In theory, an election that involves six contenders should be an awful lot more interesting than another with just one. In practice, the race to be deputy leader of the Labour Party may not be much more inspiring than Gordon Brown being crowned unopposed. The post is pointless and the candidates are struggling to pretend otherwise. Who cares if Alan Johnson is edging a little to the left or Hilary Benn nudging a shade to the right, or if Peter Hain wears hairspray? My sole regret is that there wasn’t one more valid nomination, then we in the media could have dubbed the lot of them “the seven dwarves”.

There is, nonetheless, one aspect to this escapade that captures my attention. Under no circumstances should Harriet Harman emerge as Labour’s deputy leader and, worst still, a potential Deputy Prime Minister. I have not seem a more useless aspirant to power since a party leader in Denmark in the mid-1970s almost came to office on the back of a promise to place tripwire along the border that would blast out “we surrender” in Russian were the Red Army to invade.

The essence of the Harman pitch is the argument that the deputy leader “has to be a woman” or, at a minimum, “should be a woman”. I have spent many (pretty dull) hours carefully reading the Labour Party rulebook in a vain attempt to obtain evidence for this supposition. Indeed, I have shown the sort of diligence that a Biblical scholar might have for the Dead Sea Scrolls. No hint of such a requirement has manifested (or womanifested) itself. Nor does the behaviour of John Prescott since assuming the title of deputy leader 13 years ago indicate that he believes it “has to be a woman” either. He has never sought to offer Danny La Rue a run for his money.

And even if it “has to be a woman” (which it does not), this doesn’t mean that it has to be Ms Harman. There are, after all, about three billion women on this planet. So if it has to be a woman, then let it be Dawn French, Dame Helen Mirren or that strange-looking woman who won the Eurovision song contest for Serbia. They have at least demonstrated a modicum of talent.

It is not as if Ms Harman has a monopoly on being female in this struggle. There is Hazel Blears, the Labour Party chairman. She might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but she does pass the chromosome test. She has, admittedly, a somewhat eccentric slogan – “I’m nuts about Hazel”. This reminds me of the 1964 American presidential election (I was in the womb at the time but precocious) where the posters for the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, bore the words “In your heart, you know he’s right”, underneath which Democrats everywhere scribbled “In your guts, you know he’s nuts”. Ms Blears is at risk of similar mockery.

But she is a woman. When I pointed this out to a (male) dedicated Harmanite or Harmanist or Harmaniser (whatever they are to be labelled), the devastatingly intelligent riposte that followed was: “Oh, don’t be daft, she can only be about 4ft 10in tall.”

So, it seems that the invisible ink part of the Labour Party constitution has been revised further. Not only does it “have to be a woman”, it “has to be a woman over a certain (unspecified) height”. Naively I had always thought it was the function of the Labour Party to stand up for the little people in life, not to insult them. Did Marx declare: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, except the shortarse females at the back, who have to remain locked up for eternity”? He most surely did not.

If one puts to one side the detail that Ms Harman appears to be championing the largest and least meritocratic positive discrimination scheme in history (which is charitable), what about the policies upon which her bid is based?

These can be ascertained by visiting the website www.harrietharman.org (although www.slowandpainfuldeath.com would be no less appropriate). If, having signed the necessary paperwork (last will and testament and so on) one makes the effort, then it becomes even more obvious that this contender and her campaign are as bright as Pyongyang at midnight during a power cut. For the magic word (apart from “woman”, of course) is “listening”. So much so that one has to rewrite the unofficial requirement for a Labour Party deputy leader to become “a woman over a certain (unspecified) height with a decent pair of ears”. I had wondered why Jack Straw dropped out of this battle months ago, but since he is a man and is deaf in one ear he must have determined that he did not meet the informal but demanding qualifications required. On and on she drones about “listening”. Am I the only voter in the land who would prefer that politicians stopped blathering (insincerely, invariably) about listening and went for another course of action, such as, for instance, doing?

Not that it is only about listening. Ms Harman recently enlightened the Young Fabians (both of them) with the insight that she wanted Labour to be “dynamic, committed and confident” (does Mr Johnson want Labour to be slothful, ambivalent and gripped by a crisis of self-esteem?). She is also dead keen on supporting “active campaigning” (is Mr Benn into passive campaigning”?) and favours a party that is “democratic” (John Cruddas will be surprised to learn that he must, therefore, be aching for dictatorship).

I would conclude by dismissing all of this as appallingly vacuous, though if this corner of cyberspace is anything to go by, the sort of people who are promoting Ms Harman probably think that vacuous is something unfortunate that sometimes occurs to the veins in the legs as one gets older.

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