Labour has gone oddly quiet today, and that’s not just because the party is enjoying the mayhem in the Conservative leadership contest. After a very well-organised week of resignations, the rebels have now decided to sit back and wait for Jeremy Corbyn to come to terms with what the party he leads now looks like.
The leader today appointed Angela Rayner as Shadow Education Secretary, which was a matter of necessity as it is Education Questions in the Commons on Monday, and the party didn’t have anyone to face Nicky Morgan. But the Labour frontbench generally looks like a Swiss cheese after the mice have been at it. There are gaps in every team. Only the whips office remains intact, and that is because they have concluded that their colleagues in the parliamentary party need some sense of structure.
The point of the programme of resignations this week was to show the strength of feeling, that MPs who care about Labour were unhappy enough to leave their party unable to function as an opposition, while backbench MPs continued to hold the government to account without submitting to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
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