There are 3 serious candidates in the ring – Bull, Greenwood and Shawcroft. Bull is a local councillor, fiercely ambitious and more Blairite than Blair ever was, especially over the Iraq war. She has the charisma of porridge, but none of the warmth. She does though have lots of outside backing. This includes the Labour Council Leader, Jon Collins – who wants a ‘one of us’ candidate to do the Council’s bidding – and with hints of new community centres to woo Pakistani members into her camp. She also has the backing of neighbouring Labour MP John Heppell, whose office seem mainly interested in stuffing Shawcroft. 

Greenwood is the Unison candidate, with about 7 million union nominations all coming from a national agreement to carve up seats. Pity the unions barely have 2 delegates to rub together in the constituency party. She is a much smoother operator with ‘adaptable’ politics – ‘whatever matters to you matters to me’. She has pissed off the Bull camp by climbing into the selection months before it started. When others were out canvassing for the council elections, she was out canvassing for herself. You can’t fault her, though, for the amount of time she has spent in people’s livings rooms with offers of washing, ironing, child minding, free pruning… whatever it takes to get a vote, without mentioning politics. Labour Minister Gillian Merron MP has put in phone calls on her behalf. 

Shawcroft is the left candidate with more than half the members’ votes from the nominations stage. It’s the politics, rather than the address, that upset the other camps. (There have been no problems about her being secretary to the otherwise moribund CLP for the last 3 years). Described as ‘a continuation of Simpson, but without the jokes’, she isn’t helped by having had a humour bypass in early life. Simpson himself is backing her campaign, but may by now be a busted flush. Popularity witht eh voters may not be the same as popularity than a party that is more reactionary than in pretends. 

So, will the local party ever get round to talking about the shambles of PFI schemes, private providers in the NHS, Labour’s ongoing assault on liberties, more spending on war than on welfare, conscription of the unwell and the unemployed? Not likely. They will argue about addresses. It’s what they are good at.