Blunkett is cast into the outer darkness

There was a time when David Blunkett entertained serious hopes of becoming Labour leader and Prime Minister. More recently, after he realised that Gordon Brown is unbeatable, he appeared to make his peace with the Chancellor, and indicated that he might be interested in succeeding him in that post.

Today, however, those hopes are in ruins. As the controversry over his diaries continues to rage, the Brownite camp in the shape of Gordon's First Lieutenant, Right-Hand Man and Vicar-on-Earth Nick Brown has delivered a death blow to any lingering prospect of Blunkett resuming his frontline career.

"Newcastle" Brown does not normally do on-the-record quotes. He is the kind of politician - and all parties have them - who prefer to operate in the shadowy realms of thinly-veiled hints and off-the-record briefings, generating the kind of stories that end up being attributed to "close friends," and "key allies" rather than any named individual.

Yet here is the former Chief Whip telling today's Times: "Politics is a team game. Politicians on the same side have to stick together. I cannot understand what David Blunkett thinks he is doing except disqualifying himself from consideration as a serious politician."

This comment will need no deciphering among the ranks of Labour MPs who are used to Nick's ways. He could have chosen to employ his usual, less direct methods, and still got someone to write a story along the lines that "key allies" of Gordon Brown were warning Blunkett as to his future behaviour - but he didn't.

It can only mean that Gordon is sending a clear an unambiguous message to the former Home Secretary. "You're out."

Did I do Stephen Byers a disservice?

David Blunkett's tape-recorded diaries The Blunkett Tapes are published today having been serialised in the Grauniad last week. I have already made clear my view that the content should be viewed primarily as entertainment rather than enlightenment, in particular the assertion that Tony Blair was ready to sack Gordon Brown unless he backed the Iraq War in 2003.

One little gem did catch my eye though in Friday's final instalment. Had I not been in a very important meeting for most of that day, and had my home dial-up connection not been buggered for most of the weekend, I would have blogged on it before now.

Anyway....I refer to a passage in which Mr Blunkett gives his take on one of the infamous episodes in the entire history of the Blair administration, the email sent by Stephen Byers' special adviser Jo Moore on the afternoon of 9/11 stating that it was now "a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."

Blunkett's account casts a completely new light on the episode, and therefore merits reproduction in full:

October 2001

[Leak of email sent by Jo Moore, special adviser to Stephen Byers, to Department of Transport press office on September 11 saying it would be a "very good day" to "bury" bad news]

The world has gone crackers, and the cause célèbre of the week has been the débâcle over Jo Moore, which is going on and on. Steve was intending to sack Jo Moore, but by early afternoon it had all changed and apparently it was because, quite rightly, Tony had perceived that this was a try-on by the civil service. It was felt that they were the ones who had received the email and leaked it, and no matter how appalling the email, the declaration of war by the civil service and their ability to leak emails and thereby bring down special advisers had to be countered. Unfortunately life is not as simple as that. Tony's interpretation of the situation is right, but Steve's initial decision to sack Jo Moore for the content of the email was also right because this story has run and run and run.

In dictating this I had no idea just how catastrophic it was going to be for Steve Byers. I think those advising really did mean well, and it was a difficult situation to call. There is no doubt that Jo Moore paid the price, but what price.

Now this, to my knowledge, is the first time anyone has claimed that the decision not to sack Moore after her initial, appalling misdemeanour was not Byers's, but Blair's.

I was of course working in the Lobby at the time as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, and since Byers is a Tyneside MP, it is fair to say I took a keen interest in the story. It was common knowledge within the Lobby that Alastair Campbell, then at the very height of his powers, wanted Moore out, and the supposition was that it was Byers - not Blair - who was resisting this.

I have myself written on a number of occasions in my Journal column and elsewhere that not sacking Moore was the mistake that wrecked Byers' career. Yet it now turns out that it might not have been his decision at all.

It would be too much to expect a loyal Blairite such as Byers to now confirm the truth of Blunkett's account at the cost of dropping the Prime Minister in it. But once Mr Blair has left office, it will be interesting to see if Byers chooses to set the record straight.

I'm a 40pc Political Junkie

I love all these Twenty Questions-type surveys that go round the blogosphere, so here, via Brod Blog, Mars Hill and Iain Dale is the latest, the Political Junkie Test.

The things that are true about me are in bold:

You're a political junkie if.......

1. The first thing you do in the morning is check the BBC’s politics website, followed by the broadsheets.
2. You can name 10 Lib Dem MPs.
3. The Today programme is as much a morning routine as brushing your teeth and taking a piss.
4. You know the URLs for the Top Three political blogs from memory.
5. In your briefcase is a copy of Private Eye, an iPod, and Alan Clarke’s biography.
6. You read Boris every week, even if its only to disagree.
7. You record Question Time via Series Link on your SKY + box.
8. You know the Huffington Post is not a newspaper from a town called Huffington.
9. You know who Nicholas Sarkozy is
10. Your family never brings up politics in your presence.
11. You have a complex opinion of Tony Blair.
12. You actually know where the politics section is at your local Waterstones.
13. You always vote.
14. Your water cooler conversations usually revolve around a recent Westminster scandal.
15. You have given money to a political party, via either membership or a donation.
16. Your dream is to appear on Question Time yourself.
17. You read political blogs during your lunch hour.
18. You see more of Iain Dale or Recess Monkey than your children, sadly
19. You can name the last four foreign secretaries.
20. You have a ‘handle’ at Labourhome.

I make that a score of 8 out of 20, or 40pc. A bit of a politics junkie, then, but not exactly mainlining on it.

Now even Blair's generals defy him

Ever since Tony Blair announced he would not fight a fourth election, we have witnessed a slow ebbing away of his authority. But today, that process took on a new dimension with the comments by General Sir Richard Dannatt over the War in Iraq.

Contradicting everything Mr Blair has been telling us since the start of the conflict, Army chief Sir Richard said the continued presence of our troops in Iraq was endangering British security, that they needed to be brought home "sometime soon."

Ordinarily, a Chief of General Staff who made a comment so undermining of government policy would be summarily sacked. But Mr Blair cannot afford to make Sir Richard a martyr to the anti-war cause any more than he could have done in relation to Gordon Brown in 2003 (see previous post.)

Parallels are now being increasingly drawn with the Suez crisis fifty years ago. Few questioned then that withdarwal was the right thing to do, but it still cost Anthony Eden his job.

16 Oct Update: More in this vein on my Week in Politics Podcast which is now online. The full text version is available HERE.

* Apologies to my regular visitors for the lower-than-normal volume of posts this week. I do however have a busy "day job" which is completely unrelated to my political writing, and until the day when this blog can pay me a living (!) it must always come first.

Blunkett is re-writing history

In the latest instalment of his diaries currently being serialised in the Guardian, David Blunkett claims that Gordon Brown only backed the Iraq War at the last minute after concluding that Tony Blair would sack him if he didn't. As well as making the paper's front-page splash this morning, this story was also being talked-up by a wide-eyed Nick Robinson on last night's 10 O'Clock News.

I am genuinely surprised at both the Guardian and the Beeb for giving this such credence. If they had cast their minds back to 2003 for a few seconds, they would surely have realised that any notion of the Prime Minister being able to sack the Chancellor at that juncture is palpably absurd.

The Iraq War was, and is, a bitterly divisive issue for the Labour Party. Tony Blair was extremely fortunate that only two Cabinet ministers, Robin Cook and Clare Short, resigned over it, and furthermore that they did so in such a way that the parliamentary opposition to the conflict was fragmented rather than brought together.

The idea that, in this highly unstable political situation in which his premiership hung by a knife-edge, Tony Blair could have sacked Gordon Brown without triggering a successful coup against his leadership is, as Charlie Whelan would say, bollocks.

Then again, it does throw up what would surely be an interesting chapter in a book of political counterfactuals, were Iain Dale and Duncan Brack ever tempted to repeat that exercise.

Had Blair been daft enough to make Brown a martyr to the anti-war cause in, say, March 2003 after the first phase of the conflict ended, Brown would undoubtedly have become Prime Minister by the summer of that year after the unravelling of the Government's case for the war and the suicide of Dr David Kelly.

Mr Brown, untainted by the "trust" issue that attached itself to Mr Blair post-Kelly, would then have led Labour to a third successive 100-plus landslide, reducing the Tories to a parliamentary rump and producing in them such a collective nervous breakdown that their prospects of ever regaining power became negligible.

In other words, if we really were living in David Blunkett's parallel universe, the cause of the left in British politics might today be looking a damned site healthier.

Has Reid really done a deal with Gordon?

The Independent today has the "story" of John Reid's decision to quit the Labour leadership race and back Gordon Brown in return for keeping his job, a tale which had previously appeared initially on The First Post and subsequently on Guido.

"Reid is said to have told Gordon Brown he will not stand against him.
Reid "has realised support for a serious challenge isn't there," noted the article, adding: "Odds are that ... Reid will remain Home Secretary when Brown moves into No 10."

But is it true? Well, my bet is that if the Independent genuinely thought it was, it would have put it somewhere near the front page, not buried it in the Pandora column.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if there were to be such a deal in the near future. But if there is, I think Gordo will find the Foreign Secretary's job is the one Reidy really wants....