Brown has survived, for the moment

Sally Chatterjee

Milliband looks so daft. How can he lead Britain into talks with Iran or Hamid Karzai yet he can't stand up to Brown?

Chris lancashire

Definitely the latter - not one of the Cabinet had the guts to pick this up and run with it.

The lack of courage, the lack of a burning ambition in anyone and, above all, the lack of leadership bodes very ill for Labour's hopefully long stint in opposition.

Publius

Time has run out. Brown goes on, with all the constancy of a corpse.

Naomi Muse

I see the pen of Mandy in the statement made by Miliband this morning.

Interesting though that the Cabinet 6 bottled out after the Broon Cabal raised the steel wall.

Means just one thing - Mandy's in charge.

Percy

The problem for Miliband is that the world now sees him as an utter wimp, unfit for his office.

Roadrunner

A delusional P.M. leading a cabinet of eunuchs,what an absolute total shower.No wonder the country is in such a mess and we have another 4 months of this before the electorate can show the Labour elite how it should have been done.

Walsingham's Ghost

Oh dear...

Once again the spineless members of Brown's Cabinet prove that even a jellyfish has more guts than they have.

I bet Cameron's team cannot believe their luck...

WG

Dorothy Wilson

So Labour will be going into the election with a leader who clearly does not have the support of the Parliamentary Party. So they will then have to fight a campaign with the voters suspecting that - if by any remote chance Labour happened to win - at the first hint of trouble post-election there would be another plot against Brown with the strong possibility of another change of leader mid-term.

Rich

Careful choice of words "involved in the letter"

This leaves plenty of wriggle room for being involved with the plot rather than "the letter".

We all know which 6 members of the cabinet were supposed to stand-up and didn't, I'm sure they were all too busy running their departments rather than lacking the guts to do it....

Moriarty

We have a pusillanimous Cabinet, its members too gutless to hand Brown the revolver. Incidentally, which of them are in the War Cabinet?

Moxon

Whatever the strategy/tactics of H and H, the psychology seems unbelievably naive. By their letter they are/were asking for the members of the Cabinet to indulge in such a level of hypocrisy and double-dealing as even they must recoil from.

Dungeekin

In an unprecedented development, attempting to put an end to speculation regarding his leadership, Prime Minister Gollum Jong Brown last night fired his entire Cabinet and installed himself as Supreme Leader of Britain.

Brown reportedly took the decision to become a Dicktator after becoming disappointed at the terse and vague statements of 'support' he received from senior Cabinet members after yesterday's attempted coup by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. Sources indicate that the PM became enraged after Alistair Darling, David Millipede and other unnamed Cabinet Ministers refused to grovel at his feet* and, in a flurry of four-letter oaths and flying phones, removed the entire Cabinet from their positions.

One senior Downing Street Civil Servant said, "When the Cabinet refused to kotow properly the PM started to get angry. He told them he'd run the country single-handed, and when Alistair said he'd heard that was Brown's normal method in life the PM completely lost it, screaming "you've all got it in for me" at the Cabinet before throwing them all out. He then barricaded himself into the LeaderBunker shouting that only he had the vision and power to save the country and the world, and all the people who couldn't see that were mad, and if they thought he was mad he'd show them mad, at which point he started cackling wildly and became largely unintelligible.

"Since then we have had a number of edicts emailed to us from the Bunker. For example, we have now been advised to ask you to refer to this as Browning Street, and we understand that the Treasury has been instructed to adopt the Brownd as the new UK currency. It is clear that the PM - sorry, I mean the Supreme Leader of Great Brownian - has adopted a siege mentality. He's pretty well ensconced in that bunker and our main concern is that he appears to have a supply of Ed Balls sufficient to last until at least May."

None of the Cabinet Ministers who were tenuously linked to the HooCoup were available for comment, as they were all collectively searching for either a spine or a pair of testicles.

*Though Ed Balls was, as always swift to kiss Brown's ring.

Publius

And now the knives are out for Milband (and Charles Clarke). I detect Balls' hand in this. A good time, perhaps, for him to pick off his enemies.

AndyinBrum

Sorry to be slightly off topic, but kudos to your photographer / picture editor. Thats a cracking photo

TomTom

Again, why is Internal Labour Party business being circulated on House of Commons notepaper ? Is this yet another abuse of the Expenses system and the £10,000 "Communications Allowance " ?

Yam Yam

No wonder the country's in such a mess when the party running it are too inept even to organise a decent political assassination.

Victor Southern

I am not sure what date the Ides of March falls on. Can someone enlighten me?

Hysteria

is it just me ? but is this all "beltway" BS? Does the man on the Clapham omnibus actually notice or care?

Not sure if belways have omnibuses - but you get the drift....

Naomi Muse

Victor Southern - Ides of March is 15th March. That would be almost too late to call the election but what an apposite date it would be.

Marcher Baron

"Vote Brown get ...?" It has a catchy sort of ring for an election slogan, don't you think? My money would be on the latter reason for the failure - total lack of spine. All the Cabinet members were waiting to see who, if anybody, would have the bottle to stand up and be counted. The result of all this "after you"-ing is that they all missed the boat.

Nicholas

Wurzel Gummidge is a man of straw.

Dennis Churchill

Our political class are useless even at politics.

Paddy

I think Mandelson is beginning to crack.

It may all soon be over for Brown!

Austin Barry

A confederacy of ditherers.