This will have been fairly well-covered by now, but David Davies, the shadow Home Secretary, has resigned as an MP and will contesting the by-election in his seat to protest the forty-two-day detention vote.
I listened to Davies's announcement on the radio at lunchtime and he sounded like Peter Finch in Network - "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" He's not just protesting about the forty-two-day Bill but about ID cards and all the other chips the Labour government has been taking off our freedoms. Basically, he's standing up for Magna Carta.
Has he just gone crazy? I have no idea. He has a reasonably comfortable majority of about five thousand, and the LibDems say they won't contest the election. As I write, Labour haven't decided yet, although the merest chance of a by-election win may tempt them to have a go.
This is new stuff, but I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said today and rather admiring him for standing up for it.
The one downside, at the moment, is that Gordon won the forty-two-day proposal by only nine votes - Anne Widdicombe and some Democratic Unionist MPs, to whom a colossal amount of pork was allegedly promised (£20 million, I heard) That had become a big issue, the fact that the Government was so weak and divided it had to rely on buying votes. Now that issue is dead in the water and David Davies is the New Story, so Gordon's kind of off the hook.
I dunno. We're in uncharted waters here. I can't remember a politician ever doing something like this before. As they say, we live in interesting times.