So you won’t be remotely surprised when I tell you that it has left Labour folk from the cabinet down gloomy, run down and irritated.<\/p>\n
We have seen an element of that play out publicly.<\/p>\n
Ministers deployed on what is known as the morning round, where they trundle from one studio to the next, often in possession of a government announcement but also braced for an avalanche of questions on the story of the day, haven’t hidden their frustrations as assiduously as they might once have done.<\/p>\n
The aforementioned Miliband, a former party leader, acknowledged on Sky News that when Lord Mandelson was appointed to the ambassador’s job in Washington he had worried “it could blow up” and he had discussed those concerns with cabinet colleague David Lammy, who he said shared them.<\/p>\n
What is telling is less that that was his view at the time, and more that it is something he is willing to share publicly now. <\/p>\n
He also said, on Good Morning Britain, that it was “a fair point” that enough was already known about Lord Mandelson when he got the job that it would have been possible to conclude at the time that his appointment was not just risky but wrong.<\/p>\n
Later in the week it was the turn of Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden to head from camera to camera. <\/p>\n
He is, usually, a doughty defender of the government and he still was. <\/p>\n
But he was managing to put a noticeable distance between himself and the news No 10 had been hawking their former director of communications Lord Doyle for a job as an ambassador<\/a>. <\/p>\n Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper went further \u2013 she was publicly aghast at this particular revelation.<\/p>\n Each example here felt to me like straws in the wind \u2013 easily dismissed in isolation but alongside everything else an indicator of the prime minister’s declining authority.<\/p>\n