A Major Threat?

Is the 87-year-old Joe Haines still a Labour Party member? If so, then what, exactly, do you have to do these days in order to be expelled?

Dan Jarvis? I ask you!

Only Liz Kendall had the balls to put up from and for the Hard Right (not a pejorative term, but purely a descriptive one), so only she has the right to do so again in anything like the near future.

Jarvis, Hunt, Ummuna and the rest were all talk.

Jeremy Corbyn took twice as many votes as the next candidate down. His mandate is undeniably larger than any of the other three's, never mind that of anyone who wimped out of standing at all.

With party membership having doubled under Corbyn, any of them could in any case expect even fewer votes than Kendall managed.

As to the supposed basis of Jarvis's appeal, Labour is just not like that. It never has been. It is a brains party, not a brawn party.

Only 18 years after the end of the War, it elected a Leader who had been 23 when the War had broken out, and who had picked up the OBE before it had ended.

Yet he had never served in the Armed Forces, because he had been deemed too clever to have to do so, and therefore more useful elsewhere.

Just shy of 29, Harold Wilson had in fact become the MP for a safe seat before the War in the Pacific was over, and a Minister within hours, having been appointed immediately upon election.

He had entered the Cabinet at the age of 31, the youngest Cabinet Minister of the twentieth century. With no military record whatever. In 1947.

Indeed, no one with any military record has led either party into a General Election since 1979, and no one with any military record has won a General Election since as long ago as 1970, 50 years before the next one.

Those clamouring for Jarvis have been watching too much American television. But even in the United States, no veteran has won a Presidential Election since 1988. Neither party is on course to nominate one this year.

Whereas men whose records in that regard were not without considerable distinction have lost five of the last six Presidential Elections. In all cases, to men who had, in that sense, "never served".