New Statespersons?

Congratulations to the New Statesman on ruining 20 careers by profiling 20 MPs under 40 and calling them "the best of their generation".

It is not about the Staggers: wherever this had appeared, that would have done for them. Which is a pity, because several of them are impressive, even if several of them are anything but. And even if at least eight of them (exact dates of birth are not given) are younger than I am, which is always a bad sign.

Supposedly complimentary references to being a former speechwriter for John Reid (anyone who needs a speechwriter shouldn't be in politics), or to having been handpicked by John Hutton, or to being a protégé of George Osborne, are quite beyond parody, though no less amusing for that.

But other things are decidedly more pernicious, and really not funny at all. Most of these people could just as easily have been members of either of the other parties, and can reasonably be suspected of having pulled off the old Denis Healey and Virginia Bottomley: applying to all three parties while promising to join the first one to offer them a safe seat. Most of them have hardly or never worked outside politics.

Rachel Reeves is affecting a working-class accent if, Lewisham or no Lewisham, her parents were schoolteachers who sent her to Oxford and the LSE. People as middle-class as that have local and regional accents in the North, but not where she is from. Her much-trumpeted "state school" also deserves further investigation, there being, to say the least, state schools and state schools, above all in London.

I mean this a compliment when I ask exactly what political difference there is between Rushanara Ali and the moderate Left, pro-life anti-warrior whom she removed from Parliament? But, and I only ask, is she as good a speaker as George Galloway? And has she ever been anything like a milkman?

But it was Rehman Chishti who really jumped out of the page. "He ran unsuccessfully against Francis Maude as a Labour candidate in 2005 while working as an adviser to Benazir Bhutto [a close friend of George Galloway's], then leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, a role he played from 1991 - aged just 21 - until Bhutto's assassination. He defected to the Conservatives in 2006 and became an aide to Maude as Tory chairman." He is now MP for Gillingham and Rainham. All together now: "Islam is our Faith, Democracy is our Policy, Socialism is our Economy, All Power to the People." As they say, Respect.