Will the money men help Miliband’s cause?

The Miliband leadership bid is picking up steam.  According to today’s Sunday Telegraph, his team are already drafting the Foreign Secretary’s speech for the upcoming Labour conference – and it’s set to offer an “alternative vision of Labour’s future” to the one put forward by Brown.  All fascinating stuff.  But, in the same Sunday Telegraph article, it’s this passage that jumped out at me:

“Allies of the Foreign Secretary signalled that wealthy private individuals who had stopped giving Labour money under Mr Brown were likely to be persuaded to reopen their cheque books if Mr Miliband became leader.”

If this is true, the money men really could play a crucial role in determining whether or not Brown goes.  Labour party finances are currently in the doldrums (ok, the latest figures [pdf] show some improvement, but – as Three Line Whip pointed out – a handful of loans still need to be repaid, even if the deadline for those repayments has been