The most senior positions in the shadow cabinet have been revealed. And in the top four slots – leader, shadow chancellor, shadow Home Secretary, shadow Foriegn Secretary – it’s all men. I will now explain why this is appalling. Usually, the excuse for why there aren’t more jobs given to females in politics is down […]
The first year of the Corbyn era, predicted
Right, so now that Jeremy has won by the flipping great margin we all thought he would, what does the first year of his reign look like? I’m going to try and stick to things I’m pretty sure will happen as opposed to engaging in wild speculation (as tempting as that may be). Like I’ve […]
How much did Sadiq Khan getting the mayoral nomination have to do with Corbynmania?
Most Labour people I know in Westminster have been sure for weeks now that Sadiq was almost certainly going to get the nod to be the party’s mayoral candidate for 2016 – but few saw the margin of victory coming. A whopping 18-point margin over Tessa Jowell – who at one point, let us recall, […]
The person Blairites should feel most annoyed with is Tony Blair himself
T-minus one day until the Corbyn era is set to officially begin. The Blairite wing of the Labour Party, so convinced after the massacre of May 7th that everyone would see that Miliband had been too left-wing and thus the party would revert back to them, lies in tatters. Along the way, calling someone within […]
The problem the moderate centre-left has had for decades comes home to roost
Throughout the Labour leadership contest, one thing has struck me more than any other. It is perhaps the key factor in Corbyn’s rise to become the heir apparent, in fact. It’s that Corbyn’s ideas have been presented over and over again by pretty much every campaign and centre-left voice of any description as mostly being […]
What if Cooper or Burnham DID win on Saturday?
To start with, I am in no way wavering in my prediction: Corbyn will be Labour leader in four days time. So the following is simply an academic exercise. Call it a thought process for those moderates in Labour who want to survive the Corbyn era. Saturday, September 12, 2015. The day many of us […]
Why, in retrospect, Corbynism was inevitable
Jeremy Corbyn entered the Labour leadership contest with odds of 200-1 of winning, a number we endlessly hear about these days. However, it’s still worth bringing up as an example of how little anyone saw the whole thing coming. But like so much of life, it all seems obvious in hindsight. Labour conference 2013, Brighton. […]
The “500 council seats lost” claim by the Burnham campaign is pretty desperate stuff
Still not convinced Jeremy Corbyn has the Labour leadership in the bag? Yesterday we witnessed the fag-end of modern political campaigning. If you want to know what the sound of the barrel being scraped in Westminster is like, you just had to tune into what emitted from the Burnham camp yesterday. They claimed to the […]
Here’s one time I’m glad Cameron has a habit of backing down
Every once in a while, an image so powerful it can change public opinion, or turn it even further in one direction, comes along. The day before yesterday, we were given one such image: that of a small boy lying face down on a beach, dead. If you have children of your own – and […]
Chuka Umunna’s latest statement regarding Corbyn perfectly summaries why I’m not a Labourite
The man who quite reasonably in many respects (given what was happening at the time) thought running for the leadership of the Labour Party was not for him, spoke in Amsterdam this week about several things, not least of which was the leader elect, Mr Jeremy Corbyn. Only there was none of this “coalition of […]