ANALYSIS:BRITAIN'S RULING Labour Party is staggering into a crisis conference this weekend amid growing demands that senior ministers and MPs should swiftly resolve the question of Gordon Brown's leadership, writes Frank Millar
The embattled prime minister might wish to shrug off the opinions of commentators and editorial writers, treating "media froth" on a par with the "sideshow" of the dozen or so MPs so far calling on their leader to quit or at least submit himself for re-election. But the strikingly impatient line reflected across a range of newspapers over the past few days will chime with a British public grown suddenly more terrified by the mounting turmoil in the world's financial markets.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg at his party conference in Bournemouth has already suggested we are witnessing "the death throes" of the New Labour government.
The Conservative leader, meanwhile, will be praying Labour's agonising about Brown continues through the Manchester conference and beyond. In turn in Birmingham the following week then we may expect withering assaults by Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne on a self-obsessed Labour Party fixated on its own future rather than that of the country.
As shares crashed and 5,000 workers in the City of London lost their jobs on the morning after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States, Brown's "Black Monday" came complete with a new warning, this time from the CBI, that the UK will fall into recession this year.
Urging Labour to make its mind up now either to back or sack the prime minister, meanwhile, the London Timeswarned there was nothing to be gained by putting the troubled premier on a further period of probation: "If there are senior figures who want Gordon Brown to be removed they should say so now. If they decide instead to stay their hand - and there are many good reasons for such restraint (the lack of a decent alternative being one, the need to call an early election under a new leader being another) - then they should give their leader proper backing rather than hovering behind his back holding a knife."
The newspaper said it would be ironic if, having decided Brown was a ditherer, his opponents proved too indecisive to do anything about the situation.
Beyond the political calculation, however, lay a much bigger one: "It is Labour's job to govern and it is impossible for it to do so properly if it does not allow itself to be led. The political future of the Labour Party is a matter of great interest to its own members and of little interest to anyone else. With the economic picture darkening, it is not acceptable for members of the government to spend the coming months talking about themselves."
Margaret Beckett, the former heavyweight minister recently tipped for a return to cabinet in a Brown reshuffle, seized on that message and relayed it with a warning to her parliamentary colleagues. The country would neither "understand or forgive a party that appears to be concerned with its own internal disputes than with the very real problems" facing it, she said.
The problem with invoking that self-evident truth in defence of the leader was that Beckett implicitly acknowledged the rising alarm in the party high command at the state of parliamentary opinion. As did international development secretary Douglas Alexander when he claimed it was "unconvincing" to suggest there was significant support for another candidate.
True, there is no evident or likely rallying behind any one alternative. But Alexander did not bother to deny that there are alternative candidates pretty much out there already. The showdown may be delayed, but it is hard to see now how it might be avoided.