Jeremy corbyn

Although Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign team recently asked subscribers to donate £10 to help fund the management of ‘selfie queues’ at rallies, it seems the Labour leader isn’t struggling too much when it comes to finding the coffers to keep his leadership fight on the road. The latest Register of Interests shows that since July Corbyn has raked in nearly £190,000 worth of funding towards his campaign. The hefty sum includes an ‘interest free, unsecured loan of £50,000’ from Momentum as well as two more ‘interest free, unsecured’ loans from Len McCluskey’s Unite the union, totalling £75,000. All three loans are ‘for an indefinite period’. Unite have also provided ‘serviced offices’

It’s a long way from Westminster to the banks of the Zambesi. But last week, for me, they linked up. I was lolling on my bed in the Sausage Tree Safari Camp, writing up notes for a travel article. Then a single, iridescent, rather delicate green wasp buzzed into my room and settled on my mosquito net. I folded my laptop. Looked at the wasp. And I got a sudden vision of Jeremy Corbyn and the fate of the Labour party. To explain. The reason I was able to identify the wasp so quickly — and assure myself that it was no threat — is because this wasp is one

Bit early for a lap of honour. At PMQs Mrs May congratulated her government (i.e. herself) on fifty marvellous days in government. And she drew comparisons between her polished style and the Corbyn car-wreck. One view is that the chimpanzees’ tea-party currently posing as Her Majesty’s opposition should remain beneath the attention of Number 10. Mrs May disagrees and she used Labour’s woes as the starting point for some carefully scripted comedy. With mixed results. Delivering gags is tough. Delivering someone else’s gags is tougher. Delivering someone else’s out-of-date gags is so tough that it borders on crazy. But the PM is, understandably perhaps, tempted by the illusion of omnipotence

Labour MPs have just voted 168 to 34 in favour of bringing back Shadow Cabinet elections. This doesn’t mean there will be elections for the Labour top team straight away: the measure, proposed by Clive Betts, now goes to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee, which is now dominated by Corbynites. If the NEC so chooses, it can propose the rule change at the party’s conference. This is, however, another example of the PLP, which had been fading as a parliamentary force compared to the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, asserting itself against Jeremy Corbyn. The argument in favour of Betts’ motion, which is supported by Deputy Leader Tom Watson, is that it

Running through the summer like the writing in a stick of rock was the continually disappointing and dismal performance of Owen Smith in the Labour leadership contest, and Jeremy Corbyn’s spectacular ability to make party members love him more by confecting his own rows about trains and women going out for drinks. The post-match analysis in the Labour moderate camp has already begun, with few bothering to make any greater defence of the Smith campaign than ‘it might be a bit closer than the polls suggest’. Those who were sceptical about Smith’s ability to defeat Corbyn or – even though this leadership contest has included scant reference to this rather more

Could Jeremy Corbyn come out of the Labour leadership contest with an even bigger mandate? Few would be surprised and a new poll on the front page of the Times today suggests that such an outcome is highly likely. The YouGov survey indicates Corbyn is beating his rival Owen Smith by 62 per cent to 38 per cent amongst Labour voters – a result which would gift him a three per cent spike on last year’s vote, when he won 59.5 per cent. This would spell disaster for those challenging Corbyn and make it almost certain that the Labour leader would still be in place come a 2020 general election.

Owen Smith desperately needs to make up ground in Labour’s leadership contest (bookies’ odds, perhaps more reliable than the polls, suggest Corbyn has an 84 per cent chance of winning next month). What’s more, with voting soon drawing to a close, he has less and less time to do so. Which all explains why last night’s leadership hustings in Glasgow was much more bitter than any of the others which came before it. The main topic of contention yesterday? The referendum – something which Smith is trying eagerly to make his own cause and his reason for being. Earlier this week, he said he wanted to block Brexit – a strategy which

On Wednesday, Jeremy Corbyn appeared rather rattled when a Sky News reporter asked him about ‘traingate‘ at a campaign event on the NHS. The Labour leader huffed and puffed before explaining that while there were a few empty seats on the train he had wanted to sit next to his wife. Unfortunately, this remark contradicted a briefing from Corbyn’s own team the night before, with his representatives claiming that the issue was not just that he couldn’t find two unreserved seats next to each other. So, why was there a communications breakdown? There appears to be a clue in today’s Guardian. It seems that after Virgin released the CCTV footage,

This morning Jeremy Corbyn has woken up to find his face plastered across the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Times following ‘traingate‘. After Corbyn appeared in a video calling for the railways to be re-nationalised while sitting on the floor of a ‘ram-packed’ Virgin train, the company hit back. On Tuesday, Richard Branson’s team released a press release and CCTV footage which appears to show that Corbyn did have a seat after all. As the media feasted on the footage yesterday, Corbyn’s team first dismissed the claims as a ‘lie’ before offering an alternative account several hours later. Now with the spin machine firmly back in action, the Labour leader’s campaign manager appeared on Today for an

As the internet goes into meltdown over the news that Jeremy Corbyn may have had a seat after all when he filmed a video claiming he did not, it appears that the Labour leader hasn’t done much to help his cause. While his campaign team claim that Virgin Train’s CCTV footage is a ‘lie’, Corbyn can at least take heart that the cameras appear to have been working. Back in 2012, he complained in Parliament about ‘inoperative’ CCTV cameras on the rail network, during a debate on funding for Transport for London: ‘We also do it from the point of view of station safety, because, in the days when not enough staff were at

After Sadiq Khan declared that he would not get involved in the Labour leadership contest, the Mayor of London had a change of heart over the weekend and penned a piece for the Observer endorsing Owen Smith. Corbyn’s supporters have not taken this well — even re-circulating Mr S’s story about Khan attending Rupert Murdoch’s summer drinks party to suggest that he is a wrong’un. Meanwhile at a pro-Corbyn rally in London last night, thousands of supporters took things up a gear as they let their new-found feelings on the Muslim son of a bus driver be known. Despite Khan’s recent election as mayor, attendees started booing at the very mention of his name: Sadiq Khan –

Sadiq Khan’s endorsement of Owen Smith is rather handy for the ailing Labour leadership contender, given Khan is one of the few Labour politicians who has actually won something: that something being the largest personal mandate of any politician. This enormous mandate is rather handy when Jeremy Corbyn starts waving his own huge mandate about, but it may not be attractive enough for Labour members, who largely seem besotted by the idea of Corbyn as leader. Yesterday Labour moderates were infuriated by the Corbyn camp’s email telling Labour members that ‘they’ (a wonderful pronoun that British people use to refer variously to someone in authority who is making things difficult,