Regarding the possible candidates for the Labour leadership, I\u2019ve travelled so far down the nihilistic road to nowhere that I\u2019m afraid I judge politicians these days mostly in terms of how much entertainment they\u2019re likely to provide rather than having one iota of belief they\u2019ll make anything better.<\/p>\n
Who\u2019d be the most fun up against Kemi at PMQs? The obvious choice is Angela Rayner, but I fear that after her recent shenanigans and shamefacedness, as Glorious Leader she might be regrettably inclined to rein it in. Andy Burnham\u2019s got that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look which may well indicate horrid notions about \u2018healing\u2019 our multi-fractured body politic. Ed Miliband couldn\u2019t bitch his way out of a recyclable paper bag. So my money\u2019s on Wes Streeting, who in the words of Madeline Grant, \u2018gave Mrs Badenoch a hurt and sullen look \u2013\u00a0the sort one would imagine Joan Crawford shooting at an object on which she had stubbed her toe\u2019 when she had a poke at him the other day.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll rustle through Hansard like Russell Brand looking for his favourite bit in the Bible before you find Labour MPs coming out with such paradoxically sensible and seditious statements<\/p>\n
I have high hopes that under the right circumstances, Streeting might be a Flouncer, given his old threat on Twitter to push \u2018nasty people\u2019 (actually, reasonable people like Jan Moir and Geert Wilders) under trains. We haven\u2019t had a decent Labour Flouncer in the House for ages. For the Tories, Michael Heseltine is but a memory and at the moment Zia Yusuf of Reform is doing Flounce duties for all. Flouncers add immeasurably to the joy of political life, so I\u2019m always inclined to feel warmly towards them.<\/p>\n
Or maybe he\u2019s a Bouncer \u2013 resilient and chirpy, and able to move from one side of an argument to the other when he sees the error of his ways, like a jaunty pinball pinging onwards and upwards. He\u2019s a gay Christian, which indicates by its very nature \u2013 when you consider what scripture says about a man \u2018lying\u2019 with another male \u2013 an optimistic state of mind. He once mouthed the accepted inanities about trans but fell into disfavour last year with the monstrous regiment of fellows in frocks. Streeting met with and expressed sympathy for members of the Bayswater Support Group, an organisation composed of parents with \u2018trans\u2019 children who believe that their offspring are being unduly influenced and harmed by \u2018gender-affirming\u2019 care.<\/p>\n
Even better, in 2023 on Times Radio he apologised to the great Rosie Duffield regarding her treatment by the Labour party after she understandably complained of being shouted down and ostracised due to her sensible views on biological sex versus self-ID. Again he received an earful from the trans-lobby for doing so. Duffield told the Guardian: \u2018This topic\u2026 has proved more toxic than most and it\u2019s good to have the allyship of a colleague I respect who clearly wants to engage, listen to and understand Labour\u2019s feminist members and groups who have previously been ignored or no-platformed by the party.\u2019<\/p>\n
He said of his stand: \u2018I was inundated with women in the Labour party, including parliamentary colleagues, who I do not consider to be shrinking violets, who were basically saying: \u201cI\u2019m really glad you said this about having a better conversation, because I felt afraid about voicing my concerns\u201d. And I thought, if some of the strongest women I know are feeling silenced, we\u2019ve got a problem.\u2019<\/p>\n
This shouldn\u2019t be remarkable \u2013 but you\u2019ll rustle through Hansard with all the instant gratification of Russell Brand looking for his favourite bit in the Bible before you find Labour MPs coming out with such paradoxically sensible and seditious statements.<\/p>\n
Though some of my fellow populists see him as a captured and castrated creature, mouthing the weasel words of woke through a deceptively common-sense working-class filter, I do think that in a milieu of middle-class dullards it\u2019s\u00a0 refreshing to have a genuine son of the soil (raised by a single mother in a council flat, first of the family into further education) on the ballot who\u2019s not necessarily going to live in the left\u2019s pocket like Rayner.<\/p>\n
He is the opposite of Stephen Kinnock and his ilk who have created the sense that one might as well vote for the rich men of Reform as the nepo-babies of Labour. Labour MP family trees seem to consist of several generations of policy-wonks as far back as the eye can see. Streeting\u2019s ancestry has both sides of the historic Cockney tradition: ducking-and-diving and being poor-but-honest. His maternal grandfather was a career criminal connected to the Krays, leading his maternal grandmother to share a cell at HMS Holloway with Christine Keeler. His paternal grandfather served in the Royal Navy and became a civil engineer. Streeting says of him, \u2018He was the grandad I was closest to \u2013 a traditional working-class Tory.\u2019 It\u2019s an echo of the latter, perhaps, who we hear in Streeting\u2019s down-to-earth statements such as that he wants the NHS to stop \u2018being right on and doing daft things \u2013 well-meaning things \u2013 in the name of diversity and inclusion.\u2019<\/p>\n
Though he\u2019s hardly toiled at the coalface of post-industrial Britain, you couldn\u2019t say he\u2019s had a soft life. Beaten up at school for being camp, coming through cancer, he can, as the late Rachel Cooke wrote while reviewing his memoir, \u2018pull off the very rare trick of being both a little bit boring and unexpectedly fascinating.\u2019<\/p>\n
He has a self-mocking edge which is rare in modern politics: \u2018I won a book token in a school competition and bought a collection of speeches by Tony Blair and read it on the coach to and from games. I mean, what sort of kid reads Tony Blair\u2019s speeches on the bus? I was asking for it really.\u2019<\/p>\n
His Mandelson links are bound to get dragged up again, of course, with the former spin doctor hovering over political proceedings like an albatross with an unusual interest in Farrow & Ball paint charts. But Streeting\u2019s other issue is that people think of him as inexperienced \u2013 and he looks it, what with that chubby little Mabel Lucie Attwell face. He really did resemble an angry sixth-former, pulled up at the school debating society by a proper politician, when Mrs Badenoch was mocking him this week.<\/p>\n
For voters still keen to get the grown-ups back in the room, this might put them off. But I think that\u2019s a lost cause now anyway; the country\u2019s going to hell in a handcart, with so many cock-ups on the way that it sometimes feels that we\u2019re engaged in a giant game of Mouse Trap. No, give me a likely lad of the people doing his damnedest to keep his cool (but always on the brink of blowing up) \u2013 that\u2019s all I want from my political pin-ups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Regarding the possible candidates for the Labour leadership, I\u2019ve travelled so far down the nihilistic road to nowhere…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-676511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}