As I write, the field of candidates is being whittled down. It is Rishi Sunak’s contest to lose, and the best-placed “Stop Rishi” candidates, according to Westminster consensus, are Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss. Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch have caught much attention, but they are unlikely to make it the final run-off. Nor are Zahawi, Hunt, or Braverman. Although the momentum today seems to be with Mordaunt, after a slick campaign launch this morning, it could well be Truss and Sunak on the ballot paper that goes out to Conservative party members. An MP since 2010 – five years before Sunak arrived in parliament – Truss has been courting party members up and down Britain for more than a decade. Many expect she may become Britain’s next Prime Minister.
Can she be defeated at the next general election? Most definitely she can. I should know: I have defeated her twice in elections for public office. Long before she became an MP, Truss and I stood against each other twice at council elections in the London Borough of Greenwich: in the safeish Labour Vanbrugh ward in 1998, and in the ultra-marginal Blackheath Westcombe ward (created by boundary changes, and swallowing up the old Vanbrugh ward, with lots of Tory voters thrown in) in 2002.
On both occasion I was elected, and Liz Truss wasn’t. I won 500 more votes than Truss in 1998, and 400 more votes than her in 2002. I became a Labour councillor in Greenwich, serving for 16 years until I stepped down in 2014, and Truss didn’t join me in the council chamber until 2006. I am now a freelance writer, living happily well away from Greenwich, and Westminster, while Liz Truss is foreign secretary, and may be about to become our prime minister. The head start I had over Truss clearly gave me no advantage. Being a councillor in Greenwich turned out to be the peak of my political career: for Truss it was merely a stepping-stone to selection in a safe parliamentary seat (South-West Norfolk), and then ministerial office. But what does Truss’s time in Greenwich tell us about her, and her strengths and weaknesses as a politician? Much has been said about Truss’s early years as a young Lib Dem activist in the 1990s, and about her career in Westminster from 2010 onwards. Much less has been said about the intervening years, in which she lived in Greenwich stood for election there three times.
Continue reading
After the dam breaks, a flood of analysis and recrimination. More than ten days on from Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the general election, the pain is still raw, and many in the party don’t seem to have realised the enormity of what has happened.
I am writing this as Members of Parliament are gathered in Westminster, on the first Saturday since the Falklands conflict of 1982, for yet another “make or break” day of reckoning on Brexit. MPs have just voted narrowly to pass Oliver Letwin’s amendment, delaying a decision on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and compelling him to request an extension of Article 50.
News that the redeveloped London Bridge station 
Holocaust denial at Labour party meetings. Jewish members being called “dirty Zionists”, or worse. Party staffers being made to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements to stop them speaking out against the lack of action against the culprits. Interventions by Jeremy Corbyn’s office, and the party’s general secretary Jennie Formby, to change the composition of disciplinary panels, apparently to thwart them from expelling those found to have been anti-semitic. The appointment of Thomas Gardiner as head of the party’s disputes unit, who downgraded sanctions against several anti-semites from expulsions to suspension, or from suspensions to warnings. 
Away from the noise of Brexit, Labour – and the British Left in general – is buzzing with new economic ideas more loudly than it has for decades. Moving the privatised utilities to a new form of mutual nationalisation is now Labour policy. So is a new Financial Transaction Tax. Universal Basic Income is entering the political mainstream. 
Alex Grant 