Rarely has that old cliché seemed so true. On Saturday, Anthony King wrote that “Mr Cameron looks increasingly like a rich man’s Iain Duncan Smith” and with the Tories behind by double digits in the polls he had the number to back up his point. Tory modernisers were fretting about how an increased Labour majority and a fourth defeat would dish the party for a generation. While David Cameron was being repeatedly told that nothing short of the performance of his life could pull the party back from the abyss.
A week later and all the pressure is on Gordon Brown. With the Tories now effectively level-pegging, Brown faces the devil of a dilemma. Either he marches his troops back down the hill and announces that there’ll be no early election after all, sacrificing much of his reputation for strength. Or he risks it and goes anyway, knowing that any reduction in the Labour majority would leave him a desperately weak Prime Minister.
Labour has got itself into such a mess through its own arrogance. As Danny points out, they never should have talked so publicly about the possibilities of an election. The other problem is that Brown’s tactics have been far too apparent. There’s a problem when, as John Kampfner notes, it is more obvious—and Brown seems more interested in–how Labour is planning to win the next election than what it is going to do with any fourth term.
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