It's Over, Brown. You're Surrounded

Labour backbenchers organise the coup

Benedict Brogan has written a fairly revealing discourse on the Last Days of Gordon Brown for tomorrow's Tory?graph, amusingly comparing the besieged auld fraud, currently barricaded-in behind the blast proof front door of Number 10, to a desperate fugitive hell-bent on evading capture.

...after another day of political comedy, the Prime Minister is still locked away in Downing Street, refusing to budge. Westminster thinks he's finished, but he's still there, like a gangster shouting: "Come and get me, coppers!" He has no intention of making things easy by walking away.

It's like that Edward G Robinson 30s gangland flick: "Is this the end of Rico Gordon?" Well yes, mate. It is.

Brogan speculates which Labourists will play SWAT teams and break down the door, flush-out and then bravely disarm the wounded outlaw now that negotiations have broken-down (aware, obviously, that the serial perp. has at least released a couple of his female hostages, the smaller of which is currently recuperating in one of her 94 houses in Salford).

From the conversations I've had in the past 72 hours, I have no doubt that someone can be found to do the deed. Even now, I am told, there are at least three senior figures in the Labour Party who are contemplating whether to step forward and say what no one in Cabinet has yet found the courage to declare out loud: that it is all over for Mr Brown.

There is one name popping-up, apparently. He's a big-eared man who's been hot on the case since what he considers to be Brown's worst crime of all: the 2007 assassination of Tony Blair.

Charles Clarke and others are understood to be gathering signatures for a letter from backbenchers, demanding that the Prime Minister be removed and a timetable set out for his replacement in time for the summer holidays. The total so far is claimed to be north of the 70-odd needed under Labour rules, and Mr Brown was last night said to be ringing backbenchers to plead for support.

If true, this to me is scary news but revealing about why Labour really is a totally busted flush. Who can imagine the rump of disaffected champagne socialists like Bob Marshall-Andrews or hardline, working class Trot good ol' boys like Dennis Skinner rallying around arch Blairite Big Ears' call to arms? Or the raj of Scottish-Labour émigrés still revelling in the presence of their champion in the top job, and still gratified by the unspoken thought that they rule the English? Or the other 40%: the dumbass Nulabour crop, too stupid and supine to know what to have for breakfast without a memo from the whips' office, let alone dare to act against 'The Leadership' (eek!)? Exactly.

If Brogan is right and I was wrong about this being a Left-wing uprising (and let's face it, he actually talks to them and I'm just yer common-or-garden Joe-blogger with a bee in his bonnet), then Labour really is staring into the abyss. One more year of Brown, then! Truly horrifying for us and catastrophic for them. I suppose it would be some consolation that there will subsequently be conclusive proof after all this summer madness has reached its denouement, in whatever form, that Labour fully deserves to be facing generational political oblivion.

As the Times says tomorrow:

The Chancellor’s future rests on a knife edge after Mr Brown referred to him in the past tense on Monday morning. But mistreating Mr Darling — who has been a loyal servant at Mr Brown’s side for many years — could misfire spectacularly. He is letting it be known that he would walk out of government if removed from the Treasury. Would he do such a thing and then turn on Mr Brown? Any hint of an attack from Mr Darling could well prove fatal.

Somehow I doubt it. But stranger things have happened.

All in all, though, I give not one hoot about whether or not this bunch of perfidious, thieving, backstabbing layabouts wipe each other out this week or this year. This whole parliament is finished and there must be a General Election before the autumn. Beneath tomorrow's Times article, a lone voice of reason sounds in the comments box:

Shouldn't this be resolved at the ballot box by the people of Britain?
-Thomas, Austin, TX, USA

You know what, Thomas from Texas, yes it bloody well should.

But in the absence of that GE, whatever else readers do tomorrow, get to a polling booth, work out how you can hurt Brown the most and then vote accordingly. Show him who he really has to fear: YOU.