You say it best, when you say nothing at all

Speaker Martin followed up his shumbalac...shimbulic...shambolic performance in the House yesterday with 30 seconds of pure anticlimax this afternoon, when he finally revealed he would be vacating his post next month. No doubt devastated by the c£100k he may lose out on* following his decision to go, he was subdued and immediately closed the door on any further discussions once his statement had been delivered. Not that there can have been many members of the lynch-mob queueing up to eulogise him. I'm sure they're all thinking that this move will cap the gushing well of public discontent. Guess again. I don't doubt that there's plenty more grot yet to bubble to the surface.

But if the "chibbin" of Gorbals Mick has been the most important political story of this - and many other weeks, the PM used today to bleat out what has to be one of the most pointless political pronouncements I've heard in ages. After a meeting with the Labour NEC, Gordon Brown revealed with great gravitas that MPs who had "broken the rules" on expenses would not be allowed to stand as parliamentary candidates for the party in future. Eh? Hasn't the argument all along been that the rules are so crap that no one - apart from the truly pathological thieves - actually needed to break them? If so, what's the point in talking about said tiny pathological minority? Why not say and do something of genuine value instead? For example, why not open up a debate on what might, and might not constitute enough wrongdoing to warrant de-selection? Or why not use the opportunity to recommend that each Constituency Labour Party carry out (with the support and help of the NEC) an investigation into the behaviour of each MP, de-selecting or re-selecting them as appropriate? No, I thought that would be too much like a properly functioning and accountable democratic process. It's quite shocking to see just how blind the Labour Party and PM are to what seems to most of us the clearest political reality of our lives.

* I'll believe it when I see it