Has Tom Harris fallen victim to EdM’s new assertiveness?
Was it this ad that led to Tom stopping his blog?
Just over two weeks ago I published the above spoof ad under the headline “Is discipline breaking down within Labour?” and posing the secondary question as to whether its creator, blogging Labour MP, Tom Harris, might be in trouble.
Well EdM is about to return to work and what did we see on Tom’s site last night but an announcement that he’s giving up because in his words “blogging is having a negative effect on my personal, family and political life for reasons too many and complicated to recount.” The two events, surely, are not unconnected.
I am sure that there are other “blogging crimes” that Tom is deemed to have committed but the above spoof ad bitingly illustrated what the party’s London mayoral candidate, Ken Livingstone, did during the recent campaign for the mayoralty of Tower Hamlets.
Labour figures are not supposed to campaign against anybody other then the official party candidate and the ad was designed to take the mickey out of Ken’s “excuse” which was apparently accepted by Labour’s NEC.
Since then Ken, under grilling by Andrew Neil, has conceded that he was working against the official choice in Tower Hamlets yet one assumes that once again they’ll let Ken get away with it.
Unless something is done about Labour’s mayoral candidate then everything that Lurfur Rahman does in Tower Hamlets is now tacitly supported by the party.
It’s easy to pick off small-fry like Tom Harris but has the new leader got the bottle to take on Ken? If he hasn’t then I believe that Labour can kiss goodbye to any hope of booting Boris out in 2012 or even returning to power in 2015. It’s that serious.