Is Brown really in charge?

Hope everyone had a Happy Easter!! Better in fact than Gordon Brown, who has been faced with the revelations that Damien McBride his former Press Advisor wrote some e mails for a Labour blog which never saw the light of day, e- mails containing scurrilous and unsubstantiated comments about members of the Conservative Party including David Cameron and George Osborne.

McBride clearly feels that he is unlucky and has been 'betrayed' by Paul Staines who writes a blog called 'Guido Fawkes' and who came by these mails and chose to publish them. Has McBride considered that a senior press man in a Labour Government should not be stooping to this kind of juvenile level at all, whether or not the results were intended for publication?

It does make one wonder how much authority Gordon Brown really has over his team. Even now it seems to have taken him a long time to recognise the severity of what has been done and how much damage could have been done to his own prestige and that of his government.

Now, belatedly, Brown is calling for 'a tighter code of conduct'. But it all seems very vacuous and very late. At present this government seems to be mired in sleaze, given the row over expenses and now a rather nasty bit of obscene libel. And I don't get the impression that the Prime Minister is really thumping the table and getting these people into line. I think he needs to become pro-active, rather than reactive, very quickly and start demonstrating some Prime Ministerial authority. At present he simply appears to be carried along by events.