Cabinet Reshuffle: Live Blog
So far as the so-called Blairite putsch is concern, that’s starting to look more and more like a bit of a damp squib.
Blears and Purnell may have gone, but with both Peter Mandelson and, crucially, John Hutton, throwing their weight behind Brown, his immediate future is starting to look rather more secure than much of the media speculation over he last few couple of days might have suggested.
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PM’s allies accuse Guardian of plotting
The Prime Minister’s allies are accusing the Guardian of plotting to oust Gordon Brown. That is, according to a report in the Daily Mail today. It says:
The Prime Minister’s allies accuse the left-wing Guardian – long seen as Labour’s house journal – of promoting and even orchestrating the plot.
It demanded Mr Brown’s resignation in a scathing editorial on Wednesday in which it insisted there was ‘no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support’. Downing Street was incandescent with rage that it was given no forewarning of the savage article. The Prime Minister’s allies suspected it had been written in active collaboration with Labour rebels.
The article goes on to blame its news coverage and even Polly Toynbee.
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Purnell quits; Labour meltdown open thread
Updates
12:58am John Prescott on Purnell: “Not so much a Blarite as a careerite.”
12:50am More senior party members offering support to Brown: Jack Straw, David Miliband, John Hutton, John Denham, Caroline Flint, Phil Woolas, Shahid Malik and more.
12:30am George Osborne keeps calling for an election shock! Is the guy a robot? Does he have nothing else to say?
12:05am Peter Kilfoyle MP: Purnell / Blears resignation “student union politics”
11:47pm: John Hutton also backs Gordon Brown (BBC News)
11:46pm: David Miliband statement: “I’m not resigning!”
11:45pm: Why are BBC journos saying Purnell is ‘untainted’ by expense scandal?
11:42pm: Siobhain McDonagh also calls for PM to go (BBC).
- Sunder: Why James Purnell is not as Blairite as he looks
- Graham Allen MP calls for Brown to go.
- LabourList has Purnell’s resignation letter.
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So the man who should have quit alongside Hazel Blears over the expenses scandal is now trying his best to become the hero of the hour.
Or in other words the biggest rat is jumping ship.
Headline points on the Guardian:
• [Purnell] tells PM to quit; give Labour ‘fighting chance’
• Brown offered Balls’ job to Purnell ahead of reshuffle
• Rebels say 75 MPs support email calling for new leader
The BBC’s Nick Robinson is still downplaying Purnell’s expenses mistakes while over-playing the Blairite-Brownite narrative. Given that Mandelson, seen as the biggest Blairite, has been backing Gordon Brown to the hilt – isn’t it time the Westminster press dropped his fatuous narrative? I’ll update this post as news comes in from the European elections too.
Why I’m not voting
Many good people are urging me to vote today. But I can’t feel motivated to do so.
For one thing, I know very little about European issues. I’ve got a feeling that a key issue – the optimum distribution of power between Brussels and national governments – can be illuminated by the economics of transactions costs, social contracts and public goods. But the election campaign has not, to my knowledge, addressed this.
Indeed, no party has tried much at all.
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Obama’s secret plan to convert America revealed!
You may know that Barack Obama gave a speech today in Cairo, addressed to the ‘Muslim world’.
In an earlier statement he said:
And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.
Guess what Spectator Magazine’s Melanie Phillips had to say?
Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration?
Oh yeah, whoops! Barack Hussein Obama mistakenly blurts out his plan to convert America to Islam by stealth! Phillips is so absurd that even fellow blogger Alex Massie couldn’t help but mock her:
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Are polls underestimating Green support?
Nothing is certain until the votes are cast, but the polls over the last fortnight have been very encouraging to the Green Party, putting us on an upward trend. UKIP last week commissioned a ComRes poll that put the Greens across the ‘South East’ (which includes my Region, Eastern) in third position on 16%, and on 11% nationwide. This week, the Green Party commissioned a ComRes poll that had UKIP on 17% – and us on 15%, only just behind UKIP – and ahead of the LibDems! That hasn’t happened since 1989.
In fact polls ahead of European elections usually underestimate the actual Green performance. It’s worth remembering that before their historic 2.2 million-strong vote in 1989 the Greens were polling at about 7-8%, but the actual vote turned out to be 15%.
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No tears for Hazel Blears
I feel obliged to insist that however pissed off we are at our politicians, it’s still hugely important to vote today. Meanwhile, is anyone else completely disgusted with the filibustering going on down on the Westminster farm?
Following Blears’ resignation, ‘rebel’ Labourites are calling for his resignation and they just might get it. Guardianistas are rubbing their hands and cackling armchair anarchy into their cappucinos whilst the government crumbles around them. Brilliant.
Thanks, Hazel, that’s absolutely what we needed to get us back to what’s important in politics, like that grassroots unrest you keep talking about despite the fact that you wouldn’t know community organisation if it jumped out of your tiny designer handbag and hit you on the head.
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There are worse things than fiddling expenses…
Thinking back over the last 18 months, few, if any, of the stories and issues I’ve written about either here or over at the Ministry have been prompted by a genuine and deep-seated sense of anger.
There was one story that I did cover, over at the Ministry, that did put me in just that kind of mood, a story that’s resurfaced over the last few days in several newspapers as what Charlotte Gore has dubbed “Too Stupid to Look After Baby” case – a headline that directly echoes The Sunday Times’ “Mother ‘too stupid’ to keep child” headline, which appears to have got the media’s ball rolling again.
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Mocking the Greens and the ‘protest’ vote
by David Birchall
In her Monday Guardian column Madeleine Bunting wrote: “The most useful vote this week would be for the Greens – a protest vote that will help push the environment up the agenda.”
Her mention of a protest vote for the Greens was merely an aside in another aside about the probability of a Labour wipeout, but it represents a common subliminal attack on the small parties for whom a vote is an attack on the larger parties, rather than a true belief.
This is a demonstrably fallacious idea.
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It’s time for Ed Miliband to stand
And in a puff of smoke, Hazel Blears is gone too. She said today:
In her resignation statement she declined to offer the customary expressions of praise and thanks to Brown, and instead declared that she wanted to “help the Labour party to reconnect with the British people, to remind them that our values are their values, that their hopes and dreams are ours too”.
If Blears is going to help the party re-connect then Labour is in real trouble; she couldn’t spot grassroots opinion if it hit her on the head. There’s no point even hoping for people like James Purnell to resign because it’s obvious this is part of a plot to finish off Brown. And about time too.
There are two untainted (by the expenses scandal) ministers left – Alan Johnson and Ed Miliband. Regular readers know I have a soft spot for Ed and I’ll put out my neck and say that Ed Miliband should stand for leader of the party on a reformist ticketet, along with Johnson. At this point, he is the least worst option.
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