Bankrupt

An old friend tells me that New Labour has had to repay him and numerous others because it had been both docking a Labour Party subscription from their councillors’ allowances and taking a Labour Party subscription out of their accounts by direct debit. Desperate? That hardly begins to describe it.

And the bankruptcy is more than financial. I am also assured that there might not be an all-women shortlist after all here in North-West Durham, so extreme is the acrimony over it. Well, if not here in Hilary Armstrong’s constituency, then where, exactly? And why, exactly? This looks like the end of the whole scheme.

Meanwhile Hilary’s prominence among the hundred Labour MPs who have signed a Brown-baiting letter in today’s Observer (why isn’t this a huge story?) rather indicates that, whisper it not, she may not retire after all. In which case, she never will. If she is re-elected next year, then she will die in office, because the selection of a successor would be so vicious that nothing else would be permitted to allow it to happen.