James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
If Labour does dump Gordon Brown before the next election, then each of the three major parties will, this decade, have replaced a leader before he has had a chance to fight a general election. What used to be exceptional has become almost routine. This is a consequence of politics now running in double-time; the speeded-up news cycle means that what used to take years now happens in weeks.
Consider the almost total reversal of Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s political positions since the last conference season. Then Gordon swept all before him, while Cameron had to make a brilliant speech to save his career. Now, it is Brown who is under all the pressure.
Could the tables turn again; could Brown do a Cameron? That near-extinct species, a Labour optimist, might point out that what this magazine said about David Cameron just before the last Tory conference applies to Gordon Brown this year: ‘It may be cruel and unfair, but most people in Westminster believe the election to be lost already, and Mr Cameron to have already failed.
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