When stabbed in the back, shoot self in foot...

First James Purnell whipped out the knife

I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely. That would be disastrous for our country.

Et tu Brute (although if we're going to get all Roman, I don't think Purnell has anything like the stature of a Brutus - he's more like Caligula's horse).

Then the wheels really started to fall off Gordon's chariot:

Defence Secretary John Hutton has become the latest minister to quit the government...Mr Brown is reshuffling his top team as he fights for his political future...And Labour is still bracing itself for further bad results after heavy losses declared so far in English local elections.

He looks doomed. There are some good reasons for for his extreme unpopularity - his appalling misjudgement in declaring an end to "boom and bust", the miscalculation he made when failed to call an election when he could have beaten Cameron and gained much-needed legitimacy, failing to cull the intrusive, wasteful ID Card scheme.

There are also some less sound reasons. There's the whirlwind of sleaze - well, several Labour MPs and Ministers have been caught out, but Tories with their duck islands and moat cleaning bills are just as mucky. The weakest argument is that Brown suffers from alleged "personalty disorders". Although he's got some rather unfortunate mannerisms, I don't think he's much more of a weird psycho loon than your average power-hungry alpha male - or female, for that matter. So I wouldn't normally go along with this sort of attack:

And you can't even look to Brown's personality to find something positive to right about. He is a nasty, vile little man surrounded by nasty, vile little men. He is a bully, an oaf, and is socially incompetent. He is self-serving, paranoid, and afraid of democracy.

But right now, I don't have the heart to even offer a defence on this level. On a day when he'd do well to reassure people by not doing something crass and gimmicky, he's chosen to appoint celebrity bully Alan Sugar as his "Enterprise Czar". It's as if he wants to confirm all the gossip and innuendo and hand the next election to somebody with just as many personality flaws, (but better PR). I fear there's not much to look forward to in the near political future, except, just possibly, Czar Alan sharing the fate of the Romanovs, come the revolution.