Stoking It Up

What with Gillian McKeith sniffing about on one side, and now Tristram Hunt on the other, do you have to be on the telly to be a parliamentary candidate? Current aspirants, who know who you are on the staff of certain publications, you'd better start looking out for a sideline in televised cookery, or gardening, or whatever.

Whatever else the Stoke Central carry on may be about, it is not about class. Gary Elsby is the preferred successor of the retiring MP, Mark Fisher, an Old Etonian son of a Tory MP and an earl's daughter. Elsby's past blog comments suggest that he is just what a seat like that needs: someone from within the Labour Movement rather than from the sectarian Left who hates what the Tories did to his community in the Eighties, and who hates New Labour for, at best, failing to do anything about it.

If this is all about securing a powerbase for Ed Balls or David Miliband, then consider that Balls runs an ever-increasing risk of losing his own seat, which has been Labour for as long as there has been any Labour, and which was ILP before that. And ponder that a traditional Labour candidate at South Shields might be enough to rid Parliament of the pair of them. Any volunteers?

As for the "local" question, the problem in this case is that the Constituency Labour Party was given no say in the shortlisting process. Being local is not in itself a qualification to be shortlisted, never mind selected. Under normal circumstances, which these are not at Stoke Central (among other places), do not vote for anyone who says that they would never want any other seat. Either you believe that you can, and therefore should, be making a contribution to the parliamentary process, or you don't.

In the same way, do not vote for anyone who says that they don't really want to be an MP and can't believe that they have been selected. And don't vote for anyone who says that she doesn't agree with all-women shortlists but is nevertheless prepared to use that device to her own benefit.