Quintin Jardine's blog

So I was wrong about Mr Tristram Hunt coming t through to lead the Labour Party. I guess that the cousin of a former Tory Cabinet Minister would have been a step too far. That leaves us with three likely candidates, since Mary Creagh may not clear the threshold of 35 nominees among the parliamentary  party.

I’ve been looking at the CVs of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. Apart from their Oxbridge link, they have one other common trait, and that is minimal experience of the working world outside the political sphere. Liz Kendall does list a spell as director of the Ambulance Services Network, but even after a good rummage in the NHS website, I’m not exactly certain what that is. If Mary Creagh does make the list, she will add experience as a lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Cranfield Management College. How one can hold such a post on the back of a modern languages degree followed by a stint as a volunteer in the European Parliament and then a  post with the European Youth Forum, and without every having been an entrepreneur, well, that rather beats me.

My point is this. These people all want to be Prime Minister, yet none of them seems to have any real practical work experience outside their very limited, enclosed little world. Surely there is room for a public examination of the credentials of everyone who aspires to be  leader of a national political party. If there were, I suspect that most of the candidates would fail.