What Brown has actually done is appoint ministers (outside the cabinet) for English regions (like Nick Brown for Northern England).

The English, having been convinced that elected assemblies are bureaucratic whilst central government politicians and civil servants are democratic, are presumably going to get executive devolution of the sort Scotland and Wales enjoyed before devolution.

Watch this space for Brown's great constitutional "reforms", which would have been discussed by the cabinet at its second meeting if the terrorists onslaught had not brought about the end of civilisation as we knew it.