Meet James Purnell: the best hope Labour has of avoiding disaster

Fraser Nelson says that the 38-year-old Work and Pensions Secretary is the best candidate to succeed Gordon Brown. Already surging ahead at his department, he has the gift of sounding like an ordinary human being — and he understands the Cameron Conservative party

These days, it is scarcely possible to talk politics with a member of the government for more than ten minutes — if that — without The Question cropping up. Gordon Brown is doomed, runs the premise: he has hit rock bottom and carried on drilling. This cannot be allowed to go on. So what to do? Who is the successor? The job description is easy: someone hungry for power, undaunted by the odds, someone who could reassemble the New Labour electoral coalition. Finding the candidate is not so straightforward. The hour cometh. But where is the man?

It says much about the depth of Labour’s plight that such a wide range of candidates are being quietly assessed to match all manner of scenarios. One such scenario is that the party suffers a modest loss — and then plots a rapid return to office under fresh management after a single Tory term. But the current trajectory points more insistently to cataclysmic defeat, leaving behind the sort of political wreckage that takes a decade to repair. ‘It’s not about being Prime Minister anymore,’ one leading figure on Labour’s left told me. ‘It’s about saving our party.’

This can be done in three ways. A candidate could gather signatures from 71 Labour MPs before this year’s party conference in September in Manchester and then persuade two thirds of voting delegates to back a full-blown leadership contest. An alternative is a form of guerrilla warfare so intense that Team Brown, still the most brutally effective fighters in Westminster, would be forced out of Number 10, snarling, but with hands aloft.