When Neil Kinnock - the man who laid the foundations for New Labour - publicly challenges Tony Blair you know he's got a problem.
Tonight Lord Kinnock described school reforms as "at best a distraction and at worst dangerous". He said: "I make this stand with great reluctance, partly because Tony is my dear friend. Partly because I've got great admiration for him as the leader of my party and my country. But the day was reached - which I hoped would never come - when there was an issue of such profound and lasting significance that would affect not just our generation but others, on which it was important to make my opposition known."
He said he's warned the prime minister that he'd be going public, and urged him to back down. "Politics without compromise", he said, "is like a car without a gear box. It can look quite elegant but you won't get anything out of it."
Doesn't he remember that his leader's car has "no reverse gear"?
That's the question many wanted an answer to, but today they didn't get it.
The education secretary did reveal something rather different - that 88 known sex offenders had NOT been barred from working in schools since 1997, and she detailed how the police either had or were checking that they posed no danger to children.
A further 210 offenders had been allowed to work in schools under certain restrictions.
This will not be enough to silence all of Ruth Kelly's critics, but there's no doubt that at Westminster most thought she delivered a comprehensive and a confident explanation of how past cases were being checked and how future problems would be avoided.
Those wanting certainty that their children will not come into contact with sex offenders at school will be disappointed. Those accepting that there can be no certainty - and happy to trust the assurances of the police - will hope that this time the system will give children the protection that we all hope can be delivered.
It is - or so the cliché goes - Ruth Kelly's "make or break day". I don't mean to be harsh but so what? Ministers come and go. Tony Blair lost Mandelson, Byers, Hughes and all the rest and lived to fight many other days. No, the reason Ruth Kelly's fate matters politically is because it is so intertwined with the fate of Tony Blair. She is in charge of the reforms that are "make or break" for him - schools reforms designed to unleash "parent power" and to restrain the powers of local councils to frustrate it. Even if she were not making a delicate statement today on the issue of sex offenders teaching in schools, she would be headline news.
It's not every day that the man who laid the foundations for New Labour - former leader, Neil Kinnock - comes to the Commons to speak to a meeting of MPs opposed to the prime minister's most important domestic reform. It's not every day that 90 Labour backbenchers publicly declare that they cannot back the policy as it is now. It is not every day that David Blunkett urges - in The Sun, no less - his party to "pull back from the brink".
Clearly today's statement matters hugely in its own right. It must start to restore parental confidence that their children are not at risk from school staff, whilst not terrifying teachers with the prospect that their careers can be terminated by groundless accusations. At Westminster, though, minds will turn quickly to whether Ruth Kelly and Tony Blair can restore the confidence of their own party in reforms which many fear will unleash a free-for-all in schools where the richest, the pushiest and the brightest succeed at the expense of the rest.
Incidentally, Ms Kelly may not regard David Blunkett's public declaration of "sympathy" as entirely welcome. He writes that "for a mother of four it must be difficult in the extreme to balance the demands of home with the tyranny of the 'red boxes' that civil servants stuff with papers every night...Understandably Ruth leaves work behind when she finally does go to the bosom of her family...It's no good giving Ruth Kelly all the flak. The answer is the same as that from Hercule Poirot as he gathered togther the suspects in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. They all did it." With friends like that ...
