Jeremy corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s growing confidence at Prime Minister’s Questions is almost perfectly in step with his growing unpopularity outside the Chamber. He has perfected his geography teacher stare of disapproval to the extent that Tory MPs now automatically fall silent when he talks for fear of being kept behind after class. And he isn’t leaping all over the place with a phone-in format that doesn’t hold the Prime Minister to account. This week, the Labour leader focused on tax credits, and highlighted David Cameron’s inability to answer his questions about whether he could guarantee that no-one would be worse off as a result of the changes. Cameron didn’t answer the questions

When Chuka Umunna pulled out of the Labour leadership race earlier this year, he explained in a statement that he had decided it was time to prioritise his personal life over his political career: ‘I’ve said that I could live without leading the Labour party or politics. For once I decided to put the rest of my life first,’ the former bookies’ favourite mused. While Umunna may have been led to question his decision in the months following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as the leader of the Labour party, his efforts in regards to his personal life have at least paid off. Umunna has proposed to his solicitor girlfriend Alice Sullivan,

With a gossamer Tory majority in the Commons and no majority at all in the Lords, confrontation between the two chambers was always inevitable. Tonight’s defeat over tax credits will be the first of many. But it would be a great error for the Conservative government to choose this as the issue over which to go to war with the Lords. For a start, their Lordships are right: taking tax credits away from low-paid workers, rather than phasing them out, is cruel and and unnecessary. Next, this was not in the Tory manifesto: the party said they would cut £12 billion but didn’t say how — and had hinted that they would

After Mr S’s colleague Harry Mount argued in the Spectator that the Labour party ‘has had a brain transplant’ under Jeremy Corbyn with a purge of the Oxbridge set, Martin Amis has accused the new Labour leader of being undereducated. Writing for the Sunday Times, the best-selling novelist has launched a verbal attack on Corbyn over his ‘slow-minded rigidity’. The life-long Labour supporter — who says he found himself ‘close to the epicentre of the Corbyn milieu’ in his twenties when he worked for the New Statesman — has criticised Corbyn for his lack of educational achievements: ‘He is undereducated. Which is one way of putting it. His schooling dried up when he was 18, at which

Arnie Graf was, for a little while, the man who was supposed to rebuild the Labour party after its 2010 defeat. He was a famed community organiser from the US, brought over by Ed Miliband to have a go at revitalising is party. Graf didn’t last, but last night he spoke about his experiences with the Labour party, and what he thought of the current surge in membership under Jeremy Corbyn. This was his first brush with proper party politics, and while Graf had clearly enjoyed the work he’d done in building up the party in small local areas with community meetings, he said ‘I wouldn’t come back to it

Oh dear. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is about to get a whole lot stranger. The Labour leader has appointed none other than Guardian columnist Seumas Milne as his ‘executive director of strategy and communications’. Milne starts the job next week and joins on leave from the paper. Joining @jeremycorbyn's office next week as @UKLabour strategy & communications director, on leave from @guardian https://t.co/FCYypF1161 — Seumas Milne (@SeumasMilne) October 20, 2015 The controversial appointment may well do Corbyn some good, in the sense that when compared to the left-wing columnist, Corbyn begins to look like a moderate. While Corbyn has apologised for the Iraq war, Milne has gone further and actually praised the other side. The charming Milne has also

Lord Warner has resigned the Labour whip in protest at the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn is taking the party, Patrick Wintour has revealed tonight. Warner was a minister of state at the Department of Health under Tony Blair. Now, Corbyn supporters will be quick to point out that Lord Warner is hardly a household name and that he was at the far Blairite end of the party. Both of these statements are true. But Warner’s departure should still worry Labour. All parties are coalitions and no leader should want to be losing former ministers from the party at any point in their leadership, let alone this early. One footnote

The problem with Nicola Sturgeon is that she is, by the standards of contemporary politics, unusually straightforward. There is little artifice and even less deceit about Scotland’s First Minister. What you see is what you get; what she says is what she mostly means. That is, even when she’s sidling past the truth it’s clear what she really means. And so, there it was, out in the open at last: a clear confirmation that Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour party are Nicola Sturgeon’s useful idiots. Sure, there may not be any need for another referendum on independence before 2020 – not least because, as matters stand, that referendum might, like