In changing the rules to
allow paying members to vote for the party leader, Ed Miliband couldn't have
predicted what a 5 season, 25 disc box set of political drama he's gifted the
nation. As someone who was thoroughly bored with second rate politicians arguing
over the centre ground like teenagers squabbling over which one of them has the
best mobile phone, Ed Miliband, in allowing thousands of dormant socialists to
have a voice and change the direction of their party, has unintentionally made
things interesting again.
However, entertaining as
that may be, the party is in big trouble, with the majority of its MPs
currently forced to choose between a revolt or supporting a man in whom they
have no conviction. It is the fact that thousands can effectively bring the
party to its knees just by paying to join what is probably a fairly transient
Marxist version of Thomas Carlyle's Great Man phenomenon, being played out with
a cult of personality fad, that makes things alarmingly problematic for those
affiliated with Labour, and hugely entertaining for those that are not.
For me, the
significant thing that Owen Smith's leadership loss today tells us about the current
Labour Party is that Labour is biding its time as a party. Didn't you wonder
why Labour has been holding back its better guns and putting forward the
dreadful Owen Smith as the best candidate to challenge Corbyn? I mean let me be
clear, I'm obviously no supporter of any of the Labour party MPs. But even I
can see that in the context of being a credible (or less un-credible) leader
there are MPs like Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Alan Johnson
who, unlike Owen Smith, are not thought of as being a complete duffer by 99% of
people in the country.
It was crystal clear that Owen Smith was not the best they had to offer, so why didn't the Labour
Party put forward a less un-credible candidate than Owen Smith? It seems evident to me that
it's because they have conceded short-term defeat and have their eyes on the future not the present. Given the size of the pro-Corbyn
membership, no challenger stands a chance with the current rules, so the better
MPs are probably biding their time until Corbyn presumably stands down after the
2020 election defeat.
Which leads me to my last
point. In my view, there is only one current Labour MP that would have a sniff
of a chance of being a Labour Party Prime Minister - and that person is Chuka
Ummuna. He's young, black, good looking, reasonably likeable, has views that
are closer than most in the party to being a weighted average of people who
either would or might vote for Labour, and is marginally less terrible than the
others. At 25/1 with the bookies, he looks to me a good bet to be the next
Labour leader in 2020 after Labour loses the General Election and Corbyn stands
down.
