It hasn't taken long for Egypt's "official" opposition parties – the Wafd, the Tagammu and the Nasserists – to cave in and 
agree to talks with the Mubarak regime. Fortunately, they are not enough on their own to make any dialogue meaningful.

Events of the last 24 hours – Mubarak's TV speech followed by government-sponsored thugs going on the rampage – have shown the regime has no intention of pursuing genuine and rapid change. It will simply procrastinate and prevaricate, and the more outsiders press it to do otherwise the more it will resist "foreign interference".

As my Guardian colleague Simon Tisdall wrote earlier today:

Mubarak's speech to the nation on Tuesday night was widely misinterpreted. The president was, by turns, angry, defiant and unrepentant. He offered no apologies, proposed no new initiatives, gave no promise that his son Gamal would not succeed him, and instead lectured Egyptians on the importance of order and stability (which he alone could assure).

He appeared not to have learned anything from the past week. And his one "concession" – that he would not seek re-election – was no concession at all. After all, he had never said he would.

There is no real prospect of change while the regime remains intact. If it is serious about transition (which I doubt) it should, at the very least, give a serious signal of its intent. That means Mubarak stepping aside – now – and inviting figures from other parties (and none) into a national unity government.

Another point to bear in mind is that the longer this drags on, the better it will be for the Muslim Brotherhood. A lot of the Brotherhood's electoral support is a protest vote against Mubarak and his way of governing. Once he is gone, the protest-vote element will start to wane.

There has also been some media excitement today at President Salih's announcement in Yemen that he will retire in 2013. Like Mubarak, he is not to be trusted. In fact, he has talked of stepping down several times before and on each occasion he has changed his mind later. Here is a report I wrote about it on the last occasion, in 2005.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 2 Feb 2011.