Is Labour dividing over the Afghanistan war?

In the good old days anything Kim Howells MP had to say about pulling out of Afghanistan would not have made many waves.

But today’s Kim Howells is not the same as yesterday’s.

It would not be enough that he had been a Foreign Office minister. It is enough that he remains the chairman of the rubber-stamping Commons intelligence committee, so that today’s Kim Howells making a call for an exit strategy from Afghanistan, even before the appalling slaughter of five British soldiers by one of their Afghan colleagues, Mr Howells had made his call.

The question tonight is whether this signals the opening up of a schism in the Labour party over the war? It has been there all along but it has not been expressed in these terms.

The opening of Kim Howells’s mouth has inaugurated a new season, and we shall have to see who comes out to perform.