Events make strange bedfellows of us all

What do Alistair Darling and David Miliband have in common? A lack of spine? A lack of talent? Well yes, both of those….but also mutual enemies.

In 2oo8, a rumour did the rounds of Westminster that Brown was about to put Miliband into Number Eleven, and Darling into the Home Office. The rumour was accurate, and both men were alarmed enough to consult privately about it. The reason was simple: neither of them wanted this result. Miliband promptly told the PM that his loyalty may have been bought, but the arrangement was a rental one: he did not want to move. The switch was ditched, as all things are when Gordon faces opposition bigger than him. Darling and Miliband stayed put – and in touch.

When Peter Mandelson returned from banishment, he made it clear (with customarily indiscreet triumphalism) that as Business Minister, part of his brief was to eclipse Darling – and that he would have the Chancellor on toast in short order. A year in, during another game of frantic musical chairs, the ennobled Mandelson begged to be given the Foreign Secretaryship – Miliband’s job.

Dislike of Mandelson thus became another bond tying the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary. When first Purnell and then Hoon deserted Brown’s Titanic, Miliband and Darling conferred about their decision to back out of each coup. Their partnership also by now enjoyed a further common enemy: the Prime Minister. Both men are privately convinced that Gordon is a liability who must be dumped at the first opportunity.

Some of you may be aware of what is called in Whitehall The Miliband Option. This is one of the many post-election scenarios dreamed up by senior Mandarins with nothing better to do. It is meant to be the solution to a Constitutional impasse whereby Labour want to form a coalition with the Libdems, to whom Gordon Brown would be unacceptable. David Miliband (as a reasonably ‘international figure’ known to the Obama administration) would become caretaker PM prior to Labour holding a leadership election. Miliband has promised that if he won that election, Darling would remain in his job, and thus go on to become The Chancellor Who Saved Britain Against All The Odds.

If all this sounds completely mad, I recommend you read William L. Shirer’s classic Rise & Fall of the Third Reich. In that book, ambitions and political factions vie for hegemony as the Russians are shelling Hitler’s Chancellery. When it comes to politics, power is a drug that can mask any reality – a truism our Prime Minister has devoted the last three years to proving beyond any reasonable doubt.

What all this adds up to is simple: Ali and David wish the destruction of Lord Mandelson to come to pass, and it is their view that this cash-for-perversion-of-legislation scandal (in which Byers has overtly mentioned the Business Minister as a man with an open mind when it comes to influential money) could well be the peer’s undoing….with some help from them. Hence their double-headed round condemnation of it this morning.

We would all do well to remember that suspicions (and gossip) about the sting involved in Byers’s disgrace were circulating for much of yesterday; this gave the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor plenty of time to agree on a climb to the moral high-ground. And if you can show me a more unusual example of New Labour apparatchiks caving in to media sanctimony, then I’d love to know about it.

As always, stay tuned.