Michael White surveys Gordon Brown's post-election battles and watches Alistair Darling's bid to restore momentum to Labour fortunes. Why is Boris Johnson's dad cross with the Guardian? And will the chancellor suceed ?
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Midnight
A long day, but enjoyable. Labour MPs I spoke to at Westminster were mostly relieved that Gordon Brown pulled back from the brink, but also cross with the way it had been handled.
"The right decision, disastrously taken," said one - and he's a Brown loyalist. "What my mother would have called a right Fred Karno's Circus," said another. Both are ministers. "Brown's made a fool of himself," said a leftwing serial disloyalist. "You've only just finished being disloyal to Blair," I protest.
GB's visit to the private weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) seems to have gone smoothly, not least because he did most of the talking. It was the "vision thing" again. Optimists dismiss the furore as "Westminster village chatter" which will not last. I am not so sure.
But I have solved one weekend controversy. By coincidence, I had lunch with Ken Morgan,Oxford history don, Welsh vice-chancellor and biographer of both Callaghan and Foot. We meet in the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho, much-loved haunt of the Bevanite left, though neither of us is a Bevanite. Michael Foot is still a regular.
Soft-spoken Lord Morgan, who was as passionately opposed to the Iraq war as he was to Suez in 1956, knows a lot, including which cabinet members wanted Jim Callaghan to call an election in October 1978. As I thought, Bill Rodgers was wrong on Sunday. Ken has interviewed them all.
He rattles off the anti-election ministers, who included Foot, Denis Healey, David Owen and Merlyn Rees. In other words all the senior office holders. Then as now, it seems, the gung-ho camp were teenagers like Bill and Roy Hattersley, still wearing their first pairs of cabinet long trousers.
On my way to Soho and back to Westminster I cycle past the Stop the War demonstration marching along Whitehall towards parliament, heavily escorted by police. It is a pale reflection of years ago, noisy and angry. But MPs have run the gauntlet of Brian Haw's one-man loudspeaker demo opposite Big Ben for years.
Inside the chamber, Brown makes his Iraq statement to the general, if unenthusiastic, support of Labour MPs. The troop drawdown proceeds quite quickly - all out by next year, ask some? - and he announces that 500 interpreters will be given refuge from revenge squads.
It seems workmanlike to me, but I cannot forget a Radio 4 account on Sunday of how the militias have inherited Basra from the retreating British army. It sounded grim. Brown says the Iraqis must sort out their own political settlement and tells Iran to keep out. Easier said from here than done there.
Labour backbenchers have been muttering curses against "the teenagers" who talked up an election. By this they mainly mean Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander. So I seize the chance to join fellow-hacks at the international development secretary's reception near Victoria station.
"I am glad to see so many people interested in international development," he says gamely. Mr Alexander, who is GB's election coordinator, is not saying much about it. But he concedes that, this time at least, it is not the media's fault. I say we do not need much encouragement when there is election talk.
My mate Polly Toynbee turns up and we talk to Shriti Vadera, ex- banker, ex-Brown aide, now a junior DfID minister in the Lords. We ask if she regards the collapse of Metronet over its huge PPP contract to upgrade the London Underground as a success for Brownite policy - or a failure. She reckons it saved the taxpayer the £500m which the abitrator refused to pay when Metronet demanded it.
To boost my self-esteem at the DfID reception I borrow a lapel badge saying "Peter Riddell of the Times" because Peter has not turned up. People treat me with more respect. When I go on to the Evening Standard's "1,000 Most Influential Londoners" reception at the Design Museum I decide to wear Polly's badge since she has gone elsewhere.
The 1,000 top folk notion is always a daft idea - "an easy way to make 1,000 friends and 3,000 enemies" says one guest - but the occasion is potentially tacky enough to be enjoyable - "'IWT", as Nick Soames MP sometimes says of parties. It stands for International White Trash.
Alas, I miss Mayor Ken's visit to the Lion's Den. The Standard has been horrid to him for years and ran that campaign saying he is anti-semitic for being rude to a Jewish reporter who was giving him grief. I was on Ken's side on that one.
But he is crafty enough to want to neutralise the paper's hostility in election year. He apparently makes generous remarks to editor, Veronica Wadley. Not that it will stop the paper supporting Boris Johnson's candidacy next May, predicts my old Guardian colleague, now Standard theatre critic, Nick de Jongh, who takes a real shine to my purple tie and shirt.
Nick says he could never vote for Boris. I say that Boris's public persona is just self-parody; he is not serious about anything. Derek Malcolm, who retired as the Guardian's film critic when he was 65, but still reviews movies for the Standard, agrees with me.
A lovely rascal, Derek always looks 40, but is actually nearer 100. Many years ago I took over from him as the Guardian's late arts subeditor, on the attractive 6pm-to-1.30am shift. We admire the dark Thames below Tower Bridge, a rare sight for me. Derek says he now enjoys getting movies sent to his home on DVD so he doesn't have to endure other critics coughing and chewing.
Unfortunately my Polly Toynbee badge gets me into trouble with the Johnsons. Boris's dad and clone, Stanley, protests that on this blog I accused his boy of "reverse nepotism" in trying to get his pa elected an MP in 2005. Not so, says Stan with feeling.
But his main gripe is that Polly keeps attacking Boris as a snob, reactionary and elitist. Stanley explains that their families have known each other for many years. Just as Polly once wrote that she had seen baby Boris naked, so he has seen her. Gosh, I think, do these upper-middle-class metropolitan types ever keep their clothes on in private? Memo to self: must ask Polly about this.
Tuesday morning, west London
On the radio Ken Clarke cheerfully putting the boot into the economic legacy which Gordon Brown has bequeathed to Alistair Darling. Public service reform is a "disaster", says Ken, as happy as if one of his enemies had died. Gordon has messed things up.
I remember that in the run-up to the 1997 election, chancellor Ken Clarke repeatedly told us he didn't have to put up interest rates - when everyone knew he did. Chancellor Darling is famously indifferent to personal promotion. But Labour MPs wants him to pull a rabbit out of the hat in what are difficult circumstances.
Westminster 4.30 p.m.The most startling thing I learned today before the chancellor completed his fox-hunt of Tory tax policies was from a friend on holiday in the US. The Washington Post led today's edition with a report of the anti-war demo in London which rated modest inside page treatment here. It was a modest event. What's going on?
Inside the Westminster corridors and in the Commons chamber Tory MPs are chipper and Labour ones still grumpy or bemused at the cancelled election. ''Gordon was terrific at last night's meeting of the PLP, he's always better without a script,'' one Labour loyalist tells me. But outsiders rarely see that side.
But Labour MPs are notably subdued as Alistair Darling delivers his un-election statement, shooting Tory foxes on the inheritance tax (IHT) issue, the non-domiciled foreigners and the green taxation of aircraft, not passengers, an idea first nicked by the Tories from the Lib Dems. It happens to the poor Lib Dems all the time.
It is only when the dogged Darling explains why he is spending an extra £2 bn which he could have given to higher rate IHT types to education and health instead, that Labour's partisan juices boil. Later he duffs up George Osborne for getting his own Cunning Plan on IHT from an article in the Observer.
Young George has been very cheeky, as usual, suggesting that Gordon Brown had taken the election starter's gun and shot himself in the foot. But he loses the House in mid-speech and struggles to recover. Vince Cable, the brainy Lib Dem spokesman, is more balanced.
Will voters pragmatically pocket Labour's theft of Tory conference schemes? Or will they take it as evidence of a government running out of steam, Mr Osborne's view which the media pack quickly decides is the correct one? Up to 3 million widows and widowers who stand to benefit from Labour's tweaked IHT proposals may take a day or two to decide what they think about the small print. But tomorrow's headlines will be negative, I suspect.
Milling around in the corridors after the statement I spot my son, Sam, who works for the chancellor, but do not get to talk to him in the melee. Darling's spokesman, Chris Martin, fields reporters questions, a job done in the past by Ed Balls and, long ago, by Gus O'Donnell, now cabinet secretary - the capo di capi of Whitehall.
Ed Miliband, the cabinet office cabinet minister, who has been fingered as a Brownite ''Young Turk'' accused of goading the boss on, is said to be asking what the opposite of a Young Turk would be. An Old Greek ? Jeremy Corbyn, the nice leftwing MP for Islington North, tells me that ''Old Austrian'' sounds better. They were Ottoman Turkey's perennial foe in the west.
One more interesting fact today. Sadiq Khan, the junior whip who monitors the justice department, has been telling colleagues that research shows that Quentin Davies, this season's defector from the Tories, is the first Labour MP ever called Quentin. Apparently there is a campaign afoot to get him to use his real first name; not Quentin at all, but John.
