Politics

Jeremy Corbyn’s critics may well be setting the Labour leader impossible challenges by demanding that the party wins 400 seats in this week’s local elections. But Corbyn himself isn’t exactly making things easier either, telling reporters today that his party won’t lose seats on Thursday. Independent experts such as Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher are predicting substantial net losses of around 150 seats, so unless Corbyn has better intelligence than these very reliable sources, he seems to be setting himself a challenge that he knows he will fail. Why is the Labour leader doing this? The Rallings and Thrasher predictions, coupled with the very downbeat briefings that the party has

Trailing in the polls with three days to go until the London mayoral elections, Zac Goldsmith continues to attack his rival Sadiq Khan by accusing him of having links with extremists.   It is a pretty desperate strategy, reduced to making the charge that Khan has ‘shared a platform’ with extremists.   It is also somewhat undermined by the revelation that Goldsmith himself has been photographed smiling alongside Suliman Gani, the Tooting Iman who is subject of many of the claims.  Gani also appears to have shared platforms with Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, on a number of occasions. But one thing puzzles me.  While Goldsmith’s campaign has stooped to a relentlessly negative

There have been moments in the EU referendum campaign when it has almost seemed as though Stuart Rose is working for the Out campaign. Despite being the chair of Britain Stronger in Europe, the retail supremo managed to forget the name of his own campaign group four times in an interview. He also scored an own goal when he claimed that wages were likely to go up in the event of Brexit. Now Rose appears to be at it again. The Financial Times reports that Rose made another gaffe just last week. Speaking at an event at BAFTA with former Tory health minister Virginia Bottomley, Rose did manage to remember the name of his own

Ken Livingstone’s doggedness has kept him in politics for 40 years. Yet the same tenacity was also on display this morning in this refusal to say sorry and finally help his party out by burying this row. Instead of using his interview with Michael Crick on LBC today to bring an end to this week’s anti-Semitism row, his time on the airwaves served instead to reinforce the deep issue at the heart of the Labour party. The former London mayor parroted the same lines which ran him into trouble earlier this week. He spoke about quoting history; he also told of wanting to return to his garden and his beloved

Normally, when we talk about a party being in ‘crisis’ we are really referring to a policy dispute or a bad set of election results. But the crisis currently engulfing Labour is far more serious than that. It is about the party’s very soul, I argue in The Sun this morning. The events of this week have demonstrated that Labour has a serious, and growing, problem with anti-Semitism. One of the party’s newly elected MPs has been suspended for making anti-Semitic comments and the party’s former Mayor of London has been suspended from the party after a bizarre and distasteful attempt to link Hitler and Zionism. But Jeremy Corbyn has

Frumpy, out of date and not much fun – Gordon Brown and BHS go together in more ways than one.   A word needs to be put in about the role of the former Chancellor and Prime Minister in the collapse of the chain store this week. Dominic Chappell – who must win this year’s business brass-neck award by attempting to buy back BHS days after it collapsed into administration with him at the helm — was perhaps not the kind of entrepreneur that Gordon Brown had in mind in 2001 when he published a white paper, Enterprise for All, which led to the 2002 Enterprise Act.  But intentionally or not,