Farewell then Andrew Mitchell. Now Labour need to capitalise on David Cameron's week from hell.

It has not been a great week for David Cameron. The PM has lurched his way through seven days which might inspire a soupçon of sympathy in even the reddest of hearts.

In a turn of events straight out of a The Thick of It script brainstorming session, Cameron announced at Prime Minister's Questions that he would be forcing energy companies to offer all customers their cheapest tariff. The only problem being that he'd not mentioned this proposal to energy secretary Ed Davey. Cue armies of flustered aides frantically briefing to the press that, um, this had been the policy all along, except, er, if it wasn't.

Chief whip Andrew Mitchell became former chief whip on Friday after sustained pressure from the 2010 intake of Tory MPs, while walking cadaver Lord Tebbit popped up today in the Observer to lambast "this dog of a coalition government." No, that's right, it appears he's not a fan.

The cracks in the coalition appear to be showing. The Observer reported that the cabinet were split on whether Mitchell had to go, with Teresa May apparently to keen to get rid, and Michael Gove in favour of letting him stay on. Now the question is simple: after Ed Miliband's barnstorming conference speech, can Labour capitalise on disarray in the coalition?

Can Mitt Romney make it to the White House on the back of the largest lie ever told by a U.S. President?

Whenever the cries for higher top tax rates, an end to astronomical bonuses, or demands for tighter regulation on finance become too loud, a Government minister will unfailing pop up to tell us that we can't be too hard on the rich, otherwise they'll all fly their private jets to a tax haven like Switzerland or Monaco on a permanent basis.

Ignoring for a second the moral appropriateness of allowing the super-rich to dictate the terms on which they're prepared to stick around, The Golden Latrine is taken with the idea of emigration as a means of expressing dissent. Thus, if Mitt Romney win the U.S. election race, a move elsewhere in the solar system is on the cards. Possibly Mars, although I hear Io is quite nice this time of year.

In a brilliant (if very long) piece in Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi looked at Romney's attempt to portray himself as a financial "turnaround artist" who has "saved" millions of regular Americans' jobs. As Taibbi writes:

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. 

That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

Those last two sentences are prefect. This is presidential politics as call-my-bluff and you can't help but admire the sheer shininess of Romney's brass balls. Given that a major news station like CNN was happy to wave away a number of outright lies by Romney's running mate Paul Ryan and instead spout some platitudes about how photogenic he looked on stage with his family, the chances of Romney pulling this off are not as remote as some liberals seem to think.

It might be time to start thinking of emigrating. Now where to go? Is the moon far enough away?

Winner takes it all: Is second place really just the "first place loser"? Or should Team GB athletes be proud of their silver and bronze medals?

Failure, it goes without saying, is a relative concept. For most of us mere mortals, failure is the feeling that creeps over you when you realise you've spent the entire day by yourself on the sofa, eating a whole packet of bakewell tarts and watching Jeremy Kyle reruns.

Olympic athletes, though, are cut from a different cloth. On Saturday afternoon British rowers Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter secured a silver medal in the lightweight double sculls final despite an engineering fault with Purchase's seat which forced a restart. Purchase was physically out on his feet after the race, and had to be propped up by Hunter, so I initially attributed their inconsolable demeanour in the post-race interview to exhaustion. But in his Guardian column, Purchase wrote:

I've never felt so totally and utterly gutted. We were there to win gold, nothing else. Even though I'm holding a silver medal, it still feels completely heart-wrenching. [...] I cannot imagine ever being able to derive any consolation from the race outcome. The whole point about sport is that you have winners and losers. It's important for people to keep that in mind. Getting medals for taking part is not what it's about; it's all about getting medals for winning.

The most obvious echo here is the famous sporting line, often attributed to NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt: "Second place is just the first place loser". This is sport as Nietzschean struggle, inspired by Pierre de Coubertin's Olympic motto ("Faster, Higher, Stronger") rather than the Olympic creed, which begins: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part." The winner takes it all, as Abba put it. The loser takes nothing. 

This was clearly a dictum taken to heart by British 400m sprinter Christine Ohuruogu. After forfeiting her Olympic title to the brilliant Sanya Richards-Ross on Sunday night, Ohuruogu said:

I was stunned, I was heartbroken actually. To lose your title like that was tough. I just wish I’d held on to my title — I really wanted to and I fought hard. She didn’t get an easy ride completely, at least I hope I made it hard for her. I always came here for one thing and one thing only and that was continuing my reign so I am disappointed. [...] I know I should be pleased but I’m just stubborn. I’m very stubborn.

In many ways such monomaniacal drive is commendable. Do we want to see British athletes just happy to be there, or do we want to see them win? The anxiety felt during the first couple of days while we waited for a goal medal at London 2012 suggests the latter. But is Earnhardt's line really true? Is second really just the first place loser? Isn't it possible to perform brilliantly but still only finish second or third when pitted against the world's best athletes? 

The answer, surely, is yes. In an athletics world of incremental improvement, where diet and training routines and sports science are constantly being refined, there's no shame in finishing second or third. As Liz Nicholl, the chief executive of UK Sport argued, commentators who aren't close to the high performance system think Team GB should be in the mix for every gold, but while we're progressing, so is the rest of the world.

This is what Rebecca Adlington articulated so eloquently in her interview poolside immediately after losing her 800m freestyle crown to 15-year-old American Katie Ledecky. Refusing to play the victim, Adlington said: "I am so proud and pleased to get a bronze medal – it's nothing ever to be embarrassed about. Swimming is one of the hardest sports to medal at. It is so, so difficult and I hope the public realise that."

However, perhaps the fact that Adlington was content with her two bronze medals at London 2012 isn't that surprising. Stanford University professor Bob Sutton blogged this week about the joy U.S. swimmer Brendan Hansen displayed at snaring a bronze in the 100m breaststroke. While Hansen's euphoria was partly down to his age (he was only the thirteenth swimmer to win a medal over the age of 30), Sutton also mentioned a 1995 study for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which suggested strong evidence that athletes are happier with a bronze medal than a silver. Whereas bronze medalists are happy to have made it on to the podium, silver medalists are prone to counterfactual thinking, constantly beating themselves up about how close they were to gold.

As Sutton put it: "silver medalists see themselves as the first loser, while bronze medalists see themselves as the last winner." While that speaks volumes about the mindset of our elite athletes and their relentless desire to win, in the end Adlington was surely right. Silver and bronze medals aren't first and second place for losers, they're a reward for exceptional performance, a reminder that you are among the best in the world at what you do.

How can the "flabby" public sector possibly compete with such ruthlessly efficient three-letter acronyms? All hail our private sector paymasters!

If the dignified, level-headed way G4S has handled London 2012 security has taught The Golden Latrine anything, it's that subcontracting out services that would normally fall under the public sector's remit to private 3-letter acronyms always leads to a sleeker, more efficient service.

While cynics carped about the army and police having to be drafted in in their thousands to make up for shortfalls in the number of security guards provided by G4S, in a rational world the private security firm (sorry, "word's leading provider of security solutions") would have been applauded for allowing our brave boys to get in on the Olympic action. Yes, CEO Nick Buckles admitted that perhaps not all of the security guards provided by G4S would be able to speak English, but as the old adage goes: the baton is mightier than the vocal chords.

Likewise A4e, who did such a bang-up job in ushering our jobseekers back to work (and surely the point of work is the inherent dignity of labour, rather than actually getting paid?). And who could forget Capita-owned court interpreters ALS, whose minor "teething problems" in fulfilling their £300 Ministry of Justice contract have compassionately handed our nation's criminals a moment of respite when their trials collapse.

What else can the flabby public sector do when faced with such ruthless competency but genuflect in admiration of our corporate paymasters. God bless the private sector! May its efficiency savings be a shining example to us all!

Was Vince Cable right to say banking was a "moral quagmire"? Or are the Barclays scandals really just the work of a few rogue traders?

The Golden Latrine can still clearly remember the pride he felt at setting up his first bank account. At the time it felt like a rite of passage into the adult world. Nowadays those au fair with the state of British banking might prefer to take the safe option and keep their money stuffed in a Hello Kitty pillow case under the bed.

It was perhaps naive, if not unreasonable, to hope that the greed, wishful thinking and excessive risk-taking which led to the banking crash in 2008 - an event, lest we forget, that came perilously close to derailing the entire global economy - might have taught the banking industry a lesson. Surely they would have no choice but to clean up their ways and embrace the need for tighter industry regulation, right? Wrong.

Bankers have been under the cosh this week following two major scandals which demonstrate how completely the industry has failed to reform itself. The announcement that four high street banks had been involved in the mis-selling of complex financial products to 28,000 small businesses was dwarfed by the revelation that Barclays had received a £290m fine from regulators for participating in the rigging of the LIBOR (the daily rate set by the British Bankers' Association, governing how much it costs for London's banks to borrow from each other) and the EURIBOR (the same, but for lending between European banks). And in case this sounds like obscure inter-bank politics removed from the real world, consider this: these rates underpin contracts worth $350 trillion worldwide, while the Libor rate impacted on an estimated 250,000 British mortgage holders at any one time over the last decade.

Business secretary Vince Cable penned a strongly-worded piece for The Observer on the need for greater regulation, accountability, and cultural change within the industry, as well as calling for the implementation of the Vickers report (which recommends that bank reinstate the traditional firewall between their commercial banking and investment banking arms, as well as being forced to maintain greater reserves of capital). But what was heartening is that this time the savaging wasn't just from the liberal press. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, joined the fray, with the latter decrying the City "culture of cynicism and greed that is quite shocking".

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has been summoned to the Treasure select committee on Wednesday, although chances are he won't be sweating unduly. This is, after all, the man who, upon being questioned by the same select committee last year about the seemliness of him receiving an £6.5m bonus for 2010 despite woeful trading figures, memorably told them: "There was a period of remorse and apology for banks and I think that period needs to be over." This a mere two years after his bank narrowly avoided the need for nationalisation - although they did greatly benefit from the bailout of the other banks, as their former CEO John Varley acknowledged. Humility is not, I think it's fair to say, Diamond's strong point.

And the revelations continue to flow. In a fascinating blog posted today, the BBC's Robert Peston revealed that managers at Barclays believed they had the Bank of England's tacit approval to manipulate the Libor rate - based on reports of a phone call between Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England. Tucker firmly denies that he authorised any such thing.

Whatever the results of Diamond's appearance in front of the select committee, what is becoming brazenly clear is that these are not isolated incidents. As The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland wrote: 

Just as News International's insistence that phone hacking was confined to a few "rogue reporters" has been revealed as a lie, the idea that a small number of Bollinger-swilling renegades operated unnoticed inside our great British banks is absurd.

Freedland is spot on. This isn't about a few traders overstepping the mark, but yet further evidence of a wanton disregard for rules and regulations within the banking industry. RBS today revealed that they sacked four traders between November 2011 and February 2012 over their alleged involvement in attempts to fix the Libor rate, and there's a sense that the banking profession has been protected from widespread public scrutiny in the past by virtue of its jargon-heavy impenetrability. In other words, whereas anyone can understand a newspaper paying a private investigator to tap the telephone of a dead child's parents, a large percentage of the population are simply too bored by the minutiae of banking to scrutinise the actions of bankers in any detail.

Now, though, there's a definite sense of the veil lifting. Barclay's chairman Marcus Agius has fallen on his sword, Bob Diamond is under pressure to follow suit and Vince Cable is calling for a criminal investigation into the inter-bank rate fixing. For too long the banking industry was given free reign as long as it continued contributing to British GDP on such a lavish scale. The time has come to regulate the banking system properly, but it isn't going to be easy. Our financial sector has the best lobbyists in the game, and incredible access to Downing Street. The lobbyists have already watered down the Vickers report, let's make sure our politicians don't let them dilute it any further.

"Compassionate Conservatism" was always a hollow phrase. With the welfare state now firmly in Cameron's crosshairs, should we be thankful for the Lib Dems?

Deep in his insalubrious past, The Golden Latrine claimed housing benefit for a period. The shame stills gnaws at his innards on a daily basis.

In a widely trailed speech delivered in Bluewater shopping centre in Kent yesterday, Cameron indulged in a spot of what his former sidekick Steve Hilton would no doubt have referred to as blue sky thinking. It was, he said, "time we asked some serious questions about the signals we send out through the benefits system," which is apparently encouraging a "culture of entitlement". The Golden Latrine would like to point out is in no way ironic coming from an alumni of Heatherdown Preparatory School and Eton, who is heir to a large personal fortune and was apparently given a helping hand into Conservative Central Office by a call from Buckingham Palace.

Among the ideas floated in the speech was a £20,000-a-year cap on housing benefit, a drive to make people on incapacity work harder at not being ill, and my personal favourite, the scraping of access to housing benefit for people under 25 - all with the aim of lopping £10bn off the welfare budget.

Tim Leunig from the liberal CentreForum thinktank was quick to debunk Cameron's ideas on scraping housing benefit for under-25s, rightly pointing out that simply building more public housing would reduce the government's housing benefit bill by forcing spiralling rent costs down (and, he might well have added, creating a large number of much-needed construction jobs). The speech did, needless to say, go down a storm with Golden Latrine favourite Melanie Phillips, who hailed Cameron's "important, bold and radical welfare reforms."

However, it should be stressed that this speech wasn't a set of policy directives but rather an attempt to discuss the "principles of debate," as work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith put it, adding: "The details of these, of course, we have to be careful about. We have to be sensitive to the different reasons people have housing - people coming out of care, being in difficulties in foster care." It was, in other words, a transparent attempt to woo back the Tory hardline (although interestingly, a poll on the Daily Mail showed that a massive majority of their readership were against the under-25s idea - clearly Tories aren't overly enamoured with the idea of having to house their ageing offspring either). Openly admitting that these were ideas for a post-2015 Tory government, what the PM was ultimately saying was: "This is what I would do, folks, if only I didn't have to accommodate those pesky Liberals in the Coalition. Vote for us outright next time."

With Cameron a distant dot in Labour's rear window in the polls, his desire for eye-catching reforms is understandable. But if he really wants to cut costs, he should perhaps look closer to home. According to a report from The Guardian's Patrick Wintour, the Treasury has already accepted that the current creation of Universal Credit (which basically just merges benefits and tax credits into one system) will cost the government money, rather than create savings.

For now these policies remain voter-wooing pipedreams, but if we get a majority Conservative government in 2015, there might well be a large number of graduates moving back home with their parents. In a peculiarly nasty article  in the Observer a few weeks back, Barbara Ellen opined that anybody still living with their parents at the age of thirty should "get a life". It might be time for her to take another look at that one. 

Are less well-off voters who vote Conservative just suffering from "false consciousness"? Or is the Right just better at talking about values?

Back in the days before he became a jaded roue, committed to a life of Tesco Cava breakfasts and loose women, The Golden Latrine used to get himself into a right old tizz over the idea of people voting for politicians because they were, quote unquote, "a strong leader".

The most famous domestic example of recent times was, of course, Margaret Thatcher. Watch footage of voters during her election campaigns, and you hear the same view expressed time and time again: she's a strong leader, even if I don't agree with all her policies. As a feisty young politico, this struck me as an inherently flawed outlook. Surely the worst possible combination you can have in a Prime Minister is an iron-willed leader who will enact the policies you're against with the utmost vigour. David Cameron has wreaked enough damage already, despite the fact he supposedly spends half his waking hours "chillaxing".

No, as far as I was concerned, the only reason the less well-off ever voted Tory was that old Marxist chestnut: false consciousness. If only the working class voters knew the truth, they would have no choice but to vote Labour (see this New Internationalist blog, which brands a working class Tory vote as "nothing short of a betrayal," as a shining example of this kind of thinking). Now, though, this position strikes me as fundamentally unsound. 

Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, examines this the question of why the working class frequently vote against what are, seemingly, their own economic interests. Why, for instance, was Ronald Reagan such an unstoppable hit with America's blue-collar workforce? Why did so many British working class families embrace Thatcherism? Was it simply  a sense of misplaced loyalties?

Haidt's conclusion, as he outlined in an article for The Guardian, is that the right are frequently better at articulating a moral vision for the nation, whereas the left is prone to over focusing on policies: there will be this many more NHS beds; we will lift this many people out of poverty. All very progressive and praiseworthy, but lacking an emotional pull - an important factor in politics, as The Golden Latrine has written about before. As Haidt put it:

It's more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programmes.

There's still a portion of the left that has an extremely unfortunate tendency to treat the poor as an anthropological specimen, dismissing legitimate concerns about things like immigration or Islamic extremism. The poor are seen as noble savages, mislead by their lack of education, bless their hearts. As a result of ignoring these concerns, a lot of current left-wing thinking falls foul of an obsession with tolerance and what Slavoj Zizek calls the "culturalisation of politics", which he describes as the process whereby:

political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into "cultural" differences, different "ways of life," which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely "tolerated.

What Zizek is really talking about is the retreat of politics, it's abdication of the idea that it can fundamentally change the way our society is configured. For example, the existence of a glaring disparity in living standards between the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor is no longer something to be challenged, only managed - encapsulated perfectly by Peter Mandelson's famous declaration about New Labour being "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". The naked greed of much of the banking sector and the mega bonuses they receive are not obscene byproducts of a fundamentally unjust system that needs to be redrawn, but simply a fact of life. They can no more be challenged than a law of nature can. Hence four years after the banking crash which threatened to destabilise the entire world economy, many of the major players are back to their old ways.

If we acknowledge the above, it's not hard to see why people are disillusioned with politicians. A strong, charismatic leader begins to look ever-more appealing, someone who can resusrect a nation's self-esteem and inspire a sense of pride. But what Haidt is really talking about is the Right's ability to embody values: respect for authority; loyalty; moral red-lines that can't be crossed. The left excels at iconoclasm (and condescension), but is not always so smart at making people feel safe and secure.

Take, for example, Thatcher's selling-off of council houses - a disaster for long-term UK housing policy, but a political masterstroke, which played perfectly into the desire of the poor for upward social mobility. As Andrew Pierce wrote in The Telegraph: "Thatcher understood that even families like mine, who had been kept in their rightful place often on sink estates by successive governments, had aspirations of their own. It took a Conservative leader to understand that the working classes also wanted to get on." And Thatcher was more than happy to talk about her desire to return to "Victorian values": respect, decency, hard-work and, perhaps crucially, taking responsibility for your own life. Although her policies ultimately served to undermine those values, the fact she was talking about them at all is symbolic.