Do the big brothers really want to topple Brown? Or do they just hate each other?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic for Labour’s election prospects. And if dear old Bob Crow, the railwaymen’s leader and the last Leninist in British public life, wades in to bring the trains to a halt for Easter — the week before the election is likely to be called — it will be game over for Gordon before he’s even had time to pin a Unite-funded rosette to his lapel.

That’s the bit I don’t understand: if Unite is Labour’s paymaster, how can its politburo possibly want the party in their pocket to lose? If that’s not what they want, then the cabin-crew dispute, which has little public support, looks very much like Woodley’s personal vendetta against BA chief executive Willie Walsh.