PMQs: The living dead clash

Well, Tony Blair didn't deny it - tomorrow he will hand in his notice as Labour leader and, as a result, prime minister.

There will then, in Blairworld, be an orderly transitional period as Gordon Brown sets out his agenda and ministers will get on with business as usual delivering the best possible policies for the country which has already been transformed for the better over the past decade.

Seven weeks later, as Mr Blair finally leaves Downing Street to the sound of cheers from the assembled crowds, he will hand over the keys to Mr Brown to carry on the good work.

David Cameron has a slightly different take on things.

The prime minister is in denial. Despite the "drubbing" in last week's elections, "he still doesn't realise it's over".

The government is paralysed and a whole series of ministers - Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Justice minister Lord Falconer - will be joining Home Secretary John Reid back on the backbenches.

Living dead

Ms Hewitt was for the chop, Lord Falconer was pleading for his job on the radio while the chancellor's spin doctors, he claimed, were going around handing out their jobs.

At least, he said, Mr Brown had finally got out of his blacked-out limo to show his face for the first time since those election results.

But still the prime minister didn't get it, charged Mr Cameron. This was - and here was the soundbite - "the government of the living dead".

The prime minister hit back by ridiculing a speech by Tory policy review chief Oliver Letwin in which he banged on about the post-Marxist era in which the old arguments about capitalism versus socialism had ended.

Apparently, Mr Letwin concluded it all came down to Marx. "That will be Groucho", suggested Mr Blair.

Still, it was Mr Cameron who drew the blood by driving home his image of a government no longer able to run the country and stuffed with old stagers well past their sell-by date.

Mind you, perhaps he should study the "Living Dead" horror films more closely.

No matter how many of the zombies you kill, and no matter how gory their end, they just keep on coming.

And take your eye off them for a moment and they eat you alive.

A lesson for all of us perhaps.

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