The fallout continues. Labour colleagues are pointing more fingers at Watson:

“It looks like Watson may have overplayed his hand here. Its difficult to see how Siôn Simon is going to come out of this well and if MPs do make it on to the ballot paper its  going to look like a defeat for them. In 24 hours they’ve managed to give shadow cabinet member Liam Byrne the outsider/underdog status which can only help his campaign. 

 Watson tried to reinvent himself for the new politics era but he’s let the mask slip. He walks around with a halo on calling for more transparency in the media one moment and then be doing secret back room deals half an hour later. He’s the fixers fixer, in many ways he’s like Kevin Rudd in Australia. He complains about “invisible voices” and “faceless men”, but they are him. He called James Murdoch a mafia boss, but it takes one to know one, he’s Labour’s mafia boss”

Labour sources point to the fact normally “the General Secretary would have stepped in by now to sort out this mess,” but Iain McNicol is “an ineffective lightweight with no authority”.

Tempers are flaring…

UPDATE: A former Labour SpAd twists the knife:

“This is now going to turn into a ‘stop Sion’ campaign. Watson, what a genius. Doing for Sion what he did for Gordon…”