Labour party leader Ed Miliband and brother David attend a birthday party held in London on Wednewsday

Ed Miliband has sought to play down claims of a continuing rift with his brother, David, in the wake of their bitter contest for the Labour leadership, insisting they had both "moved on".
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, the Labour leader said he would not be distracted by the renewed speculation over his relationship with his older sibling, but would "stick to the mission" to lead his party.

He also disclosed that he had been taking advice from Tony Blair, who was widely thought to have favoured David Miliband for leader and who last week called on Labour to retain the political centre ground.

The latest speculation about Mr Miliband's leadership followed the publication of a biography by Mehdi Hasan and James Mcintyre which claimed that the brothers and their wives were barely on speaking terms. Newspaper reports have suggested that David Miliband - who saw his ambition to lead the party thwarted by his younger brother - was now waiting for Ed to fail so that he could claim the top job.

Ed Miliband however insisted that David had "moved on, so everybody else should too". "Everybody knows that we fought a leadership election last year. As I said at the time I was pleased to have won and disappointed for him, but both of us have moved on," he said.

But pressed on his suggestion last year that they would one day "look back at all of this and laugh", he admitted they had not reached that point. "I don't think we've done that yet, but I think what I would say is that both of us have moved on," he said.

He refused to be drawn on claims that they could not agree on whether he informed David that he intended to run for the leadership following Gordon Brown's resignation in the wake of Labour's general election defeat in May last year.

"I'm not going to get into the detail of this. What we both agree on is that we talked before both our candidacies were declared and talked to him about the position too and we're both on the same page on that," he said.

He also brushed off reports that their wives, Justine and Louise, and also fallen out. "Nonsense, nonsense, that's nonsense. It's nonsense. David and Louise were at our wedding a few weeks ago, and we had a great day. It was great that they were there and enjoyed themselves," he said.

But asked about suggestions that the Milibands' mother, Marion Kozak, was "in despair" at the state of relations between her sons, he replied: "I'm not going to get into my conversations with her about it

 

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Ed Balls suggested yesterday that the Conservative Party may have played a part in leaking his private papers charting Gordon Brown's attempts to dislodge Tony Blair as Prime Minister.

The documents, which surfaced in The Daily Telegraph, showed how Mr Brown's allies, including Mr Balls and Ed Miliband, began planning a swift and smooth Blair-to-Brown transition soon after the 2005 general election.

Last night, more documents were released highlighting advice from civil servants dating back to 2006 recommending that public spending should rise no faster than the rate of inflation and calling for inefficiencies to be cut. Critics said this showed Mr Brown had ignored advice prior to the credit crunch, which left Britain with a deficit. The documents also indicated Mr Brown was aware that abolishing the 10p rate of income tax would leave millions worse off, something he denied.

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We've spent all this money, but what have we got for it

A confidential document presented to the Cabinet in January 2006 asks: "We've spent all this money, but what have we got for it?"
It warns that the efficiency of the public sector needed to improve rapidly and insisted that "spending growth will slow". The document drafted by civil servants also says that "ineffective spending" must be "closed down".
However, Gordon Brown discarded the advice and embarked on a £90 billion increase in spending when he became prime minister.
The expenditure meant that the economy was left facing a record deficit as the effects of the recession were felt.
The document is among 19 papers disclosed today by The Daily Telegraph that were obtained from the personal files of Mr Balls, the shadow Chancellor. They follow the divulgence yesterday of dozens of documents detailing Mr Balls's central role in a plot to topple Tony Blair.

Today, the Ed Balls files make public the warnings of officials and others over Labour's tax and spending plans.
The document is the first official evidence that shows the scale of concern over the activities of Mr Brown and those around him in his time as chancellor. In an analysis of spending plans drawn up in January 2006 for the following year's Comprehensive Spending Review, the document states that any increase in taxpayer expenditure should only be in line with inflation. It sets out detailed plans for cutting spending in more than 12 areas to reduce spending by billions of pounds.
However, Mr Brown neglected the advice and increased spending by twice as much as recommended. He only cut the wasteful spending in four of the areas identified.
At the time that the Treasury document was produced, Mr Balls was still a backbench MP and would not have been on the official circulation list.
However, other files show he was playing an important role in drawing up Mr Brown's policies. Before the October 2007 spending review he was made a Treasury minister then given a Cabinet seat as Secretary for Children, Schools and Families.
The Coalition seized on the disclosures as evidence that Mr Brown's "reckless" decisions over public spending left the country in a vulnerable position when the economic downturn hit Britain.
A Conservative source said: "This document shows the reckless approach of Brown and Balls which left Britain dangerously exposed to the economic crisis."
Michael Fallon, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, said: "As recently as last year, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband were denying something we now know to be true. While Britain's debt doubled, welfare spending spiralled out of control and education standards fell, they were obsessing about getting rid of the elected prime minister and putting Gordon Brown into the position.
"Instead of owning up to their role in a dysfunctional government and coming up with a credible plan to deal with the problems facing Britain, they are starting to plot against each other. They can never be trusted with government again."
Another leaked memorandum warns Mr Brown and Mr Balls that plans to scrap the 10p tax rate would hit millions of poorer Britons and pensioners - but the change was still introduced.
Mr Brown later denied that there would be any losers from the tax changes – before being forced to announce an emergency compensation plan.
The Daily Telegraph also publishes documents today revealing how Mr Brown's major policy idea to be introduced when he was Prime Minister was a new British constitution. Detailed plans for the bill of rights were prepared, including possible new regulations for the media, but the proposal was quietly dropped after he moved into Number 10.
The disclosure of the economic documents in the Ed Balls files comes as the shadow chancellor demands that the Coalition abandons its public spending cuts. Mr Balls has said that the pace and scale of cuts is unacceptable. Last week, Mr Balls demanded that George Osborne, the Chancellor, draw up a "plan B" for public spending if the economy deteriorates.
But, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is understood to privately believe that some of the cutbacks should be accepted – threatening a repeat of the divide between Mr Blair and Mr Brown over public spending plans.
Yesterday, Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor, gave an interview in which he dismissed the wisdom of Mr Ball's "plan B" concept. Mr Darling is currently finalising his memoirs which are also expected to criticise Mr Balls' influence over economic policy under Mr Brown's premiership.
Yesterday, in the wake of The Daily Telegraph's disclosures over his role in plotting to replace Mr Blair with Mr Brown, the shadow Chancellor denied he had acted improperly.
Mr Balls also effectively accused Mr Blair of lying to the electorate in 2005 about his intention to serve a full third term as prime minister.
Labour began discussing the "transition" from Mr Blair to Mr Brown even before the 2005 general election, Mr Balls claimed.
Mr Blair fought and won the 2005 election on a promise to serve a full third term in office. In 2004, he declared: "If I'm elected I would serve a third term. I want to see it through."
But, in a radio interview, Mr Balls alleged that talks between Mr Brown and Mr Blair about a transfer of power began before the election.
"The discussions about how to make that transition work began before the 2005 general election," he said.
He was asked: "Even though publicly Mr Blair had said he would serve a full third term, he wasn't saying that privately?"
Mr Balls replied: "Yes."
The claim was last night disputed by friends of Mr Blair. One said: "Ed is basically saying Tony deceived the British public at the 2005 election. That is not true."
Mr Balls has previously denied any involvement in any plot – which this newspaper disclosed was codenamed "Project Volvo" because of Mr Brown's reliable but dull image - to force Mr Blair from office.
Yesterday, he said he had taken part in "difficult discussions" about Mr Blair's position.
"There was not a plot but there was genuine and open and sometimes difficult discussion," he said. "There were tensions, there were arguments."
Mr Balls said he and Alistair Campbell, Mr Blair's aide, had tried to calm those tensions.
He said: "Should Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have done things better in that period? Probably. Were people like me and Alistair Campbell and others trying to hold things together? Absolutely."
Mr Campbell later appeared to raise doubts about Mr Balls' role in relations between the two camps.
Mr Campbell said yesterday: "It is right, as Ed Balls says today, that he and I worked together at times to try to keep TB-GB in a better place, but I think Ed would have to admit he was doing so very much from a GB perspective, whereas I always sought to see things from a team perspective too."
Mr Miliband, the new Labour leader, said he was focussed on the future and described the revelations as "ancient history". However, he side-stepped questions over his role in the plot and declined to defend the secret talks as Mr Balls had done.
The Cabinet Office announced it was launching an investigation into the source of the leak of the Ed Balls files, which yesterday gripped Westminster.
Volvo, the car company, also attempted to distance itself from being linked to Mr Brown's image. Peter Rask, Regional President of Volvo Car UK, Ireland and Iceland, said: "If only the Labour party had been like today's Volvos - dynamic, agile and innovative - perhaps the UK economy would have been in a better place than it finds itself today!"
with a credible plan to deal with the problems facing Britain, they are starting to plot against each other. They can never be trusted with government again.”
Another leaked memorandum warns Mr Brown and Mr Balls that plans to scrap the 10p tax rate would hit millions of poorer Britons and pensioners, but the change was still introduced.
Mr Brown later denied that there would be any losers from the tax changes, before being forced to announce an emergency compensation plan.
The Daily Telegraph also publishes documents today revealing how Mr Brown wanted to create a British constitution. Detailed plans for a Bill of Rights were prepared, including possible regulations for the media, but the proposal was quietly dropped after he moved into No 10.
The disclosure of the economic documents in the Ed Balls files follows demands from the shadow chancellor that the Coalition abandons its public spending cuts. Last week, Mr Balls demanded that George Osborne, the Chancellor, draw up a “plan B” for spending if the economy deteriorates.
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is understood to privately believe that some of the cuts should be accepted, threatening a repeat of the divide between Mr Blair and Mr Brown over spending plans.
Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, gave an interview yesterday in which he dismissed the wisdom of Mr Balls’s “plan B” concept.
In the wake of the disclosures over his role in plotting to oust Mr Blair, Mr Balls denied he had acted improperly.
He also effectively accused Mr Blair of lying to the electorate in 2005 about his intention to serve a full third term as prime minister.
Labour began discussing the “transition” from Mr Blair to Mr Brown even before the 2005 general election, Mr Balls claimed.
Mr Blair fought and won the 2005 election on a promise to serve a full third term in office. In 2004, he declared: “If I’m elected I would serve a third term. I want to see it through.”
But, in a radio interview, Mr Balls alleged that talks between Mr Brown and Mr Blair about a transfer of power began before the election.
“The discussions about how to make that transition work began before the 2005 general election,” he said.
He was asked: “Even though publicly Mr Blair had said he would serve a full third term, he wasn’t saying that privately?”
Mr Balls replied: “Yes.”
The claim was last night disputed by friends of Mr Blair. One said: “Ed is basically saying Tony deceived the British public at the 2005 election. That is not true.”
Mr Balls has previously denied any involvement in any plot – which this newspaper disclosed was codenamed “Project Volvo” because of Mr Brown’s reliable but dull image - to force Mr Blair from office.
Yesterday, he said he had taken part in “difficult discussions” about Mr Blair’s position.
“There was not a plot but there was genuine and open and sometimes difficult discussion,” he said. “There were tensions, there were arguments.”
Mr Balls said he and Alistair Campbell, Mr Blair’s aide, had tried to calm those tensions.
He said: “Should Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have done things better in that period? Probably. Were people like me and Alistair Campbell and others trying to hold things together? Absolutely.”
Mr Campbell later appeared to raise doubts about Mr Balls’ role in relations between the two camps.
Mr Campbell said yesterday: “It is right, as Ed Balls says today, that he and I worked together at times to try to keep TB-GB in a better place, but I think Ed would have to admit he was doing so very much from a GB perspective, whereas I always sought to see things from a team perspective too.”
Mr Miliband, the Labour leader, described the revelations as “ancient history”, but side-stepped questions over his role in the plot.
The Cabinet Office announced an investigation into the source of the leak of the files.

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Michael Gove, the education secretary, is confident his office will be cleared of leaking the documents that implicate Ed Balls in a plot to remove Tony Blair

Michael Gove, the education secretary, is confident his office will be cleared of leaking the documents that implicate Ed Balls in a plot to remove Tony Blair after Whitehall sources indicated that an internal Labour feud is behind the breach of security.

As the Cabinet Office released details of an investigation into the alleged leak from the education department, sources close to Gove accused Balls of demanding an inquiry to deflect attention from the Labour feuding.

A source close to Gove told the Guardian: "Like with [former Haringey council children's services boss] Sharon Shoesmith, Ed Balls is pathetically trying to blame officials. He should ask friends how these things got leaked."

Gove fought back after the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, sanctioned an investigation into the leak in the early hours of Friday morning after a complaint from the shadow chancellor. Balls also contacted David Bell, permanent secretary at the education department, late on Thursday night after the Daily Telegraph published the documents. They show that Balls was the key figure in "Project Volvo", designed to unseat Blair and prepare Gordon Brown for the Labour party premiership.

Balls told the BBC on Friday: "The last time I saw them [the papers] was when they were on my desk in the [education] department. I don't know how they were taken and got to the Telegraph."

The papers were not among correspondence sent to his Commons office after the election, by which time Balls had stood down as education secretary. Bell formally ordered the inquiry after consulting O'Donnell.

Senior figures in Whitehall are highly sceptical of the shadow chancellor's claim that he left sensitive documents, including annotations by the then-prime minister, in a file on his desk in his department as he headed off to campaign in last year's general election. The formal explanation of the inquiry indicated that O'Donnell has not accepted Balls's the claim that the documents were in the department, let alone that they were then leaked by an official or someone from the office of his successor, Gove.

The prime minister's spokesman explained the investigation, saying: "The Cabinet Office is looking into, first, whether these papers were in the possession of any department. And second, if so, whether there have been any breaches of document security within government."

One Whitehall source said of the Balls complaint: "This all has a familiar ring to it. Ed Balls loves inquiries."

The source speculated that Balls may have leaked the documents himself. "This has the feel of desk-clearing about it. Ed Miliband is struggling a bit, Ed Balls must be eyeing up the Labour leadership. So why not get all this out on his terms so this stuff is not released at a more difficult moment?"

Gove and other senior Tories have a different view. They believe that a former member – or members – of the Brown circle leaked the papers to damage Balls at the moment that he is emerging as a pivotal figure in the Labour party.

Greg Hands, parliamentary aide to George Osborne, tweeted: "Worth noting how leaky Labour has become under the Two Eds, with a steady stream of docs seemingly from both their offices in the last year."

Balls insisted this morning that the documents, from 2005 and 2006, do not show that he was plotting against Blair. He told the BBC: "After 2004 and then on there was a discussion between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and others, which included myself, about how we manage that stable and orderly transition. There was discussions, there was negotiations.

"I lived through these years. I know what happens when people allow personalities and debates and fights to get in the way of the national interest. I was part of trying to hold things together in difficult times. There are important lessons to learn, people want to know that the Labour party has learned them. We have, 100%. That is why we are not going to be diverted by these kind of false and mendacious allegations. The idea that there was a plot or a coup is untrue and not justified by these papers."

In an attempt to implicate the Tories in the leak, he said the publication was "an attempt to take attention away from what is going on in this country".

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Ed Balls has denied taking part in a conspiracy to unseat Tony Blair following the 2005 general election

Ed Balls has denied taking part in a conspiracy to unseat Tony Blair following the 2005 general election, after a leaked series of papers showed the role he played in an operation to prepare Gordon Brown for the party leadership.

Balls said there was nothing in the papers, leaked to the Daily Telegraph, that amounted to a plot. The leak, which appears designed to damage the shadow chancellor, has already reopened bitter party wounds.

The documents show that Balls was the key figure in "Project Volvo", designed to unseat Tony Blair and prepare Gordon Brown for the Labour party premiership.

In an extraordinary development, Balls said he last saw the documents in a file on his desk in the education department a year ago when he was schools secretary.

He contacted David Bell, permanent secretary at the education department, to say that the papers were not among correspondence sent to his Commons office after the election, by which time Balls had stood down. Bell ordered an inquiry after consulting the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell.

The investigation will look into whether the current government was involved in the leaking of the papers, or whether a disgruntled former member of the Brown circle has decided to strike at Balls. The shadow chancellor is rapidly emerging as a key figure in the Labour party at a time when the leader, Ed Miliband, is struggling to assert his authority.

Speaking to reporters outside his home, Balls said: "There is nothing here to justify claims of a plot."

One key document among a raft of internal papers to be published by the Daily Telegraph over the coming days shows that a meeting to discuss Brown's leadership bid was held on 19 July 2005, a few months after Blair led the party to its historic third successive election win.

The document, which is annotated by Balls, talks of a "GB Transition Storyline" under the heading "Leadership Election". It says the key people in the process would be Balls, Ed Miliband, the pollster Deborah Mattinson and Spencer Livermore, a former Brown aide. Next to a finance section Balls has written in the figure £5m.

Labour sources played down the significance of the leak, depicting it as "ancient history". Other sources said that it was hardly surprising to discover that the Brown camp was making preparations for the post-Blair era after he made clear that the 2005 election would be his last as Labour leader.

But the leaked papers provide documentary proof that Balls was the key figure in a highly organised operation to unseat a sitting prime minister.

Brown sent Balls and other members of the group a series of memos in the autumn of 2005 highlighting Blair's weaknesses. "This is a government not presidency," he wrote. "Restoration of constitution and of trust. Leadership that gets on with the job … Trust depends on proper relationship between executive legislature and civil service, Labour the champion of the constitution … Need to redefine politics from spin/calculation/manoeuvre … No presidentialism." In one passage, Brown wrote to Balls: "If we are to renew Labour, we will have to be as rigorous and brutal as we were in the creation of new Labour."

In another memo, Brown showed his frustration with Blair, who refused to give a clear date for the handover of power. "Politics is about shaping the debate as much as winning the debate itself … Recent weeks have shown how far we have moved backwards since the election … The press now write as if Blair is the only person who could ever win Labour any election.

"From untrustworthy Blair v trustworthy Brown it is now reforming Blair v block-on-reform Brown. All his talk of Labour dominating the political landscape from the centre ground is not about re-establishing Labour but a self-promotion about his exceptionalism (and it is not rooted in what is actually happening).

"The facts are: two-thirds think Britain is moving in the wrong direction. More than half think we lied over Iraq. Trust in politicians is half what it was 20 years ago."

The documents also provide a lighter insight into the Brown operation. Mattinson, the group's pollster, dubbed the campaign to prepare him for the premiership "Project Volvo". A 31-page document produced to "develop a narrative" for Gordon Brown's vision compared him to the Swedish car make on the grounds that he was steadfast and robust. David Cameron, then recently elected Tory leader, was seen by voters as a more of a BMW.

Brown's team were advised to "demonstrate wider interests" focusing on his family, leisure and lifestyle. "Show humour, character, charm," the document said. "More Richard and Judy opportunities; use Richard and Judy mode at all times."

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The British government has no mandate to pursue its austerity policies,

The British government has no mandate to pursue its austerity policies, according to Dr. Rowan Williams. Dr. Williams is not an opposition politicians or firebrand activist; he's the Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the Church of England. But in his capacity as guest-editor of the latest edition of the leftie magazine New Statesman, the Archbishop has torn into  the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron, accusing it of implementing "radical, long-term policies for which no one voted." That's a reference to an election that produced no clear winner, forcing the rare act of cohabitation, and to privatization-oriented policies in education and health that the cleric said were spreading fear in Britain.

Williams was no less scathing of the Labor Party opposition, challenging it to stop simply crying foul and explain its alternative policy: "We are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently."

But nobody in Britain's political class has suggested any impropriety in the fact that a man of the cloth was using the moral authority of his pulpit to excoriate government policies. On the contrary, it's a time-honored tradition in Britain, and as former Conservative cabinet minister and Margaret Thatcher acolyte Norman Tebbit noted, such political interventions are "part of [the Archbishop's] job." Former Prime Minister Tony Blair concurred, saying Bishops attacking the government is a tradition in British politics, recounting his own experience over the Iraq invasion. "It is just part of the way things work. I should imagine the govenrment will say they are relaxed about it, and just get on with the things they want to do."

Indeed, Prime Minister Cameron responded by affirming Williams' right to express his views, even if he those ideas were wrongheaded.  "I've never been one to say that the Church should fight shy of making political intervention," said Cameron.

The Church of England has always been an institution of state at the same time as playing a global role as the mother church of the Anglican World Communion. It was created, after all, in response to the refusal of the Vatican to annul the marriage of  Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon. And to this day, while Williams is its primate, the Church of England's Supreme Governor is Queen Elizabeth II, who is also the head of state.

In its contemporary incarnation, the Church of England has long been a repository of progressive social and political ideas, and successive governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have typically faced criticism from the Church on their left flank.

Williams, in fact, offered a broad progressive challenge to political conventional wisdom in his own critique, stressing the importance of a theological tradition "that is not about 'the poor' as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates - like the flow of blood - is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility."

"A democracy that would measure up to this sort of ideal - religious in its roots but not exclusive or confessional - would be one in which the central question about any policy would be: how far does it equip a person or group to engage generously and for the long term in building the resourcefulness and well-being of any other person or group, with the state seen as a 'community of communities'...?"

That the leader of the national Church would traffic in ideas he freely acknowledge come from the earlier socialist tradition of "syndicalism" is a reminder that the C of E, as it is known, has hardly followed the latter-day drift to the political right of its Catholic forebears.

And talking of Catholics,  Tony Blair -- who converted to Catholicism once out of office (Britain has never had a Catholic Prime Minister) -- was making waves of his own in Britain this week, while touting a paperback edition of his memoir, The Journey. In a new foreword, he urges -- among other things -- a more interventionist Western role in the Arab Spring.  Autocratic regimes in the Arab world must "change or be changed," Blair urged, and where they respond with violence to demands for peaceful change and close down the path of reform, the West should stand ready to intervene as it has done in Libya -- and to use force, where necessary, on a wider front than is currently the case.

But Britons don't necessarily share Blair's enthusiasm for democratic crusading in the Arab world. Certainly not Archbishop Williams, who savaged the then-Prime Minister's decision-making and rhetoric that took Britain into Iraq. Nor the party faithful, whose backlash to his unpopular decision to join President Bush's invasion of Iraq ultimately cost Blair his job.

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Ed Miliband's role in the plot to overthrow Tony Blair

The Labour leader is listed throughout the leaked documents as a key ally in plotting Mr Brown’s leadership coup. He was handed the job of drawing up Mr Brown’s policies for government, including a 100-day plan and medium-term proposals.
He oversaw a small group of hand-picked academics and think tank leaders who began working on the project.
Mr Mr Miliband was one of the 2005 intake of Labour MPs that consolidated Mr Brown’s inner circle. It also included Ed Balls and Ian Austin, and gave Parliamentary positions to several of Mr Brown’s long-time aides.
The three new MPs were immediately part of the “small group” of allies around Mr Brown, which also included Sue Nye, Spencer Livermore and Douglas Alexander, who had been an MP since 1997.
Mr Alexander, who is now the shadow foreign secretary, was asked to prepare plans for an election in 2009, but his position was undermined by the deliberations over the bungled attempt to call an election in autumn 2007.

 

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Telegraph's scoop will cut short Ed Miliband's time as Labour leader

Here was documentary proof that the two most senior figures on the Labour front bench, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, were plotting to oust Tony Blair from the moment they entered Parliament in 2005. Not only that, but the plot was hatched in the midst of a security crisis when the Government was reeling from a terrorist attack. The producers of This Week huddled with the show’s presenter, Andrew Neil, in a frantic effort to include this bombshell of a story in the programme.
This was already a bad week for Ed Miliband after his failure to capitalise on the Prime Minister’s U-turns on NHS reform and prison reform at PMQs, but it just got a whole lot worse. He and Ed Balls emerge from these latest revelations as hatchet men for Gordon Brown, willing to do their master’s bidding no matter how ill-advised or inappropriate. Apart from their sheer effrontery – what on earth made them think they were entitled to start plotting against the very leader whose popularity had swept them into power? – there’s the lack of judgment. In the epic struggle between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they backed the loser. They conspired to replace the man who had won three general elections on the trot, making him the most successful leader the Labour Party has ever had, with a walking black hole. The upshot was a historic defeat in which Labour got four million fewer working class votes than it did in 1997 and polled its lowest share of the vote since 1983.
The most politically significant thing about this story is the documentary proof it provides of Ed Miliband’s close ties to the Brownites. During the Labour leadership campaign he tried to position himself as the candidate of party unity, someone who could heal the rift that had handicapped New Labour during its 13 years in office. But it’s clear from these revelations that he is and always has been a Gordon Brown lackey. If anyone was in any doubt that his victory over his brother represented a triumph of the Brownites over the Blairites, here’s the evidence.
Had Ed Miliband agreed to be Gordon’s car-door-opener-in-chief because he was mesmerised by the Scotsman’s force of personality, that would be one thing. But the tragic thing is, it was also because he believed he was right on policy. He shares his master’s blind spot, believing that the British people are fundamentally progressive and will vote for a leader with an egalitarian agenda. That, surely, has been the biggest shortcoming of Miliband’s leadership – the conviction that Labour only needs to oppose the cuts in order to win the next election. He clearly shares his mentor’s scepticism about Blair’s public service reforms and on almost every important issue he’s retreated to the Old Labour default position. Like Brown, he stubbornly refuses to see the connection between Blair’s electoral success and his centrist policies and naively imagines that the public will vote for wholesale social democracy if only it’s articulated in the right way.
Reading through these documents, it brings home to me just what an extraordinary stroke of luck Ed’s victory was for the Prime Minister. Like some of David Cameron’s predecessors, the Brownites have no grasp of how to win over Middle England. There was a sophisticated, tough-minded candidate on the ballot during Labour’s leadership election – a candidate who could have mounted a convincing challenge for the centre ground – but he lost out to his younger brother. As this story makes clear, Ed had no grasp of how to win an election in 2005 and he has no grasp of how to win one now. He’s Gordon Brown lite. This story will have shortened his already precarious tenure by at least six months.

 

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Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, may be forced to scrap his controversial plans to reform sentencing after being summoned to Downing Street by David Cameron for a meeting.

Proposals to offer criminals a 50 per cent sentence reduction in their sentence for an early guilty plea may now be ditched or scaled back in a bid to re-establish the Conservative's law and order credentials.
There is also a question over Mr Clarke's planned curbs on the power of judges to give indefinite sentences, the Times reported.
Mr Clarke's proposals have been unpopular with Conservative colleagues and viewed as a vote loser.
The cimbdown is an embarrassment for the Governmnet as the plans initially enjoyed Cabinet approval and were a centrepiece of its criminal justice policy.
Mr Clarke will now have to come up with £100m of savings elsewhere from his budget but has already begun to make record cuts in legal aid as part of large cuts to Ministry of Justice spending,

 

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