There comes a point when party interest and national interest conflict.  Inside Tory HQ there are many praying that Gordon Brown survives next week and that Alan Johnson does not find the courage to oust Brown.  They know that at the General Election the scale of the Tory victory will be greater if they face Gordon Brown, a discredited Prime Minister, than if they faced a new Prime Minister enjoying a honeymoon.   That is putting their party interest before the national interest.

Around the cabinet table sit the only people who can rid the country of a Prime Minister completely incapable of getting us out of the economic mess we are in.  Brown’s solution to a debt crisis is more government debt, his dividing lines are about politics, not economic imperatives in the national interest.  The expenses crisis has obscured headlines about the dire state of the national finances, but Britain is in a really perilous state.  The members of the cabinet who prefer to cling onto their party’s grip on government (and their perks) for another year by keeping Gordon Brown in place and delaying the inevitable, need to examine their consciences.  Put the national interest before party interest, the country is crying out for change.

Polls show that Labour Party activists and voters have no confidence in Gordon Brown, dispatching him sooner rather than later might actually improve the standing of the Labour Party.  There would of course need to be a General Election after Gordon went.  That is what the public want, that would be in the national interest, it might even be in the best interests of the Labour Party…