Over The Water?

As the Government has to reassure the country that there will be electricity at Christmas, the Official Opposition is talking about how it is going to elect its next Leader. Sooner than its present Leader thinks.

Keir Starmer is a politician of immense inexperience, but the likes of David Evans and Peter Mandelson know exactly what they are doing. This whole business is about fixing it for David Miliband.

Miliband, however, would have to get back into the House of Commons. These days, no matter where they put him up, then he would come third behind, in either order, the Conservative Party candidate and George Galloway.

That would have been the result for Labour at Batley and Spen if it had fielded anyone other than the sister of the murdered former MP, and David Miliband is not the sister of any murdered former MP. That Labour understood this was clear from its selection of Kim Leadbeater, who holds no specific political opinion, and who has no identifiable capacity to formulate any.

It would almost be worth supporting the return of the Electoral College for the sight of its only intended beneficiary placed third behind, in either order, the Conservative Party candidate and George Galloway. Not that that would stop the regress towards the arrangement whereby irremovable MPs alone chose a Leader who would then have the sole say over policy.

40 years ago, rather than accept any challenge to that catalogue of privilege, much of the Right broke away from the Labour Party altogether. On no grounds whatever, their successors are equally convinced of their own dazzling grandeur.