Too soon to wave goodbye to Gordon

Will Charles Clarke challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership?

There's certainly a feeling among some Labour MPs that something has to change. The rebellion over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax is driven partly by a fear among MPs in marginal seats that they are set to be kicked out of the Commons at the next election.

Hence, they are keen to distance themselves publicly from an unpopular and badly thought through policy, even if this causes difficulty for the Prime Minister.

But there's no sense that a leadership challenge is imminent or, for now at least, desirable. It's not as if Mr Brown is likely to go quietly before he has fought even one general election as Labour leader.

So it was odd that the Prime Minister chose to stoke the fires with his comments earlier this week, when he insisted: "I'm starting a job that I mean to continue."

This has been seen as his way of insisting that he won't be pushed out of office. A Prime Minister only says these things when he is in trouble, and the effect was to give talk of a leadership challenge more credibility than it currently deserves.