Leader of the gang

There's been a lot of very excited comment in the last day or so about how Jeremy Corbyn is on course to win in the Labour Party's leadership election. Round these parts, however, we try not to get over-excited. As The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy used to advise: Don't panic. Corbyn will not be the next leader. So who will?

Back in early April, I predicted that - following its inevitable defeat in the coming election - the party would opt for a female leader and choose either Yvette Cooper or Rachel Reeves. Since Reeves isn't standing, I'm going to have to stick with my other suggestion and predict a Cooper victory in September. She won't lead on first-preference votes, but I expect her to come through the middle and win in the third round.

She is not, in my opinion, the best choice that the Labour Party could make. But none of the three outsiders I nominated - Gloria de Piero, John Mann, Ben Bradshaw - took up the challenge, and we have instead the current dull slate of candidates. Of whom Cooper is probably the least poor.

Andy Burnham is the boring and unexceptional option, Jeremy Corbyn is the fascinating and catastrophic choice, and Liz Kendall - well, I don't know. I just don't get Kendall. In print, her arguments have some validity, but her delivery is as about as convincing as a student teacher. I simply can't picture her as a party leader, let alone prime minister. And I can at least see Cooper as a leader.

But Labour should have learnt at least one lesson from the last five miserable years. When the electorate tell you that your leader has a problem with credibility and image, then you should listen to them. Every single poll showed that Ed Miliband's popularity trailed that of his party. And Labour's response was to give us more Miliband, as though it were our fault: we simply hadn't understood how wonderful he was.

He wasn't. He was dreadful. And since his colleagues couldn't summon up the courage to remove him, they should have insisted on the next best strategy: don't focus exclusively on the leader.

The party would be wise to do so this time. Cooper is not a great candidate, by any means (though she's a huge improvement on Miliband), and she's not surrounded by the best generation of politicians in Labour's history. But then, the government - with a couple of exceptions - ain't much cop either. Collectively, Labour don't look any more incompetent than the Tories.

Here's a potential shadow cabinet line-up, with their counterparts in the real cabinet shown in brackets:

• Yvette Cooper - leader (David Cameron)
• Chuka Umunna - shadow chancellor (George Osborne)
• Alan Johnson - foreign affairs (Philip Hammond)
• Rachel Reeves - business (Sajid Javid)
• John Mann - home affairs (Theresa May)
• Keir Starmer - justice (Michael Gove)
• Hilary Benn - health (Jeremy Hunt)
• Caroline Flint - education (Nicky Morgan)
• Andy Burnham - work and pensions (Iain Duncan Smith)
• Gloria de Piero - energy and climate change (Amber Rudd)
• Liz Kendall - transport (Patrick McLoughlin)
• Dan Jarvis - defence (Michael Fallon)
• Michael Meacher - environment and food (Liz Truss)
• Stella Creasey - communities and local government (Greg Clark)
• Chris Bryant - culture, media and sport (John Whittingdale)
• Emma Reynolds - women and equalities (Nicky Morgan, again)
• Chris Leslie - shadow first secretary (Greg Hands)
• Jeremy Corbyn - international development (Justine Greening)
• Rosie Winterton - chief whip (Mark Harper)
• Ben Bradshaw - leader of the house (Chris Grayling)

Well, you can juggle them around a bit - even choose a different leader - but, member for member, I think Labour's line-up is probably stronger than that of the government. So the party should play to its strengths and emphasise the whole team. Don't just put the spotlight on the leader.

A couple of other things left over from Ed Miliband's doomed leadership.

The change in the rules for the election of the leader was a mistake. The idea of one-member one-vote was fine, but there should be some way of whittling down the cast-list before it goes to the vote. Much the same as the Tories do, where the MPs choose two candidates who are then put to the party membership. The point is that a leader spends most of their time working with parliamentary colleagues; if they can't command support there, then they stand no chance, regardless of what the party in the country thinks.

I know this doesn't always work smoothly in the Conservative Party. There have been two leadership elections since William Hague introduced the system, and one of them resulted in the absurd elevation of Iain Duncan Smith. I also know that Labour has a rule that a candidate needs the nominations of 20 per cent of MPs - but in the cases of Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, we have seen how flawed this would-be filtering mechanism is.

And finally, the one thing that Miliband did get right was his promotion of new talent. In 2011 I noted the appearance on consecutive days on Question Time and Any Questions of Gloria de Piero and Rachel Reeves, both of whom had only been elected the previous year and both of whom were already in the shadow cabinet.

'These are the potential stars of the next parliament being given a chance to get a bit of exposure and experience,' I wrote. I added: 'The unmistakable impression, however, is that Labour's given up on the idea of opposition for the immediate future and is building for the world after the next election.'

That world's now arrived, and Miliband's investment in apprentice politicians may now pay off.

Lost Labour leaders

The post-War history of the Labour Party is littered with the best leaders it never had. In the context of a Labour leadership campaign, I thought I'd re-post this list that I wrote on another blog back in 2012. Note that the names are in chronological order.

1. Aneurin Bevan (1955)

After Clement Attlee led Labour to a second successive general election, he stepped down as leader. In a three-way poll, Hugh Gaitskell won an outright majority on the first ballot, defeating Peter Mandelson’s granddad, Herbert Morrison, and Nye Bevan. In terms of previous jobs, Bevan was the least experienced – Gaitskell had been chancellor, and Morrison had been both home and foreign secretary – but he had created the NHS, which gave him a certain weight. He’d also written In Place of Fear, one of the great works of British socialism and still a source of inspiration. But he was seen then, as leaders of the left so often are, as a divisive figure and his failure to carry his fellow MPs with him set a pattern that was repeated over the years.

2. Roy Jenkins (1971)
In the debate over British entry into the Common Market (as we used to call the future European Union), Jenkins led a dissident group of Labour rebels into the ‘yes’ lobby, defying a three-line whip even though he was the party’s deputy leader. Labour was then in opposition and its leader, Harold Wilson, was far from secure. The possibility existed for Jenkins to resign on the European issue and challenge directly for the leadership. He would have been good at it as well, and would have done far better at the subsequent election. Mind you, Britain would have been much more engaged in Europe, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your views.

3. Tony Crosland (1976)
What a field of candidates there was in the election to replace Wilson as leader and therefore as prime minister. Jim Callaghan won eventually, but first he had to see off Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Denis Healey. And the future foreign secretary Tony Crosland, who got barely five per cent of the MPs’ votes. Given that he died less than a year later, it was probably not too catastrophic for Labour that Crosland didn’t make it, but he would have been a decent choice: a social democrat intellectual who was capable of adjusting and evolving his thought in the light of circumstance.

4. Denis Healey (1980)
The choice of who should replace Callaghan after the disastrous election defeat of 1979 was so obvious and so stark – Denis Healey versus Michael Foot – that only the Labour Party could screw it up. So they did, rejecting the most popular politician they had, the one man almost guaranteed to beat Margaret Thatcher. Choosing Healy as leader would have caused major problems in the party, but since those problems came anyway, it’s hard to see how much worse it could have been. Most importantly, the SDP would never have been born.

5. Tony Benn (1981)
Largely thanks to Benn’s efforts, the franchise was widened for the election of party leader, allowing affiliated trades unions and constituency parties a say. So Benn stood for the deputy leadership, to try out the new system, he said. It was a bit of a cop-out, and a direct challenge for the leader’s job would have been more engaging. He would have lost, of course, but had he won, he might well have done better in the 1983 election than Foot managed; the press abuse could hardly have been more vitriolic, and Benn did genuinely inspire some of the people some of the time in a way that Foot simply didn’t.

6. Peter Shore (1983)
The inevitable defeat of Labour in 1983 saw the equally inevitable replacement of Foot by his protégé Neil Kinnock. Trailing a very poor fourth in the election (beaten even by Eric Heffer, embarrassingly enough) was Peter Shore, an intriguing figure who no one could ever quite place within the left-right spectrum. He campaigned against membership of the EEC, argued against restrictive practices in the trade unions and, as shadow chancellor, was one of the few successes during Foot’s doomed leadership. I always rather liked him as a politician: he was thoughtful, intelligent and courteous. He also had very messy hair, though it was nowhere near the chaotic state achieved by...

7. Shirley Williams (1987)
This is pure fantasy time, since Our Shirl was already long gone from Labour, having left to co-found the SDP in 1981. But if she had still been around when Kinnock failed to win the 1987 general election, she would have made the perfect replacement. And a perfect foil for Margaret Thatcher. In the words of a Times leader: ‘Mrs Williams talks to the British people in their own accents, sometimes muddled, often courageous, always human and always kind.’

8. Bryan Gould (1992)
In a straight fight between John Smith and Bryan Gould to replace Neil Kinnock as leader, the Labour Party once again got it wrong. On the single most important issue of the day – British membership of the European exchange rate mechanism – Smith made the wrong call and, had there been any such thing as natural justice, would have been as discredited as John Major when Britain got kicked out of the ERM on Black Wednesday. Gould, on the other hand, had always stood against the tide, arguing for policies based on the real economy rather than monetarist dogma. He was a true moderniser with a sound grasp of economics that shamed the young turks Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And, of course, he didn’t die in 1994, as Smith did, so that Blair might have been kept in his box.

9. Robin Cook (1994)
After Smith’s death, there were just three candidates for the leadership: Tony Blair, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett. Unsurprisingly Blair won at a canter, since the other runners were clearly so implausible. The man who didn’t stand was Labour’s strongest performer in the Commons, Robin Cook, a brilliant and principled politician with twenty years as an MP. He decided against going for the leadership on the grounds that he was ‘too ugly’ to be prime minister, but he was wrong: there was far too much character in his face for him to be unattractive. And anyway, given the state of the Tories by 1997, a monkey on a stick could have won that general election.

10. David Miliband (2007)
Why, oh why, were the Labour Party so stupid that they chose Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair? More to the point, why were they so craven that they didn’t even have an election? Brown clearly stood no chance up against David Cameron, but his fatal flaw – his indecisiveness – was sadly echoed in the person of David Miliband, his most plausible challenger. By the time Miliband had screwed his courage to the sticking-plate, it was three years too late and Ed came through as the ‘Stop David’ candidate. 

A fine day for haymaking

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the hanging of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed by the state in Britain. This is an extract from one of the best pieces of journalism I know, written by William Connor (better known as Cassandra) and published in the Daily Mirror on 13 July 1955:

It's a fine day for haymaking. A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way - and I mourn to say that millions of you do - it's a fine day for a hanging.

IF YOU READ THIS BEFORE NINE O'CLOCK THIS MORNING, the last dreadful and obscene preparations for hanging Ruth Ellis will be moving up to their fierce and sickening climax. The public hangman and his assistant will have been slipped into the prison at about four o'clock yesterday afternoon.

There, from what is grotesquely called 'some vantage point' and unobserved by Ruth Ellis, they will have spied upon her when she was at exercise 'to form an impression of the physique of the prisoner'.

A bag of sand will have been filled to the same weight as the condemned woman and it will have been left hanging overnight to stretch the rope.

IF YOU READ THIS AT NINE O'CLOCK, then - short of a miracle - you and I and every man and woman in the land with head to think and heart to feel will, in full responsibility, blot this woman out.

The hands that place the white hood over her head will not be our hands. But the guilt - and guilt there is in all this abominable business - will belong to us as much as to the wretched executioner paid and trained to do the job in accordance with the savage public will.

IF YOU READ THIS AFTER NINE O'CLOCK, the murderess, Ruth Ellis, will have gone.

The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beast of the field will have been denied to her - pity and the hope of ultimate redemption.

The medical officer will go to the pit under the trap door to see that life is extinct. Then in the barbarous wickedness of this ceremony, rejected by nearly all civilized peoples, the body will be left to hang for one hour.

IF YOU READ THESE WORDS OF MINE AT MIDDAY the grave will have been dug while there are no prisoners around and the Chaplain will have read the burial service after he and all of us have come so freshly from disobeying the Sixth Commandment which says 'Thou shalt not kill'.

The secrecy of it all shows that if compassion is not in us, then at least we still retain the dregs of shame. The medieval notice of execution will have been posted on the prison gates and the usual squalid handful of louts and rubbernecks who attend these legalized killings will have had their own private obscene delights.

Entry requirements for the British Establishment

My friend John Flaxman recently found some old copies of The Twentieth Century, a long vanished monthly journal, which he passed on to me. This is an extract from an article by the great historian AJP Taylor, published in October 1957, in which he discusses what had recently become known as the Establishment (though he prefers to call it the Thing):

'In a truly democratic society the rulers would be chosen by lot for short stretches. Failing that we should at least postulate that every citizen have an equal chance of reaching the top if he wants to get there. This does not apply in any known community, not even in Switzerland, the country that comes nearest to democracy.

'Everywhere the potential ruler has to pass some test other than ambition and ability. It may be birth, money, class, colour, religion, even (as in old China) capacity to pass exams. But some test there will be. The minority that emerges will constitute the power elite from whom the actual rulers are chosen. What we call democracy is merely a system by which the members of this power elite receive an occasional popular endorsement.

'The requirements for entering the British power elite are fairly well known. You must be white in colour; male; wear collar and tie and a dark suit; and able to spend most of your life indoors sitting down. You must also be able to dictate reasonably grammatical English. Oratory - once highly regarded - is no longer required. Anyone capable of reading from typescript can go to the highest place. These are the bare essentials.

'The right parents are a considerable asset. It is still best to come from "the nobility and gentry", though it is probably a mistake to be the eldest son of a peer. Parents from the professional class are good, particularly if they pay surtax. Rich business men, oddly, are not at all good.

'If you are so foolish as to be born into the industrial working class, then you must get out of it by winning a scholarship to a grammar school or, failing this, by becoming either a trade union official or a WEA [Workers' Educational Association] tutor. If you are born of an agricultural labourer, you should give up at the start.

'The right education helps. It is of little moment what you learn, though Latin is still probably the most useful subject and any form of science a handicap. The important thing is where you learn. Eton remains by far the best bet; Winchester runs it close in the Labour Party. Otherwise prefer a first-rate grammar school to a minor public school; and run away to sea rather than go to a secondary modern.

'Oxford and Cambridge are so obvious a requirement as hardly to need mention. Any other university can be valued only for the instruction it provides.

'As to accomplishments, it is no longer necessary to ride a horse, shoot, fish or even play bridge. In fact, the less accomplished you are outside your work the better. And even at work it is wiser to seem devoted rather than clever. Otherwise you are in danger of becoming a "character", and that is hard to live down.

'The picture drawn here differs little from that of the power elite in Washington or Moscow. Religion, however, provides a distinguishing mark. I use the word to mean morality and rules of conduct, not acceptance or denial of any theological dogma. You may choose anything from Roman Catholicism in its English version to "humanism" - that is, unassertive atheism. But is must be broadly within the tradition of liberal Christianity. Fundamentalism, aggressive atheism and of course adherence to any non-Christian religion other than Judaism, exclude.

'In other words, the members of the British power elite observe the standards created by the nineteenth-century public schools.'

Books and Bookish

I've been absent from this blog for over a week, largely because I've been busy writing. Which is going very happily, thank you.

In addition, I seem to be getting a bit of book reviewing at present. My review of Charlotte Higgins's rather fine book on the BBC is here.

I also had a trip to Blackpool, as mentioned earlier, which was very enjoyable and introduced me to a musician of whom I had never previously heard. Leo Chadburn soundtracked the movie at the centre of the exhibition in the Grundy Art Gallery, and he closed proceedings with a performance of a piece inspired by the correspondence between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was fabulous, almost touching the genius of Scott Walker at times - and by that, I obviously don't mean the melodic Scott Walker, but the creator of Tilt and The Drift.

Leo Chadburn also performs under the name Simon Bookish and I'm gradually exploring his work. This album, Everything/Everything, in particular, is stunning, like the Decca-era David Bowie covering Slapp Happy's Casablanca Moon, accompanied by the Fires of London. (There's one for the teenagers.)

This is Mr Chadburn/Bookish, wearing a shirt that Robyn Hitchcock would have been proud of in 1985:

From our foreign newsdesk

I don't really do foreign affairs - it takes all my effort to try to understand Britain. But while I was wandering through old newspapers this morning, as is my wont, I was struck by this article, published in the Daily Worker on 7 April 1945:

How the face of nations alters

Demolition work has now started on the Sir George Robey pub in Finsbury Park. For the last ten years, the building has been held up by scaffolding and the site has been boarded up, and there was never really any doubt about its future. Even so, it's a bit sad to see.

Situated just opposite what used to be the Rainbow Theatre (now occupied by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), the Robey was a music venue of some vintage and grubbiness. I played there a couple of times in the 1990s as part of a duo called the Dust, and while it wasn't the best venue in North London, it had a certain charm.

It was also here that I first met my friend Paul Thomas, with whom I currently make music from time to time under the name Lee Enfield.

Despite the name, I don't think there's any suggestion that George Robey himself ever played here. He might, though, have played the Finsbury Park Empire round the corner. That's gone now as well, demolished in the early 1960s and replaced by a block of flats.

What great revolutions we live to see nowadays.