Harriet Harman Resigns From Labour, Defects to Tories (PRESS STATEMENT)
To friends, foes and fans,
Below is a copy of the resignation letter that landed on Gordon’s desk this morning.
I couldn’t be bothered to type a completely new one, seeing as Quentin Davies (LO-SER!) had written a perfectly good one here,
I thought I’d just change the relevant sections… a swap for a swap if you like.
All opinions are welcome. For an explanation of what led to this landmark decision, please read my much more interesting blog here
Harriet Harman Resignation from the Labour Party: Letter to David Cameron and statement to Press
Letter to David Cameron
Rt. Hon.Gordon Brown M.P.
Leader of the Labour Party/Prime Miniser
House of Commons
London
SWIA OAA
25 April 2008
I have been a member of the Labour Party for over 30 years, and have served for 26 years in the Parliamentary Party, in a variety of backbench and front bench roles. This has usually been a great pleasure, and always a great privilege. It is therefore with much sadness that I write you this letter. But you are entitled to know the truth.
Under your leadership the Labour Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.
For the first 25 years of my time in the House, in common I imagine with the great majority of my colleagues, it never occurred to me to leave the Party, whatever its current vicissitudes. Ties of familiarity, of friendship, and above all of commitment to constituency supporters are for all of us very strong and incredibly difficult to break. But they cannot be the basis for living a lie – for continuing in an organisation when one no longer has respect for its leadership or understanding of its aims. I have come to that appreciation slowly and painfully and as a result of many things, some of which are set out below.
The first horrible realisation that I might not be able to continue came last year. My initial reaction was to suppress it.
You had come to office as Leader of the Party committed to
break a solemn agreement we had with the country to give them a
referendum on the European Consitution, now known cunningly as the
Lisbon Treaty. For seven months you vacillated, and during
that time we had several conversations. It was quite clear to me that
you had no qualms in principle about tearing up this agreement, and
that it was only the balance of prevailing political pressures which
led you ultimately to stop short of doing so i.e You are a wimp, Gordo!
You also broke your promise to let me be Deputy Prime Minister and run the Deputy Leadership elections unopposed, just like you.
Of course I knew that you had put yourself in a position such that if you gave the referendum you would be breaking other promises you had given to colleagues, and on which many of them had counted in voting for you at the leadership election where of course you were the only contestant. But that I fear only made the position worse. The trouble with trying to face both ways is that you are likely to lose everybody’s confidence.
Aside from the rather significant issues of principle involved, you have of course paid a practical price for your easy promises. You are the first Prime Minister of this country to be completely upstaged on his recent visit to America, by his holiness the pope, who by all accounts is a doddery old man. Up to, and very much including,Tony Blair, your superior predecessor.
I have never done business with people who deliberately break contracts, and I knew last year that if you did not give the European Referendum, or make me Deputy Prime Minister I could no longer remain in a party under your leadership.
In fact you held back and I tried to put this ugly incident out of my mind and carry on. But the last year has been a series of shocks and disappointments. You have displayed to the full both the vacuity and the cynicism of your favourite slogan “When I wake up every morning, something or other”.
One day in January, I think a Wednesday or Thursday, you and Alistair Darling discovered that David Cameron was to make a speech on your disgraceful 10p tax cut. You wished toavoid the hassle. So without any consultation with anyone – experts, think tanks, the industry, even the Shadow Cabinet – you announced a visit to the US, which was so cack-handed you managed to be upstaged by His Holiness. The PR pressures had overridden any considerations of economic rationality or national interest, or even what would have been to others normal businesslike prudence.
Equally it seems that your hasty rejection of Fidel Castro as a Hero of the Left nuclear energy as a “last resort” was also driven by your PR imperatives rather than by other considerations. Many colleagues hope that that will be the subject of your next u-turn.
You regularly (I think on a pre-arranged PR grid or timetable) make apparent policy statements which are then revealed to have no intended content at all. They appear to be made merely to strike a pose, to contribute to an image.
You thus sometimes treat important subjects with the utmost frivolity. Examples are “Britishness”, “Anti-Terrorism”, most recently, mass promotion of people who are not even Labour Party Members like Digby Jones to the government (In view of your complete failure to consult with anyone, within the Party or outside it, on many of the matters I have touched on, or on many others, the latter was perhaps intended as a joke).
Of course I could go on – but I’m tired.
Believe it or not I have no personal animus against you. You have always been perfectly courteous in our dealings. You are intelligent and charming. As you know, however, I never supported you for the leadership of the Party – even when, after my preferred candidate (Myself) chickened out as she didn’t think she had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. It was blindingly obvious that you were going to win. Although you have many positive qualities you have three, dithering, dourness and a terrible habit of picking your nose in public which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you currently hold and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve.
Believing that as I do, I clearly cannot honestly remain in the Party. I do not intend to leave public life. On the contrary I am looking forward to joining another party with which I have found increasingly I am naturally in agreement and which has just acquired a leader I have always greatly admired, who I believe is entirely straightforward, goodlooking and who has a towering record, and a clear vision for the future of our country which I fully share.
Because my constituents, to whose interests of course I remain
devoted, are entitled to know the full background, I am releasing this
letter to the press.
Statement to press
“The more I thought about it the more I realised that the only logical and honest thing to do was both to leave the Labour Party and join the Conservative Party, with which I have found myself in practice regularly in agreement.”
Posted by Harriet in Campaigning | 1 comment | April 25th, 2008
