If the Rebels Prevail, Brown Could Be Ousted in Days

Labor MPs have a real and interesting opportunity. Let us be quite clear. If the rebellion over the 10p tax rate abolition continues to gather pace and the rebels hold their nerve, they can get rid of Gordon Brown as early as next week. The Tories, it seems, will line up with an amendment from Labour's Frank Field to insist on a compensation package for those who will be worse off under the new tax rates. If Labour lost that vote, it would be all up for the prime minister.

It would be curtains because of the issue itself. Brown's selling point as a politician has always been his concern for the poor. To fight and lose a key vote about taking hundreds of pounds of extra cash from more than 5 million of the poorest voters would be too big a humiliation to survive. Ahead of every knife-edge vote, government whips go around implying to possible rebels that the prime minister could resign. It happened with Blair and the Iraq war, as well as on foundation schools, and it happened time and again in the John Major years. This time, with Brown, it cannot be a bluff. He has stamped his authority on this so clearly that to lose would finish him.

Labor is doing so badly in the polls that quite a lot of backbenchers, and even ministers, are saying behind their hands: "Good thing too, let's call that bluff and have a change of leader while we can." Some are dropping their hands and saying it openly.

Last week I did a television interview with John McDonnell, the leftwing MP who tried to challenge Brown first time round. He told me that "We are very close to the edge", and added: "I would like a leadership election now ... We should have the leadership election we never had. Let's ask Gordon Brown, what do you really stand for? Let the Blairites put up their candidate ... Let's have a contest now and clear the air." When I asked him whether he would stand, he unhesitatingly said yes.

This is real. For labor to have scheduled the vote on the 10p tax rate days ahead of the local elections, and with London on a knife edge, seems an act of incompetence so breathtaking that I'm left wondering whether it's a Baldrick-like cunning plan. Maybe the idea is to spook labor MPs so badly they pull back and kill the Field amendment. If so, it has an air of desperation that reminds me of Major's decision to stand down as party leader and flush out John Redwood to fight him. And I seem to remember that Baldrick's wheezes tended to end, well, not very happily.

Alistair Darling's promise yesterday to revisit the issue of the 10p losers in his next budget is not nearly enough to buy off the rebellion. He says he cannot reopen the budget, but the rebels' call for a package of help does not really require more than minor tinkering. They will be bitterly disappointed.

In fact what Darling and Brown are doing is pleading. They are saying, in effect, if you defeat us you will humiliate us and bring down the whole house of cards. To cave in and offer a deal would be for us to admit that we got it badly wrong. Please, please, give us time to U-turn in our own way, later. As it happens, I can't quite believe Darling when he says that the government knew it was disadvantaging so many poorer voters. I think - I hope - it was a mistake. Mistakes happen. But because it was Brown's mistake, I can also see that Darling can't admit it.

So, back to that interesting opportunity. Should labor MPs strike ruthlessly now and destroy the Brown premiership, thereby giving themselves a second fresh start - David Miliband, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls or whoever? Lots of people will find it tempting. The media will be hysterically excited by the thought of a contest, of course. labor MPs in marginal seats, despairing over their majorities, will be tempted. Other labor people will ask themselves: well, how much worse could it get?

The answer is that it could get a great deal worse. To do in Brown so swiftly and turn to a leadership contest would smack of panic and self-absorption, as well as a final collapse of party discipline. People have been comparing the 10p issue to the effect of the poll tax on the Conservatives in the last days of Thatcher. I think that's over egging it. But to continue the analogy, assassinating Brown now would be to pile the anti-Thatcher coup and the stalking-horse attempt to bring down Major into one awful mess.

It certainly would not produce the leftwing resurgence that McDonnell hopes for. Whoever won would be to the right of Brown and relatively untested and unknown. But to achieve even that mediocre result would certainly involve a fractious, drawn-out public contest. We would see the kind of bloodletting that normally happens after parties lose power, not while they are still in office.

So to those who think the polls could not get worse, I say: just you wait. A leadership battle is just the sort of tempting quick-fix confection that turns out to be honey-coated poison. David Miliband had it right at the weekend when he warned colleagues that they had to rally round the leader and stop fighting one another. Discipline under fire is what is desperately needed.

And it will have to last. For after the 10p vote will be plenty more possible crises, not least the vote over the 42-day detention proposal. On both, I am 100% against the official government view and, with every instinct, on the side of the labor rebels. But disaster is looming and the real parliamentarians have carefully to weigh in the balance what they now do, and ask how much likelier it will make a Tory landslide a year hence.

Brown has been disappointing on a variety of issues, though no disaster. Unemployment remains low. Some kind of fall in house prices was inevitable. Darling's plan to ease the banking crisis seems entirely sensible. Brown's latest words on Mugabe and the elections in Zimbabwe were clear and welcome. Now, nobody notices any of that. All the hysteria is piled on to one or two issues. But there is still time for recovery.

Alongside Baldrick, a shadowy cast of other comic favorites is haunting politics. Sometimes it seems as though the incompetent Frank Spencer has been hanging round Whitehall, while Kenneth Williams' "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me" can be heard echoing from Downing Street. But there's no doubt that one slogan from Dad's Army - "We're all doomed" - is not the one labor MPs should be singing. Panic would be an odd way of trying to regain public trust.