Britain's search for a government...continues

I idly wonder how deliberate was the BBC's juxtaposition last night of the penultimate episode of The Apprentice with a Ten O'Clock News on the fall of Gordon Brown's government. Side by side, the two look of roughly equal gravity and magnitude; an arbitrary decision must be made by some people we know only from occasional appearances on the television as to who now gets an important-sounding job that pays extravagently well but we rather suspect will turn out to be the merest sinecure. If Margaret, Nick and the four interviewers from last night's episode were somehow announced this afternoon as the new Cabinet it would strike me as no more incongruous than whichever rabble are about to be catapulted in to temporarily replace those discredited in the expenses scandal. Alan Sugar's apparent ambition to become the next mayor of London complete the circle - indeed, I vaguely look forward to the seemingly imminent transformation of British politics into a contest to see who has appeared most recently on an almost-serious TV programme (and as an aside continue to wonder why Martin Sheen seemingly never realised he could have easily won the last US Presidential election simply by changing his legal name to Josiah Bartlett and claiming he'd already been running the country for most of the last decade).