YouGov’s poll for the Sun was obviously taken this was before today’s fun and games…
Ed Balls just said he was “getting on with the job”, which today was meeting with the Fonz. The PM we are told was also “getting on with the job”. Mandelson unenthusiastically says “No-one should overreact to this. The Prime Minister continues to have the support of colleagues”. Alan Johnson said “Gordon Brown is the best man to lead the Labour Party.” No word so far from the woman yet…
Iain Dale tweets…
“I love snow, but not when it prevents me going on Sky, C4 News, GMTV and BBC Breakfast!”
CCHQ is watching developments with a mixture of excitement and fear. The last thing they want is to see Gordon ousted before the election…
Guido strongly believes that one of the strategic calculations made by the Tories that determined their decision to start the election campaign on Monday was to deliberately make it more difficult to dump Gordon. It would be argued internally in the Labour Party, Tory strategists hoped, that they couldn’t dump Gordon in the middle of an election campaign. It was not as if Clarke’s crew hadn’t clearly signalled at Christmas their intention to make one last attempt to oust Brown…
Back in 2008 after a few bruising PMQs when Gordon was looking wobbly, Team Cameron deliberately pulled their punches for fear of destabilising Gordon too early before an election. They know that their best hope of a landslide is if Gordon leads the Labour Party to a crushing defeat at the general election. Gordon will cost Labour MPs their marginal seats which could be otherwise be saved with any other Labour leader…
Guido was reporting rumours that a cabinet minister was going to call for Brown to go last night. Bad day for Nick Robinson, at midday he dismissed the rumours as “the madness we might get into with blogging and tweeting” on the Daily Politics.
With all his authority he definitively told viewers that there was no plot and nothing going on. The Guardian‘s Andrew Sparrow had the first squeak of the story at quarter past, Guido had the letter just after half past and yet it takes another half an hour for the BBC‘s Political Editor to break the fact that MPs might be texting each other:
The BBC’s News & Current Affairs operation costs taxpayers billions…
