UK Edition
There are plenty of MPs who think they could do the job of prime minister, who believe that they and they alone possess the qualities needed to lead our nation to a bright and prosperous future, who believe they have the skills and charisma necessary, if only those less talented, yet bafflingly promoted over them, would get out of their way.
It’s easy to spot such individuals: they can be found sitting on green leather benches in the chamber of the House of Commons.
A much smaller subset of potential national leaders are those MPs who actually do possess such qualities.
And then there are those rare beasts who actually do possess the qualities of leadership required of their party and their country, yet are bewilderingly reluctant to step up and seize the crown. Yet is such reluctance – some might even describe it as cowardice – truly compatible with leadership?
Personally, I was disappointed that Angela Eagle won’t be standing in Labour’s leadership contest. Don’t get me wrong: I will vote enthusiastically for Owen Smith, despite (because of?) his resemblance to Stan Cullimore, the weedy one out of The Housemartins. But Angela has that rarest of qualities in modern politicians: the courage to fail.
She knew that Jeremy Corbyn still retains, for whatever inexplicable reason, the enthusiastic support of what is likely to be the majority of the Labour selectorate.
She knew there was a high risk of failure. But she challenged anyway, not as an act of narcissistic vanity or for self-publicity, but because she knew it was essential, for the sake of her party – and therefore the country – that Corbyn be defeated.
She knew she would be criticised, particularly by Corbyn supporters in her local party. And with a boundary review and reselections on the way, she probably considered the possibility that her actions might result in her no longer being an MP following the next election.
That’s a big risk. But she took it anyway. And now she has done it again: put the party before herself and stood aside to allow Owen the chance to go up against Corbyn as the Parliamentary Labour Party’s “unity candidate”.
That’s pretty damned impressive.
It’s all the more impressive when you consider how often Labour has been let down in the past by its so-called “Big Beasts”. The state of the party today is at least in part a consequence of the tendency of certain high profile individuals to turn a deaf ear to the voices demanding they assume the top job.
When the last Labour government was hurtling towards certain defeat, first Alan Johnson and then David Miliband faced demands to challenge Gordon Brown. They refused, and it was left to others who harboured no leadership ambitions – David Cairns, James Purnell, Jane Kennedy, among many others – to resign their ministerial posts only to find that their preferred champion had already abandoned the battlefield.
In 2015 there was much talk of Dan Jarvis or Chuka Umunna riding to the rescue of a party that already looked suspiciously comfortable in its traditional role of election loser. Alas, no. The time wasn’t right. Or the media pressure was too much to bear. Or “I was washing my hair that night.”
And now, when the party is facing the greatest crisis of its history – certainly since Ramsay MacDonald decided that the Tory Party wasn’t all that bad after all – the obvious challengers are nowhere to be seen. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Hilary Benn!
The former Shadow Foreign Secretary has the name recognition, the status and the record to have taken on Corbyn, and quite possibly won. Who better to take down an incumbent leader whose attitude to terrorism is at best ambiguous, than the man who made an inspired speech against the fascism of Isil last December and whose sacking by Corbyn sparked the current rebellion?
But no. Once again, having the ability to do the job and to inspire confidence in your peers isn’t enough to tempt him. Or Umunna. Or Hunt. Or Jarvis. Or Johnson. Or Starmer…
There may well be genuine personal reasons why individuals feel they can serve in a high profile Shadow Cabinet post but not in the top job. That represents the best, most positive spin on the reasons for their reticence. Because a more widely held view is that at least some of the potential candidates are keeping their powder dry until the party’s in a better position to win a general election.
If they hold back then perhaps the top job might, at some point in the future, bring with it the possibility of a residency at 10 Downing Street. At which point these shrinking violets of the Labour movement might feel that circumstances are at last convenient and comfortable enough for them to heed the call.
Such manoeuvres would be, in the current situation, idiocy of the highest order.
With proper leadership in the past, Labour wouldn’t be in such trouble. It might even still be in government. And without proper leadership today, it may never be in government again.
You do not have to be the Leader in order to lead. Leadership is a quality, not a position. And if our elected representatives, those we send to Westminster to represent us and to fight for our interests, cannot summon the courage or the energy to come to our party’s aid at the time of its greatest need, then really, what’s the point of them?
When Labour’s obituary is written, probably in the not too distant future, the names of those MPs who “lent” Jeremy Corbyn their nomination in order to “broaden the debate” will be listed as signatories to the party’s death warrant. There are others whose refusal to intervene as the patient lay dying who will be seen by history as culpable.
Angela Eagle, however, will be recorded as one of the few who tried, unsuccessfully, to administer CPR. And she’s a hero for doing so.
Jeremy Corbyn is killing Labour: why are Hilary Benn and his colleagues not bothering to stop him?