Shadow Cabinet hopefuls
The interregnum is nearly over. Labour will soon have a new leader - and shortly after the winner is announced, Labour MPs will elect the team of top spokespeople to surround their new boss - their Shadow Cabinet. In Government, cabinet jobs lie in the gift of a Labour Prime Minister; in opposition, Labour MPs elect those who sit at the party's top table, and an incoming Labour Prime Minister has to put the Shadow Cabinet in his first Cabinet - although like Tony Blair, they can dispense with unwelcome squatters pretty rapidly. This time, the result of the election could propel some unfamiliar faces into the top team.
"I've yet to meet any man in the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) who isn't running," grumbled one woman Labour MP. "There are going to be some very strange results...." Around 50 MPs are vying for places, including some rather surprising names. And the general expectation is that some big changes will result.
The maths backs up that view. Three seats on the Shadow Cabinet are directly elected. The Leader and Deputy Leader by the whole Party via their electoral college mechanism (with Harriet Harman staying in place, there's no vacancy and hence no election under way for the deputy's job) and the Chief Whip - for the first time - is directly elected by MPs, rather than being chosen by the Leader from the ranks of those elected to the Shadow Cabinet - and more of this significant change in a moment.
So that leaves 19 places to be decided in what promises to be an exhaustive AV ballot process.... Including six places reserved for women. And in the 21st century Labour Party, the old practice of different factions endorsing slates of candidates seems pretty much dead. Instead the candidates are relying on old-fashioned methods like canvassing and trying to impress in the Chamber. Campaigning was pretty visible at Business Questions this Thursday, where a number of aspirants put in tub-thumping performances. (Tom Harris, Maria Eagle, Mary Creagh, Caroline Flint, Kevin Brennan, and Chris Leslie all popped up while I was watching, and all were armed with carefully-honed soundbites...)
Many may win elevation, often at the expense of eminent former secretaries of state. Some of the grandees of the New Labour decade are now contemplating an abrupt return to the back-benches. Why? Well it's partly generational. Even with stalwarts like Jack Straw and Alistair Darling standing down, a lot of younger, middle ranking ex-ministers believe their time has come. There's also a strong feeling that the present top table includes too many factional holdovers from the Blair-Brown years - and that they're about to be culled, because their factions won't be able to muster enough votes to keep them all in.
Particularly intriguing will be the vote for Labour Chief Whip. In the past the Leader appointed the Chief from within the Shadow Cabinet. But the Parliamentary Party has now voted for direct elections; the prisoners one Labour MP remarked, will choose their governor. The current Chief Whip, Nick Brown, is running. So is Jim Fitzpatrick... and backbenchers murmur that others like the current Shadow Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, and even the Shadow Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy might join the race. The thinking behind direct elections is that a Chief Whip has to be able to speak truth to power and dispense unwelcome news about what the troops are prepared to put up with. But Labour MPs with long memories are worried about the idea of the Chief having a separate power base from the Leader. They recall the unhappy experience of Michael Foot, who inherited his Chief Whip, Michael Cocks, from Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. The two did not get on, and their frosty relations helped deepen the factionalism which plagued Labour in that era. "The PLP wouln't wear it, if they were at each other's throats," one Labour MP assured me - but it hasn't always been a check on faction-fighting, even in more recent history.
Incidentally, a glance at Labour's last set of Shadow Cabinet elections, way back in 1996, is interesting from a number of points of view. Few of the Cabinet titans of the subsequent 13 years in power were close to the top of the poll -- Gordon Brown was 14th and Jack Straw 13th and David Blunkett 17th, comfortably outpolled by those outside the new Labour elite such as Michael Meacher, Clare Short and Gavin Strang - with Margaret Beckett topping the poll followed by Ann Taylor . There's a moral in there somewhere.....
UPDATE: The excellent Labour List https://www.labourlist.org/ site give their summary of known candidates so far: Diane Abbott, Douglas Alexander, William Bain, Ed Balls, Hilary Benn, Ben Bradshaw, Andy Burnham, Roberta Blackman-Woods, Liam Byrne, Kevin Brennan, Chris Bryant, Vernon Coaker, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Wayne David, Geraint Davies, John Denham, Jack Dromey, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Caroline Flint, Barry Gardiner, Paul Goggins, Helen Goodman, Peter Hain, David Hanson, Tom Harris, John Healey, Meg Hillier, Huw Irranca-Davies, Alan Johnson, Kevan Jones, Tessa Jowell, Barbara Keely, David Lammy, Chris Leslie, Ivan Lewis, Ian Lucas, Sadiq Khan, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Jim Murphy, Andy Slaughter, Gerry Sutcliffe, Gareth Thomas, Emily Thornberry, Stephen Timms, Stephen Twigg, Rosie Winterton.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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