Gordon Brown's accession to the premiership later this year is the surest thing in politics since the outcome of the elections his alleged role model, Josef Stalin, used to hold. The Labour party is a kindly, sentimental old thing - it hasn't ousted an incumbent leader since 1935 - and it will take the view that, after he has waited so long, it would be cruel and unjust to deny Gordon his prize.
Many journalists, however, still long for a successful challenger, largely because a Brown defeat would make dramatic copy, but also because some of them do not care for the chancellor, finding him too dour and cerebral. Though most rivals have lost credibility, one remains a runner, in Fleet Street's eyes at least. David Miliband is the political success story of the spring. Every editor wants an article from him, every paper wants to lunch him, every TV producer wants him on screen.
The Telegraph reported last Wednesday that he has been "a blur of activity in the higher reaches of the media world in recent days", with lunches at the Mail, Independent and Express, as well as a New Statesman article and a couple of book reviews. This, to the Telegraph, was evidence of a leadership campaign. Two days running, it offered encouragement, writing warmly of Miliband's "thought-through philosophy" and his "bracingly direct" approach.
The Observer, too, seems inclined to give the young pretender a whirl. Rather mysteriously, it rated Brown's chances of becoming PM as "better" after the budget (is it possible to improve on what 98% of Labour MPs agree is a certainty?) but suggested a combination of Miliband and the Treasury minister Ed Balls "could be more appealing".
The Times is certainly enthusiastic. Several of its writers, notably Mary Ann Sieghart, have been trying to launch a Miliband bandwagon for months. The Times could scarcely contain itself when the former cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull accused Brown of Stalinism. Its front page proclaimed "Black Tuesday" over a picture of Brown and Times 2 produced a spread, supposedly offering advice, but in reality detailing Brown's flaws. "His suits are ill-fitting, crumpled and cheap-looking," an "image consultant" noted. His hair "always has an unkempt look", lamented a hairdresser. From couchside, Tanya Byron, "Times psychologist", detected "an inner sense of powerlessness" beneath the control freakery.
Yet no newspaper will wish to back a loser and I wonder how many editors and proprietors would support a Miliband candidacy when the chips were down. I suspect Rupert Murdoch has already come to terms with the inevitability of a Brown premiership. The Sun - which reflects the great man's thoughts more closely than his posher papers do - was dismissive of Turnbull's views, describing Brown as "a towering figure of international stature".
Brown has a more surprising source of support. Though the Mail regularly lashes him for excessive taxation and regulation, it treats Brown, in other respects, with an admiration that borders on sycophancy. It, too, gave short shrift to Turnbull. "Hypocrisy of a loose-lipped civil servant," sneered a news feature headline. After Brown's final budget, trilled a leader, he could hold his head "justifiably high". The British economy was "amazingly successful" and the chancellor's stature "not in doubt". The paper's opinion of Miliband may be judged from a leader in February, which described Brown as "head and shoulders above all other possible candidates for the Labour leadership", and from the headline on Peter McKay's column last Monday: "Miliband? He's a new John Major."
The Mail's affection for Brown goes back several years. The editor, Paul Dacre, described him, in an interview in 2002, as "touched by the mantle of greatness . . . a genuinely good man . . . of enormous willpower and courage". This unusual indulgence of a leftwing politician perhaps says more about Dacre's hatred of Tony Blair (which followed a dalliance around 1996-7) than about his attitudes to Brown.
It may also, as one Mail journalist suggested to me, be an example of how the two weirdest boys in the playground are often drawn to each other. But there is, I think, a natural affinity in the two men's moral outlooks. Both are puritans at heart. Dacre puts traditional family life at the centre of his philosophy and he likes Brown's repeated references to "hard-working families". Like many men of his generation, Dacre (born 1948) yearns for the simpler world of his 1950s childhood. Sarah Brown, who seems to subjugate her career and personality to her husband's, is a model wife from that era, praised even by the waspish Amanda Platell for "quiet dignity and modesty", in contrast to you-know-who.
Brown, though not widely loved among journalists, has some unusually dedicated and powerful admirers, on this paper and the Mirror as well as the Mail. I do not blame Miliband for exploiting the newspapers' desperation to find a plausible challenger. Only an MP since 2001, he was almost unknown outside Westminster until recently.
Now he seems set to be a political force - perhaps the biggest force - in a Brown cabinet. But he should tread carefully. He runs the risk not only of annoying Brown but also of setting himself up for a fall. If something goes wrong - an embarrassing revelation from his past, a foolish speech, a policy blunder - he could regret the prominence he has enjoyed this spring. The press loves an exciting new face, but it loves a fallen hero more.
The Sindy's unprecedented campaign u-turn
Many journalists, having spent half their careers giving vehement expression to one set of views, suddenly switch sides and give equally vehement expression to exactly opposite views. Paul Johnson and Mary Kenny come to mind. But for a newspaper to campaign for a change in the law and then later to campaign for people to, er, stop campaigning is, I think, unprecedented.
In 1997, Rosie Boycott launched the Independent on Sunday's campaign to decriminalise cannabis. She had recently succeeded me - or, rather, elbowed me aside - as editor. I had started a campaign for a British republic and Boycott, implying I was an old bore, reversed that. Now, four editors on (or thereabouts; one loses count), Boycott's own campaign is overthrown - though, so far as I know, Ian Jack's campaign of the early 1990s to clear up dog mess remains, as it were, unsullied. Whether the IoS's campaign of the past year, to make us all eat Sunday dinner, can survive remains to be seen. After the Mail's headline last Wednesday - "Sunday roasts could have hit male fertility" - we cannot rule out another recantation.
Middleton pays price
On the same day last week that the Mirror ran a picture of Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, clutching a Starbucks coffee on her way to work - which prompted Middleton's reference to the Press Complaints Commission - the Mail reported that she had a new silver Audi. Did she pay the £20,000 list price? No, says the Mail. "It would be a very nominal amount due to the exposure the deal will afford the manufacturer," an industry source told the paper. If this is true, Middleton would appear to be profiting from her celebrity; yet she complains about the downside of being pursued by photographers. If royals and their hangers-on want to lead normal private lives, they should pay normal prices for their cars.