Special Measures?

What is so special about the advice that is given to Ministers by people who had barely left school? Anyway, 25 years ago next month, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee imposed a shortlist at Leigh, which was then a safe seat even by the standards of those very different times, in order to ensure the selection of a 31-year-old special adviser to the Culture Secretary, Chris Smith.

The idea of Andy Burnham as an insurgent political outsider is the only thing as funny as the idea of him as a standard-bearer of the Left. Before he became the only Health Secretary ever to privatise an NHS hospital, the consequences of which were predictably disastrous, Burnham was the first Culture Secretary to try to control the Internet, having been the Under Secretary of State responsible for the implementation of the Identity Cards Act 2006. All very topical.

The National Executive Committee is chaired by Shabana Mahmood, who may use that position to keep out a potential rival to succeed Keir Starmer in this Parliament, since she stood no realistic chance of being returned to the next one. She may employ an all-women shortlist, or an all-BAME shortlist (although is Burnham's Irish background not AME?), or both. That Blue Labour should have come to that. George Galloway's Gorton and Denton organisation is already in place.