Young Money! Labour Leadership Contest 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTF6N7EWzOA

Likely to be funnier than the General Election but less fun if you know what I mean.

Your runners and riders:

Miliband, D 5/6
Johnson 8/1
Miliband, E 10/1
Balls 14/1
Burnham 16/1
Darling 18/1
Harperson amirite 20/1
Mandy 25/1
Cruddas 33/1
Sir Alan Sugar 200/1

The only UK top 40 with the word "Johnson" in, sadly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts-NtP-euKI

lol mandy

wouldn't put it past him.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/05/10/article-1276661-09841FA8000005DC-123_308x104.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_h7CJteTPowo/SqXBB89NbiI/AAAAAAAAMbk/vbFPhtXbjkk/s400/embarrasing+miliband+banana.jpg

Never gets old, imo.

Works very well with your screen name, onimo! Mierda defensa indeed, Mr Balls.

I'd vote for Balls for that pic.

What's Ken Livingstone doing these days? Are there any circumstances where he could wind up a contender?

these are crazy crazy crazy crazy nights, so in a way all bets are off. but i think not: he's backing ed balls.

doesn't the PM have to be a member of one of the houses of parliament?

lol o yeah

Edward Short's still alive and in the House of Lords, he could probably do a job.

David Miliband just "accidentally" referred to himself as a candidate.

Shepherd, Reyes, Ford, Miliband.

LOL.

http://www.beatlesource.com/bs/scans/odds/balls3.jpg

what the hell is miliband's "banana moment"?

like, he was pictured holding a banana and looking a bit of a div?

is that it?

Tory bloggers went hard on it though, it truly was Britain's Pastor Wright moment.

y. pretty damning.

this isn't even a thing, d-mil's the clear favourite

He's at least *recognized* in America as that nebbish that Hillary Clinton MILF-flirts with.

http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2010/05/why-david-miliband-would-want-brother-ed-to-stand-for-leader/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ft%2Fwestminster+%28Westminster+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I was thinking for ages that the most important thing was for Labour to reconnect with core supporters and while it's still hugely important it doesn't feel like they're as disconnected as I initially though, given the election result.

Working out AND ARTICULATING what the party stands for and how they're going to distance themself from the previous government still massively important, same as ideas and fresh policies given there isn't really any money to spend any more. David Miliband and Ed Balls both feel like variations on same-old-same-old, Blair's boy vs Brown's mate. But it doesn't really feel like there's much talent there. Suppose that's what happens when you only promote yes-men for a decade.

Dunno, D Miliband still feels the most statesmanlike though. Foreign Secretary is good for that, and distances yourself from the domestic fuckups of the government.

I think they're probably at least that disconnected, tbh, just not as disconnected as the alternatives

I mean, you wouldn't want any one of them in charge of your housing application tbh.

http://gawker.com/5535848/britains-next-prime-minister-maybe-johnson-vs-balls/gallery/

^^ important commentary

i agree w. matt re "reconnecting". they seem to be p well connected and i find the idea that alan johnson is more authentic/relevant because he used to be a postman a bit patronizing. if there was something exceptional about him, fine, but... there isn't. he's just some guy. unison is apparently backing ed balls, but that whole charlie whelan vibe has been damaging to labour imo, and ed balls is no closer in background to the average labour voter than the millis. at least they grew up in a marxist home.

it'd be funny to see harman going up against her cousin david cameron.

^^^another reason it would never work for Harman. Inherited privilege always seems to cut women down at the last hurdle, if up against a man with the same privileges.

The Postman Alan thing is only good for PMQ zings. I think Ed Balls would be a big, big mistake.

lol max breaking it down for the u.s. audience

(one of) ed milliband's problem is he wrote the current manifesto

"Ed, like his brother David, is the son of famous Marxist Ralph Miliband"

He's been cribbing off the Britishers/expats for long enough to communicate the system over here without doing that smug but wrong thing.

Well, we'll know James Murdoch is really rolling out the Fox model if the biggest bloviators on Sky start getting creeped out by SOCIALISM.

(one of) ed milliband's problem is he wrote the current manifesto

― caek, Tuesday, May 11, 2010 12:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i think the current feeling is that labour actually did ok in this election, "considering". i didn't read the manifesto, but ne way these things are surely guided by "other people" too aka mandy.

i just wrote that so i could use the headline 'johnson vs. balls'

Chancellor Alistair Campbell nicknamed him "brains," due to his "brains."

psst alaastair was never the chancellor (or indeed any sort of elected politician)

thinking about the candidates for the leadership does make me reassured that campbell and mandelson will be the éminences grises regardless, though

haha *alastair

would rather read max on this hung parliament than nick robinson

would rather hear more from adam boulton than either of them tho. max, boulton's crazy blow up yesterday seems gawker-friendly. go big on it, i say.

think the johnson vs balls jokes need to combine with the "hung parliament" gags for the next post

word x2

and the fact that they're all dicks

yeah i wanted to do boultons thing but i figured more people would click on a gallery, especially if "balls vs. johnson" was in the headline

you guys with your clicks

campbell deserves to be better known, internationally. he's our rahm-e? gawker readers will all have seen 'in the loop' right?

Boulton is like the anti-Chris Matthews, too.

btw my previous posts on british politics have been picked up by famous british news-paper "the telegraph"

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/melissawhitworth/100037449/how-the-yanks-view-the-british-election-campaign/

Boulton clearly angling himself as the O'Reilly/Beck of Sky's new Fox-ish lurch

(labour mp who impressed me the most who i hadn't heard of before = rachel reeves, who represents somewhere in...leeds, iirc. came across as really smart, as per her economics background, but also able to be quite down-to-earth and normal, albeit slightly awkward in a geeky kind of way.)

I've met Emily Thornberry, she was the Canterbury candidate in 2001 and drove me across Kent to interview Chris Smith. She was nice in a middle class mumsy way but I never for the life of me envisaged her as a potential shadow cabinet member, let alone a potentialy minister.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/08/new-labour-generation-ed-miliband

classic mandelson, saying new labour should have changed the party rules (to prevent ed winning)

didn't know about the shadow cabinet election til it happened

when did they come up with that idea?

Anna Eagle was awful on PM today.

didn't know about the shadow cabinet election til it happened

when did they come up with that idea?

― journey to the end of nyt (nakhchivan), Friday, 8 October 2010 20:32 (56 minutes ago) Bookmark

apparently it's always been the case - i had no idea until now either! in the past they were elected every year, now it's going to be every two years. bit crazy though, and makes mandelson's bit for the graun there seem a bit less self-serving - labour party rules are not necessarily geared up to producing an election winning party. (but then idk what you do with the union vote - members' votes are better than the block vote, but would it be even better to have unions exerting their influence in tacit and totally unaccountable ways, the way that tory donors do? maybe for the labour party it would.)

saw ed miliband in glasgow today. getting his picture taken across from the finnieston cran' with iain gray.

iain "grey" gray

Giein' the fryin' pan a wee dunt, just in case.

Err?

http://imgur.com/Kd8XN.jpg

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/11/labour-party-hodges-miliband

sigh

Probably best to just purge any fucker that wants to start shit, it's not like there's a load of "talent" for the Party to lose.

Like whatever odious tosser was moaning on TV the other day because EMil had the temerity to launch a policy review rather than just shouting at the Tories about NuLab's tremendous record of the past decade.

There seems to be a building consensus that EMil faces a revolt - you'd think he make at least through the locals next year and see how the numbers go.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-norman/matthew-norman-bring-back-westminsters-barbra-streisand-2141934.html

Absurdly apocalyptic as this may sound, with Labour level or marginally ahead in the polls, the clock is close to beating Ed already. His legitimacy is questioned by both factions heading inexorably for a civil war to make the Tory one over Europe look like an arcane procedural squabble about parking regulations in the transport ministry of Camberwick Green. All that binds Blairites and Brownites is the shared belief that Ed is callow, shallow, directionless and not properly elected, and that he can be taken out before the next election.

Also claims that David Mil has been briefing that he's not quite done with his leadership hopes.

If he's unseated by the MPs then the Labour Party really is fucking dead and I'll happily spit on the corpse. Almost funny to see Blair and Mandy cast this shadow across the Party from beyond the grave, but I've no doubt that this is the result of what they started in 1994.

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/11/david-miliband-party-shadow

Lengthy piece in the New Statesman that covers some of the same ground.

These people are just utter cocks. Do any of these various rival camps actually realise that New Labour FAILED? They were kicked out of office, they clearly don't know anywhere near as much about winning elections as they claim to.

And they don't seem to realise that the reason New Labour failed was not due to issues of presentation or electoral strategy but because the most basic economic principles that underpinned it were wrong, and one financial crisis later we're all suffering for it. But they continue to act like it's 1997/2001/2005.

There seems to be a sizeable proportion of Blairite/Brownite people clinging to the delusion that they're "modernisers" when they're swiftly becoming dinosaurs and the sooner they realise that and fuck off out of politics the better. Or perhaps they could join the Tory Party? I have a feeling they'd be welcomed.

The day they started talking about the electorate "not getting the message" - echoing every Tory minister during the last Major government - was the day you knew that these fuckers would never, ever get it.

If there was any sort of grassroots Party left then I'd urge constituencies to start threatening public malcontents with deselection, pronto. But as I say, I think NuLab's lasting legacy will be shifting the balance of power hard towards the PLP. EMil might be just the scapegoat they need to kill the Union connections once and for all, assuming they can find the party funding from somewhere else.

xps That is the same article. The link HM posted is just talking about the Hodges one.
It's all a bit disingenuous, Hodges is one of these people, supported DavidM and can't believe he lost.

Absolutely get that these guys are spinning their own agenda, but to me that implies there's an agenda there wanting to be spun.

dmil is such a cunt

Think you mean big stroppy bairn takes his ball home and has a fucking strop like a toddler fucking cunt.

i think what you'll actually find is that the process has been shown to be fault, and what i would say is look, the results have been someone miscalibrated but ultimately we have to sit down in dialogue and accede to a more just version of events

incredibly dispiriting bunch of people

the envy, plotting, etc, are unsurprising, but this lot seem incapable of working through all that and doing a good job of opposition

meanwhile the students have an admirably universalist outlook imo

There's something in the current student protests - some small fragile thing likely to be gone in a month, probably, but still - that anybody who gives a fuck about the future of the Left in the UK would do well to analyze and consider what could be grown out of it.

what the bloody hell is he doing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13971770

i thought the video player was skipping at first!

ah proof that the labour policy of one member, 214,000 votes is a great idea

what the bloody hell is he doing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13971770

i thought the video player was skipping at first!

Holy shit it's like they programmed an Ed robot with only three sentences.

Seriously wtf!

Oh man I'm watching it again and it's making me laugh out loud. It's like a piss take satirical sketch about politicians staying on message at any cost regardless of the question.

more from the journalist who did the i/v - http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bfensm

i think this might actually be career-endingly bad - obviously not right now but once mockery on this scale becomes part of the narrative, the seeds are planted.

D. Milliband's career seemed hampered by a banana, and this is worse than a banana

they're both fucking vile

Hahaha I can't hear that at work, what's actually going on?

What, bananas and D.Milliband?

He was asked six different question and give the exact same answer every time, almost verbatim. Lex otm - once you get to the third one you start thinking someone's fucking around with the video.

xp

Well, it worked for Jeremy Paxman, albeit in reverse.

matt he keeps just saying 'look at my robot penis' and won't stop
xp
xp oh

Haha wow. He's kind of like a sponge that will absorb any stupid shit someone exposes him to.

He'd loosened up a bit later for a chat with his chums.
http://www.lbc.co.uk/mm/image/19345.jpg

does seem kinda like a cliche-reinforcing cup choice from DC

What, bananas and D.Milliband?

http://watchpeoplejump.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/david-milliband.jpeg

Actually - in the pic with Cameron and Clegg he reminds me of something else...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3561/3441211181_d5327e4cdc.jpg

there's a weird, barely visible portrait just behind cameron that looks like a tasteful framed oil painting of buzz lightyear

E.Mil and Cameron are both doing something different with their hair these days (maybe so they look less like Clegg?)

damongreenITV

Before I wrote the blog, I contacted EdM's PR. He said 'no worries' about the itvw going viral: 'it means we are getting message out'.
about 4 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/8666354/Ed-Miliband-undergoes-successful-nose-operation.html

look out world

this was on the guardian's rolling breaking news scroller, with like ed miliband has successfully undergone an operation to correct his breathing problem, MORE SOON, & now there's an article up, and it's just, how much more can there be to this

i actually thought that this had happened a couple of months ago & had found myself thinking he sounded a lot better?, so either he has improved or i fool myself

"I've spoken to him since the operation and his voice sounds exactly the same. It wasn't done in terms of changing his voice at all."

refund