Yesterday’s London Evening Daily Mail quoted a Labour MP who is supposed to be a Shadow Minister by the name of Liam Byrne as saying ‘Opposition leaders were expected within two years to set out their stall so voters knew for what their party now stood.’
Which longstanding British parliamentary convention is this veritable sage of constitutional protocol invoking? It is clearly not one from the pages of Erskine May. Perhaps it is a ‘convention’ of his own making that rather more reflects the vacuity of this generation of apparatchik politicians.
I am just old enough to recall an era when political parties had beliefs and you joined them because you shared those beliefs (broadly) and, consequently, you had a common purpose.
My Bryne seems to be entirely out of the mould sculpted by the great unbeliever himself - Tony Blair. You join a political party as a career move and then wait for the leader to tell you what to believe. One can only sympathise. It must be most embarrassing for him to have to wait for what just seem like an interminable length of time without anyone telling him what he has to think.
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