David Miliband: Invitation to a Beheading?

The Times reports, "Mr Brown may garner some encouragement from a YouGov poll in today’s Daily Telegraph, which records that Labour support would decrease from 25 per cent under Mr Brown to 24 per cent under Mr Miliband. With Tony Blair back as leader, Labour would leap to 32 per cent against the Tories at 41 per cent. Mr Brown faces an acute dilemma about what to do with Mr Miliband in the reshuffle... [A] senior figure added, however, that the “nuclear option” of dismissing Mr Miliband had not been discounted."

None of these stats or mutterings make warm and fuzzy reading for Mr Miliband, though Mr Blair might feel a rush of the old self-sustaining pride in his blood. As for Mr Brown, it would be a risible thing to see if he now did to Miliband what Blair as PM always lacked the ruthlessness to inflict upon his grousing Chancellor.

Alex Cox interview on www.filminfocus.com

My write-up of the on-stage conversation event I did with Alex Cox at London's Barbican earlier this month is newly online at Film In Focus, where you can of course find a whole load of other great stuff about film and filmmakers past and present. The evocative photo of Senor Cox herewith is by el_rengozamora over on Flickr. I seem to have lost my old audiocassette of the Repo Man soundtrack and my aged and worn ex-rental VHS of the movie, so I think it's time for me to invest in a no-doubt eminently affordable DVD plus features...

David Cameron: His To Lose...

I hope to be writing about this at length in print quite soon, but after Glasgow East are we looking at a slow grind to the succession circa 2010, as we had after Blair won the Labour leadership in 1994 while Major and his lot fell apart? If so, what are the possible impediments? Depends where you're looking from. The estimable Denis MacShane MP (Labour, Rotherham) wrote in the Telegraph at the weekend, "David Cameron's problem is that nearly all his senior shadow ministers and aides come from a narrow elite of wealth with no worries about mortgages, pensions or education costs." But then how many of the Labour front bench these days can claim to be Of The People in this manner either? To discuss...