A text message comes winging its way across the Atlantic and into my Nokia. It is from one former Minister and Shadow Cabinet hopeful to another ex Minister.

The gremlins send it to me instead. Hmmmm.

“Hope you are well. Just to say that I have put my name in for the Shadow Cabinet. Hope you might think of voting for me. This text is instead of pestering you on the phone!”

This gets me thinking.

In the first Shadow Cabinet elections in 13 years, the hopefuls, if they are serious, will have to talk and listen to their colleagues.

Celebrity status, even for former leadership contenders, is no guarantee of success.

Labour MPs have it in their own hands to shape the leadership of the Party in Parliament.

And to take responsibility for the outcome.

These are exciting days.

Ed’s message

I am more interested in content rather than delivery, which was, if truth be told, a tad clunky.

But how refreshing to hear Ed Miliband criticise the banker for earning more in a day than the care worker in a year – and to say this in such clear, unambiguous terms.

We would never in a million years have heard Blair say such a thing.

As it happens, I am reading the late Tony Judt’s “Reappraisals: Reflections on the forgotten twentieth century” (2008) which includes a chapter on Tony Blair which first appeared in the New York Review of Books in July 2001.

Judt wrote:

“In the Spring of 2001, during a BBC radio discussion of the forthcoming British general election, a young journalist voiced her frustration. “Don’t you agree,” she asked her fellow panellists, “that there’s no real choice?

Tony Blair believes in privatisation, just like Mrs Thatcher.”

“Not quite,” replied Charles Moore, editor of the (Conservative) Daily Telegraph.

“Margaret Thatcher believed in privatisation. Tony Blair just likes rich people.”

In Reappraisals, he comments on his earlier essay:

“Since then (2001) Blair’s trajectory, culminating in his shared responsibility for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his embarrassingly protracted “cérémonie des adieux,” has given me no cause to revise my low estimate of the man and his “legacy”.

Ouch!