Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Emily Thornberry’s leadership pitch, part 1

The Labour leadership may be rowing back from the idea of having a second, female, deputy leader, but that isn’t stopping those who, like Emily Thornberry, fancy a shot at the top job one day. While the Shadow Foreign Secretary was totally loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when she spoke at a Times fringe this lunchtime, she started by talking movingly about her backstory, touching also on the need for a leader who has experience of the frontbench, and repeatedly referred to the importance of members in the Labour Party. It is well-understood that Thornberry would, one day, like to run for leader, and today’s performance not only underlined that, but also showed why she should.

On the anti-Semitism row, Thornberry also played to the audience, telling the event that Corbyn had found the whole experience very hard personally, saying ‘I think Jeremy has been through a great deal this summer’. She even argued that it was easy to see how Labourites might accidentally end up being anti-Semitic, saying:

‘Anti-Semitism changes in nature over time and I think that it is quite understandable… there may be people on the fringes of our party who are virulently anti-capitalist, virulently anti-Israel and you can see how the two can meld together into an anti-Israeli and then getting very closely into anti-Jewish and then end up falling into anti-Semitic tropes which have changed in nature over the years. And so being on the Left doesn’t stop you from being anti-Semitic.’

Her emphasis on the fact that ‘the Labour Party belongs to its members’ was striking, and it won her applause and sympathy from the audience. Some of the audience members complained that there had been too many questions about Labour’s handling of the anti-Semitism row and not enough about Emily Thornberry, which showed how effective she had been.

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