CLARE Short reminds me of the more annoying sort of alarm clock. She doesn't go off when you want her to - and then she makes a dreadful racket at just the wrong moment.

As you may have noticed, unless your head has been pleasantly occupied in a bucket, Ms Short has resigned from the Cabinet amid an attention-seeking clatter.

Stepping down as International Development Secretary, Ms Short had her moment in the Commons, which she used to tear long and painful strips off the Prime Minister's back.

Some of what she said rang true, especially her acidic observation that Tony Blair was "in danger of destroying his legacy as he becomes increasingly obsessed by his place in history".

The speech Ms Short made was a bells-ringing, bleepers-bleeping sort of affair - yet like an unreliable alarm clock, the clamour came too late in the day. If she were indeed an alarm clock, Ms Short would get round to waking you up at around the second-coffee time of the morning.

After threatening to resign during the build-up to the Iraq War, Ms Short shuffled away from her big moment. And yet now, such a short time later, she steps down. Perhaps it is cynical to wonder, but let's go on and wonder: by going now, has Ms Short chosen a time to best maximise the impact of her departure? The answer to that question is surely one of the variety sometimes suggested by pondering what bears get up to in the woods.

Anyway, that's enough about Clare Short. Some people liked her, some didn't - and now she has gone (or, to complete the analogy, jumped around making a racket until she fell off the bedside table in the middle of the afternoon).

Her replacement offers an interesting take on how Tony Blair would like to operate, if he truly had a free hand. Some 25 minutes after announcing Ms Short's departure, Downing Street put out the news that her successor would be Lady Amos.

The junior Foreign Office minister becomes the first black woman in a British Cabinet. To the liberally-inclined commentator, her appoint-ment should be great news. And it is perfectly true that elevating a talented black woman to such a position should only be for the good, as it represents the modern face of Britain.

Yet there is a problem with the swift promotion of this 49-year-old minister. No one has ever voted her into power. Instead, Tony Blair made her a working peer in 1997, and so she has risen without ever having to trouble the electorate.

More than that, Lady Amos apparently has the trust of the Prime Minister, who is reported to rate her more highly than many ministers who arrived in a position of power via the ballot box.

To those of a wary mind, it looks as if Mr Blair would rather surround himself with people he admires, instead of having to call on those unreliable representatives who come his way via the cranky mechanics of democracy.

It is easy to see why Mr Blair might prefer not to deal with his MPs - after all, a surprising number of them belong to the Labour Party; some of them even arrive carrying those awkward things called principles.

None of this is to say that Lady Amos does not deserve success in her new role, or that she hasn't done well to get so far. What she hasn't ever done is get herself voted in anywhere.

The Tories used to carry on like this with life peers - and now New Labour does the same with its chosen lordly few. So no change there then.

Updated: 10:37 Thursday, May 15, 2003