Generation Why

A number of the Labour MPs in the Start the War Coalition are of my own generation, and I understand why they are as they are.

They joined the party that was sweeping all before it when we were teenagers, but they never bothered to check what that party was at least supposed to be for or about.

Nor, of course, did Tony Blair, whose canonical list of accomplishments comes entirely from his first term, and almost entirely from his first Queen's Speech, which was itself well to the right of the manifesto on which he had won the first of his three uncontested General Elections.

The Conservatives knew that they were not going to win in 1997, so they did not bother to try. With any effort, they could have cut the Labour majority drastically in 2001, and they could have won in 2005.

They consciously chose to make no such effort. They lost on purpose. Blair's record-making and record-breaking need to be seen in that light.

20 years later, the boys who looked and sounded as if they ought to have been footballers or the members of boy bands, and who were therefore deemed suitable for political preferment in the parallel universe that was Blair's Labour Party, are now Members of Parliament, and are politically still as illiterate and indifferent as they ever were.

Mind you, their tragedy, and thus ours, does not compare to that of the boys who looked and sounded as if they ought to have been footballers or the members of boy bands, and whose political illiteracy and indifference ranked with anyone's, but who were still not deemed suitable for political preferment in the parallel universe that was Blair's Labour Party.

Such forlorn creatures do exist. But at least they are not making up the numbers of the Labour MPs in the Start the War Coalition.