‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

06 August 2008

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In the latest of his occasional series, Martin Rowson talks to Bob Marshall-Andrews, serial Labour rebel who had the entertaining cheek to accuse Miliband of disloyalty

The jokes are coupled with a jovial capacity for complete indiscretion. For instance, he started the interview, more or less unbidden, with a long and compelling diagnosis of Tony Blair’s various psychoses. Then there’s his record of voting against his party in government, mostly on issues of civil liberties and the law, which also manifested itself in his recent public support for David Davis in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election: ‘As I told the chief whip, we needed someone to represent Labour in the constituency.’ It’s unsurprising, then, that many people on his own side can’t stand him. I once overheard Charles Clarke, then chairman of the Labour party, refer over lunch to ‘Bloody Marshall-Andrews’, and I told him about a Blairite ex-minister (during an entirely off-the-record conversation about how Gordon was ‘toast’) who told me she thought he was a ‘complete waste of space’.

So, on top of the anger and hurt he causes his own side, did he have any qualms about his disloyalty? ‘I owe a very great deal to the Labour party. But the Labour party I joined 40 years ago.’ So did that party still exist? ‘In this seat it does.’ And actually, eroded down to one double-barrelled QC, a fat-cat lawyer with second, third and probably fourth homes who, despite his relatively humble beginnings (‘My parents were working-class Tories with an instinctive suspicion of the Left’s illiberalism’), speaks in a slurring, nasal, Belgravia-cockney snarl, that Labour party is surprisingly right-wing. For instance, he was scathing about the press, even though his public profile is largely thanks to journalists like Simon Hoggart who recognise good copy when they see it. He also said he’d ban Grand Theft Auto IV without a second’s hesitation, although I suspect he’s never seen it, let alone played it. ‘Civil liberties aren’t limitless, you know.’