Hilary Benn for PM

Amidst the factional infighting in the British Labour Party as to who will be next to lead the sinking ship, there is only one MP who has the prospect of at least minimising the scale of that inevitable electoral defeat. He misguidedly stood in 2007 for the deputy leadership of the Party, only to lose heavily to the day facto female quota, shoe-in candidate, Harriet Harman. Then of course, a decade later Hilary Benn notoriously cooked his goose by delivering a brilliant Foreign Secretary-style speech in the Commons with his party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, sat right next to him on the opposition front bench.

The speech in the style of a foreign secretary of the old school that was in diametric opposition to the official stance represented by the hapless Corbyn. That act of perceptible treachery, although to some in the party also a noble principled and powerful stance on the need to confront Islamic State, sealed for some the notion that the sins of the father had been visited upon the most impressive son. Tony Benn reserved his cynical manoeuvrings against his party leader until the devastating general election defeat of 1979. His son, Hillary, did it brazenly with the party leader right alongside him 

Despite all of this, if there is one person who could conceivably come from the centre of the party, and unify it on the basis of not being associated with any of the dirt of the current political scene, and of course having gravitas, intellect and rhetorical emotional heft in spades, then surely there is no one who can compare to Hillary. 

Of course, for his deep but principled pragmatism on Europe, economic management, and TransAtlantic relations to be properly utilised, Hilary Benn needs sufficient Parliamentary Labour Party nominations. I suspect that’s where the unimaginative average Labour backbencher, or indeed Cabinet member, will continue to fail to see the strength that’s bizarrely largely ignored by the media and the commentariat, hiding there in plain sight. Always out of camera shot, he’s the one sitting further along the front bench, the man with responsibility for the so-called nation of Northern Ireland.

I only pray that someone in the PLP will wake up and realise before it’s too late that Starmer’s lack of intellectual and intelligence curiosity, Ange’s Bette Lynch-routine, and the Pillsbury Dough Boy friend of Mandy, just can’t and won’t cut it. Pray too that Hilary will see the historic opportunity amidst the donkeys currently offering national leadership. If that isn’t enough of a hurdle, it would then of course  require sense to prevail amidst the anti-democratic, anti constitutional, power that the dwindling national party membership would wield in choosing the PM. I am probably wilfully deluded in thinking that a touch of the old school from a man of 70 plus would appeal to the great unwashed. Shame, because i have no doubt that, given the chance to serve his country in the ultimate way, that he would rise above the image of a now largely forgotten father, and convey both charisma and leadership. This is what the party, and more importantly, the country needs. Whether it wants it is another matter. Either way it would probably prove to be a relatively brief period of highly capable but inevitably doomed national leadership on a par with that of Gordon Brown’s premiership, and of course that of Hillary’s father’s post-election nemesis, Jim Callahan.