Labour party

In tomorrow’s papers the reviewers will compare ‘A Journey’ to those “real-life” misery memoirs that seem to be publishing catnip. It is not inaccurate to conclude that this is tale of one man’s struggle in an abusive relationship, and all the more unstatesmanlike for it. The tiny details of the relationship between TB and GB fascinate me. Brown is the one, Blair admits, who coined the soundbyte “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” for example. However, by far the most interesting aspect of the book is Blair’s barely disguised hatred of the Labour left and, most of all, the left-wing intellectuals. So here, very quickly are some

And Westminster’s Idle Question of the Day is: will Ed Balls be made shadow chancellor under a Miliband leadership? There are good arguments both for and against the proposition – and most of them are made in this blog post by the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt. Even Blairites, he says, are warming to the idea of Balls running Labour’s economic policy. But if it’s to happen under David Miliband, then the two men would have to reconcile their different views on tackling the deficit. Under Ed Miliband, the reconciliation would have to be more personal than economic. Neither, I suppose, is impossible. But as all this speculation whirls around Balls, I

Amid all the feverish commotion about cuts, it’s easy to forget that it took the Tories until November 2008 to ditch Labour’s spending plans – and, indeed, that it was barely a year ago when George Osborne first mentioned the c-word in public. Even David Cameron admits that this delay was his biggest mistake. It weakened his party’s claim to foresight, and gave them less time to embed a new narrative about the economy before the election. So it’s noteworthy that Alistair Darling exhumed this mistake on the airwaves earlier, telling the Beeb that “the Tories supported [our spending plans] until the end of 2008.” This may sound like a

As Tim Montgomerie notes, cuts are becoming more real. Yesterday, the government axed NHS Direct, the telephone health service. Actually it hasn’t been axed but replaced by the more cost effective ‘111’ service. Removing the sacrosanct letters ‘NHS’ from the title of any body is anathema to the opposition, who have mobilised a frantic defence over the past 24 hours, so predictable and I can barely contain my indifference. Twitter has exploded in a fit of righteous indignation; Ed Balls, without a hint of irony, is using words like ‘callous’ and ‘ill-thought policies’; and Andy Burnham’s talking about Andrew Lansley’s ‘vindictive mission to break up the NHS’. It’s the name

I know, I know – there’s only so much information about the Labour leadership contest that a sane person can take. But as an addendum to Ed Balls’ pugnacious speech earlier, it’s worth noting that Ed Miliband has since deployed exactly the same argument about deficits and the Attlee era: “We do need to reduce the deficit but politics must be bigger than that. Remember our history. After 1945, with the biggest deficit in our history, that Labour government set out the vision of a good society – for a new welfare state and a new economy.” To be fair to MiliE, he’s made the same point before now. But

Judging by today’s papers, the idea that David and Ed Miliband’s mother is voting for Diane Abbott has entered into the political consciousness. But it isn’t true. When Ed Miliband said that his mum wasn’t voting for him or David and was instead backing Abbott, he was joking. As he explained to me the other day: “For the record, my mother isn’t voting for Diane Abbott, that’s another joke, an ill judged joke that I made.  I actually went on holiday, shut off my phone and a couple of days later I discovered that I’d spawned a whole series of stories saying the definitive view is that she is voting

The rumours were true: Jon Cruddas has backed David Miliband. It’s an unlikely union on the face of it – an ambitious centrist and an almost utopian socialist. Though Cruddas once forged a partnership with the equally centrist James Purnell, so it is no great surprise that he is a pluralist. Cruddas tells the New Statesman that in ‘terms of the nature of the leadership that’s needed, he’s beginning to touch on some of those more profound questions that need to be addressed head-on.’ Is Cruddas right? Miliband has delivered the speech that he thinks will define his campaign. To be brutally honest, it was not profound. There was little