Apparently as many as 40 Labour rebels are preparing to give Tony Blair an ultimatum if things don't go well on Thursday. Their fingers are on the trigger if Labour lose 350 council seats this week and if their vote share dips below a third in certain key areas. If this happens they will seek a definite date before next summer for the Prime Minister to step aside if this is not forthcoming they will seek to force a leadership election at Labour's autumn conference. If there are 40 rebels already in the camp they would only need a further 31 to join up to acquire the 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party required to force such a vote.
The Politics Show also ran a YouGov poll which found that 57% of the public believe that Labour is sleazy and incompetent. While we are not hearing from Pauline Prescott the SonS has an insiders view of the wife spurned by Margaret Cook. She says:
Few who have not been through this sort of misery realise the wreakage wreaked by an alpha male on the rampage. Media intervention has cut short [John Prescott's] making of hay in his autimn years, but the trauma will affect the family for years to come, as it did me and mine. Today Prescott looks a stressed and sorry figure in Downing Street; and in the case of my ex-husband [Robin], who knows how much that abrupt, self-inflicted fracture he imposed, cutting himself off from his former life and roots, cohesiveness and approval, reputation and amour proper, influenced the course of his later life?
Her Sunday essay is an interesting insight into the other part of the equation, the part that is being overlooked, not the lothario or his fancy woman but of the loyal wife that is spurned.