I’ve been off for a bit and maybe, probably, definitely, picked the wrong week to come back.
Thanks, though, to all the people who covered this column and to lots of you for the many nice messages.
I won’t bore you with details. I always think other people’s illness is something you don’t really want to hear about – like other people’s holidays, bolognese recipes, or kids. Nice to be back.
Quite a week. I could tell by the increasingly frantic phone calls from Labour folk that the election results were going to be nightmarish.
It’s hard to predict how bad this is going to be. As Custer said at Little Bighorn when the first arrow landed: “Lads, I don’t really fancy this one.”
Wales was a decent result but bad news in the West Midlands, the south-east, the north-east. Pretty much everywhere, really. Scotland is still being counted, as I write, but doesn’t look too clever for Labour.
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But it’s the Hartlepool result that dominates the postmortem – “shattering”, as one Labour figure summed it up, being about right.
Peter Mandelson was on the radio trying to put his finger on what had gone wrong for the party. Aside from the “two Cs” as he put it – Corbyn and Covid-19 – the main problem, he thought, seemed to boil down to the fact that he’s not running the show.
Beyond that, he seemed to struggle. “I’ve been in and out of Hartlepool for four weeks,” he insisted, “going house-to-house meeting people.” I think we’ve identified the problem.
I can’t think of anything more unwelcome going door-to-door. Except Ebola. This kind of lack of awareness permeates Labour at present. Mandelson appeared amazed that the Hartlepool plan of sending in a Remain candidate, from outside the area and armed with little or no policy, didn’t quite come off. “But he’s a doctor,” said one Labour campaigner.
Yes. So was Hannibal Lecter. It’s not necessarily a vote-winner.
Labour is going to have to take some serious remedial action. It can’t go on as it has been, blindly following the old ways when the nation – and the Tory party – are busy changing.
What’s ominous has been the reaction so far. I’ve had phone calls in the immediate aftermath from three different Labour factions, each blaming the other lot for what’s gone wrong.
The electorate don’t want that kind of stuff. These are uncertain times and they want a Labour Party they can be sure of – not bickering and endless infighting. But the internal war will rumble on – more finger-pointing, and in the end a shadow cabinet reshuffle. All window dressing.
The party needs to reinvent itself, and quickly. No point any more in pretending the last two decades haven’t happened. Look at what worked – various manifesto pledges – and get them out and about before the Tories steal them.
There’s a lack of purpose. One of the last things I wrote before going off was pleading for some direction of travel. That feels like a long time ago.
And as for all this being Corbyn’s fault? Look at it like this: Arsenal got knocked out of the Europa League and face a season with no European competition for the first time in 25 years. Lots gone wrong at that club.
No one is blaming Arsene Wenger.
