Momentum’s Laura Parker: ‘There’s a myth around the hard left’s dirty tactics – it’s not my experience’

On the principle that these are views held by people with whom I tend to disagree, I have always thought Momentum members were probably not thugs and bullies; they were probably not intending to unseat 50 Labour MPs; and they probably did not want to wrest control of the largest leftwing party in western Europe. The lack of curiosity among many commentators – who would take the expertise of the Sunday Times on the inner workings of this satellite of the Labour party before they would do anything as rash as go to a Momentum meeting – has been quite salutary. Yet the principle itself isn’t watertight: it is possible for both a large number of people to lack curiosity and Momentum to be full of Trots and plotters.

This is what has brought me to its office in Whitechapel, east London, which is temporary and cash-strapped, although festooned with hearts for its recent Valentine’s Day phone bank: an interview with Laura Parker, national coordinator, previously private secretary to Jeremy Corbyn. She is the natural poster-person for a different portrait of the organisation: calm, accomplished, amiable. Everybody likes her. The Blairites in her constituency Labour party (Vauxhall) like her. She is known to get on with Stephen Kinnock, which for someone not of his politics, should be listed on a CV under “special skills”. It is hard to establish hierarchies in Momentum, an organisation that both values the phrase “flat structured” and also understands it, but she is the highest ranking staff member, level with Jon Lansman, who leads it and about whom much more has been written.

I realise when I meet her that I have seen her before (I live in the same constituency), outside Starbucks; I say I noticed her because she was talking very fast Spanish (I don’t add that I thought she looked like an unusual person to know a foreign language: very English, twin-setty and quite proper, with a load of dry-cleaning). “My husband’s Italian. We were speaking Italian.” She has quite an exacting gaze. Plainly, while I was congratulating myself on my awesome powers of observation and recall, she was thinking: “What kind of idiot can’t tell the difference between Spanish and Italian?” (She does speak Spanish too, along with French, Romanian, Bulgarian and Brazilian Portuguese, after a career that started in the European wing of the civil service fast stream – “The only good idea Thatcher ever had” – and went on to NGOs in Bulgaria and Italy.)

Source: theguardian