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The Erith and Thamesmead mystery continues. Rumours reached Manchester that a fingerprint has now been found on the tampered ballot box which brought the first round in the pre-election candidate selection to a controversial close.

Was it the right sabotaging the left, or the other way round?

We may never know since police inquiries have run into the sand and, as far as Tribune knows, the London Labour Party does not have all its members’ prints on file.

Yet.

Neil Kinnock has paid tribute to Michael Foot, the former Labour leader and Tribune editor who died this year, as the man who “saved this party from terminal division and dissolution.”

Speaking at the opening of conference, Lord Kinnock said that, during his leadership in the early 1980s, Mr Foot preserved Labour in spite of being “crucified” by relentless attacks from inside the party and the media.

“The memory of him endures to illuminate all our lives. The only tribute he would want, the only memorial that will do him justice, is enduring pursuit of progress that enlarges human liberty.”

Labour’s new leader has dismissed the “Red Ed” tag as “tiresome rubbish”.

Well, it probably was too much to hope for.

The efforts of the media to de-legitimise Ed Miliband’s leadership and simultaneously demonise the trade unions reached a bathetic low on BBC 2’s Daily Politics. Presenter Anita Anand interrupted GMB leader Paul Kenny’s on-screen defence of the vote among individual union members to say: “Hold on, you can’t classify them as individuals, they are trade union members.”

Non-persons, in other words.

Outside the conference hall the BBC was inviting delegates to cast a vote on whether New Labour is dead by plopping a plastic ball into a see-through ballot box.

Asked for his view, Neil Kinnock accused the Beeb of dumbing down politics. He didn’t really need to. Back inside, Anita was showing viewers how it really should be done, observing: “The message we are getting is that people are really confused [about the vote]. The man who got the most votes didn’t win.”