Gordon Brown is counting on a swift economic turnaround. It’s probably his Labour Party’s only hope of avoiding a humiliating electoral defeat to the Conservatives next year.

The latest news on the economy has certainly got people in Downing Street smiling. The housing market is stabilising and some commentators are even talking about Britain becoming the first major country to pull out of the recession.

Treasury forecasts of reasonable growth that were derided just two months ago suddenly don’t look so bad.

The Number 10 dream scenario is that the economy recovers strongly, Brown takes the credit and the polls turn in time for a May election.

But what happens if the economy does turn around by the end of the year and the polls don’t get any better?

If that happens, some party strategists are wondering whether that might be a good time for Brown to step down, say in January.

He could say he did what he set out to do — get Britain through the recession — and it was now time for a new face.

The honeymoon bounce could end up being Labour’s only hope.

Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meetings are usually drab affairs. The leader turns up, listens to a few grumbles from backbench MPs, a few reporters hang around outside hoping to grab a half-decent quote and in the end a Labour apparatchik puts a rose-tinted spin on proceedings.

Not so on Monday night, one of those rare “crunch time” events for a party leader that creates such a frenzy inside and outside the venue. Parliament’s committee room 14 was so full one MP of robust stature tried to force not one, but two doors in an attempt to get in, and ended up with a sore shoulder. Veteran party member Greville (now Lord) Janner, a member of the Magic Circle, gave up trying to get in and instead entertained reporters with a couple of magic tricks. His skills may have been of more use on the other side of the door.

Gordon Brown, we were led to believe, faced being sawn in half by his own party after a disastrous showing in local and European elections. However, as so often is the case, the reality did not live up to the hype and the prime minister slipped away via a trap door, but not before making a speech telling everyone how humble he was and how he promised to listen in future. This is a classic leader’s smoke and mirrors trick, show them you’re listening, come out with a few “reform” initiatives in the ensuing days and when the air has cleared go back to whatever it was you were doing that upset them in the first place.

Leaders are not unseated at PLP meetings, despite how many times you read that these events are a firing squad. In fact, Brown strolled down the long, dark committee corridor, beamed at reporters and threw them a cheery “hi guys”. His predecessor Tony Blair used to do the same thing ahead of a tricky PLP, the final time with his suit jacket casually thrown over one shoulder like a model from a menswear catalogue.

Brown knew what he had to do, and for now he has bought himself some time. He also knows that the odds of a full blown rebellion are slim. It’s easy to go on television and say “Gordon must go”, it’s another matter to get that anger and dissent distilled into something more potent and then pour it down the throat of a potential challenger. The point is not lost on Labour members. They know they are on the rack, but any change of leadership now will only hasten electoral defeat. The public won’t tolerate another unelected prime minister installed at Number 10 and nor should they. Brown may still be in one piece, but it will take more than magic tricks and humility to save him if he doesn’t make sure his party is in the same state fairly soon.

As the annual chore of filling in tax returns looms on the horizon again, many taxpayers might be reflecting longer than usual this year about just where the money is going.

Since the last time he ripped open the blue cellophane HMRC envelope with a sigh and started hunting around for his P60, Joe Public has seen billions of pounds going to the banks, thousands if not millions being used to bankroll the expensive tastes of MPs — and now he sees the BBC clamming up about how much it spends on stars from that other effective tax, the licence fee. 

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, to which the National Audit Office spending watchdog reports, is fuming because the BBC will not reveal how much it pays its big-name radio presenters. 

The BBC Trust says it keeps salary details confidential because it has legal obligations to staff and that disclosure would raise questions over data protection and privacy laws.

The generosity of BBC salaries has been a long-running theme, especially since it was reported last year that Jonathan Ross receives some six million pounds a year. Newsreader Carrie Gracie raised eyebrows more recently when she revealed she gets 92,000 pounds a year.  

The Corporation says it merely pays the going rate and in some cases less. It has launched a comprehensive redundancy programme and has confirmed that its stars’ salaries will be cut when contracts come up for renewal.

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson has staunchly defended the licence fee, calling it a “critical part of this country’s investment in the creative industries”.

But is it enough? After the jaw-dropping revelations about the way MPs spend public funds, taxpayers are perhaps rightly suspicious about what happens to their money behind closed doors.

Should BBC salaries remain confidential?  Does the BBC have a right to withold information from the National Audit Office? 

The Guardian newspaper, normally a Labour supporter, has decided Gordon Brown must go.

“It’s time to cut him loose,” it declares in an editorial that goes on: “The public is calling furiously for a better system. People want an honest parliament. They want leaders who are prepared to act. They loathe the old system, and many of the people who are part of it.”

Brown, it says, has left it too late to change anything.

And yet it was only a few months ago that the same paper was carrying cartoons portraying this apparently now fatally wounded figure as Superman, as Britain took the lead in dealing with the world banking crisis. Few analysts dispute that he remains the master of his economic brief.

He may not have the political savvy of Tony Blair and his awkward mannerisms in front of TV (and YouTube) cameras do not serve him well but most observers agree he has always been a figure of moral integrity. Early on, he won plaudits for his opposition to the super-casinos plan, he was lukewarm at best about the 2005 extension of drinking laws and he is far from being one of the worst expenses offenders.

Are people being too hard on Brown, making him a scapegoat for the expenses crisis?

Can he, should he, stay on?

Last week it was pigs who saw their image dragged into the mire as they became symbols of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Now it’s the turn of the ducks.

Ducks are waddling all over the newspapers today after the revelation that Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers claimed 1,645 pounds for a so-called “Stockholm” pond house to give his ducks shelter from foxes and the cold.  

Cartoonists have had a field day.

Matt in the Daily Telegraph has two ducks surveying their aquatic pavilion with one saying to the other: “do you think we could fit a plasma TV in there?”

Steve Bell in the Guardian has two “sitting ducks” dressed as MPs in the line of fire of the Department of Work and Pensions’ campaign to target benefit thieves.

In the Daily Mail, Mac has a pair of ducks sipping champagne on the pavilion deck with one observing: “Make the most of this. Our man is being forced to stand down at the next election.”

Tim in the Independent has a couple of people sitting in front of a TV which features the words “Out for a duck” with one asking the other: “Is that the cricket score or another Tory MP?” 

And in the Daily Mirror, Kerber and Black have two ducks, faced with the news that Viggers is to retire, asking: “Does this mean we can’t get the conservatory done now?”

This last one so quacked up presenter Evan Davis on BBC radio’s “Today” show on Friday morning that there were fears he might not be able to go on. 

Any other ideas for animals that might symbolise the scandal?

The British National Party (BNP) says its leader Nick Griffin is planning to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace next month, hosted by the Queen.

All members of the London Assembly have been invited, and since last year they include the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook. He wants to bring Griffin as his guest.

Party spokesman Simon Darby says on the party’s website: “The anti-British people who object had better start getting used to the idea because if we get elected MEPs, this is the kind of thing we are going to be doing on a regular basis.”

The Daily Mirror calls the garden party idea a “vile publicity stunt” and the anti-fascist group Searchlight said many BNP members have been convicted of violence and racial harassment. “On security grounds alone, Griffin should be denied access,” it declared.

Support for the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe group has never historically been strong in this country but with the recession taking a toll and the existing political parties having been shamed by the MPs’ expenses scandal, the BNP is hoping to do well in the June 4 European elections.

Do you think it should have the right to attend the garden party?

The shockwaves reverberating through Westminster as the MPs’ expenses scandal unfolds have been compared with the “Clean Hands” bribery scandal that effectively demolished Italy’s post-war political establishment in the space of a couple of years in the early 1990s.

If things are going to get that bad, the guilty politicians are going to have an uncomfortable time.

As a reporter in Rome at the time, I remember how surprise turned to anger then just as it has now as the public began to realise the sheer extent of the corruption that was helping to line the pockets of the country’s leading politicians and their parties.

The morning newspapers brought fresh revelations almost daily of how the main political parties routinely demanded kickbacks in return for government contracts. There were the “golden sheets” for example in which invoices for linen and bedding were inflated to thousands of pounds, and the exorbitant demands placed on suppliers to hospitals, which caused particular anger.

People used to demonstrate in the streets wearing white gloves to show they had clean hands. They would try to scare MPs they felt were corrupt by sending them spoof versions of the ”avviso,” the official notice that warned potential offenders they were under investigation. The avviso itself became one of the enduring symbols of the scandal, almost like the guillotine in revolutionary France. Reproductions of it used to sell well as birthday and Christmas cards.

Another favourite amng the angry public, if any disgraced politician dared show his face his public, was to mockingly shower them with coins.

Such was the fate of one of those held to have been most deeply involved in the corruption, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who was forced to flee to his second home in Tunisia to escape jail in Italy. Other disgraced politicians and businessmen even took their own lives.

What was going on in Italy at that time was undoubtedly far more serious than the exploitation of MPs’ expenses, but because the British have tended to be less cynical about their elected representatives, the sense of outrage has been much the same.

But before the calls for a complete shake-out of the British political establishment become so loud as to be unstoppable, it might be worth remembering, as former Labour minister Michael Meacher points out in his blog, that political vaccuums often produce surprise results.

Fringe parties, for example, can make big gains, as seems to be happening already in Britain.

And in the case of Italy, the net result of the collapse of its main parties was — Silvio Berlusconi.

It’s been a grim time for pigs.

First they were blamed for the swine flu that caused a worldwide stir after it was discovered in Mexico — and now everyone’s likening them to Members of Parliament with their snouts in the trough.

But look at the facts. The genetic make-up of the virus may have been predominantly porcine but the pigs themselves didn’t have it. Even at the supposed epicentre of the outbreak in Mexico they showed no symptoms — things reached such a state that owners of some pig farms in the US were stopping humans coming near them in case they infected their animals. The pigs were innocent OK?

And yet the name “swine flu” stuck, lots of people stopped eating pork and in Egypt they were even culled.

Now this. The image changes from dirty to greedy as all the cartoonists portray our expenses-hungry MPs as curly-tailed pinstriped pigs, shedding wads of notes from their pockets as they pile into the trough.

Experts say pigs are in fact sociable, clever animals. They clear ground, fertilise it, eat vegetable waste and then make the ultimate sacrifice for our bacon sandwiches.

As the fashion of the moment seems to be saying “sorry” for everything, perhaps we should offer our apologies to the pigs — what about a statue of a Gloucestershire Old Spot on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square?

Britain’s anti-sleaze chief Sir Christopher Kelly, Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has said the MPs’ expenses scandal is worse than the infamous cash for questions affair that did so much damage to the John Major adminstration in the 1990s.

In that celebrated scandal, which fatally undermined Tory MP Neil Hamilton’s political career, Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed alleged he had paid two MPs to table parliamentary questions on his behalf.

Then, the envelopes stuffed with cash became the enduring symbols of Westminster sleaze. Today the equivalent in the expenses furore would probably be what? The garden horse-manure? The rented porn movies? Or maybe the most delicious of all: the moat. (Well - we’ve all been there, haven’t we, with the blocked moat misery. Why does it always seem to happen at the weekends?)

MPs squirming under the spotlight now have all said they acted within the rules. Some have even insisted they acted within the spirit as well as the letter of them, however much it might look from the outside that they have been milking the system for all it’s worth.

Who do you think is at fault? The MPs or the rules?  

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Gordon Brown setting out a plan to overhaul MPs’ unpopular allowances and announcing it on YouTube too.

A week later the plan has unravelled in the face of opposition protest and internal Labour party misgivings. The upshot is more bad press and the feeling that Brown’s authority has been further undermined.

Throw in a budget in which the government has been forced to admit to the worst economic performance since World War Two and it has been a few days to forget for Brown.

Commentators are increasingly writing about the Conservatives as a government-in-waiting, a focus that carries risks because it exposes their policies plans to closer scrutiny.

His visit to Pakistan on Monday also brought reports of a snub after he appeared at a press conference with  Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani rather than President Asif Ali Zardari.  

So is the game up for Gordon? Well, it certainly is hard to see how Labour can overhaul their deficit in the polls. But Brown was being written off in 2008, with rumours of his impending removal, but  emerged stronger when the credit crisis hit.

It’s been a bad week for Brown, but a year in politics is an eternity.