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 The NS offered to publish the response after receiving it but was told it was not for publication.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.
Earlier in the letter, he claims that I was “intent on a particular story” and “was not leaving” until I had it, while also accurately noting that “it was only towards the end that George himself turned the conversation to certain members of the shadow cabinet” (I did ask him explicitly for his opinion on Liam Byrne, but made no mention of Douglas Alexander or Jim Murphy), rather undermining his assertion that I was preoccupied with goading him into attacking “the Blairites”. Among other things, we discussed his priorities following his re-election as general secretary, the possible merger between Unite and the PCS, and the likelihood of the trade union movement staging the first general strike since 1926. All of these subjects were covered in the piece.
Len disputes my assertion that he displayed “contempt” for Tony Blair, praising him as “a consummate politician who led the Labour party to an historic, three consecutive victories”. This may be true, but Len did not choose to mention any of this when we spoke. He did, however, tell me that Miliband should “take no notice of the siren voices from the boardrooms of JP Morgan or wherever else he [Blair] is at the moment”, while attacking the “gushing eulogies from Tony Blair” that followed Margaret Thatcher’s death. I leave you to judge whether “contempt” was the appropriate noun to use.
I am not surprised that Len felt it necessary to qualify the remarks he made to me. By singling out individual shadow cabinet ministers for criticism (“the Jim Murphys and the Douglas Alexanders”), and implying that they should be ignored or sacked, he overstepped the mark and allowed himself to be effortlessly characterised by the right-wing press as another Union “baron” trying to call the shots. But it is Len, not the New Statesman, who bears responsibility for this.
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