The topsy-turvy world of Harriet Harman

What gives Harriet Harman the right to make her increasingly bizarre pronouncements about the Labour leadership contest?

First, she seems deeply unhappy about the lack of social diversity among the candidates. It is not immediately clear why Harman—daughter of a Harley Street specialist and a solicitor, niece of the Countess of Longford, cousin to Lady Antonia Fraser and Lady Rachel Billington, and educated at St. Paul’s Girls’ School—should feel entitled to take the moral high ground against the Milibands, both educated at a local comprehensive, or Ed Balls, whose mother took a clerk’s job to help pay his way through Nottingham high school.

Curiously, none of this biographical information is on her Labour party website. There she begins life at York university. Curiously, she’s never explained why a degree in Politics from York University makes someone more "diverse" than a degree in PPE from Oxford (or why Diane Abbott’s Cambridge degree is somehow less elitist than Balls’ Oxford degree).

It would help if Harman had had an outstanding election campaign, as opposed to being hidden away from the media by comparison with colleagues like Balls, both Milibands, Alan Johnson, Douglas Alexander, Peter Mandelson et al. After such a poor campaign she might have chosen to reconsider her own position. After all, if the Party is electing a new leader, surely the uber-democratic Harman would at least risk running again. Has this anything to do with the fact that she only beat Alan Johnson to the deputy leadership by less than 1% in 2007? Since Johnson has chosen not to run for the party leadership, would he not make an outstanding candidate for deputy leader? Why is Harman insisting she should remain as deputy while railing against the people who have chosen to run for leadership?

To summarise: the extremely un-"diverse" Harriet Harman criticizes the Milibands and Ed Balls while at the same time hiding from a deputy leadership election where the outstanding favourite would be a former postman who grew up as an orphan in a council flat.