The rounds have, of course, begun in earnest today. The Sunday Times:

Gordon Brown today admitted personal responsibility for Labour’s disastrous election results in a round of candid interviews, and confessed he felt chastened by the losses.

In BBC and Sky television interviews, Mr Brown tried to put across two competing messages - one that he understood the pain of the electorate and took responsibility for it, but two that he is in no mood to quit and is relishing the fight ahead.

The Prime Minister took the blame for Thursday’s results in a way that he has often failed to do in the past. He had no excuses, he said. He had got it wrong over the 10p tax, he allowed speculation over an election last autumn to go on too long, he sometimes spent too much time on the detail and he had not paid enough attention to selling his policies.

Mr Brown said it was vital for the Government to show voters it understood their anxieties about rising prices and to convince them it had “an unequivocal and strong sense of direction” about how to get Britain through a tough economic period. He acknowledged that voters were feeling worried about their standard of living and said: “I feel the hurt they feel.”…

Actually, if this is the “party line” (and it seems to be), it’s over. They’re done. They will get voted out at the next general election.

They simply cannot imagine that their meltdown is not necessarily primarily about “rising prices”, as if those occurred in some economic vacuum, absent of his Government’s interference. They can’t even get their rationale straight. For how can there be “rising prices” anyway, when, as he also says, “Inflation is relatively low compared to other countries”? (Yet petrol prices, for example, have been for years rising far faster at the pumps than inflation precisely because of his Government’s taxation policies.)

Oh, never mind. Obviously, the idea that voters might well be rejecting so many of Labour’s policies — that he somehow thinks he hasn’t sold? — is beyond Labour’s essential comprehension. Or they just don’t want to think it is possible.

Rather, it must be the bad, bad voters. Along with the daily barrage they endure of seemingly uncountable other Labour-contrived hassles, voters are supposed spinelessly to be ever-eager to support the need for the likes of being bashed over the head by this Labour central government’s mandating ever-rising local council taxes. And why? Because those taxes often “buy” them desirable local services that include the leaving of a garbage wheelie bin lid open by four inches becoming a criminal offense.