Events | 2009.04.16
John Harris on Damian McBride and an image change for Labour
It\'s not just the email smear debacle. Talk of a stitch-up in candidate selection adds to a sense the party is out of touch
As the Damian McBride story refuses to die down, no end of angles present themselves. Just in time for this week\'s release of his new film In the Loop, along comes Armando Iannucci, suggesting that one of his scripts for The Thick of It came close to predicting the whole thing. Out go the letters from Gordon Brown - "personal" and handwritten - that only compound the sense of danger. The Tories scent the blood of the junior minister and Downing Street online specialist Tom Watson. But in the midst of it all, we\'re in danger of losing not only the essentials of the plot, but what they say about the disjunction between where politics has to go, and the impasse in which too many people would like to keep it.
The basics go something like this. High-ups in the Labour party watched as online politics flared into life, and wondered why it was the political right who were making most of the running. As the Tory blogger Tim Montgomerie argued in these pages yesterday, they thus made plans that ignored the key reason why some of us spend far too much time reading even the most arcane political blogs: their independence. Derek Draper\'s LabourList website flags itself up as an "independent grassroots e-network", but he is too close to the government to truly walk the walk; the planned Red Rag site was predicated not only on the daft idea that people would give credence to online gossip authored in Downing Street, but McBride would somehow get away with it.
The underlying mistake was obvious: the idea that you could somehow square the essentially pluralistic, chaotic online culture with a modus operandi still stuck somewhere between Lenin and Mayor Daley. The two simply don\'t fit: thanks to the web, the political world is changing beyond recognition, and the tireless zealots who populate the online world increasingly make old-fashioned fixes very difficult indeed.
This Saturday, a rather different controversy will reach its denouement. If the McBride story is about Brownites, this one is partly focused on veteran Blairites - though it also points up how fragile the old politics is becoming. In the safe south London seat of Erith and Thamesmead, Labour members will meet to select the replacement for the outgoing MP John Austin, though a large number will have already voted by post. Among an all-female field of eight is a much-tipped young woman called Georgia Gould, whose candidacy - as often happens with people favoured by senior Labour figures - has benefited from sumptuous campaign materials and high-profile endorsements. If the McBride mess highlights some of New Labour\'s most ugly aspects, this little tale suggests something slightly more pantomimic - though, in its own way, just as worrying.
Gould is 22. Her father is Philip Gould, the pollster who can count himself as one of New Labour\'s founders. Straight out of Oxford and currently a postgrad student at the LSE, her wafer-thin CV includes some work on Barack Obama\'s election campaign, and a part-time job at Tony Blair\'s Faith Foundation. Among those who have endorsed her are Tessa Jowell, and Margaret McDonagh, the ex-Labour party general secretary who now co-runs a PR consultancy firm called BBM, which specialises in political communication at the constituency level. According to Alastair Campbell, Gould is "a wonderful young woman of deep values and convictions, and whose dedication to Labour and progressive causes matches that of anyone I know".
Unfortunately, there are some odorous clouds hanging over Gould\'s campaign. For some reason, more than a third of local party members have decided to vote by post. The selection process has been snatched away from the control of the local Labour set-up, and placed in the control of party HQ. It is one of the more convenient results of Labour\'s hollowing-out that to become a parliamentary candidate in even a traditional stronghold, you need only face an ever-smaller selectorate - in Erith and Thamesmead, it numbers 279 people. Hence phone calls and visits, and at least one alleged occasion when the business of registering a vote in absentia seems to have been all but appropriated by people supporting her candidacy.
Trying to speak to any Labour people in the constituency highlights an apparent lockdown. My attempts yesterday to talk to Gould came to grief - she claimed that the Labour party\'s code of conduct prevents selection candidates speaking to the press (which turned out to be wide of the mark: the only ban is on "disparaging any other aspiring candidate"). Nonetheless, Tribune, the left-aligned weekly, has been energetically pursuing the story, and recently ran the tale of a local party member, called on by two young visitors. "They had a postal vote application form filled in with my name, address and phone number, and even a reason for me not being able to vote in person," she said. "As they were leaving they revealed that they were supporters of Georgia Gould."
This is not the place to unpick such allegations, though while we\'re here, it\'s worth noting that concerns about postal votes have also swirled around at least one other recent Labour selection contest. But even if they are misplaced, that doesn\'t detract from the Erith and Thamesmead story - and, more important, what the big guns hovering just behind it say about New Labour\'s lack of feeling for the public mood.
In the midst of weekly outrage about emails, expenses, jobs for MPs\' spouses and the like, the cliched idea that politicians are an inward-looking, nepotistic lot is curdling into rising public anger (yesterday, one columnist warned of the public thinking politicians are "a bunch of bastards", which just about nailed it). Murmurings about an old-fashioned stitch-up will now ignite chatter that cannot be contained: when I was researching the Erith and Thamesmead story, for example, my first port of call was a very enlightening thread on the website Labourhome.
To bring all this into focus, it might be instructive to cite my favourite New Labour quote of late, offered to executives at RBS by Peter Mandelson when the size of their prospective bonuses was jangling the government\'s nerves. In that setting, it sounded pathetic, but in south London this Saturday it may have a bit more force. It is only seven words, but in terms of the distance between Labour\'s fixers and apparatchiks and a fast-changing world, they say it all: "Please be mindful about how this looks."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]n-mcbride-georgia-gould-labour
