Martin Bright

There was some rather touching Twitter activity from Charlie Whelan over the weekend (I have corrected the spelling). "Just got message from old pal Graham Sharpe at William Hill. Hung Parliament odds slashed to 2/1. Says 'Shrewd punters' are on this." This is the nearest I have seen to an official admission that a hung parliament is the best the Labour Party can now hope for. As self-appointed guardian of the Prime Minister's interests, Whelan has taken a close interest in the selection process of new Labour PPCs, so he should be in a position to know.

There has been a general consensus that Tony Blair was a class act in front of the Chilcot Inquiry. Even those who see him as a liar and a war criminal must have been impressed by the way he handled himself - although choosing to show no contrition in a room of people that included the bereaved parents of fallen soldiers was a mistake.  I was not a supporter of the war. Like most people in the country I was an agnostic: I hoped the removal of Saddam would lead to a democratic domino effect across the middle east, but I thought it probably wouldn't. I thought it far more likely that an invasion would lead to the three-way split of the country into Kurdish, Sunni and Shia enclaves. I wasn't entirely right about that either.

He's the man who managed to be the campaign manager to Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown. Just after the election-that-never-was in 2007 he let it be known that he had counselled against a snap election. Now the Sunday Times publishes the memo he sent to Tony Blair suggesting that the war might turn out to be a bad idea. Jack Straw: the man who always covers his back. In fact, Straw let the existence of this memo be known shortly after the war turned nasty. I considered it common knowledge when I wrote about it in 2007 and I'm pretty sure John Kampfner talked about it in his book Blair's Wars. The point is that Straw expressed serious doubts a year before the outbreak of war, but still continued to support the intervention.

As the Labour Party descends further into student union gesture politics, it is perhaps appropriate that the last backbench rebellion before the election is set to be over Israel and the Palestinians. As James has pointed out on Coffee House, disgruntled Labour MPs are preparing for battle over the issue of universal jurisdiction, which blew up when an arrest warrant was issued for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. Not to be outdone, the Jewish Chronicle will be splashing on the story tomorrow and has already put the story up on its website. I had it on very good authority that the government will announce the law change next week.  The government will almost certainly need Tory support to push this through.

It is just plain bizarre that Gordon Brown has announced that he will serve a full term if Labour wins the next election. He should be playing down his role in the forthcoming election (difficult I know, when he is Prime Minister) not reminding people that he will be around for another four years. It is also strange that he has written off the Hewitt-Hoon coup attempt as silly. This is the one thing it is not. It may have been unwise, badly organised and poorly timed. But the idea of giving the Parliamentary Labour Party the opportunity to save Gordon or the party was perfectly sound. Indeed, they were giving him the chance to give himself a partial mandate.

I am forced to admit that I misjudged the nature of the Hoon-Hewitt plot. I credited them with having lined up some sort of serious Cabinet-level support (I have to say I assumed they had squared it with Mandelson). Whatever flaws you might attribute to the pair, they were once serious players in the New Labour world. But such is the collapse of confidence in the party that no one looks like they know what they are doing any more. I made the mistake of thinking that because Hoon and Hewitt were once part of a finely honed Labour machine, they were still at the top of their game. Daft really. But how about this for a conspiracy theory suggested by one reader? Hoon and Hewitt have no political future so perhaps it was a fake coup designed to bolster Gordon Brown's position.

As Ben Brogan has pointed out, if the GH/PH plot was not conceived with the say-so of Peter Mandelson (or at least the nod) then it won't be going anywhere. At the same time, if Mandy tells Gordon that he must agree to the secret ballot then he will find ot very difficult to resist. But this really is the crunch time for the Labour Party. If it wants to avoid a decade of  wilderness it needs to nail this issue once and for all. The point is that David Cameron knows that the Prime Minister is his greatest electoral asset and without him all bets are off. It has become the lazy orthodoxy that Brown is the problem - lazy because it allows backbench MPs to avoid taking repsonsibility for the future of their party.

Apart from the odd terrorist plot and the beginning of an already very nasty election campaign, nothing much has happened in my absence! Yes I had a nice Christmas and New Year, thanks. It certainly made a change from being threatened with a libel action by an Iraqi billionaire as I was last year. And yes, I was not entirely serious when I described the festive break as Winterval in my last post. I even attended a very traditional village nativity play and loved it.  The telly was traditionally dreadful. But one of the highlights of my Christmas was watching Matt Smith regenerate as the new Dr Who, which confirmed beyond any doubt the genius of the producers of the cruelly discontinued BBC poiitical drama Party Animals.

As the perfect end to the political year, the three wise men of our main political parties have brought the newborn infant of our renewed parliamentary system the gift of a televised debate. This could actually be quite exciting. David Cameron was soundly beaten by David Davis in at least one of his leadership debates and Gordon Brown will hope he can do the same.   I'll be signing off for a week, but back to welcome in the new decade with my own idiosyncratic take on the political scene. A heartless neo-con Zionist to some, a hopeless left-wing apologist for socialism to others, I know I can't win with readers of this blog, but I'll have a lot of fun trying.

What a bizarre decision by Channel 4 News to invite the Muslim Council of Britain's Daud Abdullah on to talk about the attempt to arrest the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni for her involvement in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. And even more peculiar that Jon Snow tried to stop the Jewish Chronicle's Stephen Pollard raising the issue that Abdullah had signed the Istanbul Declaration calling for attacks not just on Israel and but on British forces perceived to have supported the .  The Deputy Secretary General of the MCB is currently the reason his organisation is out in the cold. Communities Secretary John Denham is sympathetic to the MCB, but even he realises that Abdullah's support for violence makes it impossible for the British government to enter into dialogue with his organisation.

I was struggling towards an analysis of the true meaning of the PBR in Friday's post, but a couple of the Sunday commentators were a little closer to the mark. John Rentoul, in an article with the provocative headline Labour is Unelectable Again the Independent on Sunday's chief political commentator has finally announced the death of New Labour. For him, Labour's latest pronouncement on the bankers' bonuses is the final death rattle. Labour sorely needs to move beyond the philosophy that made it so attractive to the electorate for a decade but at the moment it is finding it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. Matthew D'Ancona gets it about right in the Sunday Telegraph when he says that the PBR was about managing defeat.

My posh Tory friends get really irritated when I talk about class. Almost as annoyed as my posh Labour friends. The idea that class was somehow excised from the political discourse by New Labour is absurd. We live in a country where the two dominant political parties are essentially representative of their class. And why not? It is completely understandable that a political coalition would coagulate around the interests  of business and big money. It would be a pretty rubbishy ruling class that didn't protect its position.