Sam Coates and Francis Elliott on The Times reckon it will boil down to a contest between him and Harriet Harman, which, with due respect to Sam and Francis, is no contest.

Meanwhile Alan Johnson is being speculated about as a running mate for Miliband rather than as a candidate in his own right and James Purnell is also reportedly backing the 43-year-old Foreign Secretary. Jack Straw is currently looking a rather poor third and other potential contenders such as John Denham are nowhere, although one must assume that on the broad left of the party, John McDonnell, Jon Cruddas and possibly even Ed Balls are also quietly making plans

I made clear a couple of months ago my own preference for Alan Milburn as the next leader on the grounds that, having been out of the Cabinet for three years, he alone could combine relative freshness with top-level experience.

Speculation about a potential Milburn challenge at the time was running high, but his subsequent near-invisibility coupled with Miliband’s latest move must mean he is now out of the running.

There was, in my view, an opportunity there for Milburn after Crewe and Nantwich and Henley to steal a march on the Cabinet contenders by coming out publicly against Brown. It would have made the potential Cabinet contenders look lily-livered by comparison and put Milburn at the vanguard of the growing Dump Brown faction among the party’s grassroots. 

Sadly, it didn’t happen, and it’s now clear from Miliband’s intervention and also from recent comments by Straw and Harman that, far from allowing a leftfield stalking horse like Milburn or Clarke to do their dirty work, the Cabinet contenders are preparing to move against the PM themselves.

I will give my more considered views on the main contenders at a later date, but if the field remains as it is, Miliband must be the man.I don’t think he has all the qualities needed, but he does at least negate some of Brown’s perceived drawbacks – for instance he is young, English, reasonably charming on a human level, and most importantly, was not responsible for every mistake in economic and social policy that has been made by New Labour since 1997.

I don’t think he is an ideal candidate by any means – I would still prefer someone with wider experience such as Denham or even Johnson – but he would certainly be preferable to either Straw or Harman in terms of articulating a compelling vision for a fourth Labour term and taking the fight to David Cameron.

The line that stood out for me in his Guardian article was the one about Cameron’s project being about decontaminating the Tory Party rather than changing the country. For me, this message rings so true that the public will eventually be forced to concede it - provided, of coruse, they can get beyond their current inability to see anything good in what Labour is saying.

* Crossposted from my own blog.

Like a lot of people of a naturally progressive bent, I did have very high hopes for the Gordon Brown administration, above all that he could impart some fresh moral purpose to Labour after more than a decade in power. Not only has he not done this, he has done the cause of the left terrible damage by appearing to surrender Labour’s hard-won reputation for competence.

I still believe Gordon to be a good and decent man. I will continue to vigorously oppose those in the blogosphere who seek to attack him on the grounds of his so-called “psychological flaws,” as if they themselves somehow have none.

But what I can no longer defend is the failure to set out some higher purpose for his administration other than simply remaining in power – a failure which risks handing the next election to David Cameron on a plate.

During my time away there has been mounting speculation about “civil war” breaking out inside the Labour Party if this Thursday’s local election results are as bad as currently expected.

In my view, the suggestion that Brown should make way for a new leader remains fanciful without a very much clearer idea of what alternative his critics intend to put in his place. Simply substituting him with Jack Straw or even David Miliband will have zero impact unless other things change too.

Nevertheless, it is already clear that a leadership challenge this summer would have a very much better chance of success than one last summer would have done.

Maybe, just maybe, that was the Blairites’ game plan all along….

* Crossposted from my own blog.

As the driver of a Vauxhall Zafira who likes the odd drop of Scotch, I am probably going to be among the people worst hit by today’s announcements, but I’m entirely content that it should be so. The 55p a bottle increase in whisky duty will in act cost me the princely sum of around £3.20 a year, which seems a small price to pay to help curb the binge-drinking culture and do my bit towards lifting 250,000 children out of poverty.

And although I only drive a people carrier out of necessity in order for me to be able to take my growing family away for weekends along with all their assorted clobber, I think it’s only right that people like me should pay more to alleviate the effects of our environmental pollution.

That said, it was undoubtedly the most politically unexciting Budget since 1997, and some papers may well not even lead on it tomorrow. Maybe that’s the government’s intention though.

I liked James Forsyth’s take on it at Spectator Coffee House. “l suspect that the government will be quite pleased if this Budget is nothing more than a one day story…..Darling must be hoping that by hopping on the Mail’s ban the bag bandwagon, he has guaranteed himself favourable coverage in at least one paper.”

I have some sympathy for Mr Darling in that Gordon Brown really “stole” this Budget last year, by pre-announcing the 2p cut in income tax. That said, had Brown not announced this a year ago, it is a fairly moot point whether it would have happened at all, as it’s hardly now the time for big tax reductions amid all the “global financial turbulence.”

I left the following comment on his blog:

“It’s not a joke, Paul, it’s a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a “weirdo” in the public mind. It’s not just the likes of Littlejohn who are doing it, you can see also see it happening on all the leading right-wing blogs.”

When I wrote this, I had in mind a particularly disgusting post on Guido in which a sock-puppet called “Stanislav” claimed the Prime Minister was suffering from chronic mental illness as a result of having repressed his homosexuality, and that marrying Sarah and having children as the prospect of No 10 drew closer had essentially been a front.

Of course, David Cameron would never utter such contemptible rubbish. But nevertheless, it’s clear from his interview with the new Times editor this morning, in which he describes Mr Brown as “that strange man in Downing Street,” that portraying his opponent as somehow not one of us is a key part of the Tory leader’s political strategy.

Mr Cameron clearly wants to portray himself as This Charming Man, and Brown as This Strange Man, but if the public has any sense it will backfire. What on earth gives Cameron the right to describe another man as “strange” and by what measure of “normality” does he seek to judge the Prime Minister?

We are all individuals, and the fact that, like Esau, Gordon Brown is not a “smooth” man does not necessarily make him a bad man. Increasingly, for the political and media class, it seems that the worst crime is to be different.
* Cross-posted on my own blog.

Sunny adds: I also love Anthony Barnett’s response to this.

So I reckon Roy Greenslade’s call for editors to stop reporting the increasingly tedious Diana Inquest is probably quite timely.

But it seems to me there is a slightly deeper issue here to do with the nature of modern journalism which I am surprised that Greenslade, as a media commentator, does not address more fully. It concerns what I would term “journalism without context.”

Only this week, for instance, we have witnessed newspapers and broadcasters alike getting all excited over the second-hand “revelations” from the Princess’s allies that she did not think Charles would become King, ignoring the fact that this ground was extensively covered by the Princess herself in her notorious 1995 Panorama interview.

Similarly, there has been much made in recent days of the infamous “Mishcon letter” in which the Princess aired the fear that her car would be tampered with in order to cause her to have an “accident.” This too has been in the public domain for a number of years.

Maybe the press and broadcasting organisations think that the British public really does have the attention span of a gnat, and that after a certain amount of time has elapsed, any old rubbish can be presented as news on the basis that we’d all have forgotten about it first time round. Maybe they are adopting a “year zero” approach to journalism, where everything that happened before a given date is simply ignored.

I have known this to happen on papers, for instance when the editor changes, and unscrupulous news eds try to hoodwink the new guy by presenting an old story as freshly-minted.

Or maybe it’s just that news organisations everywhere are still in thrall to the idea – almost certainly mistaken if the sales figures of the Daily Express are anything to go by – that Diana still sells papers.

(cross-posted from my blog)

There is a plausible counterfactual argument for saying that, had he resigned with his old ally Robin Cook over the Iraq War in 2003, as his former admirers on the left would have expected him to, he could conceivably have mounted a successful challenge to Gordon Brown in 2007, standing as an experienced former minister on an anti-war ticket.

But it is clear that at some point around that time, Hain lost his balls. He failed to speak out against a war he must in his heart of hearts have opposed, and gradually, his left-field contributions to government policy-making dried up.

Never having been entirely trusted by the right and with his credibility on the left now badly compromised, it did not surprise me in the least that he performed so poorly in last year’s deputy leadership election, when he found his whole USP had been successfully purloined by Jon Cruddas.

For me, that is what is so tragi-comic about Hain’s current predicament – the fact that he spent £200,000 on a campaign which ended in near-humiliation for a man who once entertained serious aspirations to, if not the premiership, then certainly the Foreign Office.

Since then, he has gone on to win one small but important victory as Work and Pensions Secretary, overcoming Treasury objections to secure a £725m rescue package for 125,000 workers who lost pension rights when their employers went bust or wound up their schemes.

But even had the row over his campaign donations not occurred, I think it likely that he would have left the Cabinet at the next reshuffle, and hence I cannot help but think his time at the top of British politics is now drawing naturally to a close.

Who knows – if it meant Gordon could bring in Alan Milburn as Work and Pensions Secretary and stage a public rapprochement with the Blairites, then this is one crisis that the government might even be able to turn to its advantage?

Sunny’s update: Anthony Barnett at OurKingdom also weighs in on Hain’s future.

So it should come as no great surprise that Mr Cameron, in his call for a Tory-Lib alliance to topple Gordon Brown, is now trying to purloin the label “progressive,” which has, in British politics at least, traditionally belonged to the centre-left.

I seem to recall there was some discussion about using the word “progressive” in the title of this blog, but the common consensus was that it’s a word that’s more readily abused even than “liberal.” If so, Mr Cameron’s initiative seems to show we probably made the right decision.

Dictionary definitions are no great help. Among those listed by the Free Dictionary are:

• Moving forward; advancing.
• Proceeding in steps; continuing steadily by increments: progressive change.
• Promoting or favoring progress toward better conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods: a progressive politician; progressive business leadership.

By this token, “progressive” is about as meaningful as that irritating and vacuous piece of management consultancy jargon that is now heard in offices up and down the land – “going forward.”

The dictionary also lists definition for “progressive” in the context of taxation, namely:

• A tax that takes a larger percentage from the income of high-income people than it does from low-income people.

This is more helpful in terms of defining a centre-left agenda, but then again David Cameron probably claims he believes in this as well, in the sense that we already have a progressive taxation system, and he isn’t seeking to make it any less progressive.

Is progressive a word worth fighting over – or should its definition forthwith be restricted to a form of rock music involving long guitar solos, mellotrons and metaphysical imagery?

Today’s report by the Sutton Trust provides further hard evidence of this catastrophic policy failure for a party of the centre-left.

Of course it wasn’t Labour that started it. The decline in social mobility and emergence of a British underclass over the past 30 years is first and foremost the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But the fact that the gap has continued to widen in the past ten years is proof, if ever it were needed, that the role of New Labour has essentially been to perpetuate the Thatcherite settlement rather than challenge or overturn it.

Some people will point to the demise of the Grammar Schools as a factor in preventing children moving out of deprived backgrounds. Others will blame house prices. Others will fatalistically conclude that the establishment always reasserts itself, and that the effortless superiority learned at public school will always be worth more in the job market than countless A-grades.

Either way, the political upside is that there is a challenge here for Gordon Brown which, if he can grasp it, might even yet give his government the moral purpose it currently lacks, and a way back from the political malaise in which it finds itself.

There is also, if his pride will permit, an old adversary who could help in that task – former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, who was warning about this as long ago as 2003.

Back then Milburn wrote: “Getting Britain socially moving demands a new front in the battle for equal life chances. The most substantial inequalities are not simply between income groups but between those who own shares, pensions and housing and those who rely solely on wages or benefits.”

It was designed as a possible prosepctus for the third term. Four years on, is it too much to be hoped that such ideas could yet form the basis of Labour’s programe for a fourth term in power?

Why is this? I am as convinced as I can be it is less down how they view the merits of the case and more down to tribal loyalties. Sir Ian is seen as “Labour’s man,” and more generally as a force for “modernisation” and “reform” in a force that, not so long ago, was found to be institutionally racist. Therefore he must not be allowed to be forced out by nasty reactionary elements.

Clearly Sir Ian himself seems to view things in this light. It’s almost as if he sees the case as less about whether anyone should be seen to take responsibility for the tragic death of an innocent man and the systemic failures in the Metropolitan Police which led to it, and more about a much bigger battle between the forces of conservatism and the forces of liberalism, a battle in which he sees himself as being on the side of the angels.

But in my view, both he and and his supporters are wrong. To base one’s view of this matter on the internal political ramifications for the Met, or even on the ramifications for policing in London, is to lose sight of a much more important issue of principle – the fact that restoring trust in public life requires that those at the top start taking responsiblity for their actions.

Sir Ian Blair’s removal – and in my view it’s a matter of when, not if – may well result in him being replaced by a more conservative figure – a “copper’s copper” as they are known in the shorthand. But if that helps restore a culture of accountability to our public life, it will ultimately be a larger victory for the liberal-left.

I’m not about to depart from that view. While ideas like giving all parents the right to request flexible working hours are extremely welcome, it is not the kind of thing that is going to stuff the Tories, particularly when they are claiming they thought of it first. By contrast scrapping ID cards, or announcing a Speaker’s Conference on proportional representation, or even bringing in fixed-term four-year Parliaments to ensure no repeat of this autumn’s non-election debacle, would have done.

However Jonathan Freedland in today’s Guardian has a slightly different take on it. While acknowledging that Brown effectively stitched himself up by promising to set out his “vision” when he made his election announcement, he argues that in fact it was the wrong word, and that what Brown can really offer the nation is a programme – “something less than a grand vision but more inspiring than a mere to-do list.”

Is he right? Does Brown need a new over-arching vision or narrative to renew Labour in office, or is the country sick of all that kind of stuff after ten years of Blair? I’m not going to attempt to answer this question, but I think it will provide a good talking point for this blog!

“What’s Left?” you may well ask yourself. It’s as good a summary as any of the state of British politics – and British blogging – today.

Different people will have different interpretations as to how we got here. From where I’m standing, the responsibility lies very clearly with the last Prime Minister who, though armed with two majorities of 160 plus at a time when the opposition couldn’t run a whelk stall, failed to build that progressive consensus of which he so often spoke.

Damaged irreparably by the Iraq War and its grisly aftermath, he also failed to stand down soon enough to give his successor a similar opportunity to capitalise on the Tories’ weakness, waiting instead until they had revived under a new and charismatic young leader before finally departing the scene earlier this year.

As a result, Gordon Brown now finds himself trapped in a lethal political conundrum by which he dare not set out an agenda that is too distinctively his own for fear ceding the fabled “political centre ground” to David Cameron, even though that centre ground has already shifted several degrees to the right.

The Tory intellectual Michael Gove last week described Brown, woundingly, as a tragic figure, a thwarted idealist now unable to give effect to any of his old ideals, and for whom staying in power as long as possible has become the only remaining political objective.

I am not sure things are quite as bad for him as all that, but the problem was well illustrated by a single headline in the Comment section of The Guardian last week: “Brown’s fightback must be built on a real shift to the left.”

Jon Cruddas and Jon Trickett, the joint authors of the article so headlined, did not use those words. Like “Crisis? What Crisis?” they were convenient journalistic shorthand. But they demonstrate how hard it is for those who articulate a liberal-left or “progressive” vision of society to explain that without recourse to labels the public finds unhelpful or alienating.

In a sense, that’s also the challenge facing liberal-left bloggers: how do we make left politics engaging, exciting even? It’s easy to take refuge in the old saw that blogging is essentially oppositional, that it’s better to be a right-wing blogger when Labour is in power – harder to do anything about it.

The truth is the right has had things its own way for far too long. The liberal-left blogosphere, still divided over Iraq and more generally over the whole New Labour project, has been too disparate to mount an effective challenge to the right-wing uber blogs, which by virtue of their size are now effectively part and parcel of the mainstream media

The opportunity has long been there for a group of like-minded bloggers to come together to offer an alternative perspective on current political developments, and to set out an alternative vision for where politics might go in the post-Blair era.

This website is a possibly somewhat belated attempt to fill that vacuum. I am very pleased to have been asked to be a part of it.