New Brownites vs Old Brownites. Hostilities loom

Spencer Livermore, Brown's second longest serving aide, has announced his departure. As a polling guru and strategist, he played a key role helping Labour in successive elections and assisting Gordon in developing Welfare to Work and employment policies. He was also widely liked. Livermore is off to Saatchi & Saatchi and Fallon, the advertising agency where he will be working on the Labour account.

The official version from Livermore's friends is that he has been preparing to depart since the transition and that Gordon tried to persuade him to stay. They say that there was no rift with Downing Street's new force majeur Stephen Carter, adding that, in his previous job at WPP, Carter offered Livermore a job. Carter, they say, asked Livermore to stay until the election and it was purely his choice to go now.

But there have been signs of tension before today. Livermore did shoulder some blame for the election that never happened (there were reports that he was reduced to tears by Brown over the fiasco) and Andrew Porter on Three Line Whip has a fascinating take on the more uncomfortable end of their relationship.

[Carter] moved Livermore out of his office so he could take the space. He also conspicuously omitted his name when introducing the No10 political team to Labour Party staff at a ‘get-together’ last Friday. Reports over the weekend have quoted ‘sources close to Carter’ briefing against Livermore, and we can expect more of the same now his departure has been confirmed.

Four conclusions:

1. It suggests that Carter is shaping up to be an extremely powerful person indeed in Downing Street, and others with long-standing connections to Brown are not necessarily as influential as they once were. I sense tears.

2. Downing Street is, in terms, admitting that Brown's original slimmed-down Downing Street was ill-prepared for the demands that Whitehall placed on it because they failed to realise "everything that department do must go through No 10". Well worth revisiting Peter Riddell's comments from a month ago. Today's changes reinforce the idea that Team Brown had little clue about what life next door was like when he was at the Treasury.

3. The phrase "sources close to Stephen Carter" has entered the lexicon. This is causing tension in No 10: ironic given the amount some of them have spun against others in the past.

4. There will probably be more changes. I'm guessing that others in Downing Street may be worried and may be mounting a fightback.