If there is one good thing to come from Corbyn’s exit, it has been the utter failure of Jess Phillips to make any sort of dent in the leadership running.
This is Jess Phillips, remember, brought on to “speak for Labour” near continuously when the Get Corbyn project was active. Jess Phillips, bigged up by the papers as a future Labour leader.
Reality bites my friends.
Keir Starmer has just got the USDAW nomination, which means Jess ain’t. She is now relying on the goodwill of the Labour members she has spent four years trashing to have a hope of staying in the race.
I had to laugh yesterday when, after slagging off the format for the leadership hustings, presumably she wants the leadership to be contested on Loose Women, she told us all that she is no longer going to be “statesmanlike” and will in future just speak her mind. Statesmanlike? FFS, talk about deluded! She is the Labour Party version of Jo Swinson, her ego is twice the size of her intellect. She has spent the past four years slagging off the party in the Tory press, for money, acting like an independent MP, sort of the Jess Phillips Party. When did you last hear her supporting Labour Party policies? She wants to lead a party she has never fully associated herself with, spending the last four years doing everything she can to undermine the Party’s chances with the electorate.
There is a clip doing the rounds of her performance in the small hours of election night on Channel 4, laughing when she thought the camera wasn’t on. When Krishnan Guru-Murthy said she was on she instantly pretended to be distraught, deploying her whole range of phony emotions, rounding off with her classic bottom lip quivering and pretending to fight back the tears bollocks. She is a nasty, treacherous gobshite, who can forget her remark about stabbing Corbyn in the front, coming after her “great friend” Jo Cox was stabbed to death, her proud boast that she had told the most maligned female MP, Dianne Abbott to ‘fuck off’, then paraded herself around TV studios to brag about it like it was a badge of honour?One of the leading participants in the Anti-Semite smear campaign orchestrated by the LFI via the Israeli Embassy. Her friendship with possibly the most extremist right wing Tory in the HOC, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Her regular attendance at Rupert Murdoch’s dinner party’s at his penthouse in Mayfair, her lucrative paid stipend by the Barclay Brothers at the right wing Spectator. The list of reasons why she shouldn’t be anywhere near the Labour Party is endless. Getting her arse handed to her in the leadership campaign would be the only ray of light in the current troubled times of the Labour Party.
PS; If she needs a testimonial she knows where to come!
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Contrary to what the British media might have wanted to make her, it turns out she has no popular appeal whatsoever.
Couldn’t get a union to back her. Couldn’t get a single CLP nomination.
I just hope she doesn’t take it all out on Mr Phillips.
So, I like Thornberry due to her association with keeping Fabric in London open, but apart from that she’s a bang average politician.
As I (unfortunately for this country) predicted when Corbyn won his vote of no confidence in 2016, we now have Boris as PM with a majority government (3 months earlier than my 2020 prediction, due to the way the elections fell), and will now have Keir Starmer, a credible opposition leader, thank fuck, as Labour leader.
That is unless the crazy’s get their hands on the Labour Party again and go Nandy…
If by “credible opposition leader”, you mean someone likely to oust the government, then Starmer isn’t it. The Tories would welcome the prospect with glee, as most their campaign material will once again be written by the opposition.
All of those choices are fairly uninspiring. The most credible, as judged by the yardstick I set out, is Lisa Nandy.
Emily Thornberry sneers at the Union Flag while wearing clothing which is essentially a giant EU flag. Starmer will instantly be dismissed by the Leave part of the vote, just like his disastrous Brexit policy. Long-Bailey has got the backing of the left, but not my daughter’s boyfriend, who has seen her up close and personal at Labour events and says she treats people like shit.
Yes, she did, and that is unfortunate from a party point of view.
I’m purely thinking about what happens in the run up to an election, and whether the public are going to like the person in charge.
The Tories will hang Starmer out to dry with his Brexit form and say he can’t be trusted not to plunge us back into the EU, or some binding arrangement with the EU.
Long-Bailey’s 10/10 rating for Corbyn will get her support among the party faithful, but again, uncritical support for Jeremy Corbyn will be used to bash her in the election, and she’ll get every taint that ever took on him.
If Labour is to win an election, it’ll be because people feel they can vote for the leader. Nandy did alright on the Andrew Neil Show, has been praised this week for putting Piers in his place with decidedly non-political language.
Plus whatever people might say, the way a politician looks on TV is important. There was the famous case of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate in the 1961 race. Nixon was declared the winner by those that listened on the radio, while Kennedy won the TV audience.
Most likely person to have a chance …unfortunately Boris is a fucking tour de force when it comes to conning people. All I want is something that will make the Tories have to think about what they’re doing.
Personally, I’m all out on the Tories now anyway - I was close when I left here but now I’m totally out and with the LDs - but there seems to be a massive dearth in talent on all sides of the divide.
Far from hanging Starmer out to dry i suspect he would be the one the Tories fear most. Whoever wins they will face a hatchet job from the media, the Mail have already started on Starmer. A big spread earlier in the week about Keir Starmer being a “Trot” in his younger days, dragging up all sorts of irrelevant bile. So they are clearly worried. There won’t be another election for at least four years so nobody knows how his stance on Brexit will go down, it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Brexit will prove to be very unpopular when it starts to kick in and the lies and promises made start to unravel. He has actually said that the December election “blew away” the arguments for a second referendum, and the country must move on from it’s divide. His ‘Brexit form’ may well prove to be an asset when reality kicks in, and the penny drops with all the new Conservative Party converts and they see Polish, Bulgarians etc, who man our care homes and clean our hospitals, and pick our fruit and vegetables being replaced by ex Commonwealth brown and black skinned people. Boy are they in for a shock!
Labour isn’t necessarily doomed, all it needs to do is take a leaf out of the Conservative-Britain First Party book.
Embrace xenophobia and racial discrimination and those voters in northern towns will come flocking back. It isn’t rocket science! (Sarcasm alert).
(Sarcasm alert).