Still, this is a gossip column, and you’re reading it for gossip, not high-minded piffle arguing that these people have got bigger problems than the gossip.
First, there’s the question of how Ed Balls’ papers found their way into the press. His team suggest that they were left in his ministerial office, where discreet civil servants were expected to shift all items to his House of Commons office. If they didn’t, it’s obvious who wanted to put this out there. The dastardly Tories.
Not so, say the Tories, looking all innocent. It must have been a Labour chap who decided to use them to knife Balls, fearing he’d become a threat to the leader. They look at the Ed Miliband team and cough quietly. ‘No harm to a weakened Miliband in making Balls looks like a conniving so-and-so, is there?’ they whisper.
Team Miliband says they’d have to be pretty stupid to ignite a bomb under the party. They suspect they’re victims of a destabilisation campaign, with the revelations an attempt to show that Miliband should be replaced by a king over the water.
Oh, say the New Labourites, bridling. Do you mean us? Angered, they claim the David Miliband speech given to the Guardian didn’t come from them, some suggesting it had been circulating widely among Labour types.
In their eyes, someone’s trying to distract from the leader’s troubles by making both the other ‘big beasts’ in the party look disloyal. One senior MP described it to me as ‘a continuation of the victimhood that drove Gordon’s team’. They point out too that all this came before the publication of a Miliband bio, which the leader’s high command were worried about (though it turned out to be deeply, deeply dull).
David Miliband appears genuinely upset that his name has been used in this way, while some supporters murmur that it’s convenient that his discomfiture has allowed his brother to issue the rally-round call while the centre-left bridle at yet another abortive ‘Blairite coup’.
Obviously there are tensions between the underlings of each man. Unfortunately, those tensions are powered as much by mutual suspicion and paranoia as by any hard evidence. You get the feeling that these are people who just know each other too well, and have little sense of perspective about the pressures they operate under. Since no one knows the truth, everyone jumps to their own, likely faulty, conclusions about who is to blame, instead of laughing it off.
So what can Miliband do to stop himself being beset by this peculiar Labour madness?
The answer is most mysterious: be a success, and all these pressures will magically disappear. The question is how, when our collective leadership can be so easily distracted into a Mexican stand-off?
Miliband has to persuade Labour to stop caring about the past. That means he has to keep his focus on the future.
Making it work for Ed …
Anyway, forget the flap. Miliband is safe, despite all the hubbub. But to make his leadership a success, his first challenge is to keep the parliamentary Labour party onside.
This explains why the highly rated Michael Dugher has replaced Chuka Umunna as one of Miliband’s PPSs and why the new head of the leader’s political office is Anna Yearley – a fast-rising former staffer at the PLP and the No 10 political office who is both an able networker and Miliband loyalist.
With Yearley heading up the political office, and Dugher alongside Anne McGuire as Miliband’s eyes and ears, the PLP have people in the leader’s team they know and trust, and who understand how politics works in all its forms. The changes are a big plus for Team Miliband.
The irresistible rise of Lord Glasman
Policy wonks abhor a vacuum, and while Labour is finding itself a new agenda, a gale of articles, op-eds, e-books, panel appearances and newspaper interviews floods into Labour inboxes from the acolytes of blue Labour. Many of the offerings can be found in this excellent magazine, for those of you who like reading phrases like ‘a coordinated attack on the hegemonising power of finance capital and its telos of commodification of the institutions of civil society’ before breakfast.
But not everyone is impressed. Maurice Glasman’s endearingly shambolic personal style has gone down rather badly in the Lords, where the university lecturer mien of skewiff ties, crumpled cardigans and shapeless corduroys is regarded as rather infra dig. Glasman has even managed to offend noble lords by wandering into the chamber in what is apparently a highly inappropriate fashion, leading to much tutting. No sense of the importance of ‘tradition’ and ‘community’, one might say.
Sadly, it’s not just style that offends the Labour lords, I would rather Buster gut than reveal the identity of the Labour peer and author who, on seeing the Noble Lord Glasman departing the Lords, perhaps In Search of England?, turned to his companion and revolved forefinger on forehead in the universal sign for mental disarray.