Next leader of the Labour Party should be.....

[chrisp65]

Does what it says on the tin really, regardless of your personal voting history, who would you like to see as next Labour leader...

Those political minxes amongst you may tactically vote for the most inept, but I personally don't think anyone on VT would be that cynical

For the record, I haven't voted Labour in a very very long time, but critically, I have done. As such, I guess the new leader has to appeal to people like me. Yippee doo and up the workers.

[TheDon]

For the record, I haven't voted Labour in a very very long time

If that's before '97 (as I wouldn't count 97 as a very very long time) then I doubt labour can do anything to get you to vote for them!

[Reality]

No Andy Burnham?

I would cut my balls off for Dennis Skinner to take it.

[AVFC_Hitz]

No Mandy?

[mykeyb]

I expect it will be whoever Mandy wants it to be.

[chrisp65]

I think my first non-Labour moment was Kinnock shouting 'well alright!' repeatedly.

Also, my circumstances have changed since the 80's. It's easy being radical with no kids, no mortgage and no Merc to service and fuel.

No Burnham and no Mandy as I didn't want the list to go on for 3 pages, also no Yvette Cooper. Quite interesting the 'sameness' of the list when you look at it. No decent female challenge, no obvious minority candidates.

I'll see if I have the i.t. nouse to add some more...

[Reality]

It is going to be someone more central to Blair / Brown I think.

Andy Burnham fits that.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

add super Sadiq Kahn, you know you want to.

Sadiq Kahn, yes we can

[rjw63]

Got to be Ed Balls.

I know nothing of him, don't even know what he looks like.....but what a **** brilliant name.

"Prime Minister Balls" anyone?

**** yeah :-)

[Condimentalist]

Jon Cruddas

[mykeyb]

Good call Patrick

[snowychap]

don't even know what he looks like

Muttley.

[Guest Ricardomeister]

Alan Johnson or, if he doesn't want to stand, Call Me Dave Miliband

[funkapotomus]

[markavfc40]

I've gone for Alan Johnson. Unfortunately a major obstacle for him will be his age.

Huge opportunity though for the next leader. With in the next 18 months I can see the con/lib coaliton turning very sour and going totally tits up due to there core beliefs being so far apart. Another election will be called and if Labour are cute they will have a great opportunity to regain power.

Long term Labour will be the big winners of a Con/Lib coalition as there are going to be some massively unpopular decisions made in the coming months and the Libs will be tarred with the same brush as the Tories.

[R.I.C.O.]

They need to go back to their left-wing routes and elect someone who has principles. Not one of these careerist Blairite boys.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

One of the Milibands.

They'll pick someone safe and central though, someone who is favourable to the Unions and someone who won't scare away the wavering centre-right voters they picked up during the 90s, if they haven't buggered off already that is!

Interesting article in the Times, seems set up for a Miliband race.

At a Labour conference a few years ago, delegates appeared sporting “my favourite Miliband” badges. Some stated that their preferred Miliband was David. Others said Ed. Almost as popular were badges saying “My favourite Miliband is Ralph”, a reference to the brothers’ late father, a towering intellectual figure on the Left. The whole business started getting silly when delegates wore badges proclaiming: “My favourite Miliband is the Steve Miller band”.

Soon the Labour faithful will have to do more than choose badges. David Miliband is still the bookmakers’ favourite front-runner in the Labour leadership race. But the growing belief that his younger brother, Ed, could throw his hat into the ring, elevates the contest to another level.

Would Ed play Cain to David’s Abel and knife his brother’s career to get his hands on the top prize? Those who know them say “they have a very, very close relationship” and “will find a way through this”.

David, 44, and Ed, 40, as the sons of the late Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband had leading figures on the Left flitting in and out of the family home. They inhaled politics. “I hope he would be proud of what we are doing, and I think he would think we were doing it for the right reasons,” David has said of their father. “But I think he’d have some pretty serious discussions about whether we were doing the right thing. He was such a different generation.”

Both young men read politics, philosophy and economics at Corpus Christi, Oxford. David earned a first while Ed had to settle for a 2:1. Both were presidents of the junior common room (JCR). A friend of David’s at Oxford recalls that he pulled off the coup of persuading the college to sever connections with Barclays Bank because of its involvement in apartheid South Africa.

David did not stand out as exceptionally clever, but “unusually for a student he was very organised. He used to get up two or three hours before everyone else. He would be in the JCR at 7am having read all the papers.” He was also remembered as “really enthusiastic about football but totally s***. He was never a man of the people. He was nerdy, there was no doubt about it. But everybody liked him. No one ever had a bad word to say about him. He didn’t make enemies.”

After Oxford, David was a Kennedy Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ended up at the think-tank IPPR before Tony Blair brought him into Downing Street, where he became head of policy.

Ed had a brief flirtation with journalism before becoming a researcher for Harriet Harman. Gordon Brown recruited him and he was a key adviser when he became Chancellor.

So the brothers found themselves on opposite sides of the Blair-Brown trench warfare. David escaped when he became an MP in 2001 and began the swift rise that led to him becoming Foreign Secretary.

Ed was never a bruiser of a Brown loyalist like Ed Balls, and during the darkest days of the feuding he often acted as a well-received emissary to the Prime Minister’s domain from Brown’s world. In 2005 he followed David into Parliament as MP for Doncaster North.

“Ed has two advantages,” a New Labour figure says. “One, his first name is Ed but his second name isn’t Balls. Two: His surname is Miliband but his first name isn’t David.”

David was damaged by seemingly losing his bottle when presented with opportunities to usurp Mr Brown. His lack of ruthlessness was encapsulated in the photograph of him looking foolish with a banana at the Labour conference in 2008. He has also struggled to shift the impression of him as nerdy; a policy wonk who cannot easily connect with voters. Ed is seen as a more effortless communicator. He won plaudits for the way, as Climate Change Secretary, he handled negotiations at the Copenhagen summit. In meetings, reports a Whitehall source, Ed defers to David but he is under pressure from supporters to run.

Both scoff at the idea that their relationship is defined by competition. “It’s silly to say there’s a rivalry between us,” David said once. “If anything we get closer.”

[Jon]

Dave Milly, the only sensible option for me.

[Gringo]

Johnson has ruled himself out.

Cruddas the only sensible option, not tainted by by blair/brown years

[mjmooney]

Balls.

If only as a favour to the red-top headline writers.

And so he can do that gag about his sister Ophelia again.