If you think Blair was a con artist you ain't seen nothing yet

On the day that Gordon Brown took over from Blair as Prime Minister I asked whether Operaton Gobble had resumed. The news yesterday about Bercow and Mercer confirmed that it had. Apparently we are now going to have Citizen Juries to help "re-engage". So that's consultation by another name then. Party political people pretending to be ordinary voters deciding to do whatever the Government and, should they have an indepednent thought as happens consistently under the London mayoralty they will be ignored.

If you thought that Blair was a con artist you ain't seen nothing yet. There was nothing consensual about yesterday's appointments, and, as Rachel Sylvetser points out in this morning's Telegraph, the two Tories that have been recruited are like Lenin's "useful idiots". They have been put in place to con the electorate into thinking that Gordon Brown is somehow "new" and that we should forget that he has been in control of the domestic agenda for the past decade.