An interesting way to hand in your p45.

Politics There he goes then, but not for long. Tony Blair was never going to be someone who simply disappeared from public life and now he's at the epicenter of one of the world's great problems and as a representative of the quartet to the middle east he's probably an even greater global figure than before. So we'll still be hearing about him except in a different part of the news bulletin. Just as after the election 1997 when it seemed really strange that the Tories weren't in power (something that hadn't happened in my lifetime up until then, it will take a good few weeks before the phrase Prime Minister Gordon Brown sounds right (and for some it never will).

Blair's final questions was fairly amusing what with all the joking about ('I'm not going to bother with that' etc). Ming Campbell still looks incongruous in the chamber and not at all like he should be the leader of any party and David Cameron was particularly gracious, probably because not long afterwards he put the boot in on his annoyingly titled WebCameron and inevitably called for a snap election because none of us voted for this new man to lead the country (a sentiment -- ugh -- I can't totally disagree with), and if Blair's final words were statesman-like it's a shame it was marred I thought by the p45 joke; funny out of context but all I could wonder is what some of the people at Longbridge who'd lost their jobs and still hadn't found employment thought of a question about their future being co-opted for humour by their then Prime Minister, a man who unlike many of them actually has a job to go to.

Brown's entrance into Number 10 was a quiet affair suggesting that he's going to bring some of the dignity back into the job. He's going to have an uphill struggle on his hands though as he attempts to distance himself from his predecessor but not so far that it looks ridiculous since he was there and helped to make to many of those decisions. Layered on top of that, there's the matter of the fact that he's a Scottish MP taking up the post of Prime Minister and will be making decisions that effect English voters but not his own constituents. Don't expect constitutional reform in that regard whilst he's in charge.

Not presently having a life, I watched the events on the rolling news programmes from about eleven o'clock through to three. I've always found the process of politics riveting as the cogs of the constitution clatter away. The highlight was probably the hour that the new Prime Minister spent at the palace with the monarch as experienced newscasters, the likes of John Sopel and Nicholas Witchell diggedly filled the time by interviewing lots of cabinet members suddenly without jobs and talking about the history of what's occured and stressing that Stephen Frears film The Queen is a bit of a fabrication (despite showing a clip). No one can over these big occasions quite like the BBC...