Labour ditches person who was going to revolutionise their campaigning

Dan Hodges reports in the Sunday Telegraph:

So farewell, Arnie Graf. The 70-year-old Chicago-based political activist who mentored a young Barack Obama, and pledged to sweep Ed Miliband into Downing Street with his unique brand of community organising has returned to the United States. “Arnie’s gone,” a member of the shadow cabinet told me yesterday…

Labour insiders claim that Graf has essentially been sacked by the party’s new general election coordinator Douglas Alexander, who was unconvinced by the innovative – some would argue daft – theories of a man who by his own admission has never worked on a major election campaign in his life…

To many full-time Labour officials, Graf was the quintessential political passenger, and quite an expensive one. “He was wandering around the country, talking to people about how we’d win the election by sweeping streets and emptying bins. It was costing us a fortune in hotel bills alone.”