Loss Leaders

Ed Miliband has gone down in my estimation, and it is not as if he was all that high in it to start with. Higher than his brother or Ed Balls, but that's not saying anything. However, that best of a bad lot has today come out in support of Harriet Harman's latest wheeze, to reserve fifty per cent of Shadow Cabinet positions to women. What Harman has not, at least as yet, done is announce that she is nominating the only woman candidate for Labour Leader. Will she do so?

After all, those who have done so have now been joined by Jon Trickett, PPS to Gordon Brown. Diane Abbott's nomination by Kelvin Hopkins also reflects well on her. Her record on civil liberties is better than that of John McDonnell, who voted in favour of the Digital Economy Bill. His opposition to the third runway at Heathrow, although I can see both sides on that one, did line him up with the luvvies against the unions.

As for most of the other stuff trotted out, so to speak, against either him or Abbott, what was being said and done in those days by, for example, Harriet Harman? They both certainly bear comparison. And if Harold Wilson could have his Prime Ministerial chauffeur drop off his progeny at fee-paying schools, then how has Abbott done anything wrong? There has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish private schools, which produced Attlee, Gaitskell (Winchester, no less) and Foot.

It now seems practically certain that there will be no one on the ballot who was not a member of the Government that was recently kicked out on its ear. How stupid is that? Nor will there be anyone who as an MP voted against the Iraq War. How sickening is that? Of the two such potential candidates, it is John McDonnell who has been nominated by Frank Field, by Kate Hoey, by the pro-life Catholic Ronnie Campbell, and by no one who is not a card-carrying Eurosceptic.

John's failure to secure enough nominations to stand will indeed be to the shame of Diane Abbott. But it will expose the fact that the broad-based but identifiable Labour Party of which he conceives no longer exists, will never exist again, and is in any case about to be rendered obsolete even as an ideal by electoral reform.

It is time to start again.