Politics

Labour is holding a meeting tomorrow morning with the different leadership camps to discuss how the party is dealing with infiltrators into its membership. The campaigns are particularly keen to find out the scale of the infiltration from each side – Tory and hard left – and how local parties are dealing with it. I understand that one camp will ask for proportions of left-wing infiltrators from parties such as the Greens, Communist and TUSC, and from the Conservative side, as this is something Labour HQ hasn’t yet supplied. Opinions vary as to whether the hard left or Tories present the bigger problem. There will not be any demands to halt

Charles Moore asks in this week’s Spectator what the ‘right looks’ are for a leadership contender, comparing Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to Tory backbenchers to the appeal of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the Labour contest. The obvious answer, of course, is that the ‘right look’ involves wearing clothes for working in the House of Commons, rather than a diving suit or paint-smattered overalls. It’s a ‘look’ Cooper, Kendall and their male rivals Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham pull off on a daily basis, so presumably the question is quite easy to answer. I must confess what when I first read Charles’s column, I wondered why he was posing the question

Jeremy Corbyn has hosted over 70 rallies as part of his Labour leadership campaign. Yesterday evening, the bearded one returned to Islington to speak at a four hour fundraising event — the first in his local patch. I went along to find out more about the ‘movement’ that has sprung up around his candidacy. The event was held in the beautiful Union Chapel on Upper Street, a church that moonlights as a live music venue. Crowds lined the street to get in and the comrades took advantage of this to distribute propaganda — promoting the ‘Spartacist League’, a ‘Rage Against the Tories’ rally and Sadiq Khan’s mayoral campaign: https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/634785197108666368 The first ‘act’ was

Although Tatler received a boost to its readership following the BBC’s ‘Posh People: Inside Tatler’, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the magazine, for some ‘posh people’ the society bible has long been essential reading. One such man who fits this description is none other than the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thanks to Tatler‘s Bystander archive, Mr S has been granted a glimpse into the 21st birthday celebrations of a young Gideon Osborne. Oh LOOK we found George Osborne's 21st birthday pictures in our Bystander archive this week… http://t.co/o2ppP7fTvo — Sophia Money-Coutts (@sophiamcoutts) August 21, 2015 His party was covered by the magazine back in 1992, and shows that Osborne enjoyed a bash at the trendy

This is the Corbyn summer. From the perspective of a short holiday, my overwhelming feeling is one of despair at my own semi-trade — the political commentariat, the natterati, the salaried yacketting classes. Who among us, really, predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would be romping ahead like this? Where were the post-election columns pointing out that David Cameron’s victory would lead to a resurgent quasi-Marxist left? And that’s just the beginning: how many of the well-connected, sophisticated, numerate political writers expected Labour to be slaughtered in the general election? Not me, that’s for sure. Going further back, how many people in 1992 told us John Major was an election winner? That Parris,