Darling and Miliband won’t be moved

In every crisis of leadership, there are a few protagonists who matter much more than most: self-evidently, the Prime Minister’s spouse and core advisers, but also the holders of the great offices of state. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has already announced her departure, triggering today’s spectacularly ill-timed mayhem. As James pointed out earlier, Peter Mandelson handed the black spot to Alistair Darling in a BBC interview today and Gordon Brown conspicuously declined to use the future tense in his encomium of his Chancellor at PMQs. All seems to be in order for a new boss at the Treasury to be appointed in the forthcoming reshuffle and there is ever more frenzied speculation that Ed Balls is the PM’s candidate-of-choice. In his Mirror column today, the impeccably-connected Labour polemicist Kevin Maguire proposes Balls for Number 11 as if this was manifestly a good thing rather than the stick of political gelignite it would actually be.