I t may be that some in the Labour Party’s high command are not completely confident of victory. The Daily Telegraph reports that David Miliband’s crew is tooling up for a leadership challenge on Friday morning. An opinion poll revealed that 45 per cent of voters think he should be the next Labour leader. Ladbrokes make him 7-4 favourite. Ed Balls has impressed a relatively paltry 11 percent.

“It’s your friends you’re judged by” was my mother’s advice. Miliband’s include sergeant-major Bob Ainsworth, Tessa Jowell and Alan Johnson.

Readers of this site will probably share the Telegraph’s animus against Harriet Harman, though for different reasons. It reports that the prospect of her becoming acting leader “has alarmed senior party figures, who are privately putting pressure on Mr Brown to “pre-announce” any post-election resignation, remaining in office until a permanent successor is elected.”

What’s missing from this flurry of leaks and off the record briefing is any indication of what the politics of a Balls or Miliband leadership challenge might be. Miliband can’t really put himself forward as the anti-war candidate and since Balls has been one of Brown’s coterie since dinosaurs walked the earth it’s hard to see how can represent a break with the past.

It’s going to be a squabble between two factions on the right of the party. The party’s left seems to have been too busy trying to win votes during the election campaign to get involved in scheming behind the arras. Now it’s by no means excluded that Labour will see a bit of a resurgence under a Tory government. Certainly the pressure will be off the union leaderships to rein in any industrial action. However a Balls or Miliband leadership will be a replay of the early years of Tony Blair in a period of big pressure on the working class.

As leaderships go that’s pretty poor.