Labour party

Anne McElvoy’s report for the Today Programme on the Labour leadership this morning is well worth listening to. It featured all the usual suspect and some classic moments—Tessa Jowell damming Ed Miliband with faint praise and Ed Balls’ henchmen Charlie Whelan going out of his way to praise Andy Burnham—but the really memorable bit came when McElvoy asked Abbott about her decision to send her son to private school. As with her infamous interview with Andrew Neil, Abbott simply refused to answer. There was just a period of dead air.

A little odd, and certainly inconvenient, that al-Megrahi still lives and breathes. Then again, Scotland's a notoriously unhealthy place and a bit of desert air probably did him some good. Ensconced in Washington, David Cameron will have taken some flak for the Lockerbie bomber’s compassionate release, for which he has the perfect riposte: terrible business, but nothing to do with me. His second line of defence is constitutionally watertight: the decision was Holyrood’s alone. The Lockerbie Papers suggest that al-Megrahi’s inclusion in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement was a precondition of any deal between the UK and Libyan governments, as Saif al-Islam Gadaffi maintains.

We’ve reached the Mandelson overload zone, but he makes one vital observation in an interview with Matthew Norman: ‘We drove them (the Tories) further and further to the Right, and Cameron is driving us ever more to the Left. You only win general elections from the centre and we’re sleepwalking into a trap. We need to wake up. There’s still a little time for a leader to emerge from the pack.’ The Labour leadership election was always going to be determined by the left wing of the party and the unions. The assumption was that David Miliband would campaign from the right, but even he favours a permanent 50 percent tax rate.

Asks Jeff Randall in a pugnacious column for the Telegraph. The memoirs, Randall argues, have finally exposed the conceit that Mandelson was a tactical genius. Randall says that Mandelson was a devious and divisive backroom spinner. Well, he ain't the Prince of Darkness for nothing. But Mandelson’s career and political persona were fashioned in a bygone era. Today, ambitious homosexuals climb the greasy pole out in the open – both in terms of their careers and their sexuality, (David Laws was an exception in the latter case). Mandelson’s modus operandi was determined by the conclusion that the 1980s were not an era for gays in politics, whether preening or discreet.

Reading Ed Miliband’s piece in today’s Times on how Labour can win back southern voters, I was struck by this section: 'We need to be clear that part of the job of social democratic politics is to conserve those things in society that free-market Conservatism would destroy. Our communities are too precious to be dictated to by markets. Take the example of how our towns have changed. If you travel through the market towns of the South, too often you find them dominated by late-night bars, clubs and betting shops, even when local people want a more friendly place to live.’ Ed Miliband has made this kind of argument before, but this is the clearest exposition of it. I suspect that this traditionalist argument will chime well with a lot of voters.

Pat McFadden, the sullen-looking Shadow Business Secretary, has given an important speech to the Fabian Society. He said: ‘Fight the cuts is a tempting slogan in opposition, and there are indeed some that must be fought. But if that is all we are saying the conclusion will be drawn that we are wishing the problem away.' He is the first shadow minister to recognise that Labour’s current approach is counter-productive, and Ed Balls’ philosophy is suicidal. He notes: ‘In fact, that is the position the Tories and the Lib Dems would prefer us to adopt. They want Labour to retreat to its comfort zone and allow them to say that they alone are capable of facing up to Britain's problems.

Meanwhile, in other Labour news, Ed Balls has just jumped into the deep end without any armbands.  Speaking to the BBC this lunchtime, everyone's favourite Labour leadership candidate said that he didn't - and doesn't - approve of Labour's plan to cut the deficit in half "through spending cuts."  As if to underline the point, he added that he's reluctant to identify cuts until after "this huge risky experiment has been tried on our economy by the Conservatives and the Liberals".  So he's got the fiscal insanity and anti-Clegg positions nailed, then.