If, to borrow Harold Wilson’s dictum, a week is a long time in politics, it’s not hard to see why some in Labour are dismissing today’s Telegraph splash (“Ed Balls’s ‘brutal’ plot to overthrow Tony Blair”) as “ancient history”. But the story deserves more scrutiny than that.The paper has obtained a cache of 36 leaked documents outlining how Ed Balls and Ed Miliband fought to get Gordon Brown into Number 10 within weeks of the 2005 general election. The private papers, which belong to Balls, contain no single, startling revelation and will be of interest to few other than Westminster Kremlinologists. But there is no doubt that they are damaging to the shadow chancellor. They contradict his public insistence that he never sought to undermine Blair (just a year ago he dismissed claims that he was disloyal to the former PM as “balderdash”) and will hinder his attempts to detoxify his brand.
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