A renewed bid to oust Gordon Brown?

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

A fresh report in today’s Daily Mail says that Labour’s backbenches still carry the threat of a stalking horse challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership.

The report says:

“Labour MPs plan to run a ‘Gordon must go’ candidate in party elections next month in a fresh bid to force the Prime Minister to resign…The ‘coup candidate’ will run on a single platform – a call for Mr Brown to stand aside and let someone else lead Labour into the General Election…Mr Brown’s critics believe if the ‘coup candidate’ is elected or even if he gets 100 plus votes from Labour members –half of all backbenchers – it would make the Prime Minister’s position untenable.”

But the Mail report is completely unsubstantiated and unreferenced, suggesting that once again that the timidity and anonymity of Brown’s discreditors will once again be their unsticking. And if the plotters couldn’t get their act together in June, what’s to say they will mount anything like a credible challenge in September?

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, John Harris says that the notion that Labour’s decline and fall is “primarily bound up with Brown’s mental makeup is a convenient fiction”. He says:

“Labour is not doomed because Brown is weird and neurotic. Rather, what’s unravelling is a self-styled “project”, emblematic of the ease with which tiny cliques can now seize control of parties and what a dysfunctional mess the electoral system makes of our politics. New Labour was always built on timidity and contradiction, which only a fabulous political operator like Tony Blair could gloss over.“

If this bitterness and pettiness is what we can expect from conference season – our last chance to show a coherent and united front and to articulate a new vision for Britain – we are throwing ourselves to the sharks and an inevitable Tory government.