Michael Dugher, Delusional Dunce

Since last year’s leadership election, there has been a group of Labour MPs whose mantra has been as predictable and it has been pointless: if only the party would concentrate on attacking the Tories, they tell us in faux-reasonable tones, while all the time taking every opportunity to run to the right-leaning press and cravenly slag off their own party leader, on the grounds that they didn’t vote for him and it’s not fair.

Michael Dugher: he wasn't up to the job

Those taking this stance are readily recognisable: the pleading and slightly-dismayed-at-all-of-it-honestly John Woodcock, the supercilious smirk of Jamie Reed, the nominally Labour Simon Danczuk, and perennially complaining John Mann. And then there is Michael Dugher, whose delusional willingness to be the pointless sacrifice of the party’s right-wing is reprised in today’s Mail On Sunday.

If the idea of Dugher being interviewed by the MoS’ political editor Simon Walters was to make the MP sound remotely credible, it didn’t work. He comes over as the kind of person you would not want to be stuck in a lift with, someone who might hang around the bar looking for anyone they could bore. Readers are told “His idea of a night out is six pints of Guinness with his muckers and a curry rounded off by karaoke, where show-off Dugher hogs the limelight with pitch-perfect renditions of Sinatra classics”.

The rest of the world will do it their way, thanks. Yet Dugher still believes he is leadership material: “He baulks at the notion of a so-called 'suicide' leadership challenge, but when put in less emotive terms, grasps the nettle: 'There's nothing any of us wouldn't do to get Labour back in touch and in power … Asked if he rules out making his own leadership challenge, his 'no one has asked me to put in for the leadership' reply is less than categorical”. He’d be humiliated. Only Danczuk would do worse.

And Walters, oddly for someone who knows his politics, gets the reason for Dugher’s recent departure from the Shadow Cabinet wrong: “Corbyn will ignore the threat posed by Dugher at his peril for one big reason: he is a close personal and political ally of heavyweight Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, godfather to Dugher's daughter, who defended his 'talented' friend when Dugher was fired by Corbyn”.

No, Dugher was binned because he was perceived as useless, and Zelo Street’s sources (plural) are senior enough for me to be certain of that. Since succeeding him as shadow culture secretary, Maria Eagle has given the role a far higher profile. Dugher was too close to the Murdoch press, to whom he ran immediately after getting the sack.

What is yet worse for his dwindling credibility is his smear of Jeremy Corbyn: “'Communism In A Modern Setting' is not Labour voters' idea of a slogan. You can't just make the same old speech to fellow travellers in a meeting hall”. Folks, the kind of cheap attack that the Tories made against Michael Foot. Yet Dugher, like all the others, wants us to think that he is the one who is reasonably and loyal.

Michael Dugher, a thoroughly immodest man with much to be modest about, and doomed to remain on the back benches. It is only through his delusion that anyone believes otherwise.