… it’s up here. Lots to take in - but first, congratulations to Tom Watson on going back into the Whips’ office.

It’s been a pretty exciting day, all told, and I’m quite pleased with the new Cabinet. I wanted to flag up Unity’s comment over at Dave Osler’s place, which I thought made some interesting points about the impact of the changes on the Tories:

The Justice/Home Secretary combo of Straw and Smith is an effective downgrade in importance for the Home Office [...] That effectively pushes Basher Davis down the pecking order in terms of profile, which ain’t going to go down well with him.
Splitting education leaves Cameron with the option of giving Two Brains half his old job or moving him on, right after the grammar school spat, which makes it difficult to move him without there being some negative briefing as payback for pissing off the Thatcherite faithful, unless he gets a plum job, which’ll piss the Thatcherites off even more.

I’m supporting Virendra Sharma, the Labour candidate for Ealing Southall, in the by-election on 19 July. for more information about Virendra, go here.

To explain, this post comes very high in a Google search for “Ealing Southall”, so I edited it on 10 July 2007. The original post follows.

I don’t have anything to add to the eulogies to Mr Blair or the speculation about Mr Brown’s government, other than to say that when Brown was stood on the steps of Number 10, I felt as though I’d been holding my breath for a long time, and could finally exhale in relief. Blair’s remarks at PMQs were extraordinary, and my party will miss his eloquence and presence; hopefully we’ll find something more solid to replace it in Mr Brown.

So, instead, I’m going to blog about something else of interest to me. Along with hundreds of other party members, I get Ann Black’s NEC updates after every meeting. (There’s no truth in the rumour that Ann, as secretary of our CLP, gives a quiz to check who’s read them at the next GC, btw). This paragraph caught my eye:

Finally some members suggested reopening our decision that Ealing Southall should select its next parliamentary candidate from an all- women shortlist, following the sad death of sitting MP Piara Khabra. Traditionally, by-election candidates are chosen from open lists, a process which has overwhelmingly favoured men. However in this case, with the normal selection procedure imminent, and Piara Khabra’s own expressed wish that he should be succeeded by an ethnic minority woman, I hope that the NEC will keep its nerve or that we will at least have a chance to discuss any change.

Good, I thought. After all, our last female candidate is a winnable by-election was Catherine Stihler, in Dumfermline, last year. Before that, it was Judith Church, in Dagenham, in 1994. (Have a look at this list of by-elections, if you don’t believe me). It looks a bit bloody terrible for our party, so committed to equal representation that we changed the law to make it possible. And given that we’ve currently only two (and have only ever had three*) ethnic minority women in the House of Commons, perhaps getting a black or Asian woman selected for Ealing Southall might not be a bad idea?

Andrew, over at B4L, misses the point rather in his post. Yes, women don’t get selected because of direct discrimination, as Fawcett point out here (pdf) - but they also don’t get selected because of indirect discrimination - one might call it institutional discrimination, “the way that things have always been”. The practice of having “favoured sons”, groomed to take over from the sitting MP, is one of these ways of shutting out women. In by-elections, with a telescoped selection process, the pressure is on to select a safe pair of hands - and often that means going with the grain of the perception of who an MP usually is - white and male. It’s no coincidence that we’ve had a string of male candidates in by-elections, even if it’s not through the collective malevolence of procedures secretaries, and it’s about time we took a conscious decision to change that.

Yet today, in my MpURL (hideous thing - now the party can send me emails, emails and more emails to tell me to click onto their website to read emails - and do you say it M-P-U-R-L, or “empearl” or “empy-earl” or what?!), I got no fewer than seven invitations, sent at one minute intervals late this afternooon, by my old mucker Stephen Longdon of the constitutional unit, to apply for the Ealing Southall shortlist (BTW, 1. I’m not going to, and 2. I don’t think they were personal emails to me, somehow). Crucially, none included the information that men need not apply. What a missed opportunity, especially as we were going to make Ealing Southall AWS anyway. I hope one of the excellent Asian women who were gearing up to fight hard for that seat beat off the men who’ll no doubt flock to it, and for a second time in 13 years let us have a female candidate in a winnable by-election.

And yes, of course I think Sedgefield should be AWS too, before someone asks in the comments. I think every winnable seat should be AWS until the PLP is 50-50.

* Diane Abbot, Dawn Butler, Oona King. Only two at any one time, of course.

A new Labour leader and deputy; a new prime minister; the old prime minister standing down as an MP; a Tory defection; tomorrow, a new Cabinet? Truly, one doesn’t want to get too far from a computer at the moment.

‘Scuse the excitement - have finally worked out what was wrong with the blog. My webhost had enabled mod_security, whatever that is, and it meant I couldn’t post HTML. The good people here suggested I get it disabled, and hey presto, I have my blog back! Since sometime between 17 and 23 May, I’ve been unable to link to anyone, so so glad to have got it sorted. Hurrah!

Well, that was worth watching, wasn’t it? I will admit to being utterly flabbergasted that Harriet Harman has won - I just hope that she does stand up to Gordon on the things that matter on equalities and family policy, even if she hasn’t in the past.

Earlier I mentioned that my TV is on the blink, so I was heading to my gym to watch the result on Sky News. Well, I got there, but I think my fellow gym-goers, engrossed in the soft porn that passes for music videos these days, were rather bemused as I howled with delight when Cruddas won the first round, and went on to come a massively respectable third. (I was slightly worried that I might topple off the treadmill if he did really well - thankfully I managed to avoid that). I think Jon should be really proud of what he’s achieved - coming from nowhere in a few short months to beating three Cabinet ministers. I really hope that his ideas and enthusiasm are rewarded by our new leader.

Ipsos Mori’s poll for today’s Observer:
Con 36% (-1), Lan 39% (+4), Lib Dem 15% (-3)

That translates to a Labour majority of 72, according to electoral calculus. What a way to welcome a new leader and deputy leader than to be ahead in the polls for the first time since December?

While we’re on the subject of the deputy leader, Benedict Brogan has a really odd story about how the candidates will be told - locked in a room, no mobiles, the winner taken away whilst the others stay there. I can’t make my TV work in my new home, so gotta get to the gym to watch the announcement on Sky. If Cruddas does well, I may fall off the treadmill…

Earlier this week I was talking about women in the Cabinet; today, the Sindy suggests that Angela Eagle, Mary Creagh, Angela Smith, Vera Baird, Caroline Flint and Yvette Cooper may get promotions, and Ruth Kelly may survive for exactly that reason. I’d really like incompetent women not to survive because they’re women, thanks.

The Sindy article also has a cryptic couple of paragraphs about Ruth Kelly and “super-councils”, which I guess must be the new generation of unitaries that are being assessed at the moment - what people elsewhere might call “a sensible arrangement for local government, with one council in each area”. Forgive me for not understanding why people are opposed. I’m not bitter that Oxford didn’t get through. Oh well.

Two interesting stories about how the Tories really haven’t gone all cuddly:

“…just 46 per cent of Tory MPs agree that gay couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples, with 54 per cent disagreeing. For comparison, 83 per cent of Labour MPs and 92 per cent of Lib Dems agree. [...] there is a 52 to 48 per cent split among Tories on whether “the diverse mix of races, cultures and religions now found in our society has improved Britain”. [...] And while Labour MPs are virtually unanimous in agreeing that “one of the things that would most improve life in Britain today is people being more tolerant of different ethnic groups and cultures”, that is the view of only 67 per cent of Tory MPs.”

33% Tories would refuse to go to their friend’s civil partnership.
49% Tories oppose the right of a woman to end her pregnancy.
65% Tories think immigrants have been largely bad for Britain

I imagine everyone’s been playing “fantasy cabinet” with their friends recently - well, at least political junkies like us have, haven’t we, dear readers? Fantasy cabinet is of course a misnomer, as the rules of the game prevent you from putting Jed Bartlett / Michael Moore / Spiderman / Hillary Clinton (delete as appropriate) into Brown’s first cabinet as they’re not actually Labour MPs, but still, it passes the time.

I’m not going to bore you with my predictions, which would be totally uninformed and thus distinctly unilluminating. But I do have a bit of a concern about how many women there will be in Brown’s cabinet. Purists will say that it doesn’t matter, that it’s the politics of the thing that make the difference, but I’m afraid on this, appearances do matter, and having fewer women in the Cabinet would be a disastrous mistake to make - and one that should be easily avoidable.

If you think about who’s likely to go, it’s Hewitt, Jowell, Armstrong and Kelly that spring to mind first. Amos may also go, I reckon. Margaret Beckett may hang on, and Ruth Kelly has a technocratic past in the Treasury so may survive, but really, how many more chances does the woman get?! I reckon Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears stay in and Yvette Cooper and Harriet Harman get a promotion (HH is not going to win the deputy contest, but surely could get the ministry of justice?) But that’s just five or six women in Cabinet, of 24 or so places, compared to eight now…

I imagine the solution is to promote some junior ministers - Caroline Flint, perhaps?

UPDATE: gracious, you can actually play Fantasy Cabinet here. There goes the next few hours…

Finally, one of my votes appeared (don’t know where the T&G Unite or the LCLGR ones are, mind), and I bit the bullet.

1 - Cruddas
2 - Benn
3 - Harman
4 - Johnson
5 - Blears
6 - Hain

Cruddas was obvious. Benn has a grasp of the poverty and inequality issues that matter to me - he was marvellous on Question Time last week taking down a young woman who seemed to think that Iraq was more important than tackling world and domestic poverty. Harman’s said some interesting things during the campaign, even if I think the wisdom of basing your campaign on standing up for women and poor people, when those were exactly the groups you shafted last time we let you do something important, is questionable. But she’s a woman, so she gets my 3. Johnson’s a real person, with a great backstory. Blears is a firecracker, and has been an impressive candidate. I do not wish Peter Hain to be my umbilical cord.