Will history honour Labour's plotters?

Peter Mandelson. Alistair Darling. David Miliband. Douglas Alexander. Tessa Jowell. All, Lord Mandelson tells us, went into the general election this year believing or fearing that under Gordon Brown's leadership, Labour could not win.

This morning, spare a thought for the few Labour people who were brave enough and honest enough to say these things in public: think of David Cairns, who quit his ministerial job because of his doubts about Mr Brown, and of Tom Harris, who was sacked for the same. Think of James Purnell, who took Mr Brown to the brink. Think of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt who finally went public at the very end. Often denouced as "plotters" intent on dividing the party, all said in public what many of their colleagues were only prepared to say in private.

Labour members and historians alike should ask what would have happened if more Labour MPs had been similarly candid and Labour had fought the election with a different leader. Could the result have been different? Could Labour have clung onto a dozen more seats, making a Lab-Lib coalition a viable option? It's likely to be yet another of the great What If? scenarios that will attend the Brown premiership. (What if he'd called the election in 2007? What if he'd been challenged for the leadership?) But because so few people in the Labour Party had the courage to act on their convictions, it remains nothing more than a footnote in history. I wonder how Labour history will remember the "plotters"?

(A declaration: yesterday, I gently criticised Lord Mandelson for serving up some dull and well-worn bits of gossip in his memoirs in exchange for money. Yet today, here I am again, writing about those same memoirs. I offer no justification for this other than the fact that I, like the noble lord himself, write for money. He who pays the piper etc. )