Len McCluskey is not a happy man. The Unite general secretary is on the warpath over the piece I wrote following my recent interview with him for the New Statesman, describing it as “a distortion” in a letter to NS editor Jason Cowley. The NS offered to publish the response after receiving it but was told it was not for publication. Despite this, Len went on to enclose it in a separate missive to “all Unite MPs” (since leaked to Guido Fawkes). While I have little desire to intrude in a family feud, it would be remiss not to correct the inaccuracies and innuendos that appear in the letter.
Contrary to what Len suggests, I never wrote that he had called for Ed Miliband to “sack all Blairites” (that was a Daily Mail headline). I did write that he had “declared war” on the “Blairites” in the shadow cabinet after he claimed that Ed Miliband would be “defeated” and “cast into the dustbin of history” if he “gets seduced by the Jim Murphys and the Douglas Alexanders”, which seemed to me a reasonable description of his attitude towards the harpies allegedly wooing Miliband on to the rocks. After criticising Liam Byrne (“Byrne certainly doesn’t reflect the views of my members and of our union’s policy. I think some of the terminology that he uses is regrettable and I think it will damage Labour”), McCluskey told me that “Ed’s got to figure out what his team will be”, a suggestive remark that no doubt prompted the Mail and others (if not the NS) to conclude that he was calling for the three shadow cabinet ministers in question to be sacked.
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