These are bad times for Stephen Byers. It may come to nothing, but there is dark talk that he should be suspended from the parliamentary party, or even the party itself for bringing Labour into disrepute.
Some in Downing Street think he is doing more damage to the party than Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of Unite.
Either way between the BA picket lines and Byers announcing he is a cab for hire, Brown is losing more precious time than he would like voters to devote to taking "another long hard look" at the Tories.
The Byers affair appears to have two days' life in it, and with the unions and BA management contriving a score draw in the first round of strikes, there is a good chance that the second set of strikes will happen.
Those close to the BA dispute say it was within a whisker of being solved on Friday night, but is now embroiled in technical issues as to whether the strike is suspended or called off pending further talks.
Some in cabinet think the best outcome is for the union to be crushed and seen to be crushed.
The words brain dead and Woodley are being put pretty adjacent to one another by some in the cabinet.
Others hope Brown - dubbed "Cash Gordon" by the Tories - can rescue some kudos by acting as the go-between, so leaving Cameron looking like a juvenile throwback to the 1970s, scoring party points about the need to cross picket lines. But that is a fond hope, at present.
