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.

All the week's journalism news

This blog's main business may be politics, but journalism news and issues have always featured strongly as I obviously have more than a passing acquaintance with and interest in the newspaper industry.

I'm currently looking after the HoldtheFrontPage journalism website and I've launched a new feature today called Journalism News Digest which rounds up the main stories of the week. Anyone who is interested can read it HERE.

And now for something completely different

An old friend of mine recently made me very envious by taking a three-month sabbatical from his job and using some of the time to drive across the United States. I was delighted to discover he has also started a blog in which he shares his experiences of the journey.

It's an anonymous blog so I won't use his name here, but he is in fact the Anglican vicar who married Gill and I nearly seven years ago, someone who has been one of the greatest and most positive influences on me in my Christian life over the past decade or so.

The blog, entitled Honk If You're Lonely, is part travelogue, part spiritual diary, and is as fascinating and inspirational as its author's perfectly-crafted sermons. If you're into that sort of thing, you can read it HERE.

Was Navratilova the greatest?

Well, according to a Top 100 list of all-time Wimbledon champions in today's Times, she was. But are the men's and women's games really comparable - and would Martina have been quite as successful had the women's game in her day been as competitive as it is now?

The Times has attempted to introduce an objective criteria for measuring greatness, but for me, things like this are a subjective judgement. The greatest players I have seen at Wimbledon in all my years of watching the tournament are as follows:

Men

1. Rod Laver
2. John McEnroe
3. Roger Federer
4. Pete Sampras
5. Bjorn Borg
6. Ken Rosewall
7. Andre Agassi
8. Boris Becker
9. Jimmy Connors
10. Ilie Nastase

Women

1. Serena Williams
2. Martina Navratilova
3. Steffi Graf
4. Justine Henin
5. Billie Jean King
6. Venus Williams
7. Martina Hingis
8. Margaret Court
9. Chris Evert
10. Evonne Goolagong

There are three names on my list who never actually won the Wimbledon title - Rosewall, Nastase and Henin - but all three graced the game with their artistry and richly deserved to lift the crown.

Laver and Serena top the list simply because, in my view, they were unbeatable at their respective peaks - complete tennis machines both.

Great cricketing quotations of our time No 94

"Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen."

Robert Mugabe

Should Brown sacrifice his Darling?

Nick Robinson posed an interesting question on the Today Programme this morning - for those who missed it, he has helpfully reproduced the entire script on his blog. But basically the gist of it was: should Gordon Brown sack Alistair Darling as Chancellor as part of a planned "autumn relaunch" of the government?

There will be those who will regard such a question as simply irrelevant, in that the plight of the Brown premiership is no so dire as to be beyond such rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Others will argue that Mr Darling is scarcely to blame for the economic difficulties that have buffeted Labour moreorless ever since he took over the job. The Tories' line of attack would doubtless be that he is simply the "fall guy" for Mr Brown.

Both of these are fair points. But for me, the reason Mr Darling should be replaced is the same two reasons that he should never have got the job in the first place - one, because he is Scottish, two, because he is rather dull.

It was always going to be the case that, with Brown as premier, having another Scot in what is effectively the No 2 government role was going to be tricky. When that Scot has a reputation for being almost as dour as Brown himself, it was going to be doubly so.

It would have made a great deal more sense had Brown appointed David Miliband or Alan Johnson to the Treasury role as soon as he has taken over. A year on, they are probably now the two Labour ministers with the most popular appeal. If it is to give itself even a chance at the next election, the party must play to its strengths by promoting one of them - probably Miliband - to the Chancellorship.

Total Politics goes live

The Total Politics website is now live and my "Where are they now?" contribution can be found HERE.

As previously mentioned, this is the first of a regular series focusing on shooting stars of the political firmament - those who enjoyed a brief fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety before returning to obscurity. In issue No 1, I focus on Walter Sweeney, a former Tory MP best known for a delightful story involving a crunch Commons vote, a 22-stone government whip, and a toilet.

On the subject of Total Politics, I was interested to read this interview with the magazine's publisher, Iain Dale in yesterday's Observer, in particular this paragraph.

"I think blogs as a phenomenon are on a plateau at the moment," he says. "Readership is growing but I don't see any great innovation. I see the mainstream media organisations embracing blogging and doing it quite well, eclipsing them in some areas. I'm really disappointed there have not been five or six other people that have built a mass readership. There are only four blogs [Dale's own, plus PoliticalBetting, ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes] that have done that, and there's a huge gap between the four of us and the next 10."

I don't for a minute doubt Iain's sincerity in saying this - he has often gone out of his way to promote other, smaller blogs that he thinks worthy of note, including this one - but it's a fact of economic life that once someone - or a group of people - establishes a market dominance, it becomes much harder for anyone else to break in.

In a way, what has happened with UK political blogging is a bit like what has happened with UK supermarkets. There, too, you have a "big four" in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons, with the smaller players a long way behind.

Gordon's paper anniversary

In today's column in the Newcastle Journal, I concede that I got it wrong about Gordon Brown. Well, sort of. You'll have to read to the end to find out what I mean!

***

This Friday, June 27, Gordon Brown will mark what, in usual circumstances, would be a significant political milestone – the first anniversary of his succession to the premiership.

When 12 months ago the newly-elected Prime Minister addressed the nation outside No 10 Downing Street, little could he have imagined how quickly his fortunes would turn around.

He spoke then of his old school motto: “I will try my utmost.” Later, in his first Labour Party conference speech as premier, he promised: “I will not let you down.”

But sadly, that is exactly what he has done. Indeed for many people, to describe the Brown premiership as a let-down would be the understatement of the century.

Over the years leading up to Mr Brown’s accession to the top job, there was a widespread view among centre-left commentators that he would be an improvement on what had gone before.

Since I was one of those who shared that analysis, this column amounts to something of a mea culpa.

We thought that Mr Brown would cast off his customary dourness once he got to No 10. We thought he would put an end to spin. We thought he would lead the Labour Party in a fresh and radical new direction.

And on all of those scores, the truth of the matter is that we got him wrong.

Part of my optimism about Mr Brown as a putative Prime Minister was based on my knowledge of him as a private man, and the hope and expectation that his personal qualities would shine through once he assumed the top job.

In all my admittedly limited dealings with them, I found he and Tony Blair to be an almost exact reversal of their public personas.

On the three occasions I interviewed Mr Blair for this newspaper, I found him shy, ill-at-ease and totally unable to make even the most rudimentary small-talk.

Mr Brown, by contrast, I found charming, witty, eager to engage in conversation - in short, nothing like the grim Stalinist control-freak he is now widely perceived as.

There were other grounds for optimism. Mr Brown had always portrayed himself as the serious one in the Blair-Brown partnership, and after a decade of showmanship from Mr Blair, the public seemed ready for that.

Allied to this was a feeling that the new man would eschew then reliance on spin that tarnished the Blair era - “not Flash, just Gordon” as the slogan put it.

It could have been a winner, but as the commentator Jonathan Freedland pointed out this week, Brown himself put paid to it by his behaviour over the election-that-never-was last autumn.

“The effect was to show that Brown was as much a calculating schemer as anyone else in the trade – he just wasn’t very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician,” he wrote.

But above all, our optimism about Gordon Brown was based on his long record of championing the social justice agenda within a government that often seemed careless of traditional Labour values.

He, after all, was the Chancellor who quietly redistributed billions of pounds to the worst-off in society via his system of tax credits.

He was the man whose successive comprehensive spending reviews pumped billions more into the vital public services on which the worst-off in society most depended.

And he was the man who, each September, would stand up and reassure the party faithful that real Labour “var-lews” as he called them had not been forgotten despite all appearances to the contrary.

Was he just playing to the left-wing gallery all that time? Well, it would seem so.

When Mr Brown took over, the expectation was that he would “hit the ground running” with a blitz of an announcements designed to signal a clean break with the Blair era.

In his statement outside No 10, he appeared to encourage that view, declaring that this would be a “new government with new priorities” and concluding with the words: “Now let the work of change begin.”

But to paraphrase an old political joke, while he may have been elected as New Brown, but he has governed very much as Old Blair.

So there has been no attempt, for instance, to tackle the widening inequalities in our society, or address the decline in social mobility that occurred throughout the Thatcher-Major-Blair years.

And far from drawing a line under Mr Blair’s foreign policy disasters, if anything last week’s press conference with President Bush showed him in full Blair mode.

Our expectations of Mr Brown weren’t purely based on wishful thinking. Radical plans for his premiership were indeed drawn up before he took over, some of which were briefed in advance to journalists.

But when it came to the crunch, Mr Brown bottled it, just as he bottled out of the election and just as he has now bottled out of taking on David Davis over 42-day detention – a decision he may well come to regret.

The real tragedy, though, is that we didn’t really get Mr Brown wrong at all. He is indeed all those things we always thought he was.

He is a decent, serious man with a passion for social justice and an overriding concern for the underdog. What he lacked was simply the political courage to be himself once he got to No 10.

That fatal loss of nerve is the single biggest reason why Gordon won’t be hanging out the bunting as he marks his first anniversary this Friday, and why his primary emotion will be one of relief at having lasted even a year.

I for one would currently lay reasonably long odds against him making it to two

Talking Total Politics

The new monthly political magazine Total Politics is launching next week and I am pleased to say that I will be contributing to it in a freelance capacity.

I will be writing a regular column for the mag called "Where are they now?" which will focus on people who enjoyed a brief fifteen minutes of political fame before disappearing into the obscurity from whence they came.

Typical examples will include Lib Dem by-election victors who lost their seats at the subsequent GE, long forgotten loony-left council leaders from the 1980s, and Tory MPs whose Westminster careers were flushed into oblivion by the Blair landslide in 1997.

I'm very pleased to have been given this opportunity by the carefully politically-balanced Total Politics team headed by publisher Iain Dale (Con) and editor Sarah Mackinlay (Lab), and wish them well with the launch.

The last days of the Raj?

As a fellow University College London alumnus I naturally wish Raj Persaud well in his efforts to save his career amid accusations of plagiarising other peoples' work. Whatever else you say about him, he has certainly put psychiatry on the media map.

That said, I can't say I am hugely surprised that Persaud has found himself in a situation where his skill for self-publicism appears to have backfired on him.

In my first year, he was chair of the UCL Labour Club, in which capacity he demonstrated an easy charm and ability to bullshit which was almost pre-Blairite in its magnitude. I thought then that he could have gone a long way in national politics had he chosen to.

Later, he signed my nomination papers for an elected student union post only to tell me afterwards that he had voted for someone else. This too, I later came to learn, was a fairly commonplace practice among political types.

So farewell then, Shoot! magazine

In an announcement which will surely cut deep into the hearts of fortysomething British males everywhere....IPC has announced that Shoot! magazine is to close after forty years.

I first started getting the mag at the age of eight in 1971 and until I discovered girls about seven or eight years later, the arrival of the latest fortnightly edition was the most eagerly anticipated event in my calendar.

The line-up of star writers in those days comprised the cream of British footballing talent - Bobby Moore, George Best, Billy Bremner, Alan Ball and Kevin Keegan.

The fact that they were not necessarily always positive role models for us young readers - Bremner and Keegan were sent off for fighting in the '74 Charity Shield, while Ball was sent off while playing for England earlier the same year - only added to its appeal.

My most treasured issue was perhaps the 1978 World Cup special which contained a number of confident predictions about Scotland's likely progress in the tournament, but I must have stopped getting the mag soon after that.

It's a shame that, like Camberwick Green and Trumpton, it won't be around for my own son to enjoy.

Calling all rats up drainpipes

As long-standing readers of this blog will know, Tony Bevins was one of my journalistic heroes. So it was good to hear that a group of friends and former colleagues have established the Bevins Prize both as a way of remembering him and as a means of encouraging and promoting investigative journalism.

The prize is a bronze statue of a rat up a drainpipe, which the organisers believe captured the essence of his approach to journalism.

Always a great believer in the merits of original research, Bevins would have been appalled by the prevalence of "churnalism" in the national media that exists today.

The organisers say the judges will be looking for work that required assiduous digging, and that successfully challenged those in power. I can think of a few bloggers whose work might well qualify.

A waste of a good man

Column published in today's Newcastle Journal on the Davis resignation.

***

Over the course of 20 years or so following and writing about British politics, I can safely say there is nothing that political journalists enjoy more than a good resignation.

For sheer drama, probably none could rival Michael Heseltine’s departure from the Thatcher Cabinet over the Westland affair in 1986.

Emerging from the front door of No 10, he strode across to waiting camera crews and told the world: “I have resigned from the government, and will be making a full statement later today.”

With that he was gone, his beanpole frame receding into the distance along Downing Street as stunned reporters paused for breath.

Mr Heseltine’s exit – though not the matter of it – was half-expected, but for sheer shock value, the sudden resignation of Ron Davies from Tony Blair’s Cabinet in 1998 would be hard to beat.

The Welsh Secretary was obliged to quit after being mugged by a stranger he had met on Clapham Common and agreed to go out for a meal with in what he later called “a moment of madness.”

The resignation of Shadow Home Secretary David Davis on Thursday was both dramatic and unexpected.

But in the longer-run, will it turn out to be a resignation that was soon forgotten, like Ron Davies’s, or one that altered the course of modern political history, like Heseltine’s?

Well, at this juncture, it is hard to tell. Mr Davis’s initial aim appears to have been to use the platform of a by-election to turn the row over 42-day detention into a huge public debate.

With Labour now appearing unlikely to take up the challenge of defending its own policies, it is not at all clear whether this will be achieved.

The contest in Haltemprice and Howden – once the fictional seat of Rik Mayall’s Alan B’Stard – looks set to turn into a one-man crusade by Davis against UKIP, the Monster Raving Loony Party and Sun columnist Kelvin Mackenzie.

It will be an entertaining enough media sideshow, but by this time next month, the wider political agenda may well have moved on to other issues.

Against that, the apparent refusal by Labour to field a candidate will doubtless be fully exploited by Mr Davis as an admission that 42-day detention does not, after all, command public support.

Indeed, he has already said that Gordon Brown would be guilty of “an extraordinary act of cowardice” in not opposing him.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Mr Davis on this point as well as on his wider arguments about the steady erosion of British civil liberties and the growth of the surveillance state.

If Mr Brown really was confident of his ground on 42 days, his attitude should have been: “If he wants an argument about terrorism, he can have one.”

Sure, if Mr Davis were to go on to win big, it would explode the Prime Minister's claim that there is public support for the measure and make it harder for Labour to use the Parliament Act to force it through the Lords.

But equally, if Labour did better than expected, it would puncture the Tory revival and perhaps demonstrate that Mr Brown’s recent difficulties had bottomed-out.

But the politician with the most to fear from a successful and highly-publicised Davis campaign in the East Yorkshire seat is not the Prime Minister, but Tory leader David Cameron.

He now faces the prospect of his old rival returning to the Commons with a thumping personal mandate and the potential to become a focus for discontent on the backbenches.

For there is no doubt that the kind of issues being championed by Mr Davis resonate widely not just within the Tory Party but also among the wider public.

In his dramatic statement outside the Commons on Thursday, Mr Davis railed not just 42-day detention but also ID cards, CCTV cameras, the DNA database and restrictions to jury trial.

Another of his bugbears is the march of political correctness, and the implications which this has for freedom of expression and other historic liberties.

If Mr Davis can make himself the focus for popular discontent about these “libertarian” type issues, his leader will face an awkward dilemma over what to do with him.

The smart move for Mr Cameron in those circumstances might be to swallow his pride and welcome Mr Davis back inside the tent.

But it already seems clear from his comments about the "permanent" appointment of Dominic Grieve as Shadow Home Secretary that he does not intend to do that.

If so, it will be more good news for the government, given Mr Davis’s awesome effectiveness in the role of Shadow Home Secretary since 2003.

During that time he has personally seen-off three Labour ministers - Beverley Hughes over work permits for one-legged Romanian roofers, David Blunkett over the Kimberley Quinn affair, and Charles Clarke over the release of foreign offenders.

If Mr Davis is not to be Home Secretary in the next Conservative government, it would, in my view, be a loss not only to the party but to the country.

He is one of the few big personalities left in an increasingly monochrome House of Commons and had he been a more effective platform orator, I am certain he would now be the country’s putative next Prime Minister.

He was the overwhelming favourite to win the Tory leadership in 2005, but lost it in the space of half an hour with a conference speech that was as dreadful as Mr Cameron’s was inspired.

That he now appears set to end his career as a Powell-like figure crying in the wilderness seems, to me, a waste of a rare talent.

Labour should stand and fight

The talk is that Labour is set to piss on David Davis's bonfire and emulate the Lib Dems by refusing to run a candidate in the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. This would be a serious missed opportunity for two reasons.

Firstly, it presents a chance for Gordon and the party to take a stand on a serious issue of principle with very little political risk attached. The attitude should be: "If David Davis wants a debate about terrorism, let him have one."

The worst than can happen is the part will lose the by-election - which everyone expects it to anyway - but if it's true that Labour is closer to public opinion on this issue than the Tories, they might actually do much better than anticipated.

But there is a deeper, more devious reason why Labour should play along with Davis's game for now - because it is not in fact in Gordon Brown's political interests for the former Shadow Home Secretary's bonfire to be pissed on.

In fact, if anything the Prime Minister should be busily pouring petrol on the flames. The more publicity that Davis's by-election stunt attracts, the more awkward it will make it for David Cameron

I'd even go so far as to say it's a win-win situation for Brown. Either Davis does worse than expected, which will puncture the Tory revival, or he returns to the Commons with a thumping majority to make more mischief for Dave.

It is clear to me from DC's coments about the "permanent" appointment of Dominic Grieve that he does not intend to bring Davis back into the Shadow Cabinet, which is even better news for Labour.

Not only has the Tory frontbench now lost its star performer, but he is set to return as a Michael Heseltine-type figure on the backbenches. Gordon will be a happier man tonight.

This will weaken Cameron

David Davis's shock decision to resign from the Commons and fight a by-election over 42-day detention is, ostensibly at least, designed to mount a challenge to the moral authority of the Brown government.

In the longer-term, it could achieve just that. If Mr Davis is successful, it will explode the Prime Minister's claim that there is public support for the measure and make it much harder for Labour to use the Parliament Act to force the measure through the Lords.

But without doubt, this decision also has to be seen as a severe blow to David Cameron. It is clear there has been some almighty bust-up between the Tories' two main men, and as a result Mr Cameron's authority will now be seriously called into question.

Davis was also the best-performing member of the Shadow Cabinet by a mile and has consistently made all his opposite numbers at the Home Office appear "unfit for purpose" in John Reid's immortal words. If this is the end of his frontbench career, it will be a sad loss to the party - and potentially to the country to.

The right man wins

No, I don't mean Gordon Brown and 42 days, I'm talking about Lee McQueen and The Apprentice. And here, for anyone who missed it, is that famous Reverse Pterodactyl impersonation.



Incidentally Charlie Brooker had an interesting take on this exchange between McQueen and Paul Kemsley in his Screenburn column last Saturday. I record this in full below as I agree with every word of it.

"While we're on the subject of Lee, there was a glaring example of the show unfairly setting him up to look like a prick the moment his interview kicked off, when Johnny Vegas asked him to impersonate a pterodactyl, then sneered at him for not taking the interview seriously as soon as he did so. What is this, Guantánamo Bay? Why not really dick with his mind by asking him to take a seat, then kicking it out from under him and calling him a subservient seat-taking imbecile?"

So anyway, that's The Apprentice over with for another year. Lee may have deserved his victory last night, but my favourite candidate over the whole of this year's series was Jennifer Maguire, the self-styled "best saleswoman in Europe" who was fired after ballsing up the Marrakesh bazaar task.

Irish Jennifer came over as a bit of an ice-maiden during the programme, but, judging by this report, that wasn't her true personality at all.

Colin M. Howard 1944-2008

I realise this post will probably be of little interest to those who visit here primarily for the quality of the political analysis (!) but this is my online diary as well as my political blog and I could not let today go by without noting the passing of my former choirmaster and music teacher Colin Howard, who has died in Cape Town aged 63.

As this obituary from the Cape Town Opera website reveals, Colin died on 26 May after a battle with cancer. His death was only brought to my notice earlier today.

Colin was organist and choirmaster of St Mary's Church, Hitchin and Director of Music at Hitchin Boys' School in the 1970s, and one of the greatest men I have ever met. He taught me moreorless all I know about classical and choral music and being a part of the choir in his time was one of the most important and formative experiences in my life.

Alhough he did bring to the role a huge sense of fun, he never forgot that the work of a church choir was primarily about glorifying God. I cannot improve on this description of him that appears in his Cape Town Opera obituary.

"He believed there was a place in church for a wide spectrum of music, performed to the highest standards, to the glory of God. He also felt strongly that church musicians should be people concerned with spiritual growth, willing to be team players in helping to realise the multifaceted demands of being involved in the church."

Colin was one of two or three teachers to whom I owe a very great debt. I regret I never got the chance to tell him so to his face.

Cameron fudges English Parliament issue again

Today's Daily Telegraph contains an apparently authoritative leak from Ken Clarke's "Democracy Task Force" which is looking into, among other things, possible answers to the West Lothian Question for the Tories.

Its key revelation is that Clarke has retreated from the Tories' previous position of seeking to establish an "English Grand Committee" - effectively an English Parliament within a UK Parliament - to a bizarre fudge under which, while only English MPs will be able to discuss English-only laws at the committee stage, all MPs will get a vote on third reading.

Both Iain Dale and Little Man in a Toque have already been predictably scathing about this, and they are right, although I don't blame Clarke so much as David Cameron, whose timidity on this subject is becoming legendary.

The answer to the West Lothian Question is painfully obvious and has been well-rehearesed on this blog: to give England the same degree of devolution as Scotland and equivalent democratic representation to other parts of the UK. This will require the creation of an English Parliament. Who will be the first main party leader to recognise this straightforward political reality?

Our fallen heroes

The death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan is not of course intrinsically any more or less tragic than those of the other 99, but it is obviously a sad milestone as Gordon Brown has acknowledged this morning.

The online obituaries site Lasting Tribute, which I helped launch a year ago, has put together a special section called Heroes of Afghanistan which contains full tributes to each of the hundred soldiers where people can leave their own individual tributes.

42 is not the answer

A little later than usual, but here's my weekend column from the Journal focusing on the 42-day detention issue and what it could mean for Gordon Brown.

***

There are times in politics when staging a confrontation with one’s backbenchers can be a beneficial exercise for a Prime Minister seeking to demonstrate the smack of firm leadership.

One example that springs to mind from the Tony Blair years was the row over cuts in disability benefits in 1998.

The sums involved amounted to about £60m – peanuts in public expenditure terms - but it was not the money that was important but the principle.

For Mr Blair, it was all about sending a wider message to the public that this was a “conviction government” that would not be messed around by its backbenchers as John Major’s was.

But there are other times in the lifetime of a government when backbench rebellions are needed like a hole in the head, and for Gordon Brown, such a time is now.

Hard on the heels of the 10p tax fiasco, the local election debacle, and the Crewe and Nantwich cataclysm, comes another giant-sized banana skin in the shape of the row over 42-day detention.

The plan to lock-up terror suspects without charge for six weeks is not, we are assured, being treated as an issue of confidence, and as such Mr Brown will not automatically resign if defeated.

But be that as it may, if he does indeed lose next week’s vote, it will be seen as further proof that he has lost control not just of the political agenda but of his own party.

The arguments for and against the extension of the time limit from the current 28 days to 42 days to counter the terrorist threat have been well-rehearsed.

In summary, the police, led by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, say it is needed, while the legal profession, personified by the former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, disagrees.

In an effort to placate backbenchers, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has made clear that the proposed new powers would only be used in “grave and exceptional circumstances.”

But although some Labour MPs have been won over, others remain unconvinced, and up to 40 could still rebel when the vote takes place on Wednesday.

There are doubtless good “strong government” arguments for Mr Brown not to give way to the rebels’ demands at this late stage, particularly in the context of other recent U-turns.

The government may have no real alternative but to back down on the abolition of the 10p tax rate and the proposed fuel tax increases on gas-guzzling cars – but it has not exactly enhanced the Prime Minister’s crumbling authority.

That said, there are several reasons why I think Mr Brown may have made a strategic mistake in pinning his colours so firmly to the mast on 42-day detention.

In my view, it is quite simply the wrong issue on which to make what, for him, could turn out to be the political equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand.

Why do I say this? Well, firstly, because it’s exactly the kind of thing that Mr Blair would have done.

The most telling criticism of Mr Brown that I have read in the wake of Crewe and Nantwich was from a voter who said: “We thought he was going to be different from Blair, but he’s just the same.”

That voter was speaking for millions who wanted change after the Blair years, and looked to Mr Brown to provide it.

On peripheral issues such as cannabis and casinos, he did – but on all the big questions such as tax, public service reform and counter-terrorism, there has been scarcely any deviation from the Blair agenda.

Secondly, the government’s stance on 42-day detention reeks of more of the kind of short-term tactical positioning that has been so damaging to Mr Brown over the past year.

For all I know, the Prime Minister may passionately believe in the idea deep in his heart – but the suspicion among the public is that he is just doing it to make the Tories look “soft on terror.”

There was a time when this sort of thing was regarded as clever politics, but an increasingly sophisticated electorate now sees straight through it.

No doubt Mr Brown also thought that he was being clever abolishing the 10p tax rate so he could shoot the Tory fox by cutting the standard rate from 22p to 20p. The public begged to differ.

Another reason why 42 days is the wrong issue on which to take a stand on is that the Labour Party by and large hates the idea – and this is the wrong time for Mr Brown to have a row with them.

Any immediate threat to his position will come not from the electorate as a whole but from his own MPs, and this is the constituency he currently needs to shore up.

Finally, the 42-day plan will mean guaranteed Parliamentary trench warfare throughout the remainder of the current session.

Even if it scrapes through on Wednesday, the House of Lords will certainly reject the plan and send it back to the Commons, meaning the row is set to rumble on all summer.

Over the past seven or eight months, the papers have been full of advice for Mr Brown on how he can relaunch or rescue his troubled premiership. I myself have written one or two columns along that theme.

In all that time, the best advice I have seen has come from those commentators who have advised him to stop worrying about being popular and do something radical that he really believes in.

As I have pointed out, in so doing, he might even discover that elusive “big idea” that gives some reason for his government’s continued existence - or at worst, something good to remember it by.

Does he really want to go down in history as the man who abolished part of Magna Carta? I think not.

Boardroom farce

As someone who has followed every series of The Apprentice, it has been clear for some time that the quality of candidates in this year's competition leaves a little to be desired. They probably won't thank me for saying it, but I could look around my office and spot three or four people who would have made a better fist of it than the current lot.

So the fact that four of these no-hopers have been deemed worthy of a place in the final seems somewhat farcical to say the least.

A gruelling day-long series of interviews designed to eliminate three of the remaining five candidates succeeded only in revealing that £100,000-a-year business analyst Lucinda was "too zany" to work for Sir Alan, which, privately, most of us could have told him all along.

Then again, Sir Alan's decision-making in this series has been pretty idiosyncratic all around.

He fired pert Irishwoman Jennifer Maguire well before she had a chance to mess-up big time, got rid of nice-guy Rafe even though he won nearly every task, and kept the completely clueless Michael Sophocles in the contest until the third-from-last episode.

Of the remaining four, I hope Lee McQueen manages to win. Despite bullying Sara and lying on his CV, he deserves it. And apart from anything else, if he wins he might do his reverse pterodactyl impression again.

Blair says Brown not to blame

Oh well, that's big of him. Will he now admit that, actually, he is to blame for Labour's current plight by staying at least four years beyond his sell-by date and denying Gordon the chance to win his own mandate in 2005? Don't hold your breath....

Will Labour be out of power for a decade?

Will Labour be out of power for as long as last time if it loses the next election, asks Mike Smithson on PB.com today. I say no, for the following reasons:

1. The prevailing intellectual climate is still broadly New Labour. There has been no great shift in public opinion to the right, instead the main party of the right has shifted towards the centre ground. New Labour’s current problems are to do with personality issues and having been in power too long, rather than to do with losing any great intellectual argument as Labour in the 70s and 80s did.

2. There is nothing in David Cameron’s career to date to suggest that he will be anything more than adequate as Prime Minister. Comparisons with Blair were always wide of the mark, while comparisons with Thatcher are simply absurd.

3. The current ideological proximity of the two main parties would suggest a period of pendulum swings (similar to the 60s and 70s) rather than long periods of one-party hegemony.

4. For all Labour’s current problems, it is still more ideologically united than the Tories. The Tories underlying divisions, notably over Europe, would come to the surface again once they were back in power.

Why, Sparky?

Mark Hughes will shortly be giving his first press conference as the new boss of Manchester City. If I was going to be there, I'd simply ask him: Why?

Until this week, I would have said "Sparky" was a shoo-in to be the next boss of Man United when Fergie retires in two years' time. I doubt whether the Old Trafford fans will be too keen on that idea now.

Ever Decreasing Circles

Circle Line Parties were a regular feature of rag weeks and other student japes at UCL when I went there in the 1980s. In fact I once personally organised one as the end-of-year bash for the "Pi Collective," a weirdly assorted group of people who ran the college's student magazine at the time, at least three of whom went on to become professional journalists.

Somehow I never thought that putting a stop to this fine old London tradition would be BoJo's first act as Mayor, but as Brockley Kate has pointed out, Saturday night's revellers ("I'm going round and round until I vomit" said one) rather proved his point for him.

Haymaking while the tills ring

Hay-on-Wye is a gorgeously romantic little spot which can occasionally cause people to lose their heads somewhat...but even so, the behaviour of John Prescott and Michael Levy at the Hay Festival this weekend takes some beating when it comes to political mischief-making.

During a book-signing session for his autobiography, Prezza let it slip that he thought David Miliband would be a good leader of the Labour Party.

Although he made clear he was talking about the future rather than the present,his comments were predictably over-egged by the media into a story about possible alternatives to Gordon Brown.

Prescott has been in politics long enough to know that this was exactly what would happen, so just what exactly was he playing at here? Surely nothing as cheap and nasty as deliberately undermining the Prime Minister in order to garner a bit more publicity for his wretched book?

Meanwhile Lord Levy burnished his growing reputation for serial and gratuitous acts of disloyalty by opining that Gordon Brown "lacks Blair's way with people."

I have used this before, I know...but if ever there was anyone who needed to hear Clem Attlee's famous words of advice to Harold Laski, it is surely Levy. "I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

The Not the Labour Party

This week's Saturday column in the Newcastle Journal focuses on the Conservatives and specifically on whether David Cameron needs to do more to set out a distinctive vision for the country.

***

Of all the many political truisms that get trotted out from time to time, one of the most oft-heard but possibly most misleading is the one that says oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

It is true there has been the odd election where that has been the case, but by and large, it is bunkum.

In the last election, in 2005, for instance, an unpopular and discredited Labour government was grudgingly returned to office not on its own merits but for fear of what a Michael Howard-led administration might do.

Another election that was “lost” by the opposition as opposed to “won” by the government was Labour’s “suicide note” election under the leadership of Michael Foot in 1983. The contests in 1987, 1992 and 2001 fall into a similar category.

The 1997 election was a bit of a special case. Perhaps uniquely in the past 40 years, this was an election which the opposition did as much to win as the government did to lose.

John Major’s government may have been universally derided – but Tony Blair never took victory for granted, and his mantra of “no complacency” continued long after it became obvious to everyone else that he was heading for a landslide.

Practically the only election in modern times where the old cliché about governments and oppositions did hold true was 1979, when Margaret Thatcher’s Tories defeated Jim Callaghan’s Labour.

This was not so much a triumph for “Thatcherism” which was only a half-formulated ideology at that point, as a defeat for Old Labourism in the wake of the chaos of the Winter of Discontent.

So what’s all this got to do with the present day? Well, it is clear that the next general election, if it were held tomorrow, would be another which fell into the 1979 category.

We have in this country at the present time a government that seems to have decisively lost the public’s confidence, yet an opposition that has not yet done enough to earn it.

In 1979, people voted for Mrs Thatcher despite having little idea what her government would look like – it is possible that had they known it would mean 3m unemployed, she would not have won.

Likewise today, David Cameron appears to be on course for an election win even though very few people have any clear idea what sort of Prime Minister he will turn out to be.

Mr Cameron’s true appeal would currently appear to rest on the fact that he represents the Not Labour Party, and that he is Not Gordon Brown.

The collapse of public confidence in the government has yet to be matched by any great outpouring of public enthusiasm for the Tories – hardly surprising given that Mr Cameron has turned the party into a policy-free-zone.

What we do know is fairly unconvincing. For instance, we know Mr Cameron would stick to Labour spending plans for much of his first term, while somehow delivering a large cut in inheritance tax for the richest 6pc of voters.

Meanwhile he has yet to discover a compelling “Big Idea,” while a lot of what he says is merely vacuous mood-music such as “let sunshine win the day.”

There are basically two schools of thought within the Conservative Party as to how they should respond to the current crisis facing the Brown administration.

Essentially, the debate is over whether they should follow the sort of strategy successfully employed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979, or the one equally successfully employed by Mr Blair in 1997.

Some argue that the party now needs to do very little in the way of setting out a new policy agenda, and simply sit back and let the government continue to destroy itself.

Others, however, maintain that this is not enough, and that the party still needs to articulate a clear vision of what it will do with power, as Mr Blair did to great effect between 1994-97.

This is in essence a refinement of the continuing debate within the Conservative Party over how far it needs to change in order to be entrusted again with the nation’s destiny.

By and large, those who fall into the “modernising” camp are arguing that the party still needs to do more to “decontaminate” the Tory brand.

But the seeming inevitability of a Tory victory has latterly encouraged the “traditionalists” who want Mr Cameron to stop the political cross-dressing and place more emphasis on cutting taxes and cutting crime.

At the moment, this camp seems to have the upper hand – there has been markedly less talk from Mr Cameron in recent weeks about the importance of winning from the “centre ground.”

But whichever side prevails in this argument will ultimately depend on what happens to the government.

There is still time for Mr Brown to recover, although that really depends on an improvement in the economy that is looking less and likely with each new doom-laden forecast.

The only other alternative for him is the so-called “go for broke” strategy which involves him throwing caution to the winds, doing something radical, and somehow discovering a convincing narrative.

There is also, of course, time for Labour to change its leader again, although many Labour MPs fear that would now do no more than avert a landslide.

Logically speaking, a situation in which a government has lost the public’s support but an opposition has not yet earned it should have “hung Parliament” written all over it.

Oddly enough, that is what Jim Callaghan’s pollsters told him was the best he could hope for if he were to go to the country in the autumn of 1978, as everyone expected him to.

As I have pointed out before, had Mr Callaghan known that his delay would lead not to outright Labour victory but to 18 years of Tory rule, he would have taken that hung Parliament.

Three decades on, I suspect that the current generation of Labour MPs would take it, too.

Labour's Master Plan Revealed

Hat-tip to Justin for alerting me to the existence of this brilliant analysis of what appears to be Labour's current electoral strategy. As I'm sure you will agree, it beats all the current MSM punditry hands down.

Labour will today unveil a detailed plan to alienate its last remaining pockets of support.

The central plank of the party's strategy involves identifying the 10 most popular family cars in Britain and then making them a nightmare to own.

A Labour spokesman said: "We're going for the double whammy of making them too expensive to drive, but also impossible to sell.

"And if that doesn't work we'll just spray paint a big swastika onto the bonnet."

The party is also drawing up plans to spend £200 million of taxpayers' money on a vicious PR campaign against the country's 100 most decorated war veterans.

Meanwhile teams of party researchers will tour marginal constituencies, identifying Labour voters and then kneeing them in the groin or setting fire to their coat.

And later this week, in a carefully stage-managed event at Westminster, at least 10 Cabinet ministers will explain why they intend to vote Conservative.

The spokesman added: "We'll take stock during the summer and if, at that point, there are any Labour voters left, the prime minister will send them each a personal, hand-written letter calling them a c*nt."

North-East referendum defeat was Prescott's "greatest regret"

Having closely followed the long debate over North-East regional devolution in my old role as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, I was intrigued to read this story in today's Guardian, in which John Prescott speaks of the failure to win the 2004 regional assembly referendum as his "greatest regret" in politics.

It was obvious all along that Prescott attached huge importance to the issue. Unfortunately for him, no one else in the Blair Cabinet thought it was remotely important, including of course the then Prime Minister himself.

Prescott is often derided as a figure of fun, but it is a measure of his underlying seriousness of purpose as a politician that he should regret this policy failure more than, say, the Prescott punch, the Tracey Temple affair, and building on the green belt, all of which had a much bigger impact on the way he was viewed by the press and public.

Regional government is now about as fashionable as a Spam fritter-eating Phil Collins fan in hot pants, but I for one have to admire Prezza for the fact that he is still happy to be identified with such an unpopular cause.

A broken reed

This Friday, BBC Parliament is planning to screen 11 hours of coverage of the 1983 General Election, the one that has gone down in history as the point at which when moribund Old Labour finally committed suicide, although in truth the stricken patient lingered on until Neil Kinnock finally put it out of its misery at Bournemouth in 1985.

I was at uni in London during the course of that election and my most abiding memory of it was a visit by Michael Foot to a West London housing estate where large numbers of students then lived.

As Footie tottered into view, a bearded Labour activist suddenly started bellowing at the top of his voice: "Michael, save us from this woman," as if he were imploring Christ to come down from heaven and vanquish the devil and all his works.

The idea of this pathetic old man acting as any kind of saviour in the face of the irresistable force of nature that was Thatcher struck me as a telling metaphor for the Labour Party's weakness at the time.

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?"

Reid backs Gordon

"We think Gordon is doing a great job and we thought that before last night...There is no reason why Gordon shouldn't carry on." So said Dr John Reid MP on the Today Programme this morning.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party, Celtic chairman Dr Reid was speaking about manager Gordon Strachan, in the wake of the club's third successive SPL title win yesterday.

Needless to say I'll be looking at the implications of Crewe and Nantwich for Gordon Brown in my Saturday column, which will be available here from tomorrow morning.

Lib Dems take control of Derby

After a near three-week hiatus following the local elections, the Lib Dems last night took control of Derby City Council, my old stamping-ground during my days as a local government reporter in the late 1980s.

With 18 seats to Labour's 17, the Tories' 14 and two independents, the Lib Dems' hold on power is precarious, and although the other two parties rejected new leader Hilary Jones' offer of a grand coalition, there will clearly have to be very close co-operation between the parties if anything is to get done.

Furthermore, there is a potential sting in the tail for Ms Jones' new minority administration in the shape of independent councillor Wendy Harbon, who was thrown out of the Lib Dems last year and has since moved to Blackpool.

She was nowhere to be seen at last night's Cabinet-making meeting of the full council, and if she continues in this vein, she will be thrown off the authority, forcing a by-election in Darley ward, until recently a Labour stronghold.

Anyway to cut a long story short, if Labour were to win back this seat, it would be back in control of the city on the casting vote of the new Mayor, Barbara Jackson, who was also elected yesterday.

Sometimes, you know, I miss all this....

Come on you Reds

I may be a Londoner by birth, but I'll be cheering on Man U tonight, if only for purely sentimental reasons. It's fifty years since the Munich disaster destroyed potentially the greatest English club side ever, forty since Matt Busby's reconstructed team, George Best to the fore, walloped Benfica 4-1 at Wembley to lift the European Cup for the first time. With history on their side, surely they cannot lose?

May 22 Update: The right result, even if it was a bit of a game of two halves - but you have to feel for John Terry. Once again, sport proves its ability to humble even the greatest - one is reminded of Bradman, b Hollies, 0.

Fathers made redundant

Last night's votes on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill were, for me, perhaps the most depressing outcome to a parliamentary debate since Labour MPs went back on their 2001 manifesto pledge not to introduce tuition fees.

I have blogged previously about the hybrid animal-human embryo issue, but to be absolutely honest, what really wound me up about the Bill was not this, but the fact that it effectively denied the importance of fathers in bringing up children.

I did not oppose this simply because I am a Christian, but because it cuts across everything in my own experience both as a father and as a son.

It is blindingly obvious to all sensible people - those not consumed by political correctness - that the absense of fathers and other male role models has been a major contributory factor to social breakdown in some of our most deprived communities.

If MPs - and we are talking all three main parties here - want to deny children the right to grow up with a father, that is their lookout. In one sense it is scarcely surprising, since they also voted last night to deny hundreds of children a year the right to any life at all.

Just don't ever let them tell you again that they are putting "the family" at the heart of policy, or that "the interests of the child" are paramount. Patently, they are not.

Has Milburn's time now come?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following sentences in my Saturday Column in the Newcastle Journal.

"Potentially the most promising “change candidate” is Darlington MP Alan Milburn, whose still-youthful appearance belies his five years’ Cabinet experience. More importantly, he alone among Labour’s big-hitters has demonstrated an appetite for thinking outside the box. Whether he actually wants the job is unclear, but in my view, this could be his time."

Today, as I noted earlier, Mike Smithson on PoliticalBetting.com has claimed that Milburn is preparing to challenge Brown for the leadership if Thursday's Crewe and Nantwich by-election turns out as disastrously for Labour as everyone is now predicting.

I have no idea if the story is true, although as Iain Dale has already noted, Mike is not the sort to take a punt on such a tale. But as I have previously made clear, in the event of a leadership vacancy, the former health secretary would in my view be an extremely strong candidate.

Like most on the centre-left who hoped that under Gordon the Labour Party would rediscover its lost moral compass, I have been extremely saddened by what has happened to his premiership over the past seven or eight months.

Granted, he has not played his cards well - although the critical strategic error was not cancelling the autumn election as most allege, but allowing the speculation about an autumn election to get out of control in the first place.

Much of what has happened since then, however, has either been down to the incompetence of minor officials and party functionaries (discgate, David Abrahams) or, in the case of Northern Rock and the whole gamut of issues stemming from the global credit cruch, down to economic circumstances way beyond his control.

If he cannot now recover - more specifically, if the voters of Crewe and Nantwich deliver him a knockout blow - then Milburn is in my view the next best choice to lead the party into the next General Election.

In historical terms, it would be a bold move. Milburn would be the first premier since Churchill to take over mid-term while not occupying a major office of state (Eden, Home, and Callaghan all went from the Foreign Office to No 10, Macmillan, Major and Brown from the Treasury) and Churchill had of course previously been both Home Secretary and Chancellor.

Of the three current holders of the major offices, David Miliband has been much touted but is still less than fully-formed as a politician in my view, much as William Hague was when it fell to him to lead the Tories. He is still in the next-leader-but-one category.

The younger contenders - the likes of Purnell, Balls, Burnham and Ed Miliband - are even more lacking in experience and gravitas, while the older hands - Straw, Johnson, Harriet Harman - have simply been around the block too many times now.

At 49, Milburn 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 Brown has been able to do.

It is true that he lacks a power base in the party, but then so do most of the other names that have been mentioned. There has never been a "Straw-ite" faction or a "Johnsonite" faction for instance, and even Miliband has allegedly failed to cultivate much of a following in the PLP.

It is also true that there have been various unsubstantiated rumours about his private life prior to his present relationship which, in the context of a leadership election, could result in a certain amount of mud being flung, as indeed was flung at Gordon in 1994.

Milburn would also have to overcome the suggestion of dilettanteism arising from his two Cabinet resignations. Some claimed it was a case of "can't stand the heat," but I genuinely believe he made a long-range calculation about his chances of succeeding Blair, correctly realised that Brown had it in the bag, and resigned to spend more time with his young sons at what was a critical age for them (they are older now.)

One thing I always believed though was that Milburn would return to frontline politics. Could this now be a case of "cometh the hour, cometh the man?"

++ Milburn to challenge Brown says PB.com ++

Mike Smithson has a potentially huge story HERE. Mike is to the political blogosphere what Phil Webster of The Times was to the Lobby in my time there - if he has a story, it's worth taking seriously.

More on this from me later.

Clegg "to back election winner" shock

God forbid that I ever turn into one of those gnarled old ex-lobby hacks who continually lament that political reporting is not what is was in their day....but the latest breathless revelations from Rosa Prince of the Telegraph's new-look political team had me shaking my head.

Writing on the usually excellent and informative Three Line Whip blog, she informs us that Nick Clegg will back David Cameron to become Prime Minister in the event of the Tories being the largest single party in a hung Parliament at the next General Election.

"Before now, it had been thought likely that Mr Clegg would wait until after an election to embark on negotiations with both of the main parties in the event of a hung Parliament. But The Daily Telegraph understands that he has decided that the public would not forgive him if he propped up a Labour administration that they had voted to throw out."

Well, blow me down. How long did it take The Daily Telegraph to "understand" that one, I wonder? I mean, it's not exactly rocket science, is it, to suggest that there would not be many votes for Cleggover in propping up a defeated Brown administration? With a second General Election likely to follow within the space of a year, he knows perfectly well it would be electoral suicide for him and his party.

The real dilemma for Clegg will come if Labour is the largest single party and the Tories are sufficiently far behind that they cannot form a government even with Lib Dem support - still a possible if currently rather unlikely scenario. In those circumstances the Lib Dem leader might be obliged to prop-up Labour in order to avert constitutional chaos.

Avid election speculators may like to take part in my Poll on the election outcome which I will be running between now and whenever the election comes. I plan to tot up the results each month and track the changes to see how opinion among blog readers is moving.

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.

Four out of five readers back leadership change

For the past fortnight since the local election debacle I have been running a Poll on who should lead the Labour Party into the next general election. Gordon Brown was of course included in the shortlist, but the results show that, however much support he retains among Labour Party members, readers of this blog at any rate are less than enthused by his leadership.

Although Brown topped the poll with 20pc of the vote, four out of five of those who took part backed other candidates, with Jack Straw and Jon Cruddas the next most favoured. Furthermore there are strong suggestions that some of those who want to keep Brown in place were Tories - there was a surge of votes for the Prime Minister after my commentary piece last weekend was linked to by Guido Fawkes, sending traffic temporarily through the roof.

The full results were:

Gordon Brown 20%
Jack Straw 15%
Jon Cruddas 14%
David Miliband 13%
Alan Johnson 11%
John McDonnell 7%
Ed Balls 6%
Hilary Benn 6%
John Denham 5%
Alan Milburn 2%

Since the poll began Gordon has obviously launched a fairly determined fightback with this week's emergency Budget and draft Queen's Speech, and I'll be saying a bit more about the potential impact of this in my weekly column which will be on here from tomorrow morning.

One name I didn't include in the list was James Purnell, mainly because I view him as an incurable lightweight. However Fraser Nelson of the Spectator, who knows more about these things than I do, has since penned this piece arguing that Purnell, not David Miliband, is now the great hope of the Blairite faction.

I was in London yesterday and read a scandalous piece in the Standard's Londoner's Diary suggesting the Speccie has turned against Miliband because its editor Matthew d'Ancona's wife Sarah, who is Miliband's special adviser, has left him. This is so outrageous that it either has to be (a) true or (b) a particularly unfortunate case of a journalist putting two and two together and making seventeen.

Gordon listens

I'll have more to say on it later in the week no doubt, but first impressions of today's Draft Queen's Speech are fairly positive.

More help for first-time buyers, a savings scheme for eight million low earners, more flexible working rights for parents, action to tackle underperforming schools - you cannot say that the government is not listening to peoples' everyday concerns in bringing forward such ideas.

Okay, so some of the ideas have previously been proposed by the Conservatives, but that's politics. You could argue that the Conservatives have been not exactly been shy of emulating Labour policies over recent years, particularly since David Cameron became leader.

Media reaction tommorrow morning will be interesting. Will the papers treat these proposals on their own merit, or will they just decide that everything that comes out of the Brown government is thereby automatically damned? Watch this space....

Farewell Justine?

If it's true that Justine Henin is to retire from tennis as reported in two Belgian newspapers earlier today (4pm update: it is) it will be a very sad loss to the sport. Having followed the game since I was about seven or eight, I can safely say that she is the most watchable player I have ever seen on court. Her backhand in particular is a thing of beauty.

She has been runner-up in two Wimbledon finals, in 2001 and 2006. If Ken Rosewall is by common consent the greatest men's player never to win the trophy, Henin will go down in my view as the finest woman player never to lift the crown.