Oh god, it’s happened again. I’ve had a thought about the Labour Party, and I’m going to write it down, even though I know that by doing so I’m essentially setting my Twitter mentions on fire. Oh well, once more unto the breach.
Roy Jenkins once said that leading Labour to victory was like “carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”, a quote rolled out so frequently these last few months that your eyes likely glazed over sometime in the first half of this sentence. But it’s only these last few weeks that it’s dawned on me exactly what this means in practice. It’s hit me why Labour is so depressingly cautious – and why, the more probable victory looks, the more cautious, if anything, its leadership seems to become.
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