Labour plot General Election 2024 comeback in Lothian East for big-hitter Douglas Alexander
dailyrecord.co.ukWhen we meet Douglas Alexander in popular North Berwick cafe Cake, he’s waiting on a bacon roll.Cue the inevitable jokes about how we better not film him eating it.
No politician in an election campaign wants to pull ‘an Ed Miliband’ by repeating that infamous 2015 tussle with a bacon sarnie.In Alexander, Labour have a candidate in Lothian East with experience and star power - a former New Labour heavyweight who served as a minister under Blair and Brown.It’s Labour’s top Scottish target: back when it was still called East Lothian, it was the closest they came in 2019 against Nicola Sturgeon’s dominant SNP.Alexander thinks things are very different now. “What’s very striking is many of the issues here in East Lothian are common to people right across the country.“A sense of being pretty scunnered with both governments that they’re suffering at the moment, concerns about the cost of living… an almost imprisoning cynicism that says, it’s rubbish, all politicians do is make things worse for you.“I understand that feeling.” He slams the “cruelty and incompetence” of the Tories while claiming he “can’t think of an area where public life in Scotland has got better” under the SNP.He added: “We’re going to have to re-win the argument that politics can be a force for good in people’s lives.
It actually reminds me of 1997 in that sense.”Alexander was memorably ousted by the SNP’s Mhairi Black in his old Paisley and Renfrewshire North constituency when Labour was routed in Scotland in 2015.Since then, he’s had a glitzy post-Westminster career, working as a senior fellow at Harvard University and even becoming an advisor to U2 singer Bono on global poverty.I put to him that he’s a classic case of a big name being parachuted into a
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