Word: mps
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...billed as tragedy - an insurrection that would topple the Labour Party's flawed hero, Gordon Brown - but it played out like a Marx Brothers farce. The June 8 meeting that would determine Brown's fate attracted so many Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords that a House of Commons committee room quickly filled to capacity. And still they came, squeezing their way into the mass of bodies politic. When a clutch of tardy ministers wrenched open the doors, pressure-packed colleagues tumbled into the corridor, itself lousy with reporters poised to relay the verdict...
...could hardly perform worse. But Brown picked up the keys to 10 Downing Street from Tony Blair, and any handover of power from one unelected Prime Minister to another would ratchet up pressure from political opponents and the public for an early election. When it came to the crunch, MPs - many of whom fear losing their seats - opted to put off the moment of truth. In retrospect, that was not surprising; turkeys rarely vote for an early Christmas...
...party has endured a long, slow decline, but its current crisis was triggered by one of the greatest press exposés of the modern age. It started when a former soldier and Conservative supporter called John Wicks contacted the Telegraph Media Group with a disc containing details of MPs' expenses claims. Quite how Wicks came by the disc remains a mystery, but its contents...
...expenses claims ranged from hilarious to heinous, from charges for replacing a bath plug to maintaining a moated residence. And they demonstrated that some politicians routinely worked the system to minimize their personal tax burden at public cost - much of this falling within rules agreed by MPs over years to enhance their remuneration without having to publicly award themselves fatter pay packets. Over 27 days of revelations in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, politicians of all hues have been implicated and their reputations trashed...
...Labour's P.M. With Brown still at the helm, the Tories would romp home 74 seats to the good. More evidence of that nature - or defeat in either of the two tricky by-elections Labour faces in the coming months, following the resignation of a pair of its own MPs - could yet prompt dissenters to push for a new leader in the fall. With Brown, says Neil Stewart, once political secretary to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, "that connection is not there and that connection is not an optional thing in modern politics, as Obama has demonstrated." (See pictures...