Jeremy corbyn

The Tories can’t allow Corbyn a monopoly on morality

Amber Rudd will be keeping a low profile this weekend. The sight of a working mother on Question Time, tearfully confronting the Energy Secretary over cuts to working tax credits, won’t have made easy viewing for the Tory press machine. Earlier this month, at Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne reiterated again and again that core Tory message, so ardently championed by Harlow MP Robert Halfon and groups like Bright Blue: this is the (real) party of hard-working people. So last night’s former Tory voter was heavily on message, until suddenly, she wasn’t. ‘I work bloody hard for my money to provide for my children, to give them everything they’ve got…

Isabel Hardman

Labour whips persuade Corbyn to keep them

The Labour leadership has abandoned plans to effectively neuter the party’s whips office after realising it is quite useful, Coffee House has learned. I understand that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn had considered making the whips’ office more of an administrative entity which didn’t try to herd MPs into the right lobby. There had also been plans afoot to get rid of Rosie Winterton, the party’s chief whip, as she had initially been identified as someone hostile to a Corbyn leadership who represented the old way of doing things. But the vote on the fiscal charter this week was much less troublesome than the Labour leadership had anticipated, thanks to

Portrait of the week | 15 October 2015

Home Two groups were launched, one in favour of remaining in the European Union and the other in favour of leaving. Vote Leave drew support from Conservatives for Britain, from Labour Leave and from Business for Britain. Lord Rose, chairman of the new group Britain Stronger in Europe, said: ‘To claim that the patriotic course for Britain is to retreat, withdraw and become inward-looking is to misunderstand who we are as a nation.’ The Metropolitan Police withdrew officers stationed outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange sought refuge in 2012, a watch that had cost £12.6 million. Marlon James from Jamaica won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History

Steerpike

Diane Abbott earns herself a new nickname

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour’s new leader, few of his colleagues have been more supportive than Diane Abbott. As well as defending John McDonnell on the Today show this week over his fiscal charter U-turn, the shadow secretary for international development — who reportedly once enjoyed a romance with Corbyn — took it upon herself to defend Corbyn’s honour at a PLP meeting last month when Jess Phillips criticised him over the lack of women in his shadow cabinet. With Phillips responding by telling Abbott to f— off, it’s safe to say that Abbott’s new role as Corbyn’s champion has not gone down well with some Labour MPs. In fact, one

Isabel Hardman

Nicola Sturgeon taunts ‘divided’ Labour party

Remember those Tory posters that put a tiny Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s coat pocket? Well, it’s only five months since the general election, but Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t seem all that keen to put Jeremy Corbyn in her handbag. She seemed to suggest that she had given up on being able to work with the new Labour leader, saying: ‘You know, there is much that I hoped the SNP and Jeremy Corbyn could work together on. But over these last few weeks, it has become glaringly obvious that he is unable to unite his party on any of the big issues of our day.’ She described Labour as ‘unreliable, unelectable

Steerpike

Watch: Richard Burgon’s car-crash Channel 4 interview

As Labour’s new shadow City Minister, Richard Burgon will be hoping to prove that his party isn’t as anti-business as they were seen to be in the last election. Alas, his interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 news last night will have done little to help his cause. Burgon — who was one of the MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election — struggled during the interview in which he tried to defend John McDonnell over his fiscal charter U-turn: ‘If people don’t change their view when further evidence comes before them then they’ve got some tough questions to answer. Labour is an anti-austerity party. This is

PMQs sketch: The clash of the victims

Corbyn’s PMQ’s strategy is now clear. Hopeful emailers send their lifestyle details to Labour HQ and a computer sifts the figures to find the voter likeliest to cause the prime minister’s cheeks to blush purple with shame. Today’s lucky winner was Kelly, (no surname given), a single mum on £7.20 per hour who works for 40 hours a week while caring for a disabled sprog. Did the prime minister know how much the tax credit deductions will cost her? Cameron hadn’t a clue so he talked about the rising minimum wage and falling council rents. Corbyn gave the answer: Kelly loses £1,800 a year. The question assumes that we all

James Forsyth

PMQs: Angus Robertson has become the Prime Minister’s stress ball

Jeremy Corbyn’s second outing at PMQs was better than his first. Rather than having all six questions determined by the email-writing public, he now uses a question from a member of the public to introduce a topic and then asks his own follow ups. Corbyn combined this with a few old-style put downs—mockingly declaring that ‘The Prime Minister is doing his best, and I admire that’ and saying, ‘could I bring the Prime Minister back to reality’— to turn in a more effective performance. But Corbyn still isn’t using PMQs, his best parliamentary platform, to change the political weather. Yes, the follow-up about tax credits was pointed but it hasn’t

Labour MPs prepare to rebel for first time against Corbyn: but it won’t change anything

John McDonnell has tried to explain why he U-turned on the fiscal charter this afternoon, saying that he has only ‘changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics’, not the principles of the matter. He told Sky News: ‘I have changed my mind, but I haven’t changed my mind on the principles of what the charter is standing for which is we need to tackle the deficit and we will tackle the deficit. Labour will tackle the deficit – we are not deficit deniers, I haven’t changed my mind on that. ‘But I have changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics. Originally what I said to people was look that charter

Shambolic Diane Abbott laughs off Labour’s fiscal charter U-turn in bizarre interview

John McDonnell’s U-turn on backing the government’s fiscal charter is just the sort of inconsistent positioning some in Labour fear will destroy the party’s reputation under Jeremy Corbyn. No one from the shadow treasury team was willing to speak on the Today programme about the U-turn so it was left to seasoned media performer Diane Abbott, now the shadow international development secretary, to defend the party’s position. In a rather bizarre interview, Abbott claimed that Labour was not in a shambles: ‘No, no, no, I think we’re in the right position to oppose Osborne’s mismanagement of the economy’. Before declining to explain why McDonnell has changed his mind on backing the charter: ‘He will be explaining that to the House of Commons tomorrow so

Labour MPs tear strips off each other at party meeting

Whenever the Parliamentary Labour Party meets, journalists gather outside the room in the hope that those leaving the meeting will reveal what went or that the argument will get so heated that they will be able to hear what is going on behind closed doors. Those of my colleagues who turned up to tonight’s PLP meeting were very much in luck. George Eaton reports that Ben Bradshaw, the former culture secretary, left declaring the meeting ‘a total f*** shambles’ and that Emily Thornberry could be heard loudly upbraiding MPs for texting journalists about what was going on inside this supposedly private meeting. So, why was his meeting so rowdy? Well,

Isabel Hardman

Labour U-turn on fiscal charter to ‘underline our position as an anti-austerity party’

John McDonnell has just made his first U-turn as Shadow Chancellor, announcing that Labour will vote against the fiscal charter on Wednesday – having previously told the Guardian that it would support it. Labour’s support for the charter was previously to show that it wants ‘to balance the books, we do want to live within our means and we will tackle the deficit’, but in a letter today to MPs, McDonnell says: ‘I believe that we need to underline our position as an anti-austerity party by voting against the charter on Wednesday.’ Labour will publish its own statement on budget responsibility before the debate. The new politics does look rather

Helen Goodman finds herself in hot water over Jeremy Hunt tweet

At this year’s Tory conference Jeremy Hunt defended the government’s tax credit cuts, claiming they would make the British people work as hard as the Chinese. While Hunt has since claimed that his comments were misinterpreted, tonight Labour’s Helen Goodman hit out at the Health Secretary for the comments. She says if things are so great in China then why did Hunt’s wife Lucia — who is from Xi’an, China — move to Britain: Given that the personal dig hardly fits in with Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of ‘a new kind of politics’, Labour supporters have been quick to call on Goodman to apologise. Speaking on Westminster Hour this evening, Lady Basildon — the Labour

Tom Watson is in the same class as Titus Oates and Joe McCarthy

With the help of the BBC’s Panorama this week, the full evil lunacy of the child abuse and murder conspiracy allegations relating to Dolphin Square, Elm House, Leon Brittan, Ted Heath, Field Marshal Lord Bramall etc is now emerging. There is a long, long way to go, however, before the names are properly cleared and the police have apologised for their disgusting behaviour. There also needs to be a long list drawn up of those in public life and the media who gave credence to these cruel fantasies. The behaviour of Tom Watson puts him in the same class as Titus Oates, Noel Pemberton Billing and Senator Joe McCarthy. Many of us

What I learnt trying to buy lunch for an anti-Tory protestor

The mood at the Conservative party conference this week was a little subdued, and no wonder. As those who watched the television coverage will know, everyone entering the secure zone had to run a gauntlet of potty-mouthed protestors, their faces twisted into masks of hate. It’s not easy to celebrate after you’ve just been showered with spit and called a ‘Tory murderer’. Jeremy Corbyn made a point in his conference speech last week of asking his supporters to treat their opponents with respect and not descend to personal abuse, but I’m not sure how many of them got the message. If the atmosphere in Manchester was anything to go by,

Steerpike

Sorry Corbyn, Nick Clegg is the expert on snubbing the Queen – not you

Today Jeremy Corbyn has cancelled his attendance at what would have been his first meeting of the Queen’s Privy Council due to ‘prior commitments’. Of course naysayers have been quick to jump on this, with Alan Duncan claiming that Corbyn snubbing his first chance to be sworn in suggests that he is not a serious political figure. As for the Corbynistas praising their leader for sticking to his republican values by giving Her Majesty a miss, they would do well to remember that another politican has a far more impressive track record when it comes to snubbing the Queen. During Nick Clegg’s time as Deputy Prime Minister, he managed to earn himself a reputation for repeatedly snubbing Her Majesty. When

Brendan O’Neill

When the press quivers before the powerful, no one benefits. Except, of course, the powerful

Imagine living in a country where a politician could not only force a newspaper to retract a report but could then make it publish an alternative report on its front page. That would be a bad place to live, right? It would be a place where the relationship between the press and politicians — where the former is supposed to keep in check the latter, not the other way round — had been twisted beyond repair. It would be a country in which pressmen and women would be always on edge, fearful that if they were too stinging or scurrilous about a political player then they, too, might be forced

James Forsyth

The Tories are still anxious to reach out. And that’s a very good sign

Post-election party conferences usually follow a standard pattern. The winning party slaps itself on the back while the losers fret about how to put together an election-winning coalition. But this year, there’s been no talk of compromise or coalition from Labour. They seem happy to be a protest party, unbothered that voters disagree with them on the economy, welfare and immigration. And the Tories, instead of relaxing or moving to the right, have obsessed anxiously about how to broaden their appeal, to make their majority permanent. This determination to look for new converts is a product of the election campaign. Weeks of looking at polls that indicated they were on