On the BBC’s Andrew Marr show shortly after the election, Charlie Whelan was teased about his ‘obvious’ support for Ed Balls. “Everyone knows he’s the Unite candidate” was more bait than asserting. “Well” said Whelan, “We’ll see. It’s all going to be very comradely”.

This morning The Slog reveals how Ed Miliband’s campaign is being worked from behind by the Change Britain Forever tendency in New Labour. And how the Harman/Dromey marital power base plans to purge the Party of all Brownite and Blairite influence.

As late as last weekend, Fraser Nelson noted in the News of the World that, ‘Ed Balls’s strategy is to reassemble Brown’s team of thugs (the Unite trade union, fixers like Charlie Whelan) and carry on as before..’

So what went wrong? The answer is that Balls’ error is in being a Brownite. From well before the General Election, the Harman/Dromey axis has been planning a dramatic shift further Left in its quest for ‘equality’. All Brownites are to be ruthlessly purged. Charlie Whelan has decided he is no longer a Brownite.

The writing was on the wall for Balls a week ago, when Ed Miliband got the support of the 700,000 strong GMB Union. Both Dromey and Harman are big hitters in the GMB: as The Slog’s mother-site nby revealed a year ago, Ms Harman bought her six-bedroom Winterbrook Road SE London house with a massively subsidised GMB mortgage some twenty years ago.

But the question remains: why support a ‘wet’ like Ed Miliband? In fact, Ed Miliband is accessible for the easily-duped electorate – but in private, close to – and very pro – the Harman/Dromey agenda.

The Slog understands that Miliband Jr has privately made a cast-iron promise to UNITE that he will broaden Union powers if and when Labour returns to office. In early June, he was the first senior Labour figure to enthusiastically endorse Harman’s call for 50-50 male-female Cabinets by law. And earlier this year, Harman and Miliband spoke together at the same event as leading Muslim radical Azad Ali.

Ali is a big wheel in the Islamist London electoral network steadily filling the key jobs in east and south-east London at constituency level. Harman is a big admirer, despite the fact that he has justified the killing of British soldiers in Iraq, praised a spiritual leader of al-Qaeda, and denied the Mumbai attacks were terrorism.

Harman and Dromey are the leading lights in what is sometimes called the Change Britain Forever tendency in the Labour Party. They have enthusiastically endorsed the ‘secret social policy’ of open-border immigration for nearly a decade. A former Labour insider confirmed this weekend that “when Gordon announced his intention to create British jobs for British workers, it was merely another nail in his coffin as far as Harriet was concerned”. The source went on to allege that:

“Dromey and Whelan could easily have reined UNITE in before the Election [regarding the BA strike] but Charlie and Jack were keen for Brown to be embarrassed, and Ed [Balls] to look like a barmy militant. They knew we were going to lose – everyone knew we were going to lose. This was all about forward-planning for a long term radical Left power base. It still is”.

Change Britain Forever (CBF) has a host of allies at both the Independent and the Guardian. The latter has (as we’ve seen) begun a ruthless policy of expunging any and all criticism in its comment columns. The Indie in particular is happy to print any and all negative briefing about Balls – as demonstrated by the latest piece of malicious nothingness this week from Brian Brady:

‘….the revelation that he [Balls] had accepted Lord Black’s hospitality, on a flight from Sweden to the UK in 2001 and home from Paris in 2003, is an embarrassing development, as it links Mr Balls directly to one of the most controversial businessmen of recent times’.

Balls is now dead in the water – and the chances are still heavily odds-on a victory for the elder Miliband. But even if elected, he will still have to deal with the now iron grip that Harman, Dromey and their allies have on Labour. Over 80 MPs are sponsored either by the GMB or UNITE, she is Deputy Leader with powerful support on the NEC, and of course nepotism has landed Jack a safe Birmingham seat.

“You have to remember” said another Labour source (also now unemployed), “Quotas on councils and committees are about much more than gender equality. Harman wants every important post filled by a supporter. She’s seen bad stuff and learned valuable lessons. She saw the madness of trying to elect people like Foot, and she saw the aimlessness of electing empty vessels like Tony [Blair]. She knows she’s unelectable. The game plan is to have the Leader completely beholden to her and Jack – whoever he is. And obviously, they’d prefer Ed Miliband as he’s more suggestible. They could keep the older brother in check too – but not Balls. And anyway, they don’t like him, so that’s that”.

From an objective viewpoint, it’s hard to fault this strategy. With Balls gone and Mr Smiley Save the Planet in the top job, Labour could face the Tories in a year or two with a populist agenda sitting in front of (and hiding) another agenda entirely. From a partisan point of view, however, this spells danger for all those