Shadow Cabinet members are a little disorientated after the heated discussion on Trident that they were expecting at today’s meeting didn’t go ahead. Officially, the reason that Jeremy Corbyn and his top team didn’t talk about the party’s defence policy review is that they had a discussion on Europe and the economy, which were considered to be slightly more pressing issues than Trident. But given last night’s furious parliamentary Labour party meeting on the matter, and given they’d been told that the discussion on Emily Thornberry’s presentation would take place today, many Shadow Secretaries of State have been left scratching their heads about why it didn’t then happen.
One Shadow Cabinet Minister says ‘it was not formally on the agenda and then no-one raised it. What do you say? A terrible place and situation.’
Jeremy Corbyn is not someone who naturally likes confrontation. Yet he and his allies are trying to change party policy on Trident – for principled reasons that they’ve always been clear about, and continued to be clear about during the leadership contest, to be fair, even if they are the wrong principled reasons – and that cannot happen without a confrontation. And a delayed confrontation is unlikely to be any easier than one that takes place quickly. It may even be harder, as it gives MPs longer to stew about what is happening to their party.
There is a feeling amongst frontbench and backbench supporters of Trident that things are coming to a head. Just this morning, Andy Burnham was saying that it could be ‘impossible’ to reconcile the two camps (though some are a little annoyed at Burnham for straying from his brief), while other shadow ministers were unsettled by the way Lord West rang the Today programme while Emily Thornberry was giving her interview to complain about the ‘nonsense’ that she was arguing. Even if Corbyn tries to avoid the confrontation, he may find that he cannot control the way the debate in the party is going.
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