The Labour beauty contest
Matthew d'Ancona 10:04amThe beauty contest begins: read Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today and her praise for James Purnell, the arch-Blairite Work and Pensions Secretary who is making a speech calling for Labour to emphasise fairness and social justice. David Miliband also enters the lists this week with a lecture in honour of his father, Ralph. Charles Clarke is expected to intervene (again) shortly. There will be others.
I am reminded horribly of the period 1994-7 when the prospective successors to John Major jostled for position, all making speeches coated in plausible deniability but with a core of political gelignite: vote for me as the next leader. The question then, as now, was how to bridge the gap between appealing to the electorate – the voters in a general election – and the selectorate – the party that chooses its leader. Just as the Tories persuaded themselves in the mid Nineties that neo-Thatcherism was the cure for Majorism, so most of the voices we have been hearing since Gordon’s Meltdown Thursday have alleged – preposterously but predictably – that the party is not left wing enough. Dwindling and diminishing in scale and focus, Labour is starting to please itself rather than the country. It has forgotten the electoral coalition that propelled it to power in 1997.
The best observation of the day is made by the ever-shrewd Jon Cruddas in the Times. David Cameron is more than a salesman, Cruddas notes: Brown should take seriously the Tory leader’s capacity for personal empathy and his rejection of managerial language. Dave is very fortunate that the PM won’t take any notice of this advice at all.
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Comments
Cindy
May 6th, 2008 11:20amYou forgot about Denham as he is due to give a speech in the next few days entitled 'Labour: How to win the south of England', to some front organisation for the Blairites.
Tiberius
May 6th, 2008 11:35amIn his last Conference speech, Blair predicted (sort of) and warned that Labour would end up in its current state if it veered back to the old ways. The Party obviously didn't listen. I wonder if Diane Abbott is currently cracking her joke about telephone lines going in.
John
May 6th, 2008 11:51amLOL. Toynbee thinks she is a profound pundit, but clock this:
"No doubt they will have a neat little pledge card of toothsome bite-size canapes, followed by a few big crowd-pleasers".
She doesn't get it. She really, really doesn't get it. She still thinks of the Tories as basically useless, despite her halfhearted protestations. As a blinkered fan of a party that has not come up with any remotely intelligent policies for years, her unconscious is not allowing her to admit it. So she thinks that this halfbaked, juvenile sneer is a substitue for proper journalism.
The Tories have policies, and a real journalist would have read up on them and know what she is talking about.
Pathetic.
Austin Barry
May 6th, 2008 1:12pmIt was Mayor Boris who precisely described Polly Toynbee as incarnating " all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism". And like most creatures called Polly she will keep uttering the same shrill tedious banalities as the bottom of her cage fills with the rancid residue of the Nu-Labour project.
Oscar
May 6th, 2008 2:34pmBeauty contest? This lot are more like the ugly sisters.
James Van Patten
May 6th, 2008 3:12pmThe Tories have policies? Oh come on, I wouldn't go quite that far! Cameron pisses rhetoric and unctuous smarm, and you're so parched for power that you lap it up and then try to tell us that it's good for us -- that the Tories have something meaningful to contribute.
You might be that stupid, but I'm not buying it. We're living in an age where image has never meant more in politics and, I'm sorry to say, you've been had my son.
RW
May 6th, 2008 3:34pmWell, he may be no beauty (pop-eyed and scary, he's definitely more like an Ugly Sister) - but I wonder when John Hutton will throw his hat in the ring and give us all a reminder of the seminal truth of his original, despairing prediction: "Gordon would make a f*ck*ng awful Prime Minister". How right he was. Such spot-on soothsaying surely deserves some sort of recognition.
RW
May 6th, 2008 3:45pmIt's extraordinary that Cruddas should have advised Brown to "learn to empathise". As if this complex intuitive personality attribute was something which Brown could pick up in a few easy lessons, after an entire lifetime of doing precisely the opposite; ignoring, plotting and scheming against, or just plain trampling on other people in his grim determination to get to the political top.
David Lindsay
May 6th, 2008 3:56pmJames Purmell or David Miliband as a Prime Minister? Please, please, please tell me that you are having a laugh. It's as ridiculous as David Lammy, or Ed Balls, or Yvette Cooper, or Ed Miliband, or David Cameron, or George Osborne, or Michael Gove, or Ed Vaizey, or...
Oscar
May 6th, 2008 4:37pm... or David Lindsay?
Tiberius
May 6th, 2008 4:40pmDL: is that your plug for Ken Livingstone?
J P Ellingham
May 6th, 2008 5:04pmGordon has only himself to blame. GO before you are thrown out!
Verity
May 6th, 2008 8:36pmDave "rejects managerial language"? Then where does his claim that he has "decontaminated" the brand come from?
Sunder Katwala
May 6th, 2008 10:03pmCindy says John Denham will give a speech to some Blairite front organisation. In fact, to the Fabians, as Purnell did today. And we were here 111 years before Tony Blair, though we can count both Blair and Brown as members.
Denham, a member of the Fabian Executive, also gave an excellent speech on this theme a year ago
http://fabians.org.uk/events/speeches/john-denham-faces-up-to-labour-s-southern-discomfort