Milburn is mad to think of challenging Brown: but there is method in his madness

When Alan Milburn returned to the Cabinet in September 2004, explicitly tasked to run Labour’s general election campaign, Gordon Brown’s advisers were amazed by the Chancellor’s composed response to such a bloody-minded act of provocation by the Prime Minister. ‘Gordon was very strategic about it,’ one aide recalls. ‘He said Milburn would fall out of favour with the parliamentary party and the activists, and that it would be a shambles.’

The Brownites are nothing if not thorough, however. So a superbly orchestrated campaign of assassination was mounted just to make sure that Mr Brown’s prophecy came true: a campaign that became known around Westminster as ‘Kill Mil’. Barely a day seemed to go by without another allegation about Mr Milburn’s supposed incompetence, sexism or arrogance appearing in the press. By the time Mr Brown had been recalled, and the election won with his help, Mr Milburn had had enough, and resigned from the Cabinet a second time.