NEW Labour grandees celebrated the 25th anniversary of the party’s historic 1997 landslide in style on Sunday – in a Wetherspoons.
What, Wetherspoons like you’d go to for your cousin’s 30th or airport pints? That Wetherspoons?
It was, admittedly, a fancy-pants ‘spoons just off London’s famous Chancery Lane called The Knights Templar, within about a seven-minute stroll from the law offices where the recently-rehabilitated Tony Bliar met his future wife Cherie QC.
Anthony appears to have been indisposed, perhaps hawking cryptocurrency with his old pal Bill Clinton or giving a PR gloss to Middle Eastern dictators, and so it doesn’t look like he made the bash.
But Cherie and son Nicky – now a superstar football agent – gave speeches as did Prince of Darkness Peter Mandelson, New Labour’s chief spin doctor, according to Politico.
Mandelson – who readers might remember from “failing to declare a £373,000 loan from his millionaire pal” or “attempting to use his position to get his billionaire mate a passport” fame – now usually is only trotted out to tell the media why Jeremy Corbyn is Satan incarnate.
But on Sunday night Lord Mandelson of Foy hailed “the best team that ever came together for politics” and chanted: “Viva New Labour”.
Cool Britannia it certainly was not. But this was not just a gathering of has-beens celebrating the victories of elections past.
What marks it out was the volume of fresh blood there too. While Celtic-daft former minister Pat McFadden and his wife Marianna, a big cheese at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, danced to D:ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, some of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet paid homage to their forebearers.
Jouker is not entirely clear on the details of how the alleged musical antics square with Wetherspoon's famous no-music policy. The Knights Templar was approached for comment.
Labour frontbenchers Peter Kyle and Wes Streeting rubbed shoulders with ex-Labour high heids while basking in the afterglow of the Blair-rehabilitating party political broadcast put out by the party on May 1 – no doubt to coincide with International Workers’ Day.
A new dawn has broken, has it not? And with it, a packet of Alka-Seltzer and a bottle of Irn Bru.
