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With Gordon Brown’s departure from Downing Street yesterday and his also standing down as Labour Leader with immediate effect, there will be a Labour leadership contest in the fairly immediate future and this raises some interesting forward projections.

Donald Macintyre wrote an article in the Independent on this but frankly, I don’t think that he has got the right angle on it. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/donald-macintyre/donald-macintyre-labours-leadership-needs-the-stamp-of-a-genuinely-new-era-1971404.html

It Will Take Time

Getting a new Labour Leader will likely take far longer than Mr Macintyre thinks, Labour have one major problem, a complete lack of talent capable of being Leader, whoever gets elected this time will only be a caretaker Leader, Postman Pat (aka Alan Johnson) is most likely although he has already said that he won’t stand and will support David Miliband. However, if you stop and think about it, the current front runner is touted as David Miliband but this man lacked the courage or ‘killer instinct’ to seize the “Crown” from Brown both for the Country’s and his Party’s sake over the past two years.

Whilst it is true that people like the Milibands, those who fresh in 1997, should be in position now to take Labour forward but their political development was stunted by the Blair-Brown feud so that younger Labour MPs in order to survive and prosper in those times, had to choose one side or the other and the consequence is a “lost generation” of talent, Labour will have to grow some more. It is people who got out of the firing line some time ago like Cruddas who may offer a more immediate solution for them and he has indicated that he will likely run.

Labour New or Old ?

However, what many seem to overlook is the fact that as Brown left Downing Street yesterday, the whole “New Labour” thing went with him and more important than a new Leader (Hattie can hold the fort for now), is going to be the struggle to decide which political direction that the Party wants to travel in. So the real question is whether they have the “luxury of time” to go through this process ? I suspect the answer is yes.

All political parties are ‘coalitions’ so it is possible that the Con LibDem one could be pulled apart by the extreme wings inside both parties however and as unlikely as it may seem, both Cameron and Clegg have motives to keep it on the road for at least a couple of years for their own Party’s interests.

The Coalition Could Last

Cameron wants the Boundaries redrawn to balance the constituency populations which currently favour Labour so much and that may well fit with his aim to make a 10 percent cut in the number of MPs. Clegg wants to see a Referendum on AV which although not PR is a step on the slippery slope towards it plus, as PR would always deliver coalition Governments, he would want to demonstrate to the electorate that it is nothing to be afraid of by making this one work over time.

Given the current economic mess, no party of any kind has a snowballs chance in Hell of delivering anything from their Manifestos for the next 5 years, all they can do is utter ‘pious wishes’ for the future so Cameron has been quite smart in conceding what he has to the LibDems and whilst this coalition could fracture quickly, even as a minority Government, I suspect that Cameron will aim to get a minimum of a couple of years in before going to the Country.

There Probably is Time

So I suspect that Labour in opposition has likely anything from 2-5 years to get their political direction re-established and to find a suitable Leader to deliver that ‘message’ besides which, no party would willingly want to finance another election this or next year, even if the Palace would permit it.

If the Labour Party is smart, they will deliberately avoid the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls and the like in fact anybody who is tarred with what in the end was a failed Government, they need fresh blood now and might do a lot worse than to look closely at their new intake to see whether there is talent that could be groomed and nurtured over the 5 years or so. Quite amusingly, good old BoJo (Boris Mayor of London), suggested in one of his columns and slightly tongue in cheek, that the only choice Labour has is Peter Mandelson !