The Less-Than Fantastic Four
Anyone whose nostalgia gene is tickled by the prospect of seeing a band of bedroom pin-ups in the flesh forty years after the torn pages of ‘Look-in’ disappeared from their once-prized position is afflicted with despair when a group containing as little as one (or, in many cases, none) of the original members take to your local pub stage posing as the act in question. They might play the hits with competence, but essentially you’re seeing a tribute band – a bad cover version of the heroes who enlivened adolescent evenings tuned-in to ‘Top of the Pops’. I feel a similar sensation when viewing the current contenders for the Labour leadership. Where are the stars? I’m looking at a bunch of political session musicians.
This curiously lacklustre race has already lost a couple of wannabes I can’t say I’m sorry to see the exit of. Tristram Hunt presented an interesting BBC series on the English Civil War a good ten years back, but I’d rather he’d remained within that world; I might still be confusing him with Dan Snow if that were the case, but at least he can’t do any harm there. His limitations as a politician have already been exposed on ‘Question Time’ more than once, and I seem to recall a commentator somewhere (could well have been on here) saying they’d recently encountered him on a train, observing how many times he uttered the word ‘Cool’ during a telephone conversation. Yes, I also thought of that dim intern on ‘W1A’.
Chuka Umunna was another welcome withdrawal, apparently citing press intrusion into his private life as the main reason; has he got something to hide? After all, this comes with the territory, something he should have been well aware of following the intensive anti-Miliband campaign of certain newspapers over the past couple of years. I’d like to think he was recognising his inability to command authority and convince as a rousing orator, but it seems he merely fancied himself as a British Obama and his vanity got the better of him without taking the realities into consideration.
So, that leaves us with Ringo, Ringo, Ringo and Ringo, AKA Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and…er…Mary Creagh; can you believe a party with 232 MPs to choose from has nobody more capable of running it – and the country (they hope) – than this uninspiring quartet? The fact that Cooper, Creagh, Kendall and Burnham (yeah, they do sound like a Blackburn Rovers back-four from the early 50s) are all Oxbridge graduates shouldn’t necessarily be held against them, for Oxford and Cambridge Universities between them have produced 41 Prime Ministers out of 55 (Oxford 27 Cambridge 14). The main difference where the four Labour leadership contenders today are concerned is that many of their more illustrious predecessors didn’t travel from academia to politics without a bit of living and working amongst the Proles in between. Yet again, we are confronted by career politicians who have little or no comprehension of what constitutes reality for the majority of the electorate; and for Labour in particular, that should spell disaster.
The 46-year-old ‘dark horse’ Mary Creagh had a relatively ordinary upbringing, daughter of a Coventry car factory worker and a primary school teacher – and she attended (Shock! Horror!) a State school. However, thereafter her life assumes a familiar trajectory: Oxford, European Parliament intern, teaching, local councillor. It was during this spell in 2002 that she accused five Liberal Democrat councillors of cronyism over the appointment of the Islington Council Chief Executive. This led to a long, drawn-out investigation by the Standards Board of England that eventually concluded Creagh’s accusations were without foundation. The Tribunal were especially damning of her motivation, describing her as ‘an insensitive witness, lacking in balanced judgement and one who was prepared to make assumptions about honesty and integrity of others without any proper basis.’ Creagh resigned from Islington Council to fight for (and win) the constituency of Wakefield at the 2005 General Election, whilst the five Lib Dems she’d cast such unpleasant aspersions on all lost their places at the following year’s local council elections. Her actions in this particular case either suggest a potential leader with a not-inconvenient ruthless streak or a shifty shit. Time will tell.
The other little-known contender is 43-year-old Liz Kendall. It’s genuinely difficult to find any remotely interesting fact about Liz Kendall, other than she was recently in a relationship with Greg Davies, the goliath of a comic actor who played the intimidating headmaster in ‘The Inbetweeners’. She went from a Hertfordshire village to Watford Grammar School for Girls and then Queen’s College, Oxford. Her most notable jobs prior to entering Parliament were surprisingly not on the check-out at Wilkinson’s or as a barmaid at a pub with a flat roof, but at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank and as a SPAD to both Patricia Hewitt and our old friend Harriet. She won the seat of Leicester West at the 2010 General Election and was Shadow Health Minister under Ed. Her position on the Blairite right suggests she will appeal to voters other than inner-city Asians, but her anonymity could well work in her favour, untarnished as she is by the unenviable reputation of the previous Labour administration.
The same cannot be said of Mrs Balls. The 46-year-old munchkin is the daughter of a union leader and therefore did not attend a public school; she did, however, graduate from Baliol College, Oxford, and from there went onto Harvard and the LSE before becoming a researcher for Labour leader John Smith, a brief spell working under Bill Clinton (perhaps I should rephrase that) and a policy adviser for…you guessed it…Ms Harperson! After a short stint on The Independent, she eventually entered Parliament at the 1997 General Election, but it took a further decade before she reached Ministerial status when Gordon Brown made her Minister for Housing. Her husband was also promoted to the Cabinet by Brown and they became the first married couple to hold such a position. They celebrated by buying a four-bedroom house in Stoke Newington and registering it as their second home rather than the one they had back Oop North in Castleford; by doing so, they were entitled to £44,000 to subsidise a £438,000 mortgage (allegedly) via the Commons Additional Costs Allowance – though, to be fair, they only claimed an absolutely bloody paltry £24,400. The expenses’ investigation resulted in them having to return £1,363 in overpayments related to this mortgage.
With Balls now out of Westminster, his missus has seized the chance to run as Labour leader and the only other established competition she faces is the token bloke, Andy Burnham. The 45-year-old former Health Secretary with the Action Man hair and Sindy eyelashes is viewed as the favoured candidate of the unions, which probably bodes as well for him as it did for Ed Miliband. His road to Parliament was interesting – street-sweeper, supermarket shelf-stacker, taxi-driver, call-centre employee of the month April 1998…no, I’m bullshitting, of course. His origins may have been average, but his working life followed a familiar path pre-Parliament, too familiar to repeat again. His stint at the Department of Health was illuminated by his refusal to sanction a public inquiry into the irregular numbers of deaths at Mid Staffordshire Hospital, something of which he must be immensely proud. This is his second attempt to lead his party; but in the age of Sturgeon, will his willy work against him?
So, there you have it. Spot the future Prime Minister or spot the 2020 General Election loser taking responsibility for Labour’s electoral annihilation and announcing ‘it’s time to have a long, hard look at the direction the party must take’.
Petunia Winegum
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May 26, 2015 at 9:20 am -
If you think they’re rubbish, you should see the nutcases putting themselves forrad as deppity.
Vote for the Lemming Party. Over the cliffs we go. Good riddance to unevolving species, as one dinosaur unionist said to the other. -
May 26, 2015 at 9:22 am -
In the top left hand corner of Wales there sits , atop a hill whose name has enough consonants to win a championship Scrabble match, a lonely desolate cottage. In that cottage (which was never really rebuilt after The Welsh Dragons decided to “come home to a real fire”) , a chipped mug of tea at hand,sits an elderly man, his red hair now long white, by an ancient bakelite telephone awaiting The Call…..Boyo.
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May 26, 2015 at 10:55 am -
May 26, 2015 at 11:07 am -
What hair?
Even in his 80’s heyday his only rival as contender for king of the comb over was Mr Scargill.
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May 26, 2015 at 10:24 am -
The objection to their education is not that they went to Oxford or Cambridge but that they studied a bad subject.
If they had degrees in engineering, bacteriology, ancient history, or music they might bring something useful to Parliament.
But PPE …
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May 26, 2015 at 12:37 pm -
Be nice to someone not from an Oxbridge background get the job,a real person
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May 26, 2015 at 10:36 am -
It’s the job no-one wants for at least 2 years, so “any of the above” will do as the caretaker leader, until (or if) Labour have policies which might make them electable again.
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May 26, 2015 at 11:04 am -
Some neat turns of phrase here.
“…a brief spell working under Bill Clinton” – I especially like that one!
Someone somewhere wrote Y. Cooper resembles a dormouse crossed with a 1950s schoolboy.-
May 26, 2015 at 11:09 am -
The accompanying photo on her Wikipedia entry does bear more than a passing resemblance to one of the Bash Street Kids.
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May 26, 2015 at 12:30 pm -
Luv to see her caught in a mouse trap, or even better hubbies private bits caught in one , that would make him blink
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May 26, 2015 at 11:44 am -
Yvette Cooper was responsible for introducing the expensive and utterly useless Home Information Packs. Now whatever happened to them?
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May 26, 2015 at 12:32 pm -
Yeah that’s was another f@&king waste of money, a right balls up
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May 26, 2015 at 12:18 pm -
Chuka, who might now be regretting the name change, certainly makes an odd excuse re the press intrusion. Perhaps he’ll be back when the position is less toxic, but I don’t think he has a hope. And what is it with the Labour women that seems to require a hectoring & disapproving style sucking the joy out of life?
Isn’t the real problem that the party doesn’t have anything to offer except ‘we know best, everyone else is wrong’?
And are we to be faced as last time with interminable proceedings to elect a leader of the opposition? There was no opposition during the period, & not that much after Edstone was shuffled in by the union. They still keep taking £millions in short money as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition though.-
May 26, 2015 at 12:47 pm -
They are either feminists and/or lesbians – both require a certain sort of persona. I don’t think it will make one iota of difference who ends up leading the Labour shower (of shit). Running up to the 1997 election the Labour Party decided to ditch all the things it stood for to become an erstaz Conservative Party. People finally realised that Labour was a very poor immitation. The problem for Labour is that things have changed greatly since the time of Keir Hardie – it has lost its raison d’être.
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May 26, 2015 at 1:13 pm -
Since Keir Starmer it has just plain lost it’s reason.
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May 26, 2015 at 12:48 pm -
Doesn’t the Labour Party need a raison d’etre before it needs any policies to pursue? (“I move, Comrades, Composite Motion 4571 in support of earlier Comrades’ composites 2398 and 4509b.”)
There was a vacuous fool on the telly the other day, Owen Jones – who will be leader of the Party in 2035 – and he was chanting the myopic mantra that Labour lost the election because of a lack of policy. Yes, Owen, you might think that. I am afraid though that we must ask: what is the Labour party about in 2015, what is it for?
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May 26, 2015 at 1:28 pm -
I though Liz Kendall was quite good when she was interviewed by Andrew Neil but then I saw her on Newsnight and she was awful, don’t usually watch it now but I wanted to see how she did. So none are very impressive but unless Labour can up with another Blair who did understand Middle England and who could just as well have been a Conservative I think they are passed their sell by date. I think he did much to corrupt politics with the help of the odious Campbell and others. Time for a new party I think.
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May 26, 2015 at 1:29 pm -
The Labour Party is not unlike those challenging sweets you bravely dared to suck as a child: the Victory V, the Fishermen’s Friend, Tics and others which threatened first to incinerate your tongue and then to cauterise your insides. But they had fire and spirit, they knew what they were about and they tackled the job with vigour. Taste any of them now and they are but a pale imitation, almost forgettable, without purpose, devoid of any content to make you think.
The Labour Party used to know what it was about, it had fire and spirit, it challenged the status quo. But now it’s but a pale imitation, almost forgettable, without purpose, devoid of any content to make you think. And if you need any confirmation of that, just look at the four ‘inspirational’ leadership contenders – the Bullingdon Boys must be laughing like drains as they listen to Kier Hardy spinning in his grave.
Maybe they need a ‘Refesher’.-
May 26, 2015 at 3:58 pm -
The Labour party used to be able to rely on the support of most of the people who did the dirtiest jobs, many of them in factories or mines, and their families. They could do this because most of those people thought the only way their lives, and the lives of their children, might get any better was through the Labour Party.
The Labour Party at its most radical made the mistake of thinking that the working class were all ideological socialists at heart (not least because the types who wanted to be shop stewards largely were, and those were the loudmouths) instead of them just being practical about who was most likely to deliver better pay and conditions.
Now most people don’t do those sorts of jobs and it’s now very obvious that most aren’t ideological socialists (or ideological at all).
Without the guaranteed mass votes of most of the “hands dirty” working class, the Labour Party has tried to appeal to several different factions including the middle of the road uncommitted, feminists, greens, immigrants, assorted “identity” groups, the remains of the old working class, the unemployed, etc.Unfortunately for the Labour Party it’s impossible to appeal to all of those widely different factions all of the time. Add the fact that numerous Labour target seats are now only winnable by pandering to Islam – whole chunks of which are incompatible with anything resembling the fairly socially-tolerant, democratic, secular civilization most British people want to live in – and in my humble opinion the Labour Party is ****ed for at least a generation if not more. This is regardless of how much the Tories and the rest may be disliked.
Especially significant is that many of what would once have been solid Labour voters went UKIP at the election. Even if UKIP manages to destroy itself, which it seems to be doing its best to achieve at the moment – many of those voters won’t revert to Labour.
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May 26, 2015 at 1:33 pm -
But Moon, Owen Jones isn’t a real person, he’s an animatronic based on a lost Tom Sharpe novel.
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May 26, 2015 at 6:18 pm -
I’d vote for Margaret Hodge.
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