O Kamm Must Be Joking About O King

Oliver Kamm is throwing a fit about the presence of James Meadway on Ed Miliband’s commission of inquiry into Labour’s General Election defeat. Meadway, you see, used to be in the Socialist Workers Party, and “campaigned against @Oona_King in 2005. His very presence in @UKLabour indicates why it’s become electorally toxic.”

Before being welcomed into the Parliamentary Labour Party, the late Peter Temple-Morris had been elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament on no fewer than seven occasions. Robert Jackson had been so five times, Quentin Davies five times (including at all three of the General Elections at which Labour had been led by Tony Blair), and Alan Howarth three times. Shaun Woodward had managed it only once, but he had managed it.

In view of the ennoblements of Temple-Morris and Davies upon their retirements, has either of them ever voted Labour at a parliamentary election? If so, then when, exactly? Davies abruptly decided that “my party had left me” on 26th June 2007, the night before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. He was rapidly rewarded, and he has continued to be so. He remains in receipt of the Labour Whip in the House of Lords, having served under Brown as a Minister in the House of Commons. He had been elected as a Conservative MP at all five of the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections. He had served in the Shadow Cabinets of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Kamm’s friend David Aaronovitch has never said that his life in the Communist Party had been wrong at the time, any more than his friends such as Michael Gove have ever said that their very active adoration of apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet’s Chile had been wrong at the time. John Reid and Peter Mandelson also came up through the Communist Party, while Paul Corrigan, the husband of Hilary Armstrong and the architect of NHS privatisation, even stood as a Communist Party parliamentary candidate in 1979.

My distant cousin Alistair Darling was in the International Marxist Group, as was Bob Ainsworth. And as was Geoff Gallop, who was very much Tony Blair’s mentor at Oxford, making it practically certain that Blair himself was also in the IMG. “Idle sons of the bourgeoisie,” indeed. Charles Clarke and Jack Straw rose through the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that then controlled the National Union of Students, and which was in fact more pro-Soviet than the Communist Party had become.

Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers were Trotskyists; Milburn’s only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as “Haze of Dope”. And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. The assembled New Labourites sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. What, then, might be Kamm’s terrible problem with Meadway? The clue is in the reference to Oona King, despite the fact that King is also a former member of the SWP.

If you want a seat in the House of Lords, then lose your seat in the House of Commons to George Galloway. Both of the people who have ever done that have been raised to the ermine. Roy Jenkins would in any case have been made Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, which had been a Conservative seat until Jenkins had taken it, meaning that George was its first ever Labour MP.

But although there was a Labour Government on every day of the eight years that King was an MP, she was never made anything more than a Parliamentary Private Secretary, and it was hardly as if she were a campaigning backbencher instead. She is Baroness King of Bow only because she lost Bethnal Green and Bow to George. Indeed, from the night that it happened, that loss has caused the BBC, The Guardian and so on to treat King ever thereafter as the major political figure that she had never in fact been.

Such people still bang on about George’s foray into reality television, and perhaps it was ill-judged, but King’s goes unmentioned even though it was more recent and she had a Select Committee seat at the time. George knows far too much ever to have been allowed on a Select Committee. He is like another of my Campaign Patrons from back when I used to contest elections, who is the most distinguished municipal politician on Durham County Council, and who is therefore never given any committee assignment of any kind whatever. George is blowing hot and cold about standing for Mayor of London next year. But as he might already know, a head of steam is by all accounts gathering for him rather closer to where I am currently sitting.

Certain people are never going to stop stropping about Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, in the way that certain people are never going to stop stropping about North West Durham in 2019. But much as those latter would like to pin what they see as the blame on me, they cannot do so. Even if all of my supporters had instead voted Labour, something that some of them had never done in their lives and never will, then Richard Holden would still have won. And if Labour puts up either the former MP or a product of the right-wing Labour machine, and it is going to have to put up one or the other, then Richard is going to win again.