Sands of time running out for Gordon

How much longer has Gordon Brown got to turn things around for Labour? And if he fails, who might replace him? Here's my column from today's Newcastle Journal.

***

Last Saturday, I wrote in this column that despite Labour’s abysmal performance in the local election, I did not detect any appetite in the party for another change of leadership.

For now, I am sticking to that. In spite of Labour’s current dreadful plight, the party as a whole remains overwhelmingly loyal to Gordon Brown and desperately wants to see him succeed.

At the same time, however, there is a growing awareness that things cannot go on like this indefinitely, and that there may come a point where a change has, however reluctantly, to be made.

Mr Brown, in other words, is now on notice. Unless he can demonstrate that he is still the one to turn things around, the pressure on him to do the decent thing will become insurmountable.

The past week has brought no respite for the government. Last Thursday’s local election carnage was followed by Boris Johnson’s totemic victory over Ken Livingstone in London in the early hours of Saturday morning.

More damaging still was Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander’s decision to back a referendum on Scottish independence, almost certainly without Mr Brown’s approval.

The potential longer-term consequences of that announcement are worthy of a column in itself, but the short-term impact was to make it look like the Prime Minister had lost control of his own party.

Yesterday, the polling organisation You Gov piled yet deeper humiliation on Mr Brown as its latest survey showed the Tories 26 points in front, with Labour on its lowest rating ever at 23pc.

Estimates vary as to how much time Mr Brown has left in which to turn the situation around. Some say a year, some say as little as three or four months.

My own take on the matter is that there will need to be evidence that the crisis has bottomed out and the situation begun to move back in Labour’s favour by the time of the autumn conferences.

Furthermore, by next May’s local elections, there will need to be proof that Labour is at least on the road to recovery, back within touching distance of the Tories in terms of overall share of the vote.

If neither of those things happen, I think it entirely plausible that Mr Brown will fall on his own sword. The one thing he has always been is a party man.
So who might take over? Well, the one consolation for Gordon in yesterday’s You Gov poll is that it showed that any other leader – including South Shields MP David Miliband – would do even worse.

This bears out my own view that this crisis is not primarily about personalities, but about Labour’s collective failure to articulate a new vision capable of re-enthusing the electorate.

It follows from what I have said thus far that in my view, replacing Mr Brown with another old-stager from the Cabinet would be a completely pointless exercise.

The name most mentioned in this regard is Jack Straw, but he would carry all of the baggage of having served in the Blair-Brown Cabinet since the start, as well having been Foreign Secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Skipping a generation has a far greater potential appeal, and overwhelmingly the name on people’s lips in this context is Mr Miliband.

The other young hopefuls, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband, fall into the next-leaders-but-one category, while Ed Balls would simply be Mr Brown without the gravitas.

The main advantage of having a leader from the thirty- and forty-something age-band is that it would indicate that the party was looking ahead and moving on from the now seemingly discredited Blair-Brown era.

That said, none of the “next generation” candidates are exactly over-endowed with charisma, and if they do have any fresh ideas, they have not exactly been much in evidence thus far.

What, then, about a backbench heavyweight - someone who could combine experience with the appearance of change, by virtue of not having been party to the debacle of the Brown premiership.

Of the obvious contenders, Charles Clarke has made too many foolish outbursts and hence too many enemies, while David Blunkett has made too many personal errors of judgement.

Potentially the most promising “change candidate” is Darlington MP Alan Milburn, whose still-youthful appearance belies his five years’ Cabinet experience.

More importantly, he alone among Labour’s big-hitters has demonstrated an appetite for thinking outside the box. Whether he actually wants the job is unclear, but in my view, this could be his time.

But while the election of Mr Milburn would represent a shift back towards a more “Blairite” agenda, another, riskier option would be to make a conscious shift to the left.

The man for that task would be Jon Cruddas, whose thoughtful campaign for the deputy leadership last year now appears prophetic in its attacks on the intellectual emptiness of New Labour.

There is also a case to be made for a woman, given that Mr Brown has been criticised for his inability to “empathise” with voters in the way that David Cameron appears to be able to do.

The difficulty is that none of the available women seem particularly empathetic. Indeed the likes of Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper are even more prone to New Labour-style hectoring than their male counterparts.

After reading this far, you might think that, with no single candidate entirely free from drawbacks, the party would be better off sticking with the devil they know.

But politics doesn’t really work like that. Unless Mr Brown can recover, there will come a point when Labour MPs start to take the view that it’s his neck on the line or theirs.

Some argue that no-one really wants the job any more, that it is too much of a poisoned chalice – but politics doesn’t work like that either, and there will be someone, somewhere prepared to grasp the opportunity.

All is not quite lost for Mr Brown. But he knows that the sands of time are now fast running out on him.

Could Geoff Hoon or Tessa Jowell really be the next PM?

The weeks between the start of the summer Parliamentary recess in July and the party conference season in September have traditionally been known in the "silly season" in political and journalistic circles. With the MPs off on their holidays, it is a time of long, slow news days at Westminster, with the result that any small thing that happens tends to get rather blown out of proportion.

Perhaps the greatest silly season story of my time in the Lobby came in August 1997, when John Prescott's throwaway remark about naming a baby crab after Peter Mandelson made headlines the length and breadth of Fleet Street.

But if the past couple of days are anything to go by, the silly season has arrived early this year. Two of my favourite bloggers have come out with what can only be described as outlandish theories about the post-Brown Labour leadership.

Mike Smithson of PoliticalBetting.com is one of the most insightful political commentators in the country - inside and outside the MSM. Yet incredibly, he decided to devote an entire blog post yesterday to the idea that Tessa Jowell could become Prime Minister.

Now I do realise that the raison d'etre of PB.com is political betting, as it says on the tin, and that one aspect of this is the seeking-out of unlikely scenarios from which the site's aficionados can thereby profit at long odds, but even so....

Leaving aside the fact that Jowell is the absolute personification of nannny-knows-best New Labourism, has Mike totally forgotten about the David Mills-Silvio Berlusconi affair, which nearly brought about Jowell's resignation from the Blair Cabinet?

The Daily Pundit is a less serious blog. Indeed at times, I have openly wondered whether it is a spoof on the entire political punditry industry. Today, for instance, it carries a delightful story speculating whether Guto Harri will shortly replace Michael Cole as spokesman for Mohamed-al-Fayed.

If so, it would explain why the Pundit's current hot tip for Labour leader is Geoff "Buff" Hoon, although in his defence, there is at least a literary precedent for a Chief Whip becoming party leader, namely Francis Urquhart in House of Cards.

In a recent comment on this blog, the Pundit takes me to task for failing to include Hoon in my current poll on the Labour leadership, still being headed by Jack Straw.

In my reply, I own up to the fact that I myself once tipped Hoon to be Tony Blair's successor over a few pints with a couple of Labour researchers in Bellamy's, only to be laughed out of the room.

Well, you may say, it's all very well me dissing others' efforts to make sense of the current political crisis - who do I think should become Labour leader if Brown were to be forced out?

Tomorrow, in my weekly column which will be available on this blog, I will give my answer.

Local history site unearths oldest ever England team photo

Anyone who has heard the news today or read any of the nationals will be aware of the discovery of what is believed to be the oldest ever photograph of an England football team. It dates from 1876 and was taken in Glasgow on the day England played Scotland in what was only the fifth ever international football match.

What you may not be aware of - because none of the nationals actually mention it - is that this was actually a world exclusive for a Derbyshire local history site with which I am currently involved called You and Yesterday.

The picture was uploaded to the site last weekend by one of its regular contributors, Peter Seddon, who unearthed it during a search of old newspapers on microfilm at the Derby Local Studies Library.

To its credit, the FA website's write-up includes a link enabling users to click straight through to the picture on You and Yesterday. Readers of this blog can do the same by clicking HERE.

Derby points record under threat

"Fortunately for Derby fans, their record for having the lowest Premiership points total will only last one season thanks to Stoke. Stoke are probably the weakest team to have ever been automatically promoted to the Premiership."

- Spotted on a Yahoo forum entitled "What do you think Stoke City will do now they're in the Premier League?"

Who should lead Labour into the next election?

In my weekend column (see previous post), I wrote that I don’t detect any appetite in the Labour Party for another leadership change, and that I don’t as yet detect any such stirrings in the political undergrowth.

I am sticking by that, in spite of certain Sunday newspapers' attempts to persuade their readers that David Miliband was about to announce his candidacy for the leadership.

That said, two years is a long time in politics and things could easily change between now and the date of the next general election. Indeed, it would be mildly surprising if they didn't.

To my mind, Phil Webster has it about right in today's Times, arguing that ministers are giving Gordon Brown a year to turn things round. There is a clear logic to the assertion that if next year's local election results are as bad as this year's, even he himself would question whether it was worth continuing.

It's all very sad. I continue to believe Brown would have resoundingly won an election in his own right had Tony Blair made good his promise to stand down mid-way through the second term, as he should have done in any case in view of his administration's culpability in the death of Dr David Kelly and its use of dodgy intelligence to support the case for war in Iraq.

His tragedy was to become leader at a time when New Labour's hold on the public was beginning to wane and the Tories were making themselves electable again.

Should he decide to soldier on until 2010, he could do a lot worse than to take the advice of Sunday's Observer editorial, and seek to lay down some solid achievements which will ensure he is treated more kindly by the historians than by his contemporaries.

Either way, blog readers can have their say in my current poll below which asks whether Brown or any one of nine other leading Labour figures (sadly all men) should take the party into battle in 2009/10.

So far, Jack Straw appears to have streaked into an early lead with Alan Johnson second and other votes spread evenly between Brown, Hilary Benn, Jon Cruddas, John Denham, John McDonnell and Alan Milburn, with no votes for Ed Balls as yet.

Oh, and for the benefit of the annoyingmong who keeps asking me about the sample size every time I run a poll, it's not an attempt to be "scientific," it's primarily a bit of fun for me and for readers of this blog. Got that?

Who should lead the Labour Party into the next General Election?
	Gordon Brown
	Ed Balls
	Hilary Benn
	Jon Cruddas
	John Denham
	Alan Johnson
	John McDonnell
	Alan Milburn
	David Miliband
	Jack Straw

What now for Brown?

Martin Kettle thinks Labour MPs should tell him: "In the name of God, go." The Observer, slightly more charitably, thinks he should now focus on trying to devote himself to one or two core policy areas, in the hope that, should he lose in 2010, he will still be remembered for something other than being one of the shortest serving Prime Ministers in modern history.

So what's my take on it? Here's what I wrote in my weekly column in yesterday's Newcastle Journal.

***

Amidst the long list of disasters to hit Gordon Brown and New Labour during the course of local election night and after, it is hard to say which will have hurt the party the most.

Was it, perhaps, the loss of more than 300 councillors, or the Labour national share of the vote plunging to its lowest level since the days of Harold Wilson’s premiership?

Was it the party’s dismal performance in its so-called Northern “heartlands,” including the loss of Hartlepool, the continuing erosion of its position in Newcastle, and the Tory victory in North Tyneside?

Or was it possibly the humiliation of having your newly-appointed General Secretary resign before he has even taken up his post?

To my mind, it will have been none of those things, so much as the realisation that all the hopes of revival under a new leader that the sustained the party faithful during the latter years of Tony Blair have now been blown out of the water.

Make no mistake, this is as bad as it gets for Mr Brown, short of being dragged out of Downing Street feet first by David Cameron in May 2010.

As the pundits have not been slow to remind us, the last time Labour did this badly in a set of local elections was in 1968 when The Beatles were at No 1 and Flower Power was all the rage.

A more recent and more ominous historical parallel for Mr Brown is the 24pc share of the vote secured by John Major in 1995, two years before Mr Blair turfed him out of Number 10.

Is it bad enough for the Prime Minister to lose his job over? Well, it would be very easy for me to sit here and churn out a speculative piece about the potential runners and riders in a Labour leadership contest.

But in truth, it would be somewhat disingenuous. The fact is, I don’t detect any appetite in the party for another leadership change, and I don’t as yet detect any such stirrings in the political undergrowth.

Sure, some people are once again attempting to talk up the leadership chances of South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband - just as they were doing this time last year.

But he will have none of it, and neither will leading backbench Blairites such as Darlington MP Alan Milburn, although it has to be said he would have little to lose by trying.

As an aside, it is now clear that the Brownites made a serious strategic error in “hoovering-up” the votes of so many MPs last June that the left-winger John McDonnell was unable to get his name on the ballot paper.

Had Mr McDonnell been allowed to stand, Mr Brown would have won an easy victory and been able to swot away all those jibes about being an “unelected” Prime Minister.

Even better would have been a serious challenge, from the likes of John Reid or Charles Clarke, if only for the fact that it would have forced Mr Brown to set out his confounded “vision.”

I can only imagine they concluded it would have been a waste of their energies to take part in a contest that ultimately would only have strengthened the hated Gordon.

So there is, at least, the consolation for Mr Brown this weekend that, for good or ill, the party remains committed to going into the next election under his leadership.

But the continuing support of his party will be of little use to the Prime Minister in the longer term if the country has already decided that he is a liability.

In the wake of the credit crunch, there has been much talk of the need for an experienced economic helmsman to steer us through the choppy waters, but on Thursday night’s evidence, that argument is wearing thin.

It seems to me there are now just as many people who blame Mr Brown for the economic mess than there are people who think he is the best person to get us out of it.

And it’s not all about rising fuel bills and collapsing house prices. What is really harming Labour, in my view, is the feeling that they have run out of steam, that there is no longer any good reason to vote for them.

Less than a year ago, Mr Brown stood on the steps of Downing Street and used the word “change” 27 times as he set out his personal manifesto for power – but what has it actually amounted to?

Essentially, it has meant a greater emphasis on constitutional reform, the scrapping of the Manchester supercasino plan, tougher talk on cannabis, and a hospital deep clean.

They are all good things in themselves, in my view. But a programmme for government they do not make.

It is this paucity of vision, above all, that Mr Brown needs to address in the “relaunch” that he is now apparently preparing in the wake of Thursday’s election carnage.

Key to it will be the draft Queen’s Speech, which is set to be unveiled at the end of the month and which is expected to include measures on welfare, education reforms and involving the community in tackling crime.

But whatever its contents, it must demonstrate some innovative fresh thinking which captures the public’s imagination and which gives the government a new raison d’etre.

Above all, it must be authentically Labour, something which the public will see as fair and just and not simply as another piece of political posturing designed to out-tough the Tories.

This week, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg taunted Mr Brown by quoting Neil Kinnock’s “grotesque chaos” speech at him, in relation to the closure of thousands of post offices up and down the land.

Mr Clegg is right. Real Labour governments do not close the post offices on which deprived and isolated communities depend, any more than real Labour governments put up taxes on the poor.

That New Labour has tried to do both these things is symptomatic of a government which lost its moral compass a long time ago and, despite Mr Brown’s pretensions to the contrary, has failed to recover it.

Unless it can do so, and fast, then Thursday 1 May 2008 will come to be seen as the beginning of the end of the long Labour hegemony.

The shame of Derbyshire

The town of Heanor is an otherwise fairly unremarkable little place in the old East Derbyshire mining belt about seven or eight miles away from where I live, but today is has earned itself the dubious distinction of boasting not one, but two British National Party councillors after they were elected to Amber Valley Borough Council in yesterday's poll.

This would be almost excusable if their election actually represented the democratic will of the people of the town, but it does not. Thanks to the workings of the first past the post system, the pair have managed to be elected despite less than 40pc of the vote in both cases.

In Heanor West ward, the BNP candidate Lewis Allsebrook won with 727 out of 1,836 total votes cast, or 39.6pc, while in Heanor East, Cliff Roper emerged victorious on the strength of 36.4pc of the poll, or 537 out 1,473 votes cast.

It's the rest of the townsfolk I feel sorry for. Most people in Heanor either didn't vote BNP or didn't vote at all, but they are now going to have to put up with their town being treated as the racism capital of the Midlands for the next four years. Shame.

Big bloggers call it for Boris

Right from the outset of the London Mayoral contest, I have had great difficulty believing in any other outcome than a victory for Ken Livingstone. To my mind, London is a Labour city, and despite his many personal foibles, Ken's overall political record as London Mayor is a strong one.

Furthermore, he is up against a principal opponent in Boris Johnson who, for all his wit and charm, is regarded as a buffoon by many voters and whose track record of offending minorities hardly seems to fit him for the mayoral role.

Yet, as someone who has followed this contest from a distinct distance, it's impossible to ignore the growing consensus among those bloggers who have followed it much more closely.

Both Mike Smithson, of Political Betting and Guido Fawkes have already called the election for Boris, Mike arguing that the core Tory vote is much more solid for Johnson than the Labour vote for Livingstone.

Smithson rarely if ever gets these things wrong, but admittedly Guido's record is mixed. He wrongly called the Labour deputy leadership election for Alan Johnson last year, but correctly called both Lib Dem leadership contests in 2006 and 2007.

My head tells me they must both be right, but my heart still tells me they are wrong. We'll know the answer soon enough.

White on Brown

Donnish Times commentator Tim Hames caused a stir earlier this week by nominating the Guardian's Michael White for a political fixer's job at No 10.

White's response to this remarkable suggestion is contained in a Guardian podcast on today's local elections and is well worth hearing.

Fellow UCL alumnus Michael reveals: "Gordon has barely exchanged six words with me for several years. I don't know what I did to upset him."

Reflections on Arizona...and on what I've been missing

Okay, so leaving aside being mistaken for Phil Collins and nearly getting septicaemia, what else did I do on my holidays - and what do I make of what's been happening politically in my absense? Well, I'll come to that in a bit.

Each of my three trips to Arizona have been laden with emotion. My first, in 2003, was for my sister's wedding when I stood in my late father's place - one of the proudest days of my life. Unfortunately she got married right in the middle of the party conference season, and I was only able to stay a couple of days before dashing back to England in time to hear Duncan Smith turning up the frigging volume.

My second trip, for my brother-in-law Mitch's memorial service, has already been previously documented on this blog. The ten-and-a-half-hour flight to Phoenix that weekend was the saddest journey I have ever had to make, and I spent most of it listening to Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head. That line "God gave you style and gave you grace, and put a smile upon your face," will always remind me of Mitch.

So this, my third visit, was the first which my wife Gill and I have undertaken which didn't involve taking part in a rite of passage, and also the first we have undertaken with our two small children. It was certainly more relaxing than the first two, yet the place has such meaning for me now that it was impossible again not to be touched with emotion at being there.

Part of this is down to the sheer grandeur of the scenery. My sister lives in what are called the "desert foothills" and her garden, framed by panoramic mountain views all round, is a special place, populated only by cacti, mesquites, paloverdes, lizards and the odd tarantula.

It is at its very best in the early morning, before the heat of the day, and I loved to settle down there with a good book and put all the cares of the world behind me. As previously mentioned, my main choice of reading on this trip was Piers Morgan's Don't You Know Who I Am but I found this a rather odd mixture to be honest.

Although it has its funny bits - such as Morgan telling Charles Clarke to "stick it up your big fat arse" during a Labour conference reception - I found Morgan's obsession with becoming a celebrity slightly disconcerting and I think on the whole I preferred him in his tabloid editor incarnation, when he had a healthy contempt for the whole business.

Aside from chilling out, we found time for a trip to the Grand Canyon - my first time and Gill's second. It's certainly awesome but I suspect you would only get a true idea of its sheer scale by walking down into it and back up the other side. That's definitely one for another year.

***

I purposefully didn't blog while on holiday because I wanted to take some time for reflection on the current state of British politics. I have to confess to being somewhat depressed by this, and to be honest I have been for some time.

Like a lot of people of a naturally progressive bent, I did have very high hopes for the Gordon Brown administration, above all that he could impart some fresh moral purpose to Labour after more than a decade in power. Not only has he not done this, he has done the cause of the left terrible damage by appearing to surrender Labour's hard-won reputation for competence.

I still believe Gordon to be a good and decent man. I will continue to vigorously oppose those in the blogosphere who seek to attack him on the grounds of his so-called "psychological flaws," as if they themselves somehow have none.

But what I can no longer defend is the failure to set out some higher purpose for his administration other than simply remaining in power - a failure which risks handing the next election to David Cameron on a plate.

During my time away there has been mounting speculation about "civil war" breaking out inside the Labour Party if this Thursday's local election results are as bad as currently expected.

In my view, the suggestion that Brown should make way for a new leader remains fanciful without a very much clearer idea of what alternative his critics intend to put in his place. Simply substituting him with Jack Straw or even David Miliband will have zero impact unless other things change too.

Nevertheless, it is already clear that a leadership challenge this summer would have a very much better chance of success than one last summer would have done.

Maybe, just maybe, that was the Blairites' game plan all along....

Aren't you that guy out of Genesis?

I promised some reflections on the Arizona holiday, and this was probably the funniest thing that happened to me during the course of it - although it actually happened on the plane from Phoenix to Chicago at the start of our return trip.

As I am fetching something from the overhead compartment, a middle-aged American guy in the seat behind (who actually looked a little like Danny De Vito though I didn't tell him so) taps me on the shoulder and goes: "Aren't you that guy out of Genesis, Phil wotsisname, Phil Collins?"

I politely assure him I am not although I do confess to being a bit of fan and to having seen the great men on their reunion tour in Manchester last summer.

I have actually been mistaken for Mr Collins once before, but that was over 25 years ago, when we both had hair. Perhaps the question I really should have asked my De Vito-lookalike was whether he really thought Phil Collins would be travelling economy class?

The aftermath of fever

Just a quick update for anyone who's wondering where I've been for the last fortnight - I got back from the US on Wednesday morning, and headed immediately for the doctor's surgery, having spent the flight back with a temperature of about 104 and feeling like death warmed up.

It turned out that a minor accident last Saturday involving a brush with a prickly pear cactus had led to some infection which had set off an adverse reaction. Apparently this is the sort of thing people died from before Mr Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, so on the whole I'm quite grateful to still be here!

Apart from that rather grisly ending, it was a great holiday, and some fuller reflections will follow soon.

Meanwhile, a prize for anyone (apart from Dave Gladwin) who can tell me which 22-minute album track the title of this post is taken from.

Hors de combat - updated

I'm off to the States shortly to spend a bit of time with my sister out in sun-kissed Arizona, so blogging will be light in the time-honoured phrase. I may manage the odd book review - currently reading Piers Morgan's Don't you know who I am which is entertaining if not quite as instructive about the modern-day relationship between politics and journalism as his previous tome, The Insider. There will also be the odd update on Twitter, hopefully (see Sidebar.)

April 13 update: I see the Sunday papers back home today are full of speculation about a Labour leadership contest if the party does badly on May 1, with Jack Straw touted as the proverbial safe pair of hands to take over from Gordon. What no-one has bothered to explain is how this would actually improve Labour's election chances, but they've got to find something to write about I guess.

I had been hoping that by the time I get back, the blog wars might have toned down a notch....but with Tim having opened a new front I'm not holding my breath. Guys, guys.

A few lines on Politics Home

As most with a passing interest in political bloggery will know by now, Politics Home launched this week with the aim of creating a "Bloomberg" for politics. The leading personalities involved on the editorial side are Nick Assinder, Andrew Rawnsley and Martin Bright who are all fine journos and good chaps to boot, so I wish them well.

Meanwhile Freddie Sayers from the site has kindly emailed me with the results of their most recent Phi100 panel, an online focus group of cross-party MPs, senior political editors, commentators and campaign strategists.

The panel were asked: "How much do the following issues in the private lives of politicians influence the view voters have on them?" The results are listed below, with the percentage who thought it did have a negative influence on voters' perceptions of them in brackets.

1. Has a problem with alcohol (88.3% believe it has an influence)

2. Claims above average amounts from the taxpayer for meals and travel (77.4%)

3. Talks about green issues but is shown to use air travel much more than average (71.8%)

4. Has left his wife for another woman (55.8%)

5. Sends their children to private schools (51.1%)

6. Used cocaine when they were at university (48.8%)

7. Violates traffic laws (36.1%)

Politics Home is drawing the headline conclusion from this that "Cocaine is near the bottom of the seven deadly political sins." Fair enough - but I wonder if this is an issue on which the Westminster cognoscenti are ever so slightly divorced from the public at large?

For my part - and I'm speaking as a private individual here rather than attempting to second-guess the electorate - I would regard the use of cocaine at any stage of someone's life as leaving a very serious question mark over their fitness for public office.

For one thing, it indicates a lack of respect for the law of the land, which however much we might disagree with it, is something we are called on to follow. For another, it indicates to me a quite staggering degree of emotional immaturity.

Coke is bascially a drug used by social inadequates to maintain a self-confident facade and to make themselves "interesting." Of course most users end up talking complete bollocks but in a roomful of other cokeheads, that is unlikely to be noticed.

So I think the PHI panel are wrong on this one - but that is not to say I don't think Politics Home is potentially a great site.

The nauseating hypocrisy of Peter Kilfoyle

I used to have a lot of time for Peter Kilfoyle. He should in my view have been made Chief Whip after Nick Brown was moved from the post in 1998 and after his resignation from the government the following year he played a valuable role in speaking up for the interests of Labour's forgotten heartlands, although such was Tony Blair's obsession with Middle England it didn't ultimately achieve much in terms in of the overall direction of government policy.

So I was even more amazed to read his early day motion tabled last Wednesday which has so far obtained nine signatures from MPs of all three parties, at least one of whom should have known better.

It reads:

That this House notes recent media commentary on the rolling programme of maintenance involving the Speaker's rooms; notes that £8.2 million has been spent on the renovation of the Press Gallery; also notes that the media pays nothing for the use of the premises, nor for London telephone calls; is bemused that 10 male members of the lobby have a car parking pass for the Palace of Westminster; is conscious of the annual subsidy to the Press Bar of £210,000; and therefore calls upon members of the Press Gallery to apply to themselves the same standards that they would demand of others.

This edm is so mendacious and misleading, so full of half-truths and innuendo that it deserves a damned good fisking, so here goes.

Half-truth: "This House....notes that £8.2 million has been spent on the renovation of the Press Gallery"

Fact: The Press Gallery essentially had the refurbishments forced on them. Back in 2003, when I was a member of the Gallery Committee, it was told that its offices no longer complied with Health and Safety Legislation, and would therefore have to be upgraded. This being the case, the Committee reluctantly went along with the refurbishment plan and tried to shape it as best it could, although it was abundantly clear from the start that the House authorities were working to a particular agenda, namely removing as many of the Gallery's communal facilities as possible and maximising the amount of office space.

This, in the end, is precisely what happened. The Press Gallery dining room was lost, the gallery library was moved to a much smaller area, and the gallery bar was infamously combined with the cafeteria. In the words of the syncretistic lobby hack Bill Blanko it now has all the atmosphere of an airport terminal.

Half-truth: "This House...notes that the media pays nothing for the use of the premises, nor for London telephone calls."

Fact: Kilfoyle knows perfectly well that if the media were to be charged market rates for the use of office accommodation in Westminster, the regional press, including Kilfoyle's own Liverpool Echo, would cease to have a presence in the Commons altogether. It is frankly unbelievable to see a man who has previously posed as an advocate for the interests of the English regions making this argument.

Half-truth: "This House....is bemused that 10 male members of the lobby have a car parking pass for the Palace of Westminster

Fact: What Kilfoyle doesn't mention is that many MPs now have two car park passes. This enables them to park their second cars in the Palace underground car park permanently. The Commons authorities actually stopped handing out new car park passes to journalists several years ago. The ten that remain are held by extremely long-serving lobby men. Each time a journalist passholder leaves or retires, their pass is now reallocated as an additional pass for an MP.

Half-truth: "This House.....is conscious of the annual subsidy to the Press Bar of £210,000."

Fact: Peter Kilfoyle has regularly benefited from the availability of subsidised ale in the Press Bar. By my reckoning only John Spellar and Phil Woolas (whose job it was to patrol the Bar and find out what hacks were writing about the next day) were more regular attenders than Kilfoyle in the years 1997-2004. Maybe he's sobered up a bit since then.

Local elections are make-or-break for Brown

My weekly column in today's Newcastle Journal will be the last for a couple of weeks, so with the local elections coming up it seemed a good opportunity for a general overview of the current political situation.

Just before Christmas, Skipper said that Gordon Brown had at best six months "to prevent burnt out incompetence and drift becoming the default perception of his government." I have seen no better description of the Prime Minister's current predicament and I acknowledge my debt to him in helping me formulate this week's piece.

Of course, those six months are now nearly up, and the local election campaign really provides Gordon with his last opportunity to launch a fightback before that "default perception" becomes fixed in the public's mind.

Here's the column in full.

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There was a time, shortly after Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister last July, when Thursday May 1 2008 could have seemed a plausible date for the next General Election.

Mr Brown will by then have been in power for nearly a year – a milestone which at one time might have looked like a logical point at which to try for a fresh mandate.

Of course, the Prime Minister famously decided against an early election last autumn and in so doing effectively ruled out this spring as an option too.

If he harboured any lingering doubts as to whether he should perhaps have left the door slightly ajar, what has happened to the economy since will surely have dispelled them.

But we are, nevertheless, still going to have a significant electoral contest next month, namely the local elections in England and Wales.

In the North-East, it will mean contests in all the big metropolitan councils as well as in the counties of Durham and Northumberland which become unitary authorities next May.

The London Mayoralty is also up for grabs, with Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone facing a determined challenge from Tory Boris Johnson.

Taken together, it will constitute the first big national test of public opinion since Mr Brown took over – and the omens for the government currently look pretty depressing.

After last year’s Awful Autumn in which Mr Brown’s administration staggered from disaster to disaster, the political situation appeared to have stabilised in the early months of this year.

The Prime Minister recruited a new team of advisers at No 10, and it began to look as though they had started to turn things around.

But all that seemed to change with last month’s Budget which, while it may well come to be viewed in a better light, is clearly failing to impress the public at the present time.

The result is that opinion polls over recent weeks have shown David Cameron’s Conservatives with leads of up to 13 points, putting him for the first time in potential landslide territory.

Inevitably given the characters involved, the most national media attention in the run up to next month’s polls will be focused on the Livingstone-Johnson prizefight in the capital.

The Tory challenger currently appears poised for a sensational victory and, not for the first time, Mr Brown finds himself faced with a difficulty of his predecessor’s making.

Tony Blair was desperate to get Ken back in the Labour tent in 2004 to give the party a morale-boosting success in the run-up to the 2005 General Election.

Mr Brown was opposed to it then, and with Mr Livingstone now seemingly facing what would be a morale-shattering defeat for Labour, he must be wishing he had got his way

But while there is no doubt that the loss of London would constitute a major blow to the government, that would not be the worst of it if Labour also suffers a rout across the rest of the country.

Until recently, Labour has been able to point to the fact that while its own ratings were in the doldrums, there had been no corresponding outpouring of enthusiasm for the Tories. I have made the same point myself in this column

But once the Tories start winning actual votes, actual seats and actual councils, it will become much harder to make this claim.

The big danger for Mr Brown from these elections is that he ends up looking like a certain loser while Mr Cameron starts to take on the aura of a surefire winner – just as Mr Blair did in the mid-1990s.

Already, the Labour troops are growing restless. This week saw the remarkable spectacle of the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, criticising a key aspect of the Budget – the rise in alcohol duties.

Another minister, Ivan Lewis, laid into Mr Brown last weekend, arguing that the government is out of touch with ordinary Labour voters.

Meanwhile several former ministers and one-time loyalists have signed a Commons motion opposing the forthcoming abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax, announced by Mr Brown himself in last year’s Budget.

And if that were not enough, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke has helpfully produced a “doomsday list” of Labour-held southern seats he says are at risk unless the Prime Minister can stop the rot.

The respected commentator Peter Riddell said this week: “The malaise is real and it is widespread. The Brown Government is in deep trouble.

“The sense that something is seriously wrong has spread, ominously, to Labour MPs, not just disgruntled ex-ministers but normal loyalists.”

The worry for Mr Brown is that a heavy series of Labour defeats on May 1 could cause these rumblings of discontent to escalate into a full-scale civil war.

A spate of Tory victories in the South and Midlands will inevitably cause some Labour MPs in marginal seats to question whether it’s their necks on the block – or the Prime Minister’s.

After the serial catastrophes of last autumn, it was always the case that the first six months of this year would be make-or-break for Mr Brown’s premiership.

We waited for Mr Brown to set out his “vision,” but it never happened. We waited for him to demonstrate that his government had some higher purpose than simply staying in power, but that never really happened either.

As a result, the default perception of his administration has become one of burnt-out incompetence and drift leading inevitably towards terminal decline and defeat.

If that perception is not to become permanently fixed in the public’s mind, the fightback really must start here.

The politics of blog envy

I am not going to take sides in the current willy waving contest serious and important debate about blog stats over at Devil's Kitchen - basically because I am not enough of an expert in these things to know whose definition of unique visitors is actually correct.

But one thing I would like to say on the matter - and I have already said it on his blog - is that I am glad Tim Ireland has taken this opportunity to refute the oft-made accusation that his campaigns against Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes are driven by envy of their "success." They are not.

I have had some dealings with Tim down the years and I am as convinced as I can be that, whether or not you agree with him, his motivation is the greater good of the British blogosphere rather than the greater glory of Tim Ireland.

Mat Bowles, who himself ran one of the best medium-sized blogs before opting out of the stats race, has put it rather well on the DK thread and I can't improve on his summary.

I have said before that the blogosphere owes Iain and Guido a great deal for "popularising" the medium and forcing not just the MSM but also the government to sit up and take notice of us. But it also owes Tim a great deal for demonstrating its potential power as a campaigning tool - witness this example from only last week.

Oh, and for the record, my own willy is currently about a fifth of the size of Iain's (by Tim's conservative assessment) and around half the size of Tim's - but I'm not bothered about that any more than he is.

Openness, but only up to a point

Yesterday I ran a rather light-hearted post on the "Nick Clegg Superstud" revelations and other true stories that should have been April Fools. Judging by the lack of comments this attempt at sardonic humour obviously completely bombed, so it's back to serious today.

As the sage of Shropshire Jonathan Calder has already pointed out, releasing Clegg's GQ interview yesterday was a fiendishly clever piece of news management by the Lib Dems. The fact that it came out on April 1 would have led many people who read the story to assume it was a spoof, thereby lessening its impact.

But spoof it isn't and those Lib Dems of a sensitive disposition now have to get used to the fact that they now have a reformed serial shagger and teenage arsonist for a leader.

In what looks like something of a damage-limitation exercise, some of Clegg's colleagues have today praised his openness in being prepared to talk about such things, but they are missing one very vital point.

For me, the really interesting thing about Clegg is that while he is happy for us to know he was rather promiscuous in his younger days, happy for us to know he was an arsonist, happy for us to know he was a binge-drinker, even happy for us to know that he doesn't believe in God, he is still not prepared to say whether or not he has ever taken illegal drugs.

Once again, it begs the question just what is it about the drugs question that puts the willies up our political leaders, that causes the likes of Clegg to switch instantly from heart-on-the-sleeve mode to we're-entitled-to-a-private-life mode?

David Cameron famously refused to answer the same question after he became his party's leader, but even he owned up in the end, although the revelation that he had enjoyed a few spliffs at uni was a bit of a let-down to those who assumed his initial reticence must have meant the entire family fortune had disappeared up his nose.

If Clegg really does believe in "openness," he should bury this last taboo.

The Top 10 April Fools That Weren't

We learn courtesy of this morning's Guardian that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has not only shagged up to 30 women but that he once set fire to a greenhouse full of cacti while pissed out of his brain. Unfortunately for Lib Dem supporters, it wasn't an April Fool, and neither was John "greed is good" Hutton being named the best-performing Labour minister in March, albeit on a Tory-supporting blog.

Here's ten other true stories from the past year or so that really should have been April Fools...Feel free to add your own nominations in the comments.

Northern Rock boss gets £760,000 pay-off

Health inequality widens under Labour

Gordon Brown invites Thatcher to tea

Anglican archbishop calls for Sharia Law

Catherine Tate becomes Dr Who's assistant

Balshaw returns as England full-back

Harriet Harman elected deputy Labour leader

Andrew Porter appointed Telegraph Political Editor

China awarded the 2008 Olympics

Mugabe wins the Zimbabwean election

The bleeding obvious

Duke "did not order Diana death" reads the headline on the BBC's superdooper new website. And in other hot news, Gordon Brown "did not think much of Tony Blair," Rupert Murdoch "makes exceedingly large amounts of money," and Pope Benedict XVI "is Catholic."