Is Robinson right – they are waiting and watching? What an afternoon to be a Labour cabinet minister and what choices you have to make. For what many of them decide in the next few hours could totally shape their future in politics. Do they stick with the old regime and hope that it survives or do they switch to support the plotters with all the risks that entails. I can’t believe that Hoon and Hewitt would have made their…
And what should you be betting on? ITV news is reporting that Patricia Hewitt is acting for Harriet Harman. Clearly this move was more than just a call for a secret ballot. There has to be current cabinet minister involved. Whatever it’s hard to see how Gordon can now go on until May. Mike Smithson
News is just breaking that the former chief whip, Geoff Hoon along with the former cabinet minister, Patricia Hewitt, have sent a message to all Labour MPs calling for a secret ballot to resolve the leadership issue once and for all. The fact that Hoon is a former chief whip gives this an added credence. Is there real momentum behind this? Developing.
New Statesman But is there more going on? The above is from the New Statesman blog which also says that all is now well between Tessa and Number 10. Mike Smithson ***Political Website of the Year***
What do we make of Paul Waugh’s post? This was posted by Paul Waugh on his Evening Standard blog within the past hour:- “….In the last few hours, the rumours have been swirling around again that a Cabinet minister could quit in protest at Gordon’s leadership. The plotters have certainly asked a sympathetic minister to do so – but whether he will do so is another matter. When I just confronted one Cabinet minister – who had been described in…
Is it smart to deny the blindingly obvious? The interviewing trait where Mr.Brown is at his most vulnerable is when he seeks to deny something that is clearly the case. Less charitable people than me might use the word “porkie”. The problem is that he does this when it is so obvious Thus when it was apparent almost to the entire country in October 2007 that a factor in deferring the planned early election was the sudden change in Labour’s…
How did we rate Brown’s Marr performance? So there we have it – Gordon Brown’s big interview on the Marr programme on BBC1 and what looks like the first round of the campaign. I think a lot of work has gone on to to get him to this stage. He was much more fluid than usual and had some well-thought out sound-bites and arguments. He looked and sounded fairly confident. Where he was at his weakest was when Marr challenged…
Following a crash of our database server last night, I have migrated the database to Amazon’s new Relational Database Service. Hopefully, this will lead to better scalability and reliability. Some people (Seth O Logue and Old Nat…) lost comments in the migration, and I’m sorry about that. It is possible we will see some performance issues over the next couple of days as I tweak the configuration, but hopefully these will be short-lived. Right: off to bed now. Robert