Left Foot Forward readers overwhelmingly want the former shadow chancellor brought back into the fold.
Left Foot Forward readers overwhelmingly want the former shadow chancellor brought back into the fold
Message to Ed Miliband: bring Alan Johnson back into the Cabinet. Or at least that’s the message Left Foot Forward readers have given in our latest poll.
Almost three quarters (68 per cent) of those who voted said that the former shadow chancellor should be brought back to the Labour front bench, with just 26 per cent rejecting the idea.
Six per cent of respondents said it didn’t matter whether or not Miliband brought back Johnson.
The suggestion was first mooted by former home secretary David Blunkett, who suggested last week that Miliband should bring some “oldies” back into his top team, specifically Alan Johnson. Johnson quit as shadow chancellor in 2010 and has been on the backbenches ever since.
However it looks like many on the left still see a role for him in the shadow cabinet and, hopefully, a future Labour government.
One of the things that undoubtedly fuels public apathy toward politics is the sense that the political class are all from the same social background. This at least partly explains the success as a communicator of UKIP leader Nigel Farage. To use the tired cliche, he sounds like ‘someone you might meet down the pub’.
Similarly with Alan Johnson. Johnson grew up in a poor household and is a former postman. In the real world this isn’t particularly exceptional, but in the Westminster bubble he might as well be an alien life form. And as we’ve seen with Nigel Farage, hardly a man of the people but someone who at least speaks human, ordinariness can be turned to your advantage in a world inhabited largely by Oxbridge types.
And I suspect that’s why LFF readers overwhelmingly view Alan Johnson as a potential asset to Ed Miliband. He’s intelligent, likeable and, most importantly, he resembles an actual human being. Politics could do with a lot more people like that.
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25 Responses to “Bring back Alan Johnson, say Left Foot Forward readers”
Kay
I wonder how things would have turned out for the Labour party in 2010 if David Davis had won the leadership of the Conservative party?
Davis’s biography reminder: born to a single mother, brought up on a council estate by grandparents, left school without good A-levels; worked at all sorts of jobs and the Territorial Army to earn enough money to retake the exams. Gained a place at University and went on to a Masters degree. Worked at Tate & Lyle for a couple of decades before becoming an MP. To my mind that’s a pretty impressive and inspiring CV.
If Davis ever replaces Cameron, or if he is allowed a major speaking part in the election of 2015, then I don’t hold out much hope for the former SPADS, droids, twonks and Metropolitan Elite that hold power in the so-called Labour Party.
treborc1
They backed the leader tell me when politicians do not, the issue is do you want the 14 ministers who now sit on the opposition benches who are either progress ex chairs including Miliband or are fully paid up members of the Progress Party I nearly wrote group, but it’s a party within a party
treborc1
But he will not so that’s it dead in the water, if the Tories pick anyone it will some rich and royal person Lord Boris
Richard Honey
We need more MPs from poor, working class, BME backgrounds, with real grassroots credibility. I like Alan Johnson but he is hardly representative of a new breed from outside of the Westminster bubble that will resonate with people. Plus he cooked his goose with me by his appalling treatment of David Knutt and the whole stupid approach to drugs policy by the main parties who are too afraid to abandoned the failed mantra of prohibition.
Kay
Yes indeed! The current Conservative head boys prefer blonds and vote losing Eton-Oxford-SPAD clones.