The Long View From The Shortlist

The shortlist of one is out. Paul Brannen is also on it, but find me one word that he has said during this entire business. As a Labour Party trouper, he has been making up the numbers for decades. Kim McGuinness it is, then. To lose to Jamie Driscoll. Already, it is all about Jamie. No one is talking about anyone else. It is like London in 2000, when Ken Livingstone was the whole point.

Although not even then were Labour Party members banned from so much as uttering Livingstone's name, as they are banned from uttering Jamie's. At this moment, Jamie is a member of the Labour Party in good standing, and he holds a prominent public office as such. Yet you could be expelled from that party merely for saying his name.

In 2004, Livingstone was soft enough to seek readmission to Labour, which had to let him back in because he had been about to beat it again, thereby proving that he had had no need of it. He has had a thoroughly unpleasant relationship with it ever since, and under its banner he ended up being defeated twice by Boris Johnson.

Jamie should make no such mistake. Instead, everyone should be in from the start of a project that will run for 12 years until the 66-year-old Jamie decided how he felt by then. It is not that members of the Labour Party should be unwelcome; of course Labour has not shortlisted a Roma migrant whose Facebook cover photograph showed him with Jesse Jackson, but there may very well be a role for Nicu Ion. The Labour Party itself, however, must be barred at the threshold.

McGuinness, like Alison McGovern, embodies the fact that people like Jamie or like Mick Whitley are far more likely to be managed by members of the Labour Party than to be members of it themselves. Neither McGuinness nor McGovern has ever worked outside politics, and McGovern is married to a senior civil servant. They personify the state-backed power of middle-class women over working-class men, and that is the point and purpose of the Labour Party.

Labour has always come second at Selby and Ainsty, yet its candidate at the forthcoming by-election there is one Keir Mather, who took his BA in 2019, who took a master's degree in 2021, who was Wes Streeting's researcher for a while, and who now rejoices to be the Senior Public Affairs Advisor to the Confederation of British Industry. Quite apart from making one wonder what babe in arms must be the Junior Public Affairs Advisor, the CBI really is the last, and indeed the current, entry on the Curriculum Vitae of this person who is apparently so outstanding that he is presented as a potential Member of Parliament at the age of 25. Labour is in no position to mock the elevation of Charlotte Owen to the peerage.

But I am. And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.