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. Not actually deranged like some Labour members were — Jeremy Corbyn, for instance and John McDonnell, plus the entryist maniacs from the Militant tendency, led by Dave Nellist. But far enough over for us to debate, on the way to the leisure centre, how hard we should kick Mike Gapes if we got the chance.

Four years before, the party had split, with the formation of the SDP, and we had remained to fight our corner. I, personally, could see the attraction of David Owen — there seemed to be a welcome streak of illiberality in him — but the rest of the Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, seemed to me simply pompous high-born bien-pensants who would have been better off just joining David Steel in the Liberal party.