Factionalism is a dead end for Labour, warn McBride and Wegg-Prosser

Today should be a day to look to the future. With Labour Party Conference just a matter of hours away, and hopes rising among the grassroots that Ed Miliband will start rolling out the first few policies an eventual Labour manifesto, we should be talking about 2015 and beyond.

But we’re not. We’re talking about 2006, and 2010, and Brown, and Blair, and smears, feuds and rows all over again.

As is always the way with the Blair/Brown years, there are two concurrent accounts.

The first  account – Damian McBride’s long awaited and carefully revealing autobiography about his time as Gordon Brown’s special adviser– has had a write-up in the Daily Mail. The grim, depressing, vile revelations of McBride’s and others’ behaviour; the willingness to trash and traduce all Labour figures except those who were loyal to Brown to the last – are all pretty loathsome. But they are not particularly unexpected. The dirty linen of the Blair/Brown years has been left out to hang in public for years. Those of us who have examined all the accounts are, now, pretty unshockable. Damian McBride will need to provide much more salacious detail in the coming days, if he wants to make headlines – and I’m sure he will. His publishers aren’t daft, neither are the Daily Mail and neither is he. Ed Balls speaks on Monday, Ed Miliband on Tuesday – so expect McBride’s revelations to be timed accordingly.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, the Blair team’s side of the story is put forward in breathless, exhausting detail. Ben Wegg-Prosser, Tony Blair’s ex- Director of Strategic Communications (disclosure – Ben is a Director of LabourList) wrote in the Guardian warning the current Shadow Cabinet not to repeat the mistakes of New Labour. Ben’s intervention is well-timed, appearing at the same time as the first episode of McBride’s book – surely it’s no coincidence that they drop on the same day – and shows the desperation and acrimony of the Blair/Brown conflict’s final months in glorious technicolour. In emails passed to the Guardian, Ben refers to McBride as “Damian McPrickface”, which I imagine is rather more polite than McBride’s epithets for Wegg-Prosser. I will have to read the book to find out!

Relations between the Blair and Brown camp during the New Labour years were fairly grim. That’s hardly front page news. If you didn’t know that already, then you haven’t really been paying attention, have you?

But here’s the good news: the Labour Party, and the Shadow Cabinet, really isn’t like that any more. It isn’t full of bitter briefings, shouting matches and public abuse and smears. Reading about those years feels about as distant as the rows between Clement Attlee and Harold Laski.

Mc Bride’s and Wegg Prosser’s accounts are still relevant, of course, because figures from the Blair/Brown years are still incredibly important in Labour. Miliband, Balls and Alexander, yes, but also many of those who were close to or advising Blair and Brown during those difficult times. Yet the party seems – so far – to have learned the right lessons of those incredibly divisive years. The briefing of politicians’ private lives is a thing of the past, as are personal attacks on colleagues.

The briefers of today seem, if anything, pointedly cautious. When I speak to senior Labour figures or staffers, the moment where a well-aimed pop at someone other Labour figure never seems to arrive. That’s not to say that MPs, Shadow Cabinet Ministers, advisers and Labour staffers don’t sometimes fall out, disagree and intensely dislike each other – they are only human after all – but it doesn’t show as the ugly, tribal nastiness that characterised the Blair/Brown rows.

It seems have lessons been learned. And that’s a good thing – because factionalism and personal feuding is always, always a dead end for the Labour Party. It is the point where personal ambition, or ambition for friends, overrides what the Labour Party needs to do; namely, serve the British people. Reading and rereading accounts of how Blair and Brown created warring powerbases is intensely depressing. What we will never know is how much they could have achieved if they had consistently worked together, rather than relying on “creative tension” to drive the party onwards.

A telling anecdote from Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre’s book on Ed Miliband, published a few years ago, depicts Miliband distancing himself from Damian McBride after briefings around the “election that wasn’t”. Miliband told McBride he thought he was a liar. Their relationship was over. Miliband and his team consider McBride’s book and what is contained within it to be “ancient history”. Let’s hope that’s true, and let’s also hope that Miliband’s desire to distance himself from the uglier side of politics will continue to inform how he acts as Labour leader – and that others follow his lead.

Today we were reminded what the alternative to clean internal Labour politics is: a nasty, ugly, political abyss…