A brilliant derision of NHS direct can be found over on Pathologists Anonymous. Highly recommended (especially to those in charge of NHS policy…).

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If you have any good pictures or videos that deserve posting, then do let me know. You can comment below, email simon@sjhoward.co.uk, send mobile text, videos, or pictures to 60300 (start your message with the word ‘simon’), or call 0845 638 1916 and let me know where to look. To see more videos, click here.

In the UK, the government is in crisis. And yet Blair insists on hanging on, and has indicated he still hopes to be Prime Minister at the end of June. Why, oh why, won’t he just do the honourable thing and go now?

The Home Office is in a terrible state. It’s lost control of immigration, asylum, prisons, and is interfering in judicial sentencing. A catalogue of blunders recently have shown us that they haven’t tracked criminals who have committed crimes abroad, they’ve lost contact with 322 convicted sex offenders who they’re supposed to be monitoring in this country, they’re illegally locking up asylum seekers who’ve done nothing wrong, they haven’t enforced travel bans where they should have, prisons are bursting at the seams, the head of the Youth Justice board has resigned in disgust, they’ve lost terror suspects, and now John Reid is sending letters to judges – interfering in their ability to judge properly – telling them to send only the ‘most serious’ offenders to prison – then saying that this means exactly the same as saying that people who post ‘any risk’ to the public should be locked up. Apparently ‘most serious’ and ‘serious’ and synonymous in the lexis of our Home Secretary. Oh, and this disaster of a department still wants us all to trust it with ID cards, which will run on current systems. Which have been oh-so-successful.

On top of that, the NHS is in a terrible state, with more doctors going to be out of work any time soon thanks to MMC meaning there aren’t enough jobs to go round, and a Health Secretary who believes we have too many doctors and that last year was the ‘best ever’ for the NHS. Patricia Hewitt announced she’d get NHS debt under control, and it doubled to half a billion pounds – yet this was seen as good progress, despite being twice as much debt as her target amount. The staff of the NHS have lost confidence in her and want her to resign, but Mr Blair continues to back her to the hilt. Oh, and she wants to criminalise any staff who are still there, and she thinks GPs are overpaid – despite it being her who decided how much they were paid.

Let’s not forget that inflation is at 3% – the highest rate for 11 years, we’re still fighting a war in Iraq which was all about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, and the Ministry of Defence can’t even look after soliders properly. The Prime Minister himself is at the centre of a criminal investigation, with his closest advisers arrested and the net closing in on the PM himself.

Despite all this, Mr Blair thinks he can continue. He’s ‘not finished yet’. He genuinely beleives he’s the right person to lead a party into elections.

Surely Mr Blair can see that his administration is a disaster. Surely he can see that a new administration is needed to even have a hope of clearing up the mess created by this one. So please, Mr Blair, go soon, and let us get on with repairing the damage caused under your arrogant and destructive leadership.

An absolutely classic front page greets readers of The Sun today, with the fantastic headline ‘John Reid’s brain is missing’.

They claim that a nationwide search is underway for John Reid’s ‘walnut’ sized brain, as they are unhappy with the way the Home Secretary has dealt with the full jails fiasco – which can, of course, be added to a long list of Home Office fiascos from the last few weeks alone.

Can John Reid ride out the storm, or will he soon become the next casualty of the cursed position of Home Secretary? I suspect the former…

It’s also been particularly fun watching the news programmes reviewing the front pages with this one… Tim Wilcox on BBC News 24 certainly seemed amused by it – but then, for a newsreader, it must be pretty satisfying to get to read a headline like that…

For those of you who were too lazy to stay up for Bush’s State of the Union, here’s what you didn’t miss, as constructed from last year’s edition.
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Just looking back at this post tonight, I was reminded of one of Blair’s conference speech lines:

The first rule of politics: There are no rules

But as the criminal investigation into Cash for Peerages moves ever closer to Tony, the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed in a criminal investigation, it begins to look like he got that one wrong. Not only are there rules, but his party’s been flouting them.

Last week, we were treated to the huge news that Ruth Turner had been arrested as part of the row. As Director of Government Relations, she’s as much at the heart of Downing Street as it’s possible to be. But more is to come…

The hot news from Guido tonight is that John McTurnan, Downing Street’s Directer of Political Operations, has been interviewed under caution, and that Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell could soon be arrested. That would be political dynamite.

And, just as I’m about to publish this post, the BBC have confirmed that John McTurnan has indeed been interviewed under caution. Is it too much to hope that the second rumour is also true? After all, Blair’s said he’ll quit if his aides are charged (at least according to the Grauniad).

The excitement intensifies…

sjhoward.co.uk has never run a ‘picture of the day’ segment. But if I did, there’d be no competition today.

It’s Tony Blair attacking Linda Gilroy, MP for Plymouth South. I don’t think she particularly enjoyed it, from the look on her face.

Read Guardian Unlimited users’ captions here.

I do hope you didn’t stumble across this while eating… But perhaps it shows that he’s finally lost his marbles.

It’s at times like this when I begin to wonder why we bother with the Home Office.

After a series of Home Office blunders and Home Secretary resignations, the incoming John Reid said the Home Office was ‘not fit for purpose’. He gives himself 100 days to fix the problem, and proudly announces ‘job done’. Then, as if by magic, yet another abject failure on the part of the Home Office is revealed.

The hugely complicated bureaucratic beast that is the outsourced Criminal Records Bureau is shown once again to be less than perfect, as if anyone had committed a crime abroad then it would not show up on their record. Mainly because no-one knew they’d committed it, police included, since the information sent by foreign officials had laid undiscovered in a file somewhere in Whitehall.

Ministers deny all knowledge, then it emerges that they were sent a letter last year about the problem. Presumably it was filed in the same place as the criminal records. So what excuse will be given for this mess? Probably that the letter sent acknowledging receipt of the first acknowledged merely that the letter had been received, not read. Or some such bollocks.

But at the end of the day, what does it matter? Even if the junior ministers get fired, in Blair’s jobs-for-all government they’ll be paid off and then rehired a few months later. It’s just another example of the ‘pretty straight’ ‘whiter-than-white’ Prime Minister and his incentivised dirty government.

The obvious solution is a wholesale review and redesign of the Home Office, possibly splitting it up into several smaller departments. David Cameron’s suggestion of a separate Terrorism Office is faintly ridiculous as it leaves bodies such as the Police with two governmental masters with different priorities, but the department could be split into several more manageable chunks. But it never will be, because that would involve a wholesale spending review, and that would never do at a bloated over-funded Home Office.

It would be nice to see some true accountability for these blunders, though. But introducing a system of proper accountability is not in the interest of any MP, so that’s certainly never going to happen – whatever party leaders might want us to believe.

Let’s sack the lot of ’em!

A year ago, I made a prediction. It was my ‘Tip for 2006’:

Patricia Hewitt will be forced to resign as Health Secretary before year’s end… or, if there’s a reshuffle, her sucessor will be forced to resign. One way or another, we will see the resignation of a Health Secretary this year.

Ah. Well. Yes. Not the best prediction in the world. In fact, pants.

My prediction for 2005 is kind of coming of age, though. I predicted that MSN, and particularly MSN Search, would be the ‘one to watch’. Well, in a blaze of advertorial glory, it’s gaining ground. So I wasn’t far wrong, just two years ahead of my time. Okay, I’m trying to talk myself out of a hole, alright?

So what’s my prediction for 2007? Well, there’s the easy ones, like Blair’s resignation and the serious back-scaling of troop numbers in Iraq. But they’re easy, and I don’t do easy. So here we go: I reckon that the outcome of Yates of the Yard’s investigation of the Party Loans scandal will be a bigger political story in the long-run of the year than Brown’s leadership succession. I reckon the charges are going to be more stinging than anyone imagines, the Labour Party will be pretty damaged, and the transition will hence be a lot more orderly than is currently expected – but there will be a bumpier ride in the long run.

So there you go. Not quite as specific or objective as other years, but maybe this time next year I’ll be able to report at least a modicum of success… Or not.

John Prescott appeared on the Today programme today (well, yesterday actually, since we’ve passed midnight). It’s always a treat, and as Ed points out, this is perhaps the first time he’s managed to attack the programme before the first question is asked.

He even gets so annoyed that he bursts out with “For God’s sake” half way through… Isn’t it just a blessing to have such a diplomatic, rational person leading the country while the boss is away? And isn’t it right that he’s rewarded so handsomely for his efforts? After all, he’s such a professional.

As ever, click the play button to, err, play the audio.