As the Labour Party north and south of the border implodes during a month of extraordinary events that has seen the Prime Minister reduced to a trembling wreck of a man, his loyal lieutenant in Scotland, Wendy Alexander, decides to bounce battered women around the Chamber during a gobsmacking exchange with the First Minister who had the cheek, while accepting her statement about the hardship suffered by victims of domestic violence, to congratulate her on dominating the newspaper headlines with various lurid tales about her secret financial donors. Alexander, despite all her supposed cleverness, rose to the bait and instead of making Salmond look a boorish fool for attempting to divert attention away from the plight of abused women by taking her to task over claims of financial impropriety, carried on the fight and even got her facts wrong. It made her look ridiculous. When one of her own handpicked frontbench team, Charles Gordon, resigned to the backbenches over his part in the donations affair, she looked even more so. Does the current Labour leadership have a future? There may not have been one almighty national disaster of the Black Wednesday kind but there has been a series of drip, drip events that amount to a big enough crisis to sink Brown and Labour at the next General Election, never mind keep Labour out of office in Scotland. What we are seeing is the disintegration of two long-held reputations that were meant to transform and, in Scotland’s case, save Labour. And reputations are like virginities; once they are gone, they are gone. Gordon Brown has traded on his reputation for competence, for being the steady hand on the tiller, but the lost disks affair, and now the funding fiasco, has shattered that illusion. The other reputation destroyed is that of Alexander’s much-heralded braininess. Wendy may be very good at the kind of book learnin’ required to get an MBA, but she sure lacks the street-smart sophistication vital for a long political career. Labour is not so much out of touch with reality, as operating in a completely different zone from the rest of us. When Holyrood ran a story about leaked Labour documents, the party simply refused to acknowledge they existed. Well, they did and they still do. They were prepared for Alexander on how to take the party forward in Scotland but left on a photocopier in Labour HQ. No wonder they were leaked and continue to create problems for Labour. In London, the Prime Minister continues to expect that we will believe that he had no idea where the party’s funding was coming from. Senior insiders say he didn’t know there was any wrongdoing going on. But can we seriously believe that? This is a man who was No. 2 for ten years. Who is reportedly such a control freak that he surrounds himself with loyal henchmen who, by any other measure, would be seen as creeps and sycophants. All governments hit rocky patches when things go wrong but this is being turned into a question of Brown’s integrity and with a Labour Party that has become greedy for power, for money and influence, it may well have forgotten how to respond honestly, with transparency and yes, with dignity. The words ‘position now untenable’ appear to have been relegated to another era.