Daily View: Gordon Brown after the failed leadership challenge
After Gordon Brown survived the early stages of a leadership challenge, commentators deliberate what is next for the Labour party.
In the last week as one of the most remarkable in political history. He says although Gordon Brown survived the challenge, most of his cabinet want him to lose the next election:
"Most of Mr Brown's own colleagues find him so impossible to work for that they cannot bear the thought of another Brown premiership. Working for Mr Brown is about as life-enhancing as working for Macbeth in Act V."
whether the attempted leadership challenge was as much a failure as it appears:
"Politicians as experienced as Hoon and Hewitt must have known that courage and clear-sightedness are not the most conspicuous characteristics among their erstwhile Cabinet colleagues.
So might this have been another strategy altogether - to weaken Brown so badly that sometime before the General Election he will have to be stretchered off the political scene?"
that voters will be turned off voting Labour as a result:
"I wonder, though, if even the cleverest on the Labour side fully grasp how heavy a price they have paid and will pay for the way they have conducted themselves during the Brown years. The essence of Blair's attack on the Tories was that they had become a sect, an irrelevant club at the margins of national life ('weird, weird, weird'). Now it is Labour that is courting precisely the same charge."
the attempted challenge brought up the question of who would be the next Labour leader:
"I would back the chances of Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the party, if by then she wants the job. She was elected deputy leader as a centrist candidate with strong loyalty to the party. She has an appeal for trade unionists, women and backbenchers, a solid group of supporters in each section of the party's electorate."
The that Gordon Brown will stick it out, with negative consequences:
"In the meantime, we may expect a rash of meaningless initiatives designed to seize headlines rather than statesmanlike decisions that take the long view. The most statesmanlike of all decisions that could be made right now, of course, would be to call an early general election, not least so that the next Budget could be drawn up by a government that felt less desperate about its prospects and in consequence was less inclined to play the populist card."
And finally, free warm croissants on buses and the public execution of Simon Cowell may just win the election for Labour - according to . Mr Brooker's logic is based on a belief that Labour now has little chance of winning the next election:
"The party's condition is similarly terminal, so it might as well go for broke by announcing a series of demented and ill-advised election pledges in an openly desperate bid to retain power."
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