The sound of blank cartridge ?

Harold Wilson’s weary observation that a week is a long time in politics has hardly sounded more apposite.

Last weekend, the drumbeat of election speculation was reaching crescendo. This was the final reckoning of the Tory Party we were told. Gordon should strike now and blast the Tories into smithereens once and for all.

Now? Well we can hear a gentle “splish, spolsh” as Labour starts to row back from all the hyperbole.

Yes, there are still echoes of the phoney war with the party putting emergency plans in place to have candidates in all seats by the end of next week if a poll is called on Tuesday. But it feels half-hearted.

Instead, expect to hear Ministers in coming days talking about “getting on with the job” and “implementing the manifesto”. The message will be “back to business” after the fluff of the silly season.

Doubtless “media speculation” will be to blame for all the talk of an election.

For all that, read “the jitters have set in.”

Check out the post below. What is happening now was completely predictable and happens every year during the conference season. The state of the parties ebbs and flows. And as the Tories are the last out of the traps with their conference, they inherit a bounce as we head into the next political term. They were never going to fall apart. Silly to think otherwise. If the PM’s advisers couldn’t foresee all this it then shame on them.

Of course we have been here before. The famous putsch-that-never-was against Tony Blair last September saw Brownite outriders take to the ramparts and talk up a revolution only to lose the belly to fight it.

The sound of blank cartridge can be deafening.

But the big guff-up of the week was undoubtedly the foolish own goal of announcing 1000 troops coming home from Iraq. As 500 were already shaking the sand off their boots back in Blighty, the PM should have been more circumspect.

OK, 1000 sounds twice as impressive as 500, but only if you are going to get away with a bit of sleight of hand. Instead, Gordon took one of the army’s rickety SA80s and shot a great big hole in his foot having worked so hard in previous weeks to embrace the “new politics” and shake off his image as partisan machine politician par excellence.

The plain old truth of where we are is that too many pieces are in flux (to use Mr. Blair’s circumlocution). The polls are flaky. The Labour Party’s machinery is nowhere nearly ready for an election campaign. Foot and mouth, post office strikes, moth-eaten electoral registers and Scotland are all concerns.

A few months of stability and good government would set a better backdrop to an election campaign rather than cutting and running now. Let people see Brown in action and his policy agenda start to bed-in. That was even the advice of Hilary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, on last night’s Newsnight.

To those still prattling on about an early election we at WCH paraphrase Clem Attlee on the loudmouth Harold Laski: a period of silence on your part would be most welcome.