‘Take these broken wings, and learn to fly again, learn to live so free’, Angela Eagle today urged the Labour Party, singing at first in a fine unfettered voice, wispy but resoundingly clear. Yet as the song played on Eagle could no longer constrain herself, and openly she began to weep, her faltering sound swiftly becoming all but inaudible, her message only growing stronger the more she wept and the less she said.
Their former leader might be batting off the claims of those who would declare him a war criminal, though even Tony Blair himself admits that the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq certainly came as a bit of a shock. But his spiritual successors in the Labour Party know that it is they who are facing the fight of their lives, as they press to uphold their one moral conviction, that the leader of their party must be anyone but Jeremy Corbyn.
They seek to do battle in the centre ground, but Corbyn, still backed by the trade unions and swathes of the party membership, has so far clung valiantly to a ledge on the left.
Eagle hopes to swoop in, carrying him off as she clutches at his crumpled suit with her talons, before dropping him – plop! – in the middle of an ocean which surges and swells on the waves of her saltiest tears.
Somewhere in another room Eagle’s twin sister Maria was busy reciting Tupac’s variant of the chorus, ‘Take these broken wings, I need your hands to come and heal me once again’, from the titular song of the posthumous album Until the End of Time. It was not immediately clear whether Maria was referring to her sister’s hands, Owen Smith’s, Tom Watson’s, Tupac’s, or else to some amorphous cleansing ritual.
Later in the day however the Eagle sisters came together to hatch a cunning ruse. While one, pretending to be Angela, arranged a conciliatory meeting with Corbyn, the other, also pretending to be Angela, agreed to a damaging interview with the ever complaisent Laura Kuenssberg over at BBC News. The ruse was modelled on one of the hilarious escapades played out in the mid-90s by Tia and Tamera, the twins from Sister, Sister, a popular American sitcom.
