In half the country, sitting Labour MPs will defend their seats at the next election. The other half -Tory, Lib Dem, or seats where a Labour MP will retire – is going through a flurry of democracy. In school gyms and public halls, party members are meeting to decide who their candidate should be.
And the contests have a touch of the surreal about them. CVs with blurred passport photos at the top reel off any number of petty party posts the sender has held. They don’t say what he or she thinks about top-up fees or the war in Iraq.
Hustings meetings are stage-managed affairs where all candidates are asked the same soft questions, so the one who is anti-abortion or ex-SDP cannot be probed on their position.
Someone’s performance on such an odd occasion says little about their calibre as a politician. Perhaps it is a good job that most of the votes are stitched up in advance.
But the choice is crucial. What if members in Sedgefield had selected someone else that fateful night in 1983? Who knows what other future leaders have fallen by the wayside because they failed to shine at hustings?
The Tories are piloting a new approach. They got journalist Andrew Neil in to grill the four contenders hoping to inherit Kensington and Chelsea from Michael Portillo. Sir Malcolm Rifkind won, in part because the format favoured a politician who had the strength and experience to stand up to some offensive questions – ‘Aren’t you a carpetbagger?’ – and give back as good as he got.
That is surely a more useful skill in a future MP than being able to hold forth to a sympathetic audience in a hall. And with grassroots members increasingly carved out of the selection process – in European elections and the London assembly, for example – they might as well have an informed say on the few occasions when they can really make a difference.
Ken Livingstone’s old constituency of Brent East is shaping up as one of the more interesting battlegrounds of the next general election. Patricia Hewitt called the bitter Labour selection contest ‘disgraceful’. She meant the way Euro-MP Robert Evans’s supporters knifed their man’s main rival, Shahid Malik, at the shortlisting stage.
The eventual winner was Yasmin Qureshi, a 40-year-old barrister hoping to become Britain’s first Asian woman MP. She overturned the original result – a two-vote win for Evans, who lost last September’s by-election to Lib Dem Sarah Teather. After Qureshi’s carefully crafted appeal, the NEC recalculated the result as a one-vote win in her favour.
Qureshi is bright and likeable, and Teather was swept in on a tide of anti-government and anti-war feeling, in an area once solid for Labour.
However, the lesson of Simon Hughes shows that once Lib Dem MPs become entrenched they can be hard to shift.
Before Michael Howard moved quickly to sack Conservative MP Ann Winterton for telling a racist joke at a dinner party, he had appeared to have lost his timing on the tricky matter of when to demand people’s resignations.
In February he called on Tony Blair to go over the PM’s professed ignorance on what kind of WMD Saddam was supposed to have been able to use within 45 minutes. Westminster was slightly taken aback. After all the ups and downs of the war and the Hutton inquiry, resignation on this issue didn’t seem necessary.
And it was back in January that Mr Howard, a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC, told journalists at a Tory drinks bash that he wanted the club’s manager, Gerard Houllier, sacked before the end of the season. Hours after the outburst was made public by the Evening Standard, Liverpool won a key away fixture at Chelsea. Mr Howard had to apologise.
By contrast, Tony Blair scored a direct hit on his single foray into the thorny territory of whether football managers should stay or go. When England boss Glenn Hoddle was under pressure in 1999 over his belief that disabled people are paying for sins in a past life, Tony Blair told Richard and Judy that the remark ‘made it very difficult for him to stay’. Hoddle was sacked the following day. Now that’s timing.