Is all this about stopping Balls from over-throwing Miliband?
What’s behind the “Brown plot” revelations?
Those who’ve read the accounts of the Brown-Blair wars, particularly those by Andrew Rawnsley and Anthony Seldon, won’t find much to surprise them in the overnight revelations in the Daily Telegraph.
What this does is to flesh out what was already in the public domain with the remarkable added realism of hand-written jottings on documents by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls.
That the paper has documentary evidence of Brown in 2005 telling Balls that they had to be “brutal” in cleansing Labour of Blair’s influence is quite shocking even if this was six years ago.
The big questions are how did the paper get hold of the evidence, who is behind it and what their objective was?
On the face of it the person who comes out worst from what’s been revealed so far is Ed Balls – who seemed to have a pivotal role in the plan to rid Labour of its triple-general election winning leader, Tony Blair.
Could it be, I wonder, that this is the first stage of a stop Balls campaign and that this is being driven by those who want to keep Ed Miliband in post? On the face of it the documents themselves come from an insider – a person or persons who were part of Team Brown in 2005.
If this renews Labour’s Brownite-Blairite wars there is only one winner – the current occupant of Number 10.
Whatever it makes, by comparison, relations between the coalition partners seem quite tame.