Old habits die hard, so I wanted to share a few of the interesting things wot I’ve spotted about the internet over the last week or so. Unfortunately, I haven’t been continually saving them up, so it’ll only be the ones I can actually remember, and it’ll be unfairly weighted towards the last three days rather than the last week. Oh well.

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A quick technology one, before the politics stuff: the Time Magazine cover article this week was absolutely the best thing that’s ever been written about Twitter. Seriously. Well worth reading, even if you don’t get or don’t use Twitter – if you just want to understand what it is that people use Twitter for, and why it’s a big deal.

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Mark Thompson proposed a little wager on the question of whether or not Brown would be able to stay in office beyond the end of June. As you may have noticed, I don’t think he’s got much chance of winning that bet – and even if Brown does go it’ll only be because Labour care more about presentation than they do about politics. But time will tell.

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Blue Eyes documented the death of our democracy yesterday, and is well worth quoting:

However you define “democracy” it is clear that Britain is no longer a democratic country. A leader who was not elected now leads a cabinet of appointees undertaking polices which the people do not support. Specific manifesto promises have been smashed, proposed reforms make the last election seem a very long time ago. That the Prime Minister is left only with disgraced figures such as Mandelson, Darling and Hain and odd-ball outsiders such as Glenys Kinnock shows how few people of talent there are on the red side of the green benches of our elected chamber.

This collapse in our democracy is unprecedented since the turn of last century. It’s a disgrace.

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Alix Mortimer thinks there might be more to Caroline Flint’s accusation the Brown treated her as ‘window-dressing’ than meets the eye. I can’t see how she could be right – surely even Gordon Brown isn’t that low – but her theory fits so well to events that it’s hard not to consider it…

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Charlotte Gore set out the highly democratic process Labour would have to go through to get rid of Brown. Try reading with a thick Russian accent. It’s fun.

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Last but certainly not least is Rachel Sylvester in The Times on Friday:

This is a Shakespearean tragedy, rather than a Greek one, because the hero will be brought down by a fatal character flaw and not by fate. Labour MPs love to debate which tragic hero Mr Brown is most like. Some say he has Hamlet’s tendency to dither – agonising whether “to be or not to be” in favour of public service reform. To others it is Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition which o’er-leaps itself” that will bring him down. For years he was consumed by Othello’s “green-eyed monster”, a destructive jealousy of Mr Blair. This week he more resembles King Lear, driven to distraction by the perceived ingratitude of his daughters who rages on the heath that he is “more sinned against than sinning”.

Just marvellous.