A year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was enjoying a honeymoon as a new prime minister, building on a decade of Labour Party dominance under Tony Blair. How things have changed. A poll yesterday for the Independent newspaper found nearly a quarter of Labour voters believe Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make a better prime minister than their own Mr. Brown. Among all voters, Mr. Cameron held an 18-point lead on that question.
That's why the Scotsman, the leading newspaper in Mr. Brown's native Scotland, is rattling political china with its report that Labour ministers are considering a "suicide election" to give the party a fresh start under a new leader. Under this scenario, Mr. Brown would be dumped either this fall or next spring, and the party would call an immediate election in which defeat would be the most likely outcome.
Labour ministers "believe such a move would be better than Brown clinging on to office until 2010 when, they fear, the party would face a wipe-out on the scale of that inflicted on the Tories by Labour in 1997," the Scotsman reported. To Labour's future advantage, Mr. Cameron's Conservatives as a result would be propelled into power "without having prepared enough for the tough economic times ahead."
Normally, such gloomy talk would be discounted as exaggerated, but panic has been the norm in Labour Party circles since it lost a special election for a vacant seat in Parliament last week. The defeat came in Glasgow East, deemed one of the safest Labour seats in the entire country. "If we aren't safe in Glasgow, we could lose everywhere," is how one Labour Party political analyst put it to me over the weekend.
John Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.
