Labour needs to break its box-ticking web of wokery to unearth a strong, competent leader

IN the summer of 2016, Theresa May set out to win the diversity game. And win it she did.

Her cabinet — the perfect balance of men and women, Leavers and Remainers, Oxford graduates and bus drivers’ sons — made politically correct commentators wild with delight.

Wilfried Haubenberger - The Sun

Olivia Utley says Labour must do away with wokery to unearth a competent leader to succeed Jeremy Corbyn[/caption]

So delighted were they, in fact, they failed to point out a minor drawback to the photogenic new line-up: The PM’s choices were mainly dim, careerist MPs who she picked purely because they ticked the right boxes.

The former PM paid a high price for a few days of fawning headlines.

She and her useless coterie presided over three years of division and indecision, only to be unceremoniously dispatched by Boris Johnson and his band of Vote Leavers last summer.

But the Labour party hasn’t learned from her mistakes.

The race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn has so far involved the candidates hamming up their northern accents, trying to out-working class each other, or desperately bigging up their woke credentials to the Press.

No one has yet adopted a whippet or done a Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP and potential leadership hopeful who this week described herself out as “pansexual” — attracted to people regardless of sex — but it won’t be long now.

For the casual bystander, it all makes for a good laugh.

SNEERING COMMENT

 

Emily Thornberry’s hysterical claim that her family was once so poor they had to put down a cat sounded so ridiculous in her cut-glass accent, it distracted commentators from

Angela Rayner’s far more legitimate tales of hardship — much to the comical irritation of the latter.

For anyone serious about rebuilding the opposition, though, this farcical leadership race is no joke.

While Labour contorts itself into a web of wokeness, the Conservatives are quietly cementing their new blue wall in the North.

Why? Because outside leftie London and a few university towns, no one cares about tick-box diversity or even the life stories of politicians.

PA:Press Association

PA:Press Association

Yes, having a “powerful backstory” is useful if you want to make self-indulgent MPs weepy in the Commons, but it won’t persuade voters that you’re capable of getting things done.

And as Boris Johnson proved so decisively last month, getting things done is what counts.

The Eton and Oxford-educated Prime Minister looks and sounds nothing like most of the voters in Bishop Auckland or Redcar, but he persuaded them that he was serious about pulling Britain out of a rut.

That, it turned out, was enough for an 80-seat majority.

Alamy

The Opposition should now take a leaf out of his book.

The last election was calamitous, yes, but with 32 per cent of the vote, Labour is still the second-largest party in British politics.

That’s a powerful base for a recovery if it picks the right leader.

The challenge is finding that person. As things stand, the field isn’t inspiring.

Rebecca Long-Bailey — though a box-ticking superstar — doesn’t have the demonstrable competence that voters are yearning for from Labour.

And poisonous Thornberry, who once tweeted a sneering comment about a Rochester home decorated with English flags, will repel patriotic voters.

But if the party is prepared to ditch the diversity nonsense and ignore pious pundits shrieking that the new leader “must be a woman”, the picture is rosier.

The unbearably smug Keir Starmer — key player in the doomed People’s Vote campaign — would go down like a ton of bricks in Leave-voting areas.

A MAMMOTH TASK

But someone like Dan Jarvis, who has called for Labour to make a “clean break” with the Corbyn era, may just have what it takes.

Under Corbyn, Labour proved once and for all that wokeness doesn’t win elections.

With the exception of naive students and hipster Londoners, voters don’t much care whether their politicians wear flat caps, headscarves or top hats. They just want politicians who are unafraid to act.

Getty Images - Getty

So now MPs have a choice.

Either they nominate duds with tear-jerking back- stories and shore up their majority in Putney — the right-on London seat which provided the only cause for celebration last time.

Or they change tack, abandon wokery, and unearth a strong, competent leader, who might be up to the mammoth task of rebuilding the broken party.

It really couldn’t be simpler.

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