Good column by Martin Kettle…

The problem is that Brown is Brown. There is not some other Brown. As he made clear to Andrew Marr last weekend, the prime minister sees the May 1 election reverse as a reprimand, not a rejection. His response is to work harder, like Boxer in Animal Farm. But working harder does not mean working differently, as the clumsy handling of Scotland this week showed.

Brown is set in his ways. His ways are tactical, triangulatory and increasingly old-fashioned. He remains fixated on the Daily Mail. His response to Frank Field’s campaign about the effects of his tax changes on the poor was classic old politics: first he vehemently denied it; then he sent out his nasties to try to take his critics down; then, I am told, he tried to buy Field off – twice – with a government job. Only when that failed did he then concede, extremely grudgingly, that he had got anything wrong.

These were not the responses of a man who understands change. His preposterous 20-hour days – the Sarah Brown profile in the June issue of Vogue reveals that he is often still working at 4am – will become 22-hour days and at some point, he believes, the voters will realise that he is right. To put it at its gentlest, this is what Joan Didion calls magical thinking.

The flipside of the denial about Brown is the continuing denial that anyone other than Brown is papabile. This is the kind of doubt that takes root during long incumbencies of any kind. But the imperative of events invariably dispels it. Political parties always have other potential leaders in the ranks. Labour today has several of them…