WITH his luck William Hague should never play cards.

For having clawed his way up from the position of being a no-account, lightweight leader of the Opposition, he was just making a dent in Labour's long-standing lead in the opinion polls when Cherie Blair's middle-aged pregnancy knocked the fiasco over Ken Livingstone's bid to be London's mayor off the front pages.

Then along came the Jeffrey Archer libel-case lie to steep the Conservatives in scandal yet again.

Mr Hague's judgment in backing the manifestly dubious Lord Archer as a candidate of "probity and integrity" for the post of London's mayor is, of course, questionable. After all, this column, with no more prescience than the average observer, was questioning the nobility of this flamboyant, self-publicist years ago when John Major was plonking a peer's coronet on his swollen head.

But if events and his own naM- vet have upset Mr Hague's comeback, he - or the successor that this business may yet throw up - should depend on the shallowness of Labour's legislative programme, as outlined last week in the Queen's Speech, for alerting voters to the government's pitiful priorities.

They were summarised brilliantly by Mr Hague in his effective mockery of Labour in the Commons.

It was a triumph but, alas for him, all now overshadowed by happy events for the Blairs and dismal Archer-inspired ones for the Tories. But, aside from the prospect of a real Blair babe being exploited as a vote-winner in the run-up to the next election, at the next count the more alert electors among us may yet remember the Labour frailties that the luckless Mr Hague commenced exposing just now.

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