Who’s the biggest loser at the moment – David Cameron or Ed Miliband?
This is the question being asked at Westminster, after both party leaders lurched to disaster.
Mr Cameron has seen his Government’s Budget take a battering, first of all over plans to make some pensioners pay a little more tax and then over plans to put VAT on take-away hot pies and pasties.
The nation has also experienced a petrol shortage – not because of strikes or the threat of strikes, but because a Government Minister stirred up panic and sent motorists to the pumps to fill up their tanks.
The farcical scenes at petrol stations highlight an issue this government has faced again and again – it seems to lack competence.
Whether it’s Francis Maude telling the nation to stockpile petrol, Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman overseeing a forestry sell-off which has to be swiftly reversed or Health Secretary Andrew Lansley struggling to explain his NHS reforms, Mr Cameron appears to lack Ministers that he can trust to just get on with it.
But then it all went wrong for Labour, when the party managed to lose a seat to George Galloway in the Bradford West by-election.
An opposition party which is set to form the next government is supposed to win seats from other parties in by-elections, not lose its own seats.
The Bradford loss adds to the sense that Mr Miliband just doesn’t look like a winner and has failed to capitalise on the coalition government’s mistakes.
Still, I’m not sure about some of the excited speculation I’ve seen about Respect’s chances of winning Hodge Hill, where sitting Labour MP Liam Byrne may stand down in his bid to become Mayor of Birmingham.
Respect came fourth in Hodge Hill in 2004, when anti-war sentiment – and the Respect bandwagon – were at their height.
Mr Galloway’s election leaflets in Bradford hardly mentioned Respect at all.
They said a lot about Mr Galloway, who clearly has enormous personal charisma, but he presented himself as a “coalition against the cuts” candidate rather than the man from Respect.