163 families would not now be grieving if there had been more people like Ming in the Cabinet

I did a quick cut and paste last night about the ICM poll showing Cameron behind Ming and Brown in the popularity stakes. Yes! Ming is more popular than Cameron. So stick that in your pipe, oh detractors, and smoke it!

James quite rightly says that it is the Tories who should now be tearing themselves apart.

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian concludes that Cameron has not stayed the course of "modernisation" as Blair did for years:

...if Cameron thinks he's done enough modernising so that he can now soothe the Tory heartlands with the old songs on Europe and immigration, he's wrong. To win, he has to be able to hold a line long after the political classes, and especially his own party, have become bored rigid by it.

I have moved on from being bored rigid by the continual "Ming faltering line". The media are just pathetic. First, we got the Guardian blowing a quip totally out of proportion. Then this morning Radio Four majored on "Nick Clegg ready to takeover" or some such of nonsense. It turns out Nick Clegg had a woolly suggestion that he might stand for the leadership if and when there is a vacancy (couched around support for Ming and an attack on his detractors) reluctantly squeezed out of him (I think he had a soft part of his anatomy placed roughly between two bricks) at a fringe meeting which was not even recorded.

Pathetic.

So boredom is now being replaced by mild anger, on my part. Anger at the ridiculous, pathetic media pack mentality. I live in hope that Ming will be described as 'Lazarus rising from the dead' after his speech tomorrow. It would be par for the course.

And I have to admit I am still working up to being livid at the smug idiots who make sneering remarks about Ming's age. Humour I can handle. But not the unhumourous, sneering remarks.

Ming is fitter than many men, indeed journalists, half his age. He is mentally agile. He is a life-long liberal. He is wise and authoratitive and he was given the job by an overwhelming majority of the party membership.

To constantly snipe at his age is utterly disgraceful. It is pure, bigotted prejudice. As Ming quite rightly says, if there had been more people his age in Blair's cabinet, we would not have gone to war in Iraq and 163 British families would not now be mourning the loss of a son or daughter. (Imagine 163 crying families sat in front of you.)

Of course, to the smug self-satisfied people who sneer about Ming's age, that is a secondary consideration to making lazy jibes.