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.