Apparently “No government should ever be in the business of protecting executives who make the wrong call or bad decisions,” or so said Alastair Darling at the opening of yesterday's conference. But isn't this exactly what he did little over a weeks ago with Northern Rock?

Yesterday on Andrew Marr's programme Gordon Brown refused to answer straight when probed about when he knew about the Northern Rock's troubles.  Marr showed his weakness by not pursuing this further as he clearly had Brown on the ropes but then just let him go... probably why he does the Sunday morning show and Paxman the evening one.  The government has looked a bit stupid over all this, and well they might - they have made it up as they went along and now look like they are doing a massive u-turn when they realised they had inadvertently nationalised the banking system.  Despite this fiasco, the Tories have lost even more ground to Labour in the polls.  Surely this is the clearest sign yet that even if the government cocks up the economy they are still better than going with any of the other realistic options?  The political system is not working in this country - we are stuck with dumb or dumber.