It’s odd when a political leader’s resignation can be viewed as a victory for him, but that might be what’s just happened in the U.K. Gordon Brown has announced he is stepping down as leader of the Labour party, thereby announcing his resignation as prime minister. But the resignation is not with immediate effect. Alongside that announcement was another: that Brown’s Labour Party, which lost about 100 seats in the election last Thursday, is entering formal talks with the Liberal Democrats to stay in power in a coalition government.

This is as clear an indication as you could want that talks between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are on the rocks. It may be that Brown will remain prime minister for a few months before handing power over to a successor who the British public had no idea would be prime minister when they went to the polls. And that would be a political triumph for Brown.

David Cameron’s reaction to this will be very interesting. Will he sell the farm to the Lib Dems to get into No. 10 (the farm in question is the plurality voting system; for more, see Tim Montgomerie here)? Or will he hold fast to his manifesto’s promises to the British people and, in the end, be judged to have lost an election he had in the bag (something people are already starting to compare to this iconic soccer image)? In either of these cases, the Tory leader will surely come under severe pressure from the hard-liners in his party.

Incidentally, a well-placed source in the Tory party sent me this just before the election:

David Cameron’s approach has been to appease the ultra-liberal Guardian newspaper and the monopolistic monster that is the BBC. He hoped that by doing so, they wouldn’t attack him the campaign. Cameron would be the media’s favourite Tory (just as John McCain, who spent 20 years doing the same, was the media’s favourite Republican). But as the starting pistol is fired, the Tories’ enemies revert to type. Lady Thatcher warned us that appeasement never works. Neville Chamberlain found that out to his cost. Why is it so hard to learn the lessons of history?

How prescient that looks now!