When things are bad there is a tendency to assume they cannot get worse. There is absolutely no rational basis for this superstition. Any change from Brown will make the destruction of the Labour Party to come even worse as it will appear to try and avoid responsiblity for the last ten years .

Milliband will look like a fart in a thunderstorm almost immediately

I find the whole Alan Johnson thing rather strange. What is his appeal, apart from having previously been a postman? It’s hard to nail down his political ideology, he has been a half reasonable Minister (Miliband has been better) and he generally keeps a low profile.

Johnson-Cruddas… Two rather dull grey middle aged men.

Johnson is a compromise candidate, presumably because I suspect the unions knows Jon Cruddas won’t be accepted by government ministers. And plus he rose through the union ranks so he could be more sympathetic to their cause.

He’s also not as divisive as some of the others (Purnell, Will Hutton).

The problem is that Dave says:
Yet given Johnson’s record in backing the Iraq invasion, ID cards and top-up fees, for instance

Sure, but basically that rules out anyone electable then. You may as well be left with John McDonnell, and as much as I personally think he’s got a good heart, he’ll never be a mainstream candidate.

“and was even reportedly once a fellow traveller of the Communist Party of Great Britain.”

Which supported the charming USSR. We all make mistakes but it disturbs me that this is implied in the passage above as being the sort of thing that will appeal to “ordinary members”. I always thought that Labour’s traditional supporters, even if to the left of the country as a whole, had no time for Communism, especially of the Soviet variety.

Johnson and Cruddas are personable,street-wise and friends of the unions.

They are not leadership material however and Johnson has admitted as

much. both would be out of their depth and seen to be so.

Brown needs replacing and quickly, but not by totems.

So that leaves Milipede and Harman?

This is all academic, because apparently Johnson doesn’t want the job. How is he diffferent to Brown/Miliband/New Labour? Well he used to be a prominent supporter of PR – if he followed that through – we would have a radical agenda!

I do not see the point in changingt the leader. If the economy is causing us issues with the public how does a new leader change that ?
There is no evience any of the candidates would give us a boost.
Do the Blaires want the blame for the defeat?
If we lost 400 – 160 who wants to get the blame for that. It is not a great place in history to be the guy who took labour to it’s biggest defeat in government? Why do so many average politicans want to have that on their gravestone. Sometimes it is better to be the best PM we never had than the worst PM we did. If the Blairites did get rid of the PM then the curent PM might be able to watch the nect election laughing and claiming the loss is their fault.
I still think we should keep the current leader if he loses he can take the blame if we recover he can take the credit.

Sunny – I think you mean John Hutton, though Will Hutton as Labour leader would certainly be an interesting proposition.

I like Johnson but I don’t really see any way round the fact that he is (a) older than both Blair and Brown, and therefore hardly represents the generational change that the party needs in order to move on from the Blair-Brown era, (b) that he has declared himself unfit for the top job, and (c) that on the sole occasion when he did put his credentials to the test in a party election, he lost to Harriet Harman.

Johnson is a waste of space. He has done nothing to command any media attention in several years of cabinet positions and the only reason that the unions are interested in him is because his past connections suggest that he might give the unions more power.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

“Sure, but basically that rules out anyone electable then.”

Well that assumes that any of them are electable. Considering Brown didn’t think himself electable and needed to strong-arm the PLP before he felt secure enough to gain the leadership, it’s a long-shot that anyone would be able to take him on, let alone take Labour to the country.

It’s funny that anyone should think the unions have the answers, considering they are part of the problem. They need to be taken into consideration and negotiated with, but not listened to.

Either Brown stays, or Labour will split.

If Brown stays they won’t be the largest party any more, and if they split the rump may not even be the second largest. But a combination of ex-Labour parties and Independent Labour MPs may still be able to form a government with a restricted mandate if they can work their differences out amicably.

Have the unions taken leave of their senses?

It is bad enough that they think it acceptable to force out the party leader, let alone that they think it appropriate to replace him with their own men. But if they think they could win the general election that ought to follow such a coup then they are even more out of touch with the concerns of the public than the current Government

And if they think they can install a Johnson/Cruddas dream ticket without a general election – well that would say a very great deal about the unions’ idea of democracy.

Since we don’t have vice presidents in this country, what is this “Johnson/Cruddas ticket” anyhow? Would it be like the so-called Granita pact that did so much to promote self-defeating plotting and tribalism within Government?

Milliband’s weak-kneed non-job application through the papers is a perfect example of why he is so unsuited to being PM – because he is a pygmy. If he had anything new to say and he really wanted the job he should have resigned from the cabinet and said it. Nor do Johnson, Cruddas or any of the rest of them have either the stature for the job or a vision of what they would do if they had it. The whole problem is that the Government lacks any coherent ideology at all – the idea that it has a spare, secondary vision that could be produced, fully formed, uniting the party and wowing the public is utterly farcical.

Gordon will have to struggle through to the next election and then resign. It will then fall to some old greybeard to lead the party in the short term. Their role will be to keep a lid on the in-fighting and maintain some sort of discipline while the party decides what it actually wants Britain to look like. Once that has happened, the Greybeard should step aside to make way for the person who has best been able to answer the question “what do we do next?”

The problem is that the likeliest candidate for safe pair of hands is Jack Straw who is obviously vain enough to think that he has it in him to be Prime Minister – making him entirely the wrong interim leader. The Labour Party should look at the leaderships of Vince Cable and Michael Howard to see what sort of leader they need next but they would be totally insane to get rid of Gordon now.

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