Scarlet Pimpernell wrote:
The way he is performing just not being de Pfeffel looks like a vote winner.
You’d assume so. But if the Tories get shut, it becomes much less relevant… though the longer they wait, the more it’ll look like a cynical electoral calculation than being about standards in public life.
There’s ~644k 2019 Brexit Party voters floating about too.
You look at the key roles in the Shadow cabinet (leader, chancellor, home and foreign secretaries), both now and under Corbyn at the last election, and there’s not a lot of representation from outside London and the South East. McDonnell grew up Liverpool but was deep in London politics from the early 80s. Cooper has a Yorkshire seat but grew up in Hampshire. Nandy did have a spell shadowing Foreign in between, as well. But the shift has been from more working class London-types to more Oxford-educated London-types. While London largely sees itself as aspirational and the engine of the UK economy, much of the rest of the country sees it as divorced from them and parasitical.
I’ve seen it noted that the Labour mayors of Manchester (Burnham) and West Yorkshire (Brabin) weren’t invited to speak at the last party conference, whereas the mayor of London (Khan) was. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been, but when you’ve lost so much of your northern heartlands, you’d think there’d be more effort to reconnect. Like they did in Scotland… oh.
