Summertime and the living isn't easy for Gordon
Gordon Brown's re-launch is struggling to get off the ground as problems crowd in on him from all sides. Even is being muddied by claims that the government mobilised the whips to round up support for Margaret Beckett's candidacy, on the grounds that she'd be an establishment-minded Speaker (Harriet Harman denies the whips are mobilising for anybody). 
But Mr Brown has bigger problems on several other fronts. His plan to hold the Iraqi inquiry in private has undermining any credit he hoped to get for launching an inquiry in the first place. The issue is given even greater piquancy by reports that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were keen that proceedings should be behind closed doors. This revelation alone almost guarantees that the government will have to do a U-turn and agree that the inquiry should take place in public.
Then there's the telling riposte from the father of one of the Iraqi hostages who complains that "the PM can make the time and effort to telephone both Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan [to find out about the health of Susan Boyle] but he wouldn't contact families waiting to learn the fate of their sons kidnapped in Iraq." Ouch!
The father claims Mr Brown doesn't "give a damn", describes the Foreign Office as "useless" and dismisses Foreign Secretary David Miliband as a "waste of space". With two hostages dead and the fate of the others unknown, this has the capacity to be not just a huge human tragedy but a .
And speaking of political nightmares, how about this: government ministers have been promising for some time to get a grip of the immigration numbers, especially now that unemployment is rising fast, but this morning we learn that the number of British is set to rise to a record 220,000 this year.
No so much a re-launch into summer for Mr Brown as the stumbling of the walking wounded.
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