By Michael Brown

A Labour peer recently compared Gordon Brown to haggis and porridge. The question is whether the Prime Minister is now toast. That Boris Johnson should have turned out to have been the joker in the political pack, who administered a potentially lethal blow to Mr Brown’s authority, provides an added piquancy to the Government’s woes. These elections gave the Tories a 20 per cent lead, 44 per cent vote share and provided definitive signs that the Government is on an irreversible slide to defeat at a general election to be delayed until 2010.