The prize for this weekend’s most comic briefing must go to the ‘leading Brown ally’ who told Simon Walters that the PM would go if everyone else in the Labour party wasn’t even more hopeless than he was. Here are the choice paragraphs:
Mr Brown’s supporters said he views Foreign Secretary David Miliband as ‘lightweight’, Home Secretary Alan Johnson as ‘lacklustre’, Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman as ‘a disaster’ and his protege, Schools Secretary Ed Balls, as ‘too aggressive’.
A leading Brown ally said: ‘Gordon knows things haven’t gone as he hoped and how tough things are going to be between now and the Election. He has said he would step down tomorrow if he thought anyone else could do any better.
‘But he thinks the ones who want the job most have very little to offer.’ One wonders what the voters are meant to make of this. It almost makes the final days of the Major government look like a model of party unity.
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