Angela Rayner may not be a fan of Tory ‘scum’ – but it seems the deputy Labour leader doesn’t speak for all her party. Tonight at the Labour to Win rally, frontbench colleagues of the ambitious Rayner amounted a desperate rearguard offence to assure floating voters that they weren’t all that hostile to awful Conservative voters.
First up was Peter Kyle, the shadow minister for schools. Mr S wondered whether his podium – in front of a crumbling southern pier – was the best spot to make the case for Labour winning Tory heartlands but the cheering rump of Blairite survivors seemed to miss the irony.
In a very public slap down to his deputy leader Kyle told the crowd:
There is only one path to power for the Labour party and that is taking moderate Tories and getting them to vote Labour. Getting them to trust Labour. Now let’s just call these people ‘nice Tories.’ You don’t get nice people to like you by being nasty to them. It’s a fundamental truth. You don’t get people to like you by being nasty to them, by disrespecting them, by talking down to them, by looking down on them, by patronising them, to say that they want and will bad things to happen to good people. You get them to like you by being likeable.
Let’s hope he shared the memo with honest Ange. Kyle, one of at least six moderate MPs dubbed the ‘new Blair’ in recent years, was not the only frontbencher signalling their dissent with Rayner’s remarks. Liz Kendall – another defeated Labour leadership candidate resuscitated on Starmer’s front bench – continued Kyle’s theme, telling attendees:
Let me just say this: going around telling people we’d never be friends with a Tory or worse is a recipe for defeat because there is no path back to power unless we persuade people who voted Tory before that we want and deserve their support.
The shadow minister for social care continued in her remarks that one in four babies will now live to be a hundred. One wag remarked drily at the back, ‘they might live to see a Labour government by then’. Let’s hope they’ve learned to stop calling Tories ‘scum’ by then eh?
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