Friday 3 July 2015

Don't Bet On Betty

As soon as Labour lost, it was clear that Andy Burnham was going to stand for Leader, and probably win.

Yet a junior member of his frontbench team, a person whom etiquette demanded ought to sign his nomination papers and campaign for him, pre-emptively went on television and announced her candidacy.

Her lack of trade union or local government background could not have been more obvious.

Accordingly, her frontbench career must be over, and she needs to prepare to stand down from Parliament in 2020, so as to avoid the indignity of deselection at the insistence of the National Executive Committee.

She is not going to win (she might very well come fourth), and her candidacy at all, against her boss, has been ill-mannered.

With Yvette Cooper also a trade union leader's daughter, the old industrial and municipal rules are back, and the fact that Kendall broke them because she did not know them only makes her transgression even worse.

John Woodcock is rapidly becoming the present age's John Stonehouse, Woodrow Wyatt or Dick Taverne; an outlier for the Outer Right's departure from the Labour orbit after what it will doubtless identify as a watershed moment in September.

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