Has Labour found its Redwood?
Today's early edition Evening Standard (no, I didn't buy it, and no, there's currently no link to the story on the Standard's website) is carrying reports that London Labour backbencher John Austin is considering launching a leadership bid. Not through any belief that he's got a chance, but purely to force a proper challenge from some real big hitters.
Potentially interesting. Though let's not forget that John Redwood's opportunistic leadership bid against John Major in 1995 got precisely nowhere...
3 Comments:
I'd say he's more Sir Anthony Meyer, who stood against Thatcher in 1989, than Redwood. Redwood only stood for the leadership once Major had created the vacancy by resigning and doing his 'back me or sack me' act and none of the other 'bastards' - Portillo, Lilley etc - took the opportunity to stand.
Strange to remember that time when Portillo was the main representative of the Tory Right, isn't it?
You know what? I'd completely forgotten about Meyer. Which is pretty shocking, come to think of it, and I probably shouldn't have admitted that for fear of making myself look even more ignorant than usual...
Strange to tell, I once met Sir Anthony Meyer at a pro-European student meeting. Nice old buffer, basically, who remarked that he'd been influenced at school by none other than Lionel Curtis, one of Lord Milner's staff in South Africa and a doyen of the Imperial Federation movement with Joseph Chamberlain, who in later years apparently moved to the left a tad.
Which, frankly, made Meyer an incredible political survival from pre-1914 ideas.
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