AJ4PM: A strange bedfellow

Before one eye turns west to Ireland and then north to Manchester, the other eye keeps itself firmly fixed on what has to happen within the Labour party.

We shouldn't concern ourselves with the YouGov tracking polls, although they do provide an interesting guide to how voter’s thoughts fluctuate.  More important is PoliticsHome’s poll of marginal seats that is published this morning, which gives the Tories a majority of 70 seats.  However, this poll would have been more relevant if the sampling had been held off until after conference season.  Such is life. 

It is this life that throws up a few surprises every now and again.  Simon Heffer is one of them.  This morning, having spent the week with the comrades (how out of place he must have felt), he turns his intellectual brilliance to the Labour party:

Much of the talk in the bars and over dinner tables was about the difficulty of getting rid of him now.

Just in case there is any doubt he is referring to Brown not Cameron.

We move on:

In fact, the only obstacle to this is cowardice. Labour could suspend its rules and have a new leader in place in a week's time if it had the will to do so.

In a week!  That would rather spoil the party for your lads up north, but we get the point.

Let him continue:

Now, with the slavering jaws of defeat inches away from the party, it cannot even summon up the gumption to be done with him at last. As such, the party's catastrophe is not merely Mr Brown's self-inflicted wound, but one for which they are all responsible.

Yes, yes we know all that.

And to the wonderful conclusion:

Most of the Labour Party admit now that they face not just defeat, but possibly obliteration, and a period of ritual disembowelment afterwards such as we saw after 1979. With Alan Johnson biding his time, it doesn't have to be like that. But Labour remains too timid to tell the emperor he has no clothes, so oblivion it shall be.

Even if the Labour party doesn't get it, Heffer does.

Inviting him to become a fully paid member of the AJ4PM campaign team is stretching matters a little far, but cross- party support is more than welcome, even though Cameron will not welcome it.  That, of course, will not worry Heffer one bit.