At the Ed Miliband Momentum pub quiz the real winners were the team names
History would not have to have worked out very differently for Ed Miliband to have spent last night preparing his conference speech as Prime Minister. Instead he hosted a pub quiz
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Your support makes all the difference.Any self-respecting Ed Miliband fan knows the real prize at an Ed Miliband hosted Momentum pub quiz is having the funniest quiz team name, and on that front there was a clear winner.
“Notorious CLP” wasn’t bad. “The Miliband Tendency” was a strong effort too. But the host’s and indeed the crowd’s favourite was the succinctly named: “These strikes are wrong at a time when negotiations are still going on but parents and the public have been let down by both sides because the Government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner. After todays disruption I urge both sides to put aside the rhetoric get back round the negotiating table and stop it happening again.”
And if you don't get it, well, why are you reading about an Ed Miliband quiz night anyway?
On a night that came perilously close to overrunning, for no reason other than activities were suspended for a full minute’s worth of Seven Nation Army chanting every time Jeremy Corbyn’s name was mentioned, which was a lot, it came as something of a relief that the “These Strikes Are Wrong” crowd didn’t trouble the leaderboard.
There have been many indices throughout conference on which to measure the journey of Momentum into the heart of mainstream Labour. Ed Miliband choosing to host a quiz night for Momentum activists is right up there with them.
He’s had a go at standup, since his abrupt departure from politics, and it showed. “It was a lifelong ambition of mine,” he said on arrival, “to host a Momentum pub quiz.” If at the back of his mind was the thought that maybe he should be spending tonight preparing for a speech as Prime Minister, not hosting an activist’s quiz night, he didn’t show it..
He held the youthful crowd entirely captive, even if they did do a lot of chanting about Jeremy Corbyn. There were some killer questions too. Who was Labour’s first ever Chancellor? Who were the party’s first three MPs? On one occasion, when “Notorious CLP” requested the lyrics to a Tina Turner song be read out for a fourth time, they were simply told told: “Oh f**k off.”
Let’s hope he’s forgotten, as Notorious CLP won in the end, and the prizes were not insubstantial. The unwashed camouflage t-shirt he wore on The Last Leg AND tea on the terrace of the House of Commons with the quizmaster himself.
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