Sunday, April 13, 2008

Brown, beginning of the end?

Absolutely terrible newspaper coverage for Brown this weekend. There have been pieces in the Guardian, Mail and Times the gist of which is that Brown is facing widespread disloyalty and speculation about his leadership from within the parliamentary Labour party and the government itself. The Sunday Times goes with the imminence of a backbench revolt on the 42-day detention issue, and the likelihood that Brown would lose a vote of confidence linked to the issue, requoting a poll from Saturday's Telegraph that puts the Conservatives 16 points ahead of Labour. It also suggests that Brown has lost confidence in his leadership in the biggest swing against a Prime Minister ever, and that includes Chamberlain in 1940 just before he was forced to step down and hand the country over to Churchill.

In a local context, the last time we had local elections in Basildon with the national polls in this state, the Conservatives won every seat that was being contested, including some seats that had never previously been held by the Conservatives. Now, I am not suggesting that this could happen this time, but even half of that would mean a catastrophic set of results for Labour locally, and by extrapolation nationally. If that happened and if Boris took London what would that mean for Brown? Nothing good I suspect.