What do we think of Brogan’s scenario?

After the the first ousting of a speaker in more than three hundred years then anything is possible I suppose. So what do we think of Ben Brogan’s piece in the Telegraph this morning when he suggests the following?

“..Around the Cabinet table, his (Brown) crude politicking provokes despair. There is also frustration at his inability to say whether he plans to punish those who have behaved wrongly. He judged Hazel Blears’s failure to pay capital gains on her property portfolio “totally unacceptable”, but in the same sentence added that she broke no law and no rules. So does she survive or does she go? What does he, as leader, actually believe?.

. In private, Cabinet ministers refuse to rule out the possibility of a sudden spasm of panic after June 4, which could result in the Prime Minister being bundled out the door to be replaced by Alan Johnson or someone else brave enough to take up this burden…“

In such a situation the sheer novelty of, say, Johnson, could produce Labour ratings bounce and might provide a platform to go to the country. It would certainly, assuming there’s no contested leadership election, be presented as a means of voters being able to validate the new leader.

For more than four years I’ve been arguing here that Brown is a massive electoral liability to Labour and simply having him out of the way would be both a novelty and for many a great relief.

Johnson, if it was he, would dominate the news agenda for apart from his other qualities he would have the central characteristic of not being Brown.

In such a situation, surely, Labour would do substantially better at a general election. Whether that would be enough to stop a majority Cameron government I don’t know. But as a precaution I’ve now closed down (at a nice profit) all my Labour spread positions on the commons seats spread betting markets.

In the election date betting the July price is 25/1.

Mike Smithson