Did you know that David Miliband’s favourite snack is a Twirl? I learned this yesterday while trawling the various Labour leadership websites, desperate to find some reason — any reason — to care about any of it. In his photograph at the top, David’s odd grey patch of hair seems curiously prominent, in a manner that suggests there might be a seagull circling somewhere overhead. I stared at that for a while. The Twirl thing was number 10 on ‘10 Things You May Not Know About David’. I already knew the other nine. It’s quite sparse, David Miliband’s website. Not like Diane Abbott’s website. Hers is great.
It suffers, sure, from having Diane Abbott all over it, talking in that very special way of hers, like a petulant nine-year-old who has had a stroke, patiently explaining why she deserves another cupcake. The basic design of the thing, though, the way her big, almost spherical face dominates the screen, all looks pretty good. I wonder why she bothered. You know how much money the Electoral Commission says has thus far been donated to her campaign? £1,700. It makes me almost too depressed for words.
Not because it is so little. Because it so much. This is Diane Abbott we’re talking about, and you could get a MacBook for that. Somebody out there has thought to themselves, ‘I could get a MacBook, or I could mildly help Diane Abbott’s leadership campaign. Which would make me happier?’ And they have chosen the latter. In a world with such people in it, how can one ever smile again?
David Miliband has raised the most, with £185,265. This is a staggering sum (consider that a Twirl costs around 50p) and Diane isn’t happy about it. ‘There’s no doubt it’s made a difference,’ she told the Guardian, presumably petulantly. ‘He’s already had a mail-out. No one else can afford to have a mail-out.’
It’s the terrible smallness of it all. It makes me want to curl into a ball, and pull out my own eyes with my fingernails. We’re talking about the contenders to be Britain’s Prime Minister in waiting. David Miliband likes Twirls. Diane Abbott hasn’t got enough leaflets. Andy Burnham’s website, by the way, is bonkers. The homepage sports a very small full-length portrait of him in the bottom right-hand corner, and not much else. He looks a bit like he’s trapped in there, as a result of some imponderable sci-fi disaster. Andy thinks that unpaid interns ought to earn a fair wage. He also likes football.
It’s hard to know where to start with Ed Miliband’s website, but I ended up on a page about how Ed plans to be Leading For Women. ‘I pledge to ensure that we are a party of women as well as men,’ he says. This seems like quite an easy pledge, all in all. Ed’s Twitter feed says he’s on holiday in Cornwall right now. Which is nice.
Ed Balls’s website isn’t bad either. It’s got quite a good photo up top, in which he hardly looks like Hitler at all. The longer this campaign goes on, the more I’m warming to Balls. There’s a point to him; at least he has direction. It’s the wrong direction, obviously, but at least he’s travelling in it with a bit of zest. Opposition is going to suit him, I think. He might even end up likeable. The rest of them, though, are just bringing me down. It’s hard to grasp who any of them are talking to, or why they have the energy to bother. They’re having the leadership contest that none of them had the guts to have two years ago; promising to do all the things they didn’t do when they could have actually done them.
A month or so ago, just after the election, I toddled along to the Orwell Prize in Westminster. ‘Strange crowd,’ I remarked to a university friend I met by the bar, an old New Labour sort who works for a pressure group. ‘It’s the British centre left!’ he said, fondly, and I looked around the room and I just wanted to give him a hug. You could smell, amid the warm white wine and crumbly canapés, that none of it mattered at all. It wasn’t just power that was absent, but soul, and relevance, and any sort of future. Suddenly, this sort of thing just isn’t what Britain is. In the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s in the latter half of 1997, I bet it felt a bit like this.
Me, I actually quite like the government we have at the moment, probably for the first time in my life. Clearly it’s not for everyone. They say that 10,000 people have joined the Labour party since the election. I don’t know what those 10,000 are after in a new Labour leadership, but I’d bet they’re not getting it.
Did you hear that Lindsay Lohan is out already? The former Hollywood child star, who actually isn’t a bad actress, but whom you will remember from absolutely no films whatsoever, has been released 13 days into a 90-day jail sentence for violating parole over a 2007 drink-driving charge. Chances are she knew this was going to happen from the start. When she was sentenced, way back in late July, she was filmed breaking down in tears and hugging her lawyer, and made news across the world. See? I told you she was a good actress.
This is not even her first time in a California jail. In 2007, she was locked up in the same place, and let out after 84 minutes.
Frankly, it makes you wonder what Roman Polanski is so worried about. Hollywood’s favourite nonce, remember, has been on the run for raping a 13-year-old girl for 32 years now. Harrison Ford had to collect his Oscar for him. When Polanski was threatened with extradition back to California from Switzerland earlier this year, Harvey Weinstein called his treatment ‘shocking’ and wrote a mad article defending him, which was published in the Independent. Robert Harris made a fuss. Whoopi Goldberg redefined the concept of rape, so as to be able to argue he hadn’t done it. All these ludicrous people really, really cared.
And yet, if the Swiss had shipped him home, and he had gone to jail, he’d probably have been in and out in the time it takes to watch one of his films. Maybe they could have made him watch The Ghost again. Then he’d be sorry.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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