From this Sunday's GMTV Sunday Programme...
STEVE RICHARDS
Tony Blair is going this year. You’ve been one of those who’ve yet to endorse Gordon Brown formally, are you willing to say formally that you want him to be the next leader?
LORD FALCONER
He is an absolutely towering figure in the Labour party, he is the person, along with Tony Blair who has most contributed to what the Labour Government has done over the last nine and a half years. He is head and shoulders in achievement, above anyone else within the Labour Party. He is without doubt the strongest candidate to be leader.
STEVE RICHARDS
So is that Lord Falconer endorsing Gordon Brown to be the next leader? Has he got your backing? It sounds as if he has.
LORD FALCONER
Once he became the Prime Minister, or leader of the Party, of course he would have my backing. I don’t know what’s going to happen between now and the time that he actually takes over, which I think is probably the most likely course, he is an absolutely towering figure.
IAIN DALE
So that's a no then.
18 comments:
I think that's a yes!
A Reid/Brown race for the leadership would be the best result for all of us. There must be a lot of skeletons in both closets.
I would take with a pinch of salt anything Lord Haw Haw, otherwise known as Lord Falconer, has to say.
What interviewer would not then ask if he would back Reid?
Iain Dale then asks: And do you have any thoughts on the leadership yourself?
Lord Falconer replies: I have absolutely no ambitions in that direction whatsoever. Of course, if the party ...
And on the one o'clock news Lord Falconer has just endorsed Prescott's view of the Saddam execution.....
It may be moot. Let us wait to see if Blair goes. I don't see it, moi-self.
Verity, I agree. I also am highly skeptical of this much bandied about Blair departure thing.
I can't see him going without being putsched!(pun intended)
I thought the electorate had had enough of highly organised sections of a political coalition bringing down the country's elected leader with Margaret Thatcher.
Is the electorate again to watch their clearly expressed political choice denied, this time by the Labour Party (or factions within it)?
And if there is some argument that we don't elect a prime minister we elect constituency MPs who then form a majority for a party leader in the House of Commons,then there are some very old-fashined understandings of why we vote as we do hanging about.
Does anyone remember this, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 19/01/06?
Public figures tend to let their guard down when they are abroad, often saying things they later regret.
And Spy likes nothing more than to be there when it happens.
So when Lord "Charlie" Falconer - the Lord Chancellor and one-time flatmate of Tony Blair - enjoyed a sojourn on the sun-drenched Caribbean island of St Lucia during Parliament's Christmas recess, my mole was on the neighbouring sunlounger.
"He was staying with family and friends at a resort called Windjammer Landing, but he hardly stopped talking about
politics," says my man in unsightly Speedos. "He regularly held court in the beach bar, and was surprisingly candid about
the issue of the Labour succession. He was saying that the only way to deal with the threat from David Cameron was to 'dump
Gordon and skip a generation'."
So who does the arch-Blairite have in mind to take over from Tony?
"He was certainly talking about Hilary Benn in glowing terms."
"Once he became the Prime Minister, or leader of the Party, of course he would have my backing."
Doesn't look like an endorsement to me. More like: "I'll back him if we wins."
"He is without doubt the strongest candidate to be leader."
Stating the obvious in a way that Janet Street-Porter would recognise!
The only good thing about Blair staying would be the pleasure of voting him out.
So Iain, do you think the smart money is going on Reid to stitch up Brown at the last minute ?
My guess is there will be a hard fought campaign, and Reid will pull off the coup of getting all the Blairites [apart from a couple that are 'swinging both ways'] to go on telly with him a day before the final vote. They will have a 'shit or bust' message that Brown is the past and Reid is the future.
Risky, because if the vote goes against Reid, his chums will be out in the wilderness after publicly humiliating Brown. But if Reid gets in, they will no doubt have been promised 'first refusal' at the choice cabinet jobs in a new Reid administration.
People like Byers, Milburn, Hewitt have nothing to lose. Even Peter Hain et al might be willing to risk what they've got in the hope of something better.
Even those who think Brown will be in power may risk the fact he is unlikely to be leader after the next election, so Miliband might risk it, especially if Reid threatened him with a 'Glasgow kiss' if he didn't give a public endorsement.
Or am I losing the plot ?? Thoughts?
It'll never happen under the noxious Blair, but we need a presidential system of electing the prime minister directly. MPs cannot be trusted to vote for the good of the country rather than the chance of hitching their wagon to an arsehole.
Until we can vote directly for our head of government, we don't live in a democracy. Not that we do anyway, and it will get worse this year with the revival of the EU "constitution". This time they will jam it through, with dynamite, if that's what it takes. Unless the contrarian French decide to take to the streets and Denmark or Holland, say, dig their feet in Blair will get us sucked in.
My campaign manager, Rab C Nesbitt, tells me that Charlie is on my side.
Id like to take issue with this "towering figure"bollox but gordo is a retard whos only claim is "i freed the bank of england" which is untrue the EU insist on it.everything else he touched is wrecked ie tax credits.So if hes a "towering figure" then everyone else is flat.
My money's on Reid to win, a view that's becoming increasingly prevalent within Labour circles.
Brown's best days are all behind him, it's all trouble and strife for him from now on.
If someone wrote that in a reference for a job it would be filed under bin.
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