RATHER inconveniently, the latest attempted coup against Gordon Brown coincided with the collapse of our blogging software. Apologies for my radio silence yesterday. Here, belatedly, are a few thoughts and questions on the events:

1) What difference will they make to government policy and the way Labour fights the election campaign? Last time (in June 2009) the loyalty of Lord Mandelson, Alistair Darling and others seemed to strengthen their positions and influence. But  it didn’t last, or not much, since Mr Brown soon enough reverted to peddling the discredited “investment versus cuts” line that they and others are said to oppose. (Read Lord Mandelson’s excellent and overshadowed speech of yesterday morning if you doubt that this tension exists.) There is anyway so little time left in the life span of this government that it is hard to envisage much of a policy pay-off now.

2) David Miliband: what is he playing at? Alan Johnson, another plausible replacement prime minister, at least if Mr Brown had fallen under a snowplough this side of an election, was generous in his endorsement of his embattled boss. Calculated or not, that is obviously the right approach for an ambitious politician. Instead Mr Miliband waited and waited, and then managed to be even more tepid than some of his other cabinet colleagues. He ended up looking both tame and disloyal at the same time. Better, surely, for his own interests and those of his party, to have managed something a little more full-throated.

3) There is a French school of historians who see climate as one of the underlying drivers of human history. The typical application of this view to Britain is that, being a grey, damp nation, we have quiet, uneventful politics. Yesterday we had the snowstorm: I wonder what difference that made. Among other things, it meat that the BBC didn’t even lead with the plot on the Six O’clock news, going with the snow instead. It meant that some MPs went home early. If it had been an uneventful, sunny day, would it have made any difference? Maybe not.

4) As Tony Blair might put it: if, after yesterday, the Tories cannot take this lot apart, they should find themselves a different line of work.