Brown ends his honeymoon with a bullseye shot to his third metatarsal

It does no one any harm to have a false start. We've been out locally doing an increased level of residents' surveys during the last two weeks. Our organisation has been given a shot of adrenalin. Thank you Gordon Brown.

It's been a surreal few weeks. It is clear that when he sets his hounds off the leash, Gordon Brown finds it very difficult to tell them to stop and put them back on the leash. An example was the stupidity in early September 2006 which ended with Blair having to publicly declare that he would quit within the year. That was all set off by Brown, sitting in his bunker, and telling his acolytes to go off and get Blair. But he didn't know when to stop it, and the whole sordid episode went on for far too long.

That's what happened here with the election date tarradiddle. Complete insanity, left to carry on for far too long. Gordon Brown has ended his own honeymoon with a bullseye shot to his third metatarsal.

But, besides getting the invigorating jolt of a false start, there are some other pluses. Gordon Brown has very successfully smoked out the main planks of the next Conservative party manifesto - the Osbourne tax package. He has also brilliantly wedged Cameron back onto the right wing, an achievement clinically chronicled by Jeremy Hargreaves this morning.

This heralds, I hope, a period of renewed public debate of solid policies. It is a debate from which the Liberal Democrats can only gain.

Most of all, the next general election should facilitate the incorporation of a generational public mandate for radical green policies. Cameron has vacated this policy patch. It is therefore left to the Liberal Democrats to lead the way.