Who can lead Labour?

Westminster prefers to concentrate on one drama at a time. That is why the old rule of thumb was that only one party leader could be under pressure at any given moment. Recent events have upended that convention. The Brexit vote precipitated leadership crises for more than one party. But the spectacle of the Tory leadership election has rather overshadowed the fact that Labour is having its own leadership contest.

The contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, the party’s former work and pensions spokesman, will run all summer. In Labour circles, Corbyn is regarded as the clear favourite. Once again, the hard left appears to have succeeded in getting far more people to sign up to Labour’s registered supporter scheme than the so-called moderates have. Smith, though, is not going down without a fight. He is trying to reach out to soft Corbyn supporters by offering a manifesto far to the left of that on which Ed Miliband stood at the last election. He is promising to concentrate on equality of outcome, not opportunity, to introduce a wealth tax and to make £200 billion of investment over the next five years. He boasts that he is ‘going to be just as radical as Jeremy Corbyn’.

The hope is that by minimising the differences between him and Corbyn on policy, he can persuade the left-wing Labour selectorate that he has more chance of actually introducing these changes as he’d be both a more competent and a more electorally appealing leader of the party. Smith can do this because he knows that the moderates have nowhere else to go. They will vote for him come what may, on the grounds that almost anything is better than Corbyn continuing.