To whoever was planning it, last week’s coded leadership announcement from Dan Jarvis might have seemed like a smooth operation. From the outside, it was the news story that fell out of the boring tree and hit every branch on the way down. The main revelation from Jarvis’s speech at the Demos thinktank was the fact that he didn’t like inequality, although his no doubt controversial liking for community, prosperity and family was also striking. Only in the intellectually impovrished world of the post-crash Labour right could Jarvis’s raw, contentless political positioning be hailed as visionary.
But the most troubling aspect of the episode what not the fact of Jarvis’s announcement, or the speech itself. It was the timing of it: with less than two months to go until a crucial set of regional and national elections, the first electoral test for a new leadership which has the overwhelming support of party members. After May, Jarvis and other opponents of the leadership will have nearly three fallow years with no major elections in which to lay out an alternative to Jeremy Corbyn’s platform.
Content from our partners
