As an April Fool, I wrote a post entitled “EXCLUSIVE: Jacqui Smith resigns as Home Secretary“, saying:

Jacqui Smith has resigned as Home Secretary, after admitting that she couldn’t she “just couldn’t hack it” after being caught fiddling the Parliamentary expenses system…

She has also announced that she will be standing down as MP for Redditch at the next election, as she can’t cope with the shame.

And now it has actually come true! Well, apart from the resigning as an MP bit, but she’ll get voted out anyway so she doesn’t need to.

However, why has her departure been announced now, just two days before a major election? Either it’s a ploy by Smith’s people in order to save her the embarrasment of being fired (or be seen to be fired) by Brown or it’s a government plot to try and cover up the news reports around the disastrous Labour vote share expected on June 4th. It would benefit Brown for the newspapers to be filled with stories on a reshuffle and loads of “who will become the next Home Secretary?” comment pieces – rather than a multitude of “can the PM survive?” columns.

Also, the news yesterday was dominated by this resignation rather than more discussions of disastrous polls and stories on speeches etc from the other parties – which is all good for Labour.