Your coup update

Just been on Newsnight – yes, a special Saturday edition – to take part in what amounted to a Lineker-style half time coup round up. Charlie Kennedy, who knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a successful leadership coup, made the astute point that it is authority, not arithmetic that really counts. Forget procedure: this is all about the power vacuum left at the centre – a PM who cannot  even dictate the identity of his Chancellor – and the Labour movement’s will to do something about it.

As I say in my Sunday Telegraph column – already online – the Cabinet has behaved with deplorable cowardice, what I would call ‘behind-the-sofa government’. So now it is down to the PLP to decide what to do after tomorrow night’s European election results, and Labour’s historically low 23 per cent of the vote in Thursday’s local elections.