"Clear but muddled" – that's Michael White's take on this week's education speech by Brown – the first of a series hastily announced by Downing Street to divert chatter from leadership speculation, Labour armageddon, impending doom etc.
So what of the little policy speech on which so much lay? Seumas Milne is more positive about it than Michael; he thinks the mechanisms the government is looking at to give parents greater say in the quality of a school are moves in the right direction. Julian Glover says the opposite: he'd err more on the "muddled" than "clear" side of Mike's conclusion. For Julian it's not obvious whether the government wants to encourage greater freedom for schools, or discourage it.
We also look at David Cameron's decision to leave the moderate grouping of European political parties – the European People's party – for an altogether less savoury bunch (Seumas gives us a rundown of their sins: homophobia, hang-'em-and-flog-'em rightwingery ... all a country mile away from Cameron's "progressive conservatism"). As the June European elections loom, the split gets nearer: Julian attempts to explain why (a) Cameron decided to leave the EPP in the first place, and (b) why he's sticking to it.
And then the Royal Mail. Days after those European and local elections, which will probably result in a battering for Labour, the government's schedule indicates it is going to walk straight into a parliamentary punch up.
Some time in June MPs will be asked to vote on plans to partially privatise the Royal Mail, something 148 Labour MPs are opposed to. There's no way out of this decision, Mike warns, and sticking it on the shelf for another aeon isn't an option. Seumas agrees, but doesn't understand why a public-ownership solution still seems to be losing out to a private one.
Tricky? As a wise man once said, the government's options are clear, but muddled.
