Labour has never enjoyed a wider field of candidates for leader – but there are problems ahead

From Rebecca Long Bailey and Ian Lavery possibly splitting the leftist vote, to the fact nobody has yet captured the public’s imagination – this leadership election will not be simple

Monday 30 December 2019 20:01 GMT
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Rebecca Long Bailey is veering too far from Corbynite orthodoxy for some
Rebecca Long Bailey is veering too far from Corbynite orthodoxy for some

Many men (though, as yet, no women) have led Britain’s Labour Party. They varied a good deal in their background and personalities. Some were educated at public schools and Oxford (Blair, Gaitskell); some left school in their teens (MacDonald, Callaghan); they came from Scotland (Brown, Smith), Wales (Kinnock) the north (Wilson) and the south (Attlee, Corbyn, Lansbury, Miliband). They emerged from every class, bar the aristocracy.

Some were more successful than others (only three managed to win a Commons majority), but they and their beliefs were not defined solely, or even principally, by whence they came or which boxes they ticked. That is not what politics is all about.

One of the few signs of hope in the Labour leadership election is that the early demands that the next leader has to be female, or have a northern accent or be working class or all three, has faded. (The fact that the man who won the 2019 election has the background he has and went to Eton might have helped quash that argument). Labour has started to look instead at the ideas, the policies and the techniques that failed so miserably only a few weeks ago. That’s progress.

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