It takes a lot to get my dander up at all these days, let alone at 8.15 on a Monday morning but Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian has managed it.

Tony Blair should not quit… No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. Having called for Blair to hang up his boots on several occasions, mainly because of the disaster that is the Iraq war, I don’t believe he can walk off just now. To do so – despite the support for that idea from many in his party and, overwhelmingly, from the public – would be an admission of guilt over the loans-for-peerages affair. He, like the rest of us, must wait to see if there are more developments from Scotland Yard.

If I’ve understood Ms. Ashley’s argument correctly, there is apparently such a thing as being so unutterably appalling at your job and so mired in shady dealings that you can disprove the theory that nobody is indispensible.

This may finally explain my career trajectory.

Gordon Brown is not pushing him to stand aside immediately, and there is nobody else with the heft or willpower to make Blair bring forward his own timetable. Furthermore, a Blair resignation this month or next would actually make life harder for his party. It isn’t all farewell speeches. Even some of his harsher critics say he is needed for the final push to get the Northern Ireland parties back into a reconstituted assembly before the deadline of March 26. Once that is done, it would be sensible to announce to Labour’s national executive committee exactly what his timetable will be, almost certainly involving stepping down after the May elections. That way he takes the rap (and rightly so) for the May election results, and still leaves time for the new leader to bed in well before the autumn conference season.

No.

Just no.

Fuck right off.

If Gordon Brown doesn’t fancy the challenge of some unfavourable local election results, he’s not up to the top job period and we should hand it to someone who is.  Only the Northern Ireland argument holds any water whatsoever: Billy Liar can stay until then but then that’s that.

Mr. Tony Blair has landed himself in this mess.  It is the cumulative result of his refusal to accord appropriate respect to Parliament, to the British electorate, to the law, to the United Nations Charter and – above all – to the truth.  A man so selfishly, mendaciously cavalier with other people’s lives does not deserve to choose the timing of his exit: he deserves The Gong Show treatment.

Mr. Blair may have delivered three election victories (though, under the leadership the Tories had in 2001 and 2005, he should arguably have won even more decisively than he did) but he has not delivered three successful administrations.

Even if one accepts the hypothesis that Blair’s first Government did more good than harm (and I have been known to so when in a very good mood and after a couple of glasses of particularly agreeable sherry) it still failed to meet 48 of 229 manifesto pledges, including failures to reduce waiting times for cancer treatment, reduce the number of cars on the road, hold a referendum on proportional representation, eliminate mixed sex hospital wards, and – ahem – “tackle the unacceptable levels of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets”.  That administration also saw the unravelling of the “pretty straight kind of guys” facade thanks to the like of Peter Mandelson and Keith Vaz and breathed its last upon a funeral pyre of hundreds of thousands of burning cows.

In 2001′s manifesto Labour flat out lied about university tuition fees and thus began the slide towards today’s farce.

There should be no room in British politics for liars, delusionists and zealots.  It follows, therefore, that there is no longer any room in British politics for Mr. Tony Blair.