The famous five and the mystery of the Psychic Octopus

A scots friend recently shared with me an excellent joke:

When asked whether Paul the Psychic Octopus could predict the result of the Labour leadership election, he replied "Predict it?! He could win it!".

This is absolutely true.



Above: How much would this picture be improved by an Octopus?

All of the candidates (apart from Diane Abbott) are absolutely awful. And none of them are psychic.

They are all creatures of the Blair years - in Abbott's words "all male, all white, all former policy wonks". The Labour party - the self-proclaimed party of the working class, the immigrant, the woman, the left - has rolled up the representation of all of its core constituencies into one ultra-token candidate: Abbott.

For a party obsessed with "fairness for all", they struggled to get someone representative and likeable on to the ballot. Even the champion of feminism, Harriet Harman, who nominated Abbott, is on record as saying she will not vote for her. Ironically, Abbott is the only one who could command mainstream support from the country, but the least likely to win within the Labour party. None of the other candidates is capable of attracting support from anyone who isn't a tribal Labour voter. None of them are credible candidates for PM.

There's also some irony in a field of candidates for the party which espouses "class war", having the most 'Ghetto' amongst them singled out by the fact that he studied English at Cambridge rather than PPE at Oxford.

That said, graduates of the Cambridge English department assure me it is "Well Ghetto".

Labour party members (not to mention the electorate) were all crying out for fresh thinking, but the four main candidates are well placed to deliver only one thing - more of the same.

Not one of them has broken free of the shackles of New Labour. Unsurprising, considering this is the first Labour leadership contest in 16 years - New Labour made these men as surely as it will now break them. Part of the reason this campaign resembles a dismal election for President of a Students Union is because of the intellectual straightjacket that Blair & Brown imposed - these people are conditioned to be minor figures. Medium sized fish in a big pond.

Balls

For Ed Balls probably (the individual mostly closely associated with the fag end of the Brown government), dumping the past was his most crucial task.

But he cannot help but be compared with Brown while he continues to defend the legacy the Brown (not Blair) government. When his strongest criticism of Brown is the unspecfic "Gordon didn't get everything right by any means and in the end he couldn't be the leader that people wanted" - it's hardly a differentiating, ringing admission of the were huge problems that culminated in an electoral defeat, is it?

When he goes on to say "what he [Gordon] did manage to do was get the Labour party to have confidence in itself, its values, its beliefs, its unity ", you can't help but see the lack of reality that bedevilled Brown.

How can he say that the dissent riddled Brown government, lurching from PR crisis to real, nightmarish, impoverishing crisis - to coup, after coup, after coup had confidence in itself? In its beliefs? In unity? It sounds very much like His Master's Voice.

Balls looks, acts and sounds like a bully. It is his reputation to such an extent that even Guardian articles begin by noting his tendency towards menace.

It's public knowledge that he has inherited the monstrous Brown negative spin machine, as personified by his chief backer, Charlie Whelan. Darker rumours suggest it was threats from this muck-raking smear bazooka that convinced left-winger John Cruddas not to stand. In the light of this, Balls reaching for the mantle of a centrist, peace-making leader is met with absolute derision.

By the way, having your thugs intimidate people doesn't help with the whole "perceived as a bully" thing, by the way, Ed.

Balls also isn't helped by the sentiment within the Labour party that his infinitely more talented wife should have stood in his stead, but he prevented her from doing so. Yes, it's true - Ed Balls is not even the best potential leader of the Labour party in his own bed.

Milliband the younger

The other Ed, Milliband, is doing his best to run the worst campaign in the history of the world. As a candidate bedevilled by accusations of nepotism, his first act was to hire Neil Kinnock's daughter as his head of campaign events. Is his slogan "Labour:Keeping it in the family since 1983"?

He's also hired useless press officer Ken Young to head his campaign. Young is famously one of the worst PRs in the world - a stock joke in the business - once wonderfully described as "omnishambolic" during his tenure as Brown's head of "gaffe monitoring and prevention.

Yes, he was head of gaffe prevention for Gordon Brown. Needless to say, he is unlikely to win any awards from PR Week for that role. He was behind everything from that youtube video on the expenses crisis to the election blowing Rochdale gaffe. Malcolm Tucker, he is not.

Still, unlike the mercenary Tucker, he's been hired because he is a Labour ultra-loyalist rather than for his competence. Notoriously, Young openly tells people that he styled his hair on Gordon Brown’s while chairman of Labour Students. It really takes class to stand out among Labour student activists as a massive loser.

Aside from the image of the campaign, and inept hires of useless staff, Milliband the younger has constantly missed open goals when offered them, with his constant unwillingness to commit to actually saying anything.

On Gay Marriage: "As someone who is liberal on social issues, I will listen to what people have to say on going further if there is a demand". What does that mean? Nothing. Analyse it - if there is a demand, I will listen to people. How is THAT radical? If people say things, I will listen to them. That isn't a political pledge, it's a basic social skill.

On Civil Liberties: "I accept that in government we were too draconian on some aspects of our civil liberties" Specifics? No. Where's the vision, Ed?

On Iraq: "As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam's threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed. The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it... History will judge the outcomes for Iraq and that is important, but I think it is just clear to me because we went to war on a particular basis and when that basis turned out not to be correct even apart from the people that were against the war in the first place, that caused a big loss of trust for us: what I am not saying is that the war was undertaken for the wrong motives but what I am very clear about is what my position was at the time and the way I look at it in retrospect."


I've read that statement about 20 times, and I still have no idea what it means. There are too many caveats for it to say anything. Oh, and as for charisma? Winston Chruchill, he is not. Christ, Ken Livingston he is not.

To win the Labour leadership and then the country, a Labour leadership candidate needs to have the balls to stand up and say "We were wrong on Civil Liberties. We were wrong on Iraq." He or she needs to be unequivocal on issues, rather than running scared from the Daily Mail hate brigade. That is how to win back the five million voters who have deserted Labour since 1997.

On Policy, he is a disaster. Ed Miliband has ditched Labour's manifesto commitment to a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, and has hinted he would prefer a 50:50 split. He hinted. In a campaign to be leader of the opposition. Wow. Bold.

This also means he is dumping the the manifesto that he himself wrote two months ago. Intellectually consistent.

Who? Oh, that other one who isn't a Milliband

Andy Burnham is a non-candidate. His campaign, masterminded by the unlikely combination of the former head of the Freight transport association (that's the Trucker vote in the bag!) and invincible poison dwarf Hazel Blears, consists of repeated assertions of the blandest nature. My favourite, when asked about Andy's vision, Blears responded "Andy [Burnham] believes in fairness". Who doesn't believe in fairness? (1) I mean really?

As for vision, get this from Burnham: "I can give the Labour Party something the Tories don't have: a leader that people can relate to . . . a people person." Well, that's a big idea, isn't it! As a Tory, I am literally quaking in my boots.

You know, I don't think I would mind a field of all Oxbridge candidates so much if they had a single original, intelligent idea between them. They are all well-educated, intelligent people... but the best they can do is "I am a people person".

The Front-runner - David Milliband

The final and most likely candidate for the Labour Leadership is David Milliband.

But the Tories & Jack Straw have planted a massive bomb under his candidacy. As foreign secretary, Milliband consistently denied to Parliament that rendition occurred, yet, curiously, denied a public enquiry into the matter. After having his attempted cover up been defeated in the Court of Appeal - Miliband even had the front to welcome the decision - it was established beyond doubt that the UK knew that Binyam Mohammed was being tortured by the USA.

The truth about the government's complicity in torture is becoming established beyond doubt. David Cameron has announced there will be an inquiry into British (read:Labour) government complicity in torture. According to the first tranche of government documents released yesterday, there was an overarching, ministerially approved policy to use intelligence from torture, which continued under Milliband's tenure.

The contents of these documents are truly shocking - for example, Jack Straw having been directly complicit in individuals being boiled to death in Uzbekistan. Milliband was responsible for the attempt cover up of this; the redactions of these documents and the repeated smearings of Craig Murray were carried out on his instructions.

The cynical would argue the Tory-ordered inquiry is just political point scoring - indeed, one can't help but feel it's convenient that the enquiry will start calling people just before the Labour leadership election goes to the polls. Maybe it is.

But the truth is, Milliband is the only person still standing in the Labour party with direct responsibility for the greatest shame of the Blair/Brown years - the brutal torture of hundreds of people. Milliband has said "we didn't lose the 2010 election on Iraq" - but if he's selected, (assuming he doesn't join Jack Straw on trial), then the stink of Iraq will be something Labour guarantees to carry into the 2015 election.

In short, as a Tory, I think anyone but Abbott (or Paul the Octopus) will be a positive benefit for the Tories. But oddly, I'm not happy about that.

For this week's recipe, in honour of the possibly socialist psi-horror, I've gone for Paul's favourite, Mussels...

1.) Sepp Blatter.