This Once Great Movement Of Ours

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Anyway, the long rumoured u-turn has now happened.

Though works out more as a classic THIGMOO byzantine compromise than those originally pushing for it wanted. It's very Wilsonian.

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His cabinet does seem like Wilson’s in that he could survive purely on the fact that several senior members of it seem to very much dislike each other.

And just look at the constantly shifting internal alliances. At the core of it - and this is also extremely Wilson-era - is that you have a group who are extremely keen on economic planning, you have the Treasury Team (including a couple of de facto attached members) with the usual Labour Party view on public finances (i.e. Gladstonianism with a Human Face), and then you have a group with departmental portfolios. Much as Wilson did, Starmer clearly has a degree of sympathy with all groups, which means that he may well (as Wilson did) spend much of his time brokering arrangements and agreements between them. On top of all of this, you then have the lesser (but still real enough) issues of personal and factional and sub-factional calculations, none of which align neatly with any of the groups, which, in any case, will always be subject to change depending on where ministers are put: one defends ones patch, you see.

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Who is likeliest to succeed Starmer if by some black swan event he steps down

At present, any of Phillipson, Rayner and Reeves. It's hard to imagine that none of the three would run in such a situation and even harder to see how someone who is not also one of the three could beat any of them. All are well-liked in the PLP, would not bomb with affiliates and are popular with the Party grassroots and in the event of a sudden vacancy there would be a lot of pressure to avoid a free-for-all.

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Kendall's campaign hilariously never grasped that you need to appeal to the Centre Ground (TM) of the Labour Party to win a leadership election, or even just to get a non-embarrassing result.

The issue was failing to understand the then new rules, which was an error most of the campaigns made. So she wasn't trying to win, but was trying to put down a marker and so get certain ideas and airing while also making a case for a proper Shadow Cabinet post for herself. Not irrational in itself, but the trouble was that the campaign acted as if the EC system was still in place.

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Incredible THIGMOO content going on in Cardiff right now. If you want to get some idea of Welsh Labour as an institution you should catch up on it. Anyway, Comrade Gething is Leader now.

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So, is the voting system used by Welsh Labour an "electoral college" or not?

No.

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Incredible THIGMOO content going on in Cardiff right now. If you want to get some idea of Welsh Labour as an institution you should catch up on it. Anyway, Comrade Gething is Leader now.

I’ve been unable to tell what really is the difference between Gething and Miles the whole time and at this point I’m afraid to ask.

It genuinely does boil down to 'vibes' in this case lol. Well, and that Gething won't be making Lee Waters a minister.

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How on earth did Labour end with a German Christmas song as the melody for their party hymn? I can't stop laughing, at the moment.

The key thing to remember about the Labour Party is that it is an incredibly funny political party.

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How on earth did Labour end with a German Christmas song as the melody for their party hymn? I can't stop laughing, at the moment.

The key thing to remember about the Labour Party is that it is an incredibly funny political party.

Funny strange, funny ha-ha, or both?

By this point objectively both as Party culture really is very... erm... unreconstructed... in certain ways, but always (and especially and very, very much) the latter.

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Former star columnist leaves political party; attempts to gain attention for doing so. Film at eleven.

He's an interesting case study in how easily a career in that field can go sideways rather quickly: he had a very comfortable niche lined up as a critical friend of the Labour Party positioned slightly to the left of the leadership - and quite a lot more 'liberal' - and that's a good spot for 'influence' and high billings in certain parts of the media. Potentially makes you a useful vector for gossip and leaks as well, and that's always good news in career terms. Then along came the Corbyn leadership which undermined that model and forced choices of one sort or another on everyone. He mostly made poor choices. Now he's essentially a parody of himself, especially as no one would read him for his analytical skills (which are abysmal) or his prose (which is cacophonous). He still has that Gruaniad column, but it's no longer a column that matters in any sense and he no longer has access. I presume that he can get Sharon Graham to talk to him, but otherwise it's just a list of people slowly heading towards the scrapheap themselves. None of this really matters, but on a human level it's a little grim.

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Anyway, Tommy McAvoy (Lord McAvoy from 2010) died earlier this month. MP for Glasgow Rutherglen 1987-2005 and Rutherglen & Hamilton West 2005-10, he was a classic Labour Party career whip and spent all but five of his twenty three years as an MP in the whip's office, including for the entire duration of the Blair-Brown government. He then continued to work as a Labour whip in the Lords, only retiring in 2021. There are different approaches to whipping, and McAvoy's seems to have been similar to that of Bob Mellish: he was well-liked by most MPs and could even be supportive and helpful, but he was also feared and it was well understood that one did not wish to get into his bad books. He was also noted for his extreme local particularism and lobbied (successfully) to have Rutherglen detached from Glasgow when the present Scottish local government system was created in the 1990s. He once responded to a complaint from an errant backbencher that he was 'just a Glasgow thug' by objecting as he was actually from Rutherglen.

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However, I would caution against using these in Scotland and Wales.

Labour branding has always been different in both (Labour's traditional colours in Wales are red and green, for instance), though, for whatever it's worth, the Union Flag is no more contentious in Wales than it is in England.

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What would 'Left' even mean in that sort of context? I mention this not to be a prick for the sake of it, but historically there would have been only one possible meaning for a party of the radical Left in Britain - advocacy of the nationalization of, at least, the Commanding Heights of the economy and a transition to a planned economy* - and that is not exactly what is being talked of here. Of course for such a party there is, of course, no longer even a small electoral market (that world is gone), but that's not the point.

_{*No, no, loosely worded resolutions about the public ownership of certain utilities and forms of public transport categorically do not count, especially not from people who otherwise show a strong attachment to the notion of private property rights.}

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Doug Hoyle (Lord Hoyle) MP for Nelson and Colne 1974(Oct)-79, Warrington 1981-83 and Warrington North 1983-1997 has died. He was ninety four and was the father of Sir Lindsay Hoyle, presently the Speaker of the House of Commons. He was an active and important member of the old ASTMS union in which he was a critical ally of Clive Jenkins. He twice defeated notable politicians to become an MP (David Waddington in October 1974, Roy Jenkins at the 1981 Warrington by-election) and was was one of the core group of Soft Left MPs who abstained on the second ballot of the 1981 Deputy Leadership contest, which allowed for Healey to narrowly ward off Benn's challenge. He chaired the PLP during the 1992-97 Parliament and was a government whip in the Lords during the first few years of the Blair government.

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Doug Hoyle (Lord Hoyle) MP for Nelson and Colne 1974(Oct)-79, Warrington 1981-83 and Warrington North 1983-1997 has died. He was ninety four and was the father of Sir Lindsay Hoyle, presently the Speaker of the House of Commons. He was an active and important member of the old ASTMS union in which he was a critical ally of Clive Jenkins. He twice defeated notable politicians to become an MP (David Waddington in October 1974, Roy Jenkins at the 1981 Warrington by-election) and was was one of the core group of Soft Left MPs who abstained on the second ballot of the 1981 Deputy Leadership contest, which allowed for Healey to narrowly ward off Benn's challenge. He chaired the PLP during the 1992-97 Parliament and was a government whip in the Lords during the first few years of the Blair government.

Excellently (and we've not had a high-profile incidence of this for years) there's some uncertainty as to his true age. Initial reports said ninety four, but most obituaries are now saying ninety eight. Most yearbooks and so on had always listed his year of birth as 1930, but apparently he was actually born in 1926.

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Anyway, do we know how many of the rest of the Thirty Seven are still alive? There's obviously Kinnock himself, of course.

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Well an actual list of the 37 might help there......

This was my subtle (hah) way of asking whether anyone had one haha.

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Ah, but the source is Joe Haines, thus caveat emptor.

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Question is: which prime minister would it be most shocking if it was revealed they had an affair? We know Truss, Boris, Blair, Major, Wilson, Eden, Churchill, Asquith and Lloyd George all at least have rumours of it. Macmillan stayed faithful but his wife had an affair.

Macmillan insisted in certain circles that, actually, he himself had a mistress in what always feels like a thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to balance the books (i.e. it isn't that his wife 'had an affair': she was Robert Boothby's* mistress from 1929 until she died in 1966...) even if it were true.

_{*Yes, that one.}

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Googling it seems like Ramsay MacDonald also cheated.

No, his wife died in her early forties in 1911 and his spent the rest of his life as an unattached Ladies Man (often in an unusually literal sense) rather than remarrying.

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Didn’t Foot have an affair? He seemed very unlikely to but equally he was a former journalist and

Yes. His wife got suspicious after she spotted him attempting to comb his hair and experiment with cologne.

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Reports David Marquand has passed.

Six months or so short of ninety. An interesting figure for all his faults and actually because of a few of them: he was a very open-minded man, and that comes with disadvantages as well as advantages, especially if one wishes to be a politician! Perhaps his biggest legacy will be writing his biography of MacDonald: it isn't an especially brilliant book, but the mere act of writing and having it published at all...

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Many deaths it appears. Frank Field (latterly Baron Field of Birkenhead) has died. Member of Parliament for Birkenhead 1979-2019 (resigned the Labour whip in 2019 and stood as an Independent in 2019) and a crossbench peer from 2020 until his death. Previously the Director of the Child Poverty Action Group (1969-79). He was an independent-minded man (with often rather idiosyncratic views) who famously struggled in his one experience as a minister, but he was an effective campaigning backbencher both in opposition and in government: it is probably fair to say that he never really adjusted his method of doing politics from his time at the CPAG. He might well have been a useful member of the Lords (oddballs often are) but never had the chance to show it as a previously diagnosed cancer became terminal not long after he joined it and he swiftly became too ill to contribute. He was eighty one.

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An interesting guy, even if he became somewhat annoying and just a bit crankish in his later years as an MP. Was also one of Labour's youngest candidates at the 1966 GE (South Bucks)

He must have been one of the youngest councillors in the country in 1964.

His battles with a local party that was at least Militant influenced became a cause celebre for some in the 1980s, though things became calmer once he saw off a final deselection attempt in 1991.

The circumstances of his selection were interesting and it's a little frustrating that it's hard to find detailed accounts anywhere. I have a distant memory of reading that he'd had a phone call out of the blue telling him that the seat was worth going for (and an even fuzzier recollection that this was near some sort of deadline?) though I can't recall who from - was it CPAG people in Merseyside who spotted an opportunity? Anyway, Dell's supporters in the CLP were clearly very keen to have another intellectual as their MP and that was that.

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As noted by me elsewhere, his (otherwise fairly comprehensive) Wikipedia entry doesn't mention the internal goings on in the 1980s that almost resulted in his deselection at all.

A major, and frankly pretty incomprehensible, omission.

Yes, it's frustrating (and, again, his obituaries are surprisingly light on all of this) especially as it clearly mattered a lot to him. His recently published memoirs - which are really loose discursive essays on particular themes: not a surprise as he won't have been well enough to do much more - show that clearly enough.