Tom Griffin (London, OK): It's been a remarkable couple of days. The weekend's attacks on Gordon Brown have left the Government looking weakened at the very moment when the credit crunch has taken a dramatic new turn with the demise of Lehman Brothers. Robert Peston has called it Wall Street's 'most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s.'
The party politics may not be the most important angle in all of this, but for what it's worth, Labour looks ever more vulnerable to critiques like this one from Janet Daley in the Telegraph:
Would anyone care to address the point that the country is now sliding into recession, facing its worst property slump in more than a decade and its most serious foreign threat since the end of the Cold War - and all this under a government that is so dysfunctional as to be effectively paralysed? This internecine scrap is not just about the future of Labour - or even of New Labour, whatever that means now.
The fact that all the participants in this scrum seem to think it is is a sure sign of their decline: when a governing party becomes so introverted and self-obsessed as to fail to understand its most basic duty to the electorate, it is well and truly finished.
Even Labour supporters like Jackie Ashley are thinking in similarly apocalyptic terms:
The one prize worth having is to keep the Labour party in business. It is facing not only an electoral smash, but a final falling out between modernisers and old Labour. This, combined with no money and another flight of talent, could mean the party's destruction as a major force in British politics. I wish I thought that was hyperbole.
in the few short hours since it was written, that stark prognosis has only become more relevant.
