Labour party

David Miliband’s performance in Sky News’ Labour leadership hustings will have calmed the nerved of his supporters. In the run-off between him and his brother, David came out on top. His answers were generally sharper and he managed to parry away Ed’s criticisms on tuition fees and foreign policy. (In a pointed remark, Ed said that the Labour government’s foreign policy had been based on ‘old ideas’.) Indeed, Ed Miliband only seemed to get going in his closing statement which was pitch-perfect David’s best moment came when the contenders were asked to pick between Blair and Brown. Ed Balls opted for Brown, Diane Abbott said that Brown ‘was the better man’ and then it was the elder Miliband’s turn.

A Thick of It style interlude from Ann Treneman's interview (£) with Ed Miliband today: "There is also a visit to something called a 'communiversity' where he is confronted with what, for a Miliband, is a scary sight: a bowl of fruit. 'Us Milibands are funny about funny shaped fruit,' he notes, plucking out an apple and avoiding the yellow peril that gave his brother the nickname Milibanana after he was pictured holding one and looking, well, a bit bananas. Later, on a trip to a community farm I feel on the brink of a major news scoop when someone tries to make Ed hold a broccoli. 'Ed does not need to hold the broccoli,' says his press handler as the green blob was extended.

As we drift into the weekend, Labour are stepping up their attacks on Andy Coulson. Already today, Tom Watson, Alan Johnson, John Prescott and Chris Bryant have all drawn noisy attention to the allegations made in that New York Times Magazine article about phone tapping and the News of the World – and their efforts have already pushed the story to the top of the BBC news agenda. Indeed, Bryant has even called for David Cameron to sack Coulson. Labour types will no doubt repeat that message constantly over the next few days. So far, the Tories are standing behind their comms chief. A statement from No.10 reiterated that Coulson "totally and utterly denies" the allegations made against him.

Say what you like about Blair, but he is something of a political entrepreneur. He detects a gap in the market and fills it: he did with New Labour in the mid-1990s. And he detects a trend in the globalised world: a system where governments don't matter so much and power is held by a global elite. This, CoffeeHousers, is what he's up to with his memoirs. He is presenting himself in new incarnation, a statesman without a state, able to move without being tied down to an electorate. There's a very revealing passage in his book where he talks about Condi Rice: “She is a classic example of the absurdity of people with experience and capacity at the highest level not having big political jobs after retirement from office,” he writes.

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 do wonder why Liam Byrne's name hasn't been mentioned more often in connection with the role.

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 cheap shot at Cameron and Osborne, but I expect we'll hear more of it in coming months.

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’.