Except that is all he seems to do. Lots of press releases, but no vision. Education is supposedly his "passion" and health his "priority", yet what has he done?

Brown is presidential. He runs the government by mobile phone. He has shown in his few months in the job that he is as controlling as he ever was whilst at the Treasury. He can't allow any authority out of his hands - even to his Cabinet.

Gordon isn't going to stop governing by press release. It is the only way he knows how to. He might want people to believe that he isn't, but that fact won't change. Government by press release is here to stay for as long as Gordon Brown is.

No longer are ministers required to be full-time. Now it seems that the new Ministerial Code written by Gordon Brown means that they can sit on the board of companies whilst being paid by the taxpayer to be government ministers.

This is just wrong. If they are a government minister then that should be their only job. They shouldn't be allowed to hold directorships whilst being a member of the government.

The Ministerial Code has been deliberately weakened by Gordon Brown. No longer are they even required to “work within the letter and spirit of the code” as Tony Blair's ministers were, but instead the new, slimmed-down [halved in length!] code is instead said be be just “a helpful guide to the principles and practices of ministers”. The new code says that

But that means that Brown's ministers can be just part-timers if they choose, just so long as they pick a company [or several] well away from their brief.

Government ministers should not be allowed to hold any directorships at all. As members of the government, their ministerial brief must be their sole concern. If they can't - or don't want to - do that, then they shouldn't become ministers in the first place.

Source: The Times

Rumours are flying around that Gordon Brown may be planning to call an October election, with Iain Dale having heard that it might be 4 October, Dizzy having heard that Tuesday is a deadline for something, and Ben Brogan says that:

The Times also reports that:
But is this really the beginning of a general election campaign?

I'm not convinced that it is. I don't think that Brown will take the chance, since the polls certainly aren't all going perfectly for him, and to go for an election so soon after becoming leader will look opportunistic. I'm not even sure whether Brown will go for an election even in 2008 - he almost certainly won't unless the polls stay positive for him after the end of his honeymoon period.

When it comes to calling an election, the governing party always has the upper hand. They know when and can plan ahead in ways which the Opposition parties certainly can't, and so they have to take gambles, even if they are just preventative ones. In many ways, the lack of constraints over when an election is to be called is quite damning for a modern democracy. Whilst I don't like the idea of fixed election dates, leading to absurdly long build-ups like we see in America, longer periods of notice should be required - somewhere between 3 and 6 months. Thus it would maintain most of the benefits of a more flexible electoral cycle, but without the downsides of utter uncertainty over election dates.

Alastair Darling, the Trade Secretary [the one who closely resembles a badger] wrote this letter to Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor on the subject of the Freedom of Information Act:

"Dear Charlie,
As you know we are increasingly concerned that in a number of respects the demands of the Freedom of Information Act are placing good government at risk..."

His arguments include that the "[d]isclosure of letters between MPs and Ministers, even if ostensibly innocuous, will inhibit the dialogue between MPs and their constituents and MPs and Ministers", that the Act prevents the government "from protecting robustly and across the board advice from officials to Ministers", and that "where an FOI applicant sends multiple requests to various Departments on the same subject we need to be confident that there is effective co-ordination between Departments' responses."

He is thus basically adding his response to the Private Members Bill put forward by David Maclean to make MPs exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Whilst Darling may have some points, they certainly do not by any means warrant Parliament's exemption from FOI. There may well be a lot of pointless requests made, but that is part and parcel of that sort of law, and they must have known that it would happen from the start.

Instead of making such arguments as a means by which to exempt Parliament from the FOI Act and thus made our elected (and unelected) representatives completely unaccountable, then better rules could be made instead to prevent the stupid requests and to protect letters from MPs to ministers with specific relevance to a constituent and, to an extent, advice from officials to ministers.

What should certainly not happen is that an easy to bury bad news and embarrassing material is created. What FOI does not do is prevent good governance or place it at risk - only poor ministers and policies and do that. Freedom of Information is here, and it should stay.

Sources: BBC - article, letter transcript; The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian