Following up the account in the FT earlier this week about how Gordon Brown has already cut himself off from most people and is only listening to a tiny circle of advisters, today it is Martin Kettle in the Guardian:

Relations between the key players at the top are worse than in the summer. Brown’s long hours and short temper – he lost his cool with Bob Shrum, his American adviser, the other day – shape a bad mood inside No 10. Some staff are leaving already. Others are having second thoughts about staying. Good people feel excluded. The animus against Balls in particular is very great. He should concentrate on being a better minister, they say. Michael Heseltine was right, says one veteran. The problem isn’t Brown. It’s Balls.

Some of this stuff comes from the usual suspects. And, yes, similar things used to be said about the Blair government. For Mandelson and Campbell in 1997, read Balls in 2007. But if the large domestic lesson from the Blair years was that they wasted too much time thinking like an opposition not a government, the same already seems true of the Brown years. Blair, though, had time on his side. Brown does not.

(Hat tip: Guido Fawkes)

This sort of bunker mentality comes to just about any political leader in the end – but usually after years in the job, rather than before they’ve even been in the post for their first 12 months. Not a good sign for the future!