Labour has no idea who to elect, maybe they should all take a break?
With Chuka Umunna out of the Labour leadership race perhaps all the candidates should do the same. The declarations so far have revealed that the party has no real idea who to elect.
The New Labour cohort (they still haven’t found an alternative name but essentially that is what they are) can’t agree on a leader, and neither can the slightly more traditional Labour side either.
Whether its Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper at one end or Liz Kendall or Tristram Hunt on the other nobody seems very convinced any of them would win the next election.
Horse and cart analogies are not much use here, but perhaps Labour should just share out the leadership duties for a while or agree on a caretaker.
If Alan Johnson didn’t keep saying no he’d be the obvious choice. The party is going to be gripped by a battle over its direction. It probably needs a federal structure to allow Scottish Labour to move left while English Labour tries to recapture the Blairite coalition. And it will need all the while to be an effective opposition and pro-EU campaigner in the referendum.
That will be a bloody process for any leader and it is perfectly likely that whoever it is gets ditched in 2017/18. By then either the new generation will have yielded a more credible leader or the likes of Dan Jarvis and Chuka Umunna will be in better positions to lead. Or suddenly something that seemed implausible only days ago starts to seem more possible : by then, after five years in New York and time to have consigned his brother’s leadership to fading memories step forward David Miliband?
Stranger things have happened.