Decision time on candidate selections...
North London Bubble #20: Is it chicken run time?, Corbyn's new party descends into disarray and more from 'Starmer's back yard'
NORTH LONDON BUBBLE
The NLB is our weekly politics column on NewJournal+ for Camden and Islington. It’s written by Richard Osley (Camden) and Isabel Loubser (Islington).
Look out for our complete news digest from around the boroughs going out on Mondays. You can control which emails you receive in the Substack settings.
Plus look out for bonus features later this week.
A paid subscription is about more than the emails you receive, as every penny we get from subscriptions goes into protecting the free, printed newspaper published each week and our news websites. Please do consider supporting us by upgrading at the discount link below.
DOES ANYBODY ELSE WANT TO STAND TO BE A COUNCILLOR?
THE Labour Party in Camden has finally started selecting candidates for next year’s council elections and, in the main, they will be drawn from existing councillors who want to extend their stay at the Town Hall.
There are 55 seats up for grabs and only 48 names on an email circulated this week listing people who have declared their interest in standing, however. That suggests there is still a bit of arm-twisting to do to make sure Labour, as it usually does, has as many candidates for the seats available.
At most past elections, it has had an even longer, flexible list and people have had to win their places at branch meeting votes.
The names on the email that went out last week were: Adam Harrison, Anna Wright, Arun Kumar, Camron Aref-Adib, Dan Corby, Eddie Hanson, Edmund Frondigoun, Francesca Reynolds, Heather Johnson, Izzy Lenga, James Slater, John Carr, Jonathan Simpson, Joseph Ball, Julian Fulbrook, Larraine Revah, Leo Gordon, Liam Martin-Lane, Livia Paggi, Lorna Greenwood, Lotis Bautista, Marcus Boyland, Matt Cooper, Matthew Sudlow, Meric Apak, Nadia Shah, Nanouche Umeadi, Nash Ali, Nasrine Djemai, Kemi Atolagbe, Pat Callaghan, Patricia Leman, Rebecca Filer, Richard Olszewski, Rishi Madlani, Robert Thompson, Sabrina Francis, Sagal Abdi-Wali, Samata Khatoon, Shah Miah, Sharon Hardwick, Shuab Gamote, Simon Lickert, Suber Abdikarim, Suleiman Osman, Sylvia McNamara, Tamsin Mitchell and Willow Parker.
Not on the list, then, were Awale Olad and Sue Vincent – who we already knew were not seeking re-election in Holborn and Covent Garden, the safe Labour seat which would be the first port of call for any chicken run transfer. Anna Wright, the Highgate councillor, has assured NLB she won’t be making the dash south.
Former mayors Richard Cotton and Jenny Headlam-Wells had also already announced they were stepping down. Nazma Rahman, another former first citizen, did not appear on the list – she’s a Labour councillor in West Hampstead where the party has just been thumped at a by-election by the Lib Dems. Also not there were Jenny Mulholland in Gospel Oak, Athian Ajok (Primrose Hill) and two of the South Hampstead councillors: Nina de Ayala Parker and Tommy Gale, the latter only being elected two years ago in a ward by-election.
The final selections should now come thick and fast, with Bloomsbury councillor Rishi Madlani first to tweet a picture celebrating being picked to stand again over the weekend.
THE PERFECT LETTERS
AS we have told you many times, NewJournal+ does not use AI to write or curate our newsletters, digests and features. That means there might be some typos, but we can’t join the trend seen in some news organisations where human reporters have been replaced with robot alternatives spitting out quick web copy of varying quality and prone to factual errors.
The spread of synthetic text is growing, however, and in our office we’ve already seen it flow into our inboxes with everything from automated press releases to people trying to compose legal threats against us on the basis of ChatGPT’s ill-advised encouragement.
But what about our local politicians? The North London Bubble has been told that one Camden councillor in particular has suddenly begun producing sharper emails in their exchanges and almost poetical prose in some casework letters. It might sound like a good idea to save time or to elaborate a point with AI-generated wavy words, but it’s a slippery slope.
MORE FROM STARMER’S BACKYARD
WITH one of our MPs as PM, we’ve noted a few times how dull ‘Keir Starmer’s backyard’ has become as a description for Camden when anything political happens now.
It does, however, add a little more pressure to the local Labour group whose organisers must know what the headlines for the prime minister will look like if they lose too many council seats on his home patch at next May’s council elections.
The nationals are already sniffing blood and councillors were warned this week not to talk to one journalist in particular from the Financial Times who has been offering off-the-record chats about how Mr Starmer’s local constituents are feeling and asking to shadow them on canvassing sessions.
“Do not respond in any way… You are not obliged in the least, even to answer or respond to his message,” councillors have been told by party leaders.
THE GO-TO GUY
A LOT of things can change before the UK next has a general election, but as it stands now any Labour councillors who want to step up to the House of Commons may be relying on retirements and a bit of luck to find a decent shot.
There could be a lot of parliamentary constituencies with thin majorities to defend rather than ones to gain next time, really emphasising the ‘last bus to Westminster’ feel for those who got elected last year and those who didn’t.
Islington councillor Praful Nargund may expect some reward for the pain of a bruising campaign in which he lost to Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North last year and is now working the rooms hard with regular appearances on TV. Last week, he was back on ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme for its ‘Starmer charmer’ discussion.
He’s regularly talked about as being on a fast track, but that track will only go somewhere if the government figures he is booked to defend on TV start to perform better in the polls.
HE’S REALLY BAD, THEY TWEETED
SIR Keir Starmer has some stern words for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who beamed into Tommy Robinson’s Uniting The Kingdom march earlier this month to tell an amped up crowd that they should be doing more to improve their lot. “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Mr Musk said to a raucous reaction, after complaining about “uncontrolled migration”.
Mr Starmer responded by writing a column in the Sun on Sunday, as owned by Rupert Murdoch – seen last week sitting next to the PM’s princely adviser Morgan McSweeney at the state dinner for Donald Trump.
“When populist politicians, convicted criminals, and foreign billionaires take to the stage to encourage violence, make racist comments, and threaten our democracy, it casts a dark shadow of fear and violence across our society,” Mr Starmer wrote.
The new home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is among several government figures who have also condemned the tycoon’s big screen flame-fanning comments.
But what would Mr Musk really have to say for them to ever give up using his social network X – still known to most as Twitter?
MEDIA CIRCLES
YOU may have spotted policy adviser, commentator, podcaster, you name it Livia Paggi on the list of people interested in being a Labour councillor above – and you may have spotted her in the pages of last week’s Camden New Journal too.
As chair of the Queen’s Crescent Community Association, she was hosting a fund-raising talk by The Guardian’s former editor Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson, the paper’s former US editor, revealing behind-the-scenes details of the Edward Snowden data surveillance world scoop.
See the current edition of the Camden New Journal for a report on what they said.
The North London Bubble continues below for those on a paid subscription.
