I’ve now been blogging for a total of three years. That is pretty incredible – it doesn’t seem a week since I first posted on The LBSC, let alone since I first went independent. It’s always difficult to know what to post for these parochial, ever so slightly meaningless anniversaries.

My first anniversary of posting was met with this post, and the announcement that those first hundred posts were to be released in a very limited-edition book, Tilly Talks, which has long since sold out. On this third anniversary, I can (in a somewhat bemused way) announce that the book is currently in the process of being extensively re-edited, and will be out on general release later this year (though hopefully not too much later!) as The Tilly O’Shea Thing. The idea of me having a book out in the shops is so bizarre that I’m not saying much more about it until it’s released – and then, readers here will be the first to know.

My second anniversary was marked with a revisit of my 99-point list of ambitions. Given that most have them have changed, and that reading the list is rather tedious, I’ve decided not to do that.

Instead, I’m just going to post a few facts and figures. Over three years, I’ve made 871 posts – a bit less than one a day – consisting of almost 200,000 words – about 175 per day, or about a novel a year. Over the last year, the site’s popularity has astounded me. In the year May 2004 to April 2005, the site received 378,630 hits – at the time, I thought that was phenomenal, showing as it does over 1,000 hits per day. From May 2005 to April 2006, the site received 1,573,243 hits. One and a half million! That’s well over 4,000 per day! Where are all of these people coming from, and what do they want with my random ramblings?

Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers for their ongoing support. If you’re still here in three years’ time, hopefully I will be too!

So Blair has come third in the local elections. That’s not good for him. In response to this, and the scandals surround the Labour party for last fortnight, he’s performed a reshuffle so huge that it begins to feel like he’s got a whole new deck. Charles Clarke has been unceremoniously sacked, saying that he disagrees with Blair, and Prescott is angry too at the prospect of losing the bigger part of his responsibility whilst retaining his title and his salary. If that happened to me, I certainly wouldn’t be angry, I’d probably be cheering, but that’s Prescott for you.

Patricia Hewitt has retained her post, despite the service that she is trying to reform revolting against her, and losing all faith in her abilities. And Jack Straw, who’s seemingly done nothing wrong, gets demoted. Sensible.

Earlier in the week, I couldn’t understand why Clarke hadn’t resigned. It would now appear that he genuinely beleived he could carry on. This was actually good news for Mr Blair, because it meant he had a big headline-grabber for election results day, so the fact that Labour have performed appallingly could be buried.

Yesterday, I was unsure whether he’d pulled off something incredible, and made a fantastic political play, or whether this really would be the beginning of the end. But the news today that in a week’s time, seventy-five backbench MPs are to deliver a letter telling him to resgin or he will be challenged changes everything. This simply isn’t how Blair wanted to go.

Blair and Brown are holding talks this weekend about the future of the party. Basically, it’s pretty clear that they’re talking about when Blair should go. On Monday, Blair has a press conference at which this topic surely can’t be ignored. But what can Blair do now? If he resigned next week, he’d look pressured into it, which isn’t what he wants to do – he wants to go according to his own timetable. If he leaves it much longer, he will be forced out by his own party. If he announces a future resignation date, perhaps there’s scope for a few headlines now about him being forced out, but at the time of the transition of power, perhaps that will be more forgotten.

Could he announce that he’ll stand down on his tenth anniversary as Prime Minister? That would give about a year for the transition to take place, satisfy most of the party, and make it look like he was going according to his own timetable. It would also allow him the honour of making an official ‘final’ conference speech without plotters murmuring in the background. If backbenchers are more insistent, he could always announce that he’ll leave at the end of the year, which would have similar advantages.

But, of course, announcing in advance makes him a true lame duck, something that he and the party would probably object to over such a long period. So what can he do? Probably very little. He’s been greedy, and left the transition too long for it to happen in any symbolic, pretty way.

The idea that he won’t get his last wish after nearly a decade of leadership almost makes me feel sorry for him. Almost.

My email archive doesn’t contain spam. It does contain 33,871 emails. And I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m certainly not a prolific emailer. I do send more than President Clinstone, but not a huge many – I’d say I’m probably a fairly average user of email. Yet, in the last month, I’ve received in excess of 1,000 non-spam emails.

Not all of them are personal, of course. The majority are newsletter subscriptions, or the hundreds I am sent every month by people from uni, usually advertising houses in a different part of the country to me. Not helpful, but not really spam.

In the same period last year, I received 292 emails. So my volume of non-spam email has more than tripled in the last year. If this trend continues, my email inbox is going to become completely unmanagable.

So instead of presenting my emails most-recent first, why not invent a ‘rate this email’ feature, much like the ‘rate this song’ feature on music websites, so that my webmail system can learn what’s important to me, and present that first, and adverts for pub crawls last?

Now there’s a thought.

Charles Clarke’s department allowed 1,023 criminals who should have been considered for deportation to roam free around the country, with some of them committing further offences.

He knew about this for three weeks before he bothered to let the Prime Minister know about it, let alone the Police who need to track these people down.

Even after three weeks, he still didn’t even know the scale of the problem, or whether any of the prisoners had reconvicted.

And yet, he’s stayed in office thus far on the basis that he’s the best person to fix a problem he created. And the longer he stays, the more reports continue to trickle out, and the more damage it does to a Labour government already facing a grim local elections result.

What is he doing? And why hasn’t he been unceremoniously sacrificed?

He clearly can’t stay as Home Secretary. That’s now absolutely obvious, and as clear as clear can be. But in any reshuffle, there’s really no cabinet position of equal power to that of Home Secretary. Foreign Secretary or Chancellor would be a promotion, which would make Mr Blair look arrogant beyond belief. Anything less than those two positions would be a demotion, which Clarke would never agree to. So what’s going on?

If Clarke resigns tomorrow, it’ll hit the papers on Wednesday, the day before the local elections. That’s not satisfactory. He could resign at the point of a reshuffle, but he’s a clever guy – why hang on that long and keep the bad press coming? If he was going to go, from a political point of view he should have done it by now.

So what’s missing? There’s an outside chance that Tony Blair could use the local election result to announce a date for his departure, and relieve Gordon Brown of his Chancellorship to concentrate on the handover of power. Charles Clarke could sneak in and be caretaker Chancellor, which would techincally be a promotion, but no-one would care because the story would be eclipsed. Patricia Hewitt could be shuffled out of Health at the same time.

Prescott’s a stickier problem, because Deputy Leader isn’t a job Mr Blair gets to play with – it’s elected by the Labour Party at large, but again the announcement of Blair’s departure would overshadow any news about Prescott’s pants anyway.

It all seems a bit unlikely, but there’s something that doesn’t add up here.