Kelly’s Eye

THE Labour Party leadership contest is as unintentionally comical as the unfolding Megxit drama (how can you not laugh at the fact that Meghan’s PR guru is called Kenny Sunshine and has previously represented Harvey Weinstein and Michael Jackson?). All the candidates – when they’re not desperately seeking to contrive their humble antecedents – now talk about listening to voters as if the latter are a strange tribe they’ve just discovered.

Which, in a sense of course, they are.The voters in the constituencies Labour has lost for the first time in generations are just as aspirational as those anywhere else.

They want to feel a sense of opportunity communicated, and to be able to crack on without constant preaching from pretend proles who in truth harbour a distaste bordering on revulsion for many of the preferences and habits of the working class people they purport to represent. In the fantasy world of this distant elite, the country is stalked by evil Tory toffs in stovepipe hats like Kenneth Branagh’s Brunel in the London Olympics opening ceremony, lording it over helpless ragged masses who, devoid of any self-resource, must show their gratitude for Labour’s enlightened concern by mechanically voting for the party in perpetuity (it treats ethnic minorities with the same patronising complacency).

The only candidate who exhibits a spark of awareness about this is Lisa Nandy, below.

She went toe-to-toe last week on TV with Andrew Neil and emerged with credit. And she appears free of the illusion that it just requires another sermon from the barricades to make the electorate realise what’s good for it. She’s probably got no chance.