Next Gen News

Rolling coverage of all today's political developments

Read a summary of events so far

1.16pm: Here's a dinner summary .

• Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, has said that the government's plans to give GPs control over £80bn of NHS spending would bring "a return to postcode prescribing"

• Ed Balls has said that it was "a mistake" for Labour to say that it could halve the deficit largely by cutting spending. In a BBC interview, the shadow education secretary and leadership contender said: "In 2009 I thought the pace of deficit reduction through spending cuts was not deliverable." In a veiled swipe at the Miliband brothers, he also claimed that he was "a bit ordinary", unlike the Milibands, who grew up in a sophisticated political household in London. (See 12.49pm.)

• Ed Miliband has said that Labour did not lose the elections because of "personalities". Anyone who thought that was "profoundly wrong", Miliband, the shadow energy secretary and a leadership contender, told the Today programme. The party lost for deeper reasons, to do with policy and values, he suggested. (See 9.07am.)

My colleague Hélène Mulholland will be taking over now for the rest of the day. I'll be writing a separate blog this afternoon as Carne Ross gives evidence to the Iraq inquiry. (See 8.45am)

12.49pm: BBC News has just broadcast a profile of Ed Balls, the first of a series covering all the Labour leadership candidates. It was done by Laura Kuenssberg, and she covered quite a lot of ground in a relatively short time. Here are the highlights.

• Balls claimed Labour made a mistake when it promised before the election to halve the deficit over the next four years.

Halving the deficit in four years by cutting public spending ... I think was a mistake, and you know, in government at the time in 2009 I always accepted collective responsibility, but at the time in 2009 I thought the pace of deficit reduction through spending cuts was not deliverable, I didn't think I could have been done.

Balls has already criticised his party for not ruling out a VAT increase before the election and like Ruth First when he was a child.

Incidentally, have you ever heard anyone complain about Ed Balls being "a bit provincial and a bit ordinary"? I've read, and heard, plenty of disobliging comments about him in the past, but I've never heard anyone criticise him on these grounds. Ed, I think you're protesting a little too much.

?€? He denied a briefing on the Blairites. When asked if he would deny a briefing on people working for Tony Blair when he worked for Gordon Brown, he replied: "categorically." But he acknowledged that there were times when he was "young and energetic and a little arrogant ".

12.24pm: Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, has just told BBC News that there is no need to re-organise the NHS along the lines being planned by Andrew Lansley. (See 8.45am)

Why is this change necessary at this time, when we have a health service that is providing good care to the vast majority of people, waiting times are as low as they have ever been? To take away all of that policy simply means we are going to have a return to postcode prescribing and the NHS is going to go backwards. I think it's highly regrettable. It actually makes me want to weep that all the progress we've made is now being put at risk. It's a huge gamble with the NHS at precisely the wrong time.

12.15pm: The Mandelson memoirs (see 8.45am and 10.46am) are more interesting than anything else in the papers today. But I've now been through the rest of them, and here are a few more articles worth plugging.

• David Cameron and Nick Clegg, in a joint article in the Daily Telegraph, says that today's NHS announcement illustrates the way the coalition has become "more radical about decentralising power" as a result of combining Conservative and Lib Dem policies.

It combines Conservative thinking on choice and competition with the Liberal Democrat belief in local democracy to create a truly radical vision for the NHS â€" giving general practitioners authority over commissioning and patients much more control, and ensuring democratic accountability with councils taking greater responsibility, in particular over public health.

• The Independent saysHousing experts say the government 'plans to cut housing benefit will thousands of people homeless.

The homeless charity, Shelter, said some households in London receiving housing benefit will have to find a shortfall of up to £1,548 a month to meet housing costs. The result, say opposition MPs, will be "social cleansing" of poorer tenants from richer areas.

• Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent says that Peter Mandelson knew Labour would lose under Gordon Brown.

'Surely you know we can't win with Gordon as leader?' a colleague asked [Mandelson] last year. To which the reply was, 'Do you think I'm mad? Do you think I don't realise that?' But Mandelson was convinced that Labour couldn't win a majority under any leader.

• The Daily Telegraph saysAndrew Bridges, chief inspector of probation, have questioned whether thousands of dangerous criminals should be locked up only to stop some of them committing crimes.

In a foreword to his annual report headed "What price public protection?", Mr Bridges said his aim was to "shed some light on this emotionally charged topic" of the management of prisoners and their possible reoffending. "Is the public prepared to accept the 'cost' of having more prisoners managed in the community, in terms of a proportionately small amount of reoffending, in order to achieve the 'benefit' of substantial financial savings, knowing that people are not being expensively locked up for longer than they need to be?"

• Tim Walker in the Telegraph says Lord Heseltine has still not made his maiden speech in the House of Lords, despite getting his peerage almost 10 years ago.

11.56am: Downing Street has been explaining why David Cameron told the News of the World he was "terrified" about the prospect of finding a good secondary school for his children in London. Cameron was "empathising" with parents. According to PoliticsHome, this is what the prime minister's spokesman said about the comments.

What he's doing was empathising with the issues that many parents face where they are concerned about whether or not there is a decent school locally that they can send their children to ... which is why the government is committed to a range of reforms to drive up standards, increase choice and increase the diversity of provision."

11.30am: The recession was worse than we thought, Larry Elliott reports. That's the implication of new figures published this morning. "Fresh information collected by the Office for National Statistics showed that the peak-to-trough decline in output was 6.4% of gross domestic product rather than the original 6.2% estimate," Larry writes.

10.46am: I've just read the full extracts in the Times from the Mandelson memoirs. They don't reveal anything sensationally new. We knew Nick Clegg was unhappy about the prospect of the Lib Dems forming a coalition with Labour that would keep Gordon Brown in power because Clegg said that himself before the election. But Mandelson has provided the first detailed, insider account of the negotiations that took place between Labour and the Lib Dems after the election, and some of the minutiae is fascinating.

Patrick Wintour has already written a story with the main revelations. Here are some of the other points that struck me.

• Mandelson presents Gordon Brown as someone who was almost in denial about the fact that he had lost. Mandelson does not put it as bluntly as that, of course, but that was the impression I got from reading his account. Writing about the Friday morning after the election, he says:

Gordon was determined that if the election result left any mathematical chance of bringing the Liberal Democrats on board to form a government, he would make a deal possible. Yes, we had come second. 'But that is not the final word,' he kept saying.

Mandelson also says that even when Brown accepted that he would have to stand down later in 2010 as part of any deal with the Lib Dems, Brown insisted that he could not leave until he had dealt with "the tasks in hand" (the referendum on AV, and economic recovery). It reminded me slightly of Tony Blair finding reasons for delaying his departure.

• Mandelson claims that David Miliband was against a coalition with the Lib Dems, and that Ed Miliband was in favour. Ed Balls was doubtful or ambivalent, Mandelson says. Mandelson is thought to be backing David Miliband for the Labour leadership, and Labour MPs will be wondering if he included this to help David's chances.

?€? Mendelssohn, it seems, joined the fan club, David Cameron. Writing the announcement of Cameron s "on Friday after the election that he is ready to make the generous offer of the Liberal Democrats, Mandelson said that he" almost single-handedly "in the ranks of labor 's is impressed.

To me, it sounded like the new politics. In the past, I had felt that Cameron was not bold enough about changing his party. But now he was acting boldly, and if he pulled off a deal with the Lib Dems the alliance would offer him a renewed prospect of delivering a changing perception of his party.

• Tony Blair joked about Gordon Brown's relations with God. Mandelson recalls that on the Sunday he sent Blair a text saying that he was free to speak about the talks with the Lib Dems, but that Brown was going to church. Blair replied: "He'll find that a tougher negotiation." I assume that's a joke about Brown asking God for forgiveness - a line in the Lord's Prayer, and a routine feature in a service - although it's not entirely clear.

• Brown put his head in his hands when he was on the Jeremy Vine show and being asked about Gillian Duffy because he was thinking. Mandelson says this about that famous image.

It seemed to many who watched that show that he was in the depths of despair. For those who knew him, it was a familiar pose. He always put his head on his hand this way, when he had to concentrate.

• Mandleson says he thinks Ed Balls and Harriet Harman were included in the team negotiating with the Lib Dems "because Gordon felt they might go off-message if they were excluded".

• Mandeslon says that at one point he phoned David Owen to discuss the prospects of a deal with the Lib Dems. But he doesn't explain why. Owen isn't a Lib Dem.

9.56am: The Iraq inquiry has published a list of witnesses who will be giving evidence next week. Tuesday should be good. s, that "when we LL 'hear Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI-5.

9.28am: Have you seen the Mandelson "fairy tale" ad yet? I've only just caught up with it on YouTube and it's well worth taking a look, because it's classic Mandelson: both conceited ("Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would never have got into power if it hadn't been for me" - I paraphrase) and self-mocking ("people called him the Prince of Darkness ... don't know why"), as well as arch, faintly sinister, ridiculous - and rather funny.

Three months ago Mandelson was almost the most powerful man in Britain. Now he dressing up in a daft costume to flog his memoirs, while at the same time describing New Labour as a "fairy tale". I'm always amazed how quickly fortunes can change in politics.

9.07am:Yesterday Andy Burnham accused Mandelson self indulgent arrogance, as Patrick Wintour Guardian reports today . This morning Ed Miliband was on the Today programme and he was also asked about the Mandelson book. He sidestepped the question by saying that he had not read the Times extracts yet. But he also made a wider point, contradicting John Prescott, who claimed yesterday that factionalism cost the party the election.

This is what Prescott said yesterday.

We lost the election when we started attacking each other about Brown and Blair â€" now being reiterated in Peter's book â€" and then some of the people on the sides coming in and blaming somebody else.

And, according to PoliticsHome, this is what Miliband said this morning.

I think one of the lessons for Labour is that we do need to move on, we need to move on from some of the psychodramas of the past, some of the factionalism that there was.

But I think there sa 'profound lesson that if any of us think that we lost the election because of the personalities, we are deeply wrong - there are big problems for us to face up to.

We began as the party of the windfall tax on the privatised utilities and the minimum wage in 1997, we ended - despite doing great things - as the party that was defending bank bonuses and a party that was pushing forward ID cards.

8.45am: A big public service reform, a minister on the ropes, and the opposition embroiled in in-fighting â€" it's a busy news day and we've got something for everyone. Here are the four main stories on the agenda.

• Mandelson memories. The Times published excerpts from Lord Mandelson 's alleged "explosive" autobiography. Patrick Wintour wrote a summary of today 's Guardian and, if you want to go behind the paywall, you can read them on the Times's website. John Rentoul and Peter Watt don't think there's much new in the extracts. I'll tell you what I think when I've read them in full.

• Carne Ross at the Iraq inquiry at 2pm. Ross, a former British diplomat at the UN, has been described as an Iraq war whistleblower. He wrote secretly to the Butler inquiry in 2004 saying that Iraq's WMD programme was not considered a threat to the UK and that the claims made by the government before the war were implausible. After he submitted his evidence, he resigned from the Foreign Office.

?€? Michael Gove in the House of Commons on 2.30pm.The line abolishing Building Schools for the future ISN programs' t going down. Gove takes questions in the Commons today, and Ed Balls calls for answers to a series of questions he has sent Gove about the affair.

• Andrew Lansley announces a major NHS reform at 3.30pm. My colleague Randeep Ramesh wrote about the plans, which will involve GPs taking control of funding worth £80bn, in the Guardian at the end of last week. Lansley, the health secretary, will formally unveil his plans in a statement to the Commons.

We'll be following all these stories, plus other breaking Westminster news, as well as bringing you the best politics from the papers and the web.