The line-up remains the same

Yesterday, as the McBride resignation story raged, a distinguished former Labour minister asked me a rhetorical question: why is it always the same faces coming back? Derek Draper, Damian McBride, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Charlie Whelan: all have supposedly resigned, disappeared from the front line, retired to explore new careers – and yet, here we are, in 2009, a decade and a half after Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party and the faces remain the same. In this line-up, McBride, who only became a political adviser officially after the 2005 election, is very much the new boy.

The answer is to be found, like so much wisdom, in the Blues Brothers: it is the politician’s instinct always to “get the band back together again”. Every political leader establishes a gang that gives human form to his psychological comfort zone.