Alan Milburn has a big set-piece interview in The Speccie today, and it repeats what's becoming an emerging trend (and, Mr Fraser Nelson, this is not Milburn's first interview since the election, he's spoken to local media at some length): Mr Milburn has a proposal. ‘The way I would do… read more…

Charles Clarke has been having a pop at Gordon Brown with monotonous regularity, but what is fellow big-beast Alan Milburn up to? In an interview in the North, he does two interesting things: he proposes a Labour version of the Tory policy of education vouchers; and he becomes another Labour… read more…

John Prescott's son David won't be following his Dad into the Commons as Hull East MP: The son of the former deputy prime minister John Prescott failed last night in an attempt to replace his father in the Commons when he stands down at the next general election. David Prescott,… read more…

Gordon Brown's got the man he wanted as general secretary of the Labour Party: David Pitt-Watson. A millionaire City bigwig. And thus Labour's journey along the road from socialism to, er, something else is now complete. Pitt-Watson can argue to have articulated something of a post-socialist agenda in his book… read more…

Matthew d'Ancona says there'll be a new boy in the Brown team from today, when David Muir is appointed as Director of Political Strategy. The appointment's interesting because of Muir's background - for the last decade or so he's been a big noise at Martin Sorrell's WPP advertising giant. He's… read more…

Is indifference a good thing or a bad thing for Gordon Brown at this stage of the electoral cycle? We ask because two media strongholds which could be expected to be interested in the fact that the governing party held a conference over the weekend - the lefty Guardian, and… read more…

People are talking "the long game" this morning, as the Tory lead over Labour remains stubbornly large. 2010 is looking increasingly like the most plausible election date - ie, as late as possible. One interesting development: El Gordo's apparent appetite for curbing some of the relaxations to licensing laws. As… read more…

Some of Westmonster went to Peterhouse in Cambridge, and a more right-wing, masonic, weird place it is hard to imagine. So we were surprised to discover, in the latest of the Telegraph's list of Gordon Brown's biggest influences, that Number 10's two lead press men, Michael Ellam and Damian McBride,… read more…

We like Tom Watson, we do. But even we would balk at calling him more influential than David Miliband, as the Torygraph does this morning. He's described as "burly but likeable", which points to an odd latent fatism over at Telegraph Towers which we haven't detected before.… read more…

Gordon Brown really is in trouble, if the latest of the Telegraph's list of Brown's biggest influences: 40-31 - Telegraph is anything to go by. Yesterday we had perennial under-achiever Charlie Whelan; today we have perennial under-achiever Bob Shrum: A US political consultant, Shrum has worked on eight presidential election… read more…