Does a sensible centre-left party - or come to that a sensible centre-right party - want to pick a leader from a vicious faction that was so lost in backstabbing and plotting that it could not recognise a crisis in capitalism when it was about to hit it in the chops?

Short answer:

No, it most certainly does not.

Long answer:

The Brownites' campaign to unseat Alistair Darling and replace him with Ed Balls revealed both the nastiness and stupidity of the old regime. The briefings by Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride against one of Brown's oldest friends in politics were standard practice, of course - it was always the Brownite way to betray an ally or stitch up a candid critic. You would never have guessed it from reading our tame press. Lobby journalists wanted then and still want now to stay in the loop. So they did not reveal how government propagandists fed them dirt stories from behind the coward's mask of anonymity. I found it very telling that when Guido Fawkes finally revealed what McBride was up to hardly anyone who relied on the Lobby for news knew who he was.

Darling's crime was, you may remember, to predict at the start of the crisis that we were facing the worst recession for 60 years. For this, the Brownites began a campaign of denigration, saying he was unfit for the job and should be replaced by Balls. If anything, Darling was guilty of understatement. We are in the worst economic crisis for 80 years.

Now, for reasons which make me despair, Balls, Whelan and the rest of the gang are regarded by press and punters alike as somehow being left wing. The dumbos who run Unite have allowed their union to become Whelan's plaything because he has convinced them that the Brownites are somehow more authentically left than any other faction in the Labour party.

Yet when he was at the Treasury with Brown, Balls was as guilty as his master in allowing the financiers to run riot. Like Brown, he forgot the inherited wisdom of social democracy that bankers can bring down the economy if governments are foolish enough to leave them to their own devices. More to point, when the bubble burst and the inevitable crash came, the Brownites could not see what was going on in front of their noses, but turned instead on Darling for daring to tell the truth about the disaster they had presided over.

Don't vote for them.

Vote for Miliband senior, Miliband junior, Burnham, McDonnell....anyone but Balls.

Read Part one here.

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