You know a government is in trouble when the ‘week from hell’ moves beyond cliché to become the normal state of affairs. We already had a slew of pieces around the time of party conference asking if things could get any worse (I believe I even wrote one myself). And then they did.
The Mail and the Sunday Times have now joined in with what has become a national sport of Tory-baiting. The charge of incompetence is everywhere and everyone is blaming everybody else. The Mitchell affair hit at the very heart of party discipline, with the man appointed to impose it losing every scrap of authority he had before finally falling on his sword. Now the Sun (seconded by Guido) has demanded the heads of ‘No. 10 chiefs’ Craig Oliver and Andrew Cooper. But who on earth would replace them? Who would want the job?
The next few weeks will be crucial for the government, not least because we will discover whether a central element of its reforms has been working when the first full “outcomes” of the Work Programme are published.
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