At the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte famously remarked, “Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake. That’s bad manners.”
As I believe the Labour Party is making a mistake by seeking to replace Tony Blair with Gordon Brown, I shall mind my manners and resist the temptation to analyse their mistake in detail.

Suffice to say that Gordon Brown is the man whose stealth taxes massively increased our tax bills and undermined our pensions, whose opposition to reform of our schools and hospitals led to billions of pounds being wasted, whose obsession with complexity has massively increased the burdens of our tax system and whose bungled tax credits have cost more billions in fraud and incompetence while leaving thousands of families in misery as they struggle to repay large sums of money.
On top of all this, his shockingly dishonest last Budget showed his obsession with spin is every bit as complete as was Tony Blair’s.
Oh, and all his extra spending on education means the gap between our schools and those in Birmingham has got even larger, putting Worcestershire children at even bigger disadvantage. He is the author of our misfortunes, not the solution.
I had not meant to write about the local elections, but Chris Moncrieff’s baffling suggestion on Saturday that the results weren’t very encouraging for my party needs to be corrected!
They were extraordinarily good results for the Conservative Party. Nationally, we gained 911 council seats and now control more than 200 councils across England – three times as many councils as Labour and the Lib Dems combined.
In the north of England, we now have more councillors and control more councils than the Labour Party ,winning places such as Blackpool, Chester and South Ribble. We won constituency seats in Wales and Scotland too, making us the only genuinely national political party.
Candidates from the UK Independence Party and the British National Party both performed disastrously and the Liberal Democrats have nothing to cheer about either.
Malvern Hills and Wychavon are two of the 89 councils that now have no Labour councillors at all. In Worcester, although only one seat changed hands, the results were spectacular – Conservative candidates polled 9,249 votes while Labour attracted only 5,457.
By any measure, the challenges facing Gordon Brown are huge, both here in Worcestershire and across the whole nation. But as Napoleon said, when your enemy is making a mistake, it’s bad manners to interrupt.