The Labour leadership candidates are starting to release lists of names supporting them, with more announcements on the way. So far Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, who reckon they have 100 names between them, have been the most vocal about the levels of support, and there is some concern in the party that between them they will make it impossible for a ‘modernising’ candidate like Liz Kendall to accrue the 35 names needed to stand for leader.
Other MPs are still considering their position, including Tristram Hunt and Jamie Reed. Hunt is, I understand, still trying to ensure he has enough names. There is an assumption that this is because the party is somehow not quite ready to be led by someone called ‘Tristram’, but in reality it has less to do with some class warrior colleagues being chippy about someone’s accident of birth and more to do with Hunt’s style of operating.
Some of his colleagues think he hasn’t tried hard enough to woo fellow MPs. ‘Tristram needs to get himself on the rubber chicken circuit more,’ one canny MP pointed out to me during the party’s wobble in the autumn. He wasn’t, this MP felt, doing very much to make other Labourites feel loved, or at least as if they owed him a go at the top job. Perhaps he was being more loyal to Ed Miliband than others, perhaps he hadn’t quite twigged about how these things work, or perhaps he hadn’t thought of himself as a contender.
Perhaps Hunt has upped his game since then, but it’s worth noting that at the same time, miserable Labourites were telling me what a nice man Chuka Umunna was and how Yvette Cooper really was very good at making herself available for chats in the tea room. Those MPs knew there could be a leadership contest on the horizon, and had been preparing for this over a good long while. It’s why Cooper and Burnham (and Umunna, had he not pulled out) have been able to announce names so quickly: they’d prepared the ground.
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