‘Labour, to me, has always been a bit of a life sentence,” Jon Cruddas says. “I don’t get a lot of fun out of it.” The Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham is sitting in the atrium in Portcullis House opposite the Houses of Parliament, under one of the monitors that call MPs to vote. Periodically, it clangs loudly and we fall silent and wait for the pointless noise to pass. It’s a metaphor for late-capitalist democracy. Sorry, his disaffection is contagious. He seems cheerful on it, though.
The life sentence began in 1978 when he joined the party at 16. Participating in local politics in Portsmouth wasn’t the formative experience; more important was when he went to Australia, before university, and got involved with a construction union. His dad was a sailor from West Yorkshire and met his mum in Derry. “Classic, extraordinarily socially mobile generation,” he says of himself and his four siblings. “We had free education, free health, access to housing, access to work. How much of that is still available? We were very fortunate.”
