Tessa Jowell has warned that attacks on Ed Milliband from inside the Labour party are creating an impression of “toxic disunity”. In a piece for the Observer today she writes that Labour’s “so-called summer crisis” had been helped a great deal by Labour’s own members, too open in attacking their leader. These were people, she says, “who should know better”, as “publicly offered criticism is only ever destructive”. It remains to be seen whether Jowell’s own publicly offered criticism will do the trick. She writes:
There are complementary rights and obligations when it comes to the leadership of the Labour party: anyone may stand for the leadership, but once the winner is chosen, he or she is entitled to the loyalty and support of the party at every level. “Loyalty is what keeps the boat afloat; disloyalty the rock against which it breaks. And disloyalty comes in many shapes, most of which artfully ape the gestures of friendship. There is, however, nothing constructive in publicly delivering “helpful advice” which could be much better delivered quietly in private. For the public it creates an unappealing sense of toxic disunity.
She draws a distinction between Westminster’s media coverage and the business of politics, suggesting, in her piece for a national broadsheet, that the party stay away from the former:
We are not commentators on a Westminster game of who is up and who is down, of who has coined the best soundbite or delivered the sharpest put-down. We are, rather, participants in a political contest whose outcome will affect the lives of millions of people. It is not the political class but our constituents who will pay the price if we allow David Cameron and the Conservatives another term in office – to squeeze living standards as prices rise faster than wages, to abandon families with elderly relatives and children waiting on trolleys in hospitals, or to take no responsibility towards our those of our young people who are without jobs or hope of a home of their own.
This comes as Meg Hillier, a senior Labour party backbencher, criticises the Labour party for its lack of an “Alistair Campbell-style figure“, in senior advisory circles.
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