A senior Tory tells me, over a cup of Earl Grey, that 30 Labour/Lib Dem councillors have defected to the Conservatives in the last 12 months.

Only one Tory councillor has quit the party during the same period.

Not a lot, judging by the latest poll by Labourhome.

A poll by the group - designed to “take the temperature of Labour activists” gave the highest scores (this is relative) to David Miliband at 5.48, Alan Johnson at 5.45 and Hilary Benn at 5.43.

The worst were Gordon Brown at 3.37 and Alistair Darling at 3.35.

 Remember: these are Labour activists.

There is one statistic that really hammers home how expensive the 10p U-turn is. About £2bn of the £2.7bn in compensation is going to those who had already won from the 2007 Budget. Officials insist this was the only simple and quick solution. But there was another way that was cheaper and more comprehensive.

Ian Mulheirn, chief economist at the Social Market Foundation and a former Treasury official, thinks he has the answer. He believes the chancellor could have compensated all those who lost out for just £1.5bn. By contrast, the chancellor’s plan was almost twice as expensive but only covered 80 per cent of the 10p rate losers.

The main downside would be losing any political benefits from the bung to middle England. Indeed, that may be the reason it was not pursued.

The alternative involves raising the income allowance by £1,100 and tapering (or gradually reducing) the additional allowance away as a person’s income reaches 19,000. Mr Mulheirn calculates this would fully compensate the 5.3m losers for 1.5bn in a targeted manner. There would be no additional benefit to those higher up the income scale. The main downside is that it makes the tax system more complicated (but so did raising the allowance mid-year).

The graph below shows how this proposal compares to what Mr Darling proposed yesterday. The effect of the 10p rate is in blue, Mr Darling’s proposal is marked in red, and Mr Mulheirn’s is in green. The green line is clearly fairer to the poor.  Was Gordon Brown was offered this solution? And did he decide against it?

Caroline Flint has just announced a new £200m fund to buy unsold properties from desperate homebuilders and then rent them to social tenants.

By my calculations, that money could buy…..less than 1,000 average British homes.

In a country of more than 50m people, this is the equivalent of a finger in the dyke.

The  government’s other measure to prop up the housing market is no more impressive.

It is - as I predicted in this morning’s FT - opening up shared equity schemes to more first time buyers. I hope, for their sake, the youngsters ignore this temptation - at least until prices have fallen by 10 per cent or more.*

* The government’s own prediction, as spotted on Ms Flint’s cabinet briefing notes yesterday.

Charles Clarke, the dissident former home secretary, was fairly loyal last night at a debate  held by Progress magazine at (ironic this) the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House. However, Mr Clarke conspicuously failed to answer the question of whether Gordon Brown was the right man to lead Labour into the next election.*

The motion: whether Labour could hold the south.

The most gloomy prognosis was from Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, who said Labour’s notional majority would end with the loss of just 24 seats. Of these, he argued, 17 were ominously south of the line from the Wash to the Severn.

With the public mood about the economy at its most pessimistic for 40 years, said Kellner, the result of the next election depended on how the UK’s finances panned out over the next year.  

John Denham, skills secretary, hinted that Gordon Brown should not be blamed for Labour’s situation in the south.

“We lost one and a quarter million votes between 97 and the last general election, (in the south)” he said. “The sort of policy decisions that say this has all happened in the last six months isn’t necessarily the right starting point for Labour’s strategy in the south”.

His recipe for a southern revival sounded - to me anyway - Thatcherite in tone. Labour succeeded in 1997, Denham argued, because it had spoke in general terms about a society it was trying to create.

“A society where it has been possible for people prepared to work hard to see improvements in their lives”….he said….”It  was a party that said we have a bias towards those who are prepared to pay their way…we have to tell that story again in a 21st century world.”

* Meanwhile Tamsin Dunwoody, the Labour candidate for the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, was asked three times last night whether Mr Brown was an asset or a liability. She refused to answer the question.

It was Sian Berry, the Green candidate for London mayor, who told me - a while back - that people care less about the environment during difficult economic times.

“In about the mid-1980s, environmental issues started to appear spontaneously, and it kept rising up to 1989,” says Ms Berry. “At the top of the economic cycle it was considered more important than health and immigration. During the recession it dropped like a stone.”

There is even a word for it: Maslow’s theory (look it up on Google).

Hilary Benn, environment secretary, will tackle the theme in a speech tomorrow in Washington.

“Some will say that these pressures mean that we must put our economic interests first - that we must choose economic stability over environmental stability. We need both. So I believe that this is a false choice….” he will say.

“We must resist temptation to put off dealing with climate change for another day, when the world economy is stronger.”

But there is growing evidence that green issues are sliding down the policy priority list; the lukewarm path to bin taxes and road taxes…the possible cancellation of autumn’s fuel duty rise…

Nor are the Tories banging the green drum any more. There was little or no mention of the environment in David Cameron’s big policy speech last week.

David Brooks, one of the most influential conservative commentators in the US, has just penned a love-bomb to David Cameron in the New York Times. The Republican party, he argues, must take lessons from across the Atlantic to revive its fortunes. Here is the key passage:

The flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”

Well worth a read.

Lord Darzi’s pledge yesterday that future health service changes will be evidence based and subject to external review is all aimed at making some entirely necessary changes to the shape of services more understandable and palatable.

As part of the reassurance, service changes will be put through the government’s “gateway review” process, one that subjects major government projects to peer review to identify failures and risks early so they can be put right.

Will these be published, Lord Darzi was asked. “Yes, we will publish them,” he said. But did he not know that the Office of Government Commerce, the review process guardian, is currently fighting its way up and down the
courts refusing to release the reviews on the grounds that staff will not be frank about problems if they
believe their admissions will become public?

Really, Lord Darzi said. Nonetheless, ” we will publish them. This is about transparency, and if you want to engage the public in this process you have to be transparent”.

A couple of hours later the health department press office is on the phone. The OGC had been consulted. “Ara made an error. We will publish the clinical assessments that go into the gateway reviews, but not the whole review”.

The result? Disappointment at the Campaign for Freedom of Information which had been delighted at the apparent weakening of the government’s stance on non-publication - one that the courts look almost certain eventually to overturn.

“Lord Darzi’s arguments in favour of publication are far more persuasive than the government’s arguments against,” Maurice Frankel, its director, said. “It shows that ministers invidually are persuaded, it is just that the government collectively refuses to be”. Quite.

There is one huge roadblock to any future leadership challenge to Gordon Brown: any challenger would need the backing of a fifth of MPs to trigger an election. This restriction is a big reality check to those speculating that Mr Brown’s position is in danger.

But, as someone pointed out to me recently, this is not the only way that Mr Brown could be deposed. There is a Labour rule that would allow for a change of prime minister without the immediate need for a party leadership election. It is effectively the “silent coup” clause.

If the cabinet joined forces and convinced a serving Labour prime minister that his time was up, he would become “permanently unavailable”, in the words of the party rule book. The cabinet, “in consultation with the NEC”, would then be able to anoint a new prime minister “until a ballot…can be carried out”. An election is not immediately triggered: the cabinet could decide to “leave the post vacant until the next party conference”.

There appears to be the wiggle room in these procedures (which I have pasted below) to put off an embarrassing leadership election until a general election — if the cabinet were united.

Clearly there are some massive qualifications to this fantasy politics. Can you imagine Mr Brown stepping down that easily? Or the cabinet acting acting in unison? And how bad would things need to get to convince the cabinet that appointing a doubly unelected prime minister would be wise? All highly unlikely. But it is always worth knowing the rules of the game.

4B.2e Procedure in a vacancy

(i) When the party is in government and the party leader is prime minister
and the party leader, for whatever reason, becomes permanently unavailable,
the cabinet shall, in consultation with the NEC, appoint one of its members to
serve as party leader until a ballot under these rules can be carried out.

(ii) When the party is in government and the deputy leader becomes party
leader under (i) of this rule, the Cabinet may, in consultation with the NEC,
appoint one of its members to serve as deputy leader until the next party
conference. The Cabinet may alternatively, in consultation with the NEC,
leave the post vacant until the next party conference.

Labour’s national executive committee are meeting again this week to revive the search for a new general secretary to replace Peter Watt - who quit last year after the David Abrahams proxy donations controversy.

On Friday the party slipped out the news that David Pitt-Watson, the City fund manager who was poised to take the job, had walked. The founder and chairman of Hermes Equity Ownership Services was concerned about potential liabilities from taking up the job at a time when Labour is about £20m in the red.  

There is speculation that Mike Griffiths of Unite - who was pipped to the post by Pitt-Watson - could stand again.

But my understanding is that the unions are trying to secure a more consensual figure and have Keith Sonnet, deputy general secretary of Unison (now part of super-union Unite), lined up. If you want to know more about him here is a link.

Another frontrunner is likely to be Ray Collins, a senior figure in the Transport and General Workers Union (also part of Unite).