Peter Hoskin

There's a remarkable self-certainty about what we've seen of Tony Blair's book so far. Sure, there are the fleeting moments of doubt and insecurity: the drinking that was becoming less a pleasure and more a habit, for instance.  But, apart from that, the dominant motif is how His Way was the Right Way. And so, he was right to keep Brown on as Chancellor. He was, it seems, right to prosecute war in Iraq – even if the WMD intelligence was "mistaken". And his chapter on Northern Ireland is written up as a ten-point action plan for future peace processes after future conflicts. Make no mistake, this isn't a bad thing in itself.

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.

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 its reappearance is a reminder that he has more in common with Ed Balls on the economy than his brother does.

Here's one aspect of the Labour leadership contest that has passed without much comment: how many of the contenders want to extend the 50p tax rate from those earning over £150,000 to those earning over £100,000. Ed Miliband's one of them; so is Diane Abbott; and so too – as he reminds us in interview with Left Forward Forward today – is Ed Balls. Sure, only one of these candidates has a realistic chance of becoming leader – but another could easily end up as shadow chancellor. So it’s fairly probable that this will be official Labour policy in the not-too-distant.

Coffee House congratulations to Samantha and David Cameron on the birth of their baby daughter. Here's the Downing Street statement: "The Prime Minister and Mrs Cameron are delighted to announce the birth of their fourth child, a baby girl. Both the baby – who was born weighing 6lbs 1oz – and Mrs Cameron are doing very well. The PM and Mrs Cameron would like to thank the doctors and nurses at the hospital for their help and kindness." No name, as yet – any guesses?

The coverage in today's FT is a reminder that one question will pursue the coalition more doggedly than any other: are the cuts fair and "progressive"? This isn't an issue that Osborne & Co should duck, and not just because they've set it as a measure of their own success. There is, to my mind, a moral and economic necessity for measures that benefit the least well-off – and, what's more, this is terrain which the coalition should feel quite comfortable traversing. Benefit reform, schools reform, lifting low-income earners out of tax: these policies provide a solid foundation for an argument about fairness. If the coalition wants to develop that argument persuasively, then it should remember four points: 1) The graphs don't show the whole picture.

The quotes emerging, in advance, from Nick Clegg's Westminster Hour interview are a mix of the unsurprising and the intriguing. To the first category belongs his claim that "parties in government tend to get a dip in their popularity" – I mean, he's hardly going to say that the Lib Dems' decline in the polls is a disaster, is he? But this, for instance, belongs firmly in the second category: "If we weren't in a coalition now I don't think people would take any notice of the Liberal Democrats ....  If we were in a coalition with Labour, arguably our identity crisis would be even worse." In other words, the Lib Dems are better off in coalition – and they could well be better off in coalition with the Tories.