I can visualize Mandelson rolling his eyes at these reports and imagine him lambasting “press tittle-tattle,” as he does when any story appears that suggests he’s been on maneuvers (which he often has been).

But becoming foreign secretary would represent the achievement of a life’s ambition. As I noted several weeks ago, Mandelson longs to emulate his grandfather - Herbert Morrison - by holding the post. Morrison was foreign secretary for just seven and a half months, which is about the time left between now and the final possible date of the election next year.

Yet, it appears that Brown is going to deny Mandelson the fulfillment of his life’s wish — which is exceedingly brave of him in the circumstances. In the PM’s position, I’m not sure it’s entirely sensible to run even the smallest risk of alienating the figure who has ensured his continued survival in office and to saw off the botched coup mounted by Labour plotters.

It would hardly be a surprise, based on past form, if Mandelson is feeling quite sore about the way in which he and Blair have been treated. Will he feel, deep down, that Brown did everything he possibly could for both of them in his lobbying for these European jobs? Somehow, one suspects not.

And will any of those European shenanigans have an impact on Lord Mandelson’s view of the future? Perhaps if there were a new prime minister — Alan Johnson maybe — he would find a Foreign Office shaped berth for a certain peer of the realm with ambitions in that direction.

Thus this latest bout of instability in the system is potentially highly dangerous for Brown. Why was the man upon whose support he depends even thinking about leaving for Europe when he is supposed to be central to the party’s election plans? Is his view of Brown undergoing another shift? Now that he has lost out, will he just sit quietly enjoying being business secretary until polling day? Let’s see.

In the weeks ahead, Brown will have to be extremely careful with Mandelson and his ego for a very straightforward reason. Whatever fashionable chatter there is saying otherwise, the business secretary still has it within his power to get rid of the PM if he chooses. I’m not saying he will, but he could arrange for it to be done in a matter of hours. One productive phone call with Alan Johnson is all it would take.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Brown at the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference in London on Monday.

The prime minister has been looking bouncy of late. He’s been convinced that he’s making progress, but it appeared to be having no tangible impact — until now.

The latest poll numbers, from Ipsos/Mori in the Observer, show Labour only 6 percentage points behind the Tories and will quite seriously spook the Conservative leadership. On hearing the news, I suspect Gordon Brown will have been bouncier than ever.

The full numbers are Conservative 37% (-6), Labour 31% (+5) and the Liberal Democrats 17% (-2).

Of course it is dangerous to read too much into a single poll. It may be a rogue, and even if not, this is still just the second time in six months that Labour has polled more than 30% (again it’s just 31%). Labour doesn’t start to break through into floating voter territory until it gets above that and closer to 35%. Still, the Tories will be quite stunned by their number being as low as 37%.

After Brown’s savaging over mistakes in a letter of apology to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, there was a good measure of public sympathy for him. Economic confidence also seems to be on the rise (a product of the latest long stretch of very cheap money) and he won — unsurprisingly — the byelection in Glasgow North East. Now here comes this poll.

It is momentum that matters, and right now the PM will feel, with some justification, that it is with him.

Herman Van Rompuy is a name rich with potential for those writing newspaper headlines, particularly those on British red-top tabloids such as the Sun. We can expect, I suspect, some cracking headlines and mad-cap scams in the days and weeks ahead as they help readers to get to know their new president.

Today’s effort - Rompuy Pumpy is EU’s numpty - is a fine start. But I suspect they’re just warming up.

For today’s paper, the Sun sent the excellent Graeme Wilson (deputy political editor in the Westminster lobby team) to Brussels. He covered the anointing of the president and Baroness Ashton as high representative last night.

However, this story is going to run and run after Graeme returns to Westminster. It’s going to require dedicated coverage and quite possibly a special crack team of subeditors back at HQ to write headlines.

How long can it be before the Sun appoints a special Van Rompuy correspondent? A matter of hours, I wager.

What are her qualifications for this powerful new role? My goodness, she’s the former chair of Hertfordshire Health Authority. Or does she just have a Zelig-like gift for being there when the jobs are handed out? It must be that, because to say she is a politician virtually unknown to the public is an understatement. She is barely a household name in her own household.

In the end all that strutting — Sarkozy bustling about with his power-broker face on, Brown trying to get a Brit into a post and Merkel serenely playing queen of the continent — amounted to Haiku Herman van Rompuy of Belgium as president, and the Baroness.

For Britain this is quite embarrassing. Consider all the great names the country has contributed to the world of foreign affairs and international diplomacy in the last few centuries. Ernie Bevin’s name springs to mind for starters.

And if it was to be a Brit for this new post, there are well-respected figures with clout who would have been smart appointments. Either Chris Patten or Paddy Ashdown would have been good.

But this weird kind of compromise choice is what you get with backroom stitch-ups. With France and Germany settled on Van Rompuy for president, the high representative needed to be from the socialist grouping and a big country. So thoughts turned to Britain. But who did Gordon Brown have to hand after the machinations of recent weeks? Not David Miliband, or Ashdown or Patten. No, at the eleventh hour modern Britain had just Baroness Ashton to offer.

AFP/Getty Images

Downing Street has confirmed that Tony Blair is out of the running for the EU presidency. And that’s even before the first course has been served at the EU council dinner at which the heads of government are expected to choose a winner.

Perhaps Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian PM and rival contender to be EU president, will pen one of his famous haikus to mark this development.

I suggest:

So farewell then Tony Blair,
Europe would have been fun to run,
But now you’ll never know, how much.

I accept it’s not really a haiku at all, more like doggerel, but I do think it captures the moment.

The Conservatives will be mighty relieved it’s not Blair, and so too - I suspect - will be Gordon Brown deep down if he’s being frank. It would not have been a comfortable experience having his more successful former partner reborn as president of Europe.

And for all that he put his weight behind the Blair candidacy, it was never explained why he felt the need to do so. The conspiracy theory was that Mandelson demanded it in return for defending him against the plotters of the failed Labour party coup. But that sounds too neat an explanation, and I suspect we’ll all have to wait for the various sets of memoirs for something closer to the truth to emerge.

But what next politically for Blair? He has all the material comforts he could desire and is still only 56. He is robustly healthy and clearly interested in more power. In these terms, his Middle East peace envoy job is a nonjob if ever there was one. It is hard to imagine that this EU setback will somehow quell his ambition.

No, if the EU didn’t want TB, I suspect he will shrug and say that is their fault for not thinking big enough. Their loss; their fault for being too parochial. Now he’ll want a big global role of some sort.

Tony Blair is not going to retire quietly. The world hasn’t heard the last of him yet.

Sir Christopher Kelly, the mandarin who drafted the reforms all the party leaders are on record as saying they want implemented, has even issued a statement expressing his disappointment.

Jon Craig at Sky has an excellent account of  the way in which the issue is cutting across party lines. Some Labour and Tory MPs are discussing trying to block Sir Christopher’s rule changes being implemented.
Is that why the subject was not addressed in the Queen’s Speech? Did Number 10 fear a possible rebellion and think it better to ignore expenses and say instead that the changes can be implemented without legislation? If so, it suggests a serious misfiring in the engine room at of Number 10. Which issue has dominated U.K. politics other than the recession for the last six months? Answer: MPs’ expenses. How can any advisor worth his or her salt fail to point out to the PM that it would look very strange indeed not to lay out such reforms in the Queen’s Speech? Or did they do so only to be over-ruled?

Either way - whether it was deliberate or a slip-up - it’s a strategic blunder. The opposition parties will say the government is out of touch in neglecting to include measures to clean up parliament - the issue which troubles the public above almost all others right now. The Tories and Lib Dems now have, beyond the usual party politicking about this Queen’s Speech being all about the election and headlines, a clear line of attack. How bizarre for Brown to gift it to them.

I do hope not. Can you imagine anything more likely to sap the will to live than a U.K. campaign that goes on for six whole months? By polling day, most probably on May 6, voters would be beyond tired of the whole affair (if they’re even listening at all, as Danny Finkelstein says in the Times today).

But it - the election campaign starts today - is just what political journalists say to create an illusion of drama. No, this is something else. The ground is being cleared today at Westminster with most of what is being announced destined not to become law (there isn’t time).

Parliament is winding down after an extraordinary four and a half years involving a change of PM, financial meltdown and expenses-related calamity. In truth, the various parties are just desperate to get to the Christmas holiday for a break. Labour for a rest, and the Tories because they calculate that by then it will be too late for Labour to switch leader.

Then, when they all return in January, they will fire the starting gun for the election.

It has been widely reported that in his spare time he likes to write poetry, or compose haikus. Herman has been derided widely for this but I think it’s unfair. They’re rather good.

Here are the two best in case you missed them:

Hair:

Hair blows in the wind
After years there is still wind
Sadly no more hair

A Fly:

A fly zooms, buzzes,
Spins and is lost in the room,
he does no one any harm

But even better, he has spawned imitators. Last week the staff of the Independent decided to have a go at composing haikus in the Belgian leader’s honor, creating a veritable “Stars on 45″ style megamix of Van Rompuy sounding haikus. Some are even better than the originals. Some are not.

Vote Haiku Herman.
Within Brussels has sprouted
Bitter taste for Blair.

He writes poems!
That should cheer dull hours
Of talks on iron ore tariffs.

Vintage wine at lunch:
Expensed. At least it’s
not American, you claim.

Europe pluribus unum,
But don’t tell Ukip:
They just want unum.

Update: Latest Herman-style Haikus

The mania for Herman van Rompuy style compositions is catching. As we have seen, the Independent led the way last week with members of its staff creating their own Herman haikus. But now the Wall Street Journal is on their tail. Stephen Fidler, bureau chief in Brussels, passes on the first of two haikus from members of the WSJ team.

One call to Europe:
Vaira Vike-Freiberga
On the other end!

Kissinger Calling
Van Rompuy answers the phone
Henry: “Wrong number”

As Peter Oborne put it at the weekend: “It’s dawning on Cameron that it isn’t in the bag yet.”

By various accounts the PM is bouncier now than he has been in some time and is behaving as though he can sniff a coming change in public attitudes. But he has a big problem. His party’s numbers are not - yet - moving in any way that promises to make a difference.

Yes, the latest ICM monthly poll for the Guardian shows Labour two points up and 13 percentage points behind the Tories. The Conservatives are at 42% (down two percentage points), Labour is at 29%, the Lib Dems are at 19% (down one percentage point) and the others are sitting at 10%.

As the invaluable U.K. Polling Report details, in the most recent five polls the Tory lead has been 13, 14, 14, 10 and 14 percentage points. In those polls, Labour has been at 29%, 27%, 25%, 29% and 24%. It has polled above 30%, with 31% in the You Gov Sky News poll on Oct. 8, just once in the last six months.

I’ve written this on numerous occasions, and I repeat it simply because it’s always worth remembering: Labour’s magic number is 35%. Party strategists who understand their polling know that numbers such as 29% and 30% are no good. It’s only when they see a number such as 33% that they allow themselves to get a bit excited, because it suggests they are are being heard.

Here’s why. Being stuck in the high 20s is just solid Labour core vote territory. Even at 30% the party’s strategists know they are reaching only their own solid supporters. The implication is defeat. At 33%, there’s evidence of a breakout into floating voter land. At 35% and upward that breakout is serious and established.

The gap sounds relatively small - just five points - but it is not. It is huge. It is a yawning chasm. On one side are party tribalists who will still give you the benefit of the doubt. On the other side, appearing tantalizingly close but in reality a long way away, are those floating voters.

It seems that many of these floating voters are simply not listening to Brown right now. They appear to have tuned him out. Not for the first time, recently I heard the PM referred to by a Labour MP at party conference as a TV, or radio. “He’s like a television that’s on in another room. You know it’s there and you are aware of the background noise but you’re not listening. That’s how voters view Gordon,” he said.

It is one of the most difficult tasks in politics to change such a mindset when it has settled. It takes massive powers of charisma and persuasion.

Thus, Gordon Brown is trying to just move those numbers up a nudge. Get to 33% or so a couple of times and you’ll know it’s working. His opponents would be shaken if he did. But for all the talk of a stirring in the undergrowth of public opinion, there’s little real sign of it yet.

Brown battles away in a bouncier mood. Try as he might the numbers aren’t - yet - budging.

It is not long since the prime minister attempted to move him and put Ed Balls in his place - a reshuffle plot that failed. But Darling has survived and prospered, even as the economic news has become more troubling.

How has he pulled this off? For a start, in the public imagination he looks a lot like a Chancellor should: grey, sombre, careful.

Knowing Gordon Brown inside out - because they have been together so long - he has been able to play a very clever game with Number 10. Despite numerous provocations, he has kept cool and behind the scenes firmly refused to follow the PM’s every order and obey his latest whims.

Opposition politicians also admit that he has handled himself well after a start in the most difficult of circumstances. What next? The Darling-Brown relationship has to get through the PBR this December and then a difficult pre-election budget in the spring. Darling is said to favour caution and fiscal responsibility where the PM wants rabbits produced out of hats to help him win votes.

After that? If the election is lost by Labour I have long said that Darling’s memoirs promise to be the best of the bunch by far. He’ll have no problem getting a subsequent job.

Accepting his award yesterday, he displayed an undemonstrative wit that he often keeps too well hidden. He had, he said, been in politics a long time. But recently he had branched out into banking and now owned four banks. To laughter he acknowledged that combining banking with politics was not a route to popularity.

On the contrary, the economy may be in the most terrible shape but it does not seem to have done his personal standing any harm at all. The opposite, it seems. Whatever your perspective, that’s quite something to pull off.