A weekend of woe for Brown

What a strange doublewhammy weekend of memoirs we have. Yesterday the story was the news that Cherie Blair was publishing her memoirs six months early and having the serialised in the Times. Today we the start of John Prescott's autobiography being serialised in the Sunday Times.

I imagine there two ways you can look at this. My first impression yesterday was that Cherie Blair's helpful contribution to Brown's premiership did not really reveal anything we didn't already know. All it did was confirm what was believed to be the case.

The same is largely true for Prescott too it seems. The general thrust so far is that he played the peacemaker in the Blair/Brown axis more than once. Prezza has also confirmed that Brown would have moody fits of silence in meetings and then would 'explode like a volcano' later on.

Again much of this is not new news, but the real impact has to be the timing. Is it a bizarre coincidence that two of the closest people to the most significant political power relationship in the last decade just happened to publish and serialise in apparent unison?

Only they know the answer, but, at a time when Brown is suffering so badly, with ICM calling a 'dead man walking', it is difficult not to ponder upon whether the timing represent a quiet revolutionary fightback by those who consider themselves victims of a Brownite coup that they knew would be a disaster.

With ICM now saying that the Crewe and Nantwich by-election is virtually in the bag for the Tories, a weekend where people that were on the inside start to push the line that Brown is, in effect, mentally unstable, how long will it be before even more talk of a leadership challenges surface. As Prescott once said, the 'tectonic plates' are moving.