Gordon brown

It's the story which has been simmering throughout the election campaign, and now it has has boiled over onto the front pages: fear and loathing in the Labour ranks.  After rumblings in the Sunday Times yesterday, its sister paper splashes with the headline "Labour in turmoil as pressure on Brown grows".  And, inside, Francis Elliot and Suzy Jagger report on the "jockeying to replace Gordon Brown".  Meanwhile, the front of the Independent speaks of "growing recriminations in senior Labour ranks over a lacklustre campaign that has seen the party relegated to third place in opinion polls."  The spotlight is finally turning, white-hot, on to Labour - after ten days of near exclusive illumination on the Lib Dems.

The sole current political certainty is that Nick Clegg will not prop-up Gordon Brown. Clegg holds Brown personally responsible for 13 years of failure and not even political marriages can be built on enmity.  Labour’s choice is clear: remove Brown to accommodate Clegg. The Sunday Times reports plots are afoot to kill Gordon ‘with dignity’. But euthanasia is messy. Two options are being discussed. First, Brown would be given a year to make a final indelible mark on Britain before shipping himself off to Westminster’s version of Dignitas. I think we can all see the problem with that cunning scheme, and Nick Clegg certainly will.

Let's not forget that the Labour Party should not have been able to lose this election. I am still convinced that Cameron came to the Tory leadership with a two-election strategy. The swing needed to win a clear majority was always huge. Part of the reason that the party leadership has found it so difficult to retain the lead in the polls is that they could never quite belive their luck at the collapse of Labour support.  Likewise, the Lib Dem surge has happened partly because no one is quite convinced that the Tories are ready for government. But the real story of the next week and a half will be how Gordon Brown deals with the draining away of Labour support.

Today’s new economic data gives a handy piece of ammo to the Conservatives.  It is untrue that, as Gordon Brown says, this recession was somehow milder than others. The economy contracted by 6.3 percent this time – it was 3.8 percent in the 1980s recession and just 2.4 percent in the early 1990s recession. I feel confident that the Conservatives will get this point across clearly, next time that Brown boasts that this recession has been somehow milder, thanks to his decision to “intervene” (ie, double our national debt).

It seems that the general election of 2010 will turn on 90 minutes next Thursday. David Cameron was far better tonight than he was last week. This time he managed to bracket Brown and Clegg together and had the moment of the debate when he called Brown out on Labour’s leaflets claiming the Tories would scrap various things that pensioners currently get free. If there was a YouTube moment in the debate, it was that exchange when Brown said he didn’t authorise the leaflets making these claims. The Tory press team then delighted in pointing to a Labour party political broadcast where they had suggested the Tories would take away these things. Nick Clegg came under far more fire than he did in Manchester.

Who would have thunk it? Inflation has again “surprised” on the upside – 3.4 per cent against a 2.0 percent target. Why so high? Even the return of 17.5 percent VAT does not justify this bounce. Might it have something to do with all those bank notes which were being printed by the Bank of England? Might interest rates be going up now to control this inflation – and, if so, what impact would this have on a UK economy which is already the most indebted of any major economy in history? The March figures show Britain has, by some margin, the highest inflation of any major European economy: it’s way higher than that of France (1.7 percent) Spain (1.5 percent) Italy (1.4 percent) or Germany (1.2 percent). And in America, 1.1 percent.