Brown previews his big speech

Today is G-Day, and Gordon is doing the rounds of the broadcasters before his big speech this afternoon. Up against Sky's Adam Boulton, Brown led off, as he did on Marr yesterday, on the "personalised" NHS - although when Adam mentioned that this very New Labour approach to health reform had been welcomed by Peter Mandelson at a meeting last night, the PM could barely muster a nod of disgusted recognition.

On election timing, he was positively sharp in response to Adam's perfectly legitimate questions: "The first person I shall talk to is The Queen and not Sky TV." Let's remember that promise if, by chance, the date is actually announced in due course on the front page of a red-top newspaper. At any rate, the PM is conspicuously leaving open his options. If he is frustrated by the extent to which election fever dominates the papers this morning, he only has himself to blame.

The big MRSA clean-up and further measures to crack down on gun and knife crime will be amongst the policy nuggets in the speech: there will be others. A more revealing moment in the Sky interview was Gordon's dismissal of the Tories: "They just want to stop things. They don't want to make things happen." So that's one of the charges he'll level at Cameron when the election comes: the Tories stand for inertia and obstruction. They are the true reform-blockers, not me.

Incidentally, Gordon was not, as he claimed, "the first to propose a referendum on the euro." He did so only because John Major had done so, who did so only because his party was split and under intense pressure from Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party.