Last week, we revealed that the office of Hywel Francis, the retiring Labour MP for Aberavon, had been doing its best to get Progress loyalist Jeremy Miles selected for the constituency at the next election. Phone calls had been made to party branch officers, we’d been told, in which it was said that his main rival “lacked the academic abilities” to be a Member of Parliament.
You might have assumed that this was simply snobbery on the part of the Francis office. But that ain’t necessarily so. We have now heard from several reliable sources that a member of Francis’s constituency office staff contacted each of the frontrunners in the selection – Miles, Stephen Kinnock, and left-winger Mark Fisher. They were asked if they would retain current constituency staff in the event of them winning the selection, and subsequently being elected as Aberavon MP. Continue reading
What a difference a day makes! Yesterday, 
He swanned over to Wales, and it seemed he meant business. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, his wife and the Danish Prime Minister, flew over for a county Labour party dinner in a grand and rather questionable move that some said would backfire. But apparently, the thing getting Labour members exercised in Aberavon is a story that we only saw ripples of three years ago. The story that Stephen Kinnock had