Quote of the day

“This coming 12 months will be the most difficult 12 months the Labour party has had in a generation, quite frankly. Both the general economic situation, and in terms of the politics. In the space of 10 months we’ve gone from a position where people generally felt we were doing OK to where we’re certainly not doing OK. We’ve got to rediscover that zeal which won three elections, and that is a huge problem for us at the moment. People are pissed off with us.”

Chancellor Alistair Darling endears himself to Gordon Brown by offering Guardian readers a refreshingly honest assessment of his party’s predicament. “I’m not a great politician”, he confesses elsewhere – and certainly the absence of obfuscating rhetoric and glib platitudes suggests he’s right.

One question: what exactly prompted the paper to publish an exclusive tete-a-tete with the person currently the second most newsworthy in the country and yet still decide the cover feature should be a Kiera Knightley interview which essentially consists of Sam Wollaston sniggering schoolboyishly at her carefully calculated use of rude words?