One thing is clear, says Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. “It’s over for Gordon.” But if it’s sad for Brown, it’s a “disaster for the Labour government”. The real reason for Labour’s predicament is that after more than a decade of New Labour, nobody in the party knows what it stands for. Labour is now heading not for defeat, but for “meltdown”. Another leader could at least “stem the bleeding and limit the damage”.
And if ministers don’t act, ordinary Labour MPs are likely to. As one Labour worker put it: being an MP is the “best self-employed job there is: it’s like running a small business and you make of it what you want to. But there are now more than 100 small business people whose businesses are going bust with no prospect of good alternative employment. They are the people who will move against Gordon.”
“What a stinking state of affairs this sets out,” says Dominic Lawson in The Independent. It tells us that our Prime Minister will be swept from office, not because his party has lost a general election, nor even because “millions of people might be suffering economic hardship which they had been assured would not take place” – but because “a hundred or so sole traders” want to continue to enjoy their salaries and perks. The British public could be forgiven for regarding Labour’s current in-fighting as irrelevant, and “they will take their revenge, in the usual way”.
They will, says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Labour’s “catastrophic” defeat in the Glasgow East by-election – the third-safest seat in Brown’s homeland – is the most “devastating” of recent electoral defeats and a sign of what may be to come. Were a “stunning anti-Labour swing” to be repeated across the country, Brown would become the first sitting Prime Minister since Ramsay MacDonald to lose his seat in the Commons. In fact, “virtually the whole of the Government would be handed their P45s”. One projection suggests that only Andy Burnham and Harriet Harman would “survive the cull”.
Such meltdowns do happen. In Canada, the Progressive Conservatives went from being the government to a party with just two MPs. This is a “crisis of existence”, agrees Iain Martin in The Daily Telegraph. Labour sowed the seeds of this crisis by “unpicking” the Union: it failed to listen to warnings that devolution would give nationalists a platform from which they could acquire a measure of credibility. Predictably, Alex Salmond has hollowed out Labour’s Scottish base. “Endangered in England’s largest cities, losers in London, out of power in Scotland and sharing it with the nationalists in Wales, wiped out in the south”: this is how parties die.
Getting rid of Gordon would avoid a “Canadian style wipe-out”, but it won’t happen, says Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. The practical difficulties are immense, and Labour know they don’t have a better candidate. True, says Roy Hattersley, so they should unite behind him. “The hope of establishing Labour as the party of conscience and conviction is being eroded by timidity.” Brown must set up his objective and “pursue it remorselessly… The most important ingredient of a still-possible victory is purpose.”