Sometime ago I wrote on Gordon Brown’s bitten fingernails as a sign of weak intellectual skills. It is time for an update as Brighton will be welcoming Gordon and the ruling Labour Party to Brighton this weekend. The weather forecast suggests rising high pressure – it will be sunny and pleasant – and as a result Brighton will normally be full of people enjoying all that Brighton has to offer. If they do come they will be confronted with 3 miles of steel barriers, security services on high alert and very nervous riot police expecting trouble from a bunch of anarchists. As usual, apart from the bars, and the prostitutes well prepared with receipts that will pass muster at the expenses office in Parliament, and police bussed in from all quarters of the UK totting up their overtime payments (since there will be nothing to do otherwise), the good citizens of Brighton will, if they have any sense, leave. Unfortunately, I will be staying.

The consciousness of Brighton has been steadily rising the last few years, so the contrast will be all the more shocking. Most years I see a dark black cloud over and around the hotels on the seafront that become the headquarters of Government for a few days. Bitten nails are a sure sign of a troubled mind, a mind that can not think clearly. Bitten nails show frustration, anger, resentment, and insecurity. We are in a war that is impossible to win in Afghanistan, a war initiated by Gordon’s bitter enemy, Tony Blair, so Gordon is hardly in the frame of mind to ‘win’ something Tony started. I do not have a problem with war – it is a fact of life, but I do have problems with wars that lack any kind of strategic thought and support from the public. The status of the armed forces has risen dramatically over the last few years, but that is more from sympathy and embarassment about the way they have been treated by the government.

Even if we did have a coherent master strategy to win in Afghanistan with a small force of soldiers (history tells us that no-one has ever successfully invaded this country), what we need is a Lucky Leader, a man with principle, a man who has leadership skills, oratory skills, charisma. Churchillian qualities that we have not seen since the Second World War. The qualities of a head of government is a reflection of the conscious of the country he leads, so on that basis we are (as if we did not know it), in serious trouble. The humiliation experienced by our Prime Minister at the United Nations this week when Barack Obama, our ally in the war in Afghanistan was reluctant to meet him, shows how much we are falling.

It is about time we had a lucky Prime Minister – it does not matter if he or she  is Liberal, Labour or Conservative – luck changes situations, the X-factor, the missing ingredient. We need a Barack Obama, a man who moves with calmness and dignity, despite the overwhelming problems he faces.

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