"Gordon Brown resign" petition. Now at the top!

The "Gordon Brown resign" petition has just reached the top of the chart with 28,454 signatures. Congratulations to Kalvis Jansons for getting there in just over a week!

It will be interesting to see how Number 10 responds to this now. They surely cannot completely ignore it. I know they can claim that some of the signatures will be spurious but I bet the vast majority are from real people and it reflects a strong feeling within the country that the man is a disaster and he should go.

There was talk within the blogosphere earlier today that David Cameron might bring this subject up during PMQs. I had hoped he might but he did not and the more I have thought about it, the more unlikely this seemed. Brown could have plucked a few of the obviously spurious names from the list that had made it through the vetting to make Cameron seem silly. Also, Cameron is probably thinking that assuming he becomes PM himself, after 6 months or a year of tough decisions when he is unpopular, a similar petition against him could be started and he could then find himself skewered with his own words from today.

But just because Cameron and others from within the political classes do not want to make the running on this does not mean that others such as political bloggers should not. Hopefully now it is at the top is should garner more media coverage and we can then get many more signatures. I think the next target should be 100,000 which should be achievable within the next couple of weeks if it is publicised widely enough.

"Gordon Brown resign" petition - numbers now exceed his votes at the last election

Unlike with Tony Blair, nobody outside of the constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath actually voted for Gordon Brown. Blair got 9.5 million votes as putative Prime Minister pledging to serve a full term in the 2005 General Election. Brown has no real mandate for anything because not only has he never faced the electorate in a General Election but uniquely among modern Prime Ministers he hasn't even faced an election within his own party giving him even less legitimacy.

The number of people who voted for Gordon Brown in his constituency in 2005 was 24,278.

The number of people who have put their name to the petition for him to resign on the Number 10 petitions website has just passed this mark and is now at 24,325:


More people have now officially registered that they wish him to go than elected him MP in the first place.

There are only a few thousand more votes to go before it becomes the top petition on the site.

UPDATE: It is now at the top!