Chris Bryant interview: Labour has to speak to voters ‘at the end of the line’

Chris Bryant is haunted by Labour’s general election defeat. He has taken his former colleague Douglas Alexander’s office, and Commons staff have been appearing to collect the former Shadow Foreign Secretary’s computers. ‘They were referring to the computers as “the defeated computers”,’ he says. ‘Politics is quite brutal.’

The defeated computers are a sad symbol of Labour’s loss: Alexander was one of Labour’s many election chiefs, but is now just an ex-MP. But Bryant, who says he did feel in his gut that Labour was going to lose, still seems rather chipper. Perhaps it’s because he is now Shadow Culture Secretary, and is facing John Whittingdale, who has been tasked with being radical in a way that Labour will enjoy opposing. Or perhaps it’s because he can see that the government’s majority of just 12 is going to give him plenty of opportunities for, as he puts it, ‘getting up to something’ on the policy areas he covers.