The tension from Labour’s underwhelming performance at the locals last week is boiling over. Last night Peter Hain comically denied he was firing a broadside against Ed Balls for not pulling his weight:

Advance Mischief-making to suggest my coming piece in @ProgressOnline Gdn an attack – coded or otherwise – on anybody in Labour. It's not.—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) May 07, 2013

It was described by the Guardian as a ‘coded attack’, but now the full piece in Progress is out, the word coded looks like a massive understatement:

“Labour’s Treasury team need to get out on the stump now and work even harder. It shouldn’t just be left to Ed and Harriet to carry the heavy load, whether on the World at One, the Today programme or anywhere else.”

If that is a ‘coded attack’, then bring on the open fireworks. Ever the master of subtly, Hain is so loyal to Miliband, Guido doubts he rumbled Macavity Balls without permission. Though worth remembering the lecture is coming from someone who quit the Shadow Cabinet to make some money…

Peter Hain’s trip to open a school in Sierra Leone last week seems to have gone well: he managed to land yet another job along the way. He’s just been appointed as a non-executive director at Amara, a major mining company that has subsidiaries in Burkina Faso, Mali and the Ivory Coast. Sounds like a nice little earner…

Peter Hain has spent the morning rubbing salt into Tory boundary wounds, openly gloating about a potential 11% handicap facing Tories hoping for a majority. Evidently having too much time on his hands as a mere MP, Peter Hain has just become a partner in his wife’s political PR firm. Back in 2010 Elizabeth Haywood described being the politician’s wife to the Guardian:

“Your job is open to comment, and certain roles may be off-limits (for example, I would have found it very difficult to continue in my old job as a lobbyist) or will create adverse comment.”

A politician’s wife being a lobbyist is off limits, eh? Funny then that Elizabeth’s bio on the Haywood Hain website boasts of her ability to influence ministers: “Dr Elizabeth Haywood is well versed in public affairs, media and government. She has lobbied Ministers and appeared on peak-time TV and radio”. How she might have done that Guido can only guess…

Guido is a getting a bit worried about Peter Hain. Yesterday the former Labour minister was lounging by the pool in sunny Spain and decided to pick a fight. Today he came back for more, which is never a good idea. There is not room for the whole conversation here, but this is a flavour:

So let's see if @GuidoFawkes is still on the sauce again today as he was so paralytic yesterday—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) August 07, 2012

Liar. @PeterHain—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 07, 2012

Like all bullies @GuidoFawkes doesn't like it when people stand up to him.—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) August 07, 2012

When I got you sacked from the cabinet @PeterHain it wasn't bullying, it was reporting the facts. It clearly still stings.—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 07, 2012

. @GuidoFawkes used to be influential blog now just propaganda for tired and discredited government—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) August 07, 2012

.@PeterHain Only one of us is a tired, old propagandist. Blog forced resignation of a Conservative politician in Wandsworth yesterday. QED—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 07, 2012

Asked by District Judge Timothy Stone whether he had an alcohol problem, @GuidoFawkes said: "Possibly."—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) August 07, 2012

Lest we forget how the @PeterHain v Guido spat ended yfrog.com/kembenzj—
Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) August 07, 2012

The sun must have gone to his head…

Something in the Commons water this week? Hain and Gove on verge of coming to blows behind speakers chair.—
Eye Spy MP (@eyespymp) July 11, 2012

Fight! Peter Hain tells Gove "grow up". Mickey juts out jaw, waves and shouts it's Ed Mili's fault. Kicking off behind Speaker's chair #pmqs—
Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) July 11, 2012

Gove and I not near coming to blows – he was screaming like a demented school child but calmed down after I told him to grow up @eyespymp—
Peter Hain (@PeterHain) July 11, 2012

Guido has always found that Peter Hain’s side of the story is never spun…

I know it makes me seem a bit geeky but here’s the first time I came across Peter Hain. From my school diary age 9 twitpic.com/9l2umb—
Jim Murphy (@jimmurphymp) May 14, 2012

Terrible day. The horse was innocent.

Guido hasn’t read Hain’s “Outside In“ memoir yet, though his interview in the Observer suggests that it should, to a extent generous even by the standards of political memoirs, be filed under fiction. On having to resign after being exposed for over-spending an undeclared £100,000 under-the-counter on his Labour Party deputy leadership campaign he pleads

“It was about an honest mistake and a disorganised end to the campaign and when I found out about it I told everyone. It’s quite possible that nobody would ever have found out if I hadn’t done that. And a lot of thanks I got for it.”

Not true, Hain only went to the police about it after details were published on this blog and on the front page of the Guardian. Decca Aitkenhead says in the interview that for Hain “the subject is still terribly raw”. No doubt it is, that is still no excuse for falsifying the facts.

With a disaster on his doorstep in the Swansea Valley Peter Hain, the Shadow Welsh Secretary, has been hogging the airwaves all morning. Though he is the local MP, he seems to be trying to make  capital out of the Welsh mining tragedy. Guido understands that Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan is on her way to the site from London, feeding lines to the media on the way. She’s on a train. Presumably not a fast one though…

UPDATE: Hain’s office insist he was only part of the press conference at the specific request of the police.

Guido is always happy to hear news of an old friend, so imagine his delight when this press release arrived earlier:

“BITEBACK is delighted to announce it will be publishing the autobiography of former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain in January 2012. Hain held an array of glittering posts in the British political firmament under both Blair and Brown.”

Guido can’t wait to finally read the truth about keeping it in the family – with the details of what Hain’s pensioner mother was doing to earn her taxpayer funded salary as one of his staff. The truth behind that bank robbery in 1974 that Hain was charged with, but got off after blaming “a body double.” One of the most interesting chapters will surely be how he didn’t notice that “someone else” was spending an extra hundred grand during his deputy-leadership bid and how he couldn’t add it all up. The fun he had digging up cricket pitches as a Liberal Party student activist. And finally we may learn the truth of exactly how he was exposed to that perma-tan blast of radiation.

Peter Hain had a shocker on Question Time, being jeered and booed by the audience for his take on Britain selling arms to Libya:

If we found, as we did in some instances that they were not being used for the license they had been granted for… If that’s the case, then it was wrong to sell them and we wouldn’t do it again…

Which would of course be too late…

Hain’s ministerial record on arms dealing is far from squeaky clean:

Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Africa, yesterday told The Independent on Sunday that the Government would investigate the deal if any substantiated allegations were made… “nobody could object to Britain selling arms to South Africa”.

On the BBC’s Today programme ….

…the Foreign Office minister Peter Hain gave his personal assurance that new Labour had never sold arms to any government that used them for internal repression. At last month’s Farnborough arms fair, weapons and all manner of war equipment were on offer to Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey…

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: “The public were outraged and shocked in the role the UK had in being a major supplier of arms to countries like Indonesia. The fact that the government finally brought in an embargo given the atrocities in East Timor just recently shows that the public has become very concerned about where we are selling arms too.” However, Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain insisted the government had acted ethically and openly in its arms sales policy.

His conversion to the cause of peace seems to coincide with him being out of office…