Oops. Scratch that. It’s never had a woman leader at all. For all its posturing about progress and equality, all it has mustered is the UK’s first female chancellor in Rachel Reeves, and that hasn’t turned out too well. Instead, we’ve had a parade of white men, from the hare-brained Ed Miliband to the pre-programmed, pound-shop robot that is Keir Starmer.
By contrast, those old sexist Tories have somehow managed four female party leaders, including today’s Kemi Badenoch. Imagine if Labour had a leader who was not just a woman but Black. They’d never shut up about it.
They set the ball rolling 50 years ago, when a certain Margaret Hilda Thatcher replaced Ted Heath as party leader in 1975.
Thatcher stomped into power, a natural leader. The left despised her and still do, but they couldn’t deny her clarity, energy, rigour and will. No Labour leadership contender has ever matched that, at least, no electable one.
That may just have changed, thanks to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Ms Mahmood’s rise is quietly impressive. Her father ran a corner shop in Birmingham and chaired the local Labour Party, turning the family living room into a strategy hub. Ms Mahmood would sit and listen, then speak so clearly and decisively that she dominated discussions.
And now she’s made her biggest political intervention in the most toxic area of all, asylum and immigration.
Ms Mahmood, 45, has made tougher pledges than any other Labour cabinet minister would dare, to agonised cries from the party’s left.
Many may not see any similarities to Mrs Thatcher (and many more won’t want to) but the parallels are striking. Both Mrs Thatcher and Ms Mahmood are shopkeeper’s daughters, both went to Oxford, both became barristers.
Both have been praised for their clarity, sense of purpose and plain speaking. Mrs Thatcher shot down snooty old school Tories, Ms Mahood has wiped the floor with privileged middle-class liberals. Both live for politics, even at the expense of their personal lives. And crucially, both have recognised the concerns many Britons feel about immigration.
Mrs Thatcher talked of Brits feeling “swamped”. Ms Mahmood points out the the scale of recent rivals has been “unprecedented”.
Of course there are massive political differences, but Ms Mahmood appears to have that same steely nerve. And the power to wind up the virtue-signalling left.
Activists are lining up to condemn her but they’ve been deprived of their most obvious line of attack: they can’t accuse her of racism.
Ms Mahood deprived them of that chance in last week’s tense Parliamentary clash over migration, albeit in language Mrs Thatcher would never use in public.
That’s the ace up her sleeve and she’ll need it, because in Labour’s internal politics the cards are stacked against her.
But she could win this battle and if so, that’s bad news for Angela Rayner. She will surely have imagined becoming Labour’s first female PM when Starmer goes, which can’t be too far away.
Red Ange now has real competition, and from someone who isn’t just brighter and sharper (and a lot less, er, sketchy), but who scores higher on Labour’s authenticity scale too. Bring it on.
