Jon Bright (London, OK): There's an excellent piece by Rachel Sylvester in today's Telegraph charting the demise of morale within the Brown government. No cataclysmic events, she says, but a steady drip drip of divisive decisions (of which the 10p tax rate is the latest), plus repeated poor polling performances, are conspiring to drain away party unity.
As usual with much of the press, she becomes part of the story as she writes it, spicing her tale of ill-disciplined leaks with more than a few new insider comments of her own:
In private, ministers who were once in awe of Mr Brown have started complaining about their boss. "It's dither, dither, dither," sighs one. An aide claims, blithely: "It's like a Shakespearean tragedy. Gordon's not up to the job."
She even claims that Jack Straw threatened to punch Ed Balls in a previous cabinet meeting, adding weight to his reputation as a bit of a hard man. And, most damagingly of all, talk has started to turn to the issue of succession.
Sylvester claims that Brown is getting close to the point of no return - which might seem a bit of a cautious prediction. Once a party starts thinking about who the next leader will be (Granita deals apart, perhaps) the incumbent's days are usually numbered. What could Brown do to reverse this slide?
