"We landed in bright sunshine at Dulles, and as usual, I had my two phones out and switched on as we were descending, ready to pick up the latest from London. Not that I was especially obsessed, but I could guarantee Gordon’s first question as we walked off the plane would be: “What’s the news?” If we’d ever been taken hostage by the Taleban in Kabul, rescued by the SAS, and dragged into a helicopter, Gordon’s first question to me when they took the hoods off would have been: “What’s the news?”
The news was that Tony Blair wasn't going to stand down for Gordon Brown before the 2005 election. A behind the scenes account by Brown's former special advisor Damian McBride. It's fascinating not only as a description of how it all went down, but also as a look at how McBride rather brutally dealt with leaks from inside. That is he fingered potentially innocent team members so the real culprit would sweat through the guilt. That's some old school shit.
He segues into the "seven year theory" which suggests that after that amount of time the public tire of their political leaders and want something new. God bless the electorate, if that's true.
Incidentally, McBride resigned in 2009 after it was revealed on a right-wing blog that he'd prepared a bunch of emails smearing a number of conservative MPs.