Ed Miliband, brow furrowed and red in face, was spied deep in whispered conversation with Jack Dromey in the Westminster lobby immediately after Unite union leader “Red Len” McCluskey’s explosion.

Dromey, other half of Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, was a senior Unite official before election as a Birmingham MP.

The anxious Labour leader, pictured, wanted advice on how to handle McCluskey, a union general secretary who helped engineer Miliband’s victory but now fears Ed will lead the party to defeat. I don’t believe Miliband appreciates how deep a hole he’s in as he keeps digging.

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The GMB’s Paul Kenny is a loyalist but won’t be taken for a mug. Nor will Unison chief Dave Prentis, mild-mannered until crossed.

Miliband and Ed Balls lit a fuse in accepting living standard-lowering Tory wage limits for council workers, nurses and teachers.

Attacking George Osborne’s austerity measures, then adopting a large chunk and declining to reverse any, strikes professional negotiators as perverse. Prentis is calling, I hear, an emergency session of the Unison body which manages the giant union’s link with Labour.

That administrative move masks a seismic political threat when unions pay the party’s bills.

Blair could tell union leaders to take him or leave him because he was a winner.

Miliband doesn’t have that aura and, after another bad week, might never get it, though he shouldn’t be written off. Yet.

Labour spin, however, that Miliband welcomes a fight with the unions should be swallowed only by the criminally gullible.

Ed’s in a hole and this week he dug it a little deeper instead of trying to climb out.

Who fared best thanks to the last Labour Government?

BUS passes and fuel allowances saw pensioners do pretty well under the last Labour Government.

Kids enjoyed nurseries, rebuilt schools and grants to stay in the sixth form. The low paid prospered with the minimum wage and tax credits.

But did any couple do better than Tony and Cherie Blair? He’s made a fortune and now she hopes to profit from the NHS.

Nothing’s too good for the New Labour aristocracy, eh, Mr and Mrs Blair?