The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

MPs' expenses: Alistair Darling billed us for two homes at the same time – Telegraph.

Nick Clegg says the Chancellor of the Exchequer;

How idealistic. Taxation is theft. Actually no, it is robbery. The money is brazenly extorted from the victim by the threat of force. The Chancellor is the man in charge of that extortion and the public would be naive to expect the job to appeal to anyone other than the likes of Alistair "Eyebrows" Darling. Indeed, we should always be deeply suspicious of anyone who wants the job. It is not the Speaker of the House of Commons who should be ritually dragged to his work, but the Chancellor.

There is a serious issue for the Prime Minister here. He has signalled by every deniable means that he wants to replace Darling with Balls. Yet Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper have behaved just as badly as the Chancellor. Whether or not the "flipping" was "within the rules", the public is unlikely to smile upon replacing one aparatchik who exploited the expenses system for personal gain with another.

If Brown appoints Balls as Chancellor, I suspect he will face a firestorm of public anger unlike anything to date. Balls may have the Telegraph in his pocket, but there are other newspapers. And there are bloggers. Can the PM really be that stupid? In the cause of freeing Britain of Socialism for a generation, let's hope so.