Despite the protestations of the Labour leader candidates that the days of spin and backstabbing anonymous briefings are over, the memo clearly hasn’t reached all the campaign teams yet as someone has been having quite the chat with the Mail’s Andrew Pierce. Ed Balls’s time as a member of Oxford University Conservative Association hasn’t gone down too well with a backbench colleague who was quick to twist the knife:

‘It’s astonishing that any Labour leadership contenders could have even considered paying money to join a Tory association in the mid-1980s. It’s sickening as he was paying them subs when Mrs Thatcher was wreaking terrible destruction on constituencies in the North of England that he represents. No wonder he is airbrushing his past.’

Sounds a lot like a man often used for rent-a-quotes. The justification was so that Balls could hear the likes of Michael Heseltine doesn’t really wash. Being a closet member of Oxford or Cambridge Conservative Association never did Nick Clegg any harm, just look where it got him.