Yes, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And, of course, if you are in that position, you can compensate for the difficulty by appointing the right kind of advisers, etc., but then putting all of your eggs in the basket of overrated right-wing Labour factionalists out for revenge is just nuts.
Having a high-functioning Mandelson as an adjunct to a political operation that basically knows what it is doing is preferable to having the central political objective of your ministry being the business of appointing a radically-dysfunctional Mandelson to a sinecure, it is true.
I agree with most of that--but too many people who start reasoning along those lines end up saying it's about "delivery" as if optimistically spinning a small-to-medium-sized amount of decent mostly-economic news over the next three years can dig the Government out of the hole it has dug for itself.
A long haired tabby cat wit cream highlights around her ears and eyes sleeping on a cream sofa next to a coloured cushion made from an old Turkish carpet
In not very important news we now (at long last) have a cat again. She's a rescue cat about 5 years old we think. Say hello to Nova. 😻
How is this "not very important news"? Obviously a darling.
Hullo, Nova!
On this kind of thing, I am on Team Stephen Bush, in that the comms people can do their work if they know what the strategic messaging actually is, and one of the deeper problems with the Starmer regime is that beyond cosying up to racists no-one actually knows what the strategy is supposed to be.
My article on 1970s feminists, spycops, and if feminist historians can use materials extracted by undercover police officers is out in History Workshop Journal doi.org/10.1093/hwj/...
There is a small number of internet jokes of which I never tire, and this is one of them.
Your occasional reminder that one of the many marvellous things about Middlemarch is an absurd character called Mr Brooke who talks too much, especially about early nineteenth-century political economy.
"We just need a good Pm to communicate effectively."
It is a bit more complicated than that.
And the Australians have their "spill".
I'm not sure my French is good enough to understand the full subtleties of Libé's review of the Michael Jackson biopic
"Did you know that the politician was friends with a nonce when you appointed him?" is not a question that should ever be answered with "which one"
The Mandelson affair was survivable. Keir Starmer’s explanation for it may not be. It is a parable of his premiership and its wider problems- that the explanation is always process, not politics.
Piece from me on the limits of process politics
open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...
Clearly his current public position is (a).
Because then Miliband would be Brown to Burnham's Blair (possibly without the poisonous animosity)?
Or, more charitably, they understand that politics *is* a matter of friends and enemies, in opposition to the more woolly-minded and high-minded among us who think it can somehow be nicer than that.
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Yes. Growing up, I assumed the Republicans won everything & the Democrats (like the Labour Party in Britain) were the perennial plucky losers--because news media in the UK (understandably) largely ignores Congress. Now I'm really struck by the extent to which they dominated the Presidency, 1968-92.
What those three have in common is that they were properly good at something ("spin doctoring" for PM, running Vote Leave for DC, shafting the Corbynite Left for MMcS) but then people made the mistake of thinking they were good at other things, or overlooking their faults/vices, which are massive.
Labour would be thrilled to poll 30.4% next time around!
I got the drift, take the point, and if I were recording responses, I would code you as a (c).
Are there, perhaps, any recent examples of dubious characters with obvious security risks being appointed to the House of Lords?
Either Miliband or Rayner? Same here (with a preference for the former). But it looks as if the reason Starmer hasn't been axed just yet is a reluctance on the part of enough of the PLP to have Rayner lead the Party, so I'm interested in thinking through how Miliband might fit into what's going on.
A handsome beast.
A handsome male tabby basking in warm afternoon sunshine.
Mrs Chippy the Magnificent!
Do we think that Ed MIliband (a) genuinely doesn't want to have another tilt at being Leader of the Labour Party (&, this time round, PM)? (b) does, but wants an uncontested election? (c) does, but is biding his time before showing his hand? or (d) does, but doesn't think he can beat Angela Rayner?
In what sense? That the lessons Mandelson had to teach him somehow no longer apply, or just that it led him to do stupid & obnoxious things for stupid & obnoxious reasons? (I think my "hopelessly out of his depth" covers both scenarios.)
Perhaps the most Soviet-relic thing about me is that I tend to measure a queue not by how close I am to the front but by how many people are behind me (quite a few but they've just closed it!)
