If he can't send one rival for the keys to Number 10 to the EU, then he'll send another. Yep, Gordo is talking about sending that young pretender to his throne to the EU to take up another of those made-up roles currently seeking candidates:

Gordon Brown is secretly backing David Miliband to be the European Union’s foreign affairs chief — clearing the way for one of his protégés to be Labour’s next leader.

Downing Street is discreetly supporting the foreign secretary as a candidate for EU high representative for foreign affairs, with Tony Blair looking increasingly unlikely to win the presidency.

First we try to make a discredited former Prime Minister EU President. Now we are pushing the dweebier of the two Miliband spawn as the Foreign Affairs representative. What will the EU think? We truly are sending our trash to them, and expecting them to give that trash high-profile jobs. Still, this sort of thing will be common - and increasingly blatant - as the government freefalls into a general election defeat. Labour MPs will be jumping ship left, right and centre. And what better place for them to head to that the EU? Undemocratic, elitist, patronising and offering massive financial rewards. What more could an ambitious Nu Labour troglodyte want?

It is this, though, that really gets to me:

Miliband’s departure for Europe would increase the chances of one of the prime minister’s chosen candidates, Ed Balls or Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary’s brother, winning a leadership contest if Labour is defeated at the general election.

Those two are the chosen successors to the Labour leadership? Jesus. The less famous Miliband brother and the only man in modern politics less easy to like that the incumbent Labour leader. Presumably Gordon Brown is pursuing a scorched earth policy for the Labour party as well as the British economy, since either Ed would be electoral suicide!