Money worries will put paid to a beleaguered Brown

That YouTube video of Gordon Brown trying to explain his policy on MPs' pay looks like going down as his comic epitaph. Rather like James Callaghan at Guadeloupe saying "crisis, what crisis?" in 1978, or Thatcher elbowing John Sergeant aside at the Paris Summit in 1990, it's the one that will run and run. No politician since Richard Nixon has looked so shifty on camera. Partly, it was that plastic smile that the PM plants on his face at inappropriate moments, as if someone other than he is in charge of his facial muscles.