Will any leadership candidate tell Labour the hard truths it needs to hear?

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

The entry of a forty-something, privately educated white male Oxford graduate into a political contest normally does little for its diversity. But when Ed Balls jumped into the Labour leadership race he did at least expand the pool beyond members of the Miliband family. Even now, all three candidates read the same subject at the same university. If Andy Burnham joins the fray, though, there will be a non-Oxonian candidate. Burnham went to Cambridge.

For the People’s Party, the self-proclaimed champions of the working class and diversity, it is a bit embarrassing that all the likely candidates to lead it are Oxbridge-educated white males. But this problem goes beyond appearances. All four of these men have come off the political class production line. They have been special advisers, become MPs and been fast-tracked to ministerial office and then the Cabinet. They have all been with the Labour party since the early Blair years. They are too intimately involved in the whole Blair-Brown project to fundamentally rethink it.

Jon Cruddas, a Blair union-fixer turned MP who resisted the lure of ministerial office, could have questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of New Labour. Having spent his time campaigning against the BNP rather than in a Whitehall office, he has a bottom-up perspective on where New Labour went wrong. But he has, sadly, decided not to stand. John McDonnell, that tribune of the hard left, is trying, as he did in 2007, to find enough MPs to sign his nomination papers. His candidacy will wrongly suggest that the party faces a choice between New Labour and unreconstructed socialism.