Odds at Ladbrokes this morning:

Next permanent Labour leader :

David Miliband 7/4
Ed Miliband 5/1
Alan Johnson 6/1
Harriet Harman 8/1
Peter Mandelson 10/1
Alistair Darling 12/1
Ed Balls 14/1
Jon Cruddas 14/1
Jack Straw 25/1
John Denham 25/1
Andy Burnham 25/1
Hilary Benn 33/1
Yvette Cooper 33/1

Nick Clegg?

Too right, forget the others on that list.

As much as I'd love the Dark Lord to get it.. I think Alan Johnson would be the best bet. Harman is a nutter and the Millibands I think can come across a bit smarmy (Cameronish).

Andy Burnham is quite fit though.

Burnham wears too much makeup.

Mandelson, David Milliband, Benn, Darling will struggle with the electorate. Whelan has done a very good job of getting his union lackies into safe seats.

Balls, Cruddas and Straw are all being spoken of as possibly losing their seats. If they survuve they might do it though.

My guess is that it will be between Balls (if he survives) and Johnson, with Harman getting humilated. There will be a new deputy as well, possibly Cooper.

Personally I agree with those betting odds in that I think D Milliband is probably the most likely next leader but I'd like it to be Jack Straw, at least in the short term.

It really depends what the result of this election is.

If we get a hung parliament and a second election looks likely/possible within 18 months then I could see them opting to have Jack Straw, Alan Johnson or someone of that nature take the reigns to lead them through another quick election. I say this purely because I can't imagine electing one of the 'rising stars' of the party into the leadership spot only to have them fight and then lose an election within months is desirable.

With that said if the Conservatives manage to win a majority then David Miliband looks disappointingly likely. I would however be utterly amazed if they let Ed Balls become leader. He's far too close to Brown.

Gordon Brown is a goner - bring on Peter Mandelson

Forget Harriet Harman or David Miliband, there is only one person fit to run Labour after this general election, says Boris Johnson.




You see, I know how these Labour politicians think. I'll tell you what was going through the mind of the average Labour MP when Gordon Brown managed to stage one of the most spectacular political pratfalls since Neil Kinnock invited the world's media to picture him walking along a beach with his wife and contrived to be knocked over by a wave. It was worse than Walter Mondale crying on television. It was as suicidal as Cicero being rude about Octavian.

When Gordon Brown went to Rochdale, and ended up making a direct personal attack on the character and motives of Labour's core vote, Labour MPs weren't thinking how to rescue the situation. They were thinking it was the end.

"Right, that's torn it," they thought. "Who are we going to get to lead us now?" By the end of Gordon's heart-breaking, gurning performance in the third leaders' debate, there could be no doubt. Watching the wounded Gordon as he bellowed about tax credits was like watching some tragic old bull, at the end of the corrida, as he turns with heaving withers to face his tormentors.

It cannot go on, and in the name of common humanity it must not go on. Deep in their hearts, Labour knows that there will be a change of government on Thursday. There are plenty of Labour people who believe – as I believe – that the spectre of a hung parliament will vanish in the polling booth as voters are confronted with a choice: between the endless drift and dither of a coalition, or giving this country the new start it so desperately needs.

"I think you guys are going to get a majority of 40," one veteran Labour adviser told me at the weekend, and I did not disagree.

Gordon will finally be asked to leave the stage in what most of us can now see is the best thing, not just for the country, but perhaps even for him; and then Labour will have to find a new leader.

So in a spirit of strict impartiality, let me canvass the options. Let us avert our eyes from the car-crash of the Labour campaign, whose press launch on Friday was interrupted – in a glorious example of what I think T S Eliot called the objective correlative – by an actual car actually crashing, and let us focus on the forthcoming battle for the Labour leadership.

I have read somewhere that Harriet Harman believes she is the front runner, since she is already deputy leader and would be expected to step pro tem into Gordon's shoes. All I can say is that if Hattie Harperson becomes leader of the Labour Party, and uses that platform to advance her bossy, bullying, nannying agenda of yet more workplace regulation – at a time when the country is struggling to get people back to work – then it strikes me that Labour could well be out of office not just for a generation but for a century.

With the Guardian and the Observer already coming out for the Lib Dems, the great Clegg switcheroo would be complete. Labour would be pushed out to the Left, a party of Luddite reaction, supported by only the most traditional of trades unionists, and the Liberals would be the new voice of the centre-Left. So they would be mad to go for Hattie.

Who does that leave? There are the Milibands, David and Ed, who both attract support from respectable opinion.

The trouble is that there are two of them, and the older one, David, lost a lot of points when he bottled an assassination attempt on Gordon and made a reedy speech to his party conference about how the "world is a dangerous place". We know the world is a dangerous place, David, but if you haven't got the gumption to take on Charlie Whelan and the Brownites, how can we expect you to stand up to Putin or North Korea?

Some people say Labour should therefore draft his younger brother Ed, but I have to say that as the elder brother of my family – beleaguered by taller, cleverer, better-looking younger siblings – I feel this is an offence against the natural order of things.

The only way to avoid some Cain-and-Abel crisis in the Miliband family is to rule they are neither of them quite ready for job.

Which takes us to Ed Balls, and again, it is hard to see how this would work in the long-term interests of Labour. There are all sorts of reasons for voting Tory this week. It is a chance to strike a blow against over-regulation and over-taxation and political correctness, and a chance to enact beautiful new ideas like National Citizens Service for 16-year-olds.

But for some of us, the most powerful and intoxicating reason of all is that we have a chance to vote out the pugnacious Education Secretary and punish him for his attack on Latin. Even if Ed survives Thursday night, it is hard to see how Labour would prosper under a leader who already mobilises such rage.

There is, of course, Alan Johnson, who would normally get my vote because he is a nice chap and probably a distant cousin,
but he has mystifyingly ruled himself out by saying that he is not up to it.

Who else is there to emerge with any credit from the smoking wreckage of the Labour campaign?

There is one man whose reputation – amazingly – has been burnished by the disaster of the past few weeks; one man who is still sought after by society hostesses; one man whose every silken Voldemortian utterance is still taken down, with reverence, by the political journalists.

It is wholly fitting, after the disastrous stewardship of Gordon Brown, that the man best placed to rescue the New Labour project from Cleggmania and reassure the middle classes is the ermine-sporting, eyebrow-arching aristocrat of the party, the grandson of Herbert Morrison, the Deputy Prime Minister, Lord President of the Council, President of the Board of Trade and Lord High Everything Else, Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool.

That is my advice to my Labour friends, though whether they take it is another matter.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2...-Mandelson.html

Oh yes, that'll work, Boris. Sabotage, much?!

David Milliband is trying to be Tony Blair Jr - what with his hand gesturing and thoughtful pauses - he'll probably become the next leader.

Personally though, I don't care who it is, as long as it's not Mandelson

I thought he said he didn't want to??

Mind you, that's now. Give him a week or two to sweat over it, and he'll be singing a very different tune.

Me and you could fall out you know!

Any comments the majority of the Labour party are making about the leadership now can be chalked up to the mentality that you can't admit that Labour will lose this election, Brown is done for and a new Labour leader will follow shortly after the election result.

What I find most interesting about all of this though is that not much thought seems to be given to the notion that Brown won't want to go. As we saw with the protracted Blair/Brown handover its incredibly difficult for the Labour party to oust a leader who doesn't want to go. There's the potential for this to become spectacularly entertaining if Brown decides he won't go quietly.

What, you haven't already??

Absolutely all of them are terrible people with not one redeeming quality amongst them.

David Miliband - sneaky little school prefect
Ed Miliband - actually the worse of the two
Alan Johnson - the David Nutt affair highlighted what a cretin he is
Harriet Harman - oh dear
Peter Mandelson - possible
Alistair Darling - possible
Ed Balls - as if
Jon Cruddas - don't know who that is
Jack Straw - awful
John Denham - awful
Andy Burnham - awful and hates civil liberties
Hilary Benn - don't know who that is
Yvette Cooper - bitch but not quite Harman levels

They're all fine for Labour lackeys, but to the general public the mere though of any of them being Prime Minister should quite rightly chill your blood. The best of the bunch are Mandy, Darling and *shock* Brown - which says it all.

To be fair, though, at this time we do not know who will be newly elected on Thursday. As so many MPs have stood down this time there will, inevitably, be a lot of young blood coming through.

So you may see a bright young guy who will have ambitions, and drive to lead. Just like Tony Blair did nearly 30 years ago...

The David Nutt affair demonstrated why he is one of the few worthy of consideration.

No, it didn't. It highlighted his contempt for evidence-based policy in favour of a media-based one.

It highlighted his contempt for a media whore adviser who was unable to grasp the really rather simple concept that he was merely one part of a much broader picture.

On the original point, I am increasingly of the opinion that if Balls holds his seat then he will win it. He's pretty much got the unions stitched up, and from what I hear the safest seats have been stuffed with Whelan's cronies. (Ironically, if Balls survives, the worse Labour do, the more likely he is to win).

Yes, the broader picture of a media-based policy. There's no shame in challenging it, there's only shame in its perpetuation.

Public opinion is one of many factors which ministers should bear in mind (hence broader picture). Nutt was bitter that he, elected by nobody, had not got his way. His narrow minded belief tha his was the only opinion that mattered demonstrated why he was unfit to hold his position. The idea that men such as him should dictate policy is to advocate tyranny.

I put it to you that, this is generally what in fact happens. The Home Secretary usually accepts advice provided by the panel. Only on this occasion, he decided not to, and overruled him (ring any bells, Mr. Howard?? ).

So are we usually ruled by tyrants, unless the minister has a hissy fit??


I would actually bung a terrorist to blow Balls up. And I'm not kidding...

The only hissy fit was nutt who through his toys out of his pram because he didn't like the decision Johnson made.

You might enjoy this video of Ed Balls then.....

I think it would have to be Johnson as an interim measure, although one electoral outcome could actually se him leading a liblab govt next week.

The "oncoming storm" of the Millibands seems a bit ominously predictable; I wonder if the x-factor public can see through pretty vs smarm vs shallow vs untalented though? I've previously thought "Burnham" seems OK although a) too soon for him and don't really know enough about him yet.

.

Burnham hates civil liberties, so he's unsuitable too.

The ongoing clegg love-in suggests not.

Todays odds at smarkets:

Speaking as a person who loathes and despises the labour party, and would like nothing more than to see their permanent destruction, the one who scares me the most is Darling. There is an certain reasonableness about the man, and for all that he was chancellor though the worst of it, he managed to make it clear that he didn't really like what Brown was making him do and is thus less tainted than the others.

I hope and pray that it is Harman, but I acknowledge that even labour aren't that stupid, and would happily settle for Balls.

I agree with Darling. If I had a gun to my head and had to choose, it would be Darling. He was honest enough to talk bout "the forces of hell" being unleashed.

If Gordo resigns now, cabinet would choose a new leader. If he resigns while in official opposition, Hattie automatically steps in?

I think Harriet Harperson as leader of Labour would represent a great result....for the Conservatives. 6 months of that evil bitch would make her party unelectable for decades.

I'd like to say I can't imagine any situation where Labour would actually allow Harriet Harmon to be leader but they did (for reasons that still completely escape me) allow her to become deputy leader so I suppose anything is possible. I agree though it would destroy what limited credibility Labour has left.

One thought, If it is Harman then there will be another general election before Christmas, and anyone who thinks that 28.3% is as low as Labour can go will be in for a shock.

If Labour end up as the Opposition party then how should they move,

New Labour - Centrist,
Brownian - Control and Order or
Move to the Left and ditch co-operation with the Private Sector.

There is a (genuine) email doing the rounds amongst the Labour backbenches tonight:

It amazes me that anyone in Labour honestly believes their chances of forming a Government without Brown are improved.

As much as Clegg can't prop up Brown that would surely still be preferable than Clegg allowing Labour to elect a new leader and make him Prime Minister. At this stage Labour might just be best served by allowed Clegg and Cameron to work out some kind of deal (whether that's a coalition or confidence) at which point Brown would really be left with little choice but to step down as Labour leader. It really is time for them to abandon any hope of remaining in Government.

I don't think it would be as much of an issue if they could have a leader in place imediately to conduct negotiations. The bigger problem would be forming a coalition with a temporary leader who could end up on the scrap heap in a few months time. If Labour could put a permanent leader in place immediately then it might fly, but I can't really see two from Balls, Milliband and Harman stepping aside in favour of the other.

I've never really minded Jack Straw but am not sure about his mass appeal (though its far better than Brown's). Johnson would be a safe and different pair of hands and it would mix things up against the other two (if Clegg has much of a future after his failures).
Balls is too much like Brown in policy and could be viewed as a son of kind of replacement and David Milliband has a real air of arrogance about him. Darling has no chance based on his chancellor record and Harman, well where do we start?

Most of the less politically motivated people I have spoken to actually quite like Darling. They seem (probably fairly) to blame Brown for the failures, and Darling does have the gift of sounding reasonable.

Well now that Brown has announced he's standing down, I'll be putting my money on Brown being the next Labour leader - or rather still being Labour leader this time next year.

This is only partly because I think the only reliable way to get rid of him is to hammer a wooden stake through his heart. It's more that I suspect his game is to get the Libs and the Nats into his rainbow coalition and then, surprise, surprise, only he will be able to lead such an unholy mess.

Yes all things considered Darling has come out of this spectacularly well.

I don't think he'll become leader, he lacks the presence and charisma they'll be looking to replace Brown with and he's too easily linked to the economy or alternatively open accusations of weakness.

It will be Balls, Milliband or Harman. If I were to put money on it then I would go for Balls due to the Whelan influence, but if he looked like being too much of a liability then it isn't inconceivable that Dromey could swing the placemen behind Harman.

I mention Darling as my greatest fear, but I agree that labour are fortunately probably too stupid to pick him.

Harman has announced on Newsnight that she doesn't intend to stand, but as we all know a week is a long time in politics, well it was before Thursday Night. Now an hour is.

Darling is very good but I agree he isn't 'media' enough.

I still think it might be Alan Johnson.

I think he'd be a much more credible leader than almost anyone else - apart from Alistair Daling, maybe. And v. much more a 'man of the people'.

Of course, no-one remembers when he was the CWU leader during the postal strikes...

I think that a lot of people do remember, but now isn't the most damaging time for them to remind the others. If he were to become leader, I would imagine the scum would make great play of it during the election.

Slight surprise ... Alan Johnson not to stand. Peter Hain also not contesting for Leader.

Shame. Hain would have kept them out for a generation as well.

Fraternal leadership? The brothers Miliband in Leader and Deputy roles, possible as Ed is joing David as a candidate.