Trots, stitch-ups and door-knocks: the leadership candidates’ parliamentary selections

In his wonderful Uncut interview last week, Andy Burnham set great store by the manner of his initial selection as a Parliamentary candidate in 2001.

He adduced it as evidence that he is a man of the people. A proper party person who got selected the proper way, with no help from anyone, no special treatment, no favours. Which is more than can be said, Burnham clearly implies, for the coddled and over-promoted princelings who are his leadership rivals.

He told Uncut:

“I represent my home seat of Leigh. That often isn’t what people associate with a career politician. I went to Leigh when Laurence Cunliffe resigned. I lived back at home with my mum and dad, and basically worked on it for a year. It was pretty much a year where I campaigned solidly every weekend to win the nomination for Leigh.

So nobody parachuted me in. Nobody gave me a ‘oh well, I’ll speak to this person, speak to that, all these doors will open’; none of that happened. I went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member and won the Leigh nomination through grassroots campaigning. In many ways as a parallel to what I’m doing now in this leadership election. The establishment isn’t necessarily helping me; the media establishment, the union establishment. Even the Labour establishment. My connection is with the grassroots, ordinary members.”

There is a lot of truth in what he says. It’s not the whole truth, obviously. Our recollection is that Andy was at the time special adviser to an extremely popular cabinet minister (Chris Smith). During the period in which he “went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member”, he was still being paid to be the special adviser to the secretary of state for culture, media and sport.

Which is not the same as being “parachuted in”. But does confer a considerable advantage over opponents who may be trying to hold down a proper job at the same time as knocking on every door of every member. And is not exactly storming the establishment from the outside.

All in all, though, Burnham did fight a proper selection, under the normal rules, with minimal help. He deserves quite a lot of the credit which he so generously heaped on himself during our interview.

The same cannot be said of either Miliband, though it can much more so of Ed than of David. Both were senior government advisers at the time of their initial selections (2001 for David, 2005 for Ed), in Downing Street and the treasury respectively. This does not usually recommend hopefuls to local constituency parties, but is an obstacle regularly overcome by good candidates, as it was by Burnham and Balls.

Ed Miliband got enormous assistance from the Brown machine. The then chancellor phoned members personally on his behalf, as did the then education secretary, Ruth Kelly. But it was a full and open selection, with real opposition (Michael Dugher, who had to wait till 2010 before being selected in Barnsley East) and a real chance of losing, fought over a period of several weeks, several months before the election. And in the end Ed made old ladies like him over cups of tea in the their front rooms, and he made the best speech on the night (“Put – your trust – in me”, with a Jesus-like hand gesture at each pause). He was a deserving winner.

David, by contrast, was inserted in an old-fashioned, full-service stitch-up a few days before the 2001 election. Shadow defence minister, Kevan Jones, generally credits himself with being the most instrumental therein, but so do several others. Successful stitch ups in favour of consequentially powerful people generally have surplus parents.

The reason this is relevant nine years later is that David could not, or thought he could not, get selected even as a Labour Parliamentary candidate by means of convincing the membership, one-by-one, over cups of tea, to support him. Persuasiveness, likeability and normalness were so not his forte that he couldn’t take a chance on them. Some will think these leadership-relevant qualities. On the other hand, like the two Eds, David has improved since then. Indeed, he has had twice as long to improve, and he has improved more than they have.

Ed Balls did his selection over several years, in the traditional way. He had plenty of heavy-handed support from his boss Gordon and from the unions; but, ultimately, he did it by turning up over a long period and making himself the heir apparent. He is the only one of the leadership candidates who went for the traditional very long haul, nursing the seat by regularly turning up to constituency events years in advance of the sitting MP announcing his retirement. By the time it came round, it was a selection that no other ambitious person wanted to contest.

Diane Abbott is the leadership candidate from another era, and so was her selection. She de-selected the sitting Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Ernie Roberts. Aged 67 when first elected in 1979, he would have been in his eighties by the end of the parliament which began in 1987, which counted against him. Roberts was from the hard left, having been instrumental, with Peter Hain, in the birth of the anti-nazi league.

As ever, the hard left was split. What one comrade called the “ ‘pure’, solely-class-politics Trots” of Labour Left Briefing stuck with Ernie Roberts in spite of his age. They hated, as they still do, Diane Abbott for what they saw as her bourgeois dilettantism.

Her faction was the “70s identity Trots” of socialist action – the Livingstonites who were always looking to do deals. As indeed, they still are, with Livingstone trying to realign the hard left to include compass, to the fury of the McDonnellite purists, and at the cost of the fragile “grassroots” coalition, which no longer exists.

It is why there were two hard left leadership candidates splitting fewer votes than would have been enough for one.

Paul Boateng also threw his hat into Abbott’s selection ring, but was a boy among mastodons. He had better luck next time in Brent, where, in his victory speech, we seem to remember him proclaiming “today, Brent South; tomorrow, Soweto”. And so, for him as for Thabo Mbeki and Walter Sisulu, it did eventually prove.

All the leadership candidates have come a long way. All but one of them in a very short time. Elite stormtroopers of the leadership cadre that all the men are, they generally airbrush their origins. Which is too easily done.


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5 Responses to “Trots, stitch-ups and door-knocks: the leadership candidates’ parliamentary selections”

  1. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by sion simon, MattFinnegan, Annie B, James Anthony, Labour Uncut and others. Labour Uncut said: Trots, stitch-ups and door knocks: the leadership candidates’ parliamentary selection http://bit.ly/cRSXvk […]

  2. Editor says:

    A reader writes:

    “Chris Lennie was the man who made David Miliband’s selection happen, in opposition, oddly enough to Margaret McDonagh, who was keen for Iain Malcom (a protege of Alan Donnelly MEP, along with his brother Ed) to succeed David Clark, a prospect half the divided local party regarded with horror.

    Of course most of the credit went to Kevan Jones, as the local politician fixer.

    (At the time, there was a suggestion that David’s selection would lead to a purge of the long divided South Shields Labour party. It looks like David M subsequently reached an arrangement with brothers Ed and Iain Malcom, as they all get along famously now, or at least David doesn’t interfere with the Malcolms’ control of the local Labour party and the Malcolms don’t destabilise David M).

    It does make me laugh when I hear the various candidates talk about their desire for open selections.”

  3. Matt Hills says:

    So Ed Balls went for “the traditional very long haul”, but who pulled the strings and stitched things up to exclude the Normanton constituency from all women shortlists, so that he could be a candidate?

    As Paul Routledge noted in the New Statesman in January 2004, four out of the six constituencies in Yorkshire where MPs were retiring in that election had all women shortlists – but not Normanton where “the seat is being kept warm for the Chancellor’s economics adviser, Ed Balls, the partner of Yvette Cooper, who occupies adjoining Pontefract and Castleford.”

  4. Carl says:

    As ever, the hard left was split. What one comrade called the “ ‘pure’, solely-class-politics Trots” of Labour Left Briefing stuck with Ernie Roberts in spite of his age. They hated, as they still do, Diane Abbott for what they saw as her bourgeois dilettantism.

    Her faction was the “70s identity Trots” of socialist action – the Livingstonites who were always looking to do deals. As indeed, they still are, with Livingstone trying to realign the hard left to include compass, to the fury of the McDonnellite purists, and at the cost of the fragile “grassroots” coalition, which no longer exists.

    Perfectly put – but you kind of think that when somebody like Simon Jenkins, when he writes in the Guardian today that the British left today are a disgrace and mostly absent, denigrates the left, that this is what he means, they are too inverted and worrying about internal conflict.

    I disagree with this, I’m a McDonnellite purist (!) – you can’t win the war if you lose the battle

  5. No, when Simon Jenkins writes his usual drivel, he means that he’s hates the left because we’re the left. There’s no point treating anything he writes as constructive criticism.

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