Doing their dirty work
by digby
If Labour forms the next government, who will be the most hated man in the cabinet? A leading candidate for that unenviable role is Chris Leslie, the MP for Nottingham East. It will be nothing personal. He is a smart and pleasant individual. The “baby of the House” when he first entered parliament in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, he has grown into one of the more credible, persuasive and forward-thinking people in Labour’s ranks. The unpopularity that awaits him will be professional. If he moves into the job that he is currently shadowing, he will become the chief secretary to the Treasury, the man who holds the purse-strings.
When his colleagues want to spend money on what they identify as good causes, and it is the default instinct of Labour people to search out good causes and spend on them, he will be the man who has to deny them their dreams. Actually, this nice guy is going to have to be much nastier than that. He will have to laugh at his colleagues’ dreams. He will have to tear up their dreams and stamp them in the dirt. And he will have to do so without mercy. He will be the abominable no-man who has to tell a Labour cabinet that they will have to cut spending, cut often and cut deep. As he noted in a recent speech: “The settlements we will need to make following the general election will be the toughest faced by an incoming Labour government for a generation.”
I’m going to guess that the deficit fetishists will have regrouped here by 2016 as well and we’ll be looking at a similar dynamic. Liberals are always willing to do this dirty work. In fact, they’re really good at it.
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