Nice Guardian piece by Jonathan Freedland.

As for personal ambition, the virus that brought down Macbeth, those looking kindly on Brown said he was cured of it. "I'm past caring," he mused privately on Friday, when asked about his own position. They point to his statement accepting that Clegg talk to Cameron first, all statesmanlike and above the fray, as if he had made the emotional shift from combatant to referee.

Others see the weekend’s events rather differently. The less charitable version pictures Brown in the No 10 bunker, scheming to cling on. It cites the late-night calls to Clegg – although those who heard them insist they were calm and businesslike – imagining a fevered Brown stabbing jotting pads with his thick pen, totting up the assorted minor parties to see if he could somehow reach the magic number that spelled power.

That the PM saw Clegg again today, in a clandestine meeting at the Foreign Office, confirmed Brown was far from ready to surrender. Instead, this man of uncanny resilience was clearly planning one more resurrection.

Which version is true? Is Brown now the becalmed statesman, planning his exit, or the bloodied survivor, determined to fight on? The likelihood is that, when it comes to Brown – the most psychologically complex figure to inhabit Downing Street since Winston Churchill – the answer is both.

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

I watched Gordon Brown’s ghastly Conference speech and thought that Simon Hoggart got it right.

But there was a dreamlike quality to the whole speech. The gist of it was, that after nearly 13 years, Labour wants a crack at government. Having constructed a short, sanitised version of a past that did happen, he launched into a future that probably never will: whimpering bankers flee from the wrath of the British people, grateful old folk get free care at home, sinister-sounding “action squads” will sort out troublemakers on problem estates, no more hereditary peers, a plebiscite on PR, green jobs for green people, as he almost said, and a weird Victorian notion of an institution for fallen women – a barracks for single teenage mothers. There will be “family intervention projects” for the most “chaotic” families. “Blimey, it’s the fip-man at the door. Put that spliff out and get the dog off the baby’s tea.”

And asbos will be strictly enforced, no doubt by the same action squads that will stop binge drinking and bankers’ bonuses. But as the late Linda Smith said: “Don’t knock asbos – for some of these kids it’s the only qualification they’ve got.”

The whole fantasy, that Labour has another five years in office to do all the things it never quite got round to in the last 13, pleased the conference mightily.

They’re going to dream massive buy-two-get-one-free dreams and reach deep inside themselves like the monster from Alien. They loved it.

As regular readers know, I’ve thought for a long time that the reason Tony Blair hung on for so long was that he knew Brown would be a disaster. In that, at least, he was dead right.

Thoughtful Observer column by will Hutton.

The essence of democracy is alternative governments. After 13 years of New Labour, the country is ready for change. But the question it will and must ask is whether David Cameron’s Conservatives are the answer to Britain's problems. To jump from the frying pan into the fire would be stupid. Brown, like the tortured heroes of Shakespearean tragedies, is complex: he has strengths that partly compensate for his all too obvious flaws. One strength is that he is assembling an array of policies that are right. This, along with his astonishing tenacity, makes it so hard for his party to junk him. And here's the rub. The country may find it has the same difficulty.

One of the Conservative party’s problems is that it does not have the intellectual, political and philosophical wind at its back and it has no surefooted sense of what it should do as the economic and social crisis unfolds. Thus Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty in which little positive has been done. As somebody close to him acknowledged admiringly to me, Boris is the classic Tory. It is as important to occupy power, so denying its use to others, as to do anything constructive with it. That may excite Tory camp followers; others may feel that the point of power is to use it.

The size of the prospective budget deficit has given the Tory leadership a new confidence. The Conservatives’ task is to do what comes naturally: to take an axe to public spending and the regulatory arms of government like OfCom or the Financial Services Authority that displease the Tories’ natural constituencies, whether Rupert Murdoch or a stage army of City traders. Yet under Adair Turner, the FSA has begun to get serious about insider trading, investment banker bonuses and the structure of banks’ business models. Just as it gets its act together, it is to be disbanded and its powers handed to what City minister Paul Myners calls the “bookish” Bank of England, whose record of both spotting asset price bubbles and handling bank crises is dire. Thinking City people concerned about the dominance of speculative finance are shaking their heads in disbelief. Equally, Sky’s competitors and many consumers are no less dismayed that a champion of competition is to be abolished.

Diane Abbott MP said something interesting on the radio the other day, namely that the atmosphere among her fellow-MPs was “hysterical”. And the cause of the hysteria? Why the expenses scandal (mainly) plus fear of losing their seats. In the circumstances, Abbott worried about her colleagues’ ability to make any rational decisions about Gordon Brown’s future. She might be right.

But what would such a ‘rational’ strategy be like? Answer: it would involve calming down and letting Brown survive subject to conditions about sorting out the expenses shambles and a modicum of attainable constitutional reform (like fixed-term Parliaments, reductions in the volume of legislation, relaxation of the Party whip system and giving MPs the right to choose membership and chairmanship of Select Committees).

Switching leaders now — however emotionally satisfying it might be — would be suicidal, not just for Labour MPs but also for the country. It would provoke an emergency General Election which, if held at the moment, would produce crazy results. In fact, if MPs wanted to ensure a few Westminster seats for the BNP to add to the two European Parliament seats they picked up last night, then provoking an election is the best way to go about it. What should be in everybody’s minds now is what happened in Holland after the murder of Pim Fortuyn — when the Dutch elected a parliament of fruitcakes and rendered their country virtually ungovernable for several years.

As for political journalists… well their orgasmic delight at being able to cover such a juicy story is becoming nauseating. They really are like hyenas closing in on a wounded beast. And apart from anything else, most of them are adding little if any value to the story. And yet BBC TV (and no doubt ITV and Sky too) persist in wasting energy, fuel, time and money ferrying their big name reporters to Downing Street instead of sticking them in a studio or keeping them in Westminster where they can get on with real investigation and reporting.

It’s really irritating, for example, to see the ludicrous way the Beeb is mis-using its Political Editor, Nick Robinson. He’s very useful as a summarising, contextualising commentator after others have done the leg-work. But the most value-adding contribution he’s made over the last few frantic days was a piece to camera recorded at his desk. Dragging him to Downing Street to say exactly the same thing would have been daft. But that’s what they do most of the time.