Nick Robinson’s analysis of why the Snow Plot failed misses, I think, one key reason why none of Mr. Brown’s antagonists have succeeded.

That being: there there are actually no, or at least very few, actual policy or ideology wedge issues that split the Labour Party. Even at Cabinet level, the tension is not related to any specific direction of travel or intellectual underpinning that Gordon Brown has embraced. The rift is purely stylistic, which makes it something of a curiosity, as both Thatcher and Major faced intra-party opposition who disagreed with them profoundly on the way in which the country should be run. But more than that, it’s this quality that severely reduces the dissent’s chances of success: without the white heat of an ideological rift, getting enough people to take on a sufficient amount of risk to oust a sitting Prime Minister would be an impossible task.

An argument could be constructed that the lack of a coherent alternative ideology within Labour is a symptom of Labour’s political turpitude, and to be sure, the cabinet does seem to lack the ideological creativity that one would expect of a government at war with itself. With the exception of Harriet Harman and Ed Balls in their respective remits, they seem to be a bunch singularly averse to asserting firm positions on anything.