DID you hear Sarah Montague going at Gordon Brown yesterday morning on The Today Programme? It was like two cats in a barrel. Nagging and pestering, she was, about whether Brown was going to call a general election.

Surely she didn't think he would announce his intentions in a wireless interview? The first person to be consulted about such a decision must be Her Majesty the Queen. Mind you, Brown missed a trick or two: all he had to say was that the Government was given a five years' mandate a mere two years ago and that the Prime Minister has it in his gift to call an election when there is an evident necessity.

Everyone seems to think our new Prime Minister is doing very well and the so-called "Brown bounce" seems to be going on forever. But it's all appearance and no reality. Brown and his apparatchiks are better at spin than even Tony Blair and his smarmy clique. Never mind the appearances, what is the reality? After ten years of New Labour and billions of extra funding, the NHS is a failure. MRSA is rife and the one-off clean up proposed by Brown will do nothing to cure the filthy culture of neglect which caused the superbugs in the first place. It is utterly scandalous that so many doctors and nurses don't bother to wash their hands.

By the Department of Education's own figures, more than 40 per cent of our children are leaving school after 11 years of full-time teaching unable to write and count properly. A-levels have been so dumbed down that the universities are complaining that first year students are not up to the required standard to begin reading their degree courses - especially in maths and physics.

Everybody knows that the certificates awarded for A-level and GCSE are not worth the paper they're written on. Only we're not allowed to say this because to do so is alleged to be an undeserved criticism of the pupils. It's not a criticism of the pupils: it's an indictment of the sham and pretence of the education system.

Corruption in national life is widespread. What other word is there except "corruption" to describe a government policy which over the last decade has created 800,000 new public sector employees and a benefits culture which, in reality, bribes a large section of the electorate to vote New Labour? Then there are the official lies - chiefly the statement so frequently repeated that crime has gone down. It hasn't. It's simply that many serious crimes are excluded from the reckoning altogether. Ask yourself: are there fewer or more stabbings and shootings (especially of and by children) in 2007 than there were in 1997?

Why are our town centres terrorised by drunken yobs every night?

And then there's the debt crisis. Government borrowing is higher than ever and out of control.

Private borrowing stands at £1.3 trillion. The Government's answer to this is to increase it.

Brown's ministers are on a drunken spree more destructive than the town centre yobs. It wouldn't be so bad if Government spending actually achieved improvement in health, education, transport and crime-fighting. Instead it's just pouring money down the drain. In short, if the Government is as competent as it tells us it is, why are things getting steadily worse?

It can't continue forever. The real world will catch up with New Labour's profligacy sooner or later. Brown fears it might be sooner. That's why he's tempted to cut and run.