The end of a premiership?

Oscar

I'm getting very worried by these reports, which smell of disinformation and clever expectations management. The Leader in the Times and Guido are both running it and it's been picked up by PB. Brown is crap at governing the country but very very sophisticated when it comes to infiltrating the media. This smacks to me of Glenrothes style media scare stories. After the elections we will no doubt be inundated with stories about how Gordon did miraculously well, while the Conservatives, despite all expectations, were the ones to get a kick in the ballots. The media narrative has clearly turned the expenses scandal into a Tory Sleaze story. I fear Tories will be punished, not Brown.

Don

David Miliband still thinks he's in with a shout, does this child's vanity know no bounds?

Vulture

I feel that Liebour have already resigned themselves to appalling results in the June polls. (GO fo(u)rth!' indeed). Straw's acknowledgement of that today is significant - he is warning off Millipede and Postman Pat. Luckily, from the Tories' PoV; we're stuck with Mr
Useless Bruin until the bitter end. And it will be very bitter.

anthony adams

Swapping the leader means we will get an almost immediate election I would say.

I really don't see much appetite for that from the Laboour people. Hence Brown will stay until the bitter end.

rmh

Oscar makes very valid points, the whole Respect party attack on the wife of McKay is very seedily underreported.

Where are the Balls and Cooper troughing stories we know exist?

The DT is getting boring in it drop drip mentality, it should go out with a bang as what is being reported is really just froth.

Why not show what Balls/Cooper did with the flipping, what Hoon earnt through his machinisations.....

The Labourgraph...... indeed.

Paul B

I agree with Anthony Adams conclusions, a new leader/PM will have to go to the country immediatly, otherwise he or she will not have any popular legitimacy in the country . There is already a clamour for a GE, if Labour elected a third PM within the one parliament, then that clamour would become a tidal wave and we would be living in very dangerous times. I cannot see it happening

Gawain

I have a horrible suspicion that Oscar is right. This looks like a cassic Labour spin operation. Brown is the Rasputin of British politics and just as toxic. I'll belive in his political demise only when I see the removal vans leaving Downing Street and crossing the border into Scotland.

Nicholas

Much of merit in Oscar's post. Kirkbride et al are a Godsend to the snot gobbler and, fantastically, the ghost of Tory sleaze has returned. The cabinet (q.v. McNulty) have got away with it by the "lessons learned and move on" routine perfected by Labour but denied to the opposition. The CPS and police have shown themselves utterly complicit in bending to New Labour's will. There are so many horrendous Labour crimes which have been buried without trace. The snot gobbler will no doubt press on and with a combination of deadly slander by his many agents and gerrymandering win the next election - if there is one.

The petition for Brown to resign: 63,000 after several weeks. Give me a break. This odious creature is indestructible.

Resign yourselves to another 5 years of lefto-fascist government, entrenching the very worst of Nanny New Labour and turning Britain into the biggest open prison in the world.

And all those supposed right wing, right of centre and anti-Labour commentators (including Guido) who just can't bring themselves to support the only viable opposition to the worst and most dangerous government in British history and who have been far too busy plucking the splinter from the Tory eye to notice the giant Redwood in Labour's will be partly responsible. Well done, useful idiots, enjoy the next six years of wall to wall Kim Il Brown.

Tiberius

Brown is the 21st century version of Alex Forrest (you remember her; the original bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction).

Now I have no idea how many bunnies Brown has boiled in his time, but I don't think he's finished yet with his repeated returns from the dead.

Where's Ann Archer when you need a result?

CCTV

Can't they take it in turns ? Miliband for 3 months, then Johnson, then Harman ?

Verity

Nicholas, well said!

Did Cameron mishandle this, or what? He has allowed Labour to shed its coat of sordid sleaze, malice and greed by noisily reprimanding the few troughing Tories in such a manner as to prod vivid memories of "Tory sleaze".

Why the hell was Cameron motivated to focus on the very few Tory wrongdoings? Why, to turn the spotlight on himself and demonstrate what a stand-up guy he is. Until he interfered with such clumping ineptitude, I was afraid the Tories might win the next election and we might have five years of the Heirites. Thanks to Cameron, that won't happen.

Most of the tiny amount of Tory troughing was rather funny and could have been used to comical effect, lessening its sting. I mean a duck house, for God's sake. Cleaning the moat! Dave's wisteria trimming. (An absolute Ealing Brothers gift!) Compare with the sordid Jacqui Smith and her bathplug and her husband's porn ... well, you can see the possibilities for lessening the impact ...

Finally, I can't remember any other of the legion of Labour instances now, so well has Dave embedded the few Tory examples in our minds.

So my plan remains the same. Labour should get Alan Johnson as Leader. He will win the next election, thanks to the Cameron spotlight on "Tory sleaze" and the Tories will replace Cameron with someone who has political nous and politics, not public relations, running in his veins.

Summer

When did he take over? Last summer? Goodness it seems like an eternity and a day.

How can they scrat around in the dirt and try and change the leader again in the current climate. They've got to call a general election. We've got to force one. I've already started my campaign of civil disobedience and I suggest others do too.

We want social change, we want political reform and we want to rescue our economy NOW.

Denis Cooper

anthony adams @ 11:49 AM

Even if there was a change of Labour leader and Prime Minister, it's very unlikely that would affect the timing of the repeat referendum on Lisbon in Ireland.

As that referendum is provisionally scheduled for October, and afterwards it would be getting rather late in the year, it's pretty certain that our general election would still be deferred until spring 2010.

You mustn't assume that any normal considerations of democratic legitimacy, or even simple decency, would apply here, as furthering the EU project takes priority over everything.

Kalvis Jansons

Let us go viral, and take out Mr Brown:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go --- the petition
http://kalvis.com?PleaseGo.pdf --- the poster

Pete, Scotland

The end of a premiership?

Let's hope so, the country needs it so that we can start cleansing the system.

John

Alan Johnston is the only chance for Labour. I hope the Militwat gets in. He can then lecture the electorate in his naive and hertoring style, and he'll be as popular as Brown in no time. Remember how Mandleson had to fly out to India after the Militwat kid had managed to hack off the mild mannered Anglophile Prime Minister Singh ?

Draughtsman

I can't think why anybody in the cabinet would want to take on the premiership now. Brown will cling on with all his tenacity in the vain hope that the economy will come good before there has to be an election next year. He knows that if the economy doesn't recover before then history will judge him as one of the most disastrous prime ministers this country has endured.

It is more than likely that Labour will be trounced at the election whoever is PM at the time. Labour always ruins the country as they just can't help themselves in the end. They believe that the state has to do everything and therefore relentlessly expand it costing the taxpayers far more than they can afford. In reality the state does everything very badly and in trying to be stong everywhere it is weak everywhere. It was Blair's great achievement in 1997 in convincing an electorate tired of the Tories that Labour had changed, but Labour can't change. That fact unfortunately has to be learned afresh by each generation.

dorothy wilson

Given the state of the economy how on earth can Johnson expect to have any credible? Can anyone see him making the necessary cuts in public services? So it would be tax rises - and very substantial ones - for everybody, not just those on high incomes.

Chris

Daily Mail headline today:

The final straw: Expenses MP Julie Kirkbride finally stands down after a blizzard of new revelations. Labour MP also quits

Labour MP also quits! Dear God.

The Laughing Cavalier

Postman Pat or the Milliboy. Not a choice but a dilemma.