It appears our old friend Damian McBride couldn’t resist sticking the knife in to Ed Miliband’s shambolic media operation. McBride was happy to recount the following anecdote about a grim-faced Tom Baldwin, the ex-Times hack who became Ed’s press guru.

“Tom Baldwin was in a very dark mood at a party one night. I told him ‘Tom, what have you got coming up, what are you looking forward to?’ And he just stared at his shoes for 15 seconds. And then he walked out to have a cigarette as though I’d deliberately tried to say something to offend him. I just thought he’s clearly got no good answer to that question. If you’ve got no good answer to that, if you’ve got no plan to turn it around, you can’t survive in this. When Gordon got himself deep into that territory I always kept him out of the hole by saying, ‘the next speech will turn it around’ or ‘I’ve got this great stuff we can leak about the Tories. Ed Miliband got himself into a place where just to get himself some good press he’d just deal with the Guardian and Observer and all the exclusives were given to them. It was crazy, it was just so Tom could walk around and say ‘Oh we got a good splash in the Observer.’ Who cares?”

Perhaps  psycho-spinner Baldwin, whose main contribution to Miliband’s mauling was his tasteless remarks on Ed’s “Milly Dowler moment“, actually left the party to powder his nose?