Gordon Brown is being killed by ridicule

Hazel Blears is toast. The Mole hears she will be sacked from the Cabinet for ridiculing Gordon Brown's recent YouTube performance on the issue of MPs' allowances. But her sideswipe at Brown - "YouTube if you want to" - may yet come to be seen as a lethal blow to the PM too.

Her attack on Brown's "lamentable" communications skills, coupled with the PM's weird video appearance, had John Prescott pulling faces as a cut-price mimic while on the campaign trail in York. Mocking the PM's grin, Prescott called it "the worst bloody smile in the world". Which has caused yet more explosions in the Downing Street bunker.

If there's one thing that's a killer for a politician, it is to be ridiculed. And that is now happening to Brown, too often, as today's PMQs showed.

He looked like a bull having its nose tweaked when Tory MP Stephen Crabb asked Brown at Prime Minister's Questions what he was going to do about "bullying in the workplace given the reliable reports of a senior Whitehall boss throwing around mobile phones and printers and swearing at switchboard operators".

As Brown lumbered on, saying: "Any complaints will be dealt with in the usual manner,"  the Tory benches collapsed in fake laughter at the spectacle of Brown looking bemused.

David Cameron decided to take the prime ministerial bull by the horns and asked Brown why Blears was still a member of his Cabinet. Many Cabinet ministers were, of course, wondering the same thing while the terrier-sized red-head herself hid by the side of the Speaker's chair as Brown brushed aside Camo's demands for an early election to replace his hapless Government.

"If things were different, she wouldn't have survived the weekend," one Cabinet minister told the Mole. "She'll go after the European elections in June."

Interestingly, Cameron ignored the ammunition he could have used from the Treasury Select Committee which - as I forecast in my earlier posting today - delivered a devastating critique this morning of Brown and Darling's Budget strategy.

The cross-party committee accused the Chancellor of plucking a figure out of the air when he decided on a 50p income tax for those earning above £150,000 and said there were "considerable uncertainties over the yield". The committee also predicted that unemployment would go above 3 million, that Brown would miss his targets for reducing child benefit, and said the stamp duty 'holiday' would do nothing to boost the housing market.

But it's not the serious stuff that is killing Brown - it's the ridicule. ·