Dan Hodges

Chuka Umunna was the victim of an old-fashioned Westminster character assassination

A few months after Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader I met with one of his supporters in the shadow cabinet. Who, I asked, were ‘Ed’s People?’ He began reeling off a list of names. ‘Chuka Umunna, Peter Hain, John…’ ‘Chuka?’ I said. ‘But he’s walking round the Commons with a giant target on his back. They’re out to get him.’ He was, even then, the bookies’ favourite – which, in politics, normally means that you are a dead man walking. The shadow minister smiled. ‘Well, they haven’t got him yet.’

Well, now they have. Umunna has finally been cut down, withdrawing from Labour’s leadership race just three days after entering. There was no proper reason, and no proper scandal. He was the victim of an elegant, silent old-fashioned Westminster character assassination.

For some it wasn’t personal, just business. Umunna was a candidate for Labour leader, and there were other people who wanted to be leader. So the whispers started. ‘Chuka isn’t going to run,’ I was told by a trade union official back in March. ‘Personal issues.’ He smiled, and tapped the side of his nose. A former Minister had heard it too. ‘The word is “Chuka’s out”. He won’t even enter.’ Again, ‘personal issues’ were cited.

The briefings became so intense that at the Daily Telegraph we discussed whether or not to run a story about them. But we decided that, if we did so, we’d become part of the spin operation. Umunna had been on what is called ‘a journey’. He had been a member of Compass, the anti-Blairite think tank run by former Gordon Brown aide Neal Lawson. Then, as his parliamentary ambitions looked like bearing fruit, he began building bridges with the Blairites. He angered them again by endorsing Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership, then he angered Team Ed by keeping his distance as the project began to unravel.

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