‘Bureaucrats or talent scouts?’

Is anybody else annoyed at our milquetoast deputy leadership race or am I just looking for trouble? 

The two candidates who got enough MP nominations, Lucy Powell and Bridget Philipson, are recent or current members of the Cabinet and when they speak you can feel the invisible hand of No10 on their shoulder. 

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Lucy Powell, by necessity the “anti-establishment” choice, gave her first interview to Nick Robinson this week in which she claimed in the mildest terms that she stood up to Keir Starmer during cabinet meetings. When challenged by Robinson (who was briefed that she had been just as compliant as everyone else) she quickly backed off, framing her objections as part of her job as leader of the House, and that she communicated those in private, not around the cabinet table. She ended her answer re-iterating her loyalty to Keir and how she is not planning to be a rabble-rouser. 

Bridget Phillipson on the other hand, anointed and tainted at the same time by No10, is struggling to reach non-sycophants and incite the warm response once common in British politics to her identity based claim to power. “I am a proud working-class woman from the north-east. I have come from a single parent family on a tough council street!”

“What is a council street???” One Labour member asked innocently (the usual phrase would be council house or estate). If I had to guess, I would say she wanted to make clear she came from a neighbourhood that was “tough”.

Let me tell you not one thing that comes out of Nigel Farage’s mouth requires this kind of explanation, or gives the sense that being seen to be as underprivileged as possible warrants the extra breaths.

It would be fair to say that some of this is sour grapes on my part. My former boss, Emily Thornberry, failed to receive the needed nominations to get through, and like many a political animal I am often blinded by my loyalty to those who’ve helped me. 

But I would be lying if I didn’t say that I have been listening to Lucy’s interviews and reading Bridget’s OpEd’s and thinking ‘Emily would not have hesitated here, cracked a joke there, and why not, even offered a smile towards the end’. Alas, I was told it is not fair to have another London lawyer, we need a Northern MP. I wonder if Reform is having similar soul searching moments with its current leader, being as he is a public school boy from the South. 

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Mythologised control freakery

I don’t think Lucy or Bridget are not showing personality or strong political compass because they are lacking either.  But I do believe their discipline in hiding them played a part in both of them being given roles in government when Labour won last July. 

There is no point trying to combat this claim. Labour activists and future MP hopefuls feel this in their bones. They tell me and others all the time when we encourage them to stand. The neurotic control freakery of who is let through has been mythologised since the Blair years. But while Mandelson et al. were known to ruthlessly filter out the left, our current party make up is seen to extend its aversion to anybody with a pulse. In the age of Farage and Trump, this is political self-harm. 

No sign of life

You see this most strongly in the new crop of MPs and the ambitious Labour adjacent zoomers making their ways into the corridors of power in bag carrier positions. Their social media are the sites of nuclear catastrophe, barren with no sign of life. I see some joining Substack- an online publishing platform whose whole raison d’être is independent thought, free of tyrannical editors- but the mere idea of some undefined Labour party apparatchik  haunts them even here, making their expression sound stilted and frankly, fake. 

People pin this atmosphere of fear on Blair’s legacy for message control but I disagree. As Steve Richards reminds us in his recent book, Blair was too confident a leader to care about the minutiae our current media ecosystem amplifies. Blair’s biggest strength was his ability to make big, expansive statements even when speaking about small policy adjustments. 

There is no training ground for current and aspiring Labour MPs to grow their confidence in political communication fit for the 21st century. The media ecosystem is ruthless enough on its own, in the form of endless trolling comments and DMs which are familiar to any fellow political commentator who graces the screens of GB News and other similar platforms that now have a majority Labour voting audience. 

Bureaucrats or talent scouts

But they have to add into their calculations the danger of being disparaged by their own party, which still looks like it is assessing candidates’ suitability like petty bureaucrats rather than talent scouts. 

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What is the difference between the two? The scout catches a glimpse of raw natural talent and offers to coach it into greatness. A scout advises on how to clean up one’s act and gives access to resources. The bureaucrat on the other hand takes out his checklist and red pen and looks for mistakes and gaps. 

The scout looks for ways to promote. The bureaucrat looks for reasons to block. 

So, Labour, which one are we when we are looking for a deputy leader? 

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