I have never been out with a member of the Labour Party, but I am aware of five of my exes, albeit defined pretty loosely in two cases, who have been approached by the party nationally and invited to stand by for imposition as the Labour candidate here at North West Durham immediately before the next General Election. There may be more, but not all of them would tell me. Have Richard Holden's old flames also been approached in this way?
Of course, the Constituency Labour Party has no idea that this is going on. Factions of that variously want to hang me or to canonise me because my mere existence makes it impossible for the Labour candidate here to be a very young woman who was sufficiently apolitical and ambitious to do whatever the Right told her to do both locally and nationally.
Instead, the CLP is either furious or delighted to have to have been made to want a candidate who was a middle-aged man, as established on the political scene here as I was, and very seriously right-wing all on his own. Meanwhile, the party nationally is going to quite remarkable lengths to track down my erstwhile romantic interludes. Mercifully, there is no crossover between the two.
Why would national Labour want one of your exes? Why would Labour have to have a middle-aged man to fight you?
ReplyDeleteIt is hoped that I might go easier on one of my exes, or that one of my exes might go full tonto on me, or both. There is no chance of the first, anyway.
DeleteLocally, they are of the view that my campaign would be emotionally bearable by few men and by practically no women, and not by anyone much younger than I was; I was born in 1977. I take that as a compliment, although I was cheerfully enduring far worse from them at a much earlier age.