'A smile like the brass plate on a coffin'

I've been having a horrible recurring dream for the past week, a menacing bald man, with a sinister smile is standing waving to the crowd before entering No. 10 as Prime Minister. No it's not IDS raised from the political grave, it's someone infinitely more rightwing and authoritarian....John Reid.

Reid has had a good week in political terms, with many believing that he handled the latest "Terror Crisis" well while Big Tony was at the seaside. He's now being touted as the only credible candidate to beat Gordon brown when Tony Blair finally calls it a day. It's a terrifying thought.

While the chorus of praise is being sung its worth taking a little closer look at our brave Home Secretary. he started his political life at Strathclyde University as the Student Communists (yes this was when the British Communists thought that Uncle Joe Stalin was just misunderstood) political enforcer - the political & physical heavy who 'persuaded' recalcitrant party members to toe the line.

Perhaps it was this aspect of his personality that led to him striking up a friendship with Serbian war criminal Radozan Karadic. He stayed for 3 nights as a guest of the charming Karadic in a luxury hotel while he was a Defence Minister.

Reid comes across as a brute, an intelligent one, but a brute none the less. He is charmless, cold and unsympathetic. He has a total lack of empathy, whether it's his past as a communist bully boy, his friendship with war criminals, his complete disregard for civil liberties, his crude political populism & opportunism or his swaggering self-importance. Reid’s Labour party defenders are welcome to him.

If it wasn’t for the awful things he could do with even more power I’d welcome him as Labour leader as I think he’d be a disaster in an election and at least we could be sure of getting rid of the rest of this tabloid government as well!