James Forsyth

Andrew Sparrow flags up a quote by David Miliband at today’s Cabinet away-day in Birmingham: "I think Gordon is leading us with more vigour and determination and will prove people wrong ... I am absolutely convinced that Gordon can lead us to victory. He has enormous values, drive and vision." Now, as Andrew admits one can try and read too much between the lines. But I think he’s right that the “more” does seem significant. It is at the least proof that the truce between Brown and Miliband is holding.

The ‘conservatorship’ of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae represents, as Steven Pearlstein notes in the Washington Post, the most direct role for the federal government in the “workings of the financial system” since the great depression. Clive Crook points out that the eventual nationalisation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will bring 25 more times more loans onto the public balance sheet than the nationalisation of Northern Rock did in Britain. It is an illustration of how bad things are that there has been almost no political dissent about the move. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have long stood as examples of how political problems get kicked down the road in Washington because they are too difficult to solve or because their patrons are too powerful to be confronted.

Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush administration is being serialised by the Washington Post this week and is a grim reminder of just how badly Iraq strategy was run for so long. This exchange between Condoleezza Rice and General George Casey in Iraq in, presumably, November 2005 illustrates the almost total lack of policy co-ordination: "Excuse me, ma'am, what's 'clear, hold, build'?" Rice looked a little surprised. "George, that's your strategy." "Ma'am, if it's my strategy, don't you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?

“If GB goes down, he's going to take everybody with him." John Rentoul reports, in his column today, that this is what Nick Brown has told various Labour backbenchers. Leaving aside the sub-Godfather nature of the rhetoric, it is clear that the Brownites have decided to fight the enemy they know how to beat: their internal opponents in the Labour party. It appears that there is now a concerted effort on to make Brown’s critics in the Labour party fear him again. Meanwhile, the Tories have a largely free ride. Conservative Home reveals that the Tories intend to use this space to issue a more limited commitment to matching Labour’s spending commitments, the new pledge will only apply to a year’s worth of spending after the election.

Andrew Rawnsley hits the nail on the head when he says that a “Prime Minister cannot be on perpetual probation”. At some point soon if it is not to go down to total disaster at the next election, Labour will either have to back or sack Brown. But as Rawnsley points out, Labour is in too much of a shambles to do either. There is, though, a reason other than incompetence preventing Labour from making a decision. Everyone assumes that the Brownites will do all they can, and that is still an awful lot, to stop whoever topples Gordon from succeeding him.

Many people in the Westminster Village will tell you that Labour’s last best chance is to personally attack David Cameron. The theory is that if you can take down Cameron, the Tories will fold. But when you ask about what Labour should go negative on you receive pretty weak answers involving the Bullingdon, Eton or White’s. The, predictable, aim would be to paint Cameron as out of touch or a sexist. But neither of these attacks strikes me as likely to be effective. First, the out of touch line has been tried already and hasn’t hit home, just turning up the volume won’t make it effective. Also, the fact that Cameron has spent more time inside NHS hospitals in the last few years gives him an emotionally powerful response to the charge that he is out of touch.

There’s a fascinating stat in Prospect’s In Fact column. In England, 57 per cent of children aged five to twelve have visited visited Spain and 54 per cent France. But only 44 per cent have visited Wales and 39 per cent Scotland. I’m tempted to blame this discrepancy on our appallingly expensive train system but it probably has more to do with the weather. But it is a real pity as Scotland and Wales contain some of the most beautiful places in Europe to have a holiday.

Martin Bright’s politics column in The New Statesman this week is absolutely essential reading. He points out that Miliband has to challenge soon or he too will be seen as a bottler, that Labour still can’t agree on how to challenge Cameron and that the Cabinet simply aren’t use to operating in such tough times—none of them have governed during a recession. But I think it is this point which is perhaps most important: “The Labour Party is in an unprecedented crisis. If it carries on as it is, it will lose the next election by a landslide. The consequences could be worse even than those that followed the election defeats of 1983 and 1987, because no one realistically expected Labour to win them.