A plague on all their houses

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, a fringe party sent shockwaves through the political establishment after securing 15pc of the popular vote in the 1989 elections to the European Parliament.

Alas for the Green Party, it could not sustain the momentum of its unexpected success, and by the time of the following general election in 1992, it has sunk back into relative political obscurity.

So the big question in the wake of this week’s local elections is whether the UK Independence Party can succeed in 2013 where the Greens failed all those years ago, and achieve a lasting and significant political breakthrough.

Certainly the signs currently seem positive for Nigel Farage and his crew, who weathered a determined smear campaign by the big parties to emerge as the big winners of Thursday’s poll.

In the North-East, UKIP repeated its surprise second place at the Middlesbrough by-election last November by coming second to Labour in the South Shields contest to choose a successor to David Miliband.

While nobody expected the Conservatives to win here - it has been Labour or Liberal since the Great Reform Act of 1832 – the result was little short of a humiliation for the Coalition parties.

Not only were the Conservatives beaten into third place by Farage and Co, the Liberal Democrats were beaten into seventh place by a ragtag and bobtail collection of independents and fringe parties, including the BNP.

It suggests that, unless they can somehow extricate themselves from the Coalition in time to re-establish themselves as an independent force, the Lib Dems are facing electoral wipeout in the region come 2015.

But while South Shields provided an interesting snapshot of the current state of opinion in the North-East,  UKIP’s strong performance there was but a foretaste of what was to come across the rest of the country.

When last I counted, the party had gained 139 councillors across England compared to a loss of 106 for the Lib Dems and 320 for the Tories.

The political impact was immediate, with a Tory Party that had earlier in the week attempted to brand UKIP as a bunch of racist clowns being forced to eat a very large slice of humble pie.

“It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for,” said Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday, effectively withdrawing his previous claim that UKIP members were “fruitcakes.”

The real headache for Mr Cameron’s Tories is that, with the general election now only two years away, they are no nearer knowing how to deal with the threat of the anti-EU party.

Announcing a referendum on UK membership to be held in the next Parliament was supposed to lance the boil – but Thursday’s results show it has had no effect whatever in curbing support for UKIP.

The situation is likely to get worse for Mr Cameron before it gets better.  Mr Farage entertains legitimate hopes of first place in the popular share of the vote in next year’s Euro-elections, and a strong performance then will give his party even greater momentum going into 2015.

It is already looking very likely that, if TV debates are to be a part of the next general election campaign, the UKIP leader will have to be given a slot.

But if Thursday’s results were bad for the government, they were not a bed or roses for Labour either.

As ever, the party performed strongly in the North-East, holding South Shields and regaining the North Tyneside mayoralty, as well as winning 15 council seats to become the biggest single party in Northumberland and tightening its grip on County Durham.

But nationally, the party’s failure to win outright control of Lancashire and Staffordshire County Councils, or to do better in the South, leave a huge question mark over its ability to win in the key battlegrounds, as well as its claims to be  the ‘One Nation’ party.

On what was a bad night for Mr Cameron, the only saving grace is that it was a not much better one for Ed Miliband.

Was this the week Cameron lost his party?

Whatever else the past seven eventful days in politics will ultimately be remembered for, it’s certainly been a good, maybe even vintage week for political jokes.

“I didn’t feel in the least bit sorry for Chris Huhne - until I heard that Lembit was planning to visit him in jail,” one Lib Dem wag is supposed to have told another.

Then there was the one about the new film they are making about the Tories: Gay Weddings and Dave’s Funeral.

And one enterprising cartoonist even managed to work Richard III in, depicting a battle-scarred Mr Huhne crying: "Three points, three points, my kingdom for three points."

The fact that South Shields MP and former Foreign Secretary David Miliband was pictured asleep on the Tube with his flies undone merely added to the general hilarity.

But all joking aside, this was a week of seriously big political stories which could have equally serious repercussions for David Cameron’s coalition government.

Timing apart, Mr Huhne’s dramatic fall from grace following a 10-year cover up over a driving offence and Tuesday’s Commons vote in favour of same sex marriage are completely unrelated stories.

Yet this week saw them come together in a way that may signal real trouble for the Coalition over the forthcoming weeks.

Mr Huhne’s demise has triggered potentially the most significant by-election of the current Parliament, with the two Coalition partners set to go head to head in what is a genuine Lib Dem-Tory marginal.

And the smouldering anger among grassroots Tories over the gay marriage vote means they are certain to see it as an opportunity to vent their frustrations by giving the Lib Dems a damned good kicking.

I suspect that in an ideal world Mr Cameron would like to have been in a position to give the Lib Dems a clear run in Eastleigh in order to avoid such obvious unpleasantness.

He did, after all, allow Mr Huhne to be replaced as Energy Secretary in Cabinet by another Lib Dem, Ed Davey, so why not allow him to be similarly replaced in Parliament.

The situation is vaguely analogous to what happens in a football match when a player gets injured and play has to stop while he is treated on the pitch.

On such occasions, when play resumes the ball is automatically thrown back to the side originally in possession before the injury occurred.

Yet Mr Cameron is not in a position to make such apparently sporting gestures. His own backbenchers, and his grassroots activists, simply wouldn’t stand for it.

And even if the two parties did manage to reach a non-aggression pact, there would be no guarantee it would stop UKIP snatching the seat.

Mr Huhne’s downfall was, for Mr Cameron at any rate, one of those random occurrences which come under the category what Harold Macmillan famously termed “events, dear boy, events.”

The split in the Tory Party over gay marriage, however, was entirely preventable from his point of view.

Mr Cameron has forged ahead with a piece of legislation that was neither in his party’s manifesto nor in the Coalition agreement in the belief that it would make his party look modern and inclusive.

What it has actually done is reveal it to be bitterly divided from top to bottom – and divided parties, of course, never win elections.

Neither is it ever politically wise for a Prime Minister to put himself in a position where he is dependent on the votes of the opposition parties to get a crucial measure through the Commons.

Since Mr Cameron is fond of drawing such comparisons, it is worth recalling that this nearly happened to Tony Blair in the Iraq War debate in 2003 which saw 139 Labour MPs vote against the invasion.

Although it took another four years before he was eventually forced from office, the knives were out for him from that moment on.

If 18 March 2003 was the day Mr Blair lost his party, will 5 February 2013 go down as the day David Cameron lost his?

Advantage Tory right as Huhne exits stage left

So farewell then, Chris Huhne – well for the time being at any rate, as the erstwhile Energy Secretary quits in order to fight charges of perverting the course of justice in relation to a driving offence committed in 2003.

The leading Liberal Democrat politician was left with no choice but to resign from the Cabinet yesterday after effectively being charged with lying to the police over whether he or his ex-wife was driving at the time of the incident.

Mr Huhne, who continues to deny the charges, will now have to clear his name if he is to stand any chance of resuming what has been an eventful career over the course of less than seven years as an MP.

For now, though, his Lib Dem colleagues will have to manage without his combative presence around the Cabinet table as the curse that has seemed to bedevil the party’s senior figures since the last election strikes again.

They lost their cleverest minister, David Laws, within 16 days of the Coalition taking office, and nearly lost their most well-known, Vince Cable, over his ill-judged pledge to destroy the Murdoch empire – uttered before it succeeded in destroying itself.

Now they have lost their most abrasive in Mr Huhne, the stoutest defender of the party’s interests within the government and, by some distance, the Tory backbenches’ least-favourite Liberal Democrat.

Few Tory tears will be shed at his departure. Right-wing internet bloggers who have had Mr Huhne in their sights for some time were literally cracking open the champagne yesterday morning – and one even posted a video of himself doing so.

The evident Tory glee demonstrates the fact that Mr Huhne’s enforced resignation is likely significantly to alter the balance of power within the Cabinet in their favour.

His successor Ed Davey is a capable minister who deserves his Cabinet promotion - but he is no Chris Huhne, described by one commentator yesterday as a “political bulldozer who would try relentlessly to get his way, and who was not averse to media shenanigans to advance his cause.”

It was Mr Huhne, rather than Nick Clegg, who led the attack on the Tories over their handling of the referendum on the voting system last May, when Mr Cameron gave the green light for a series of bitter personal attacks against the Lib Dem leader.

And it was he who articulated the Lib Dem rage over Mr Cameron’s decision to veto a new EU treaty at the Brussels summit in December.

What gave Mr Huhne a particular degree of authority within the Cabinet was his strong power base within the party as a two-time leadership contender and de facto leader of the party’s social democratic tendency.

He could very well have become his party’s leader instead of Mr Clegg, had not a pre-Christmas postal strike in 2007 led to thousands of votes in his party’s leadership election arriving after the ballot boxes had closed.

Until yesterday, he would have been the likeliest replacement for Mr Clegg were the latter to have been forced out by party activists still grumbling over his decision to join the Coalition.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron, the party’s distinctly Coalition-sceptic president, now looks odds-on for that role, possibly as soon as 2015 in the event of Mr Clegg’s three-way marginal Sheffield Hallam seat turning either red or blue next time round.

The short-term impact, then, of Mr Huhne’s departure is that it will embolden the Tory right and make this look even more obviously a Conservative-led government than it already is.

This in turn will be good news for Labour and Ed Miliband, whose essential line of attack on the Coalition is that it is a Tory government in all but name, and who this week restored some of his party’s sagging morale by putting Mr Cameron on the back foot over bankers’ bonuses.

The real nightmare scenario for the government, though, would come if Mr Huhne were to go to jail – forcing a by-election in his highly marginal seat of Eastleigh which would pitch the Lib Dems and the Tories against eachother.

And the potential consequences of that for the Coalition hardly need spelling out.

Relief for Ed...but just what will David do next?

And so after all the hoo-ha, a relatively easy win for Labour and a creditable second place for the Liberal Democrats, with Nick Clegg's party staving off the post-tuition fees meltdown some had feared.

Both Mr Clegg and Labour's Ed Miliband went into Thursday's Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election on something of a hiding to nothing - but both appear to have got away with it.

Instead, it is Prime Minister David Cameron who may have the most difficult questions to answer after appearing to soft-pedal the party's campaign in the final week.

After their party's share of the vote was more than halved while the Lib Dems' went up, Tory backbenchers already unhappy about the direction of the government will want to know why their coalition partners were given such an easy ride.

For Mr Miliband, a result which saw Labour's majority increase from 103 to 3,558 will take the pressure off – for now.

After a decidedly lacklustre start to his leadership, Mr Miliband moved to sharpen up his press operation in the weeks before Christmas and this appears to have had pretty instantaneous results.

Victory in what was already a Labour-held seat should leave little room for complacency, however.

His appointment of the economically sub-literate Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor appears to be unravelling, while his own appearance on a Radio 2 show a couple of weeks back ended in embarrassment, with Middle England listeners quizzing him over his unconventional private life.

The by-election also saw a fleeting return to the political fray for elder brother David Miliband, one of 40 Labour MPs who travelled to the constituency on Thursday for some frantic last-minute door-knocking.

It concluded what to say the least has been an eventful week for the South Shields MP, with his surprise appointment as vice-chairman of Sunderland Football Club.

At the same time, reports emerged that he was being lined-up a possible new role as a TV presenter with the BBC.

Cynics might be tempted to pose the question: What next? An appearance on 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here' maybe?

In fairness to David, he has made clear his intention to continue as a constituency MP at least until the next election, while in an interview with this newspaper before Christmas, he signalled that he has still not given up hope of leading the Labour Party one day.

He has also appeared to set out his stall as a backbench 'Voice of the North' – although his new role at the Stadium of Light scarcely seems designed to endear him to all corners of the region!

But taken together, the two stories highlight the difficulties which can face politicians when they lose their main raison d'etre – climbing the greasy pole.

And while he is not about to join the 'Z-list' of those who are famous for being famous, Mr Miliband needs to give careful thought to what he does next if he is to remain a serious political player.

The prospect of him becoming a TV presenter inevitably drew comparisons with Michael Portillo – and not for the first time.

Mr Miliband's somewhat cack-handed attempts to unseat Gordon Brown in autumn 2008 echoed Mr Portillo's botched coup against John Major in the summer of 1995 when his supporters were caught installing phonelines for a leadership campaign HQ.

Mr Portillo was regarded by many in the Conservative Party as its natural leader, but partly through circumstance and partly through lack of judgement, he ultimately became its lost leader.

There are many still hoping that David Miliband, so long seen as the 'heir to Blair,' can avoid a similar fate.

One of them, possibly both, is going to end up a loser

Given that the British electorate as a whole only gets to vote once every 4-5 years, it is perhaps inevitable that by-elections tend to wield a somewhat disproportionate influence on our political process.

Usually they follow a fairly predictable pattern. The public – or the media – identifies which of the two main opposition parties is most likely to give the governing party a good kicking, and the 'protest vote' does the rest.

But we are in unchartered waters now. There are two governing parties, only one main opposition party, and the new-ish leader of that party is something of an unknown quantity to most voters.

All of which is what makes Thursday's Oldham and Saddleworth by-election possibly the most fascinating such encounter since the Darlington contest of 1983 which, to Labour's ultimate detriment, saved the leadership of Michael Foot.

On the face of it, it ought to be plan sailing for Labour. In a few short months, the Con-Lib coalition has slashed public spending, put up VAT, and scrapped much of the regional aid budget that was helping former industrial towns like Oldham to find a new role.

Not only that, but the seat was won by Labour in the general election last May, before MP Phil Woolas was disqualified from Parliament for having lied about his Lib Dem opponent on his election literature.

One of the many imponderables in this contest is whether the fate of Mr Woolas will help or hinder Labour's cause here.

The fact that he was actually quite a popular local MP might appear to favour the party, but some voters may feel he was too readily hung out to dry by the Labour establishment, and punish the party accordingly.

Inevitably given its status as a three-way marginal, 'Old and Sad' is being viewed as something of a mini-referendum – not just on the Coalition, but on Labour leader Ed Miliband.

If Labour cannot even win by-elections in seats it already holds, serious questions will start to be asked as to whether it can win anywhere else under Mr Miliband's leadership.

But for Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, too, a defeat on Thursday would be seen as a significant blow.

His party's candidate, Elwyn Watkins, may well feel the seat is his by moral and indefeasible right having been on the wrong end of Mr Woolas's misdemeanours, but politics doesn't work like that.

Undoubtedly the leader with the least to lose and the most to gain here is Prime Minister David Cameron.

For one, the Conservative candidate Kashif Ali started the contest in third place. For another, the Tories have been accused of soft-pedalling their campaign in a bid to help their Lib Dem partners.

Perhaps realising he is in with an outside chance of a stunning victory Mr Cameron is now doing his best to dispel that impression, becoming the first premier to campaign in a by-election for 13 years.

Yet ironically a Tory win, in a seat where the Lib Dems began as the main challengers, might end up being more destabilising for the Coalition than a Labour triumph.

Mr Clegg would then face more tough questions from his own activists and MPs as to what exactly the Lib Dems are getting out of the Coalition.

A Tory victory would simply reinforce the idea that it is the Lib Dems who are taking all the political pain while Mr Cameron reaps the political dividends.

But whoever wins on Thursday, at least one and possibly both of Mr Cameron's fellow party leaders are going to be waking up to some difficult headlines on Friday morning.

And for either or both of them, that could set the tone for a tricky political year ahead.

Regaining sympathy not the same as regaining trust

The Sun's quite disgraceful personal attacks on the Prime Minister over his letter to Jacqui Janes understandably swung some public sympathy behind him this week. But neither that nor the Glasgow North East by-election result means he is necessarily "safe." Here's today's Journal column.

---

Six weeks ago, The Sun newspaper torpedoed Gordon Brown's hopes of a party conference uplift by announcing on the evening of his keynote speech that it would be backing the Tories at the next general election.

At the time, I was among those who sought to downplay the significance of this, arguing on these pages that it was no more than a right-wing newspaper returning to its natural ideological home.

But if I’m honest, I was swimming against the tide on this. Most of the media seem to take The Sun’s own estimation of itself as the paper ‘wot won’ every election since the 1960s completely at face value.

Hence the paper’s switch after 12 years of loyal support for New Labour was reported as a political event of huge symbolic importance which drove yet another nail in the government’s coffin.

Perhaps, though, they were right. We have seen over the past week just what a dangerous opponent The Sun can be when it has it in mind to ‘go for’ a particular politician.

It used an error-strewn handwritten letter he wrote to grieving mum Jacqui Janes expressing his condolences at the loss of her son in Afghanistan to mount a highly personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s all becoming very reminiscent of the latter days of John Major – another well-intentioned PM who seemingly could do nothing right and who incurred the wrath of a certain red-top tabloid as a consequence.

Who could forget the Sun editor on Black Wednesday who promised to take two large buckets of something unmentionable and empty them all over poor old Mr Major’s head?

But if that at least had the merit of humour, on this occasion the paper appears to have over-reached itself.

As the sheer ferocity of its attack became clear, the public’s sympathy seems for once to have swung towards Mr Brown.

Ironically, had the paper not previously announced its intention to support the Conservatives, its reporting of the whole episode might have had a greater political impact.

But as Alastair Campbell rightly pointed out: “Precisely because they made such a splash with the switch to the Tories, the wider public now know more than ever that their coverage is politically driven and totally biased against Brown.”

The Sun also has something of a credibility gap with some sections of the public on issues such as these – as David Higgerson, a former Journal political correspondent now plying his trade on Merseyside, was not slow to point out.

“Nobody in Liverpool needs reminding about the sick irony involved when The Sun decides to have a pop at somebody for being insensitive,” he wrote on his blog.

As it is, a difficult week for Mr Brown has ended on a triumphant note with Labour’s unexpectedly comfortable victory in the Glasgow North-East by-election caused by the defenestration of Mr Speaker Martin over his handling of the expenses affair.

It did not take long for the Prime Minister’s loyal ally, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, to claim the party’s thumping 8,111 majority over the SNP as “an endorsement of Gordon Brown and what he is trying to do.”

But is it? Earlier this week, South Shields MP David Miliband’s decision to turn down the chance to become EU Foreign Minister led to more speculation that he could yet take as Labour leader before the next election.

A defeat for Labour in Glasgow North-East on Thursday might have raised that speculation to fever pitch.

As it is, the consensus among political commentators last night was that the result will make Mr Brown “safe” from any further attempts to unseat him – but I’m not at all sure they’re right.

The Prime Minister may have garnered some public sympathy this week. But regaining the public’s sympathy is a long way from regaining its trust.

Review of the Year 2008

It's that time of the year again. Here's my look back at an extraordinary political year from today's Newcastle Journal.

---

The year 2008 will be remembered as the year that defied the normal laws of political gravity. While the British economy came crashing down, the reputation of Gordon Brown’s government somehow went up and up.

This time last year, the Prime Minister looked down and almost out, likely to go down in history as the short-lived leader of a fag-end administration that looked long past its sell-by date.

It was to get worse before it got better. A succession of dire by-election performances coupled with the loss of the London Mayoralty to Boris Johnson and the Scottish Parliament to the SNP led to a summer of plotting and serious talk of a leadership coup.

But then, in one of the most bizarre and unexpected twists of political fate in recent times, the credit crunch and the accompanying economic downturn rode to Mr Brown’s rescue, enabling him to play to his strengths as a “serious man for serious times.”

Actually, when the Prime Minister used those words, he was talking about someone else – his old friend Peter Mandelson. But more of him later.

At the start of the year, though, Mr Brown seemed less of a serious man for serious times than a political figure of fun, ruthlessly characterised by the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable as having undergone a transformation “from Stalin to Mr Bean.”

He had still, at that stage, not recovered from the debacle of the election-that-never-was in the autumn of 2007 and the succession of rows over Labour funding that followed.

One of those rows claimed a ministerial scalp early in the new year in the shape of Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain, though he was later cleared of any wrongdoing over the matter of his deputy leadership election expenses claims.

The first half of the year was dominated by the run-up to the May elections – notably Ken Livingstone’s battle for a third term as Mayor of London against Mr Johnson’s challenge.

But any hopes Mr Brown might have had of using those elections as a springboard from which to relaunch his flagging premiership were sunk by a chicken coming home to roost in the form of the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

When he had announced this in his final Budget as Chancellor the year before, there had been scarcely a murmur of opposition from either the Labour or Conservative benches.

Not so this year. When Labour MPs realised that the tax change would hit their own people the hardest, it sparked a backbench revolt that forced Mr Brown into a humiliating climbdown.

But the inevitable loss of London, Scotland and hundreds of council seats nationwide was not the worst of it. Far more damaging was the disastrous sequence of by-election losses that saw some of Labour’s safest majorities overturned.

It had begun in Crewe and Nantwich where Tamsin Dunwoody’s attempt to inherit her late mother Gywneth’s Commons seat drowned under a tidal wave of anger over the 10p tax rate.

It continued in Mr Johnson’s old seat of Henley as Labour lost its deposit and slumped to fifth place behind the British National Party and the Greens.

And it finally culminated in Glasgow East, with Labour’s hitherto third-safest seat in Scotland disappearing to the Scottish National Party on a 22pc swing.

Many concluded that Mr Brown’s authority and standing with the public was now so badly shredded as to be beyond recovery. Talk of a leadership challenge began to grow.

Foreign Secretary and South Shields MP David Miliband had long been regarded as the great hope of the party’s Blairite wing. Now he made his first, tentative moves.

In a national newspaper article which caused shockwaves throughout Westminster, he set out a possible prospectus for a Labour fourth term with not a single mention of Mr Brown.

Shortly afterwards MPs went off on their holidays. Mobile phones buzzed between Italian villas as, somehow, the Labour Party tried to come to a collective judgement about what to do with its beleaguered PM.

But there was no September coup. In its wisdom, the party decided it would give Mr Brown one last chance to turn things around at Labour’s autumn conference.

It was too much for four junior members of the government - Siobhan McDonough, Joan Ryan, Barry Gardiner and David Cairns – who all resigned in frustration at the cabinet’s refusal to move against the Prime Minister.

It could hardly have been a worse preparation for the conference, but Mr Brown rose to the challenge and made what by common consensus was the “speech of his life.”

Its key soundbite - “This is no time for a novice” – neatly skewered both Tory leader David Cameron and the banana-wielding young pretender, Mr Miliband.

Then came the reshuffle, with Mr Brown cutting the ground from under the Blairite plotters by bringing back the Blairiest Blairite of them all – former Hartlepool MP Mr Mandelson.

The return of the newly-ennobled Lord Mandelson had a profound impact on the government, and he is now de facto deputy Prime Minister in addition to his official role as Business Secretary.
Finally, there was Mr Brown’s audacious £500bn banking rescue which meant that ten major banks, including the already-nationalised Northern Rock, are now at least partly in public hands.

Coupled with a Pre-Budget Report that saw the government effectively decide to spend its way out of the recession, it was no less than an attempt to turn the Thatcherite politics of the last 30 years on its head.

Labour’s recovery was confirmed by a triumphant by-election campaign in Glenrothes, finally ending the dismal sequence of defeats that had brought Mr Brown to the edge of the abyss.

The party still trails the Tories in the polls, but the 5-6pc deficit is now of the order of those from which mid-term governments often recover to win the next general election.

Whether or not Mr Brown can pull off that feat remains very much open to doubt, given that the economy is still likely to get much worse before it starts to get better.

But in the crucible of this crisis he has, at the very least, discovered a purpose for his premiership: nothing less than the saving of the British economy.

A tale of two elections

It's all change in America, no change at Glenrothes - but which result tells us more about the current state of UK politics? Here's today's Journal column.

---

It was a tale of two elections, one that has seemingly given new hope to the whole world, another rather closer to home that has given new hope for Gordon Brown and his once-beleaguered premiership.

One outcome - the victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential election - was widely expected. The other - Labour's victory in Thursday night's Glenrothes by-election - was rather less so.

The first brought the sense of a fresh beginning for America and possibly the world, encapsulated in the words of Mr Obama's acceptance speech "change has come."

The second, by contrast, conveyed a message of “no change just yet,” at least from the voters of Glenrothes but also possibly from a wider British public that currently seems more content with Mr Brown.

Taking Mr Obama first, it has been notable how much of the coverage of his victory has focused on his colour when it was scarcely an issue in the campaign itself.

I don't deny it's a remarkable achievement for an African-American to become president of a country that 40 years ago denied blacks the right to travel on the same buses as whites, but Mr Obama won because of his charisma, not his colour.

Above all, he won because he successfully presented himself as the change candidate at a time when America appears to be crying out for change.

His republican rival John McCain also lost it by failing to do enough to distinguish himself from the increasingly unpopular George Bush, and also by appearing to be somewhat complacent about the state of the US economy.

Much discussion has already surrounded the impact of Sarah Palin, Mr McCain's surprise choice of vice-presidential nominee, on the eventual result.

On the one hand, she undoubtedly energised the Republican Party’s campaign and enabled Mr McCain to re-connect with a part of its core vote that has always distrusted him.

On the other, she was plainly out of her depth when dealing with foreign policy issues and, for all her freshness as a Washington "outsider," came over as something of a political ingenue.

All things considered, perhaps a 72-year-old man who has had cancer four times should have paid slightly more heed to the need for experience in choosing the person who would have been "a heartbeat away from the presidency."

As for what it means for UK politics, it was predictable that the two main parties would offer wildly differing interpretations of the significance of Mr Obama's triumph.

For Tory leader David Cameron, the important point was the message of change. For Mr Brown, it was the victory of progressive politics over the neo-Conservative right.

Both are plausible enough interpretations, but for me, the sight of British Tories attempting to clamber aboard the Obama bandwagon has been one of the more amusing aspects of the campaign.

No matter that Mr Obama is the most left-wing president since Franklin D. Roosevelt - there's absolutely nothing the ideology-free-zone that is today's Tory Party won't do to get with the zeitgeist.

For all the understandable excitement about Mr Obama, though, it is what happened in Glenrothes which says more about the current state of British politics.

That this is an extraordinary triumph for Mr Brown cannot be in doubt, even allowing for the fact that local issues dominated the by-election campaign.

Consider where the Prime Minister was before the conference season two months ago. He had lost three by-elections on the trot, all of them badly, and there was a growing perception in the party that he was a "loser."

Foreign Secretary and South Shields MP David Miliband was openly agitating for his job, while deputy leader Harriet Harman told friends "this is my time."

There was a widespread expectation of an autumn coup against Mr Brown's leadership, and dark talk that up to 15 ministers would refuse to serve come the reshuffle - a rumour which, had it come to fruition, would surely have spelled the end of him.

Even at the end of what was judged a successful conference, the shadow of another disastrous defeat in Glenrothes still hung over him like a sword of Damocles, as I noted at the time.

Instead, Mr Brown now finds himself back in the game and with an outside chance - I would put it no more strongly than that - of winning that elusive fourth Labour term.

Okay, so it's largely down to his handling of the economic crisis - but that fighting conference speech and the coup-de-theatre of Peter Mandelson's reshuffle comeback have certainly played their part.

Up until now, the Brown renaissance, or the "Second Brown Bounce" as some have called it, has been largely driven by a media narrative - a general consensus among the commentariat that the Prime Minister's position has improved.

But there is no substitute for actual real-life votes, and Thursday's result has provided concrete evidence that the "media narrative" is actually not that far off the mark.

In other words, the Labour fightback is no mere media invention designed to make politics more interesting again for readers, viewers and listeners. It really is now under way.

It doesn't prove that Mr Brown is a "winner." But it does show that he is not quite the inveterate loser that some thought he was.

So is it now "game on" for the next general election? Could we soon be back to a position where a hung Parliament, rather than an outright Tory victory, once more looks the most likely outcome?

Well, hang on. One swallow doesn't make a summer, and it's important for Mr Brown and Labour not to get carried away with Thursday night's success.

The truth is that Mr Cameron remains as much an overwhelming favourite to win the next general election as Mr Obama was to win the presidency.

But unlike Senator McCain, Gordon Brown still has time on his side.

To reshuffle, or not to reshuffle

The September reshuffle will be key to determining whether Gordon Brown faces a leadership challenge this autumn. Here's today's column from the Newcastle Journal.

***

This time last year, as I prepared to go off on my summer holidays, I openly speculated on these pages as to whether I would come back in the middle of a general election campaign.

Gordo-mania was then at its height and all the gossip at Westminster was that the Prime Minister was planning to hold an early autumn election.

Well, what a difference a year makes. Twelve months on, I am wondering whether by the time this column resumes on 6 September, we might be in the midst of a Labour leadership battle.

The one thing all Labour MPs seem to agree on at the moment is that the first week of next month will be crucial in determining whether or not the Prime Minister will survive.

Why is this? Well, that’s the week MPs start returning to Westminster for the three-week “mopping up” session that takes place between the summer recess and the conference season.

They will have had a chance to go away and reflect on their party’s plight, and reach some kind of collective judgement about whether or not Mr Brown’s position is recoverable.

At the same time, the Prime Minister will have to use that week to try to regain the initiative and demonstrate that there is

He has two potential weapons in his armoury – the proposed launch of a “new economic plan” to alleviate the worst effects of the credit crunch, and that old staple, a Cabinet reshuffle.

Taking the “new economic plan” first, this could well be a last opportunity for Mr Brown to set out some kind of distinctive agenda for his administration, based around the idea of “fairness.”

A series of over by measures to help the worst-off, possibly paid for by a windfall tax on energy companies, may well help win over rebellious Labour MPs.

But it’s the reshuffle that holds the key to the whole crisis. Mr Brown has to have one – partly as a means of reasserting his authority, and partly because the government is badly in need of refreshing.

But there is a very considerable risk that the whole exercise will backfire, with ministers either refusing to be moved, or even in some cases refusing to continue to serve under him.

Any meaningful reshuffle would almost certainly have to involve changes in the major offices of state, in particular the Treasury where Alistair Darling has endured a torrid 14 months.
But the trouble with Mr Darling is that he knows where too many of the bodies are buried.

He knows, for instance, that the 10p tax debacle was entirely of Mr Brown’s own making, and that the Prime Minister had been warned shortly after taking took over that the policy would need to be changed.

If he went to the backbenches, or was given a job which disagreed with him, there is always the risk that he could go nuclear.

There are those who might argue that Alistair Darling is too obviously nice and mild-mannered a character to do such a thing to poor Mr Brown, whatever the degree of provocation.

But in response to that I would say just three words: Sir Geoffrey Howe.

In 1979, Denis Healey said that being savaged by Sir Geoffrey was “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” Years later, Margaret Thatcher was to discover the inner wolf that lurked beneath.

It follows that Mr Darling is probably unsackable, although he might just decide go of his own volition following what has been a rather unhappy spell at the Treasury.

The biggest danger for Mr Brown, though, is not so much Mr Darling refusing to move as other people simply refusing to continue to serve under him.

One national newspaper reported last month, in the immediate aftermath of the Glasgow East by-election, that up to 15 ministers were prepared to do this.

If that is true, then I am very much afraid that Mr Brown is toast. No Prime Minister, not least one already as weakened as this one, could survive such a rebuff to his authority.

In these circumstances, the wisest option might seem to be not to have a reshuffle at all – except that this too would only serve to highlight his weakness.

But even if he manages to walk this difficult tightrope, Mr Brown faces another excruciating dilemma over when to hold the Glenrothes by-election following Labour MP John MacDougall’s death this week.

The obvious option seems to be to delay it at least until after the conferences, by which time Mr Brown may have had a chance to stabilise his leadership.

But that runs the risk that the by-election will reverse any gains made as a result of the “September relaunch” and deliver a final knockout blow to the Prime Minister.

If he makes the speech of his life at the party conference, carries out the reshuffle to end all reshuffles, unveils a new economic plan, and Labour still can’t win a by-election, then what on earth is there left to do except change the leader?

So, cards on the table time. Will Mr Brown face a leadership challenge this autumn? Probably. Should he face one? Regretfully, I have to say yes.

The past year has been, I don’t mind admitting, a depressing one for those of us who invested such hopes in the Brown premiership.

I had argued for years that his more understated style would put an end to the spin that marred his predecessor’s reign, and that his commitment to social justice would restore Labour’s lost moral compass.

The fact that Mr Brown has done neither of these things is the biggest single reason why he has forfeited the support of so many of those who once championed him.

Historians will argue for years about what went wrong, and why this considerable political figure managed to make such a hash of the premiership he coveted for so long.

The best answer I can give is that, like Anthony Eden, it was his misfortune to come to the top job when his best years were behind him.

The long years of waiting for Number 10 appear to have made Mr Brown old before his time, and worn-out his once legendary political stamina.

I think it will probably take more than a two-week summer break in Suffolk to revive him.

A clear and demonstrable collapse

Crewe. Henley. Glasgow East. Are the voters trying to tell us something? Here's today's Newcastle Journal column.

***

When in years to come, historians pore over the long, slow demise of New Labour, the series of by-elections in the spring and summer of 2008 will, I believe, be seen as a crucial period.

First there was the catastrophe in Crewe, after the contest held in the wake of Gwyneth Dunwoody’s death saw David Cameron’s Tories win their first seat off Labour for nearly 30 years.

Then it was humiliation in Henley, as Labour lost its deposit and slumped to fifth place behind the British National Party and the Greens.

Finally, on Thursday night, the earthquake in East Glasgow, after Labour’s hitherto third-safest seat in Scotland disappeared to the Scottish National Party on a 22pc swing.

As he surveys the wreckage this weekend, Prime Minister Gordon Brown must be cursing the malign combination of political circumstances that forced him to fight three by-elections in as many months.

Had they not taken place, he might by now have been able to shore-up his position and even build some political momentum. As it is, a clear alternative narrative is now emerging.

There can be no writing-off these results as a short-term protest vote such as happened in the post-Iraq War by-elections in the predominantly Moslem constituencies of Leicester South and Brent East during the last Parliament.

No, the story of the three 2008 by-elections is of a clear and demonstrable collapse in public support for Labour in general, and Mr Brown in particular.

What is particularly damaging about the Glasgow East result is that this was a revolt not of the swing vote but of the Labour core vote, which now seems to be bleeding away.

When the by-election date was set for July 24 – two days after the start of the summer Parliamentary recess – there were those who claimed it had been deliberately timed to minimise the threat of MPs plotting against Mr Brown.

If that is the case, then Mr Brown’s strategists have clearly never heard of email or the mobile phone.

Labour MPs may be scattered to the four winds this weekend, but expect the lines to be humming between the beaches of Europe and beyond.

As it is, a number of Labour MPs and ministers will not be sunning themselves, despite the current unaccustomed spell of decent summer weather.

Instead, they will be at the party’s national policy forum in Warwick, discussing the contents of the next Labour manifesto with the trades unions and grassroots constituency activists.

Ostensibly, the conference is about whether or not to implement a.long shopping list of demands ranging from scrapping NHS prescription charges to the reintroduction of secondary picketing.

But the subtext will be the position of Mr Brown. To paraphrase the Bible verse, when two or three Labour activists are gathered together, the talk shall quickly turn to the leadership.

Up until now, the prospects of a successful challenge to Mr Brown have been hampered by the absence of a clear alternative candidate, but if one is to emerge, then now is surely the time.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell set out his stall this week by publishing a Green Paper on welfare reform, advocating the scrapping of Incapacity Benefit and making those out of work for more than two years work full-time in the community.

At one level, it demonstrated that there is intellectual life in New Labour yet, in terms of fresh ideas which could underpin what would be an unprecedented fourth term in power.

But at another level, it was hard to escape the conclusion that it was designed as a piece of pre-leadership election positioning, a warning to Foreign Secretary David Miliband that he is not the only Blairite pebble on the beach

Despite his undoubted intellect, though, Mr Purnell carries the air of a lightweight about him and his election would manage the considerable feat of making Mr Cameron look statesmanlike.

South Shields MP Mr Miliband remains the man to beat, although it seems clear he will not be the one to raise the standard of rebellion.

His old alliance with Health Secretary Alan Johnson could be key. The two were education ministers together under Mr Blair and became huge admirers of eachother’s work.

Mr Johnson has said he is not up to the job of Premier, but the idea of him playing John Prescott to Mr Miliband’s Tony Blair could be an increasingly seductive one.

Mr Brown’s instinct will be to plough on. We read this week that he is planning a September reshuffle, the centrepiece of which will be to bring back Margaret Beckett as the government’s chief apologist, or “Minister for the Today Programme.”

Now Mrs Beckett has been a loyal servant of the nation, and despite an undistinguished spell as Foreign Secretary, she was rather harshly treated when left out of Mr Brown’s first administration last year.

But if the Prime Minister really believes that bringing her back into a senior Cabinet role is going to restore his or Labour’s political fortunes, it demonstrates how out of touch he is.

Increasingly, the view among Labour MPs is that the only minister Mr Brown should consider reshuffling is himself.

A dream scenario for Mr Brown is that no clear challenger emerges over the course of the coming weeks, and he restores his authority with the conference speech of his life in September.

But such has been the scale of the public backlash against the government in recent months that it is unrealistic not to expect his leadership to now be openly called into question.

The corresponding nightmare scenario for the Prime Minister is that, against a backdrop of dissension and even open revolt, he makes a poor speech which reinforces the speculation about his position.

Sadly for him, this seems overwhelmingly the likelier of the two outcomes.

All quiet on the Barnett front

Why has it all gone quiet over the Barnett Formula? And could it be anything to do with Glasgow East? Here's my column in today's Newcastle Journal.

***

Earlier this year, a brief flurry of excitement went around the Westminster village that Gordon Brown might be about to do something that few thought possible for a Scottish PM.

The Treasury had ordered a study into the workings of the controversial Barnett funding formula which governs the allocation of public spending within the UK - surely a precursor to its eventual abolition.

At the same time, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems agreed to set up a Commission to look at the Scottish Parliament’s powers and funding, likely to include consideration of whether the Scots should move towards greater financial self-sufficiency.

Could the 30-year-old formula, long a source of disquiet in the North-East on account of the tens of millions of additional spending it awards to Scotland, finally be on the way out?

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson certainly thought so, proclaiming on his blog that "the skids appear finally to be under the Barnett Formula.”

I myself was slightly more circumspect, commenting on these pages that the long battle for a fair funding deal for the North-East still had a way to go yet.

Since then, though, nothing. Maybe Mr Brown has thought better of it. Maybe the various reviews, studies and commissions are taking longer than expected to come to fruition.

Most likely, it's been put on the back burner pending the resolution of other political crises requiring more immediate attention.

The issue, of course, has not gone away. This week's report by the regional think-tank ippr north once again underlined the case for reform.

It found that although the gap between Scotland and the North-East in terms of public spending has narrowed in recent years, it still stands at £716 per head.

The report's main author Guy Lodge said the Barnett formula was no longer "fit for purpose" and should be replaced.

"It does not result in a fair distribution of spending, and is becoming an increasing source of tension between the nations of the UK," he added.

In its response to Thursday's report, the Treasury certainly gave little indication that anything was about to change.

It said there were "no plans" to change the Barnett formula, describing it as "a fair allocation which reflects population shares in the different nations of the United Kingdom" - which is pretty much what it's been saying for the past 11 years.

But whatever the reason behind the apparent lull in government activity around the issue, it is doubtful that much more is going to happen in the next fortnight at least.

Why? Because on July 24, voters in Glasgow East will go to the polls to elect a successor to Labour MP David Marshall, who resigned his seat on the grounds of ill-health last month.

Like Crewe and Nantwich, like Henley, this was undoubtedly a by-election that Mr Brown could have done without.

The main opponent will be Alex Salmond's Scottish Nationalists, and even the slightest movement on the Barnett Formula is bound to be exploited.

Mr Salmond, indeed, got his retaliation in early in his response to Thursday's report, saying: "It is abundantly clear that the motivation of both Labour and the Tories on this issue is slashing Scottish spending."

He claims that, far from being subsidised by England, Scotland's oil revenues are actually subsidising the rest of the UK to the tune of £4.4bn a year.

Does Glasgow East represent any sort of threat to Mr Brown, given that Mr Marshall had a majority of 13,507and had held the seat for Labour since 1979?

Well, ordinarily, no - but these are not ordinary times and the Prime Minister's record in by-elections thus far hardly inspires confidence.

Furthermore, there is one aspect of the Glasgow East contest that carries a particular danger for Mr Brown - the fact that it is taking place in his own Scottish political backyard.

If he can't win this one, Labour MPs will justifiably start to wonder whether he can actually win anywhere.

Mr Brown can at least take comfort from the fact that the by-election is taking place two days after the start of the summer Parliamentary recess, reducing the scope for plotting.

But the fact that even Harriet Harman has been talked about during the past week as a possible replacement demonstrates the extent of the trouble the Prime Minister is in.

My guess is that Labour will hang on, and that the immediate danger for Mr Brown will recede until the start of the conference season in September.

But as for the future of the Barnett Formula, the Prime Minister finds himself as caught between a rock and a hard place as he ever was.

It was, I think, always Labour's hope that it could safely ignore the problem, and that the formula would simply wither on the vine as spending between the different parts of the UK gradually converged.

It has now become clear, though, that this process will take so long that unless something is done sooner, the union could well fall apart in the meantime.

Reforming the Barnett Formula might have been one of the many radical things that Mr Brown dreamed of doing once he got to Number Ten.

Now he's there, though, he has found himself far too preoccupied simply with staying alive.

Recherchez la Femme

Forceful and Moderate was one of my very favourite blogs a couple of years back. It then went into abeyance while it's prime mover and creative driving force, Femme de Resistance, completed her Phd.

Now at long last she's back, with a redesigned blog and a follow-up to my story about another recent comeback - that of ex-Tory MP Walter Sweeney.

The Sweeney rides again

You really couldn't make it up. Just days after my Where Are They Now? profile of former Tory MP Walter Sweeney appears in the launch issue of Total Politics, the bugger decides to make a political comeback. He's one of 25 candidates standing against David Davis in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election on July 10 - but as an independent, not as a Conservative.

I just wonder if Sweeney read Total Politics and decided it was a bit early for people (ie, me) to be writing his political obituary?

A more likely explanation is that it's a revenge match against DD for having masterminded the notorious whipping operation on the Maastricht Bill in 1992 that ended with Sweeney being locked in a House of Commons toilet.

It is also surely significant that Haltemprice and Howden is Sweeney's local consituency. As I pointed out in my Total Politics piece, nowadays he is a local solicitor in the village of North Cave, near Hull.

Damage limitation may require new leader

Today's column in the Newcastle Journal, focusing on the potential fallout from Crewe and Nantwich and the prospects for a Milburn leadership challenge.

***

It would be fair to say that, during the course of her long parliamentary career, the former Crewe and Nantwich MP Gwyneth Dunwoody was not exactly a friend of New Labour.

As chair of the Commons Transport Committee, she regularly lambasted the government’s failure to make the railways a priority and, in particular, its slowness in tackling the chaos of rail privatisation after 1997.

Indeed, she proved so troublesome that, in 2001, the then Chief Whip, Durham North West MP Hilary Armstrong, made a ham-fisted attempt to keep her off the committee so she could not be re-elected as its chairman.

But backbench Labour MPs rose up in support of their doughty colleague, and Mrs Dunwoody continued to be a thorn in the side of the government moreorless up until her death last month.

There is, therefore, no little irony in the fact that the by-election caused by her passing has now resulted in Tory leader David Cameron hailing “the death of New Labour.”

But party stalwart that she undoubtedly was, I doubt that even Mrs Dunwoody would have wished what happened on Thursday night on Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Whether the 17pc swing to the Tories leaves Mr Brown’s leadership holed below the waterline only time will tell. It certainly constitutes the gravest crisis of his premiership.

It will, I suspect, become clearer over the next 48 hours whether there will be a serious attempt to depose him now, or whether he will be given until the autumn conference season to try to turn the situation round.

Is there a historical precedent for what happened at Crewe? The most oft-heard one this week has been the Eastbourne by-election in October 1990, won by the Liberal Democrats from the Tories on a 20pc swing.

Within five weeks of that result, the most successful Conservative Prime Minister of modern times, Margaret Thatcher, had been unceremoniously ousted.

As is often the case with Mr Brown, however, the case of James Callaghan provides an interesting counter-precedent.

In April 1977, the Tories won Ashfield from Labour on a 20pc swing, a year or so after Mr Callaghan had become Prime Minister. It was another two years before he left No 10.

The contrast between Mr Callaghan’s position then and Mr Brown’s now illustrates how much politics – and the media’s coverage of it – has changed in the ensuing three decades.

The loss of an old mining seat like Ashfield was a truly catastrophic result for Labour – but no media pundits rushed into print demanding that Callaghan make way, and certainly no MPs did so.

Perhaps the key difference was that Callaghan’s personal popularity ratings always remained high – right up to his defeat by Mrs Thatcher in May 1979.

Maybe because he lacks “Sunny Jim’s” avuncular disposition, the voters’ attitude to Mr Brown seems entirely more visceral. It is not just his policies which are the issue, it is him personally.

So should Mr Brown now do the decent thing to spare his party any further carnage? Well, the arguments for and against are not straightforward.

The Labour mantra about the former Chancellor being the best man to steer the economy though the current choppy waters still just about holds true, if only for the lack of an obvious alternative.

In my post-Budget column in March, I wrote that if Mr Brown can succeed in guiding the economy through the current slowdown, he will in all probability win the election. Crewe notwithstanding, I stand by that claim.

I would add, however, that it has become increasingly clearer since then that the situation may be beyond even his legendary powers of economic management

A more persuasive reason not to change leaders at this stage is that Labour could not possibly get away with foisting two unelected Prime Ministers on the electorate in close succession.

Whoever took over would therefore be virtually obliged to call an immediate election that Labour would be bound to lose, thereby negating the whole point of changing leaders in the first place.

That said, if the situation gets much worse for the party between now and the autumn, MPs would have very little left to lose by gambling on another leadership change.

At some point, it may become simply a case of damage limitation. The question would not be so much “could a new leader win?” as “could a new leader save at least some of our seats?”

A couple of weeks ago, I ran the rule over some of the possible contenders to take over should Mr Brown fail to recover. My view then, and now, was that Darlington MP Alan Milburn represented the best option.

During the past week, there has been some considerable speculation that Mr Milburn will indeed challenge Mr Brown, with backing from his old chum, North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers.

Some would regard the former health secretary merely as a stalking horse. My view, for what it’s worth, is that he would be a very serious candidate.

He is the right age for No 10 and having served in Blair's Cabinet, but not in Brown's, can combine top-level experience with relative freshness, enabling him to more credibly claim to be “the change the country needs" than Mr Brown has been able to do.

Were he to stand for the leadership, Mr Milburn would invariably have to deal with a certain amount of mud-slinging over the reasons behind his original Cabinet resignation in 2003.

Although he maintained it was to enable him to be a father to his two young sons, there are many other theories, not all of which would be particularly helpful in the context of a leadership campaign.

Whatever the truth of it, I always believed that Alan Milburn had too many unfulfilled ambitions not to return to frontline politics one day.

Could this now be a case of "cometh the hour, cometh the man?"

By-election will settle Brown's fate

Will Gordon Brown's determined fightback over the course of the past week be enough to save Labour in Crewe and Nantwich? And why is the contest beginning to resmeble another by-election battle in an old railway town some 25 years ago? Here's today's column in the Newcastle Journal.

***

The Queen’s Speech and the Budget are the pivotal moments of the parliamentary year, the points at which the government sets out its law-making programme on the one hand and its spending priorities on the other.

Traditionally, they have been held at opposite ends of the year – the Budget in early spring, the Queen’s Speech in late autumn.

This week, however, we had the almost certainly unique spectacle of a Budget and a Queen’s Speech effectively being unveiled within 24 hours of eachother.

It was perhaps a reflection of the strangeness of the political times we are living in, and the fact that, for Gordon Brown’s government, desperate times require desperate measures.

There are two ways of looking at Alistair Darling’s announcement on Tuesday of a
rise in tax thresholds to compensate most of those who lost out through the abolition of the 10p starting rate.

One is that for a Chancellor to have to come back to the Commons with what amounted to an emergency Budget within ten weeks of the original one is a fair old humiliation.

Furthermore, if the government now accepts that scrapping the 10p was a mistake, it has to go down as one of the most expensive mistakes in recent political history.

Raising the threshold by £600 for all taxpayers is costing the Treasury £2.7bn, all of which will have to be funded out of increased borrowing.

That said, there is a sense in which the government may have accidentally arrived at the right decision even if it was probably for the wrong reasons.

Pumping more money back into the economy via tax cuts is a fairly classical policy response to the sort of slowdown in economic growth which we are now experiencing.

From the point of view of family finances, the additional £120 a year for all those earning up to £40,835 a year will certainly help weather the rise in food and fuel costs.

Of course, the more sensible thing to have done would have been to put 1p on the top rate of tax to pay for all this, but that’s forbidden territory for New Labour.

So much for the emergency Budget – what, then, of the draft legislative programme – a Queen’s Speech by any other name?

Well, again, this may just be a case of serendipity - of a government almost accidentally rediscovering its sense of purpose in its desperation to avoid a shattering by-election loss.

The most damning accusation made against Mr Brown during the course of the 10p tax row was that it seemed emblematic of a government which had lost touch with people’s everyday concerns.

But ideas such as the new savings scheme for eight million low earners, more flexible working rights for parents and action to tackle underperforming schools seem to suggest the government has started listening again.

Meanwhile the plans to allow local communities to elect police chiefs and enable parents’ councils to help run schools show New Labour at last breaking free of control-freakery.

Both are nods in the direction of the local decentralising agenda which Darlington MP Alan Milburn has again hailed this week as the new “big idea” of 21st century politics.

Okay, so some of these ideas have previously been proposed by the Conservatives, but that's politics.

Given that the Conservatives have ditched most of the policies they fought the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections on in order to be more like New Labour, it’s not an accusation that can be easily sustained.

So where now for Mr Brown? Well, his dream scenario would be that this week’s “relaunch” will be followed by victory in Crewe and Nantwich, enabling Labour to claim that the worst is now behind them.

It will give Mr Brown the vital breathing space he needs to get through the summer and into the conference season without facing endless speculation about his leadership.

But the problems will come if, in spite of the fact that he thrown virtually the kitchen sink at it this week, next Thursday’s by-election is still lost.

Having fired off the two biggest shots in his armoury in the shape of this week’s announcements, it is unclear what ammunition Mr Brown would have left to turn the situation round.

The Crewe and Nantwich excuses are already lined up. If Labour loses, the government will seek to pass it off as part and parcel of the local election debacle rather than as a separate crisis.

That, however, will only work if Labour’s share of the vote remains broadly in line with what happened on May 1.

If the result suggests that the crisis has actually worsened since Mr Brown launched his “fightback,” then the pressure will really be on the Prime Minister.

In those circumstances, it is entirely possible that he may shortly be receiving a visit from the men in grey suits – or whatever Labour’s equivalent of them may be.

Indeed, Thursday’s by-election is rapidly assuming the same degree of importance as the one that took place a quarter of a century ago in another old railway town, Darlington.

On that occasion, Labour went into the contest beset by internal divisions and with serious question marks over the leadership of Michael Foot.

Had Labour lost, it is likely Foot would have been replaced by Denis Healey, but university lecturer Ossie O’Brien pulled off a shock win and saved his leadership, albeit only temporarily.

Can Tamsin Dunwoody pull off the same trick for Brown? This time next week, we’ll know the answer.