Sunday 22nd April

I watched Newsnight on Friday night; I don’t always watch it – a bit too depressing sometimes, but if you want t a bit of in-depth analysis this is really the only place for it these days.  The first item was headed Omnishambles, a made-up word which had originally featured in the brilliant ‘The Thick of it’ a few years ago.  Omnishambles is a description of a series of blunders, one falling on top of the other, like Jenga building blocks.  It was used this time in the context of the present Government’s current run of bad headlines or mid-term blues or whatever else you want to describe it as.  What invariable seems to happen is that when a new Government comes in, and it was thirteen years since Labour swept to power in 1997 and it had been eighteen before that since Mrs. Thatcher first won an election, so lately it hadn’t been that often, there is a swathe of goodwill not only from the general public but also from the media.  The press and the broadcasters seem hesitant to criticize when a party has just turned another out.  But gradually sentiments change and usually about two years in things start to turn; either the new Government seems to run out of ideas, or things come home to roost.  There is only a certain length of time that you can blame the previous lot for everything.  And the very nature of this coalition, which seemed so fortuitous to all concerned when the Tories failed to gain an overall majority is now looking quite shabby and neither party is feeling that they are really in charge, and everything is a compromise. The current omnishambles started really with the Budget, which was supposed to breathe new life both into the economy, but also into the electoral prospects of both the Tories and the Libdems.  It has done neither and has continued to unravel and be torn to shreds from all sides including Tory backbenchers for over a month now.  Add to that the fiasco surrounding Abu Qatada’s appeal, and we seem to see a Government in power but not in control of events at all.  It will probably improve a bit during the summer, the Olympics and the Queens Jubilee and the good weather will help, but the thing which brings Governments down is more than anything the appearance of incompetence.  It doesn’t rheally matter how unpopular a Government is, or how hated certain policies are, it is the idea that they don’t know what they are doing that becomes their undoing.  Read on…