The Nutter in Number Ten

Matthew Parris has it spot on in The Times this morning, read it all here, or these few quotes: I’ll tell you what scares me, and scares (I believe) a wider public who may not always be consciously aware why. It’s not the thought that the Prime Minister may be lying. It’s a more disturbing thought: that he may not. That under the terrible internal pressure created in his own head by a refusal to accept either that his will may be thwarted or his judgment questioned, the PM is having to warp the external world to make it fit.

Could it be that it is to himself, and not to us, that Mr Brown is unable to acknowledge reality? That he really doesn’t now think he did change his mind about that snap election for fear of losing it? That the main reason for a Budget U-turn was a need he suddenly saw for economic stimulus? That Wendy Alexander was not calling for an earlier referendum on Scottish independence? That the May local and mayoral elections were not a tremendous rebuke to his administration?.....................

.......But a cold, angry repudiation of the evidence itself, a look that suggests a different prism, a different picture; a strange, knotted, jaw-clenching, fact-defying, interview-wrecking rejection of what the rest of us see plain as daylight . . . this disturbs more deeply than everyday mendacity ever can. Where could a national conversation with such a man begin?