Newspaper coverage in the wake of Gordon Brown’s hammering at the polls will have had Labour Party strategists choking on their low-salt muesli.
And nothing will have alarmed them more than the verdict from The Sun, whose switch of allegiance from the Tories to New Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election was a huge PR coup for Tony Blair.
“We were watching a dead man drowning,” was The Sun’s veteran associate editor Trevor Kavanagh’s opinion of Gordon Brown’s tour of the TV studios after his ballot box rout.
Placing the sting in the tail, he added: “I give him six months.”
Kavanagh’s political views are known to be close to those of his ultimate boss, News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch.
A Tory by inclination, the Sun man’s pronouncement almost certainly spells the end for that newspaper’s unlikely support for New Labour.
Elsewhere in the paper, political editor George Pascoe-Watson reinforced the view by reporting that Brown now risks open revolt.
“Several ministers – including some at cabinet rank – are privately discussing whether or not to dump Mr. Brown,” he wrote.
“They will give him a year to rescue his position – but [he] could face a leadership crisis if he fails.”
That interpretation reflects a growing consensus among political commentators that the PM’s days at Downing Street are numbered.
“You’ve got one year, ministers tell Brown,” ran a headline in The Times – The Sun’s upmarket stable-mate, once considered to be highly sympathetic to New Labour.
The paper’s political editor Philip Webster reported that amid “back-bench sniping”, the PM “will have a year to show he can turn around Labour’s fortunes” before his position risked becoming “untenable”.
Over in the Daily Telegraph, Toby Helm was similarly warning darkly of plotting behind the scenes and “former allies lining up against [Brown]“.
“More and more [Labour back-benchers] are questioning how much longer he can – and should – go on,” he wrote.
The party’s woeful showing last week also allowed Brown’s most trenchant critics free reign.
Not that Richard Littlejohn has ever needed an excuse.
Tough times ahead for Gordon BrownWith his usual flair for a phrase, the Daily Mail columnist described the local election results as “a howl of rage from the shires and the suburbs”.
He sneered: “Even though I said from day one he wasn’t up to the job, I admit to being quietly astonished at the way in which things have unravelled so spectacularly.”
However, the true picture of the direness of the PM’s plight is revealed by how even those columnists sympathetic to his cause are now calling him to account.
The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee – recently named Britain’s most influential political columnist – wrote damningly that Labour had “become the stupid party – dumb, directionless and depressing.”
Meanwhile, the same newspaper’s Jackie Ashley warned that while a leadership challenge to Brown was not imminent, if the picture did not improve by autumn he will certainly face a revolt.
Media reporting about a possible leadership challenge, she continued, “will not go away”.
It was once said that one of the worst jobs in the world belonged to the flunky who had to bring John Major – another hapless and beleaguered PM – the newspapers every morning.
Pity whoever it is who performs that task for today’s famously thin-skinned Number 10 resident.
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