For all the hustings and the hype, what really makes leadership campaigns successful is the hard cash. And no surprise that favourite David Miliband has raised nearly five times that of his closest financial rival Ed Balls.
Abbot and Burnham haven’t even raised enough to need declaring yet. Ouch.
So where is Miliband’s money coming from? He has declared that there are three Lords pulling his strings. Blair’s old chum Lord Sainsbury gave £20,000, Lord Alli used a proxy company to give £50,000 and Lord Puttnam threw in a cheeky £10,000. The novelist Ken Follett gave Balls the bulk of his money. Cha-ching.