FIRST came the Notting Hill Tories following the election of fresh-faced David Cameron as the new Tory leader.
Now, another coterie, it seems, has come onto the scene – the Primrose Hill Gang.
These were described by columnist Rachel Sylvester in Monday’s Daily Telegraph as “a collection of bright, youthful and ambitious friends,” – all pretty eminent Labourites, including junior ministers – who have been meeting, apparently, in Primrose Hill to plot life after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Worried about the impact on voters of the new Tory rising star, they have been holding informal meetings, with no agenda or minutes. They are so deadly serious – according to Sylvester – they are planning to publish separate essays in the next few months.
A spoof by Sylvester? A bit of journalistic licentiousness? Or an attempt to smoke out a political cabal she has heard of on the grapevine? Her article on the daily’s main features page could meet any of those possibilities.
To try and add gravitas to her story, Sylvester points out that David Miliband lives in Primrose Hill, and, while mentioning that, claims another member of the Primrose Hill Gang is Mathew Taylor, the Prime Minister’s head of policy.
David Miliband, in fact, lives in a flat in a house near Chalcot Square while his brother Ed Miliband, a former advisor to the Chancellor Gordon Brown and now a Doncaster MP, is believed to occupy a flat in the same house.
Another high-flyer in the local Labour party for Primrose Hill is a member who has been a chief advisor to deputy prime minister John Prescott since Labour came to power in 1997.
Fears about David Cameron’s election can be seen in the flurry of articles by Labour politicians and supporters warning that the party must wake up to the fact that the Tories suddenly appear youthful, optimistic and full of new thinking.
When I spoke to a senior Labour councillor in Camden about Sylvester’s article he hadn’t heard about these secret meeting but he didn’t think they weren’t necessarily taking place.
He pointed out that David Miliband was very popular among Labourites in the borough – the sort of man who could become a Prime Minister one day.
Would he be Labour’s new man after Blair and Brown? Maybe that’s what Sylvester is trying to say.
I’d say it wouldn’t be met with guffaws in the Camden Labour Party.

Pictured: David Miliband