Tongues are wagging in Westminster
Yesterday the febrile Westminster air was thick with talk of a cabinet reshuffle after the local elections on June 4th; now that's been replaced by talk of a leadership challenge to Gordon Brown should be the disaster for Labour it is widely expected to be.
Tongues are wagging about the possibility of a senior Labour figure -- Charles Clarke seems to be everybody's front-runner though he denies it (but then he would, wouldn't he) -- seeing if he can get enough backbench Labour names in the summer to mount a challenge to the PM in the autumn.
Yesterday I warned against taking talk of far-reaching cabinet reshuffles too seriously -- and wondered aloud if they really matter anyway. I feel the same about all this talk of a leadership challenge.
For a start, no matter how bad it gets, I'm not sure Labour has the stomach for it: unlike the Tories and the Lib Dems, Labour doesn't really do regicide.
That is especially true when the incumbent shows no inclination to go and, for all his woes and travails, Gordon Brown gives no sign of voluntarily calling in the removal men.
Nor do the plotters offer that much. Even they don't think a change of leader can win Labour the general election. They simply argue that the carnage would be a little less with a new leader than with Mr Brown. It's hardly a stirring rallying cry -- and who would want such a poisoned chalice anyway?
I can't see Labour figures lining up to be a caretaker leader whose purpose is to preside over a bad defeat (as opposed to the widely expected rout) then quickly depart the post-election stage.
Mr Brown will be even less inclined to go quietly -- no matter how bad the June results -- now that there is growing chatter about green shoots beginning to sprout in the economy. The , the stock market has been rising strongly on both sides of the Atlantic and even sterling is staging something of a recovery after its slump.
I'm not sure any of this has much political significance. Even if some economic indicators look a little better, there is still a lot of bad news to come. What recovery there is this side of a 2010 election is likely to be an "economists' recovery" ie only economists will notice it. But that won't stop Mr Brown and his allies claiming that it would be folly to get rid of the PM just as his policies were bearing fruit. The claim may or may not be true but I suspect Labour, in its current resigned state, will be inclined to listen to it.
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