I've taken a selection of some of the more interesting commentary and analysis from today's papers.
Matthew D'Ancona in the Telegraph is still convinced Brown will be toppled but reckons it'll be the Parliamentary Labour Party that sticks the knife in now that the cowardly Cabinet has bottled it:
As instructive as precedents can be, this crisis really has no direct forebear. More accurately, it is so multi-layered, so bipolar, such a roller-coaster ride that it seems to contain and synthesise all previous leadership crises. Just when you think he's dead, Brown rises like Rasputin. Just when you think he's saved his skin, another minister resigns - for a different reason. Hazel Blears marches out in fury at her treatment over expenses, Jacqui Smith pre-empts the axe, John Hutton goes but stays loyal, Purnell goes and doesn't, Caroline Flint demands a L'Oréal promotion - "Because I'm Worth It" - and then, denied the prize, sends a resignation letter of awesome feminist fury. There is no choreography, no co-ordination, no theme. All the interventions have in common is that they weaken the Prime Minister yet further.
The context, of course, is extraordinary: a rebellion, local and European elections, a wretchedly ineffectual reshuffle, all happening simultaneously. No wonder the political landscape morphs by the hour, shifting beneath our feet with unsettling speed. This is three-dimensional chess, not a straightforward assassination plot. Indeed, it is clear that if the PM is to fall, it will not be the work of the Cabinet, the cowardly oligarchs who froze in the headlights so pathetically. Labour's innermost elite has lost its nerve. It will be the wisdom of crowds - or, at least, of the Parliamentary Labour Party - that does the trick.
Writing in the IoS, however, John Rentoul predicts that Brown has been saved for now but that he will be forced to step down in favour of Alan Johnson in the autumn when he and his supporters can no longer claim that this would bring forward the general election (and implicitly Labour's defeat):
It doesn't matter how bad the European Parliament election results are tonight: they can be safely dismissed as a diversion akin to the Eurovision Song Contest, a competition between groups dressed in silly costumes.
But it is also why they will get Brown in the end. When he faces his next convulsion, probably in the autumn, the timetable will look very different. Alan Johnson will be able to come in and promise an early general election - in the spring of next year; that is, roughly, when there has to be an election anyway and nobody has anything to lose. Then, the only calculation that matters is, as James Purnell put it in his resignation letter, whether Brown's "continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more not less likely", or, as Stephen Byers asked more bluntly: "Is Gordon Brown a winner or a loser?" We know what most Labour MPs privately think is the answer to that.
In the Mail on Sunday Suzanne Moore has some great reflections on just how irrelevant the whole Labour soap opera has become:
Blair has gone, Brown is going. If there are no other principles around which Labour can organise itself, then it's all finished. For what are the great policy differences between these two factions?
Before Brown took over, it was assumed that he was somehow more of a 'socialist' than Blair. It turns out that he wasn't at all.
What has Brown done in power that has in any way shored up his credentials on the Left? Even the idea of Labour representing the Left is questionable.
For several years now I have not been able to see how anyone committed to anything as basic as the redistribution of wealth and opportunity - or any other simple Left-wing credo - could have voted Labour.
And in an excellent piece for the Guardian, Will Hutton argues that the dark arts practiced by Brown and his predecessors are a direct symptom of Britain's broken monarchical constitution:
The plenipotentiary powers of the prime minister quickly turn Number 10 into a court. Both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair ran governments with the disproportionate influence of key courtiers attracted by the magnetism of such raw power. Alan Walters second-guessed chancellor Nigel Lawson's economic policy while Bernard Ingham had huge influence as press secretary; Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell played similar roles for Blair. For Gordon Brown, it is Ed Balls, Peter Mandelson, Shriti Vedera and, until recently, Damian McBride.
To an extent, courtiers surround government leaders in all democracies; it is worse here because of the sheer scale of the discretionary power in the prime minister's hands. Caroline Flint's complaint about an inside tier of the cabinet from which she was excluded could have been made by any minister in modern times. But this concentration of power also sets up incredible political tension. Because constitutionally the parliament is not the people's but the crown's, once a politician commands a parliamentary majority, he or she can become prime minister in midterm without having to call an election. So eliminate the incumbent and that power can be yours.
The media discussion around elections, resignations and the re-shuffle has helped generate a sense of return to "business as usual" as the focus of politics is once again on the merits and flaws of personalities, rather than the structures within which they work. That's why I think Hutton's analysis linking the whole sorry mess to a system failure is so helpful.
As Hutton argues, our disfunctional constitution also leads to massive inefficiency in public spending as departments of government are chopped up and handed out as part of the spoils of power:
Prime ministers and opposition leaders talk about eliminating waste in government. What they never grasp is that the inefficiency of so much public spending is integrally bound up with Britain's constitutional settlement. Brown, like Cameron, shores up his position through patronage and so prevents any significant politician from building an independent power base. The culture of the reshuffle grows out of the capacity continually to create new political spoils as political exigency dictates, a patronage that comes from borrowed monarchical discretion. We watched Brown at it again on Friday. But the impact on the underlying departments and efficiency with which public money is spent is bound to be disastrous. MPs' expenses are part and parcel of this sorry, discretionary, patronage story.
