The battle for Labour’s soul

Bloody civil war lies in store for the Labour party if it loses the election, says James Forsyth. Brown’s henchmen are hoping to keep power, with Ed Balls as the next leader. The Blairite resolve to play nice will be tested

The public gallery of the House of Commons was unusually full on Monday afternoon. For the visitors kept behind the glass wall, the proceedings will have been particularly perplexing. A scandal had erupted: that of Stephen Byers and other Labour MPs caught offering their services to lobbyists. There was plenty of anger. Yet little of it was coming from the Tories, who restricted themselves to rather dull pro forma points. The venom was all coming from the Labour benches, who were turning on their own with a vengeance.

It was, for those in the gallery, a sneak preview of what lies in store for Labour in about five weeks’ time: bloody civil war. There is an old adage in the Commons that your opponents sit across from you and your enemies behind you. But even by Westminster standards, the current internal divisions in the Labour party are remark-able. The other day in the members’ lobby, the area where MPs mingle before they go off to vote, James Purnell walked up to a fellow ex-minister — Tom Watson — and informed him that he was ‘the cancer at the heart of the Labour party’. Such exchanges are becoming increasingly common.

Their exchange was a shot in the not-so-cold war between the various camps vying for the future of the Labour party. Purnell is standing down at the next election and has been incensed by the way Watson, a Brownite fixer, was handling the selection of a candidate to replace him in his constituency. Such vitriol suggests a bigger picture involving a post-election race to replace Brown.