A Blairite conspiracy? Unlikely…

By Conor Pope / @conorpope

I was reminded, amidst all the “revelations” this week, of the Labour leadership election of 2010. Remember that? The one that appeared to defeat all previously held notions of time by being so dull as to last longer than the year in which it happened.

Very occasionally, somewhere between David Miliband’s empty platitudes and Diane’s insistence that actually everything the party ever did in government was awful, something vaguely interesting would happen.

To end the televised Newsnight debate for instance, Paxman asked the wannabes who their favourite Labour leader was, or who was the best leader that never was? Abbott and Burnham went for John Smith, David Miliband foreshadowed his own nearly-man future by choosing Tony Crosland and Ed Miliband unimaginatively chose Attlee.

It was Ed Balls who did something interesting: he chose Blair.

It seemed odd at the time and remains so now. Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of ‘Project Volvo’ is Ed Balls’s flat denial of any plots to oust Blair when all common knowledge and evidence suggests otherwise. We know Balls was never his biggest fan. It’s like watching a Shaggy video, or a bad panto:

“There wasn’t a plot!”
“Oh yes there was!”
“Where?”
“Behind you!” etc.

I can see why he wants to pretend none of it happened. The documents are all a bit teenage diary: ‘Project Volvo’ is every bit as cringey as your fourteen year old self thinking up possible names for your future band (for a long while I was obsessed with the idea of a band being called ‘El Dorado’ to really stick it to the money obsessed public, fawning over a shallow ideal that didn’t exist. Take that, IDIOTS!).

Who has leaked them, though? Some say it was that most bitter of species, the Blairites. I believe this was the view of George Galloway on the radio on Friday: frankly an amazing insight into a party he hasn’t been a part of for almost a decade. To back up this point of view is the leak of the David Miliband speech that never was (which, even as acceptance speeches go, is hardly The New Frontier) and a “close friend” of Miliband Sr telling a Sunday newspaper that he still wants to be leader. Balls certainly has enough enemies in this wing, having spun against many of them himself. It may well be too late for him to call for the unity within Labour, when for years it was he who played a major part in “the difficult and painful times” he reminded us of the other day.

“You made this bed, Mr Balls, now you must sleep in it. Yes, I do realise there is a horse’s head in it. Perhaps you shouldn’t have put it there.”

At any rate, the Blairite conspiracy seems unlikely. During parts of Labour’s time in government, the Blair and Brown camps would barely talk about policies, let alone the strategies they were concocting to get one over on each other. While Brown was PM, the few that regularly plotted against him would hide away in offices that were tucked away in the labyrinthine towers of Parliament, leaving in groups of no more than two so as not to arouse suspicion. These are not groups who tended to share their plots.

Or maybe they did. Maybe that’s why they always failed. Maybe Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt sat in Hoon’s office that fateful evening and Hewitt mumbled: “In retrospect, telling Nick Brown was a mistake.”

On top of that, it would be an odd time to launch an all-out media attack. Balls is consistently the best performer in the Shadow Cabinet and Ed Miliband, although at times flailing like a bloody useless Magikarp (“It had no effect!”), is still in far too strong a position for any serious challenge on his leadership to be mounted.

So we could well presume it was the Tories. It may not rid them of Balls, their bogeyman, but it has got the spotlight off them temporarily and has got everyone focussed on Labour’s big split.

It’s all very odd, from the Progress magazine front page on which Balls declared “I’m firmly New Labour”, to the timing and content of these leaks. All, I think, we can know for sure is that this isn’t the end. There is more to this story, and it’s coming right up.