Brown is going nowhere

By Jonathan Walker on Jul 23, 08 08:54 PM in Politics

School's out at Westminster, as Parliament has broken up for the summer break and won't be back until October.

This should make life easier for the press pack, who will have less to write about. In fact, it makes things harder, as you still need to come up with stories - there's just fewer of them around.

Hence, we have the silly season, which affects political journalism as much as any other field.

My guess is that we will see plenty of speculation about Mr Brown's future, whether he will face a leadership challenge etc. It's already begun, although it may take a while to get into top gear if Labour wins the Glasgow East by-election.

I'll stick my neck out and say talk of a leadership challenge is piffle. Brown won't go without putting up the mother of all fights; nobody wants to wield the knife, and whoever wins would probably be forced to call a General Election almost immediately.

After all, can Labour really have three leaders since the last election and carry on as if nothing has happened? The Tories did it between 2001 and 2005, but they were in opposition. We're talking about the Prime Minister here.

So it would be straight to the polls after a nasty leadership contest during a time of economic uncertainty. The chance to lead the Labour Party into that poll would hardly be a prize worth fighting for.

The big events this week are Glasgow East, on Thursday, and Labour's National Policy Forum - widely known at Westminster simply as "Warwick" - at Warwick University, beginning Friday.

Then its weeks of the great unknown, until the party conferences begin in late September.

If you have any stories, do get in touch.

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Paul Groves said:

Labour does seem to be doing a very good job of getting themselves into the kind of mess the Tories got into over the last few years. So three leaders in such a short space of time isn't beyond the realms of possibility - never say never.

All the main parties have got pretty uninspiring leaders at present, but there aren't many realistic alternatives waiting in the wings.

July 24, 2008 10:12 AM