Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents are finally starting to show political nous

Chuka Umunna’s call for Labourites to unite around their new leader and show ‘solidarity’ does show a growing acceptance that Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of being installed as the party’s new chief in just ten days’ time. But it also shows that the Blairites in the party are finally starting to come up with a plan for dealing with the rise of the hard left.

Labour’s centrist modernisers have spent the summer scratching their heads at the Corbyn phenomenon, which they hadn’t predicted at all – indeed, I was initially briefed by one of their number that ‘we will get hundreds of thousands of new supporters. Social media has changed how we communicate in a way we can’t grasp and it has blown open this leadership contest too.’ My source was right that there would be hundreds of thousands of new supporters and that social media would have a big impact on the leadership election. But given they were a Kendallite, their line about not being about to grasp the changes turns out to have applied more to their own way of thinking than it did to the wider party. The Blairites clustering around Liz Kendall were once aggressively assertive that she was going to win because they were convinced the membership was in the same place as they were.

Those Blairites then spent the summer in a state of confusion about what was happening to their party, though to be fair to Umunna, he has been much quicker off the mark than many of his colleagues in analysing the situation and starting to work on repairing his faction’s reputation. Now all his colleagues are coming to terms with the idea of a Corbyn leadership too.

It’s not just the Blairites who are seriously thinking about how things will work under Corbyn: those involved in all the three non-Corbyn campaigns have said to me in the past few days that they think the party will be surprisingly good at coming together for a while.

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