Labour

Is this the start of a Labour revival?

Few may know of Baron Howarth of Newport. But in 1995, on the eve of the Conservative party conference, as plain old Alan Howarth he became the first Conservative MP to directly defect to the Labour party. Today, just ten minutes before PMQs, Christian Wakeford became the fourth Tory MP to join the Labour benches. His timing was excruciatingly cruel for a Prime Minister visibly sinking under the weight of his many contradictory obfuscations over ‘partygate’. Howarth had been an MP since 1983, a junior minister and a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms: he was no wet. His defection was a body blow to the already embattled John Major

Labour MP Jack Dromey dies, aged 73

Jack Dromey, who has died today aged 73, was a Labour MP, a trade unionist and a campaigner. He was extremely well-liked across the House of Commons: something that those who didn’t know him will have noticed immediately in the shocked tributes that have been pouring in from Westminster figures. He was a good MP, one with a clear set of political beliefs but who never let them stop him from working with those he disagreed with. He formed firm friendships with many MPs on the other side of the house, which is not something every member manages. It is a testament to the way he operated that it is

What does Angela really make of Boris?

Poor Sir Keir Starmer. He’s having a bad pandemic. The Labour leader was absent again at PMQs. His gifted and charismatic deputy, Angela Rayner, got another chance to display her credentials as his replacement. Rayner, with her necklace of white beads, looked like a duchess launching a battleship. She and Boris flirted constantly, which may not be a good thing. Teasingly he said he knew that she coveted Sir Keir’s job. ‘And I wish her well.’ When she got up she leaned so far across the despatch box that she seemed ready to clamber over it When she got up she leaned so far across the despatch box that she

James Forsyth

Rayner hits Johnson where it hurts

The first PMQs of the year gave us a preview of the political debate we’ll be having for the next few months. Labour went after the government on inflation. Angela Rayner asked Boris Johnson why he had dismissed fears over it as unfounded back in October: Johnson denied he had said it — which is an odd claim given what he said in that interview. She then punched the Tory bruise, by asking why Johnson wasn’t cutting VAT on fuel, as he had said he would do during the EU referendum. Johnson made the point that this help wouldn’t be well targeted, which is true. But the political pressure for this from

The pure cynicism of David Lammy

David Lammy says he regrets nominating Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader. We are meant, presumably, to be impressed by this admission. Given that it was delivered at Limmud, a Jewish festival of ideas, it sounds perilously close to an expression of contrition. Lammy has every reason to be contrite given the part he played in the Corbyn catastrophe. The guilty men of the Corbyn era typically belong to one of four categories. There were the True Believers — the pensionable Bennites and millenarian millennials with righteous faith in the leader and the (never properly defined) ideology he represented. There were the Fellow Travellers — the spineless soft-leftists (but I repeat

Steerpike

Labour MP demands ‘free movement for all’

New year, old Labour. As 2021 draws to a close and Keir Starmer’s managers seek to establish Labour as A Very Serious Party again, it’s good to be reminded of some of the talent found on his backbenches. The Corbyn era may be over but Jezza’s children remain, still sitting in the Commons, the legacy of a dozen different local selection squabbles. One of them is 25-year-old vegan socialist Nadia Whittome, who since her election in 2019 has used savvy social media skills to launch herself as a sort of ersatz Dawn Butler – like Zarah Sultana, without the comebacks. Like many of her brethren in the Socialist Campaign Group, Whittome has quickly become

Steerpike

David Lammy’s Labour lament

Foreign affairs is a difficult brief, demanding tact, sober judgement and discretion of the highest order. So who best to embody all these qualities than Labour’s recently promoted man of the hour, David Lammy? The Shadow Foreign Secretary made his first diplomatic foray this week while appearing at this year’s Limmud festival, a Jewish event where he attempted to atone for the sins of his past.  The Talleyrand of Tottenham apologised to his audience for being one of the 35 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for leader in 2015, declaring that ‘If I knew what I do now, I never would have nominated him… I never believed he would become leader. That was a mistake

Corbyn chief’s Caribbean dispatch

During their four years running the Labour party, most of the protagonists in the Corbyn project became well-known faces to the British public. There was the hapless Richard Burgon and the sinister John McDonnell; the flailing Diane Abbott and the unctuous Barry Gardiner. Even backroom boys like the gum-chewing spin doctor Seumas Milne briefly became minor celebrities, thanks to celebrated cameos in appearances like the 2016 Vice documentary. But one figure who remained largely unknown to the world outside Westminster was Corbyn’s spokesman James Schneider, the co-founder of Momentum. Schneider spent three and a half thankless years at the Corbynista coalface, being sent out to face the media firing squad at daily lobby briefings. It

The sex work divide in British politics

They seem like completely unrelated questions: ‘Is sex work real work?, and ‘Who will replace Yvette Cooper as chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee?’ Yet the two are deeply linked. Sex work first. If you’re not familiar with the phrase ‘sex work is work’, get used to it, because you’re going to be hearing it a lot more in public debate in the next few years. The phrase has been around since at least the 1970s, but is now being used with growing frequency and energy by people on the self-appointed ‘progressive’ side of politics. As a result, ‘sex work is work’ is looking like being a new dividing

Claudia Webbe goes missing in action

Pity the poor people of Leicester East. Having finally rid themselves of the disgraced Keith Vaz in 2019, the long-standing Labour constituency now finds itself lumbered with convicted criminal Claudia Webbe. Despite being slapped with a suspended jail sentence, Webbe still clings on in the Commons, pending her appeal, after her barrister’s pleas for the last judge to ‘consider my client’s suffering as a black woman’ was, er, unsuccessful. If her appeal fails, a by-election will (finally) be triggered. Let’s hope next time Labour pick someone who won’t threaten others with acid – nor get caught in a Sunday Mirror drugs and escort sting… With all her appearances in court, it’s no

Lord Mandelson’s City outreach

‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, once drawled Peter Mandelson, ‘as long as they pay their taxes.’ And it seems the socialist Svengali is practising what he preached, with his latest appointment at a new British bank. William Hague famously mocked the New Labour spin doctor for his many honorifics during the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government – ‘it would be no surprise to wake up in the morning and find that he had become an Archbishop’ – and now Mandelson has a new title to add to his collection. For the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county

Keir’s Centrist Dad reshuffle is the sign of a decadent party

Sir Keir Starmer has rarely enjoyed such good press as he’s received for overhauling his frontbench. His Centrist Dad reshuffle saw promotions for soft-left pin-ups like Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Lucy Powell, while Corbynista Cat Smith got told to clear her desk. It was a pitch-perfect signal to Labour moderates that they were getting their party back — not least the crucial newspaper columnist demographic — who got to see all their princes return across the water at once. Well, almost. If Sir Keir had really wanted to earn some sweet, sweet commentariat love he’d have arranged a by-election and the first available flight from JFK to Heathrow for

Starmer’s attention-grabbing shadow cabinet reshuffle

Keir Starmer has a new front bench. He has conducted his second reshuffle in the space of a year, but this time he’s actually managed to get the changes he was after.  A key theme of this reshuffle has been giving Labour a better chance of being heard. Many of the departures today have involved figures who were underperforming in key roles: Nick Thomas-Symonds, for instance, was very well-liked in the party but struggling to get much purchase even against Priti Patel’s growing political mess on human trafficking in the Channel. He has now been replaced by Yvette Cooper, who has done this brief before and who has grown even

Katy Balls

Starmer’s reshuffle goes wrong again

Keir Starmer would have been hoping for a case of second time lucky today as he reshuffles his front bench again, following a botched attempt in the aftermath of the local election results. Back then, the Labour leader got off to a bad start when he tried to move his deputy Angela Rayner from one of her briefs. She refused and then the whole reshuffle ground to a halt. In the end, Rayner ended up with more jobs than she started. This time around there are similar hints of trouble. Rayner has spent her morning giving a speech on Labour’s plan to clamp down on outside interests (my piece from earlier this month explains

Even Boris’s supporters are turning against him

Perhaps the past seven chaotic weeks are best regarded as an experiment by the Tories. Boris Johnson’s intention appears to be to establish just how badly he can run the country while remaining on course for re-election. Despite calamity after calamity hitting Boris’s administration, things are still looking rosy for the party: Politico‘s poll of polls shows that we are basically back where we were this time last year – at pretty much level-pegging between the Conservatives and Labour. There is no sign of the kind of positive surge in support for the opposition that would indicate the electorate is considering putting it into power.  A year ago – on 24 November, 2020

Labour at war in Starmer’s backyard

Sir Keir Starmer has become accustomed to Labour in-fighting since he became leader 18 months ago. But as the former DPP battles to drag his party into some kind of vaguely electable shape, has he been neglecting matters closer to home? For in northwest London, on Keir Starmer’s doorstep, a vicious party battle has broken out involving smears, lies and a case of mistaken identity, all splashed across the pages of the Labour leader’s local newspaper. The Camden New Journal – on which Sir Keir has spent more than £3,500 in adverts since April 2020 – has been breathlessly reporting this past fortnight all the twists and turns of some vicious skulduggery plaguing

The sleaze row isn’t finished yet

Number 10 will have been relieved that the weekend did not bring new stories about Conservative MPs raking in lots of money from second jobs. There were still sleaze angles in the Sunday papers, including regarding the Prime Minister’s own dealings, but the air seems to be going out of the story a little. The past two weeks has opened up a chasm between the ‘red wall’ MPs elected in 2019 and more traditional Tories The trouble is that this week brings a whole host of new chances for the row to blow up once again. There’s the Liaison Committee hearing with the Prime Minister on Wednesday, which will include

Jess Phillips and Labour’s ongoing women problem

Last week, Intelligence Squared put on a debate called ‘Is Labour unelectable?’ Unsurprisingly, Labour MP Jess Phillips spoke against the motion – yet in doing so she managed to prove exactly why Labour are in fact hopelessly sunk. The key moment was when Spiked’s Ella Whelan challenged Phillips for having quote tweeted and then promptly deleted an article that was supportive of Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor hounded out of her job for her audacious view that women deserve some of their own spaces.  ‘This is worth a read. Thoughtful and gentle,’ said Phillips on Twitter, though apparently she quickly decided it wasn’t worth a read and removed the tweet. Some

Cabinet mask-off as Sir Keir self-isolates (again)

Oh dear. Poor Keir Starmer has tested positive for Covid meaning he has to miss today’s Budget. Unlike Boris, he has managed to avoid getting ill until now but it’s the fifth time he has been forced to self-isolate after four previous incidents. Starmer’s absence means that shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be forced to step in to deliver the response to Rishi Sunak’s speech, while Prime Ministers’ Questions will be fronted by Ed Miliband. Ahead of COP26, it looks like Labour intend to show their eco-credentials by recycling their old leaders too… On the Tory side, a different Covid row dominates: the ongoing saga about masks. The Leader of the

MPs gather to pay tribute to Sir David Amess

Boris Johnson announced this afternoon that Southend will receive city status as a tribute to the campaigning work of Sir David Amess, who was killed. Sir David’s best known Commons contributing was Inserting Southend’s bid to become a city into any question, no matter how tenuous, and it seemed an inevitable way of the government marking his death. MPs paying their respects to the Southend West MP have all focused on his dedication to his constituency, but also on his kindness. Johnson told the chamber that ‘he was… one of the nicest, kindest, and most gentle individuals ever to grace these benches’. Everyone mentioned his smile and his sense of humour. The way