New party, same old views

I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the seven Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the imaginatively named Independent Group. Back then he was something relatively senior in Labour’s Walworth Road HQ, I can’t recall exactly what. The match was between Walworth Road and the researchers and speech writers, of whom I was one, who worked for Neil Kinnock’s shadow cabinet, in the House of Commons.

We viewed our Walworth Road comrades with enormous distrust, bordering on outright dislike, on account of their leftism, especially Mike. We were largely from the right-wing of the party — the Manifesto Group, as it was called, with a couple from the centre-left Tribune group. Head-office staff were much further to the left.