80s Revival Begins With Interminable Kinnock Speech

Veteran party members remember Lord Kinnock's oratory well

Those bad old days which new Labour leader Ed Miliband faithfully promised would not return returned in full today, as an invigorated Neil Kinnock mounted the platform at a Tribune rally and launched into a speech which seasoned political observers say may not end until the next Labour government falls.

Lord Kinnock began by saying he could never praise Mr Miliband enough and then went on to prove it by droning his way through a thesaurus for four hours, before temporarily veering off at a tangent to tell dewy-eyed activists: “We’ve got our party back,” “The party which, at a particular point in time belonged to us, but then didn’t belong to us for a considerable period of time, is now hello, hello it’s good to be back, good to be back in our hands again,” “We, who had a party taken from us, are now finally at last back in total, utter and complete possession of the self-same aforesaid party once more for a second time now, isn’t it,” “What it is, you see, is those of us who think, feel and particularly those who think we feel that we lost the party which appertained to us - both collectively and on a personal basis - can now be said to be in full, frank and frankly full agreement that this present party which we now have is indeed the self-same party, to all practical intents and purposes, not to mention intense practical purposes – minor differences notwithstanding - that we previously had both heretofore and previously at that time which was then,” and many other horribly life-draining variations on the same tedious theme.

After three hours of this, Mr Kinnock returned to his effulgent praise of Ed Miliband’s two-day captaincy of the Labour movement, repeating his previous comments again but this time in Welsh.

While veteran left-wingers settled down in the sleeping bags for a long haul, some younger party members on the fringes of the meeting were seen furtively casting around for suitably heavy objects with good aerodynamic properties.

“Kill me,” begged a distraught Ed Balls to a rapt reporter from the Daily Mirror, as he clawed his bleeding ears. “Kill me now.”