Wending my way home with bread and drugs, I stopped for a winter warmer and was delighted to encounter an old friend who, to give some context, had been a supporter of David Miliband, Andy Burnham and Owen Smith. He regaled me with the despair of North West Durham Constituency Labour Party.
The CLP had only ever hoped to come second next time, but even that is deemed to be imperilled by your humble blogger. "Speedboat," my interlocutor almost wept, "where the hell are we supposed to find a candidate who's at least 40, male by all definitions, lived here all his life or as good as, been in politics here since the Nineties, and wants to be a Labour candidate even though the party's now as right-wing as fuck, but doesn't actually want to be an MP?" Where, indeed?
But should such a candidate ever materialise, then I would have him beaten from the start on race. White? The candidate for people who just did not want a mixed-race MP. Black? A comical attempt to out-colour me. Somewhere in between? Some variation on either of those. Exactly my skin tone, with a name exactly as WASP-y as David Alexander Stephen Lindsay? A mere tribute act, the candidate who was as much like me as possible without being me. Any of those ways, I win, and I am also going to do something similar on class. I am really, really, really going to enjoy this.
Actual words of Hilary Armstrong, "David Lindsay is just a fact of life, you might as well complain about Rod Stewart."
ReplyDeleteThat is a lot better than some of her lines. She once told me that something or other had "not been handed down on tablets of stone from Mount Olympus".
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