Howells tells Miliband: put a sock in it

Kim Howells, the outspoken former Labour culture minister, has launched a scathing attack on the younger Blairite ministers such as David Miliband who have been stirring up trouble for Gordon Brown through ill-advised media interviews, referring to them as beneficiaries of "the Assisted Places Scheme for Cabinet members".

Howells, 62, a former student firebrand who boasts of being one of the first protestors to breach police lines at the infamous anti-Vietnam war demonstration on Grosvenor Square in 1968, suggests that Miliband et al "should consider seriously the advantages of putting a sock in it for the next 11 months".

In a letter to the Times published today, Howells continues: "I know how difficult it must be for these youngish adults who have done little in their lives but walk the moderately risky tightrope strung between university Labour clubs and Cabinet positions. I am vaguely aware of some of the pressures contemporary life places on them: the sheer toil of blogging, twittering, trying to balance the competing attractions of exuding gravitas and fashion chic at the same time as running government departments."

But, concludes Howells, with a general election less than a year away, it's "time to stop gazing lovingly into the political mirror and get on with making the most of the leg-up they've received over the past decade. Use it to help the Prime Minister make the world a better place."

The attack has delighted Tony Blair's former spin doctor and Labour loyalist Alastair Campbell, who picked out the letter on his blog this morning. "He probably shouldn't have written it, as whilst intended to call for an end to division, it rather opens a new divide," writes the former No 10 spin doctor, "but it is funny, even if he takes a pop at blogging and tweeting. People say there are not enough characters in politics. Kim Howells is a character."

Howells has some form when it comes to plain speaking. As culture minister, he slammed the Turner Prize shortlist in 2002, saying: "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit". He also criticised folk music by saying that "the idea of listening to three Somerset folk singers sounds like hell", and called gangsta rappers "macho idiots" for "glorifying gun culture and violence".