When Will Bottling Brown Call It A Day?

The election date jigsaw puzzle is falling into place with Hattie finally telling MPs when they can take their Easter hols. Spinners are stretching out Brown sauce propaganda but clues are a tad more easy to find.

The date when Bottling Brown finally makes that call to Her Maj is being kept well under wraps. Too many clues would give the game away and give away the advantage. Spin it out until the bitter end.

Now with a very short Easter recess fixed, election flavour of the month May 6, just 28 days before the deadline set by law, is odds on favourite. But the Orange Party has been shouting from the rooftops - it's the date Bottling Brown names the day which is crucial.

Clues were hard to find. A cunning plan to dither around with budget day and keep under wraps when MPs would break for Easter added to the uncertainty.

Faced with an increasingly jittery money market, Borrowing Brown took his time but was finally forced to announce the date for the fag-end government's fake budget on March 24.

Now the cat and mouse game over the Easter hols has ended, as Harman announced in parliament that MPs will break for Easter on Tuesday March 30, returning on Tuesday April 6.

Weeks later, at the stroke of midnight on Monday May 10, the Westminster Cinderella coach would turn into a pumpkin and parliament would cease to exist anyway.

And a general election to elect the new Parliament "must be held by no later than Thursday 3 June 2010."

Calling the election hard after budget day, a week before the hols, makes sense. Time for then ex-MPs to get down and dirty in the constituencies. But only makes sense if you are sensible, not a crafty cunning prime minister.

Returning on April 6 to hear the election call, only to be booted out of Westminster a couple of days later is kinda cock-eyed. But hey, there's an election to be fought and spun.

The March 24 budget fires the election starting gun as the fag-end government tries to weathering the storm with storm clouds ahead. The Orange Party's gut feeling is to try to cling on as long as possible to make the most of Brown propaganda despite being caught out lying through his teeth, Nixon-like, over defence cuts.

The bogeyman of crucial GDP growth figures out for Q1 on St George's Day, April 23 can be spun as "good news" with another rigged recovery. An election on April 22 only makes sense if those figures were bad. Today Brown BBC/ONS borrowing spin started to fan the flames of that false optimism with fiddled GDP figures.

As soon as Bottling Brown makes that call, after a couple of days wash and brush up, the party will be over at Westminster.

BBC's Robinson - still at it today banging on about Ashcroft - will have his toenails clipped. Brown becomes mere mortal — an unelected prime minister, not even an MP. And woe betide anyone who tries it on with a bit of party political spinning on the side.

Spin it out. Keep the formal election campaign short and snappy. All part of the pre-election plan to capture, control and dominate the media narrative at the taxpayer's expense.

The true cost of New Labour's crafty plan to splurge with party political propaganda dressed up as public information has long been a bugbear of the Orange Party.

As Fraser Nelson notes in the Spectator, "Gordon Brown has been shameless in using the tools of state to advance his party political objectives — to him, government is electoral war by other means."

Tracking down the figures, Nelson shows the extent of the splurge. State advertising was £13 million in December - yet surged to £34 million last month.

Unleashing "the biggest propaganda spend in British history with a mass propaganda splurge to rig the election" is all part of the cunning plan.

But all good things must come to an end. Goodman writing on ConservativeHome puts it rather well. The choice, he says, will be between "Authenticity and Artificiality".

Name the day on April 6. Wash-up. Parliament dissolved. Election day May 6. Election weary voters will finally have a chance to decide which side they are on. Unless Bumbling Brown decides to pull an early one. Or Bottling Brown goes to the wire.........