Qualified and Unqualified

Does Harriet Harman even regard herself, never mind expect anyone else to regard her, as qualified for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party in any way except that she happens to be the involuntary bearer of an unearned second X chromosome? Yet she and her old associate Patricia Hewitt are even said to be planning a constitutional change whereby there would always be two Deputy Leaders, one of each sex. What in the world would a second Deputy Leader actually do?

Meanwhile, we are told that the late Tony Blair, of unhappy memory, has told Alan Johnson that he cannot be a future Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom because he is "untested and "a lightweight" compared to ... David Miliband! If Johnson is "untested", then Blair cannot know that he is "a lightweight"; but we cannot expect Blair to understand this, since he is really the central character in an Ealing comedy of how, by a series of accidents, a thick toff with no interest in politics manages to become Prime Minister.

Now, there might be all sorts of reasons not to want Alan Johnson as Prime Minister. But the facts remain that Johnson's father walked out when he was six, that his mother died when he was 12, that his own daughter died, and, most significantly, that he has had proper jobs as a postman and as a postmen's trade union rep, both a lot more testing than being "Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit", whatever (if anything) that might actually entail. It strikes me as one of those non-jobs for people who are far too grand to have to work for a living because, say, their fathers are among the most important academics in the world, they themselves went to Oxford and Harvard purely on the back of that fact (and despite very limited intellects of their own), and a safe seat has yet to be arranged for them in such a way as to bypass the local party.