Harriet's in Charge - Don't Panic!

My eyes are open, but I am not awake. The little monkey must have woken me up about 200 times last night. We just let him cry alone in the end. It's very difficult to do that, but sometimes, it really is the best option. He was super difficult this morning. I thought it was going to be a bad day, but I've phoned in, and he doesn't appear to have been too awful.

The stupid bus didn't turn up again this morning. That's two days in a row. I think it was broken down. I had to wait for the next one. There are usually two buses going backwards and forwards between the industrial estate where I work, and the station. Today there was one. I saw the other one sitting in the car park outside my office. It's gone now. Hope it's fixed.

Headline on the BBC website this morning, "Harman minding the shop while Mr Brown's away". Well that fills me with confidence that does. Actually, the Telegraph puts a rather different spin on the story. They claiming that Harriet is not the only senior MP who thinks they are in charge as the PM is on holiday.

Poor Gordon Brown is in all sorts of trouble. Even the Matt cartoon in the Telegraph ridicules him. Rumours are rife about Labour MPs plotting to unseat him and take over. A friend of the PM has been quoted as saying, "Any of the pretenders has to know that if they are proposing to become Labour's third leader and prime minister in 18 months, they would come under intense pressure to have an election, and as things stand, that means losing." That quote comes from the Telegraph again, though the source is not named. It's quite possible of course that no one ever said it, but it's worth considering anyway. If there was a leadership challenge, and Gordon did lose, there would be calls for an election. And they couldn't possibly win.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and true blue Tory, has speculated in a typically muddled article, that Gordon remaining in power would be good for the Tories because they can beat him at the next general election. If there was a leadership change, he still thinks the Tories will win the next election, but there is a question mark over the next one. I don't quite follow his logic. It has something to do with cheese.

I see that the foreign office has managed to lose 3,000 blank passports today. That was careless wasn't it. It seems the blank passports and visas were in a security van on their way to London. The driver stopped to buy a newspaper, and the thieves took advantage of the situation. As far as I can tell, the driver and his mate were assaulted, though not seriously, by unarmed men. The passport office has said that the stolen passports are worth nothing on the black market because they have biometric chips and therefore can't be used. The serious fraud office says they are worth £2.5 million because, although they can't be used for travel except in countries that don't have chip reading technology, they can be used as id to open bank accounts etc.

See, this is yet another example of the government not realising the importance of data security, and mistakenly thinking that a biometric chip is the ultimate security measure. They also appear blissfully unaware of how identity theft works.