The Tories are having a great and terrible day

So far as the Tories are concerned, today’s brought news of both the extremely encouraging and extremely ominous variety. The good news is all for the short-to-medium term. For instance, there’s been the constant drip, drip, drip of Labour leadership speculation, which undermines Brown’s position within his own party. And then, this afternoon, there’s been a damning indictment of Brown’s economic approach from the CBI’s Richard Lambert. Here’s what he said:

“The government appears to have been fighting a series of forest fires rather than building a platform for economic recovery. There’s little sense of a coherent strategy about what’s happened to date … It’s hard to remember – let alone distinguish between – the welter of initiatives that it has launched in the past couple of months. The big ones that could really make a difference … have got lost in a thicket of much less ambitious announcements.”