Well, well. The Sunday Times is back firmly on the trail of splits and arguments at the top of the Labour hierarchy, this time claiming that all out war may be just around the corner thanks to the PM appropriating Gordon’s big budget announcement - a rise in the minimum wage to £5.05 an hour - to shore up the current faltering campaign being led by Alan Milburn.

Is this a case of ‘Big Trouble in Old Queens Street’ or just another storm in a teacup? - I’m inclined to think the latter.

As much as Tony’s been out an about playing, alternately at being the international stateman (Davos) and ‘man of the people’ (Richard and Judy) I suspect most of the Labour rank and file, myself included, are of the view that the real election campaign isn’t going to get under way until Gordon has spoken on March 15th despite the best efforts to Milburn and Campbell to push things along with Tony firmly ‘front and centre’.

Whether Tony, Alan and Alistair want to believe it or not, they’ve already clearly been out-manouvered by the Chancellor simply by the expedient of his doing nothing and letting them get on with trying to run the campaign without him.

What that’s given us so far is probably no more than we could have reasonably expected, lots of puff-piece TV appearances, insubstantial pledges and the rather embarassing sight of the Government losing the initiative on immigration and, more recently, the issue of ‘control orders’ which, thanks to the opposition finally waking up and acting like an opposition for the first time in years, will most likely see the Home Secretary back off and place the responsibility for these order with the judiciary where it properly belongs.

With opinion polls showing the Tories pulling up to within a couple of point of Labour but still nowhere nead the 5-6 point lead they need to take into an election to have any chance of winning, the stage is now nicely set for Gordon to enter the fray on Budget day, put the opposition parties firmly in their place and set the scene for a Labour victory and his own eventual ascendancy to the top job.

I’m by no means privy to the inner workings of the party but I have to say that it looks to me very much like the more the Blairite camp try, allegedly, to push the Chancellor to the sidelines in an effort to move him off his position as heir-apparent to the PM’s job, the more successful they are becoming in ensuring that the inevitable will happen and that it will, after all, be Gordon Brown leading the Labour Party into battle to win an unprecendented fourth consective term of office.

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