Prime Minister Brown may have delighted the Tory front bench over the weekend by backing away from an early general election, but it seems fair to guess that his own party are generally less impressed by what is, even by his own impressive standards, a tremendous attack of cold feet.

One Labour man will be smiling, though. James Alexander, the ex-YUSU heavyweight recently nominated as the party’s candidate for the newly-formed York Outer constituency, will need every day that Gordon sends to achieve his objective of becoming the first Union alumnus to make the House of Commons. The boundaries of his seat seem – at least by a quick count of great big houses and shiny cars – to encompass York’s leafiest, Tory-est quarters.

This isn’t to say that Alexander isn’t going to put up a fight. Perhaps only people like me who have been in York far too long will remember his tenure as SU President, but it demonstrated him to be a shrewd communicator and a zealous politician.

He also exhibited some unscrupulous tendencies that make me nervous about his suitability for higher public office, chiefly his willingness to use YUSU’s clout to prevent campus newspapers from reporting on a violent assault committed by then Union Treasurer Ozzy Atton. The principle might have been defensible (although that too is debatable) but selectively applying it for a close friend was not.

There’s certainly no questioning his hunger to win this time round, evident in his self-produced election video on YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/yqgzx4), which adopts the format of an ‘80s weather forecast to portray an earnest, impassioned underdog, somewhere between David Copperfield and a Bible salesman. His rhetoric is of service to residents and of fighting for their interests, but I can’t help thinking that his spiel remains just that: rhetoric.

I find Alexander interesting because he is the embryonic form of the classic career politician, given a spit and polish just in time for the rolling news channels. As YUSU President, Alexander was solely accountable to his electorate – the students. As a Labour party candidate, this won’t be the case, and surely this is the delicate tightrope act of the career politician: professing to be interested in public service, while bending your allegiances to those of a particular party that may have concerns very far removed from those of your own constituents.

None of the main political parties have shown much interest lately in a healthy level of internal debate, of the kind that would allow MPs genuinely to fulfil their representative responsibilities. When Gordon Brown calls the next election, Alexander will be asking students for their support, but it’s unclear what real representation he will offer them in return. Will they be able to trust him to look out for their interests? The jury’s out, but there is at least reason to ask whether his only real interest is the future of James Alexander in the Labour party.

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