to be a significant player," he enthused. "But she's going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She isn't going to be the de facto leader."

Indeed she is not. Gingrich is. The coup de grace has already fallen: the organisers of the Republican's top-top-table Senate-House Dinner, on June 8, have announced that Governor Palin will no longer be the key-note speaker, as previously announced. She is too busy in Alaska. Gingrich has graciously agreed to take her place.

He is already the clearest voice of opposition, attacking Obama's "higher tax, weaker economy, fewer jobs" strategy as "likely to make things worse". Conservative columnist Robert Novak has already anointed him for 2012 in the Washington Post. Gingrich himself told the Richmond Times-Despatch that "if we think it's necessary, we will probably do it".

Gingrich is even making a play to "restructure" the Republicans' religious base. He has dumped the discredited fundamentalist protestants and evangelicals to convert to Roman Catholicism. His third wife is Catholic, and he wanted to join her in her faith. That, of course, is possible. But then again, the single biggest church in America, and growing with every Hispanic immigrant, is that of Rome, and it has not been associated with the destruction of the moderate Republican vote.

Gingrich is uncannily close to being Bill Clinton's dark-side twin

This is all Gingrich the smart guy. But there are already reports of Republican grandees trembling at the prospect of Gingrich disaster zones.

Gingrich is uncannily close to being Bill Clinton's dark-side twin. Both were born poor and grew up in the South. Both have good-ol' boy charm and rhetoric. Both have unrivalled political instincts. Gingrich, as Speaker, was the perfect opponent for the political fight-to-the-finish that ended in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the attempt to impeach Clinton.

But it was Gingrich who lost. He blew the budget showdown when he forced Clinton to shut down the government, and then told reporters that he did it because he felt insulted when Clinton forced him to sit at the back of Air Force One. And he blew the Lewinsky scandal when it turned out that his own "family values" included committing adultery at the very time he was persecuting Clinton for his Monica dalliance.

To complete the circle, the wife that Gingrich was then betraying revealed that his modus operandi with his mistresses was oral sex. He believed, just as Clinton did, that oral sex was not sex, as such, and was therefore easier to lie about.

The Grand Old Party is Gingrich's for the taking. But if hubris does lead to a run in 2012, it will be Obama who can celebrate with a satisfied pat to the head of his dog Bo.