Labour Party politics have always been by turns ferocious and genuinely fraternal, bitter and yet sentimental. They have their little rituals, and they have their own little hypocrisies.  Anyone who has ever contemplated pushing their best friend under a bus in order to get his or her job will be familiar with the fine-sounding euphemisms that are used to disguise ruthless ambition.

If you want to understand what it’s like inside the belly of the beast, I strongly recommend a trip to the White Bear in Kennington this week to see Triggered.  This is its second run and it ends at the weekend, though given that it filled the small theatre space for its first run and was full on Tuesday when I went, it might be back.

It’s about so-called trigger ballots. A Labour MP is “triggered” when the request for a full selection is made by either a third of local party branches or a third of affiliate branches, such as trade unions. If it is not triggered, the sitting MP is automatically reselected.  Once seen as a tool for the left, triggering is now said to be being used by Keir Starmer to help purge the left.

Labour MPs, by and large, hate them.  They argue, as the then Labour List editor Sienna Rogers wrote in the Guardian in 2019, that “selection races are fiercely fought, and campaigns are time-consuming and expensive. They argue that their efforts could be better directed towards defeating external enemies.”

Triggered is an attempt to turn a trigger battle into drama.  It’s January 2020, and Labour MP Sally Finch (Antonia Beamish) desperately wants to avoid a reselection battle, but the well-intentioned chair of the local branch of Momentum, university lecturer Jim Marr (Michael Palmer) manages to force one on her, and he and fiercely ambitious local businesswoman and Blairite Safia Peters (Catherine Adams) stand against her for the nomination.  The ring is held by the chair of the national executive’s organising committee, June Wright (Carrie Cohen.)