What Mandy would have told the waverers?

The parliamentary Labour party would be mad to dispense with Brown right now. A change of leader would make the calls for an immediate general election absolutely deafening, and holding one this summer would be infinitely worse for Labour than holding one in a year's time.

Were the Tories to take over now, a visionless and vacuous right would enjoy the political fruits of the now pretty inevitable economic turnaround, and Labour would be finished, perhaps for good. The left would be resurgent, the right would be intransigent, the party would become even more irrelevant.

Which is why the more intelligent Blairites have not jumped on the bandwagon of would be assassins, currently populated by - how to put it? - people of unproven ability. For Mandelson and others, the risk of a big swing left and political obscurity is just too great to be countenanced.

Of course, the press makes it look like Brown is just digging in because he's a control-freak oblivious to the popular will. In fact, his resolve is actually rather astute and, regardless of whether his own credibility can be restored, probably works in the whole party's favour.

All that said, Labour still have to do a huge amount of work if it is to restore to itself any semblance of a popular movement.

A couple of other things to reflect on in the light of the EU election results. Only UKIP and the SNP can really claim to have had a fantastically good night. The Greens' laudable 2.4% increase in vote share hasn't translated into seats. The Tories' progress is very limited. There is no rising tide of support for Cameron and no reliable thumbs up for anyone except Salmond's lot. (In fact, the SNP had a 0.72% rise in the share of the UK-wide vote, only 0.01% lower than the Tories' increase.)

The Tories have not really capitalised on Labour's predicament. It is therefore still conceivable that Labour will make up a hefty minority of MPs in the next parliament, providing it is their government that sees the UK through the next few months.