Brown meets the press

Fergus Pickering

And when he's killed the king it all goes wrong for him and he ends up with his head on a pole (though that bit's still to come).

EyeSee

Together Blair and Brown were Laurel and Hardy. On his own Brown is Homer Simpson.

Tiberius

I don't know about topping that, but to me, the tragedy of Gordon Brown is akin to the fate of Star Wars' Anakin Skywalker, a man who seems destined to champion his creed, a force for good, but becomes consumed with the dark side in pursuit of unnatural powers. His fate, as the reviled Darth Vader, is inverse to his destiny as he suffers terrible personal loss after choosing a flawed route to happiness.

Tom

Why can't we just stick with Macavity? He even got Darling along today to hide behind on the NR issue.

Amanda Huggenkiss

He's more like Principal Seymour Skinner: the same laboured attempts at humour, the same risible conviction of his own authority. And Alistair Darling can be his Groundskeeper Willie. "That's the last time you'll slap your Willie around."

RW

Macbeth - the single-minded lust for power and the betrayal of friends along the way. The Weird Sisters are phantasms conjured up by his own tortured psyche, making him promises of greatness he has been desperate to believe since adolescence. His brief Premiership has been a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying, well, not a lot. The only question remaining - who will be the MacDuff who symbolically beheads him (off-stage)?

Max Kaye

Shakespearean comparisons flatter him. Shakespeare's characters were never blunt or clumsy. They were complex and capable of considerable self-doubt, reflection and wit. Cable Vincent had it right: Mr Bean.

Mrs Campbell

Why is George Osborne (or whoever is representing whilst he is in China)not insisting that Northern Rock be put into administration (the British version of Chapter 11) in riposte to the insistence of the Government and the Lib Dems on Nationalisation. Administration is a court supervised procedure which enables experienced insolvency practitioners to get a grip on the business in order to see whether there is any real prospect of either working out of insolvency or a sale. Admittedly you have to pay them...but then the Treasury is not going to be administering Northern Rock if it is nationalised so will have to pay insolvency practitioners to do the job anyway. Could the answer be that the Treasury ordered the Bank of England to lend all that money without finding out about Granite and is hoping that a nationalisation will enable the Government to get round the European rules on lending money and to drift the whole problem off out of the public attention span before the serious lack of security is fully understood? Administration is the clean answer to a serious private sector problem. Losses this big need cutting sooner rather than later

Sepoy Agent

How I shall miss Bob Marshall Andrews when he stands down. He has been a delight during his time in Parliament, never afraid to speak against his Party, and giving me much amusement.