Peter and Gordon – what really happened?

The Prime Minister was all smiles with Peter Mandelson at the London launch of the economic growth strategy, this afternoon.

But yesterday, after a phone call around 8am, the two didn’t speak again. All day.

Wasn’t Peter Mandelson meant to be the key strategist, right-hand man, Deputy Prime Minister in all but name?

Yesterday morning’s speech by Peter Mandelson was supposed to mark a drawing of a line under the cooling of relations between him and the Prime Minister but things are still clearly not great. What this makes you realise is just how well aligned some of the stars were for yesterday’s attempted coup.

Unlike last year, Peter Mandelson wasn’t the Blairite bouncer on the door in quite the same way. He wasn’t initiating anything, he wasn’t exerting too much protective energy either. It’s no secret Lord M thinks that the party is in danger of forgetting the aspirational better off and focusing too much on the core vote.

One of the plotters tells me there were indeed 6 Cabinet Ministers who were ready to jump – there was, I was told, “an expectation not an understanding, something stronger than an impression” that in the right circumstances they would act. (This plotter estimates the Cabinet is made up of 4 or 5 diehard loyalists to Gordon Brown, 2 neutrals and the rest had various degrees of hostility and criticism.)

So what went wrong?

A Cabinet minister told me the plotters’ biggest mistake was that they had not constructed a mechanism of guaranteed momentum – they needed either to unveil impressive new names of supporters each hour to satisfy the 24 hour TV news machine or have some sort of mechanism whereby backbenchers could register their support – maybe through an email system.

Announce that one hundred MPs were backing the move, the Cabinet member said, and the “skids” would’ve been under Gordon Brown. So the mechanisms weren’t great. One former minister called it “Charles’ worst coup yet.”

Tonight, by the way, Charles Clarke is facing a constituency association meeting in Norwich at which some Party members are expected to attack him and tell him to pipe down but he is not thought to be in danger of de-selection.

PS

What do you think Gordon Brown would most like to have been doing in the hour after Prime Minister’s Questions as his political life hung in the balance? Probably not sit in a room with Nick Clegg and David Cameron giving separate pre-scheduled security briefings on the situation in Yemen.

One of the party leaders, I hear, witnessed modest amounts of frenzy on the fringes of the meeting at the Prime Minister’s House of Commons office as aides tried to line up other meetings and conversations to make sure Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister by Monday.