Martin Rowson - As I please

Now and again, in moments of calm as well as crisis, it can be quite productive to pause and ask yourself precisely why it is you hold the opinions that you do. This applies to politics as much as anything else, and it’s a useful corrective to the ever-present danger of getting set in your ways. The pretentious or the desperate refer to this process as “renewal” or frame it within the context of a “relaunch”, a word which always conjures up in my mind the idea of trying to relaunch the Titanic. Anyway, recently I’ve been filling the odd empty moment, when otherwise I’d be drawing or cooking or staring out of a train window, wondering what exactly it is that colours my politics.

Paul Routledge - Rattling the bars

IT WAS a scene familiar from 1,000 televised election counts. Only the familiar, rotund figure of the late Vincent Hanna was missing. But this was the first time I had been personally involved.

If it wasn’t clear before, the local and London elections hammered it home with a clunking fist. “New” Labour is dead. The question now is whether Gordon Brown is determined to stagger through the next two years in some sort of grimacing deathlock, clinging on to the policies of the past while attempting to give the appearance of change.

Bryan Rostron - Out of Africa

DICTATORS come in all sizes and shapes – short, tall, obese or skinny – and encompass the gamut of religions and ideologies. The most common denominator, apart from an absolute lust for power, is that they despise their own people.

Kevin Maguire - As I please

TORY billionaire Michael Aschcroft should sit down with his accountant and then wave goodbye to David Cameron, because the Victor Kaim of the Conservatives – who liked the Tories so much he bought the party – is doing obscenely well under Labour.

WHATEVER the scale of the damage at a local level, the local elections were always going to have a purgative effect at a national level. The gamut of reaction was pre-destined to run from head-in-hands despair about Labour’s chances at the next general election and hope that this may be a cathartic point at which the need for a change of direction shines as the only beacon of hope across a bleak horizon.

Jill Palmer - Prescriptions

GIVING patients more choice about how, when and where they receive treatment is a cornerstone of the Government’s health strategy, insists the Department of Health’s website.

Paul Routledge - Out of the cage

NATURALLY, the incompetents at the BBC flashed up a shot of the wrong Angela Smith when Angela Smith, the unknown Sheffield MP, staged her on-off resignation from the Government while Ir’n Broon was in Washington. They showed a photo of gorgeousex-minister Angela E Smith, as she is now obliged to call herself. She would be an unlikely rebel: remember, she was a whip.

BY JOVE, they got it! Eventually. It took the threat of Labour backbenchers in sufficient numbers effectively to blow the Government’s Budget out of the water to persuade a Labour Government to go back from a tax measurethat would have made 5.3 million of Britain’s poorest even worse off and which could have pushed 300,000 below the official poverty line.

Joan Smith - As I please

THIS is a painful time for the Labour Party and I’m sorry if what I’m about to say sounds flippant. But I can at least report some progress since I wrote this column last month, when most Labour MPs still seemed to be clinging to the hope that Gordon Brown would somehow come right as Prime Minister.