Though Cowards Flinch

LOLcredit to MTPT

Both Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, since their little coup flopped so spectacularly, have been giving interviews offering bullshit reasons for their actions. Hewitt declared, “[a secret ballot is] the best way to put an end to this once and for all, and give Labour the best chance at the next election.”

Interestingly their letter didn’t advance a name that would give Labour a better chance at the next election than Gordon Brown would. This was an act of political cowardice, on their part. If they don’t think there is someone, then they are taking nonsense to say that they revolted to give Labour ‘the best chance’. If they do think there is someone, they’ve had two years to come forward with the name.

If that person didn’t want to stand as leader, then this continued failure to mention a name is plainly dishonest.

Hoon offered an even worse justification for his ludicrous actions, actions for which he will rightly take flak from his constituency party:

“I think it’s absolutely vital, which is a point I’ve been making all week, that the Labour Party goes into the general election with a very clear view of what we stand for and that that message can get across and too often, sadly, in recent months, that message has been lost in all the noise about the leadership. Our proposal…was simply to resolve this matter once and for all, now, because otherwise we both feared that this would run on into the general election campaign.”

To sum that up, Hoon thought that the best way to get past ‘all the noise about the leadership’ was to make more noise about the leadership. Spot on, twat. There had been no serious noise about disagreements in the leadership since June, when some cabinet ministers (one of whom is a walking, talking joke) resigned as part of a ‘coup’. Suddenly Hoon, to ‘solve’ the problem of everyone not talking about the issue of leadership decides to rebel.

The thing that concerns me most is that these are the supposed political whizz kids who had their fingers on levers of power as cabinet ministers for quite a number of years.