THE MEMBERS of the Parliamentary Labour party are fighting to reach the door in their desperate attempts to avoid being handed the job of leader.
Like a risk of lobsters being asked which one of them wants to be slung in a pan of boiling water and then eaten rather than staying on the sea bed clowning around with his chums the MPs are lining up to say, “please sir, not me sir”.
As I write Alistair Darling, Jack Straw, Harriett Harman, Yvette Cooper, Alan Johnson and Jon Crudas have all made their excuses and said “not on your nelly”.
So what is it about the job that all apart from the brothers Miliband find so repellent? The pay and perks are pretty good, there’s a chance to be on the television frequently and to be photographed for the papers, then there’s a fairly decent weekend home thrown in. Just the sort of cushy number you might imagine any ambitious middle-aged layabout would think to be right up his, or her, street.
Not a bit of it though. It looks as they are going to be a bit short of candidates and some of what they do get might well be a load of Balls.
Did Gordon ‘Mr Growser’ Brown leave such as poisoned chalice behind him that none dared pick it up?
It begins to look that way. Yet things can’t be that bad, as things stand the new incumbent could well be in with a fair chance of becoming Prime Minister the very next time the music stops playing. It is early days yet, of course, but the coalition of clowns running the show at the moment are set for a fairly stormy passage on the course to the mass-mailings of false hopes and vague promises we are earnestly assured will be in five years time.
Time was when they would have been fighting for the top spot. Yes gouging, clawing, biting, hitting below the belt, libelling, slandering and slaughtering in their efforts to become the man on the steps of Number 10 waving to the adoring band of press photographers across the road.
Yet this time around there is not even a ripple of interest from, what these days pass for, the heavyweights of the party.
Strange days indeed. Interesting, of course, but still very strange.