Will Labour leader stab toxic media chief in the back?

LIKE their presumptuous boss with his 8ft limestone slab chiselled with manifesto promises, Red Ed’s closest advisers are planning for life in No 10.

However, some fear they may be dropped by Miliband if he becomes PM.

Among them are media aide and party strategist Tom Baldwin. If Labour wins, he wou ld hope to have the key post of PM’s official spokesman.

But Baldwin (a former Times journalist once accused by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft of having a ‘voracious’ cocaine habit) has had a torrid election campaign.

He upset the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler by sickeningly suggesting a petty row over Tory links to tax avoidance could be exploited for political gain as a ‘Milly Dowler moment’. (He was referring to how public opinion crystallised against the tabloid Press after it was wrongly alleged the News Of The World had deleted missing Milly’s voice-mail messages.)

Baldwin, who lives in a £6 million Highbury home with his heiress wife, also angered health workers by saying Labour would ‘weaponise’ the NHS and then blamed David Cameron f or migrants being drowned in the Mediterranean because, he said, the Tories had failed to do any post-conflict planning in Libya.

It is not surprising that some senior Labour figures think Baldwin — in the way Alastair Campbell became when he served Tony Blair at No 10 — is too toxic a figure to be given the important post of PM’s chief spin doctor.

They also point out that Baldwin sends one of his children to a £15,000-a-year private school — in defiance of Labour policy which is viscerally opposed to selective education.