On 6 June, all hell will break loose

"The Labour Party faces a shattering defeat at the next general election unless there is a fundamental change in the character, culture and direction of the government. That requires a change of leadership, for two reasons.

Firstly, because Mr Brown is simply too closely associated with the economic mismanagement of the past decade to be able to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence.

Secondly, because post-McBride, he cannot now escape responsibility for the corrosive culture of spin that has always characterised New Labour. Indeed, it is now clear that he has no more abolished spin than he has abolished boom and bust."

Here's the rest of today's Journal column.

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It is not so very long ago that the main yardstick against which many political commentators sought to judge would-be Prime Ministers or party leaders was whether they were “good on TV.”

Tony Blair certainly fell into that category, and for a decade, he successfully used his mastery of the arts of communication to mask his numerous other political shortcomings.

But if the last few weeks are anything to go by, we are now entering a new age in which Prime Minsters could rise and fall according to whether they are good on the internet.

Recent political events have led some pundits to pose the question: Could Gordon Brown be the first occupant of 10 Downing Street to be brought down by the worldwide web?

First, we had the Damian McBride smeargate affair, a scandal that for all the damage it has done the government, could only really have occurred in the digital age.

To start with, the smears in question were contained within emails. Secondly, they were brought to light not by the compliant national political media, which had an interest in keeping Mr McBride onside, but by an internet blogger, Guido Fawkes.

We then had the spectacle of Mr Brown making an ass of himself on YouTube, bopping around and smiling in the wrong places while announcing a clampdown on MPs expenses.

The fact that he was this week forced to withdraw the wretched proposals for fear of a humiliating defeat at the hands of his own backbenchers only served to rub salt into the self-inflicted wound.

Finally, 10 Downing Street was hoist by its own digital petard when it found itself hosting a 24,000-signature e-petition on its website calling on the Prime Minister to resign forthwith.

To add insult to injury, a rival petition calling on him to stay was signed by just 600 “visitors” including the likes of Phil McCavity and Orson Carte.

All of which left Mr Brown not just struggling to hold on to his authority, but – far worse for someone of his intellectual seriousness – struggling to avoid turning into a national joke.

As one commentator put it: “The internet hasn't yet made a politician in Britain. But the comic relief it affords bored office workers is helping to finish off poor Mr Brown.”

Of course, that was not all that the Prime Minister had to cope with this week. He also had to deal with a good old-fashioned backbench rebellion over plans to restrict the rights of Ghurkas to settle in the UK.

The obvious injustice of the government’s position presented an open goal to opposition party leaders Nick Clegg and David Cameron, whose alliance gave a foretaste of what might happen in a hung Parliament.

On top of everything else, we even had Mr Brown trying to leave the Commons Chamber after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, forgetting that he had a statement to make on the war in Afghanistan.

How MPs fell about with laughter. How this most high-minded and sensitive of Prime Ministers must have inwardly squirmed.

So where does this leave Mr Brown now? Well, the Prime Minister’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed moreorless ever since he entered No 10, and in a sense we’ve been here before.

The problem is, there are some European elections coming up on 5 June which, in my view, are likely to prove a catastrophe for Labour.

Not only is the party up to 20 points behind in the polls, but as every Labour strategist knows, the party has always had a problem getting its vote out in elections where the government of the country is not at stake.

If the elections go as badly as everyone expects they will for Labour, it will create the political momentum for some sort of Cabinet-led putsch against the premier in the early weeks of June.

This is not the time to speculate on exactly how that might happen – there will be plenty of scope in future columns for me to do that.

But the underlying truth of the situation is that the Labour Party faces a shattering defeat at the next general election unless there is a fundamental change in the character, culture and direction of the government.

That requires a change of leadership, for two reasons. Firstly, because Mr Brown is simply too closely associated with the economic mismanagement of the past decade to be able to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence.

Secondly, because post-McBride, he cannot now escape responsibility for the corrosive culture of spin that has always characterised New Labour. Indeed, it is now clear that he has no more abolished spin than he has abolished boom and bust.

As someone who has always admired Mr Brown, and believed he would make a good Prime Minister, it gives me no great pleasure to write this. In fact I feel desperately sorry for him.

He should have had the chance to work for his vision of a fairer society at a time when the political wind was set fair for Labour. It was his tragedy to be denied that chance until the tide started going out on the party.

In the five weeks leading up to 5 June, we will by and large see the party rallying round him, Charles Clarke’s comments about being “ashamed to be a Labour MP” yesterday notwithstanding.

But once these elections are out of the way, expect all hell to break loose. And not just on internet blogs and YouTube.

A tale of two council leaders

Nearly two decades ago, Labour councillors David Bookbinder and Martin Doughty fought eachother for control of Derbyshire County Council. David had been leader for 11 often controversial years, but Martin thought there needed to be a change of direction. Eventually in 1992, David stepped down, and Martin went on to lead the council for nine years. I chronicled the absorbing struggle between these two genuinely gifted men in the Derby Evening Telegraph, of which I was then the political correspondent.

More recently, David and Martin have found themselves fighting battles of a different nature - against cancer. Sadly Martin, who had gone on to become a national figure as chair of the environment quango Natural England, and a knight of the realm to boot, succumbed to the disease in March at the tragically young age of 59. Most of his obituarists have understandably highlighted his passion for the environment, but back in the early 1990s I knew Martin on a more personal level. I can genuinely say that he was one of kindest men I have ever encountered in public life.

David meanwhile has suffered more than most from the ravages of the Big C, having lost both his wife and son to it before himself being diagnosed with the disease in 2004. In a recent interview with the Evening Telegraph, he tells how at one point he came close to taking his own life, but ultimately overcame the disease by dint of a bizarre mixture of remedies, his sheer will to live, and his unwavering belief in Manchester City Football Club.

I had many battles with David - he did not brook criticism as council leader and my approach to political journalism and his approach to politics were always likely to end in conflict - but I am genuinely pleased to hear that he has beaten the disease like the fighter he always was. I am incredibly sorry that Martin Doughty is no longer with us, but I wish David Bookbinder many more happy years on this earth. And I bet you thought you'd never hear me say that, Harry Barnes.

Ten more firsts

I thought the list of firsts which Iain Dale tagged me to fill-in on Monday left out one or two key rites-of-passage, so here are a few more. I won't tag Iain to do the same though....

First conscious memory of a news event
The Aberfan disaster, 1966.

First school
Elmgrove Infants, in Harrow.

First part in a school play
As "Wiz the Wizard" in the Elmgrove panto in 1968 or 69.

First time in hospital
December 1970, to have my tonsils out. It was at Charing Cross hospital - the old one that was right in the middle of Central London.

First pet
A goldfish called Highfield that was duly eaten by the cat.

First footballing hero
Peter Lorimer

First love
Her name also began with a J, but it wasn't the same one.

First drink in a pub
The Market Tavern, Hitchin, on Friday night after choir practice, sometime in 1977.

First time refused service in a pub
New Year's Eve 1983. I was well over-age by then, but two of the people I was with looked younger.

First run-in with the law
Sometime in the early 80s, for relieving myself outside St Mary's in the early hours of Christmas Day after attending Midnight Mass. I won't name the former Hitchin Boys' School head boy who was with me.

The way we were

The latest edition of Total Politics magazine focuses on the 1979 general election which was of course 30 years ago next month. I have contributed a tangentially connected "Where Are They Now?" piece about the former Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun who lost her seat at that election after having become Britain's first openly lesbian MP during the course of the previous parliament. It is not a story that reflects particularly well on British society at the time or more particularly on the Labour Party.

More memories of 1979 on this blog coming soon......

The twenty firsts meme

Mr Dale has tagged me to complete something called the "Twenty Firsts Meme" and since this seems like a chance to take a bit of a trip down memory lane, I'm happy to oblige.

First Job
Working behind the counter at the Barracuda fish and chip shop, Hitchin, on a Saturday. It was, as they say, a good way to meet people.

First Real Job
Trainee reporter on the Mansfield Chad 1986-8

First Role in Politics
Administration and Finance Officer of UCL Student Union 1983-84. The first, and only time, I have ever stood for elected office.

First Car
Fiat Uno.

First Record
The Pushbike Song by The Mixtures. Look, I was nine, okay?

First Football Match
Arsenal v Leicester City at Highbury, with my late uncle Eric, sometime in the 1972-73 season.

First Concert
Genesis at the NEC, 22 December 1981.

First Country Visited
Holland, on a school trip, in 1976. We had to go through Belgium to get there, of course.

First TV Appearance
Songs of Praise in 1978. St Mary's, Hitchin, was featured in the programme and I was in the choir.

First Political Speech
Probably in about 1981 or 1982 at the UCL students union, but I can't remember what it was about.

First Girlfriend/Boyfriend
Her name began with J, but I am certainly not going to be any more specific than that on a public website.

First Encounter with a Famous Person
We were having a family meal at a Hertfordshire restaurant some time in 1971/72 when Eric Morecambe came and sat at the next table.

First Brush With Death
Nearly drowning in the sea off the south coast of France while on holiday there in 1984.

First House/Flat Owned
It was in Sycamore Avenue, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts. I moved in on what must have been the hottest day of 1987.

First Film Seen at a Cinema
The Jungle Book.

First Time on the Radio
Discussing the resignation of David Bookbinder as leader of Derbyshire County Council on GMR (Greater Manchester Radio) in 1992. I was the local government correspondent of the Derby Evening Telegraph at the time.

First Politician I Met
I think this was possibly Willie Whitelaw, during a campaign visit to Hitchin in the '79 general election.

First Book I Remember Reading
I don't remember!

First Visit to the London Palladium
Never been.

First Election
Other than the student union election referred to above, I have never played an active role in any election of any kind.

I am supposed to tag five others, and although I don't believe there should be any compulsion attached to this, I gently and respectfully suggest the names of: Barnacle Bill, Little Man in a Toque, Mars Hill, Party Political Animal - either one - and View from the North.

The election is now as good as lost

The Tory pundits, stuck in the battles of the 1980s and 90s, think the proposed 50p tax rate will lose Labour the next general election, but that's really not the issue now, and there are plenty of other good reasons why the Brown Government is almost certainly doomed. Here's today's Journal column.

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It is a measure of how much the recession has changed the nature of political debate in Britain that this year’s Budget headlines focused on the kind of issues which once left most people bemused.

Thirty years ago, the Budget was all about the price of booze, fags and petrol. More recently, the main interest has lain in whether rates of personal taxation were going up or down.

This year, though, people seem to care more about the public sector borrowing requirement and the ratio of debt to GDP than whether they will be a couple of hundred pounds a year better or worse off.

Is it down to our increasing economic literacy as a nation? Or simply a reflection of the astronomical sums of money being thrown around as Chancellor Alistair Darling tries to rescue the stricken economy?

The days when Gordon Brown as Chancellor concluded his Budget speeches with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat designed to send Labour backbenchers into paeans of ecstasy already seem very far away.

Those naïve enough to be looking to Mr Darling to produce such a rabbit on Wednesday will no doubt have been sorely disappointed.

For one, he does not have the room for manoeuvre needed in order to procure a last-minute crowd-pleaser, and in any case, he is not that sort of character.

Mr Darling’s low-key, calm authority is one of the few political assets Labour still possesses in this otherwise dire situation. He was surely right not to try to play the showman.

The nearest thing to a surprise in the Budget was the car scrappage scheme to give people an incentive to buy new motors and so help the car industry out of the doldrums.

No doubt it will encourage some to trade in their old bangers for shiny new models, thought the main obstacle to this remains the reluctance of the banks to provide credit.

Elsewhere, the £500m to kick-start stalled housing projects will be a welcome boost to the construction industry at a time when the market has gone flat, although there have been signs that it is reviving of its own accord.

Much of Wednesday’s package though – for instance raising statutory redundancy pay by £30 a week – seemed like pretty small potatoes in view of the extent of the crisis.

Much attention inevitably focused on the decision to introduce a 50p top rate of tax from next April, but I cannot believe this is the defining issue which many Conservative commentators have made it out to be.

The recent row over MPs’ expenses and the backlash against bankers’ bonuses seem to me to be indicative of a new mood in the country that is now ready to see the rich pay more.

The 50p top rate will affect just 1pc of the population, the great majority of whom are based in London and the South, while the amount of money raised - £3.3bn over the next three years – is hardly going to repay the national debt.

Freezing the top rate of tax at 40p doubtless helped win over the “aspirational” middle classes to Labour in 1997. But times change, and even policies as iconic as this one ultimately have to change with them.

The tax pledge was a direct response to the fact that Labour’s old tax-and-spend reputation had lost it the 1992 general election. But the 2010 election will be decided on very different issues.

What will almost certainly lose Labour that election is not its taxation policies but the dire state of the public finances, with borrowing levels for the next five years set to be £175bn, £173bn, £140bn, £118bn and £97bn.

As Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers Alliance put it: “This Budget commit taxpayers to a terrifying amount of debt that will burden ordinary families for decades to come.”

Labour can blame the global economy all they like. I suspect the response of voters will be: “It happened on your watch.”

Could it all still come right for Mr Brown and Labour? Could this Budget yet be the springboard for election victory in the unlikely event that Mr Darling is proved right in his forecasts and growth picks up again from the end of the year?

Well, if you had asked me that question a couple of months ago, I would have said yes – on the basis that it is “the economy, stupid” that usually determines election outcomes.

But then came the damaging row over Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s expenses and the truly appalling “smeargate” scandal involving former No 10 spin doctor Damian McBride.

As a result, this government has now begun to take on the same air of decay and moral degeneracy that characterised John Major’s Tories in the run-up to 1997.

To my mind, it is now inconceivable that the public will vote for another five years of this, even if the green shoots of recovery do start to appear by the time we go to the polls next spring.

When Mr Brown became Prime Minister, his admirers – of whom I was one – hoped he would restore trust in politics by ending the spin culture that will forever be associated with the Blair years.

But those who argued that Mr Brown was no different from his predecessor in this regard have been proved right, and the sense of optimism that surrounded the start of his premiership has long since faded.

It will take much more than this grimmest of Budgets to restore that sense of hope.

The millstone of debt

Thanks as ever to Slob for his Friday cartoon. My own Budget verdict will be here from tomorrow morning - thanks for being patient!

No instant judgements

I'm going to break the habit of a lifetime today and not rush to instant judgement of today's Budget. This is partly because now that I am no longer a political news reporter I can afford to take a slightly more reflective approach to such things, but also of course because it's a well-known fact that any Budget that looks good/bad on the day invariably looks the opposite 48 hours later.

I will however comment on the selection of the British Lions Rugby Squad, and it is to say that English players have on the whole been pretty harshly treated. While I myself predicted a couple of months back that the squad would have a distinctly Celtic air about it, I still reckon Tom Croft and Delon Armitage in particularly have been very unlucky not to make the 37.

Ian McGeechan says he has picked the squad purely on form over the last three months, but someone with as long a rugby pedigree as Geech surely knows that while form is temporary, class is permanent. Besides Croft and Armitage, other "class" players who can count themselves unfortunate are Ryan Jones, Gavin Henson, Mike Blair, James Hook, Dwayne Peel and Josh Lewsey. By contrast some of the players who have made it strike me as journeymen.

McGeechan will no doubt prove me wrong and win the series, as he did in 1997, but I still can't escape the feeling that this is not our strongest squad.

Smeargate was a car crash waiting to happen

So much for cartoonist Slob's take on "Smeargate." Do I share his sense of nausea at the Adoration of the Guido that has followed the RedRag scandal and the defenestration of Damian McBride? Well, up to a point I guess.

Paul Staines is at least right in his analysis of the Lobby, although the initial diagnosis that it had become part of a client media was not Guido's, but Peter Oborne's, in his brilliant book The Triumph of the Political Class.

I myself watched it happening from close quarters and it became very obvious fairly early in my Lobby career on that you could not expect to receive help and favours from the New Labour machine if you also insisted on telling it like it was for the benefit of the readers who paid your salary.

I made my bed, and although those contemporaries of mine who took the Campbell spin subsequently saw all sorts of exciting career doors opening to them, I have never once regretted the road I took.

That said, there is a central hypocrisy at the heart of the Guido version of history that should not be overlooked. In my relatively limited personal dealings with Paul Staines, I have always found him to be an okay bloke - he even bought me a drink once - but when it comes to smear campaigns against rival politicians, his blog is the last word.

Back in 2007, Guido spent months attempting to convince his blog's many readers that Gordon Brown had been photographed on a rocking horse wearing a nappy, and to utilise the power of search engine optimisation and Google to spread this ridiculous tale across the entire internet. It even made it onto Wikipedia, and when I tried to remove it, some patsy came along and reverted my edit.

He also gave house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public's mind.

None of this in any way excuses the suggestion that David Cameron is suffering from some embarassing health complaint. But it does put it into perspective, and should serve as a corrective to those tempted to hail Guido as the new conscience of British public life.

Labour of course should have risen above all this. Instead, it set up LabourList, bringing in Derek Draper as editor despite the fact that his previous spell as a NuLab adviser had ended in embarrassing circumstances for the government. It was, in short, a car crash waiting to happen.

I disliked the idea of LabourList from the start. I was in fact invited to attend one of the breakfast sessions, and would have gone if I had been in London and at a loose end, but the whole thing seemed to me to be built on two false premises - firstly, the Dale Hypothesis that all left-wing blogs are basically crap, and secondly the Guido Hypothesis that smearing one's political opponents is a legitimate purpose of political blogging.

In other words, Labour thought they needed a Guido-style "attack blog" to take the fight to the Tories, and they concluded that none of the existing left-of-centre blogs was up to the job.

Had the party not got the first of these questions so catastrophically wrong, it would have realised that instead of trying to impose its command-and-control approach on the blogosphere, it would have been better off discreetly encouraging some of the excellent, well-established left-of-centre blogs that were already out there.

In short, instead of listening to Dolly Draper, they should have listened to Sunny Hundal. His post on Liberal Conspiracy is the best defence I have thus far read of the left-of-centre blogosphere and why Labour would have been better tapping into that rather than attempting to out-Fawkes the Tories.

Then again, New Labour has been ignoring its own natural supporters and trying to mimic the Conservatives ever since it was invented, so we should probably not be that surprised.

Meanwhile the issue of "spin" has once again become the issue that defines New Labour, the single word that I suspect will be associated with the Blair-Brown government long after everything else it did has been forgotten.

And those of us who thought Gordon would put a stop to all this nonsense have suffered another, perhaps terminal, disillusionment.

Are all politicians crooks?

Some would say a resounding yes to that question, especially in the wake of the latest MPs expenses scandal. But we wouldn't have known about it at all had it not been for another politician's pioneering legislation. Here's today's Journal column.

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A former Journal colleague of mine had a fairly straightforward view of politicians – one which, though I didn’t necessarily always share it, was at least admirable in its consistency.

It was, in essence, that they were all crooks, and that it was basically the role of the press to ensure the public were made aware of this indisputable fact of life.

It may surprise some readers to know that he and I had many a tussle over this question, my own default position being that, for all their faults, politicians are no more intrinsically good or evil than the rest of us.

Looking at the continuing controversy over MPs expenses, though, I do begin to wonder whether my old friend might have had a point.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown occupies the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of his view of the politician’s role. Like many of his generation and background, he has always believed he is in public life to “do good.”

In his case, it’s probably genuine. Mr Brown has been called many, many things in the course of his long career – but no-one has ever accused him of having his snout in the trough.

This week we saw Gordon at his do-gooding best, trying to fix the world’s economic problems with the help of his fellow G20 leaders and their trillion-dollar rescue package.

Mr Brown is one of those rare people who still believes in the power of politics to change the world. If he is right in this instance, he may yet confound the sceptics and win that unprecedented fourth term in power for Labour.

But whatever the long-term political impact or otherwise of this week’s G20 summit, the Prime Minister certainly could have done without the distraction of the latest expenses scandal.

When I saw last Sunday’s newspaper headline about Jacqui Smith claiming back the cost of adult movies, my first thought was that it’s either going to cost the Home Secretary her job, or alternatively leave the paper’s editor facing a large legal bill.

To date, it has done neither, but it has certainly focused minds on the need for reform of the system like never before.

The three main party leaders have all now agreed to speed-up an inquiry into MPs expenses by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, but some fear the recent spate of revelations has already reduced Parliament to a laughing stock.

Should Mr Brown have sacked Ms Smith? The temptation must have been very great, but as it happens, I think he has done the right thing by not giving in to it.

To have dismissed the first female Home Secretary in our history on the basis of her husband’s taste for adult movies would have had the Labour sisterhood truly up in arms – with some justification.

Rather than make a martyr of her by acting precipitously – as Tony Blair once did with Peter Mandelson - he has left her in place in the expectation that events will run their course.

I suspect Ms Smith will make it easy for him and fall on her own sword. She has a wafer-thin majority in Redditch, and barring a major electoral turnaround, her career in frontline politics is almost certainly drawing to a close.

But the issue of course goes far wider than the fate of one individual Cabinet minister. It is not so much a problem for Mr Brown’s government as for the entire political class.

I cannot improve on the analysis provided by a pro-Labour blogger, Shamik Das, on the Labour loyalist website Labourlist.co.uk this week.

“It isn’t just the perceived financial impropriety that appals taxpayers as the fact that many MPs simply do not believe what they are doing to be wrong. So out of touch with their constituents are they, that they actually believe the taxpayer should pick up the tab for bath plugs or pay-per-view films,” he wrote.

“While the vast majority of MPs undoubtedly go into politics for the right reasons, it is the alarming ease with which they forget where they’ve come from and how their constituents live that is the most depressing aspect of this sorry affair.”

One who certainly seems to have forgotten where he came from is Speaker Michael Martin, who showed once more this week that he is less the custodian of the dignity of Parliament than a shop-steward for greedy MPs.

Displaying his unerring ability to shoot the messenger, he told the Commons he was “deeply disappointed” that 1.3m expense receipts from MPs which had been handed to a private contractor had now been leaked to the media.

You might have thought that the holder of his office would be more “deeply disappointed” by the behaviour of the MPs who have tarnished the reputation of the House over which he presides, but no.

Mr Martin is more concerned about catching whistleblowers – always in my experience a sign that an institution has lost touch with the people it is supposed to be serving.

One final point to make about all this, though, is that it demonstrates the impact that has been made by that initially much-derided creature, the Freedom of Information Act.

When the former South Shields MP and public services minister Dr David Clark first produced this piece of legislation in 1997, it was rubbished even by Cabinet colleagues, yet it has become a vital weapon in the hands of those seeking to uphold the public’s right to know.

It may be making life difficult for the political class – but in terms of exposing wrongs that need addressing, FoI has already had a hugely positive effect on our political culture.

Even my cynical ex-colleague might have conceded that Dr Clark was a politician who did some good.

Global Village People

Byers tells it like it is

The North Tyneside MP's comments on Gordon Brown's economic policies this week may have been deeply unhelpful, but his analysis is spot on. Here's today's Journal column.

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At the start of the year, I wrote that Gordon Brown’s chances of political survival up to the next general election would ultimately depend on whether his economic rescue package showed any signs of working.

There will be those who claim the fabled “green shoots of recovery” are already appearing – in the London housing market for instance.

But it will take more than a few satisfied estate agents to convince the rest of us that the economic downturn is bottoming out and that the good times are just around the corner again.

After all, there remains considerable doubt even among some of Mr Brown’s natural allies as to whether his remedies for the country’s economic ills are the right ones.

Mr Brown would like to believe there is a broad national and international consensus for the “fiscal stimulus” measures he has been advocating, and which he continues to claim are being copied the world over.

Unfortunately for him, this is very far from being the case as events this week have only served to emphasise.

If it was just the Tories who doubted the efficacy of his proposed solutions, Mr Brown would have less cause to worry – but some of the opposition has been coming from people who might have been expected to show him more support.

Most notably, it has come from the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his former Labour cabinet colleague , North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers.

Mr Byers may normally be a mild-mannered sort of chap, but his comments ahead of the Prime Minister’s world tour this week to drum up support for his measures ahead of next week’s G20 Summit could not have been more wounding.

He claimed the proposed summit agenda was too ambitious and also called for the withdrawal of the 2.5pc pre-Christmas cut in VAT, the centrepiece of Brown's domestic economic stimulus.

“The 2.5pc cut in VAT may appear modest but it comes at significant cost. On its own figures, it will cost the Treasury £8.6bn between April and the end of the year,” he wrote.

He suggested this money would have been better spent on raising personal income tax allowances in the Budget by £1,520, taking around £1.7m low-paid workers out of tax altogether.

More damaging still was Mr Byers’ claim that Mr Brown’s attempts to get international agreement on an economic rescue package at the G20 Summit will fail, with serious political consequences for Labour.

He said the next month would prove "make or break time" for the Prime Minister, with the outcome of both the Summit and the Budget likely to be decisive to his chances of re-election.

Although this will have been regarded in Downing Street as deeply unhelpful, Mr Byers is correct in his analysis of the government’s position.

It shows that the supposedly “settled will” of the Labour Party, that Mr Brown should lead the party into next election come what may, is not necessarily as settled as all that.

It was perhaps unlucky for the Prime Minister that Mr Byers’ intervention came on the same day Bank governor Mr King went public with his doubts about the Brown strategy.

He told the Treasury Select Committee that the government should not unveil any further fiscal stimulus in the Budget because the public finances are already in such dire straits.

The Tories couldn’t believe their luck. Shadow chancellor George Osborne, said: "Not only has a former Labour cabinet minister attacked the ineffective VAT cut, but the governor of the Bank of England has said Britain cannot afford a further fiscal stimulus.”

“It leaves Gordon Brown's political plans for the G20 and the Budget in tatters. It is the Prime Minister who is now isolated at home and abroad."

For all Mr Osborne’s bullishness, the Tories have been having troubles of their own this week, with Shadow Business Secretary Ken Clarke taking a sledgehammer to the party’s flagship policy of raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1m.

His comment that this was an “aspiration rather than a promise” was followed by furious backpedalling on his part, but the damage in the eyes of the voters has probably already been done.

I suspect Mr Clarke was just telling it as it is, as is his wont. It does, after all, stand to reason that an incoming Tory government faced with a huge black hole in the public finances is going to be in the mood to cut taxes straightaway.

But inheritance tax remains a totemic issue for the Tories – not least because Mr Osborne’s autumn 2007 pledge to cut it dealt Mr Brown and Labour a blow from which they have never really recovered.

The debate over inheritance tax is just one more illustration of just how much the world has changed since then.

Mr Osborne’s dramatic move provoked Chancellor Alistair Darling to effectively double the threshold for the tax in his October 2007 pre-Budget report, but the truth is neither party would have made such pledges had they known what was around the corner for the economy.

Sure, any tax cut constitutes a “fiscal stimulus” of sorts, but like the cut in VAT, slashing inheritance tax is not going to make a real and substantial difference to the spending power of large numbers of people.

Meanwhile the wait for the “green shoots” goes on. And slowly but surely, time is running out for Mr Brown.

Fiscal stimulation

Celebrating life together

A few years ago I project-managed the launch of the memorials website Lasting Tribute. Since those relatively small beginnings the site has gone from strength to strength under the leadership of Elaine Pritchard and this week its tribute to Jade Goody received 36,000 page views in a single day, with 340 people leaving messages of condolence.

Here's something a few LT folk put together last week to illustrate, in a fairly light-hearted way, the purpose behind the site. Eagle-eyed readers will spot a guest appearance from yours truly.

In BOD we trust

Having lived in Cardiff for two very enjoyable years of my life in the mid-90s and found it impossible not to get swept up in the passion and excitement that Six Nations rugby generates in that city, I usually support Wales against everyone else in the tournament bar England.

But on Saturday, I have to confess to having cheered on the Irish as they pursued their dream of a first Grand Slam in 61 years.

Partly it was down to sentiment - Wales have won their fair share of Grand Slams in that period after all - but mainly it was because Brian O'Driscoll is the greatest rugby player these islands have produced in the past 20 years (sorry Johnno and Jonny) and if anyone deserved the accolade of captaining a Grand Slam team it was him.

After a sublime Six Nations tournament, BO'D is once again in contention to captain the Lions this summer, and although his main rivals, Welshman Ryan Jones and fellow Irishman Paul O'Connell would both be perfectly adequate, I think he should have the job.

O'Driscoll, of course, has unfinished business with the Lions. I remember being in the Queen's Head for the opening Test of the last series against New Zealand. As the game got under way, the pub's rugby-mad owner, Dick Watson, called out "win it for us, Brian."

And win it he may well have done, but for the fact that, less than a minute into the game, his tour was over.

Brian was the victim of a disgraceful spear tackle by the All-Blacks Keven Mealamu and Tana Umaga that could have left him paralysed or even dead and which most British rugby fans continue to believe was premeditated.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure this year than to see this great, great player join John Dawes, Willie John McBride, Finlay Calder and Martin Johnson in leading winning Lions sides.

So who else should play? Well, on the basis of performances in this year's Six Nations alone, you might select a starting XV along these lines.

15 Delon Armitage (England)
14 Tommy Bowe (Ireland)
13 Brian O'Driscoll, Capt (Ireland)
12 Riki Flutey (England)
11 Shane Williams (Wales)
10 Ronan O' Gara (Ireland)
9 Mike Phillips (Wales)
8 Jamie Heaslip (Ireland)
7 David Wallace (Ireland)
6 Tom Croft (England)
5 Alun Wyn Jones (Wales)
4 Paul O'Connell (Ireland)
3 John Hayes (Ireland)
2 Jerry Flannery (Ireland)
1 Gareth Jenkins (Wales)

But based on the maxim that while form is temporary, class is permanent, my Lions starting line-up would be:

15 Chris Paterson (Scotland)
14 Tommy Bowe
13 Brian O'Driscoll, Capt
12 Gavin Henson (Wales)
11 Shane Williams
10 Stephen Jones (Wales)
9 Mike Phillips
8 Ryan Jones (Wales)
7 David Wallace
6 Tom Croft
5 Alun Wyn Jones
4 Paul O'Connell
3 Euan Murray (Scotland)
2 Jerry Flannery
1 Gareth Jenkins

In addition to the above names James Hook, Tom Shanklin, Dwayne Peel and Martyn Williams (all Wales) Andrew Sheridan, Matthew Tait and Ugo Monye (England), Mike Blair and Ross Ford (Scotland) and Donncha O'Callaghan (Ireland) would all make my squad.

I leave this party withour wancour

The story of Dennis Skinner's heckling of Roy Jenkins during his parting speech to the PLP before leaving for Brussels in 1977 never loses anything in the telling, so I naturally jumped at the opportunity to tell it again in my latest "Where Are They Now?" piece for Total Politics magazine which is now online. The subject of the piece - and the victim of Skinner's wicked humour - is Jenkins' close political ally David Marquand, a man whose career encapsulates much of the shifting history of the British centre-left over the past four decades.

Labour's silver lining

Is David Cameron ready to govern? Not until he can fill the policy vacuum at the heart of his party's programme. Here's today's Journal column.

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Amidst all the doom and gloom that has come to characterise Gordon Brown’s troubled premiership over the past 20 months, there has been one small consistent chink of light for Labour.

While opinion polls continue to show it on course for a catastrophic election defeat next year, there is one regular poll finding that has continued to give the stricken party hope.

It is that, despite a lead stretching to around 20 percentage points, there remains a prevailing public consensus that the Tories and their leader David Cameron are not quite ready for government.

To his credit, Mr Cameron is perfectly well aware of this - which is what made his comments ahead of a big speech on public spending on Thursday so potentially significant.

“The election is far from won and I still hold to the belief that governments don’t just lose elections, oppositions must deserve to win them with a positive mandate for change,” he wrote in a magazine article.

He said that the Tories must not simply “sit back and let the government unravel,” but advocate a “radical and ambitious” new approach.

It is a moot point as to whether Mr Cameron is actually historically right about this. Very few oppositions actually “win” elections and when power changes hands in the UK, it is usually because the government has made a mess of things.

But taking his cue from Tony Blair in 1997, Mr Cameron is surely right to recognise the dangers of complacency, even when all the signs are that you are heading for a landslide.

So why is it that the public has so far proved resistant to Mr Cameron’s undoubted charms? Why is it that even though the polls show Labour as wildly unpopular, they also show the public are unconvinced by the Tories?

Well, part of it is probably down to the fact that Mr Cameron appears at times to be far too slick for his own good.

He prides himself on being the “Heir to Blair” and in many respects he is, but the public isn’t necessarily ready to see another smooth-talking, snake oil salesman in Number 10 just yet.

The Old Etonian thing doesn’t really help either. While Mr Cameron and his shadow chancellor George Osborne have worked hard to project a modern image, their privileged background rightly or wrongly conjures up folk memories of the bad old Tories who thought they were born to rule.

But undoubtedly the biggest reason why Mr Cameron has failed the capture the public’s enthusiasm in the same way Mr Blair did prior to 1997 has been the huge vacuum at the heart of his party’s policy programme.

This has been demonstrated most graphically in the context of the recession, with Mr Brown successfully characterising the Tories as the “do nothing” party.

Okay, so it’s a bit rich coming from an ex-chancellor who did precisely nothing while City fat cats paid themselves obscene bonuses while the economy steadily went to hell in a handcart, but no matter.

It’s a charge that has by and large hit home, leaving Mr Cameron stuck with the label of a “laissez-faire” free market Tory at a time when the political consensus has moved decisively towards greater government regulation.

But it’s not just economic policy on which the Tory leader has been found wanting. Much of what he says about a whole host of issues is simply too vague to be taken seriously.

One of the big themes of Thursday’s speech was decentralisation – or “giving folks power over their lives” as Mr Cameron put it in a rather Dubya-esque way.

Yet there is no evidence that the Tory leader has any idea as to how he is going to do this, how he is going to resist the pressure to centralise and control that affects all governments to a greater or lesser degree.

On the contrary, the way in which he runs his own party suggests he is just as cabalistic in his approach to politics as Messrs Blair and Brown.

An illustration of the vacuity at the heart of the Tories’ “new localism” was provided by the launch of their new local government policy paper a month ago.

The centrepiece of this was a plan to give 12 big cities including Newcastle the right to bring in city mayors with the same kind of powers as London’s Boris Johnson.

The trouble with this idea is that it is neither new nor particularly local. Labour went down this road a decade ago, and most of the cities listed in the Tories’ policy paper were not interested.

The comparison with Mr Johnson is, in any case, absurd. London is a city of 8m people with 32 different boroughs. Creating a similarly powerful figure in the North-East could only be done by re-opening the regional governance debate.

Will any of this matter at the end of the day? Won’t Mr Cameron, despite what he himself says, be able to win the election simply on the back of Labour’s unpopularity?

Well, probably. The nearest comparison here is with 1979, when Margaret Thatcher won comfortably without having a fully-developed policy agenda largely because Labour was seen as incompetent.

But it will matter greatly in terms of the kind of government Mr Cameron will lead if he wins – and whether it too will culminate in failure and disillusionment.

The polls say the Tories are ready to win. Whether they are ready to govern, though, is an entirely different matter.

Gordon gets a rocket

A warm welcome back to Slob....

Cheers, Sir Liam

Gordon Brown, in his infitite wisdom, has given a lukewarm response to Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson's proposals for a minimum price per unit of alcohol. I think he is missing a trick.

We can argue about the exact price, and whether Sir Liam has pitched it quite right at 50p a unit, but the Government should have welcomed the general principle

It's not that I want to penalise "moderate" drinkers as Mr Brown calls them. I just want to stop supermarkets selling booze at knockdown prices and putting more and more pubs out of business as a result.

One of the things that makes this country really unique is its pub culture, by which I really mean Northern pub culture as opposed to London bar culture. It is something well worth saving.

Lion hunt

It's a perennial source of debate among rugby fans after each round of Six Nations matches as to where they leave us in terms of potential selection for the next Lions' tour. I blogged on this a few weeks' back when it looked like every place in the starting XV would be taken by an Irishman or a Welshman. Since then England have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence and even one or two Scots have made the case for inclusion, so here's my current line-up (with last month's selections in brackets).

15 Lee Byrne (Wales)
14 Mark Cueto (England) (Leigh Halfpenny, Wales))
13 Brian O'Driscoll (Ireland) (Jamie Roberts, Wales)
12 Riki Flutey (England) (Brian O'Driscoll, Ireland)
11 Shane Williams (Wales)
10 Stephen Jones(Wales)
9 Mike Phillips (Wales)
8 Jamie Heaslip (Ireland)
7 Joe Worsley (England) (David Wallace, Ireland)
6 Tom Croft (England) (Ryan Jones, Wales)
5 Alun Wyn Jones (Wales)
4 Paul O'Connell (Ireland, Captain)
3 John Hayes (Ireland)
2 Ross Ford (Scotland) (Jerry Flannery, Ireland)
1 Garin Jenkins (Wales)

In addition to these names I would say that Martyn Williams (Wales), Donncha O'Callagahn (Ireland), Andrew Sheridan (England) and James Hook (Wales) can probably be fairly certain of a place in the squad.

It's obvious who should succeed Gordon - and it's not Harriet Harman

Could Harriet Harman really become Prime Minister if Gordon Brown fell? Not if Labour wants to maximise its chances at the next election. Here's today's Journal column.

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One of the enduring truisms of British politics is that when it comes to choosing party leaders, Labour invariably chooses the obvious candidate while the Tories often opt for the unexpected.

By and large, it holds true. In each of the last four Labour leadership elections, the party has chosen the initial front-runner – successively Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

By contrast, the status of early front-runner in a Tory leadership election is usually the kiss of death – as Michael Heseltine in 1990, Ken Clarke in 1997, Michael Portillo in 2001 and David Davis in 2005 all found to their cost.

It is tempting to think it has something to do with political worldview. While Tories are ruthlessly unsentimental by nature, Labour people seem more inclined to award the leadership on the basis of what used to be known as “Buggins’ Turn.”

But in the summer of 2007, the party did something mildly unpredictable. Not, of course, choosing Mr Brown as leader – that was as Buggins-ish a Labour appointment as they come.

No, their slightly leftfield choice – in more ways than one – was to select Harriet Harman as deputy leader over a field of candidates which included several nominally more senior figures.

If there was an “obvious” candidate in that election, it was probably Alan Johnson, at that time the education secretary and a man who had been seriously talked about as a potential alternative to Mr Brown for the top job.

That the Labour Party instead chose Ms Harman has subsequently led many observers to suggest that she would be the person to beat in any contest to succeed the Prime Minister.

It is not hard to fathom at least one of the reasons why Ms Harman had such substantial support among the party’s grassroots – her gender.

The party has a proud record of campaigning for greater gender equality and to give her her due, Ms Harman has been right in the forefront of that campaign for most of her political career.

Another reason for Ms Harman’s success was the fact that she managed to position herself in exactly the right place to win the election to be Mr Brown’s deputy – that is, very slightly to the left of the incoming PM.

This careful positioning ensured that she scooped up the second preference votes of the left-wing candidate, Jon Cruddas, enabling her to defeat Mr Johnson in the final run-off.

But there was one other very significant element of Ms Harman’s support in that 2007 contest which is less easily explained – the backing she received from key members of Mr Brown’s own inner circle.

Labour MPs who gave her their votes included Douglas Alexander, Yvette Cooper, Nigel Griffiths, Ed Miliband, Geoffrey Robinson, Michael Wills and two North-East MPs, Nick Brown and Kevan Jones.

Of course, it is quite possible that each of this eminent group of Brownites arrived independently at the judgement that Ms Harman was the best qualified of the candidates.

But that is not, historically, how Gordon’s gang have operated. They tend to hunt as a pack, taking their lead from the top and always acting in what they see as their man’s best interests.

So for me, the enduring mystery of the Harman election – especially in the light of all the subsequent rumours about her plotting to take over – is why the Brown camp wanted her as No 2?

The suspicion persists that it was primarily down to a desire to keep out candidates who would have been more of a threat – such as Mr Johnson or Peter Hain – along with those espousing a “Blairite” agenda, such as Hazel Blears.

It has been said by some that having encouraged his inner circle to back Ms Harman, Mr Brown then regretted it immediately.

If so, this would seem to be borne out by his decision to appoint her not as Deputy Prime Minister but instead to the relatively humdrum positions of party chair and Leader of the Commons.

Ever since then, Mr Brown has kept the post of deputy premier open, giving him the option of using it either to strengthen his Cabinet line-up or neutralise a potential rival.

That wily tactician John Major successfully achieved both when he elevated Mr Heseltine to the position in 1995.

The most likely beneficiary of such a manoeuvre in these circumstances would be Mr Johnson – but that would run the risk of triggering a full-scale revolt by Ms Harman’s supporters.

Ms Harman has already been cleverly positioning herself to the left of the collective government position on issues on which Mr Brown is vulnerable in his own party, such as bankers’ bonuses and the Royal Mail sell-off.

So could she really become leader and Prime Minister? Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think so.

Okay, so she won the only contested leadership or deputy leadership election Labour has held in the past 15 years and, on the strength of that alone, it is impossible to write her off.

But if Mr Brown did fall, the party would in my view be focused on one thing and one thing alone – choosing the person most likely to give David Cameron a run for his money at the next election.

That person is not Ms Harman, but the “obvious candidate” she so narrowly beat: Alan Johnson.

Should Gordon say sorry?

Probably not if he still wants to win the next election. But there is another option for Labour. Here's today's Journal column.

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Chancellor Alistair Darling says the government should show a bit of "humility" and accept "collective responsibility" for the economic crisis. Childrens’ secretary Ed Balls says it underestimated the risks of not having stronger financial regulation of the City.

Is New Labour edging towards something resembling an apology for the economic downturn? Not if Prime Minister Gordon Brown has anything to do with it.

To be fair, he’s had other things on his mind this week – that much-sought-after first meeting with President Barack Obama, and his big speech to the US Congress in which he set out his rescue plan for the global economy.

But the UK national media had only one thing on its mind – whether or not Mr Brown was going to utter the magic word: “Sorry.”

You almost had to feel sorry for the guy. There he is in the Oval Office enjoying his long-awaited moment of glory with Obama and all the BBC’s Nick Robinson wants to ask him about is the “S-word.”

A Sky News analysis of his speech to Congress concentrated less on Mr Brown’s ongoing attempts to save the world from financial meltdown and more on the fact that the number of times he had used the word sorry was zero.

Back home, meanwhile, the Conservatives redoubled their attempts to get the Prime Minister to take the blame for the recession, even in the absence of leader David Cameron.

It launched a new satirical website entitled www.sorryfromgordon.com in which users are invited to draft an apology on the Prime Minister’s behalf.

So should he or shouldn’t he? Well, the answer to that question really depends on whether you are looking at it from the point of view of political morality, or from the point of view of pure political advantage.

From the moral standpoint, the case for a Prime Ministerial apology is fairly clear-cut. This was after all the man who claimed to have abolished boom and bust, who insisted Britain was best-placed to weather the downturn, and above all who invented the system of financial regulation which has so palpably failed.

Since Mr Brown got all of these things wrong, some sort of “I screwed up” –style gesture is probably long overdue.

But whenlooked at from the point of view of whether it would be in Mr Brown’s or the Labour Party’s best interests for him to say sorry, the picture becomes much more confused.

There are good arguments on both sides, and they are arguments that have been playing out at the most senior levels of Mr Brown’s own Cabinet over the course of recent weeks.

Those urging Mr Brown to make some sort of apologetic gesture contend that it would enable the government to achieve “closure” on the issue of who caused the recession, thus enabling the public to focus more on the issue of who has the best remedies for it.

But those urging caution take the view that the whole apology saga is no more than a Tory trap that has been set by the opposition and its cronies in the national press.

Once Mr Cameron has secured an admission of guilt, they argue, he will throw it back in the Prime Minister’s face every day between now and the next General Election.

The public’s own view of the dilemma is not necessarily as straightforward as the Tories would like to think.

On the one hand, the Tory attacks seem to chime with the public’s general view of the Prime Minister as someone who is happy to take the credit when things go well but seeks to avoid any responsibility when they go wrong.

On the other, there is some evidence that the voters see the Tory attacks as petty point-scoring and the “apology” row as a distraction from the main issue of how to tackle the crisis.

A poll published on Thursday found that 60pc of voters would like to see the media and the Tories “give up” on the issue and move on to more pressing matters.

What are the recent historical precedents? Well, Margaret Thatcher would certainly never have dreamed of saying sorry for causing the mass unemployment of the early 1980s, for instance, or the social divisions arising from the miners’ strike that began 25 years ago this week.

For her, all this was mere collateral damage in her overriding mission to rescue the British economy from the ravages of socialism.

What about Tony Blair? He said sorry for the 75p state pension increase in 1999 – which was Mr Brown’s idea anyway – and also for initially having opposed Ken Livingstone’s bid to become Mayor of London.

But those were relatively minor mistakes. He never really apologised for the big one, the Iraq War, saying only that he would “answer to his maker” for the consequences.

Of course the key point about both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair is that they each won three elections in a row, suggesting that a refusal to apologise for mistakes is not necessarily an electoral liability.

My own view on the matter- and I choose my words carefully here – is that if Mr Brown is intending to fight the next General Election, he would probably be better off sticking to his guns on the apology issue.

But there is another scenario, in which Mr Brown says sorry while simultaneously announcing he will not fight that election, thus achieving closure on the issue without giving Mr Cameron a gigantic hostage to fortune.

Ultimately, it may be the only way for the Labour Party to resolve the excruciating dilemma in which it finds itself.

"And a portion of your very excellent guacamole, please"

Those were the immortal words which were memorably not spoken by Peter Mandelson during a campaign visit to a Hartlepool fish and chip shop shortly after his adoption as the Labour candidate there in the mid-1990s. But, of course, they ought to have been. Indeed, never did an apocryphal political tale more deserve to be true than in this case.

So was it really green custard which the airport protesters threw at him today, or was it the guacomole coming back to haunt him again? Or could it, just simply, have been a punnet of mushy peas?

Another victim of the credit crunch...

Music lovers all over the East Midlands (and beyond) will have been dismayed to hear of the forthcoming demise of Selectadisc, Nottingham. My good friend David Gladwin - who expresses these sorts of things far better than I ever could - reminisces about bygone days spent there:

"I spent huge amounts of time there. And huge amounts of money, relative to my disposable income at the time. I first went on a bus trip to Nottingham with Antony Fearn. It was on Bridlesmithgate then, in just the one shop. I remember first hearing Garlands by the Cocteau Twins in there, and having to have it right there and then.

"The same thing happened some years later, when I went to the Market Street shop one Friday afternoon as a student and they were playing Birthday by the Sugarcubes. Selecta (as the locals used to call it) would stay open late on nights when there were gigs in the centre of Nottingham (so that was every weekend and most of the week, then) and would give me somewhere else to go instead of a pub before the show. It was tricky getting through a standing show with a piece of 12 inch vinyl under your arm, mind.

"I went there less and less over the years, but only because I didn’t live in the area. If I’d stayed in Belper then I’d have gone to Selectadisc at least once a fortnight – Nottingham has always pissed all over Derby for shopping purposes. But now Nottingham will never be the same.

"So thank you and goodnight, Selectadisc. Thank you for all those glorious 12 inch singles on Factory and 4AD. For albums and singles on Cherry Red. Thank you for having a Giveaways rack where curious young music fans could pick up Tim Buckley’s Starsailor on cassette for £2. Thank you for the fantastic second hand section (a whole shop full until fairly recently) where some serious bargains and get-it-now-or-never-see-it-again opportunities were to be had. The only better second hand section I’ve ever been to is in (the thankfully extant – for now) Record Collector on Fulwood Road in Sheffield. Thank you for the Fantastic Something album for £1.99. For Still by Joy Division. For my first copy of Martin Newell’s The Greatest Living Englishman. For the amazing dance and soul sections. For being the only record shop I’ve ever known where you could just walk in and be certain that a new release – however obscure – that you heard John Peel play the night before would be there, in the racks, waiting."

The answer's in the Post, Gordon

Wednesday's suspension of hostilities at PMQs showed Brown and Cameron in a good light - but with the Royal Mail row threatening the mother of all Labour rebellions, politics will soon be back to normal. Here's today's Journal column.

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Over the course of recent years, it is fair to say that the weekly gladiatorial joust that is Prime Minister’s Questions has not always shown the British system of government at its best.

Although seen as vital for party morale, the exchanges between the two main party leaders frequently generate more heat than light while more often than not leaving the public cold.

The clashes between Gordon Brown and David Cameron over the past 18 months have proved no exception to this general rule.

In truth they have been less about policy and more about psychology – a series of confrontations in which the opposition leader has sought to get under a notoriously prickly Prime Minister’s thin skin.

But it is this evident personal edge to the Brown – Cameron rivalry which made the suspension of hostilities in the Commons Chamber on Wednesday of this week all the more remarkable.

For the best part of two years, they have kept their relations at a purely perfunctory level, avoiding the customary courtesies that take place between a Prime Minister and an opposition leader.

Yet on Wednesday, the two men set aside their personal and political differences as they found themselves united by the common bond of grief they share.

The death of Mr Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, seven years after the loss of Mr Brown’s own first child, reminded both them and us that there is more to life than politics.

The personal is of course political, and there can be no doubting the part that their respective private traumas have played in forming the political outlooks of the two men.

Mr Brown has spoken openly in the past of how his experiences of the NHS after losing an eye in a rugby injury as a teenager helped shape his politics from an early age.

More recently Mr Cameron too has made clear the important part he believes the health service plays in the life of the nation - based on the significant part it has played in his own life.

Much of what the Tory leader does in politics is pure positioning, but not this. This comes genuinely from the heart.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether this week’s events will lead to any lasting thaw in the frosty atmosphere between the two party leaders.

Will they start to treat eachother with greater respect, now that each of them knows the other has shared their deepest personal tragedy?

I suspect the public would probably welcome that, but a year out from a general election, it’s probably not going to happen.

Mr Cameron may well now view Mr Brown in a more sympathetic light, but that won’t stop him trying to get the Prime Minister to admit that the recession was his fault.

What would the two men have talked about this week, had Wednesday’s clash gone ahead as normal?

Well, former Royal Bank of Scotland chief Sir Fred Goodwin’s £650,000-a-year pension certainly. It is becoming increasingly clear that the government may have missed a trick here.

But probably the big issue of the week would have been the government’s plans to sell off a 30pc stake in the Royal Mail.

Mr Cameron’s objective in this would have been clear: to drive a wedge between Mr Brown and the growing army of Labour backbenchers who are bitterly opposed to the plan.

There are broadly speaking three points of view in the Commons on the future of the Royal Mail. One is that it should be privatised – the view that is held by almost all Conservative and most Liberal Democrat MPs.

Another is that it should remain entirely in the public sector – the view held by 130 backbench Labour MPs who are determined to thwart the proposed legislation.

In this context, the government’s “third way” of part-privatisation might seem like an acceptable compromise – but it is hard to find anyone who believes in it outside the government.

As the rebel former minister Peter Hain has pointed out this week, it is not easy to see where a parliamentary majority for any of these positions currently lies.

The Commons arithmetic is such that if even a third of the 130 Labour rebels vote against the plans when they come before the Commons in June, Mr Brown will have to rely on the votes of Tory MPs to get them through.

Which essentially means that, on this issue at least, Mr Cameron has the Prime Minister by the short and curlies.

An added danger for Mr Brown is the fact that not everyone in his government – notably deputy leader Harriet Harman – appears to be wholeheartedly behind the proposed sell-off.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that, like banking bonuses, this is yet another issue on which Mr Brown’s would-be successors are carefully positioning themselves.

For all these reasons, I expect Mr Cameron to try to keep this issue uppermost on the agenda when he returns from compassionate leave the week after next and Prime Minister’s Questions returns to its familiar format.

He knows that Mr Brown can ill-afford to fall out with his party at this point in his troubled premiership and that a rebellion of the magnitude of 130 MPs could prove terminal.

Last week I posed the question whether the government can carry on much longer in an atmosphere where Labour MPs were indulging in ever more open speculation about the succession as the Prime Minister’s authority steadily drained away.

For Mr Brown, the answer to that could be in the Post.

Fatcats

Whatever happened to the Grey Man of Toryism?

The latest edition of Total Politics is now online and I continue my regular "Where Are They Now?" column with a look at the career of Grey Gowrie, who probably deserves to be remembered for more than just resigning from Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet on the grounds that it didn't pay him enough to live in London.

I would also strongly recommend an excellent a piece by blogging Labour MP Tom Harris on why David Cameron is guilty of "silly populism" and "dog whistle politics" in bringing forward plans to reduce the number of MPs.

Brown's authority is draining away

Could this week's "mini silly season" of Labour leadership stories turn into a full-blown crisis for Gordon Brown? Absolutely. Here's today's Journal column.

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And so it begins again. From the high watermark of Brown Bounce II before Christmas, when it looked certain that Gordon Brown would lead the Labour Party into the next General Election, the Prime Minister is once again beset by rumours of his political demise.

Okay, so it’s moreorless exactly what I said would happen at the start of the year, but to be perfectly honest with you, it wasn’t rocket science.

Once the recession really started kicking in, it was never likely that the Prime Minister on whose watch it occurred would somehow manage to escape the blame for the whole crisis.

It was even less likely when that Prime Minister is Mr Brown, the man who claimed to have abolished boom and bust and to have presided over an economic miracle during his 11 long years as the self-styled Guardian of the People’s Money.

Mr Brown’s default response to the downturn thus far has been to blame it on global economic forces way beyond his or any of his ministers’ control.

For a while, the public seemed prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But over recent weeks, the excuse has become increasingly threadbare as the failure of the government’s system of financial regulation has become more and more apparent.

Last week it was revealed that former HBOS executive Sir James Crosby, who went on to become deputy head of the financial services authority and a key Brown adviser, had sacked a whistleblower who had tried to warn the bank about excessive risk-taking.

While it did not constitute a “smoking gun” linking Mr Brown directly to the collapse of the bank, it added to a growing public feeling that he was part of the problem – and hence cannot be part of the solution.

When the former bosses of HBOS and other leading bankers appeared before the Treasury Select Committee ten days ago, they practically fell over themselves to apologise for effectively causing the banking crisis.

But there has, of course, been no such apology from Mr Brown, and nor is there likely to be.

As Shadow Chancellor George Osborne put it with lethal precision this week, the Prime Minister “is still living in his Walter Mitty world where his system of banking regulation didn't fail, where boom-and-bust had been abolished and where Britain is best placed to withstand the recession.”

It may be Punch and Judy politics, but it’s also a charge that is increasingly resonating with the voters.

The politics of the situation are being driven, as ever, by the polls, with the Tory lead once more stretching towards the 20-point mark.

It is important to remember that even at the height of Brown Bounce II, the polls never had Labour in front, but the pre-Christmas deficit of around 5-6pc was of such a magnitude as can often be clawed back during an election campaign.

It gave the party hope that they could at least get to the starting-line in 2010 with a fighting chance of victory, but as the Tory lead has grown over recent weeks that hope has turned steadily to despair.

As I wrote three weeks back, it was only a matter of time in those circumstances before the plotting to replace Mr Brown began again, and sure enough, this week it has.

At the start of the week, the main beneficiary of this renewed speculation around Mr Brown’s future appeared to be the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson.

"The Prime Minister's mistakes are catching up with him. Only Johnson can hold back the Tories,” cried John Rentoul, in the Independent

The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley wrote: "If Brown stepped aside and was replaced by, say, Alan Johnson, then Labour might do better…..the one quality Johnson does have is authenticity - and that is what is needed right now.”

And the Telegraph’s Matthew d’Ancona weighed in from the Tory perspective with: "Alan Johnson is the figure who bothers the Cameroons most."

Such a remarkable degree of unanimity from the commentariat suggested some kind of spinning operation on Mr Johnson’s behalf, but by the end of the week, other names had entered the frame.

Depending on which paper you read, deputy leader Harriet Harman and Children’s Secretary Ed Balls were either forming a leadership “dream ticket” or alternatively locked in a deadly briefing war against eachother.

The Balls camp was said to have fingered Ms Harman over a suggestion – floated in Ms Ashley’s column – that Mr Brown could be offered some grand international post to enable him to quit the UK stage with dignity.

Meanwhile Mrs Balls – Treasury minister Yvette Cooper – was named by London’s Evening Standard as a potential “Stop Harriet” candidate, although her husband’s response to this idea went sadly unreported.

Is this all just froth of the kind the national political media excel in? Well, up to a point.

But take it from me as someone who has been there, Westminster journalists don’t simply sit there making this sort of stuff up. There is always some grain of truth, however small, in what they are writing.

What I suspect is happening at the moment is that minsters are becoming increasingly indiscreet about what they say to journalists, and that some of that is finding its way into the news pages.

What that shows in turn is that the Prime Minister’s authority is steadily collapsing as Labour MPs indulge in ever more open speculation about what will happen when he goes.

Can the government go on like this? Not really, and certainly not for another 15 months up to a May 2010 election.

Mr Brown is in dire need of economic good news, but that currently seems very far away and, in any case, whenever good news of this nature occurs the government has a tendency to over-claim for it.

Until very recently, there was a settled will in the Labour Party that, for good or ill, the party was stuck with Mr Brown until the election, and that it had better knuckle down and make the best of it.

My instinct tells me this mood is changing, and that the party may be about to experience a spring awakening. Watch this space.

Second Home Secretary

In defence of Mrs Balls

It was fairly predictable that the right-wing blogs would have a field day with yesterday's London Evening Standard story about Yvette Cooper running for Labour leader. Guido describes her as a comedy candidate while Iain comments: "Please let it be true. Pretty please."

For what it's worth, this is what I wrote on Iain's blog:

"It's not in the least absurd. Yvette Cooper is easily the most intellectually capable of all the potential women candidates and it's quite obvious to anyone who knows her that she is capable of being Prime Minister - something that could not be said of Ms Harman.

Yvette is handicapped by the fact that she occupies the most junior position in the Cabinet, and to a lesser extent by the fact that she is seen as junior to her husband, but it should not be forgotten that she has been in the Commons eight years longer than he has.

Her career has been held back thus far for two reasons. Firstly, she had an attack of ME during Labour's first term which hampered her progress up the ministerial ladder. Second, she incurred the emnity of Tony Blair who refused to promote her to the Cabinet even though she was widely regarded as the most able junior minister of her generation.

Now that she has finally made it to the top table, it is entirely proper that she should be talked about as a potential Labour leader. In my view, the party could do a lot, lot worse."

I'm not quite sure why it is that the right has it in for Yvette in a way that it doesn't, for instance, for Hazel Blears or Jacqui Smith. Sure, she can come across as a bit strident on the telly at times, but so did their heroine Mrs T. I personally think Cooper vs Cameron would make a very interesting contest.

One further point about the Standard story which some other bloggers may have missed: it carried the by-line of political editor Joe Murphy, which suggests to me there is probably something in it.

Lets hear it for the girls...

At the risk of permanently alienating those who believe the history of popular music came to an end with the death of Curtis, or at the very least with the breakup of the Smiths a few years later, I thoroughly enjoyed last night's Brit Awards and in particular the award of Best Single to Girls Aloud for The Promise.

Okay, so I don't generally go in for their kind of music, and had such a manufactured outfit won an award such as Best Group it would have been a travesty, but I know a perfectly-crafted pop single when I hear one and The Promise is one such.

They don't come along too often. Keane had one a few years back with Everybody's Changing, Kylie Minogue has had several - notably Better The Devil You Know and Can't Get You Out of My Head - while one that I always remember from my teenage years was Never Let Her Slip Away by Andrew Gold.

So well done to Cheryl, Kimberley, Nicola, Sarah and Nadine - not forgetting Miranda Cooper, Brian Higgins, Jason Resch, Kieran Jones, and Carla Marie who actually wrote the song.