The old order changeth, yielding place to new

David Cameron, slated in an anonymous article by an old-guard Conservative MP in the Daily Mail on Saturday, is further embarrassed the next day by selective and distorted revelations of a confidential briefing by his "close friend" Christopher Shale (full document here), who is then found dead in a toilet at the Glastonbury Festival. I think Cameron is on notice and conscious of this, is likely to make some further misjudgments in the effort to regain control swiftly. It's very odd he should remark "a big rock in my life has suddenly been rolled away", which to some ears would have a most inappropriate Biblical association.

On the other side of the House, Jack Straw has returned to the fray with further carefully-calculated populist topics. The burka controversy stirred the pot nicely in 2006, when it had become clear that Gordon Brown wasn't up to filling the saddle from which he'd thrown Tony Blair. Now, it is equally clear that the voters are less than impressed with the Miliband brothers' exaggerated sense of political entitlement. So Straw has let it be known last week that he thinks the euro is doomed, and this week that he is mightily concerned about the selling of consumers' personal data by car insurers and others. His comments have been well taken up by the allegedly Tory-hating media and perhaps we are meant to start thinking that it is time that Ed should make way for an older man; never send a boy to do a man's work, and so on. But I think Richelieu deceives himself if he dreams of becoming King.

The next General Election will be interesting. Perhaps we will finally see the collapse of both main political parties, a wish Peter Hitchens has repeatedly expressed.