Tom Peck's Sketch: Will Anjum’s sauce add fire to Alan Johnson’s campaign to keep Britain in EU?

Mr Johnson's speech was profoundly unsettling

Alan Johnson MP launches the Labour In for Britain Campaign (Joe Giddens/PA Wire)

On a spare concourse of a deserted Birmingham Conference Centre, a man called Alan Johnson stood up to talk about why Labour wants Britain to remain in the European Union.

Alan Johnson. Sensible chap. Union man. Postman.

Five years ago, some found it comical that Ed Miliband had decided to make Alan Johnson his Shadow Chancellor, on the grounds that he might potentially be a touch on the left wing side, and also, having spent his formative years delivering letters rather than studying PPE at Oxford, he may not be sufficiently well versed in the fundamentals of macroeconomics to make a serious bid to run the nation’s finances.

Back then, this was the type of thing that made Labour look slightly ridiculous. One of its most credible, likeable individuals, having an honest and admirable crack at a job that was possibly - but by no means certainly - slightly beyond him.


 "This is the Labour party, not a fringe, not a clique, not a small group. The Labour Party: united.”

Things are different now. Here he was, on stage, an entirely normal human being, launching the Labour’s In campaign, setting out a series of careful arguments as to why Britain is better off as a member of the European Union, and it was all profoundly unsettling. Like having the local Monster Raving Loony Party candidate knock on your door and tell you his name is Malcolm Underwood and he is deeply committed to local business.

It did get reassuringly odd soon enough, with the introduction of three ‘local’ people - one had moved to London, another was a scouser - to explain why a future outside the EU was not worth living. One was a small time curry sauce manufacturer with big dreams who could see no prospect of expanding her business without continued EU membership. Another was a carpenter in thrall to the European working time directive. The third was the mother of two disabled children whose futures were, she said, dependent on, “The opportunity and jobs that come from Britain being connected to the rest of the world.” If Nigel Farage is planning on switching off the wifi he will have to come clean soon.

“I’ve been asked to lead the Labour In campaign,” Mr Johnson told them. “A principled campaign free of machinations, or political doublespeak. This is the Labour party, not a fringe, not a clique, not a small group. The Labour Party: united.”

That his party leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary were, as he spoke, simultaneously broadcasting on different radio stations setting out opposing positions on Syrian airstrikes has long ceased to be anything out of the ordinary.

Mr Johnson was true to his word, too. “What do we tell people on the doorstep, who say that immigration is out of control?” one activist asked him, and he got an honest answer.

“Well If Anjum wants to sell her curries to the rest of Europe you have to accept free movement as the quid pro quo,” he said. He’s probably right. No one eats Norwegian curry sauce after all. Not even the Norwegians. But whether setting unchecked cheap Eastern European labour as the acceptable price to pay for Anjum’s masala empire is the argument that will win back the millions of votes lost to Ukip is by no means certain.