Peter Hoskin

Clarke lashes out at Balls

The Labour infighting is becoming bloodier by the day. Remember Ed Balls’ call for party unity last week? Well – in a letter to today’s Times – Charles Clarke responds with an astonishing personal attack on Balls. Here’s Clarke’s invective in full:

“Sir, Ed Balls’s extraordinary interview with you (April 18) is most revealing and provokes a response.

His injunctions about the “indulgent nonsense” of “private briefings against the Labour leader” certainly come from one who is well acquainted with this kind of activity. Such things do discredit politics and take us back to the days of faction and party-within-a-party that were so damaging in the 1980s. As he says, we’ve seen it over this parliamentary recess, as I know to my cost from the totally false briefing (to which he refers) that I am considering running as a “stalking horse” against Gordon Brown.

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