Peter Hennessy used an interesting quote from Clem Attlee: Nothing grows under the heavy roller
Attlee was referring to Eden’s disastrous failure as PM. The heavy roller had been the dominance of Winston Churchill
Hennessy’s point was about the lack of young pretenders in the Labour Cabinet. While it is always possible for someone to surprise us, not one of them seems to have the maturity, authority or just what used to be called bottom to make the step up
As an aside, it is a mystery to me why Jack Straw’s name never crops up in discussions of Labour leadership. Not that I am advocating this, it just seems strange
With the Blair/Brown dominance it was perhaps always going to be impossible for anyone to learn how to shine
But I always thought that it was, in this sense, a very serious mistake to make a binding pledge to keep to the Tory spending plans in 1997. It may have been a political necessity at the time. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to believe that Labour could have won with a threat of 90% taxes for all
Anybody who knew anything at all about the then cycle for setting Departmental expenditures would understand the problems which this would cause. Even in that tired old comparator, the ordinary family budget, nobody would expect to have to adhere, in two years time, to a line by line estimate of what could be spent on potatoes, new shoes, car maintenance, trips to the cinema …
But most of all it really put the fetters on a set of new & untried Ministers who were unable to perform one of their most basic roles of prioritising & decision-making. Completely unable to learn to grow into the job
