Might Brown dissolve parliament very soon?

Further to my previous post about the G20 summit and positive coverage Brown is getting, I am starting to wonder if my former confidence that Brown will go the distance is perhaps misplaced. I still think it most likely that the next General Election will be in May or June 2009, but if Brown has the balls he could surprise us all. As Peter Hoskin says here on the Spectator blog today:


Much as with one of Brown's Budgets, it takes at least a few days - if not weeks, months - for the charade to be picked up on by all the media, and to become the dominant narrative.


This chimes with what I was saying too. However, it really will take weeks or months before it becomes clear whether or not the G20 was a success. In the meantime, Brown has come across as a leading world statesman and is getting very positive coverage. It will not get any better than this for Brown.

There are all sort of problems in the economy, with MPs expenses and lots of Labour chickens from the last 12 years coming home to roost.

If I was Brown I would be very quietly considering calling a snap election. Because of our twisted electoral system, he can be a few points behind the Tories and still get a majority, or at the very least be the largest single party in parliament.

The odds are still with a long game but the generally positive reaction to Brown's G20 performance just made a quick election that bit more likely.

Will this unravel for Brown?

So, Brown has managed to get some fantastic coverage in today's press regarding the G20. Probably about as good as he could have hoped for and the markets also rose 4% yesterday.

However, I think we all need to remember that this is Gordon Brown we are talking about here. Every budget that he announced as Chancellor was always spun to the max and usually also garnered positive headlines, until a few days later when the detail had been pored over and the double counting, reannouncements and shabbily concealed bad news became clear to everyone. Indeed Fraser Nelson has already started the analysis here and is does not look good if he is right about the detail.

There is another point worth remembering here. This is Gordon's last roll of the dice. He is massively associated with the decisions made yesterday. He hosted the summit and was first to the podium with the speech after the agreements had been reached. If this package now fails to work then he has nowhere else to go.

I hope it does work - there has been such relentless bad news for the last year that something that showed clear signs that a corner was being turned can only be a good thing.

Charlotte has performed a detailed analysis of yesterday's announcements from a Libertarian perspective.