Labour party

Gordon Brown has announced he is backing Yvette Cooper in the Labour leadership contest. In a statement on his website, the former Prime Minister has revealed Cooper will be his first preference vote, while Andy Burnham will be number two and Liz Kendall number three. It’s a surprising move, given that Brown delivered a barnstorming speech on the state of the contest just over a week ago and declined to back any particular candidate. Without naming him, Brown was railing against Jeremy Corbyn and appears to have decided Cooper is the best person to beat him.  His predecessor Tony Blair has also intervened in this contest but so far has yet to reveal which candidate he

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

Whoever wins the Labour leadership contest, questions will be raised about how it has been run. If Corbyn loses, his supporters will become even more angry about the ‘purge’ of the Corbynites. For Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, entryism is their chief concern and Team Burnham have decided to publicly raise the issue. Michael Dugher, Burnham’s campaign chair, has written to Labour general secretary Iain McNico calling for an urgent meeting to discuss what can be done. Interestingly, Dugher singles out Tory infiltrators as the main entryism concern instead of the Communist/Green/Health Action party activists others in Labour are worried about — the Burnham camp doesn’t want to disgruntle these new members: ‘There

Watching the very pleasant Liz Kendall on television this week, I was struck by how extraordinary it is that more than 40 years have now passed since the Conservatives selected a woman leader and still the Labour party cannot bring itself to do so. (Although, come to think of it, it took Labour 142 years to catch up with the Conservatives in selecting a Jew, so perhaps we have another century to wait.) I am not necessarily saying that Ms Kendall is the answer — she seems able, but inexperienced — but there does appear to be a serious barrier to women at the very top of the Labour party.

Jeremy Corbyn has hit back at suggestions he has been hanging out in a rather bad crowd. The former Conservative MP Louise Mensch has dug up a press release on her blog that suggests Corbyn invited Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese extremist who once said the ‘death of every British soldier is a victory’, to speak in Parliament. On the World at One, Corbyn responded to the accusation he invited Jahjah to speak in Parliament: ‘Sorry who? I saw the name this morning and I asked somebody who is he?’ He went to dismiss the idea that he is racist or anti-semitic: ‘My views are that the Holocaust was the most disgraceful and vile