Across the pond

Gordon Brown, presently across the channel with Prince Charles, will be going to see the Queen in Buck House within days rather than weeks, to offer his resignation. This prediction is made before the results of Thursday’s European election have been announced. Because the Euro result will tell us nothing tangible. It will provoke a guessing game as to whether the result proves better or worse than expected for Labour. And an even bigger guessing game; trying to calculate how British voters would have voted on Thursday if they had been voting in a general election, instead of for European MPs and some local councillors.

As I realised yesterday, when doing my analysis of the council elections, the three elections are so different that that, however good the analysis, it is just not possible to predict the results of one of these elections from the behaviour of voters in the other two.

Even in normal times.

And we are not living in normal times.

So instead I have done an analysis of the Saturday newspapers, the Saturday television and radio programmes, and the Sunday newspapers, already available on the web, before breakfast.

The dominant message from the headlines, and from those ministers who are prepared to speak on radio and television or to be quoted in the newspapers, is that Brown’s the ministers have now decided that changing the leader before the election would be more damaging than damaging than sticking with Brown. And it is not only ministers who are peddling this line. Jon Cruddas, perhaps Brown’s fiercest critic on the back benches and the leading left wing potential candidate for the leadership, calls on the party to unite behind Brown in a signed article for the Mirror.

But all the newspapers are full of long stories about the events of the past few days, which provide lots of evidence about what ministers have been saying to the political journalists ‘off the record’. And who actually called the shots in last the re-shuffle.

It was none other than the Prince of Darkness himself. Peter Mandelson is now said to be deputy Prime Minister, though his offical title is First Secretary of State, and he is an un-elected peer, not even an MP. He is also Business Secretary and has been given responsibity for education as well. Which was part of the portfolio of Ed Balls, Brown’s closest friend and ally, who he was hoping to make Chancellor.

But forget titles and responsibilies. What nearly all the newspapers are agreed on is that Mandelson was the prime mover in last week’s events. It was Mandelson’s reshuffle.

You could say that he is Prime Minister in all but name. And understandably, Ed Balls, who is sometimes called the schools minister and sometimes called the childrens minister, is ‘furious’.

Both Guardian Unlimited and the Telegraph are now reporting that James Purnell did not act alone and that last week’s events were the work of several Blairites. The Mail, which pushed that view a couple of days ago, goes one better. They imply that the master mind who orchestrated the attempted coup was Tony Blair himself.

In a damning verdict on Mr Brown’s character, Mr Blair said of the Prime Minister recently: ‘The darkness in his heart and the lies will be his downfall.’

The source for this ‘quote’ is a ‘friend’ of Blair’s, who talked to him ‘recently’.

The Mail’s story today is remarkably similar to my spoof Daily Mail blog on Friday.

So I had better re-iterate that it was a spoof.

I do not believe that Blair is controlling his former colleagues like puppets on a string. I agree with today’s Independent, there was no plot in the accepted sense.

The reality is that the Blairites are now, and have been for some time, ex-Blairites. Including Lord Mandelson.

But all the newspapers carry reports of leaked emails written by Mandelson a year ago in which he makes a damning assessment of Brown’ character and political ability. Some of the newspapers suggest that these show how much Mandelson has changed his mind. Others imply that this is what he still feels.

In due course we shall discover the truth.

(Picture from The Guardian.)