Plenty of spray-on charm, but Chuka’s Change just isn’t sexy...
For an ambitious young go-getter, opposition politics can be an uphill slog. Long hours, often menial work. Sure, the pay ain’t half bad, but it’s mere chicken feed compared to what they reckon they could be earning in the private sector.
Take Chuka Umunna, the silkysmooth ex-Labour high-flyer who recently left to form Change UK, a breakaway party whose sole raison d’etre is to overturn the result of the EU referendum.
Chuka is handsome, engaging, economically literate and blessed with that spray- on personality that one can imagine passes for charm while canvassing the old dears on the doorstep. Had Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist loons not taken over his old party, Umunna’s well-upholstered derriere would by now be readying itself for the soft, soft leather of a ministerial limousine.
Instead, the one-time DJ and City lawyer will likely have to suffer the rackety Tube home each night for the remains of his political career while his former colleagues are jetting off to their Alpine ski schlosses.
Yesterday, he addressed an audience for Progressive Centre UK, a think-tank that calls for a new political party. Unofficially though, it was a chance for Chuka to plug Change UK ahead of next month’s European Parliament elections.
We were gathered in a glass-fronted office in Clerkenwell, that fashionable east London enclave where men wear women’s jeans and extravagantly-moustachioed waiters serve plats principals on roof tiles.
Chuka was introduced by Matt Browne, Progressive Centre’s chief wonk with a mid-Atlantic accent who, like Chuka and his ilk, wants to ‘cree-aid’ a new type of politics.
on stage bounded Chuka, dressed in an electric-blue suit, silken tie (Hermes?) and one of those clunky sports watches James Bond wears, which could probably tell the time on Saturn.
First up, a trumpeting of Change UK’s achievements. It had irritated Corbynistas (not hard) as well as Conservatives for stealing some of their most pro-European MPs. Defections are never welcome, but I don’t recall the loss of Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and the (admittedly redoutable) Anna Soubry causing too much weeping in the Tory shires.
‘Politics is broken.’ That was Chuka’s main message for the day. our main political parties were now so busy dealing with their own internal squabbles, they were failing to tackle the main issues facing the Government. Change UK, he insisted, offers a united front. Give it time, Chuka me lad, give it time.
He harked back to the opening ceremony of the 2012 olympics. This was a time when the United Kingdom was at ease with itself, he claimed.
Funny, I don’t remember Chuka having such kind words for the Coalition back then when he was shadow business minister.
Meanwhile, London had turned
into a version of Batman’s crime-ridden Gotham City. Said Chuka: ‘My part of the world are stabbing and shooting each other,’ by which he means his south London constituency of Streatham.
Nota bene: Chuka’s now said to live in leafy Chiswick.
Change, change, change. oddly, for a party so keen on disrupting the status quo, you barely hear a peep out of Change UK about disrupting the stinking political cesspit that is the European Union. Presumably they feel everything in anything-goes Brussels is hunky-dory.
As for next month’s European elections, Chuka was bullish. He referenced that time-honoured political bellwether, London cabbies, who apparently give him the Cockney thumbs-up every time he hops in one. one to file in the ‘possibly not true’ drawer, methinks.
THIStune he was humming is nothing new, of course. Ever since Chuka’s mentor, Peter Mandelson, stuck the word ‘ New’ in front of Labour, political parties have been looking to position themselves as the sexy, different option.
But Chuka is no Tony Blair and his likeable colleague, that dry cornflake Chris Leslie, is no Gordon Brown.
Their version of change is simply a bland, repackaged version of all that’s gone before.
Voting for Change UK is like going to a Michelin-starred restaurant and ordering the grilled chicken.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect this disaffected bunch will have about as much impact on British politics as the Natural Law Party – without the laughs.
As for Chuka, I can’t help wonder if he sometimes remembers those heady days as a thrusting corporate legal eagle and ruefully ponders what might have been.