Drafting candidates

According to today's Guardian a plot is afoot to run a "write-in" campaign for David Miliband - enough MPs publicly nominate him that he has to stand.

This is just cringe-worthy and desperate. You can't bully someone into running to be Prime Minister. It's not like twisting his arm to be CLP Treasurer.

The Westminster-centric nature of this is really alienating too - all of this is being conducted at a parliamentary level with no reference to whether anyone at a grassroots level in either the CLPs or the unions wants a non-left challenge to Brown. If there was demand for it it would be being expressed, in party meetings, in newspaper letters pages, in the blogosphere. But there's a deafening silence.

The Guardian cites a poll in "the Local Government Chronicle [that] showed 74% of council chief executives polled favouring Mr Miliband over Mr Brown as prime minister." So what? I would be more interested in what Labour Councillors, or shopfloor UNISON members working in councils, thought about this than the opinions of highly-paid and theoretically politically neutral local government civil servants.

Perhaps most irritating is the badging up that this is a"Blairite plot" - actually its a plot by a small - a very small - minority of Blairites. The rest of us want nothing to do with it.

I like and respect most of the people who are seeking an anti-Brown candidate. But as I've said before I think they have totally misjudged this both in terms of the appetite for it in the wider party and the strategic impact on Brown's positioning with the wider electorate and in the Party.