Following yesterday’s transfer of UK state power from Downing Street to Belfast’s Shankhill Road, and the discovery by a member of the public of top secret intelligence reports on a Surrey-bound commuter train, we now have the melodramatic resignation from the House of Commons of Tory home affairs spokesman David Davis. The Shadow Home Secretary is forcing a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, which he will fight solely primarily on the issue of the new 42-day detention without charge limit.

It’s an impressive stunt, and I have no doubt that Davis will be returned to the Commons. The Liberal Democrats have said that they will not field a candidate, and if Labour politicians have any sense they will keep a very low profile. A pall of shame hangs over the Labour Party, and we now have the ludicrous spectacle of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom portraying itself as a champion of individual freedom and liberal democracy.

The government won a pyrrhic victory in the Commons yesterday afternoon. Even if it does manage to get the legislation on the statute book in the face of solid opposition from the Lords, Gordon Brown is a dead man walking. He says he has public opinion on his side. I wonder if that is true, but even if it is I doubt it will save the man who so wanted to be king, but following his coronation found he couldn’t hack it.

So is New Labour throttling fundamental British freedoms, as Davis charges? Yes it is. But Labour is merely continuing with an ignoble endeavour launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government. The rot goes far deeper than New Labour and its incompetent leaders. And right-winger David Davis, political child of the Thatcher era, is no civil libertarian by temperament.

British politics is getting decidedly weird.