Playing for Time
So Gordon Brown survives to fight on and by all accounts his performance at the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meeting has strengthened the support of the Party’s MPs for their leader.
This doesn’t mean though that Brown is safe, it doesn’t mean that the threats of a leadership challenge have ended, rather that he has bought time - perhaps until the autumn to demonstrate that he can make the most of his Premiership and attempt to take the fight back to the Conservatives.
Gordon Brown was by all accounts very candid at the meeting and admitted to weaknesses which he said he would work at improving as well as concentrating on his strengths. This seems to have gone down well with the PLP.
Some members of the PLP have made the point following the meeting that Brown is as good a leader as they can hope for in the short term and although they accept that under Brown Labour is unlikely to win the next General Election, changing the leader now would make little, if any, difference.
This does beg the question, has Labour essentially given up hope of winning the next Election? With the results from the local elections and especially from the Euro elections in which Labour were pushed into third place and the latest polling figures, it certainly seems so.
What has Gordon Brown left to pull out of the bag to turn the tide back in Labour’s favour? He has effectively promoted Peter Mandelson to the position of Deputy Prime Minister, he has shuffled his pack for probably the last time before the Election and he has established a number of new Cabinet Committees, designed to input into policy direction.
Is this enough? Time will tell.
In the meantime, against a background of some of the poorest economic indicators for some time against the Government and what appeared to be an increasing opposition to Gordon Brown continuing as PM, this demonstrates that it is not particularly easy, nor straightforward to remove a sitting Prime Minister.
Tags: election, Gordon Brown, Government, Labour Party, PLP, Prime Minister, Reshuffle
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