Much excitement on the internet about the prospect of Brown being out of his post within the next week. Mark Reckons has given a £10 evens bet on it. Easy tenner.

As bad as things are though, I can’t see Brown stepping down.

For starters, that would require Brown to grudgingly accept that there’s someone else in the Labour Party that can lead the party better than he can. There’s no way he’s going to accept that.

Next, it needs Brown to give up on his hope that he can turn things around as his ‘message’ of ‘action’ versus ‘nothing’ begins to get through. There’s no way he’s going to give up on that.

Then he needs to believe that there’s someone else in the Labour Party who can fight at better General Election campaign than he can. Remember he believes himself to be the guy that got Blair re-elected in 2005. He’s the master campaigner, the master election strategist. No-one else can be trusted, can they?

Finally he’d need to feel that he’s had every minute of being PM he’s entitled to, that he’s had ‘what he deserves’ for his loyal service to the Labour Party, and believe that there’s other people who now deserve the chance to lead Labour. He believes he’s entitled to more.

Brown won’t go voluntarily. The pressure and murmurings of rebellion will do nothing to dent Brown’s resolve.

So how do you remove a Labour Prime Minister? He can be replaced at their Conference, assuming enough MPs can get the correct forms in to the NEC in the correct time-scales. But there’s the tricky issue of getting the NEC to issue these forms in the first place - there’s a precedent that they do not issue these papers while the Leader is serving as Prime Minister. The machinery of the Labour Party is set up to make it impossible for MPs to remove the Prime Minister with a democratic process.

An alternative tactic would be for every Cabinet Minister to resign, and every backbencher refuse to take up a Cabinet post – however that’s the realms of fantasy. It would cause a constitutional crisis and force the dissolution of parliament and an immediate General Election. Labour MPs will not want to use any tactic that causes a General Election.

Same goes for a blackmail dissolution of Parliament vote – a Labour Backbencher, with the support of the Tories and the Lib Dems, decides to trigger a vote of no confidence in the Government. More than 63 Labour MPs say they’ll vote ‘no confidence’ if Brown doesn’t resign before the vote – Brown would call their bluff and decide that standing up to backbench terrorists will stand him in good stead if they do, in fact, end up voting ‘no confidence’.

No, there’s no way to force Brown out of the role that doesn’t involve a General Election, with perhaps one exception – would Brown listen to Sarah Brown? Could she be the only person who could make Brown see sense?

So Mark, I’ll take your £10 bet.