No Brown ID?

Jack Straw, 'campaign' manager for the man who would be king, is apparently in line to be Home Secretary (again) when Reid steps down as Blair's NuLab project finally collapses on 27 June. According to the Guardian, Jack has hinted that the ID card fiasco might be reviewed under a Brown premiership.

While the former home secretary has been supportive in public, leaked papers have made clear that he repeatedly opposed the idea in cabinet... "I will continue to urge strongly that this issue be shelved," he told his cabinet colleagues on September 24 that year [2003].

The estimated cost of the scheme is now around £6 billion, although the £510m cost of registering Britons living abroad has been offloaded to the Foreign Office budget to keep the official estimate looking better. But Gordon's eye for numbers would surely be attracted by "six billions", as he likes to say it, if he could say he was moving some of it to the NHS.