'Charlie Whelan: I persuaded six MPs to switch second preference to Ed Miliband'

The Guardian reports that

'It was Charlie Whelan wot won it. At least that's what the outgoing Unite political director is saying, proudly recounting the hardball political operation he ran to deliver the Labour leadership to Ed Miliband.

The new leader himself denied any such thing to Andrew Marr on BBC1 this morning: "Why did the trade unions endorse me? Not because there was some kind of cabal who made the decision," he said.

Whelan begs to differ. The former spokesman for Gordon Brown told me in the Radisson hotel how the "Big Four" union leaders had sat together in the summer working out who was best placed to be the "stop David" candidate. Their own personal preference would probably have been Ed Balls, but a lack of initial support among MPs suggested his chances were limited. "I'm pragmatic," Whelan said, explaining that the union men then came to the swift, unsentimental view that Ed Miliband was the likeliest to thwart his older brother, whom they regarded as too Blairite.

Formal endorsements soon followed from Unite, Unison and the GMB. Whelan and his colleagues focused their energies particularly on second preferences, seeking to persuade union members that even if they put Balls, Andy Burnham or Diane Abbott first, they should place the younger Miliband second – calculating, rightly, that it was those second votes that would determine the election.

The effort reached its climax at the Trade Union Congress earlier this month. Whelan targeted a dozen union-backed MPs who were at the TUC, putting pressure on them to switch their second preference to Ed Miliband. He had, he says, a 50% success rate, converting six of the 12. Run the maths and, under Labour's weighted electoral college system, the votes of those six MPs may have been just enough to have given the younger Miliband his one-point margin of victory.'

Remember this when the BBC spin the line that Ed Miliband is his own man.