The huge depth of research is accompanied by a fairly narrow focus – this is politics as seen through the eyes of Whitehall insiders, both in the civil service and in the Labour Party. That strength is only occasionally a weakness – most notably in the account of the May 2010 hung Parliament negotiations, which is remarkably favourable to a small number of Labour figures and glosses over Labour’s failure to prepare for a hung Parliament despite for many months that being widely seen internally as not only the party’s best but also only hope.

Indeed, this account is bookended by two unanswered questions: why are we now drowning in Labour figures who are revealed as having been critics of Gordon Brown all along yet did not back a contested leadership election, and why was Labour so unprepared for hung Parliament talks that the preparations of its negotiation team added up to little more than a quick cup of tea between Ed Balls and Peter Mandelson before walking into the negotiating room? Those two big acts of omission frame Brown’s rise and fall and are largely absent from the book, though it does provide hints of partial answers.

Their absence from the book is deliberate for neither question features in the list of ten questions provided at the start of the book as forming its structure and purpose. In filling the gap between these two questions with their own ten questions, the authors do an excellent job, telling the story of a Gordon Brown who, having been consumed with plotting and addicted to spending money to win internal Labour support from 2003, was a dreadful Prime Minister until the financial crisis forced the best out of him. “Brown will go down in history as the creator and destroyer of New Labour, and then, at the last minute, its guilty and ineffective reviver,” they conclude.

Despite those stringent criticism of Brown, in many ways the person who comes out of the book worst is Ed Balls – the uber plotter even pursing plots in secret from Brown when he feared Brown would not have the bottle for them, “the most unpleasant bully I have come across” in the words a colleague and the liar denying in public what he did in private.

Coming a close second to Balls are Harriet Harman (also fingered as a plotter against Brown, trying to marshal Cabinet members into ousting him) and British political journalists, a handful of whom are frequently pictured as being the far too uncritical recipients of misleading leaks and personal smears, published under their bylines and reduced to being mouthpieces for Labour infighting rather than independent seekers of truth.

The book’s narrative structure shows just how much of a Prime Minister’s time is taken up with security and foreign affairs matters – a pattern which David Cameron has been reported as being surprised by too after he took office.

With a number of other detailed accounts also published, there is little that is strikingly new in Brown at 10, though some details are wonderfully evocative – as when an aide hustled Gordon Brown into a building and behind a curtain so that he would avoid having to meet Robert Mugabe outside the UN or the story of how Ed Miliband helped craft the “this is no time for a novice” put down aimed at his brother David. News such as Gordon Brown breaking a mobile phone by throwing it away in anger is, however, no longer news even if it is reassuring to know that detailed research backs up such stories.

For a one volume account of the Brown years as Prime Minister, this book is hard to beat. If, however, you have already been a voracious consumer of memoirs and political news and have a good memory, there will be little new to be found in it.

You can buy Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge  from Amazon here.

There is however a quieter failure, going on every day and hitting many Whitehall departments. It is quite simply this: lots of films made, almost no-one watching.

Take the example of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Plenty of films on its YouTube channel but not many viewers. The most watched at the time of writing has just under 4,500 views accumulated over two years. No film less than a year old has more than 1,300 views. Yet individual films with lower viewership feature not only high profile figures but also topics hotly discussed online – such as Vince Cable on digital rights (under 800 views).

BIS is not the exceptional bad child at the back of the class though. Other departments blessed (or cursed, depending on how you see it) with high profile and controversial issues have produced films on them but they consistently get lower viewership – witness the Department for Education and free schools. Sometimes the figures are almost embarrassingly low when you consider the size of the potential audience, such as with the DCLG’s Happy Hanukkah message. Not much happiness was spread there.

The Department of Environment and Climate Change gets close to good performances, with a couple of films in the last year that have broken the 3,000 views barrier. One of those however has had the bulk of its views come via the DECC website and the other via a dedicated official micro-site about redesigning pylons. In other words, whilst DECC is getting the benefits of video hosting for free from YouTube, it is not benefitting very much from the ability to use YouTube to spread videos to a wider audience.

There are some good films, and some nice digital touches – such as the increasing standardisation of YouTube channel names to all end in “govuk”, so that it is easy to spot (or guess the name of) official channels. Nor should every film be expected to succeed. There is merit in doing several on varying topics, planning that one will hit the big time but covering your bets as to which one it will do by producing them all.

Yet if there is some intention to reach audiences, it is hard to see what successes are really being had. It is also notable how exceptionally rare it is to see YouTube films from government departments embedded in political or news blogs, despite the very healthy state of such blogging in the UK.

Overall however, some honourble exceptions aside, it is very much a case of lots of films, little viewership – leaving the nagging suspicion that use of YouTube is being judged too much by inputs (“Good news Minister, we’ve done another film”) and not nearly enough by outputs.

If you’re putting time and money into getting the Home Secretary to make a YouTube clip about the recent riots, shouldn’t you be getting more than under 1,500 views in a month?

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.

Though there is a smattering of references to polling results from other firms, the great strength of the MORI data is that many of the questions have been asked regularly for decades, allowing the story of 2005-2010 to be put into a consistent historical context and polling results judged against previous ones that led up to victory or defeat. It also means that (as with Deborah Mattinson’s excellent book, Talking to a Brick Wall, based on focus groups rather than polls) it is an account of politics in which the views of the public dominate rather than the machinations and words of politicians, who usually take centre stage in post-election accounts.

The book is bulging with facts that make it hard to summarise them beyond “go read the book”, though a few do particularly stand out. The authors conclude that “the nature of electoral support in Britain has changed, probably permanently … the culmination of years of steady change … British voters are … less tribal … and less polarised”. Yet geographic division, especially the decline of the Conservative Party in Scotland, has hardened even as other divisions have softened.

Somewhat paradoxically the authors also very successfully model vote share in individual seats based on 17 different characteristics drawn from 2001 census. Factors such as the number of two or more car households are very influential in explaining the Conservative Party vote share, whilst factors such as the proportion of single-parent families do the same for Labour. Some factors do seem to divide even if the old patterns no longer have the same power.

In addition, “the old habit, whereby a predominant belief among voters that the economy was moving in the right direction was enough to ensure a government’s re-election, no long holds. So, despite having convinced an extraordinarily high proportion of the public that the economy was on the upturn … Gordon Brown could not muster the votes he needed”.

The authors also point out that Gordon Brown’s ratings as Prime Minister, whilst very low, followed a simple extrapolation of Tony Blair’s declining figures though his time as Prime Minister. The problem wasn’t that Brown worsened the long-term trend; it was far more that the decline had set in the moment Blair became Prime Minister and at election time Blair was up against unpopular Conservative Party leaders whilst Brown was up against David Cameron, far more popular than his three predecessors.

Indeed, the book points out that on their overall bundle of measures of leader image, Gordon Brown was in a slightly better position in May 2010 than Tony Blair had been even pre-Iraq was in April 2001. But William Hague was no David Cameron.

At times the authors skirt with over-playing the determinism of Labour’s long-time decline in popularity during its term in office. After all, John Major – a Chancellor succeeding a three-times winning Prime Minister too – did pull off a slim victory against the odds. However, the authors do also point out that the final result was by such a fine margin (not many extra Labour seats would have transformed the possibilities of a non-Conservative coalition) that small events might have tipped the final outcome one way or the other.

As it was, Labour went down to defeat with for the first time in its history with, as the book points out, “more middle class voters than working class voters”.

This book includes a useful introduction to how polls are conducted and how they are often misreported, with the warning to “think of polls as being like a barometer – barometers don’t predict the weather; they measure something that is helpful to know if you want to predict the weather. But for that purpose, rather than relying purely on voting intentions the many other measurements that the polls regularly provide may be far more useful in developing an impression of what the future may bring”. Wise words from a good book that ends with a very welcome appendix – a survey of the political cartoon during the 2010 election, an often overlooked form of commentary.

You can buy Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: How it came about – an analysis of the 2010 British General Election by Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Paul Baines and Mark Gill from Amazon here.

Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, the authors of Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader, have avoided making the next generation’s version of the same mistake by talking to both sides of the Miliband family, even returning more than once to the conundrum of when Ed told David he was going to run against him for leader. The different versions of events from across the brotherly divide flatly contradict each other and, as the authors rightly point out, that is not a promising sign for a harmonious future.

Aside from balancing these conflicting camps well, the book also handles skilfully the fact that with such a new leader to write about, there is so far very little hindsight available with which to make sense of his earlier career. Yet due to the book’s balanced approached, whether Ed Miliband is a success or a failure, the explanations are likely to be found in the book. Most notably, it recounts several of the high profile campaigns he has run, from student politician through to Cabinet minister, which have two themes in common: successfully involving a large number of people yet also failing in the end to deliver the main objectives with Ed Milband eagerly trying to describe failure as success. Whether he should succeed or fail, that is a record that future biographers with the advantage of hindsight will merrily return to in order to give their explanations.

Where the book struggles rather more is in explaining quite what Ed Miliband really believes. The book goes through various occasions where it has been claimed he was critical of the Blair/Brown governments, weighing up the evidence and concluding that on several occasions he did indeed dissent, albeit usually very privately. Yet in parallel with this account of a thoughtful critical friend, the book also presents an account of someone who was extremely loyal to Gordon Brown, opposing plots against him and insisting that he should not be ousted before the 2010 general election. Ed Miliband appears to have been at the same time both more critical of Brown than other Brownites yet also the loyalest of the loyal to Brown.

Ed Miliband appears to have wanted to both have his cake and eat it. This unresolved question does at least explain the curiosity of the book finding plenty of evidence of Ed Miliband thinking of standing for Labour leader well before a vacancy arose, yet also when it came to it being horribly unprepared and having to fight through organisational chaos for several weeks. It was as if he had been both wanting to stand yet also not want to do so – hence talking about it yet not preparing for it.

More positively, what comes through clearly is how important being nice has been to his political career. A large part of the reason he was able to present himself in the leadership contest as the man to leave behind the old Blair-Brown struggles, despite having been such a central Brownite figure, is that – to put it in an old fashioned way – whilst many of his colleagues spent their years in governments swearing at others, he spent the years showing good manners.

One area the book does not shed any light on is the almost comical lack of preparedness for hung Parliament negotiations by the Labour Party. Despite many in the party for a long time thinking their best hope was to be the largest party in a hung Parliament, when a hung Parliament did occur, Labour was unprepared for negotiations. Ed Balls only discovered shortly before the first meeting with the Liberal Democrats that he was on the negotiating team, for example, and his preparations for that involved a quick chat over a cup of tea just beforehand with Peter Mandelson.

Yet Ed Miliband should have been central to a proper preparation process. As prime author of the manifesto, he should have been thinking – however infrequently – about what might or might not work in a hung Parliament. As one of Gordon Brown’s closest advisors he should have been reminding the then Prime Minister that a hung Parliament would then require talks and talks require preparation.

His failures in this regard are not simply a matter of historical curiosity because if the truth is that he (like many others) was so lost in traditional Labour tribalism that he failed to grasp a hung Parliament wouldn’t simply be a matter of Gordon Brown telling other parties what to do, then how likely as leader is he to be at getting the pluralism he occasionally talks about right?

That said, the authors are by no means unthinking apologists for Labour and make the powerful point that in one respect the die is already cast for Ed Miliband’s leadership: during those early days when he could set the public’s perception of him there was no single iconic picture. Contrast that with David Cameron and the controversial but (in part for  that very reason) successful huskies photograph.

As they add, “Mischievous critics of the Labour leader have suggested there is such a snap: Ed hugging his defeated brother … The perceived void over what Ed stands for risks being filled by a definition probably most recognisable to the pubic: that he is the man who ‘shafted’ his brother”.

At this early stage in his leadership any book can’t hope to answer for sure the question of whether Ed Miliband’s leadership will ever amount to more than that. But this book does a good job at filling in the background against which we can all speculate.

You can buy Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre from Amazon.

Gordon Brown has said this is immoral but so far it’s been all talk and no action.

The Government needs to take a stand and use its influence in the IMF to help devise an internationally binding system to ensure companies can’t prey on heavily indebted developing countries in this way.

The Government claims they advise countries to help them avoid being used by vulture funds. That is all well and good – but they must take stronger action to help the countries that are already in this horrible and immoral financial prison.

Temporary action was eventually taken by Labour. The coalition agreement itself was fairly tepid on the topic, promising a review, but breaking the cliche that a review is an excuse for pausing pending further inaction, the review turned into action. The Treasury’s press release says,

Legislation to make permanent The Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act 2010 was passed in the House of Commons today. The legislation will stop creditors, including so-called “Vulture Funds”, from using the UK courts to extract harsh and inequitable payments from poor countries for debts that the companies may in some cases have bought for a fraction of the cost.

The Act could save poor countries an estimated £145m over six years.

The original Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act 2010 was passed in April 2010, temporarily restricting the actions of “Vulture Funds” in the UK.  This act had a sunset clause meaning that it was due to expire on 7 June. To prevent Vulture Funds returning to the UK, the Government has passed legislation to make the law permanent.

Danny Alexander said of this,

Today the Government has acted to stop the unjust actions of a few unscrupulous companies having a huge impact upon the futures of some of the poorest countries in the world.

This act will make sure that Vulture Funds will never again be able to exploit the poorest countries in the world within the UK’s courts.

Co-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Committee on International Affairs, Martin Horwood said:

It will save poor countries nearly £150m over the coming years by preventing ‘vulture funds’ from using the UK courts to sue poor countries for the full repayment of debts that they have bought cheaply.

Vulture funds are effectively wiping out the benefits which international debt relief was supposed to bring the poorest countries in the world.

The Liberal Democrats have long fought on this issue and that is why I’m delighted that the UK is achieving a world first by making this law permanent. This shows the Coalition has a real commitment to helping the poorest countries with this unfair and crippling debt.

I urge the Government to continue the fight against these vulture funds and ensure that the members of the G8 follow suit at their meeting later this month.

The list is voted on by readers of Global Financial Strategy, and Sharon Bowles came out twentieth due to her role as Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. This committee of MEPs has an important role in debating and amending European-wide financial regulation, including new rules on bank capital and bankers’ bonuses.

Sharon Bowles came ahead of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (25), former Prime Minister Gordon Brown (35), Bank of England Governor Mervyn King (39) and FSA Chairman Lord Turner (48).

With thanks to the Liberal Democrat European Group for this story

Whilst the outcome is certainly significant for British political history, what the book is far less convincing on is that there was really any serious chance of a Labour – Lib Dem deal that would have kept David Cameron out of 10 Downing Street. Neither Wilson’s book, nor its sister book published at the same time – 22 Days in May by Lib Dem MP David Laws (reviewed here), offers a convincing alternative sequence of events which could have delivered a Labour PM once the election results came in.

The obstacles to a Labour – Lib Dem deal were threefold. First, the election results made the Parliamentary arithmetic for such a deal extremely tough. “It became a regular refrain at the telephone conversations and meetings between Clegg and Brown that whatever Brown said, Clegg would respond by drawing attention to ‘the sheer unforgiving political reality’ of the figures’,” Wilson records.

Second, the decisions people in Labour had made over the previous three years to elect and then stick with Gordon Brown had left their party with a leader that others were extremely wary of trying to make a deal with. As Laws puts it in his own book, “If his own Cabinet colleagues cannot work with him, what chance do four or five Lib Dem ministers have?”

Third, as has come out in all the accounts so far, Labour were badly unprepared for talks, with divisions within their own negotiating team, their team not speaking for all the key figures and little in the way of preparation over what policy areas were up for negotiation.

As Wilson recounts,

Ed Balls’ experience of Labour’s preparations for a hung parliament, or lack of them, is perhaps the most instructive. The first that Balls, one of Brown’s closest and most long-standing allies, heard of the fact that a Labour negotiating team would hold talks with the Liberal Democrats – and that he was part of the team – was when Brown called him late on Saturday morning, with the meeting due at 3pm. It was only on the drive down to London from Yorkshire that Balls found out who else was in the negotiating team … The pre-meeting briefing with Mandelson consisted of a conversation as Balls bought a cup of tea in Portcullis House and the pair walked to the lifts.

All three of those factors were set by 10pm on polling day. As a result, Wilson’s book – as with that of Laws – is an entertaining and interesting read but as a book that only briefly touches on the prior events which set the scene, it is not one that explains why a coalition government came to be. The explanations for that lie in events prior to Friday May 7th, which is when Wilson’s book really gets going. For those explanations you need a longer historical perspective – and who knows quite how far back you have to go in Gordon Brown’s case to explain why he ended up a senior politician that so many were so wary of being able to work with yet almost none in Labour were willing to say ‘no’ to him being leader? Perhaps even as far back as the Labour politics of the 1990s.

Where Rob Wilson’s book is weakest is in its attempts to either dramatise events (suggesting there was a real chance Brown could have stayed on) or in trying to paint a picture of Nick Clegg as being keener on a deal with the Conservatives for ideological reasons rather than because of the circumstances. In that vein, he suggests that the exclusion of Vince Cable, generally seen as warmer to Labour, from the Lib Dem negotiating team is evidence, but in doing so he glosses over the voluntary decision by both Clegg and Laws to have Paddy Ashdown, also generally seen as warmer to Labour, as one of the key advisors, frequently turned to during the days after the election.

Where the book is strongest is in the sense it gives of how emotions flowed back and forth over the days, not always for wholly logical reasons in hindsight, as the negotiations took different turns. Though the book is not exactly politically even-handed (it is by a Conservative MP and, look, it is Cameron who gets by far the most praise of the party leaders), it is much fairer than a simple political polemic. Other points of view get their look in and the book is far better for that.

You can buy 5 Days to Power by Rob Wilson and 22 Days in May by David Laws (reviewed by me here) from Amazon.

Although only briefly mentioned by Laws himself, perhaps the most important is how much the Liberal Democrats owe to Chris Huhne. In April, just before the second TV debate, I wrote,

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on one of the reasons why Nick Clegg did so well in the first debate and also why the party was poised in a happy and strong position such that Nick’s debate victory boosted the party

Not only did Chris Huhne play the role of Gordon Brown in the debate preparations, but the very fact that a closely defeated leadership candidate was used in such a role reflects on how closely and how well Nick and Chris now work together.

Their leadership contest was tetchy at times and finished a nail bitter. Some predicted the outcome would doom the party to splits and further trauma, but Chris has played his role perfectly.

Laws’s book brings out into the public Huhne’s close involvement in shaping the party’s approach to a hung Parliament and how he persuaded many others of the virtues of coalition over confidence and supply. The environment in which that was done was one of mutual respect and debate – a sharp contrast from the Labour Party where so much of their approach to the hung Parliament was shaped by former and future personal ambitions.

In Laws’s account, the final outcome of the coalition talks between the three main parties was pretty much determined by the result the voters decided on (wittingly or not) in the general election. There are no “what if…” moments from the post-result events which can spur alternative histories except for one – perhaps it might have been no AV referendum and confidence and supply rather than coalition. But it would still have been Cameron as Prime Minister, and Laws’s book does not suggest any plausible sequence by which that could have turned out differently.

Laws emphasises the strong Liberal Democrat desire to avoid a second general election in 2010 because of the strong (and rich) position the Conservatives would be in but above all because a  period of instability after May 2010 could have wrecked havoc on the financial markets and would have been the worst possible advertisement for electoral reform in the future. As it is, the sort of anti-hung Parliament arguments that the Conservatives used before polling day are now impossible for them to make in future with a straight face.

The book has a few barbs at others, though they are generally good humoured or discrete, as in the lack of naming names when Laws says of Clegg that, “refreshingly for a Lib Dem leader he did not spend all his time obsessing” about hung Parliament scenarios in advance of the election.

The one exception is Gordon Brown who, in every political book I have read that has come out since May, gets a heavy pasting regardless of the political loyalties of the author. As Laws recounts saying to Clegg when discussing hung Parliaments in advance of May, “If his own Cabinet colleagues cannot work with him, what chance do four or five Lib Dem ministers have?”

One nugget about Brown’s views that Laws does reveal is that in the post-election negotiations, Brown expressed a willingness to speed up the pace of deficit reduction. Another nugget about Labour’s rather dysfunctional approach to handling a hung Parliament is the quote from Peter Mandelson who, on opening formal talks with the Liberal Democrats, added that, “Of course, Alistair Darling will have views on all of this … We do not presume to know Alistair’s views”. A rather more conventional approach to negotiations would have seen the lead negotiators knowing their own Chancellor’s views before entering the room.

Aside from Brown and Labour’s approach to negotiating, some of the sharpest comments are directed at Liberal Democrat habits or outlooks, as in the description of the party’s manifesto policy to scrap tuition fees as a “comfort blanket” and an electoral “gimmick”.

More good humoured are Laws’s accounts of Paddy Ashdown, who comes through in the book as having played a central role as an advisor to Nick Clegg and others and who hasn’t changed his habits: “I switched off my phone only to be woken half an hour later by Paddy who, having failed to get through on my mobile, had managed to track down my pager number instead. I cannot remember what he said to me at 3:15am, but I have the distinct recollection of thinking that it could have waited until a more civilised hour.”

Laws’s book offers some insights into his own political views, particularly how his liberalism differs from Conservatism. Interestingly he concurs with the views of David Howarth, the former Liberal Democrat MP and a man usually seen as being from a different political tradition within the Liberal Democrats than David Laws. In Reinventing the State, Howarth argued that social and economic liberals agree on objectives, but differed on the best means to achieve them. Laws here agrees, describing the Orange Book as seeking “to explain how ‘social liberal’ ends could be delivered by ‘economically liberal’ means”.

Overall the book is an easily digestible quick read, with enough new little anecdotes to keep it interesting even for a reader already familiar with the events. It is also good to see David Laws do what some, but not enough, politicians do in their accounts of events – he remembers the contribution of staff and volunteers (both in his constituency and in the party centrally), naming, praising and thanking many.

You can buy 22 Days in May by David Laws from Amazon and see also Helen’s interview with David Laws about the book.

In large part that is because their account is based on hundreds of off the record interviews carried out during the last Parliament and in the immediate aftermath of the general election. Because the interviews have been carried out across political parties (and across factions within them), the authors present a much more robust picture of events than is the fate of some journalists who source their off the record information much more narrowly.

The conduct of these interviews is nothing new for the Nuffield series, which has covered each general election since the Second World War, but this book makes much more extensive use of them than previous volumes. It stands in particular contrast to the 2005 volume, being much longer and more detailed.

Part of the audience for what has become the standard reference series on British elections are scholars decades in the future, for whom accurate summaries of what was publicly said at the time is useful. Thanks to the use of the interviews, however, this book retains an interest even for those who have widely consumed political news since 2005 – as with the example of the authors’ revelations of the role the Conservative Party played in media attacks on Nick Clegg. The authors also reveal that the Labour Party somehow got advanced sight of the Tory billboard posters planned for January 2010 – a significant leak of sensitive campaign information – and present this delicious detail of Labour’s problems:

The [Labour election] war book listed so many negatives that when it came to analysis of the party’s strengths and weaknesses the authors had to use a smaller font size to detail the weaknesses.

Much more so than previous volumes, the authors show a willingness to draw pungent conclusions from their evidence, as when they conclude of Gordon Brown,

The impression gained was of a Richard Nixon-style leader, who kept unseemly company, and was willing to go to almost any lengths to stuff his political opponents. Gordon Brown’s Number 10 was made in the image of the Prime Minister: an indecisive, often chaotic, combination of erudition and aggression.

In addition to the detailed narrative of electoral politics for the election that never was in 2007 and then the actual election of 2010, the book brings in co-authors for chapters on how the broadcast media covered the election, the actions of the press and an analysis of candidates before presenting a meaty appendix analysing the election results using extensive statistics yet plain English explanations.

The book gives much greater attention to the detail of grassroots campaigning than many chroniclers of politics from Westminster do, reflecting the authors’ own belief in the importance of this side of politics, even if they also point out that, “not one of the seats visited by party leaders on the first day of the campaign went on to be won by their party”.

You can buy The British General Election of 2010 from Amazon here.

During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, relates the hilarious story…

“Given the Treasury’s refusal to share information with us, we had real trouble working out what the financial implications for Britain of the Luxembourg proposal would be. In desperation, we kidnapped the Treasury’s expert at the UK mission in Brussels and took him with us to Luxembourg so that he could explain to us what the offer really meant.

“He was enormously relieved when we finally let him go. He didn’t mind that he was being dumped in Paris, the next stop on our trip, without a passport or any money. He just wanted our assurance that we wouldn’t tell the Treasury that he had been travelling with us: that would blight his career for ever.”

It’s not quite all a matter of ancient history now as Ed Miliband was one of the inner Gordon Brown entourage for years. He has somehow managed to avoid being burdened with that record in the way that Ed Balls has, even though he keeps on cropping up right at the heart of the Brown operation in the memoirs that have appeared since the election. But it does leave a very big question mark over the judgement of Ed Miliband (and many others) that none of this was enough for them to think that backing Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister was the wrong move.