Gordon Brown is, according to The Sunday Mirror, finally going to take a proper holiday. The Brown family will head to East Anglia later this month for a week or so. But if Labour loses Glasgow East on the 24th of July, Brown might find the Labour party sending him off on a permanent vacation.
It looks like Labour has finally found a candidate, Margaret Curran—a Glasgow MSP, to stand in what would in normal circumstances be a very safe seat for the party. But as Andrew Rawnsley points out, Labour’s traditional strength here means that the party is not well-equipped to fight a competitive campaign; the Glasgow East branch of the party has less than 200 members and no canvassing records.
Labour’s majority in Glasgow East is formidable but it is possible to imagine that the SNP could pull this off. If Labour does lose then Brown’s position is vulnerable in the extreme, as Fraser notes in the magazine this week defeat in Glasgow East would mean that no Labour MP could consider himself safe from Brown’s unpopularity. Add to that the fact that the longer Brown is in office the more unpopular he is becoming and that in a general election campaign Labour could not hide the Prime Minister away, then the case for removing him becomes compelling enough to force Labour MPs to act. Rawnsley notes that while Parliament will be in recess when the Glasgow East results comes in, Labour’s National Policy Forum will be in session. If Labour does lose, events may move faster than anyone is expecting.
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