David Guyatt Wrote:Why would Mandy put an ice cream on the end of his North pier?

Quote:“Return all of our troops from Asia immediately. How do we end up with so much heroin on our streets from Afghanistan? If there are hundreds of thousands of western troops in that country we would expect no heroin at all. Is our government complicit in drug dealing? Does “our government” care about drug abuse? Maybe drugged up people are easier to manipulate? Very sinister isn’t it? The LibLabCong gang will keep everything the same.”

Quote:Don't mention the war

Afghanistan: A conspiracy of silence

An IoS poll shows 77 per cent of Britons want our forces to come home and a majority believe our presence makes UK streets less safe from terrorist attack. Yet all three parties are ducking this most critical issue

By Brian Brady

Sunday, 18 April 2010

It is one of the few genuine issues of life and death during this general election campaign. It will not dictate how much any British school improves, how many police appear on the streets of a city, or how quickly patients are allowed to leave hospitals around the country. But it will, literally, decide the fate of thousands of British service personnel and, ultimately, how many of them live and die.

Yet nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan.

When Nick Clegg "won" the televised party leaders' debate on Thursday night, his victory owed nothing to his limp response to a question about support for British troops serving in Afghanistan. The Liberal Democrat leader agreed that British troops in Afghanistan were under-paid and under-equipped, but he did not question why they had lost 281 colleagues in that country, or why they were there in the first place.
Related articles:

Crispin Black: Three parties, no clue about the Army
Kim Sengupta: Nine years after 'liberation', Afghans continue to despair
Leading article: Afghanistan must be debated

Similarly, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have pledged loyal support for a campaign that is deep into its ninth year, and shows no sign of nearing an end. In front of the cameras, the Prime Minister offered sombre reflection on the campaign, while Mr Cameron queried the number of helicopters available to British forces. Yet neither has gone out of his way to tackle the issue head-on elsewhere during this campaign, to explain why the UK should remain in Afghanistan, why it should continue to support a discredited government in Kabul, and how many more British service personnel must die before the mission can be brought to a close.

Last November, The Independent on Sunday called for a "phased, orderly withdrawal" of British forces from the "ill-conceived, unwinnable and counterproductive" campaign in Afghanistan. The UK still remains in there – and more than 50 servicemen have died since then. Last month, The IoS revealed that Britain harboured profound concerns at the highest levels over the quality of the Afghan police who must guarantee security before our troops can leave.

The leaders may, at last, be forced to explain their positions this week, when the second debate concentrates on foreign affairs. But, given their performance so far, it is unlikely that they will offer any fresh hope for the service personnel in Afghanistan or their families back home.

"We want to see more substantive engagement on defence issues from the parties," said Douglas Young, executive chairman of the British Armed Forces Federation, an independent staff association for service personnel. "Up to now, there have been too many airy-fairy platitudes and not enough substance."

These are leaders who last week presented election manifestos amounting to more than 80,000 words on their grand plans for education, health, the economy, but who managed to mention Afghanistan only 19 times between them.

The stifling of the issue might be due to the fact that all the main parties know their policies are entirely at odds with the feelings of the population over Afghanistan. In November, a poll found that 73 per cent of people wanted British troops to come home within "a year or so" – and almost half of them called for immediate withdrawal.

A poll for The IoS today finds that this number has increased, with 77 per cent now supporting withdrawal on the same terms. The number disagreeing is now below one in seven. Further, more than 50 per cent of those polled believe that the risk of terrorism in the UK is increased by the presence of British troops in Afghanistan.

However, none of the major parties is promising to pull troops out if they get into government and only the Scottish National Party – confined to one part of the UK – is calling for an honest reappraisal of the operation. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, last week made much of his record of "speaking out pretty forcefully" on Afghanistan. But his manifesto commits the party to being "critical supporters of the Afghanistan mission'', albeit with a pledge to match the military surge to a strategy of tackling corruption and winning over moderate Taliban.

The Lib Dem defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, yesterday conceded that anti-war voters have few choices. "If they are against the whole principle of being involved [in Afghanistan], they'll struggle to find anyone putting that case," he said. For opponents of the war, the lack of differentiation between the three main parties and their failure to embrace the Afghan question during the first two weeks of the election campaign amounts to a "conspiracy of silence" to suppress debate.

Chris Nineham, of the Stop the War Coalition, said: "There has been a deafening silence about Afghanistan in the run-up to the election. The three main parties are doing their best not to mention the war, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population oppose it."

Yet, despite complaints from the most vocal critics of the war, there is no guarantee that, however strongly voters feel, they are prepared to treat it as an electoral issue. In November 2006, when the toll of British deaths during five years of the campaign stood at 41, pollsters Ipsos Mori found that "defence/foreign affairs/Iraq and Afghanistan" topped the list of concerns facing the country. Two out of five voters spontaneously identified it as a key national problem. Three and a half years on, with 240 added to the death toll – 36 this year alone – it has slipped to seventh.

A leaked CIA report last month observed how "some Nato states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission". It also argued that such apathy "enabled leaders to ignore voters". It seems that Britain's leaders are banking on indifference to help them through a potentially troublesome campaign without having to confront the most troubling issue before them.

"All three parties in 2001 thought we should go in. There are no votes in it, so they keep quiet about it," said General Sir Hugh Beach, former deputy commander of British Land Forces.

Five years ago, public opposition to the Iraq War was widely listed as a contributory factor behind a general election result that cut Labour's majority from 167 to 66. And lingering rancour over the war helped to lever Mr Blair from office two years later.

Afghanistan has been different. It has been overwhelmingly regarded as the "just" war. It was portrayed as a campaign to democratise a wild nation, to oust the Taliban, al-Qa'ida and all the extremists threatening the West with terror plots over the past decade.

That justification has lost its power as the death toll spirals and Afghans show little inclination to take control of their own affairs. Military commanders in Pakistan, where suicide bombers killed more than 40 people yesterday, regard the failure of US-led forces to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan with ill-concealed derision.

"They don't have the legitimacy we do," said Colonel Nauman Saeed, who commands 3,500 solders in Bajaur, a mountainous district on the Afghan border. "Afghans see them as illegitimate intruders and occupation forces." At the moment, the Pakistan military are in a victorious mood after retaking much of the territory along the Afghan border which was ruled by the Pakistan Taliban a year ago.

When experts point to terror plots from Pakistan and even within the UK, the Government's contention that the Afghan campaign is vital to protect Britain's security at home is difficult to explain.

And the government of President Karzai continues to raise concerns in Nato capitals. "The problem we have is that the regime in Afghanistan, which we support, is built on electoral fraud, with graft and corruption," said the SNP's foreign affairs spokesman, Angus Robertson. "We need to be absolutely honest about our options, and one of the aspects of that is that there needs to be a decision about when we bring our forces home."

The IoS military covenant panel

Major General Patrick Cordingley

"There is an embargo on the Ministry of Defence, so there is virtually no news coming out of them. The two main parties basically agree on Afghanistan. If somebody disagreed it would be a big issue but as they all agree, there's no point banging on about it."

Major Julian Thompson

"The reason is the parties have stayed off the issue in toto. Defence is unfortunately the last thing people think about and it is not something that turns people on. Labour got us in there in the first place and don't want people to be reminded of it."

General Sir Hugh Beach

"Nobody thinks there are votes in it one way or the other. All three parties in 2001 thought we should go in. There are no votes in it either way, so they keep quiet about it."

Rose Gentle, mother of Fusilier Gordon Gentle, killed in Iraq

"It isn't really a vote-winner. Iraq isn't mentioned and the soldiers that died there are the silent heroes. Families I've spoken to think someone should say something about it, but to be honest I don't think anyone will."

Retired Colonel Clive Fairweather

"In 2001 it was the war on terror, but since then the country can't make the connection with the war on terror any more. I don't think the Tories or Nick Clegg have much else to offer. It would only become an issue if there were multiple casualties, which is not very good for troop morale."

James Fergusson, journalist, foreign correspondent and author of 'A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan'

"It is easy to say we need more helicopters but I have always thought that the argument that we are fighting over there to protect the streets is easily shot down. But I think the [political] opponents are too scared to take on the issue."

The Rifleman: 'William would have made a fantastic husband and dad'

Anyone who met Rifleman William Aldridge had only to look at the teenager to know how much his family meant to him: he had the name of his young brother George tattooed on his arm.

He had planned to get Archie, the name of the youngest brother, inked on his other arm but was deployed to Afghanistan before he got the chance. He was killed, aged 18, by an IED blast while on foot patrol with the 2nd Battalion The Rifles in Sangin province on July 10. He now holds the tragic distinction of being the youngest British soldier to die in the conflict.

It took his mother Lucy Aldridge, 42, a couple of weeks to find the right words to tell his brothers – then aged five and four – that they would not see him again. "I explained that William was doing a very important job protecting people in another country but now he had a much more important job to do and that meant that he wouldn't be able to come home because he had gone to be with the angels and look after everybody."

William's brothers meant "everything to him. He would have made a fantastic husband and dad."

The rifleman was a "very keen outdoors type" as a child, enjoying martial arts, rowing and canoeing. He was a Cub and a Scout, and joined a rifles cadet force when he was 12, his mum said from the family home in Bredenbury, Herefordshire.

"It was his dream, so I couldn't have been happier with him knowing exactly what he wanted to do."

That dream saw him sign up at the age of 16 after taking his GCSEs at the Minster College in Leominster. He passed out in August 2008 after basic training at the Army Foundation College in Harrogate and moved to Catterick for infantry training. He joined his battalion in Ballykinlar, Northern Ireland, that December.

William, who had formed part of the rearguard looking after families of serving soldiers, was posted to Afghanistan three days after celebrating his 18th birthday on 23 May last year with a family meal.

In their last conversation he sounded in "good spirits" but also "extremely tired" after being at a patrol base for 10 instead of 28 days due to "an inability for them to be resupplied with equipment, with basics like water and ammunition".

Two days later, he was killed following an improvised explosive device (IED) blast during an early-morning foot patrol. The "calm" soldier helped comrades caught up in an earlier explosion in which he had also been injured. He was airlifted to Camp Bastion but died about an hour and a half later.

Ms Aldridge is calling for a ban on foot patrols "unless greater safety measures are put in place to protect these young men".

She has since thrown herself into fundraising, launching the Kilimanjaro 2010 Appeal in October. The project hopes to raise £40,000 for the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine patient welfare fund at Selly Oak Hospital and the Rifleman's Fund, supporting injured riflemen and bereaved families.

This October, she will officially launch the William Aldridge Foundation to raise money to support charities caring for wounded service personnel across the three armed forces. She wants to expand help "not just for the physically injured but those who are psychologically scarred", and describes the problem of soldiers suffering mental illness as a "ticking time bomb" that urgently needs government funding.

"I would hope that had my son returned home somebody would be doing the same for him," she said.

Kate Youde

The amputee: 'He never wavered'

At just three, Lance Corporal Simon Wiggins was inspired by his grandfather's interest in the Guards, and the pair watched Zulu together. Now 23, he is rehabilitating after stepping on an IED on 16 March 2008, while serving with the First Battalion Coldstream Guards in Helmand. The blast – two weeks before he was due home – necessitated the amputation of his leg. He also suffered extensive internal trauma and lost a finger. His mother, Gilly Wiggins, 50, of Coulsdon, Surrey, said his military passion never wavered during his childhood and "he used to go running with a backpack full of Coke bottles filled with water to train".

The sniper enlisted in 2004 after his A-levels and trained at Catterick, passing out in May 2005. He was serving in Iraq the following month.

But Mrs Wiggins, vice chair of a support group at the charity Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association Forces Help, worried about his deployment to Afghanistan and had a "strange feeling" about it. Her son made a "miraculous recovery" and is now at the regiment's Aldershot base.

Kate Youde

The veteran: 'I was a mess. The Army didn't help me'

Lance Corporal Jim Maguire (not his real name), 29, from Hull joined the Army in 1998 and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He began to develop obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), depression and anxiety in Iraq which developed into PTSD after he was ambushed in his Scimitar in a village in southern Afghanistan. "I was a mess. The Army didn't provide me with help. Fortunately I was referred to Combat Stress. They saved my life. I met other guys who'd been through it too. It was a massive help. It's easy to hide a problem. They hide people like me. "

Paul Bignell

The mother: 'I was glued to the news'

Diane Blackmore-Heal, a police officer from Banbury, near Oxford, welcomed her son, Adam, 22, home just two weeks ago after a seven-month tour with the Household Cavalry in Helmand province.

"Adam has wanted to be in the Army since he was five years old. This was his first tour of active duty, and I don't think I realised how stressed I was until he came home and I started to sleep properly again. I was glued to the news for seven months. Somehow I felt he would come back but I was aware of the IEDs and worried whether he would cope with a serious injury. Adam showed me a picture of a colleague, taken after he lost both legs on their last patrol; it could have been him."

Nina Lakhani

The parties...

Labour

Manifesto: 78pp, 30,227 words

Defence: 2,750 words

Health: 2,950 words, 47 mentions

Education: 1,927 words, 61 mentions

Afghanistan: 11 mentions

Conservatives

Manifesto: 120pp, 28,733 words

Defence: 1,178 words

Health 1,741 words, 72 mentions

Education: 1,184 words, 58 mentions

Afghanistan: 5 mentions

Lib Dems

Manifesto: 110pp, 21,668 words

Defence: 466 words

Health: 1,143 words, 34 mentions

Education: 1,719 words, 87 mentions

Afghanistan: 3 mentions

Greens

Manifesto: 50pp, 20,427 words

Defence: 254 words

Health: 715 words, 59 mentions

Education: 522 words, 35 mentions

Afghanistan: 4 mentions

Quote:The Lib Dem defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, yesterday conceded that anti-war voters have few choices. "If they are against the whole principle of being involved [in Afghanistan], they'll struggle to find anyone putting that case," he said. For opponents of the war, the lack of differentiation between the three main parties and their failure to embrace the Afghan question during the first two weeks of the election campaign amounts to a "conspiracy of silence" to suppress debate.

David Guyatt Wrote:The fact is that political class do what America tells them to do, militarily speaking.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Minty's finest hour in his campaign to destroy the electoral chances of the party he nominally serves:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8641849.stm

Has SIS ever played a better joke on a discarded skin?

I am, all things considered, all shook up.

Quote:And there is particular incredulity at one bizarre event at the weekend which involved Mr Brown appearing with an Elvis Presley impersonator.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Next up from Minty: Lord Lucan to appear at Broon's closing campaign rally. In Sheffield.

Quote:Business Secretary Peter Mandelson said he was "intensely pig sick" that Peppa was unable to attend the event.

Paul Rigby Wrote:According to the testimony of Maurice De Vere Gamp, the whistle-blowing former British diplomat expelled from St Petersburg in 1996 for possession of a radioactive undergarment – plus a shaved Borzoi - in a public place, McCavity’s plumbing service was a cover story for a deep penetration/psy-ops project on behalf of the occupants of the Thames-side Babylonian Palace.

In Gamp’s somewhat bizarre memoir, Specialised Services in Modern Russia: Of Hookers, Dentists and Shrinks (London: Anthony Gland, 2001), he claims that McCavity was sent to Russia by SIS for the express purpose of spreading sexual panic among Moscow’s new ruling elite.

Gamp...found himself wandering the streets of a wintry St Petersburg early morning armed only with a radioactive thong, a vacant expression, and a scalped mutt. The psychiatrist concerned, Ms Beatrice Nightingale, later fell victim to an exploding “Rabbit” in a Rotterdam hotel. The final insult came when Gamp learned that the call-girl ring he thought he was running turned out to have been under FSB control all along.

This cautionary tale - why we should never mix espionage with oral relief - comprises an entirely new chapter in the updated version of Northern Roots, which I am delighted to reveal will be published by Gland in November 2013.

Quote:Last year British diplomat James Hudson was targeted in what was widely seen as a classic 'honeytrap' operation by Russian secret services.

The 37-year-old deputy consul in Ekaterinburg quit the Foreign Office after being filmed with two women in a sauna and massage parlour close to the British consulate.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Minty's finest hour in his campaign to destroy the electoral chances of the party he nominally serves:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8641849.stm

Has SIS ever played a better joke on a discarded skin?

I am, all things considered, all shook up.

Quote:How they undermined Gordon to get into bed with Clegg


In a nail-biting campaign, there have been gaffes and plots against Gordon Brown to the end. Chris McLaughlin reports

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Barely a week into the general election campaign, Ed Miliband, the architect of Labour’s manifesto, turned up unannounced on the doorstep of a colleague in a neighbouring constituency. “You’re right”, he said dejectedly to his fellow MP. What he confirmed in those two words was the view that the campaign had been hijacked by Peter Mandelson. Anyone seen as a close ally of Gordon Brown was being given the cold shoulder. There was a campaign taking place within a campaign and whatever happened, beyond a stunning and game-changing Labour victory, Brown was to be the loser.

“Gordon’s managed to put the plotters in charge”, said his colleague glumly.

“You won’t believe what’s going on in Victoria Street”, Ed Balls confided to those who already shared their suspicions. By the second week, some of Brown’s closest aides were becoming convinced that the plot was aimed at ensuring his swift removal on the morning after the election. He was to be replaced by David Miliband in a “bloodless coup”.

The speculation was as detailed as it was impossible to confirm: exploratory talks had already been had with Nick Clegg over the possibility of a post-election deal; Clegg had delivered what the plotters wanted to hear: he could work with Labour, but not with Brown; in the event that Labour came third in the poll of votes, but with enough seats to form a coalition government and keep the Tories out, Brown would have to go – and quickly.

The party rule drawn up to deal with the event of a Prime Minister’s illness making them “permanently unavailable” was to be invoked by a special meeting of the Cabinet which would then vote to install, temporarily or otherwise, David Miliband. The calculation was that Brown would have only five votes of the 23 Cabinet members, a symptom of the fact that he had failed to make the Government “his own”. Mandelson would be Foreign Secretary and Vince Cable would take over the Treasury.

The quid pro quo for Liberal Democrat support was predicted to be pledges from David Miliband on reform of party funding (reducing the role of the unions), a referendum on full proportional representation, constitutional reform and talks about the creation of a new centre-left party – one which would jettison what remained of the left and the historic link with the trade union movement.

A typical Labour conspiracy in the debilitating, over-long feud between the two houses of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? Perhaps. But one shared, by accounts of at least two of his closest aides, by Brown himself. Then came the welcome performance of Nick Clegg in the first televised leaders’ debate that transformed the campaign. Except that Clegg excelled beyond preferred expectations and was no longer the dog under the underdog.

He started publicly flirting with, then rejecting, both bigger parties and re-opening options. The X-Factor idol had become a tease and was beginning to annoy his Labour suitors. That was soon to change but, publicly at least, not for several days.

By election launch plus 11 days, Thursday April 22 and the morning of the second leaders’ television debate, The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland was reporting from the Brown election tour that the Prime Minister was being served up to the electorate as a sort of minor royal, with lots of cuppas with Labour supporters in front rooms but nothing that allowed Brown to be himself in a campaigning way.

“Some of Brown’s Cabinet colleagues are beginning to despair… several telling The Guardian that the leader’s time is being wasted, that he is travelling from Worcester to Birmingham to Oxford to Cardiff to generate nothing more than a few wallpaper pictures for the local news.

“[Some] suspect that Brown has lost out in a battle for control with his one-time nemesis and new ally, Peter Mandelson. In this reading, Mandelson has dispatched Brown to the provinces so that he can remain in charge at the centre.”

On the same day, the paper’s columnist Seamus Milne suggested that senior Labour figures were “transparently delighted by the third party eruption”. He went on: “For the Blairites, it has another attraction. As one senior Labour figure declared, a Lib-Lab pact would be “the ultimate fulfilment of the New Labour mission”. They also see it as an ideal opportunity finally to replace Brown with David Miliband – now expected to win backing from centre-left figures such as Jon Cruddas.

Cruddas’ stance in the new realignment has been simplistically misrepresented in the media, but his role was always going to be crucial if he held his seat.

The scenario was this: the electoral system is bust and there is a popular mood to change it; if the Tories are allowed the power to implement their proposals for change in parliamentary boundaries and numbers of seats, Labour would be out of power forever; leaving aside the Liberal Democrat meaning of the slogan, this was a once-in-a-generation chance for change, to create a new, permanent “progressive” political realignment which would leave the Tories out of power for good. It was what advocates would later call “the bigger picture” and what critics would call the SDP mark two. Even if, in the advocacy of tactical voting to achieve the goal, it meant sacrificing Labour seats.

The following weekend, Brown announced that he was going to “up the tempo” on his campaign, a public expression of the internal attempt to wrest it back from “the plotters” (whom he blamed with lumbering him with an Elvis impersonator at a key point), and talked of the election being the “fight of my life”. As far as the campaign-within-a-campaign was concerned, it was a fight for his political life.

By Tuesday April 27, Clegg appeared to be back on script. “Clegg: I’ll work with anybody except Brown” was the Daily Telegraph headline which summed up the spin of the Liberal Democrat day. While David Cameron warned his rival against “holding the country to ransom”, Clegg joked that he would even see “a man from the moon” as an acceptable partner in a coalition if it meant that reforms to voting, taxes, education and banking were driven through. But he singled out Brown as the one person he could not do business with. “Nothing personal”, he said, but Brown could not cling on to power if Labour turned in fewer votes than the Lib Dems and the Tories.

Then came the Rochdale encounter. As it went viral on the internet and made global live television, Labour members held their heads in their hands even before Brown did – compounding the error over the on-air microphone by being unflagged by his staff about the radio studio’s live camera – a standard in today’s multi-platform media. In Barking and Dagenham, Stoke Central and Oldham East & Saddleworth, the consternation, and probable effect, were greater than the immediate aftermath recorded among public opinion. While the view appeared to be that this was “just Gordon being Gordon”, two factors kicked in. One, with a wider resonance than these constituencies, was that this represented the exposure of the real Gordon Brown: two-faced, arrogant, detached from reality. Political nous prevented the other two major party leaders from attempting to exploit this “there-but-the-grace-of-God-go-I” moment, but it may have been instrumental in keeping the Labour vote from turning out or even exacerbated the stemming of protest voters drifting back to Labour.

The other factor, with greater local traction, was the reasonably-put question about eastern European immigration – albeit abetted with the emotive use of the words “flocking here”. Did it trigger Margaret Thatchers’s “swamping” moment for Brown, zeroing out any other language to which he ought to have been better attuned? The incident was evidence to Brown’s internal critics that you could not take him anywhere; likewise to his increasingly despondent coterie of supporters, who felt that taking over his own campaign strategy – to meet the voters and be himself – delivered the plotters’ self-fulfilling prophesy.

What was less evident was that the Mandelson strategy had also ruled out any “hostages to fortune”, such as any boast about the proposed increase in the national minimum wage or redistribution of wealth. The attack, rightly in the consistent opinion of Tribune’s leader commentaries, was on the threat of the Tories’ economic policies, but it ducked, as though embarrassed, the potential effect of Labour’s social welfare policies.

Discredited former “new” Labour spin-doctors such as Benjamin Wegg-Prosser were calling the shots, along with his old boss, Mandelson. When the Cabinet were paraded to support an education policy promotion in south London, Balls – still Schools Secretary and party spokesman – travelled from his constituency where the Tories were already planning to give Labour their “Portillo moment” only to be silenced by Mandelson. Only he and, perforce, Gordon Brown would address the cameras.

Among those said to have been excluded from the campaign strategy was Charlie Whelan, head of political policy at Labour’s biggest funder, the Unite union. Nothing could be further than the truth, other than, in the sense that, while soaking up the union’s funds, Mandelson made it clear the union’s subservient role would be legalised out of existence in the future.

Whelan was there in the spinning room, but his strategic spinning role was left to tweeting. Take a look – he’ll be denying it now.

The Peter Mandelson-David Miliband anti-union political elitist alliance saw a fresh boost with the flagging up of the suggestion that supporters of Compass – which boasts it is the most influential and effective campaign group on the “left” – should vote tactically. The proposal – which dismayed and enraged Labour candidates and members in marginal seats across the country, many of whom resigned their Compass membership – was endorsed in a ballot of members by 74 per cent to 14 per cent.

This is the internet view of one Compass punter on the advice: “Well, the decision means that Labour’s share of the national vote goes down – especially since there is no reciprocal arrangement from the Lib Dems. And, since Clegg has unilaterally rewritten the constitutional rulebook to take account of national share, this will contribute to a worse showing for Labour, and therefore increase the chances of Cameron getting to Number. 10. All in the name of ‘progressive politics’.

“Tactically, reproducing the Tory target list is utterly inept. Are we meant to vote Lib Dem in Gillingham & Rainham, simply because this is the first Tory target, but where the Lib Dems have no hope? If so, this only increases the chances of Tory victory at constituency level. If not, why include it in the list? If, instead, we are meant to start in Watford, where the Lib Dems are already in second place, if their surge in the polls is to believed, they may have won it anyway, but without the help from supposed Labour members and supporters, again diminishing our national share of the vote and demoralising our supporters and members in the area.

“Or perhaps Colne Valley is what you have in mind, more of a three-way contest with the Lib Dems in third in 2005? But again, how can you be certain that by handing Labour votes to the Lib Dems, you won’t hand the seat to the Tories – even at a local level, before Nick Clegg interprets it as a reason to enter coalition with the Tories?

“This is a foolish approach and tactically unsophisticated – and whose sole guaranteed effect will be to minimise Labour votes and seats. People have been expelled for less.”

Compass head Neal Lawson reproduced the Tory target list on the organisation’s website as a basis for tactical voting, rather than a list of seats where Labour has no chance. Judith Blake, the Labour candidate in Leeds North West, would probably have empathised with Lawson’s critics, as would other candidates in three-way marginals, or even in no-hope seats such as Woking where the Labour candidate was at least flying the Labour flag.

When Blake, a now former Compass member, protested, she was told by Compass to consider “the bigger picture”. The bigger picture included Compass giving supportive space on its website to Caroline Lucas, the Green candidate in Brighton Pavilion, another marginal where Labour had a high-quality candidate in Nancy Platts.

Eventually, four days before polling, Brown found his voice, speaking out for the low paid at a rally in Westminster, but sounding as though his passion was driven from a position of opposition. The next day, he underlined the mood around him by admitting that if he could no longer make a positive difference “I’d go and do something else”. It was beginning to look as though a coup would not be necessary after all.

In the early hours of Friday morning, Ed Balls, Ed and David Miliband, Yvette Cooper and any other minister who still had their seat and a government car was offering a lift to other surviving MPs on their way back to Westminster and Number 10, where Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman and others who did not need to travel so far were already gathering for the arrival of Gordon Brown. Winning outright had long been abandoned as a plausible outcome. But the biggest fight, not just for the soul of the Labour Party but for its very existence, was about to begin.