Word: labours
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...billed as tragedy - an insurrection that would topple the Labour Party's flawed hero, Gordon Brown - but it played out like a Marx Brothers farce. The June 8 meeting that would determine Brown's fate attracted so many Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords that a House of Commons committee room quickly filled to capacity. And still they came, squeezing their way into the mass of bodies politic. When a clutch of tardy ministers wrenched open the doors, pressure-packed colleagues tumbled into the corridor, itself lousy with reporters poised to relay the verdict...
...those present instead cheered and banged their desks in support of the beleaguered leader. In return, a humbled Brown pledged to be more consultative and transparent with his party. "I have my strengths and my weaknesses," he said in the stiflingly warm room, packed to the gills with Labour MPs and peers. "I am going to play to my strengths and address my weaknesses." By morning, the air was clearer. "The Labour Party does not want a new leader," Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced to the BBC. "There is no vacancy. There is no challenger." (See pictures of Brown...
...Brown's "case for unity", as he described it during last night's meeting, would seem to bring to an end - for now, at least - the rudderless efforts to unseat the Prime Minister. In light of Labour's collapse in the Euro poll, wavering MPs were probably spooked by the prospect of a general election. (Imposing a second successive unelected P.M., the assumption goes, would be one too many for the electorate to swallow, making a national poll inevitable.) Rebellion was stymied, too, by a failure of the disgruntled to unite behind a policy agenda or a credible successor. When...
...none of that puts Brown in the clear. According to a poll published Tuesday in Britain's Independent newspaper, the opposition Conservatives - consistently double-digits ahead of Labour in recent opinion polls - would nonetheless fall six seats short of a majority in any general election with the genial Johnson as Labour's P.M. With Brown still at the helm, the Tories would romp home 74 seats to the good. More evidence of that nature - or defeat in either of the two tricky by-elections Labour faces in the coming months, following the resignation of a pair...
...while doubts remain about Labour's chosen medium, Brown's bigger challenge remains the message. "You simply cannot solve these problems through changes at the top," Brown told Labour parliamentarians Monday night. In that sense, he's right: the party ought to stand and fall on its vision and policies more than the P.M.'s style of leadership. That it doesn't owes much to the prolonged absence of any big plan from Brown. The Prime Minister shelved plans for an election only months after taking over from Tony Blair in 2007 - a vote he would have likely...