James Forsyth

Despite all the courting of small ‘c’ conservatives in the speech, Gordon Brown doesn’t get the front page coverage he would have wanted in two key papers. The Sun’s front pages blares, ‘Not his finest hour’ and takes him to task for not promising a referendum on the EU Constitution/Treaty: The Sun was clearly serious when it promised to keep up the pressure until polling day. While the Daily Mail’s front page is dominated by a story about the McCanns.

Michael White has the scoop on a classic exchange between Gordon Brown and Paddy Ashdown when Brown was trying to persuade Ashdown to come into his big tent: When Paddy Ashdown turned down a cabinet post - Northern Ireland - he explained: "I can't support your attitudes towards civil liberties." GB is supposed to have asked: "But could you keep quiet about them?" No. It is easy to see how Ashdown resisted this seduction attempt. But as White points out, the interesting question is what will happen when the various Tories and Lib Dems who were vain enough to accept Brown's blandishments realise that he is taking advantage of them.

The predicament of the Lib Dems is summed up by the media coverage, or lack thereof, of their conference. Looking at the papers today, the Lib Dem conference seems to be about, at best, the fourth item on the news agenda. The worrying thing for the Lib Dems is that this isn’t likely to change as the week goes on. It is hard to see Northern Rock shifting from the front pages and if it does there is bound to be another twist in the McCann saga to capture public attention. Perhaps, though, the audience for the conferences isn’t the general public. As Sam Coates points out, the Lib Dems are essentially running their version of a core vote conference; majoring on their plans to make Britain a zero carbon economy by 2050 and to ‘hammer’ the rich on tax.

There was a single, unmistakable message emerging from the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in Washington this week: the Iraq war may have started on President George W. Bush’s watch, but it will not end on it. Petraeus was as impressive as you would expect a four-star general with a Princeton PhD to be. But his timetable for the withdrawal of US troops was revealing — consisting merely of a series of question marks after March 2008. Anyone who thinks that the US military will be out of Iraq by 20 January 2009, when the next president takes the oath of office, or even inside the next administration’s first 100 days, is as deluded as those who believed that democracy would follow dictatorship in Iraq as night follows day.

If you’re struggling to come to terms with the slew of polling data that is currently circulating take a look at Tim Hames’s column in The Times that does a good job of putting these numbers into perspective.  This point  is particularly worth paying attention to: “what has been missed,, though, is the extent to which Labour under Mr Brown has been running its own core vote strategy by stealth. For while the shift from the Blair to Brown era has seen the average Labour vote share increase by 6.5 per cent, that improvement has been strikingly more pronounced among working-class voters (the DEs) than the affluent ABs. To put it crudely, antiBlair old-Labour backers who had defected or abstained have returned to their historic allegiances.

Today has been quite a day. Gordon Brown has burst back onto the political scene with an agenda-setting appearance on the Today Programme, a march into Conservative territory in The Daily Telegraph and a speech announcing the new politics which contained some very old fashioned points scoring. In Iraq, British forces have pulled back to Basra airport at the same time as George W. Bush has arrived to demonstrate his continuing support for the surge; illustrating just how much British and American strategies are diverging. While in London, Boris Johnson has launched his campaign for mayor. August is definitely over. Another poll will be out tomorrow that shows, according to Ben Brogan, Labour ahead by just a point. This will pour further cold water on talk of an autumn election.

The chances of Gordon Brown opting for an early election are rapidly receding. The latest polls show the Tories level and behind by three respectively; hardly the kind of margin that is going to encourage Gordon Brown to go now when he has so much road to play with. Even before these polls were published, Douglas Alexander went on TV to rubbish rumours that an election would be called this week It is not all good news for Team Cameron though, Ben Brogan reports that a deputy Tory treasurer has quit over the ‘lurch to the right’. This should guarantee Labour’s favourite soundbite gets some decent play in the media. While John Bercow has apparently signed up to do some work for Brown—he has not, though, defected.

Anthony Wells has the details of the Tories private polling, done by Populus, which puts them on 36% to Labour’s 37%. The results are very different from YouGov’s in the Telegraph this morning that put Labour eight points ahead. If this Populus poll is right it surely makes an autumn election too risky for Gordon Brown. If YouGov is right then an autumn election is a distinct possibility. Iain Dale is tipping the fourth of October as a possible date.

The biggest risk to David Cameron’s leadership to date has been his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as the shadow minister for community cohesion. Warsi’s rise makes Cameron’s ascent from freshman MP to leader in four years look almost sedate. In just two years she has gone from failed parliamentary candidate to being responsible for, perhaps, the most sensitive portfolio in opposition politics. Add in her history of making injudicious statements about anti-terror laws, talking to extremists, and Iraq — combined with some distinctly unCameroon views on homosexuality — and you have a pretty volatile cocktail. Especially as having staked his reputation on her judgment, Cameron cannot sack her.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that as many as 120 Labour MPs want a referendum on the new EU treaty. Ian Davidson, the MP who is at the forefront of efforts to get Labour to honour its manifesto promise, has written to Gordon Brown demanding 12 fundamental changes to the treaty if there is not to be a vote. Intriguingly, the Telegraph suggests that there are cabinet ministers privately backing the call for a referendum.

Today’s poll in The Guardian will be met with relief at CCHQ. Labour is still ahead, but a 5 percent advantage is far less intimidating than a double digit lead and makes a snap poll far less likely. Crucially, considering the increased political salience of the issue, the Tories have a 10 point advantage on which party is best equipped to deal with crime. The poll also takes a detailed look at how the parties are doing in various bits of the country compared to 2005. Amazingly, Tory support in the north has actually declined since then to 26 percent from 28 percent. However, in the south it has risen from 39 to 48 percent. The party who should be really worried by this shift is the Liberal Democrats who look set to lose a whole swathe of southern seats to the Tories.

There is an important op-ed in today’s Times by Dean Godson on the latest developments in the Undercover Mosque saga, the sorry tale of the decision by West Midlands Police to refer Channel 4 to Ofcom for revealing the extremist ideology being propagated in a Birmingham Mosque. Godson reveals that Paul Goodman, the shadow Communities minister, has written to the government to ask if any foreign government brought pressure to bear over the programme. West Midlands Police’s actions set a dangerous precedent. As Godson writes, “By referring this matter to Ofcom, West Midlands Police showed that its preferred associates in the Muslim community are Wahhabites and assorted radical Islamists rather than the nonsectarian Muslim mainstream.