THE LABOUR PARTY STARTS TO UNPICK BEFORE OUR VERY EYES

Ed Miliband's first conference speech as Labour leader may have been slightly overshadowed after David Miliband, who was sitting in the audience, was caught mouthing something to Harriet Harman who was sitting next to him.

Despite his public show of loyalty it’s clear that David is far from pleased, and his wife is said to be raging about the election.

In his speech Ed disowned a huge amount of what New Labour had done. He condemned tuition fees, lack of any real regulation of the City, and Brown's idiotic claim to have ended boom and bust.

However, when he got to the Iraq war, he described the decision to invade as "wrong". That was when his brother reacted. Miliband Snr turned to Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman who was sitting next to him applauding and said: "You voted for it, why are you clapping?"

Harman replied: "I'm clapping because he is the leader. I'm supporting him."

Shortly after that Ed mentioned that he had been nicknamed Forest Gump by some of David’s supporters, and the cameras swung to David who was shaking his head.

I doubt that in all honesty David Miliband will stay as a member of the shadow cabinet, but if he goes, and particularly if he resigns his seat so that he can carry on his ambitious career elsewhere, he is going to look like a huffy little man who didn’t get what he wanted, and surely Labour has had enough of that kind at the helm.... so they may have had a narrow escape.

After his own speech on Monday, when he made an appeal for Labour to unify behind Ed, his wife Louise was spotted in floods of tears backstage, and it is said that she is extremely angry that Ed stood, after he apparently advised David not to try to oust Brown a year and more ago. That he won by the narrowest of margins, and thanks to the section of the party that these people like the very least...the trade unionists....must be the saddest of blows to the Milibands Senior.

When asked about it, Ed said he hadn't seen it. He went on to praise his brother for his support in response to his speech.

David Miliband may not be the only person to have trouble with things that were said. Ed made it clear that he was against the tight restrictions the last government introduced, curtailing personal liberty with the excuse of the Bush/Blair “war against terror”. This put him at odds with Postman Pat, another trade unionist. And Ed has backed Ken Clarke’s policies of intelligent sentencing, which Jack Straw described as madness. (Jack Straw is more of a Michael Howard type of man.)

We shall see what the next few days bring, but as the papers are totally obsessed with this, now might be a good time to bury bad news as Labour comes apart at the stitches.

(In the second picture wee Spud looks as if he doesn't even recognise the guy on the platform, don't you think?)

ANOTHER EXPERT TURNS OUT TO KNOW LESS THAN A GOVERNMENT MINISTER

The Government’s expert advisor on drugs has been sacked by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary for erm ...giving an opinion on drugs to his university.

Professor David Nutt MRCP, MRCPsych, FRCPsych, FMedSci, of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London, pointed out that all drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should be ranked by a "harm" index with alcohol coming fifth behind cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, and methadone.

Tobacco should rank ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy.

Prof Nutt said: "No one is suggesting that drugs are not harmful. The critical question is one of scale and degree. We need a full and open discussion of the evidence and a mature debate about what the drug laws are for - and whether they are doing their job."

The Professor was not talking for the government when he made these assertions. He was giving a lecture and briefing paper for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, when he attacked what he called the "artificial" separation of alcohol and tobacco from other, illegal, drugs.

Prof Nutt is the Chairman of the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He is, as you might have guessed from the list of letters after his name, his work at Imperial College and the fact that he has reached professorial rank, something of an expert on the the subject. He can't be expected to tow the government line and in doing so feed faulse information to his students. Academe isn't really like that. Experts are there to be.... well...expert.

So Alan Johnson has sacked him, because his expert opinion doesn’t fit with the government’s policy that drink and cigarettes are less harmful than other drugs. With the greatest respect to Mr Johnson, I don’t think that he can begin to have the Professor’s understanding of the subject. Strangely, at the time of writing, the government has not put up anyone to argue their case on the news channels, perhaps because no one in the home office has a clue how to counter what David Nutt has said.

Time and again this London government employs and pays experts to give advice, and time and again they ignore that advice. It has happened over education, over unemployment, over various aspects of health including alcohol, and as we know, it has happened over devolution.

I wonder if the next set of experts to bite the dust will be the ones who have been looking at MPs’ expenses. Doubtless they have got it all wrong too.