This is pathetic. How anyone in Brown’s team can think it’s appropriate / beneficial to start pointing fingers in true school-playground style when there are such serious issue at stake is beyond me. No doubt Mandelson had a hand in all this.

This looks to me like an attempted coup by the Blairites- at the moment it looks to have failed. Milliband was the key and he has bottled it.

Why am I surprised?

Good news is that, assuming Purnell’s gamble has failed, it will be some time before we have to listen to him again and to have gone it alone suddenly looks stupid rather than brave .

So are we saying that New Labour are incompetent at political machination as well as everything else?

Because of all this I’m actually coming down slightly in favour of Brown. I don’t think that Labour can win at the next GE, but I think now there is a possibility they can salvage something away from complete destruction.

If Brown keeps his head down, keeps working, but mainly just gets on with reform of the politics of this country then people will become a bit more reasonable. These calls for a general election now are ridiculous, and I believe Purnell and co have gifted Brown the reason to carry on.

If they had stuck it out, and Brown was forced to look like the only one in meltdown then it would have been likely the party could have forced him out over the next few months. Now…well, he’ll have a largely new team, he’ll try and reboot the narrative…they’ve given him a lifeline to survive until May as far as I’m concerned

Lee, I don’t think your predictions of what Brown will do square with the reality of how he has acted over the past two years as Prime Minister. He will lurch from crisis to crisis until he has no moral authority left and Labour’s subsequent general election defeat will be enough to keep them in opposition for another 18 years.

“just gets on with reform of the politics of this country” He has neither the courage nor the will to do any such thing, let alone get anything else done. He is finished.

I said if, I’m not exactly saying I have any faith in Brown, but if he has even the tiniest pinch of sense then he would not give in on elections. He will take a hit in the polls now as people dislike it, but if the outcome is an election next year that is fairer for the public, and ensures that the next 4-5 years will be more accountable (the alternative with the Tories, and to a degree the Lib Dems being to change things after an election, promises promises, and the earliest we’d see any real effect would be 2014)…he will gain some forgiveness for the current chaos.

Not much, probably not to come close to a win, but it is his *only* option, if he chooses to take it is up to him.

To be honest, the Mail is probably in the position of a dog with two dicks on this story: whom do they hate most out of Brown, New Labour, the Guardian or (cherchez la femme) Polly Toynbee, even as they relish the infighting? And it’s only now that Brown’s team have realised that Toynbee doesn’t love Gordon any more? What bit of ‘private encouragement’ was Toynbee’s recent columns in which she practically all but said: ‘I’ve bought the knives and sharpened them specially so you can stab Gordon good and proper’? Still, judging from the news that Alan Johnson is to be Home Secretary, Toynbee’s fox has been well and truly shot.