Due South?

Polly Toynbee demands that the new Deputy Leader of the Labour Party be a woman, and goes on to demand that she therefore be Harriet Harman, while comments posted in reply demand that the new Deputy be from the South. So, is Hazel Blears actually a man, or is it just that she is not upper-middle-class like Harman and Toynbee?

Still, it has to be Cruddas. Labour (like the Tories) is demographically doomed, but it has to be Cruddas to help pick up the pieces and fashion at least some of them into something else.

I don't see that being from the South matters: the Tories already hold most of the seats there without that's doing them the slightest good, and there was nothing remotely Southern about New Labour, centred as it was on a half-Ulster posh Scot with County Durham connections, who was schooled entirely in Durham and Edinburgh, who gravitated to London as Oxford graduates do, but who then married the Scouse girl at work, and at just 30 was back in County Durham as an MP.

But if it does matter, then Cruddas is from the South, and sits for Dagenham. But then, John McDonnell is also from the South, and also sits for a seat in the London/Home Counties border country. Or have I missed something?