The moment Starmer lost control of the Labour left

00:00 06:43

Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘Tony Blair walks on water.’ Decades ago this statement led a Times photographer and me to the front door of the dismal Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour party offices. It was 23 April 1997, and a fateful general election loomed. I was my newspaper’s 46-year-old political sketchwriter, and Labour’s local candidate was a 43-year-old MP called Diane Abbott. She had hit the headlines with her withering response to New Labour demands that she cease her unhelpful noises-off from stage-left and toe the line. There were Labour colleagues who could have attested without sarcasm to their leader’s amphibian powers. She was not one of them.

We were destined to wait outside that office all day. Abbott never came out. Occasionally we thought we spotted her peering through an upstairs window.

So we amused ourselves by contacting her rival candidates, and were joined on that doorstep by Dickon Tolson, an engaging youth from the None of the Above party who had invested all his savings in the requisite deposit. An extra in Peak Practice, Mr Tolson was campaigning for individual freedom; and arrived on his bike. Also joining us was Lisa Lovebucket, of the Rainbow Connection Dream Ticket party, who hoped for 23 votes precisely: ‘It’s the number of the Illuminati,’ she told me. And arriving with his rosette was the obviously doomed Conservative candidate, Michael Lavender.

Mr Tolson has gone on to a successful acting career; I have been unable to track down further information about Ms Lovebucket; and there’s a Michael Lavender who became Tory leader on Enfield Borough Council and briefly hit the news by playing the Candy Crush video game during a council meeting and – accused by Labour councillors of treating them with contempt – responded magnificently (according to report) that he was glad they’d got the message.