The one where the cat leaps out of the bag
Laurie for PM? My First Impressions
When I first met the man who was looking to replace George Buckley as MP for Hemsworth, in the first week of 1992, I was determined not to like him. I had the first draft of my column written before I had even met the man. A seat that had seen the popular Alec Woodall forced out due to his differences with Arthur Scargill was, five years later, being taken over by Kinnock’s London Mafia, with an Old Etonian sportsman being imposed from on high. Half a dozen local candidates, many with a long history in the Trades Union movement, were being passed over for a public schoolboy with a sudden interest in politics. The idea that the working people of Featherstone were being represented by the son of a Cambridge educated doctor was farcical. I was going to tell the world just how farcical the idea was.
And then I met Jim Laurie. Despite the biting cold, he insisted on meeting my train at Wakefield Westgate Station on foot, saying he would not hear of the “grotesque chaos of a Labour candidate, a Labour candidate, sending a taxi to pick up a Yorkshire Post journalist from the station.” This line, delivered in an unsettlingly accurate impression of Neil Kinnock, had me roaring with laughter before I’d left the platform. A short while later, I found myself in a hotel bar with Laurie and his Electoral Agent, Mr Derek Enright. Enright himself was rumoured to be a possible replacement for Buckley, until the spat with the more militant sections of the Yorkshire area of the NUM became quite so toxic. If he had entered the Commons, the press would not have known what to make of a proud working class Yorkshireman quoting Livy and Cicero, as well as Lennon and McCartney, all in flawless Latin. Instead, they got Laurie.
As I sat there, I got a glimpse of the man we have all become familiar with over the last twelve years. Armed with bags of charm, and a self deprecating humour, Laurie managed to put me at ease alarmingly quickly, and often had the majority of the bar laughing at his jokes. At the same time, his passion, his earnestness, and his desire to work for Hemsworth was infectious. Over the previous six months, Laurie had been spending nights at a time on the camp bed in Enright’s spare bedroom, getting to know the area. He spoke with confidence on the challenges facing the community, and the hardships suffered by the constituents. Having very little time for sport, I had no real impression of Jim Laurie. I had expected a stockbroker crossed with Bertie Wooster. My colleagues had suggested that he was more likely to be a snake oil salesmen, all style, and no substance. Neither opinion was in any way close.
He had genned up on the area, and the problems it was facing to an admirable degree already, and still had five more months to add to his armoury. By the time of the election, some claim that the Hardcore Scargillite ‘Independent Labour’ candidate was facing more questions about being a Trot from Bradford than Laurie was about his own background. While this is likely over-egging the pudding, Laurie did prove incredibly effective at answering the charges levelled at him. His very background was proof, he said, that the right name, the right accent, and the right school still mattered. He knew that patronage and money still mattered more than merit, and he knew just how insidious it was. If you wanted to dig such a thing out, you had to understand how deep the roots went. He knew. His life was testament to that. Moreover, he was incredibly well versed in Labour tradition and history. At one hustings, an opponent criticised his university education as antithetical to what Labour stood for. After asking if he should have slummed at that, and I quote "complete dump" Oxford, with Atlee and Wilson, he countered more seriously with the argument that Labour wanted anybody capable of success to be able to go to Cambridge, rather than preventing anybody at all from going. "What sort of equality do we win by stopping the next Atlee from joining Labour, simply because he went to the wrong college? That is Toryism done backwards. Labour should not be the opposite of the Tories. It should be better than them."
By the time the election came, a combination of tribalism, Laurie’s effective communication, and the support of both Enright and the increasingly frail George Buckley convinced the electorate of Hemsworth. Scargill’s man got just over two thousand, and Laurie finished just under 20,000 votes ahead of his nearest challenger. The count would have been relegated to the briefest of footnotes, were it not for a video camera catching Enright heckling the Scargillites in song. His Latin rendition of “Get Back” is still inexplicably popular on internet video sites. Since then, Laurie has become ever more part of the seat, and has refused to let first wider party responsibilities from preventing his work in West Yorkshire to go unattended. Now, he is being tipped for the highest office in the land, there is some disquiet in Laurie’s constituency. For some, there is a fear that Laurie will forget about them, that they’ll ‘lose’ him, back to the South, to the background from which he came. Others, however, seem to have a deep sense of pride. Just as Laurie has adopted Hemsworth, so it has adopted him. As one elderly gentleman in South Kirkby told me last week. “
Ah reckon he’s one of us now. He’ll do well in That London if they give him the job. If he were any good at cricket, we might consider him for Yorkshire in a few more year.” Surely, there’s no better signed that you’re accepted.
Ever since he walked away from rowing after Seoul, James Hugh Calum Laurie has confounded expectations. He still does mine. I expected him to go beyond Hemsworth, but Foreign Secretary would have felt like something of a stretch, let alone Number 10.
As for that first draft? I still have it, but I’ve never looked at it since I put it in a drawer in 1992, and began to write a whole new article.
For the benefit of readers, that 'new article' from 1992 is published verbatim opposite.
Is this the face of our next Prime Minister? Jim Laurie at a recent Foreign Office Bash
