“And all the sons I might have had mean nothing, for I have a son.” So wrote James Baldwin.
And so it is with the leadership. While Diane and the boys spend the summer in a four month penalty shootout, Harriet has quietly slipped on the captain’s armband.
If the coalition collapses in August – which is very unlikely, but not impossible – it will be Harriet who leads Labour’s reponse. (more…)
We’re a little concerned that Andy Burnham doesn’t seem to have got the hang of the whole entourage thing. Last night he was hanging round the House of Commons on his own. This afternoon he was waiting for a bus outside Victoria Embankment gardens – on his own.
Come on Andy. Get a grip. As even the most middling hip hop gangsta could have told you, you are nobody if not surrounded by people whose presence in your presence serves no purpose.
Once the special-branch-protected holder of a great office of state, David “Fiddy” Miliband is the modern master of this art. From the black clad men with submachine guns outside his house in Primrose Hill to the PPSes and campaign flunkeys who shepherd him from terrace to tea room introducing him to people he should know, he is never alone.
His brother, Ed “Snoop” Miliband, more unassuming till recently, has learned fast. His appearance at last night’s New Statesman hustings brought squeals from gaggles of ecstatic young Fabianistas. But he can now not be reached through the armour of his entourage.
The Snoop Miliband posse, as you would expect, is lighter-hearted and more charming than Fiddy Miliband’s, which is cool and serious, but underlain with a slight air of menace. Snoop’s boyz will crack a joke and make you feel at ease. Before they kill you.
In truth, there is some way to go before either will be ready for the mean streatz of Compton or Queens. The pimp-stick-wielding bad boyz in Snoop “Ed” Miliband’s krew include London barrister, Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP, the Oxford don, Dr Stewart Wood and “Big Sista” Polly Billington, formerly of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Fiddy “David” Miliband’s top homeboyz are people like former ITV corporate affairs director Jim “Smackup” Godfrey and former FCO special adviser Madlin “Mizzlsizzl” Sadler.
It is a long way from Watts to Westminster. And the sad truth is that the Miliband boyz are not so much Straight Outta Compton as relatively recently graduated from Corpus Christi. Not so much Tupac and Biggie as, well, David and Edward.
Let’s hope Andy’s not still waiting for the bus.
We did a laugh count at tonight’s New Statesman leadership hustings.
Tiny chuckles weren’t recorded.
We maintained our rule that to score you had to get a proper laugh from a significant portion of the room.
David Miliband 1
Ed Miliband 2
Andy Burnham 1
Ed Balls 2
Diane Abbott 5
Make of it what you will.
One war-weary Labour old stager just sent Labour Uncut a text message from an idle moment. It was one of those absent, unsolicited little updates that the Twitter-literate now do without thinking.
On this occasion, quite without realising how quickly he’d become accustomed to a new world which is mad, this MP described himself as “sitting in the IPSA queue with several other MPs”.
That’s what they do these days. Between legislating and agitating and holding the executive to account. They sit in the IPSA queue.
Since they got (back) to Westminster, Labour MPs have been assaulted by a relentless barrage of vote-begging letters from their Parliamentary colleagues. There are or have been elections for the leadership, the deputy speakerships, all party groups, backbench committees and a host of select committee chairs. There are shadow cabinet and select committee membership elections to come.
Everybody is sick of it. Most of the letters are dull and unremarkable. There has generally been no reason to inflict them on Uncut readers.
There are two that stick out, though.
UPDATE: Diane Abbott has secured 33 nominations and will be on the Labour leadership ballot paper.
This was the second in our series of crowdsourced interviews with the leadership contenders.
Diane spoke to us last night at her office in Westminster, where everyone was keenly monitoring her leadership support with hours left until nominations closed.
She was completely unphased by your questions, which included her son’s private education, the demographic of her leadership opponents and how much she is paid by the BBC.
Q. (From Derek) You and John McDonnell both have solid socialist credentials, but isn’t there a danger that in standing you will split the left vote? I don’t really want the wishy washy alternative of the other 4 candidates. What are your thoughts?
A. There always was a tendency to say that if women stood it split the vote. I think that there is the politics that I’m on the left, and have as good a voting record on left wing issues as John McDonnell, but there’s another issue which is about gender. It’s not so much that I stood against John, but that John stood against me.
Q. John McDonnell’s come out and said that if it means getting a woman on the ballot, he’ll stand down. In that case, do you wish he’d never stood in the first place?
A. I think it would have been easier if he hadn’t stood. If he was committed to gender issues it would have been easier if he hadn’t. Initially, it was very difficult for either of us to gain momentum. If there’d been just one of us standing then that person would have gained momentum much quicker. (more…)
This list is MPs who have declared plus those who have formally nominated. 33 nominations gets you in the race.
PLP chair Tony Lloyd has this evening emailed all Labour MPs attaching a letter to him from Ann Black, chair of Labour’s ruling national executive committee.
In it, she reports “widespread concern among party members that this leadership election should allow the broadest possible debate”.
This will add to pressure on the 44 Labour MPs yet to declare to nominate Diane Abbott, and on John McDonnell to stand aside in her favour. The deadline for nominations is 1230 tomorrow (Wednesday).
This is the full text of Ann Black’s letter to Tony Lloyd: (more…)
We did a laugh count at last night’s PLP leadership hustings.
Tiny chuckles weren’t recorded.
To score you had to get a proper laugh from a significant portion of the room.
David Miliband 1
Ed Miliband 4
Andy Burnham 3
Ed Balls 1
Make of it what you will.
A private meeting of hundreds of MPs is not really a private meeting. But meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) are slightly more so than entirely public gatherings.
Several MPs tweeted from yesterday’s PLP leadership hustings: John Woodcock, Rachel Reeves, Douglas Alexander and Denis MacShane, for instance.
But these were tiny snaphshots, in some cases only of their favourites.
The note below is a fuller record. There are many public hustings to come. But the tone of the leadership cadre is always slightly different at the PLP than anywhere else.
We have provided this note for that reason.
Nominations close at 1230 tomorrow. There are currently 42 MPs still to declare or nominate.
This is a not a transcript. It is an amalgam of several contemporaneous notes taken for their own use by people present at the meeting. If some candidates have more remarks recorded than others, it is because they said more things that people wrote down.
