Spinning Labour's Future

Extremely funny read by Simon Hoggart in the Guardian. I have really no idea who Alan Johnson is, but it is a marvellous depiction of him, and very amusing!

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Real human takes joystick

Simon Hoggart
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The Guardian

Alan Johnson launched his campaign for deputy leader of the Labour party yesterday. He is running as a real human being - always a high-risk gamble for a politician. The event was held in the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster. The Labour party famously owes more to Methodism than to Marx, and Mr Johnson has scant time for the German savant. He is no more a Marxist than Richard Dawkins is a Scientologist.

 

He had a claque. Every politician seems to have one now. They are bright, shiny, eager-looking persons, mostly young, the men wearing suits and ties. They applaud everything their candidate says, for slightly too long.

"Good morning," he says, "thank you for coming." "Yee-haw!" shouts the claque.

Mr Johnson's aides had distributed endorsements. One began with the most improbable statement I have seen for some time, even in politics: "We are a group of 53 Labour peers from all sections of the party and all walks of life."

Lords from all walks of life! How inclusive can you get?

The literature contained many pictures of Mr Johnson. In nearly all of them he had his mouth open, perhaps to depict good-humoured spontaneity but in fact making it look as if he is about to eat a cream bun, or flick out a foot-long tongue and catch flies.

His message is: we must keep the middle classes on board (translated here as "we have signalled our determination to build a coalition of aspirants as well as the disadvantaged") and at the same time support the unions. This is because the unions, as well as being a vital part of a modern and mature democracy, have a third of all the votes.

And he is backing Gordon Brown, which is lucky, because so far he hasn't got much choice. He read out an extract from his diary ("more Pooter than Samuel Pepys", he said - "film rights are available, Johnny Depp should play me") written in 1992 when he first met Gordon. "Could he be a future prime minister?" he had asked himself. "He knows his stuff!"

And here is the difference between the average political lickspittle and a genuine human: he realised we might imagine this was fiction, and added: "You can carbon date it if you like."

His other message is that, unlike the lawyers and consultants he is running against, he has done a real job. "I did stack shelves at Tesco - they sacked me at 16." He had also been a postman.

And he admits when he's got it all wrong. "We are on a long flight - we are having a bit of inflight refuelling, er, we are changing the pilot and the co-pilot, so, er, maybe this analogy doesn't work ... "

What, someone asked, about Lord Turnbull's charge that Gordon Brown was impossible to work with - a Stalinist? He had a cunning riposte. "Gordon is to Stalinism what Turnbull is to civil servants' discretion."

Someone asked if his campaign team were not all men in suits. "For those who believe the deputy leader should be a woman, there's not much I can do. The operation is very expensive and wouldn't be over by June 27."