Rebecca Long Bailey’s obscurity once worked in her favour – now it could be her undoing

A 12-week campaign might illuminate weaknesses hitherto masked by the public’s lack of familiarity with the MP

In all of human history, there was never a child prodigy to match Rebecca Long Bailey.

If you’re screaming “Mozart!”, fall silent. All right, having a piece of music published at seven undeniably puts Wolfgang Amadeus right up there on the pantheon of precocity.

Nonetheless, alone on the top plinth is the frontrunner for the Labour leadership. By the time she was two, Long-Bailey had come of age as a political savant.

“My dad, Jimmy, worked on the Salford docks,” she recalled in a recent election leaflet, “and I grew up watching him worrying when round after round of redundancies were inflicted on the docks.”

She was born in the autumn of 1979 and the docks were closed early in 1982… but you needn’t be Professor Hawking to do the mathematics.

Even now, in the phoney stage of the war to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, portions of the press are lacing their jackboots with Long Bailey in mind.

If and when she, Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips summon the strength to declare, it will get much, much nastier. But certain journals are already flexing the kicking muscles with the claim that her hire as campaign chief, one Alex Halligan, is a Stalinist.

The evidence seems limited to a snap of him wearing a badge bearing the legend “Good night Trotskyite” beside the image of a man carrying an ice pick – an apparently approving reference to the murder of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City not long after he accused Uncle Joe of betraying socialism by turning the USSR totalitarian.

And that’s not all. According to the Daily Express, Halligan “was also pictured in a firm handshake with Unite boss Len McCluskey”.

Many people must have been photographed shaking McCluskey’s hand, and not all of them Stalinists.

No doubt Halligan’s ideological leanings will be explored more fully in the weeks ahead. So, it goes without saying, will Long Bailey’s.

For now, the papers content themselves with the suggestion that she deliberately misled the voters of Salford about her political awakening.

This is exactly the kind of vicious distortion she’ll need to get used to if she does become leader. But I gather from dependable sources that she was telling the simple truth. When other babies were pointing at cows and going “moo”, she was perfecting her grasp of Marxist dialectic. Her first words, as lisped to a group of dockside flying pickets a fortnight before she turned one, were “Workerth of the world, unite!”

And just look at her now, almost 40 years on and grown up into the favoured candidate of the workerth of Unite – or at least of McCluskey, its firm-handshaking supremo.

Almost nothing more is known about her among all non-hyper nerd demographics. A poll charts her name recognition among the general public at a mighty 2 per cent.

The reassuring news for the Shirley Temple of political awareness is that, in Labour circles including the one that fixes internal elections, the general public is something between a nuisance and an irrelevance. Its contribution to the political process is restricted, after all, to choosing the government.

The only electorate that matters is the 550,000-strong party membership which chooses the leader, and the presumption is that it will alight on Long Bailey as the Joshua to Corbyn’s Moses; that it will see her as the one to complete the journey he began by leading them out of Pharaoh Blair’s House of Bondage.

From this vantage point in the wilderness, where the manna from heaven is in scant supply, doubts about Long Bailey are already discernible. Her odds have drifted sharply in a week, her mentor John McDonnell has reportedly bailed on her, and every major union is as smitten as Unite. A 12-week campaign might illuminate weaknesses hitherto masked by the obscurity.

But the two candidates whom the public does know, and by and large likes, have problems of their own. Phillips is sufficiently hated by the membership, for her front-stabbing disloyalties to Corbyn, to be a no-hoper. Starmer, though ideologically less unsound, is not only a southern male, but also broadly centrist.

If Labour had the Tory electoral system, its MPs would send Starmer and possibly Nandy into the play-off. If they had five runners to choose from, Long Bailey would do well to come in sixth.

But while the civil war between MPs and membership rages, all the power ultimately lies with the latter, and the membership regards itself as the only electorate that counts; there is a strong chance that in a few months, hindsight will deem Long Bailey a dead cert from before the off.

If so, let no one have the nerve to deny her prodigious political talents, or that she began preparing for this a very long time ago. Somewhere in a family album will be the faded photos to prove it.

If there isn’t a snap of her infant self flirting with Stalinism by shaking Len McCluskey by her pudgy little hand, there will be one of her annotating her well-thumbed Ladybird edition of Das Kapital on the potty.

Which of Marx’s best loved apercus she insisted be emblazoned on her babygro is one of those charmingly humanising details for which we must be patient.

But if it was the old boy’s zinger about how history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, that has the makings of some sledgehammer irony if the election of the continuity Corbyn candidate comes to pass.