18th place

My copy of the Guide to Political Blogging 2007 arrived on my doormat today and I am very pleased to see that this blog is still rated among the UK's Top 20 political blogs, as chosen by 500 readers of Iain Dale's Diary.

Although my 18th place represents a drop of eight places from last year, when I was placed 10th, I am actually pretty chuffed just to stay in the Top 20 as the past 12 months have not been easy ones in terms of maintaining the work-life-blog balance.

I was also placed fourth in the "media blogs" category behind Nick Robinson, Spectator Coffee House and Ben Brogan, and while it is gratifying to be named in such illustrious company, I do have a slight issue with this categorisation.

No doubt it was an innocent mistake, but unlike Nick, Ben, and the Spectator boys and girls, whose blogs are essentially adjuncts to their print or broadcast journalism, I am no longer a full-time journalist and the political columns I write for two regional newspapers are not my main source of income.

Update: The full list of the top 300 blogs can now be viewed over at Iain's place.

The perils of political punditry

Having said on more than one occasion that Gordon Brown would not call an election this autumn, it's looking increasingly like it could be egg-on-face time for me if Gordon decides to go for it over the course of this weekend.

That said, it looks like I am in good company. As BBC political editor Nick Robinson admits on his blog today, he himself initially described talk of an early election as tosh.

I took the view I did because I do not believe that the public wants an election at this stage, and that against that backdrop Brown will struggle to increase Labour's majority beyond 66. I still hold to that, and agree wholeheartedly with Guido that 3.5 - 1 against the Tories being the largest single party represents good value at the moment.

I'll be saying a bit more about why in my weekend column which will will be posted here tomorrow after it has appeared in the Newcastle Journal and Derby Evening Telegraph.

The election: what Gordon should do.

I don't know whether Gordon Brown is going to call an autumn general election, and if the amount of bet-hedging and fence-sitting going on in Bournemouth amongst my former colleagues is anything to go by, neither does anyone else. In this post, however, I set out my admittedly rather idealistic view of what I think he should do.

We already know enough about Gordon's plans for his premiership to know that constitutional reform - what he termed democratic renewal in his speech on Monday - is going to figure highly. In his speech he gave us one specific commitment, namely to an elected House of Lords, but I am sure there will be more to come.

Mr Brown has also made it clear, in his inaugural Commons statement back in July, that he sees divesting himself of power as a part of that agenda, for instance, the right to declare war or appoint bishops.

Well, writing in today's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland identifies another such reform that is now urgently required - the introduction of fixed-term parliaments and the end of the Prime Ministerial power to go to the country as a time of maximum advantage.

Freedland says in his piece: "British elections are running races in which one of the contestants get to fire the starting gun. So when Gordon Brown finally names the date, let him also vow to be the last Prime Minister to exercise that privilege."

My only criticism of Freedland here is that he doesn't quite go far enough. Were Brown to follow his advice to the letter, he would still be free to decide the election date at a time of maximum advantage to Labour while seeking to deny that power to his successors, which would be rightly viewed by the public as a monumental hypocrisy.

Brown should therefore announce that there is going to be no election this autumn, that he will legislate in the forthcoming session for the introduction of fixed term four-year parliaments, and that in the spirit of this, there will not be another general election until May 2009 - four years after the last one.

I personally think the public would thank him for sparing them an unnecessary trip to the polls, but even if he were to lose, and had to spend the rest of his life listening to people saying "you should have gone in autumn 2007," his place in history as one of the great reforming premiers would be absolutely assured.

How I wish I'd been there....

My conferencing days are well and truly over and I rarely find myself feeling wistful about the annual booze-sodden seaside jaunts...but I would have paid good money to watch Blair-worshipping policy wonk Darren Murphy fall over unaided during a late-night bar-room contretemps with arch-Brownite Ian Austin, as reported by Hugh Muir in today's Guardian Diary.

This is getting silly

As if political cross-dressing had not gone far enough in recent weeks, with Dave trying frantically to be like Tony but not Maggie, and Gordon trying frantically to be like Maggie but not Tony, we now have the spectacle of Norman Tebbit simultaneously lionising Gordon and rubbishing Dave.

Surely all we need now to complete the circle is for Tony Benn to hail Cameron as the new, authentic voice of democratic socialism.

The next leadership race starts here?

When I first spotted this post on Ben Brogan's blog earlier today I initially thought it was a bit frivolous of him to start speculating about leadership "beauty contests." But in fact Brogan has a very good point.

Despite Gordon Brown's current dominance of the political scene, it should not be forgotten that this could easily be both his first and last conference as Labour leader.

As Brogan points out: "If Brown listens to the hotheads, goes for November, and gets it wrong, we really will be looking for a change candidate."

So just for the sake of argument - and because no party conference would be complete without a bit of leadership speculation - who might that candidate be?

Well, as Iain Dale notes, frontrunner David Miliband has just bored the delegates into slumber for the second year running, although the content of his speech today was largely spot-on.

Brogan himself speculates that energetic Ed Balls could emerge as a runner, although I have long believed that his wife, Yvette Cooper, is really the more talented politician in the Balls household.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson would certainly stand, but at 56 may be considered too old for a gruelling four or five years of opposition before he would have a chance to unseat Prime Minister Cameron in 2011/12.

In my view, the dark horse could well be Jacqui Smith, who has made a great start as Home Secretary and has impeccably New Labour credentials. It will be interesting to see how her speech goes down later in the week.

On a related point, does anyone know why Brown moved the leader's speech to Monday? I guess he must have had his reasons but it's turned the whole of the rest of the conference into a largely meaningless anticlimax.

The conference always tailed off after Tuesday, but I reckon that the extra day's build-up to the old Tuesday afternoon slot was worth at least an extra day's front-page headlines for Labour.