This Kinnock might be a real winner

GURNING for the cameras, Labour’s five leadership hopefuls line up like beauty contest finalists at a seaside holiday camp. Do you detect much enthusiasm for Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, Mary Creagh or Tristram Hunt?

Political commentator Steve Richards interviewed a Labour MP on Radio 4’s The Week In Westminster who sounded more convincing than any of the above — Stephen Kinnock, 45, the new member for Aberavon and son of former party leader Neil Kinnock.

Should Labour concentrate on fairness or aspiration? It wasn’t an either/or question, said Kinnock. Why not embrace both? The end result could be ‘happy, productive’ workers.

Aspiration didn’t belong to the Tories, he said. Labour ‘invented social mobility and we should remind people of that’.

As for government borrowing, ‘it’s morally wrong to hand on debt to our children and grandchildren’.

Smooth, well- spoken Kinnock, husband of Denmark’s prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, doesn’t carry any political baggage.

Except for his father’s epic defeat by the Tories in 1992.

What does the Bible say? ‘Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.’

SHOULDN’T David Cameron fix a knighthood soon for Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union? Surely the latter’s brilliance at plotting to have Ed Miliband lead Labour made Cameron’s job of winning May 7’s General Election so much easier. Now McCluskey is going for a double: he’s conspiring to saddle the People’s Party with Andy Burnham, who came fourth, out of five candidates, in the 2010 leadership race and was Health Secretary during the scandal about the unseemly number of deaths at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust. If he pulls that off, he’s worth a peerage from the Tories — Baron McCluskey of Mayhem?