LONDON – BRITAIN’S newspapers said on Saturday that Gordon Brown’s premiership was fatally scuppered and called for a general election to restore some authority in the government.

A defiant Mr Brown vowed to tough it out as prime minister after Cabinet members quit in bitter circumstances and his governing Labour Party suffered electoral meltdown.

Newspaper editorials raked through the wreckage and said Mr Brown was badly wounded in the fight to save his job. ‘Gordon Brown is like a wounded bull… proud, defiant and seemingly unaware of the blades driven deep within his shoulder blades,’ said The Sun.

‘For all the dire labels of a ‘dead man walking’, he is still walking.’ The tabloid said Mr Brown needed to rally his new Cabinet and get them working rather than plotting over the coming months before putting his leadership ‘properly to the test’ later this year.

The Financial Times said time had run out on the prime minister. ‘At the end of the worst week in his political life, Gordon Brown is still standing – just. The question is whether he can still govern,’ the broadsheet said.

‘He has failed to reassert his authority in the Cabinet reshuffle. He faces humiliation in the European elections. He should show he commands a clear majority in his party or step down and clear the way for a general election.’

Of the reshuffle, The Times said ‘the correct technical term was a suicide pact.. an exercise in insurrection management’. It was a hasty exercise that showed the government was ‘paralysed, with a weak prime minister presiding over a Cabinet that has declined to show any steel’.

Even the staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Mirror said: ‘Brown has a mountain to climb if he is to convince voters that Labour is on their side and worth voting for.’ The reshuffle ’smacked of expediency and was not the radical surgery we had expected and the country deserved.’

The Daily Mail said Mr Brown was now ‘a deeply compromised figure who will have been severely wounded’. ‘Yes, we need a general election, sooner rather than later, to cleanse parliament and give a proper mandate for ministerial action, which this government so manifestly lacks.’

‘But the last thing Britain needs now is a second unelected Labour prime minister in just two years.’ The Independent also said the need for an election was ‘overwhelming’. — AFP

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