From Algernon to Crewe in just 30 years

The Labour campaign in Crewe and Nantwich rang a faint bell and I've been trying to remember what it was. And then it came to me.

Algernon.

The boy with the silver spoon in his mouth.

In December 1976 the Labour Party televised a broadcast making a nakedly class based appeal. It satirised "Algernon" a boy who went to an expensive school, who doesn't need social security and doesn't need to work.

Voiced by Joe Ashton and Helene Hayman (now Lords Speaker) the broadcast was extremely controversial. Even Jim Callaghan the Party leader was critical.

The broadcast was seen as a disgraceful class slur and an antiquated message. That was more than 30 years ago.

Some Labour figures (Party General Secretary Ron Hayward for instance) thought the broadcast a triumph, the best thing the party had ever done. Others understood it was a disaster. Now all these years later the same mistake is being made again.

I don't imagine Tony Blair would ever have sanctioned such a campaign - he would realise it was both irrelevant and a negation of new Labour. Blair wanted everyone inside his big tent. Toffs included. And he wouldn't want to signal that Labour was at all a class vehicle.

Which raises these questions - did Brown approve this fiasco of a campaign?  Or is he so out of the picture that he wasn't consulted?

Comments

[Praguetory]

Donchaknow that Brown runs a 'don't ask don't tell' style of management. If he doesn't ask difficult questions and nobody tells him what they are doing he can't be to blame (remember Peter Watt and David Abrahams or the cash for peerages).

Brown is, of course, perfect and can't be blamed for anything rogue forces in his party or government do.

[Ross]

"I don't imagine Tony Blair would ever have sanctioned such a campaign - he would realise it was both irrelevant and a negation of new Labour."

Do you not remember his infamous "Forces of conservatism" speech, with his sneering references to 'old elites' and hereditary peers and fox hunting?