down to a confidence vote. Clegg should think about the people who voted for his party and where their preferences might have gone under the sort of voting system he wants. My bet is their preferences would have gone to Labour. No doubt there will be hordes of posts on this thread denouncing Brown in the most immoderate of terms. Personally, I'm no great fan of him but he is a politician of intellectual substance albeit one too flawed psychologically, and politically far too scarred by the Labour defeats of the 1980s, to be effective. In some ways the defining moment of his political life was his failure to secure the Labour leadership when John Smith died. Had he done so, his history and that of Labour and of Britain might have been very different. Instead, he became obsessed with getting the PMship and, when he got it, seemed not to know why he wanted it or what he would do with it. A strange story in many ways - and it will be interesting to see what his legacy will be once the dust has settled - but certainly not deserving of his hate-figure status on cif, and on the main issue of his premiership, namely the decisions that prevented a recession becoming a depression, he got it largely right. Good riddance Gordon you and the rest of your New Labour cronies have been a disaster for what was (the Labour Party) at least an alternative to the Tories,