'Crisis? What Crisis?'

Back in 1979, then Labour PM Jim Callaghan returned from Guadeloupe to face a barrage of questions from the press and political opponents about the state of a strike-torn country, denying allegations that Britain was in chaos.

Britain, was was a country divided then, strikes had been erupting all winter in protest at the government's 5% pay limit.

We'd had a bakers' strike, lorry and tanker drivers were on strike, and by the end of the month, water workers, ambulance drivers, sewerage staff, and dustmen were out, heralding the "Winter of Discontent".

All of which brings me to the lamentable events in Westminster this week.

On a human level, I feel sorry for Gordon Brown. The man is obviously an able and capable man, who has devoted his life to public service. He has held two of the Great Offices of State, ironically, Callaghan's still the only man to have held all four: PM, Chancellor, Home, and Foreign Secretary.

And yet all of this has turned to ashes in his mouth.

With friends like those in the Labour Party, who needs enemies?

If I can offer any words of comfort, it would be "alea iacta est" (the die has been cast), they were supposedly uttered by Julius Caesar on this day in 49 BCE as he led his army across the Rubicon in northern Italy.

Hold fast and make the coming election a battle of ideas (which I believe that we Lib Dems would win hands down) and which would show the shallowness and vapidity of any Tory claims to represent the British people.

Why is Jeremy Clarkson such an obnoxious little oik?

For once I actually don't have an answer, I genuinely, truly, madly, deeply want to know.

He (Jeremy Clarkson) epitomises ALL that is wrong with modern Britain, the incivility, the bullying, the thuggery, the total idiocy masquerading as blunt-speaking.

Whatever, one thinks of Gordon Brown, and I certainly am not a fan, to call him the c-word in public, is an insult too far.

Please Auntie starve this gobby sub-golf club wiseacre of the oxygen of publicity, however much money he brings in in overseas sales.