Harrington: Who remembers this banker? Chuka, the Liberal Democrat

Chuka Umunna gives a runners-up speech in Two Cities in 2019

WHO remembers that smart lad with the yellow tie who stood for the Liberal Democrats in the Two Cities constituency at the last election?

Given the fuss that both the Labour Party and the Lib Dems once made over the rise of an apparent messiah in Chuka Umunna, it’s quite something that he was able to land on his feet in a top banking job and act like his rather humiliating political side-swapping never happened.

Of course, you can still see his name in the financial pages of newspapers. Recently, you may have read reports that he has been busy advising a Czech billionaire looking to buy Royal Mail.

But nearly five years ago, you would have found Mr Umunna in the West End Extra and ­– on election night – looking like a man who was wishing the stage would eat him up as it dawned on him he had joined the Lib Dems for no reason.

He had of course once been the dashing Labour prince deployed as the party’s shadow business secretary.

At that time, he was being tipped as a possible future leader and the most dizzy commentators even suggested he would one day be resident in Number 10.

Now, with the way the fickle world of politics works, coupled with the return of centrists to the Labour fold, who is to say Mr Umunna won’t one day fulfill all these predictions?

But whatever they do and wherever they go, the seven MPs who tried to start a whole new political party over a chicken wing roulette at Nando’s will be reminded of the fact that they weren’t very good at it.

Mr Umuna resigned from Labour in 2019 ­– then led by Jeremy Corbyn – and found himself in the TIG, short for The Independent Group.

Then they decided to call themselves Change UK, but not many people liked that either and little more than four months in – with it clear that they were all about as popular as brussel sprouts – Mr Umunna resigned.

You might have thought this would have been enough and an end to it, and let us not forget there is no law that says you have to belong to a political party at all times, let alone stand for one.

But oh no ­– Mr Umunna paddled on and signed up for the Lib Dems. At the party’s conference he was treated like a transfer window marquee signing. Young members wanted selfies, older ones shook their heads and probably knew where it would all end up. Sure enough, Mr Umunna went straight to the front of the queue for a target seat and there we all ran into him in our constituency here.

He would breeze past Corbyn’s Labour and take out the Tories, we were told, as the Christmas election grew nearer. The Conservative winner Nickie Aiken need not have worried. She held him off by nearly 4,000 votes.

In normal circumstances you might have expected him to be back as the candidate ready for a second crack at the upcoming general election on July 4.

Truth is, we hardly ever saw that yellow tie around his neck again.

Rightly or wrongly. his story smacked of a guy who had no real interest in the party he had stood for and was ready to do something else as soon as it was announced that he hadn’t won.

You don’t know whether to feel sorry for the Lib Dems for looking like a party that had been used to satisfy somebody’s own ego, or to tell them they were always stupid for ever thinking Mr Umunna, Luciana Berger or Sam Gyimah ever loved them.

Either way, Mr Umunna’s unsuccessful sweep through our patch has been lost to mists of the time.

Maybe even the Lib Dems are glad about that.