By Jane Merrick

Watching Prime Minister's Questions from the members' gallery, above the opposition benches and facing Gordon Brown and Labour MPs, and on an excursion from the House of Lords, was would-be Strictly Come Dancing contestant and yachting enthusiast Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy.

By Jane Merrick

Did Gordon Brown see his bounce coming eight months ago? In the middle of March, over lunch with a Cabinet minister close to the Prime Minister, I asked what was the one thing that could rescue Brown.

Labour had just seen its worst poll rating for 24 years, and the Tories were building a sustained double-digit lead. There was some turmoil on the markets - although nothing on the scale of what we've seen during the last two months. The minister said: "The economy is going to get much, much worse. But as it does, rather than suffer at the polls, we will become stronger. The PM's rating will climb because of his strength on the economy. It's what he's good at."

By Jane Merrick

A momentous day in world history, and at noon the beacon of democracy that is the British parliament stood still and drew breath to absorb Barack Obama's dramatic presidential victory hours earlier. Er, not quite.

I have sat through some historic, glad-I-was-there moments sitting in the press gallery above the Commons chamber, but this wasn't one of them. Which was a shame really. Attendance for Prime Minister's Questions was a bit thin - MPs didn't pack themselves in behind the Speaker's chair, or crowd the doors at the opposite end. Perhaps the absentees had been partying all night, or keeping vigil on the sofa until 4am and couldn't quite drag themselves in to Westminster.

By Jane Merrick

I'm sure Gordon Brown doesn't have a voodoo doll of George Osborne, but the Prime Minister did his best to stick needles into the shadow Chancellor at PMQs today. A chastened-looking Osborne was not in his usual seat, at the right hand of David Cameron, but one seat along. The man between them was William Hague, who some MPs have speculated could be given the shadow Chancellor job after Osborne's role in the Yachgate affair.

By Jane Merrick

As a teenager I spent many happy summer evenings at the Taverna Agni, the Corfu restaurant where Peter Mandelson was said to have "dripped pure poison" into the ear of George Osborne while at a dinner party for Rupert Murdoch's daughter Liz, with Nat Rothschild seated nearby. My family loved going there because it was undiscovered, understated and quiet. You had to get a boat there, but for us this was not a vast gin palace but a little wooden craft hired from the taverna owner. One summer Princess Margaret's yacht dropped anchor in the bay, and the locals were horrified that their peaceful horizon could be spoilt by the jaw-dropping wealth and vulgarity that it brought. That was 1988.

Twenty years on, they must be used to billionaires asking for the wine list. The dinner on August 23, and the conversations in the days before and after which have dragged Osborne into the Oleg Deripaska donations affair, have entered political folklore. The political power games played that night broke into the House of Commons for the first time today, at a highly-charged and bitter Prime Minister's Questions.

By Jane Merrick

She surprised her critics at her last outing against William Hague, but Harriet Harman lost the House at Prime Minister's Questions today.

For the first time in this grim new financial climate, every question bar two was on the economy. The two were: one about armed forces veterans and one about the activities of the Inter-Parliamentary Space Committee. Harman told questioner Bill Olner she hoped his committee would "boldly go". MPs didn't find this funny, given the circumstances.

By Jane Merrick

As Gordon Brown heads to Paris to tell Eurozone leaders how they can copy the British bailout to save their banks from collapse, his loyal supporters are congratulating themselves for averting another major institution from bankruptcy: the great Clunking Fist himself.

But is this premature and misguided? A pair of leaked emails suggest that whatever the outward appearance, internal ruptures at Number 10 are rather too deep to be so quickly healed.

By Jane Merrick

A typically noisy back to school atmosphere for the first Prime Minister's Questions of the new parliamentary term. By the sound of Labour MPs, you'd think the next election was in the bag, and there isn't a major economic crisis going on. The mood was also skittish because the Prime Minister revealed what MPs sitting in the chamber waiting for PMQs to start won't have known, that the Bank of England has cut interest rates by 0.5 per cent. But has Lord Mandelson been sending Labour MPs pager messages to get them buoyed up?

By Jane Merrick

Stephen Carter, Gordon Brown's high-profile PR guru, is leaving Downing Street after losing a turf war with hardline loyalists close to the Prime Minister. Funny, this is what I revealed in the Independent on Sunday at the end of August - yet it was denied by Downing Street as "completely without foundation" and rubbished by some of our competitors. So let's set the record straight.

Carter has been given a junior ministerial job in the House of Lords. It was sold to him as a promotion, but he's totally out of the picture.

By Jane Merrick

We've just been given a glimpse of the "back to the lectern" speechmaking style that David Cameron will use tomorrow for his major address to Tory faithful. After three conferences where Mr Cameron showed off by walking around the stage with no notes, it was quite refreshing to see him use the traditional podium method in an emergency statement on the financial crisis. It would have looked totally ridiculous to do anything else. Just as well strategists had already planned a more sober tone given the grim economic climate.