GORDON Brown continued his political fightback last night by somehow finding a brand new thing to make an arse of.
The deputy prime minister had hoped to restore confidence in his leadership by announcing a full public inquiry into the Iraq War, but changed his mind at the last minute and decided to make a total arse of it instead.
The arseing of the Iraq war inquiry follows hard on the heels of Labour's catastrophic election results and the worst cabinet reshuffle since Gladstone put Gilbert and Sullivan in charge of the Navy in 1884.
And it come just weeks after Mr Brown made a surprisingly comprehensive backside of attempting to reform MPs' expenses, even by his standards.
Junior minister Bill McKay insisted: "Gordon faced a real dilemma. Do you have an inquiry in private that makes it just look as if you care? Or do you have an inquiry in public, accompanied by six months of daily headlines about how the Labour Party is filled to brim with evil, warmongering liars? It's a tricky one."
But Labour backbencher Julian Cook said: "It's actually not that difficult to make decisions that are both popular and the right thing to do.
"The thing about the Iraq War was that it was based on a series of murky decisions made in secret. So it would be an idea to make sure the inquiry into it is at least vaguely unmurky and very much not in secret. But no."
Mr Cook added: "As arseings go it's on a par with the election that never was and could even be up there with the absolute, balls-out fuck-up that was the abolition of the 10p rate of income tax.
"I really thought we'd have to wait until after the summer holidays before he got hold of a new thing and reconfigured it into the shape of a pair of big fat hairy buttocks. He's some guy."
