Danczuk Dissed Blair Too

In the New Statesman last year, Rochdale’s nominally Labour MP Simon Danczuk expressed his “admiration for the New Labour years, Tony Blair’s leadership specifically”. Last month he defended his attacks on Jeremy Corbyn by asking “Tony Blair as leader never disciplined Jeremy for the attacks that he made on Tony. Why would Jeremy want to discipline me for speaking out and sharing my constructive comments on his leadership?”

The Blair years were clearly not a problem for Danczuk. But the Corbyn ones certainly are: in his latest Sun column - the Mail On Sunday having found him expendable - he invoked the struggle of the International Brigades against Francisco Franco, the downing of Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, the massacres in Rwanda, and of course the Third Reich, as reasons why the UK should drop bombs on part of Syria.

And anyone who stood against this particularly muddled logic was clearly wrong. Some had, he claimed, resorted to bullying, and these were of course all supporters of Corbyn. Sadly, he was unable to back any of this up, but he did show his support for the Sun on Sunday’s vacuous political editor David Wooding, who had shown a mock-up of Corbyn’s face going down the toilet. But Danczuk is a loyal Labour MP, you understand.

And, like the sainted Tone, he is a moderate. So when he says “Moderate Labour will always ignore this idiocy and stick to our first principle - defending Britain and reducing risk … There is no certainty in any path we take”, and follows that with citing John F Kennedy, readers are meant to infer that he is a serious and constructive critic, who is doing no more than wanting his party to emulate the leader who won them three elections.

That is, until a Guardian article from 1994, with the by-line of Peter Hetherington, is unearthed. Here, readers are told “Among the old mill terraces of East Lancashire, in Labour’s most marginal constituency, the faintest stirrings of dissent can be detected among some party activists … Simon Danczuk insists that voters in Rossendale and Darwen - a former Tory seat that Labour hold with a majority of 120 - are a touch uneasy about the inevitability of a Tony Blair leadership”.

Do go on: “‘On the doorsteps some people are saying that the party is wishy washy,’ says the local Labour Party secretary. ‘That’s Blair in a nutshell … I’ve never been impressed with him. Talking to people on the ground, feelings are much more mixed than the media would have us believe.’ But Mr Danczuk … says that Mr Blair will probably win anyway - ‘although I don’t think it will be as clear-cut as all that’”.

Well, it was as clear cut as all that, and now Danczuk cannot praise Blair enough. So he got that one wrong twice over. And the modus operandi is as nowadays, citing views he claims to have heard “on the doorstep”, which by the most fortunate of coincidence chime exactly with his own. Probably because they are his own.

So when anyone tries to pin Danczuk down as a Blairite, remember that the only Labour faction to which he belongs is the one promoting Himself Personally Now.