Form An Orderly Queue
I'm not always a fan of Adam Boulton's opinion pieces in The Sunday Times, but on this occasion he paints an accurate picture of a Labour Party that seems intent on tearing itself apart, with a dwindling band of supporters seem to hate each other far more than they agree on anything else.
Forming an orderly queue to conduct a leadership contest seems to be the last of Labour's worries when the party is so riven by factionalism and hateful behaviour.
Labour is in a deep sleep and its likeliest prince has declined to pucker up
By Adam Boulton - The Sunday Times
Numero uno? No thanks — they don’t want the job. However persuasive the reasons offered by Dan Jarvis and Chuka Umunna for not running in the Labour leadership race, the fact remains that the two most fancied flutters have decided not to make themselves available.
Jarvis, the brave army officer, put the interests of his children first at the first whiff of the intense demands and media scrutiny to which a potential leader of a major party would be subjected.
Umunna freely admits that he had long planned a bid for the top when the post became vacant, but pulled out of the contest, confessing: “I have not found it to be a comfortable experience.”
In the wake of Ed Miliband’s election trouncing, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell comforted the Labour faithful with the claim that David Cameron’s five years of slim majority government will be a calvary. We shall see. What is beyond doubt is that Labour now faces a brutal four-month stagger across waste ground, as various unlikely volunteers shoulder the cross in the hope of winning a crown of thorns on September 12.
On the off-chance of becoming prime minister in 2020, the victor faces five years of criticism, conspiracy, crises, and Cameron shouting that they are a weak, despicable loser every Wednesday lunchtime at prime minister’s questions.
Politics and the political parties have yet to gel in the period after a decisive general election. For winners and losers alike, this could be a moment of redefinition.
Cameron knows this. That’s why he attempted from his lectern in Downing Street to reset the Conservatives as a “one nation” party for working people. He had not expected that the decapitated corpses of all three of his rivals would be lying in the gutter behind him, but rather than gloat he chose to pay tribute to the fallen.
Leave aside for a moment whether Ukip can be resurrected by sewing back Nigel Farage’s head, the Liberal Democrats, Ukip and especially Labour had not expected to be in such a ravaged state.
Journalists and pollsters got it wrong too, but we are where we are. The only people who don’t seem to have woken up to that fact are in the Labour party. Labour is not seizing the moment. The preamble to the leadership race has been confused and defensive, with none of the contenders prepared to confront their party with reality, because that would most likely be suicide to their ambitions.
According to the Tories, the defining moment was Miliband’s refusal to admit that the last Labour government overspent when he was challenged by a live television audience.
In part, it’s a bum rap. The Tories backed the Blair-Brown government’s spending plans at the time. The UK government did not cause the banking crisis, as the Conservatives claim. And, yes, the economy was already growing when George Osborne grabbed the controls.
None of that matters — the public believes that Labour contributed to the misguided mood of the times and wants an acknowledgment and an apology. The people are still not getting it.
Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, two candidates who are veterans of the last Labour government, flatly refuse to admit they got their sums wrong. Burnham says the criticism is “a triumph of spin over facts”, and it’s awkward for Cooper since her husband Ed Balls was pressing the calculator buttons at the time.
While he was a contender, Umunna ducked the question. To their credit, the two lesser-known female contenders, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh, have admitted that tax and spending was out of balance before 2008 — but in their quietest voices. Neither of them has made it a centrepiece of their platform, as David Miliband had intended in 2010.
Speaking up wouldn’t do them any good. Labour activists are still in thrall to Gordon Brown, their Wizard of Oz. Blair can be trashed for letting in too many migrants, being too friendly with bankers or as a “war criminal”, but Brown is still venerated as a sage.
The rest of us see things differently. On May 7, Phil Wilson held Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield with 47% of the vote. In spite of being treated to a course of campaigning lectures by the outgoing MP, Brown’s Kirkcaldy constituency was swept away by the SNP with 52%.
If he’d had the stomach for it, Umunna was the most viable candidate to end the Blair-Brown feuding. In 2010 he told me he was backing Ed Miliband because he turned the page on that era. He knows differently now.
In chippy Britain, his elegance, restraint and “British Obama” tag were often liabilities. Umunna was shocked when friends told him he would have to deal with “the gay thing” if he wanted to be a candidate. It’s not that anybody minds, he was told, it’s just that you can’t live a lie. He replied he was straight, and on cue for his first TV interview appeared with his girlfriend, Alice Sullivan.
With three “progressive” candidates in the field, Umunna found it more difficult than he expected to get the required 35 Labour MPs to nominate him. That’s why canny Tristram Hunt is holding back on whether to make a run until nearer the closing date for papers on June 15.
Even if his father got his peerage for leading the Labour group at Cambridge city council, it’s still hard to see someone called the Honourable Tristram Hunt taking over the people’s party.
To be sure, the modernisers should coalesce much sooner around a single candidate. If they don’t, Burnham, the traditional candidate, will remain the favourite to win.
Once a Blairite, he is now a champion of the public sector in spite of having presided as a health minister over the Mid Staffs hospital disaster, private finance initiatives and even the privatisation of some hospital services.
Burnham offers his party the comfort of a rerun of Miliband’s agenda without a long dark night of the soul. In that sense, I suggested to one senior Cameronite, Burnham could be a Labour version of Iain Duncan Smith following William Hague. “Oh, is he thick as well?” he chuckled.
So now Labour has four candidates — Cooper, Burnham, Creagh and Kendall — who want the job and are prepared to put up with the scrutiny. That’s not all they have in common: they all went to Oxford or Cambridge University. Three of them worked as special advisers to ministers; the other, Creagh, worked in Brussels. The age range is 43 to 47 years old.
The next leader’s massive task is to turn round in just five years a Labour party that is simultaneously complacent and demoralised. Form an orderly queue.
Numero uno? No thanks — they don’t want the job. However persuasive the reasons offered by Dan Jarvis and Chuka Umunna for not running in the Labour leadership race, the fact remains that the two most fancied flutters have decided not to make themselves available.
Jarvis, the brave army officer, put the interests of his children first at the first whiff of the intense demands and media scrutiny to which a potential leader of a major party would be subjected.
Umunna freely admits that he had long planned a bid for the top when the post became vacant, but pulled out of the contest, confessing: “I have not found it to be a comfortable experience.”
In the wake of Ed Miliband’s election trouncing, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell comforted the Labour faithful with the claim that David Cameron’s five years of slim majority government will be a calvary. We shall see. What is beyond doubt is that Labour now faces a brutal four-month stagger across waste ground, as various unlikely volunteers shoulder the cross in the hope of winning a crown of thorns on September 12.
On the off-chance of becoming prime minister in 2020, the victor faces five years of criticism, conspiracy, crises, and Cameron shouting that they are a weak, despicable loser every Wednesday lunchtime at prime minister’s questions.
Politics and the political parties have yet to gel in the period after a decisive general election. For winners and losers alike, this could be a moment of redefinition.
Cameron knows this. That’s why he attempted from his lectern in Downing Street to reset the Conservatives as a “one nation” party for working people. He had not expected that the decapitated corpses of all three of his rivals would be lying in the gutter behind him, but rather than gloat he chose to pay tribute to the fallen.
Leave aside for a moment whether Ukip can be resurrected by sewing back Nigel Farage’s head, the Liberal Democrats, Ukip and especially Labour had not expected to be in such a ravaged state.
Journalists and pollsters got it wrong too, but we are where we are. The only people who don’t seem to have woken up to that fact are in the Labour party. Labour is not seizing the moment. The preamble to the leadership race has been confused and defensive, with none of the contenders prepared to confront their party with reality, because that would most likely be suicide to their ambitions.
According to the Tories, the defining moment was Miliband’s refusal to admit that the last Labour government overspent when he was challenged by a live television audience.
In part, it’s a bum rap. The Tories backed the Blair-Brown government’s spending plans at the time. The UK government did not cause the banking crisis, as the Conservatives claim. And, yes, the economy was already growing when George Osborne grabbed the controls.
None of that matters — the public believes that Labour contributed to the misguided mood of the times and wants an acknowledgment and an apology. The people are still not getting it.
Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, two candidates who are veterans of the last Labour government, flatly refuse to admit they got their sums wrong. Burnham says the criticism is “a triumph of spin over facts”, and it’s awkward for Cooper since her husband Ed Balls was pressing the calculator buttons at the time.
While he was a contender, Umunna ducked the question. To their credit, the two lesser-known female contenders, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh, have admitted that tax and spending was out of balance before 2008 — but in their quietest voices. Neither of them has made it a centrepiece of their platform, as David Miliband had intended in 2010.
Speaking up wouldn’t do them any good. Labour activists are still in thrall to Gordon Brown, their Wizard of Oz. Blair can be trashed for letting in too many migrants, being too friendly with bankers or as a “war criminal”, but Brown is still venerated as a sage.
The rest of us see things differently. On May 7, Phil Wilson held Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield with 47% of the vote. In spite of being treated to a course of campaigning lectures by the outgoing MP, Brown’s Kirkcaldy constituency was swept away by the SNP with 52%.
If he’d had the stomach for it, Umunna was the most viable candidate to end the Blair-Brown feuding. In 2010 he told me he was backing Ed Miliband because he turned the page on that era. He knows differently now.
In chippy Britain, his elegance, restraint and “British Obama” tag were often liabilities. Umunna was shocked when friends told him he would have to deal with “the gay thing” if he wanted to be a candidate. It’s not that anybody minds, he was told, it’s just that you can’t live a lie. He replied he was straight, and on cue for his first TV interview appeared with his girlfriend, Alice Sullivan.
With three “progressive” candidates in the field, Umunna found it more difficult than he expected to get the required 35 Labour MPs to nominate him. That’s why canny Tristram Hunt is holding back on whether to make a run until nearer the closing date for papers on June 15.
Even if his father got his peerage for leading the Labour group at Cambridge city council, it’s still hard to see someone called the Honourable Tristram Hunt taking over the people’s party.
To be sure, the modernisers should coalesce much sooner around a single candidate. If they don’t, Burnham, the traditional candidate, will remain the favourite to win.
Once a Blairite, he is now a champion of the public sector in spite of having presided as a health minister over the Mid Staffs hospital disaster, private finance initiatives and even the privatisation of some hospital services.
Burnham offers his party the comfort of a rerun of Miliband’s agenda without a long dark night of the soul. In that sense, I suggested to one senior Cameronite, Burnham could be a Labour version of Iain Duncan Smith following William Hague. “Oh, is he thick as well?” he chuckled.
So now Labour has four candidates — Cooper, Burnham, Creagh and Kendall — who want the job and are prepared to put up with the scrutiny. That’s not all they have in common: they all went to Oxford or Cambridge University. Three of them worked as special advisers to ministers; the other, Creagh, worked in Brussels. The age range is 43 to 47 years old.
The next leader’s massive task is to turn round in just five years a Labour party that is simultaneously complacent and demoralised. Form an orderly queue.
