The Seven Year Itch?

The last time that the Labour Party needed a candidate for North West Durham, then the Constituency Labour Party was told that it was to be allowed no role in the process of selecting one, and then that no one who had ever set eyes on the place was capable of being its Labour MP.

Next time, the CLP might reasonably insist that that approach had been a disaster. Therefore, four possibilities present themselves, and only one of those might realistically be expected to happen.

There is not going to be a candidate who, having been no older than 17 in 2017, was still no older than 24 in 2024. There is not going to be a candidate who, while heavily trailed as "local", had been living here for less than seven years. And there is certainly not going to be a candidate who had been a Labour Party member for less than seven years.

So the candidate will have been old enough in 2017, will have been living here in 2017, and will have been a Labour Party member in 2017. But in that case, then why was that person not the candidate in 2017? That question will be unanswerable in 2024.