Manipulating parliamentary selections to secure constituencies for the party leadership is a trick so old that it may well have been in existence longer than the Labour Party itself. Although journalists often talk about favoured candidates being “parachuted” into place, with the local party membership cut out of the process, in practice both major parties prefer managed democracy to autocratic imposition.
As one old Labour fixer, long since rewarded for their efforts with a seat in the House of Lords, once put it to me: the most effective way to get your people in was to present local party members with a choice between “five donkeys and a horse”. No one can say that the winning candidate has not been subject to a democratic election – it’s just a contest that they had little prospect of losing.
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