Charles Clarke attacks Labour leadership (again)

Funny you should say that….I know I might sound a bid paranoid but I can’t help wondering if he is acting as a warm-up act for David Miliband.

That bit about “We need to have a clear narrative of what we did right and what we did wrong. ”

Sounds a bit like DMs speech about a fortnight ago. Coincidence?. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

It has to be said very few leaders and those near the top (I can imagine Charlie shambling round bus stops in rural Norfolk saying to anyone who’ll listen “I used to be home secretary, you know”) really manage to bow out gracefully. Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and John Major are about the only ones to have only spoken when they have been spoken to, and then never in a flagrant way.

We all take the mickey out of John Major, but what I did admire about him was that on May 2nd 1997 he just said “when the curtain falls, it’s time to the leave the stage” and then went off to a cricket match. He may have been a poor PM but at least that showed a bit of class. If Charlie couldn’t persuade his own flock in Norfolk in 2010 how can he possibly believe he could have persuaded the country?

Wilson said in Interviews after he retired, that He was A huge thatcher fan ,cearing up the mistake he made with the Unions, and He begged Shirley williams not to leave in Febraury 1981, (a month before Rodgers and Owen had discussed the Plan for the SDP) Callaghan said in A interview on the eve of the ’83 election that these policies weren’t Neccesarily his own) Callaghan also went on to the Stage of the Labour ’83 conference to be booed by most people before he’d said A word to say ‘Look what you’ve done, All you do is tell other people what policies you want us to have ,without consulting us , You’ve lost us millions and Millions of votes” Callaghan Also relfected in 92 and 97 on the Mess his generation ahd made of running the Labour party resulting in 2 consecutive lections Where laobur got less than 30% of the voteChalres clarke on becoming Home secretary was A defender of the Human rights act, something his preducessor David Blunkett wanted to get rid of as Blunkett had brought in so many half baked ideas that had been proved Illegal by the HRA, Clarke admitted that the Home office was In such A state that it would need 5 years to sort out, Unfortunately, as 700 of the 1000 foreign prsioners who were relased without being deported had already been released during Blunketts time, clarke had to go, At least he fell on his sword for the mistake of the foriegn prisoners, HAS Gordon browns staff at No 11 downing street, Ed balls and ed miliband admitted that they should take some responsibility for the economy.regarding the Attlee domment, Attlee realsed he sohuld have gone 4 years earlier than he did in 1955, and that he was keen to oust Bevan earlier than he did, Attlee was A keen endorser of gaitskell and hole heartedly supprted Gaistkells reforms to weed out epople who admitted that the Attlee government had made mistake in getting spending out of control in 1949 and that they’d ran out of idea by 1948, So maybe Clarke should endorse someone like Attlee who admits that we got the economy wrong and that the 2010 manifesto was without ideas and that we should accept that we have to have ideas to be a future governemnt not just criticse the Current lot as we don’t like the cuts, and that some of the Ideas Clarke had Like the police mergers shouldn’t have been dropped.

Really? You prefer it that someone from the 0position won a Labour seat?

Very democratic, your instructions for people to keep their mouths shut.  Presumably, you’ll keep doing so until only the Mike Homfray-approved list of politicians remains approved of to say anything?

Quite the Liverpudlian Gauleiter, it seems.  Except your power is only in your keyboard, and real life keeps on going, relentlessly ignoring you.  I’m glad of it.

Why was he a failure as Home sec, he cleared up Blunkett’s mistakes, it wasn’t A safe labour seat, it was tory up to 1997 and he lost by 300 votes ,because he couldn’t guarantee not viting to get rid of tuition fees ,the way the libDems winner did, and look what happened when the election was over the libdems went back on their word. i recall the by election for Ian gibsons seat down the road, there were alot of labour votes going to the greens, and the Libdems were ploughing a fortune into it, Becasue gordon didn’t like Clarke Labour didn’t spend much money there, everyones after that seat as a potential winner next time, why shouldn’t clarke express his views he had year of standing by Neil kinnock when people were oppsoing kinnocks work to maek Labour electable, both the Tory press and the far left of the Laobur party, if he done all that work for Kinnock to get laobur elected, Why shouldn’t he not want to see laobur swing so far to the left at the moment that the’yre not going to win the next election as people see this as goiong bacvk to unelectable old Labour. He laso voted aginst trident renewal so as Kinnocks right hand man he’s hardly a blairite.

”
for being impressed by and liking James Purnell.”

William, I  am genuinely interested in why?. This was the man who resigned his ministerial job on the evening of the 2009 EU elections, three hours before the polls closed in what was generally assumed to be the impression that David Miliband was about to mount a leadership challenge. So disloyalty and personal advantage (or what he THOUGHT would be his advantage) are well to the fore in his make-up

And that ministerial job – the one where he was dragooning Freud’s welfare reform policy through the HoC AFTER Freud had decamped to the Tories – the reliance on ATOS, paid by results meaning that terminally ill people were being turned down for benefits. The man who bought extra suffering to people who were so ill. 

Purnell the man who claimed full food allowance and putting in false claims for cleaning that was never done, at the same time as he was complaining about “benefit claimants playing the system”, happily playing the system himself as if there were no tomorrow.

What is there to like about a hypocrite and scrounger like him?