Steve Richards: Hasty plotters still offer no plausible vision of life after Brown

Charles Clarke has done the easy bit. His article in the New Statesman is a cogent analysis of the hole that Labour is in. But Mr Clarke is not a political columnist making an assessment of the current gloomy prospects for Labour. He is a player seeking the removal of Gordon Brown.

In this role, he has gone public without a clear sense of how he is going to achieve his objective. This is dangerous, not so much for Mr Clarke but for his party. He makes a lot of noise, prompts a series of even more damaging headlines, undermines Mr Brown and yet at the end of the road, Mr Brown could still be Prime Minister, more unpopular than he is at the moment as a result of this sequence. On the Today programme, Mr Clarke admitted the route towards his goal was unclear. There may be no cathartic moment to follow the increase in pressure.

So far, David Miliband has rattled the cage with an article on Labour's future that made no mention of Mr Brown. That did not produce a bandwagon within the Labour party towards the Foreign Secretary and, for now, he is keeping his head down. Similarly, no one significant has publicly followed up Mr Clarke's call to arms and he admitted in his interview it was possible no one would. Mr Clarke's aim is to destabilise in order to create a context in which the leader becomes doomed, but what if others fail to strike? They are all doomed then.

There are other gaps too in the high-risk strategy of those seeking to oust Mr Brown. Like other noisy dissenters, Mr Clarke offers no alternative policies to address the political nightmare of governing in an economic downturn, the main source of Labour's unpopularity. There is no point replacing a leader if the successor is pilloried for presiding over precisely the same economic gloom.

Those who want the removal of Mr Brown have three obligations. First, they must spell out in detail how they would deal with the external factors that have derailed Mr Brown's leadership, in particular the credit crunch and the soaring price of oil and food. Second, they must outline their policies for the future and how they connect with a party that is meant to be on the centre-left of British politics. In fairness to Mr Clarke he has done that in articles and lectures. Third, they must demonstrate they can build a coalition of support that gives Labour a chance of winning the next election.

I am not saying that some of the doubters are incapable of meeting all three conditions, but they have shown no sign of doing so yet. The first and third are particularly daunting especially when they are being addressed in the context of forcibly removing a Prime Minister selected by their party a year or so ago.

Instead of attempting to meet these demanding conditions, the dissenters tend to blame the party's unpopularity on Mr Brown's leadership alone and offer bland generalities in articles which give no sense of what they would do when dealing with the specific crises that a Prime Minister faces on most days of the week. If they cannot meet these three conditions the public dissenters are contributing to the decline of their party rather than reversing it.

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