Jeremy corbyn

Mr Corbyn has a beard. If he becomes leader, he will be the first bearded leader of any main party since Keir Hardie. The beard as a fashion item is now back, generally in shaped and even waxed form. But Mr Corbyn’s one owes nothing to fashion. It is a 1960s political beard, already obsolete when he first brought it into the House of Commons in 1983. Like Lord Hailsham who, as Mrs Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, continued to wear a bowler hat long after it had disappeared from everything but hunt puppy shows, Orange parades and A Clockwork Orange, Mr Corbyn is undaunted by the passage of time. I must try not

It’s only lunchtime but the Guardian may have already reached ‘peak Guardian’ for the day. The paper has published an article penned by Chris Elliott chronicling an in-house investigation into their coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid. They decided to do this after a number of Corbynistas complained that the left-wing paper had shown bias against Corbyn, with one reader going so far as to claim that their reporting of his leadership bid was worse than the paper’s coverage of the Vietnam war: ‘I’ve been a regular reader of the Guardian (Manchester Guardian as was) since 1958. Despite the low point reached in the 60s when you supported the US war in Vietnam

Finally, someone in Labour is tearing apart Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas. Overtly criticising what Corbyn stands for is something the leadership candidates have been reluctant to do. You can see why: his popularity with the party’s grassroots could result in a backlash. Therefore, it’s been left to poor old Chris Leslie, Labour’s shadow chancellor, to point out that a party promoting ‘Corbynomics’ is not going to help ordinary folks. On the Today programme, Leslie said: ‘This is a fork in the road for the Labour party. On 12 September we will know what the fate is of the progressive left of centre and there are millions of people whose living standards, whose working conditions depend on

George Osborne reigns supreme over Westminster — how did he end up with all this power? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Isabel Hardman discusses our cover piece on the Chancellor’s dominance with George Parker from the Financial Times. As the de facto deputy Prime Minister, is the Chancellor a shoe in to succeed David Cameron? How has Osborne won over once-sceptical Tory MPs? And how significant was his image makeover? Former Labour adviser John McTernan also discuss whether the modernisers in the Labour are stuck in the past and why the party is falling in love with Jeremy Corbyn. If Corbyn wins the leadership contest, what will the Blairites do next? How long would he last running the party? And

Jeremy Corbyn is stormin’ his way through the trade unions affiliated to the Labour party. The Communication Workers’ Union has announced it backs him in the leadership contest, not because it thinks he can win, but because it thinks his victory would drive the Blairites out of the party, and would therefore serve its purpose. This is what the union’s general secretary Dave Ward had to say about the decision: ‘We think that the Labour party needs to be shaken up, and we think that we need to loosen the grip of the Blairite wing of the party, people like Mandelson who in our view have taken this party far

Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. In 2016 Britain votes narrowly to remain within the European Union, despite the Prime Minister having achieved little in attempting to renegotiate the terms of our membership. The ‘out’ campaign — which was no longer led by a marginal party, Ukip, but by the majority of the parliamentary Labour party, under its new leader Jeremy Corbyn — came mightily close to securing our withdrawal, and thus, as it is put by proponents, our independence. Subsequently, Labour receives the same sort of bounce in the opinion polls as the SNP enjoyed following the equally close independence referendum in Scotland — helped by a continuing crisis in the