Adam Leigh, the assistant news editor at the Indy, has been given the bullet. He was appointed by the old editor, Simon Kelner. His uncle.

Guido has spent the day skulking the corridors of the Liverpool Convention Centre and Jury’s Inn waiting for the Labour Party conference to really kick off. Lobbyists and hacks seem to outnumber the dyed in the wool types and even the most rabble rousing of activists are amusing themselves playing Sky’s political top trumps. It’s as quiet as a scouse mouse.

The whole conference is a bit of a shambles. The airport-style security scanners are on and off resulting in queues out, back and around. The media bunker, in the bowels of the building and thus encased in steel and concrete, has limited phone reception and the £250 for rubbish slow internet has hardly buttered up hacks.  If you can’t run a conference properly, it doesn’t leave much hope for the country…

Given the state of Labour’s finances it comes as no surprise that the whole affair has been done on the cheap. It was pointed out that the set looks like someone handed the designer a note saying “there’s no money left”…

Ed’s chat on the regional fringes last night was of the “media reality and actual reality”. Well the proof is in the pudding in Liverpool. Maybe The Guardian’s shindig tonight will yield that elusive story. Guido’s not holding his breath though…

If you hear @edballsmp talk about #eurozone crisis remember he led Labour through lobbies to vote against UK's #IMF contribution this summer—
Matthew Hancock (@matthancockmp) September 25, 2011

Back in July the government won a vote to send £9 billion to the IMF by just 28 votes, the tightest margin yet for the Coalition government. Despite the best efforts of the whips some thirty-two Tory MPs rebelled against the government.

Osborne’s former bag carrier Matthew Hancock thinks this was a bad thing, others (including Ed Balls, Guido and John Redwood) think they voted in the national interest. We were told at the time that this was not like £9 billion transfer which we would never see again, it was a “contingent liability” and the IMF has never failed to repay such borrowings. The IMF has never faced a financial crisis on this scale before, the US is in no position to be the leading lender of last resort if the Euro shatters the IMF.

Christine Lagarde of the IMF is now briefing that the IMF needs more funds to deal with the worst case scenario.

Osborne and the Treasury spin that if Britain wants to sit at the top table the taxpayers have to cough up to the IMF. Isn’t it time to let other people sit at the top table. Brazil, China and India should get a better seat. The menu doesn’t look that appealing and is overpriced.

Harriet Harman tells Women’s Hour…

“We are entirely focused on getting David … err … Ed … elected as PM at next election”

When Derek Draper announced his return to the political fold he smoothed feathers by promising to keep a low profile and to not visibly front his new venture. Which would explain why he was leading the standing ovations for Ed Balls earlier.

It looked like he was mouthing “absolutely brilliant”…

Word cloud quite revealing…

Given that he’s still suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party, and sits as an independent MP while the police continue to investigate his expenses, you would have thought that Denis MacShane would be keeping a low profile in Liverpool. But no, not only is he pea-cocking around the conference centre pressing the flesh, he has even had the cheek to appear on the Daily Politics.

Shameless…

Ed Balls claims unconvincingly…

“My instinct is that you should always try to reduce every tax if you can…”

Jeff Randall mentions in passing some more Guilty Men that Peter Oborne missed in his fast-selling pamphlet for the CPS, namely the authors of an earlier pamphlet published in 2002 “Why Britain Should Join The Euro” written by Richard Layard (LSE), Willem Buiter (ex-BoE MPC and eurocrat), Chris Huhne, Will Hutton, Peter Kenen (the Princeton University academic famous ironically for his work on optimum currency areas ) and Adair Turner. In this nonsense filled pamphlet for Britain in Europe they asserted:

“Opponents of the euro have forecast disasters which have in fact never happened and which always looked most unlikely… Euro-sceptics constantly underestimated the competence of Europeans and their ability to organise things properly.”

These Guilty Men are not the types to apologise. It is remarkable that Will Hutton, Chris Huhne and Adair Turner are now prominent tub-thumpers for carbon based global warming. Demonstrating, once again, their characteristic quality of  judgement.

Ed Balls is trying to reposition himself as slightly less keen on government debt than he was last week, to this end he is about to tell us that in government Labour would use the proceeds of selling the state’s shares in the banks to pay down the debt. Chuka Umunna, the Shadow Business Minister, has been leading a campaign to mutualise the banks supported by over 100 signed-up backbenchers. Balls isn’t having  any of that.

Chuka was Ed Miliband’s PPS before he was appointed to the Treasury Select Committee. Balls is showing how much he respects Chuka’s prowess on economic policy.