Another dispatch from inside the Westminster village
To those who think the leader of the opposition offers neither leadership nor opposition, Jeremy Corbyn’s return to hibernation after his re-election has done little to change minds.
If unity is what the leadership wants, it would struggle to pick an easier issue to unite around than the Tories reclaiming the ‘nasty party’ banner as they set out plans for hard Brexit at their conference last month. Home secretary Amber Rudd finished her speech – denigrating foreign workers, dividing communities – at lunchtime on the Tuesday. Labour’s response landed at 10am the next day.
Junior researchers to backbenchers put out quotes about Westminster’s best dog quicker than this, and they do it on a salary a fraction of the £97,000 Seumas Milne reportedly receives. Corbyn’s response to Theresa May’s speech was a little speedier but the impact was lost after a week-long silence so deafening people assumed he was spending more time with his jam than with his job.
As Corbyn supporter Owen Jones suggested this summer during his brief flirtation with realpolitik, the leadership’s communication strategy requires nothing less than a complete overhaul. Getting the basics right ahead of Tory conference would have been a start. While his boss had a rest from doing his job, Milne was left running the show – and yet still ended up becoming the story, having been named in an article published by the online successor of Soviet newspaper Pravda, which praised him for refusing to condemn Russia’s actions in Syria.
Rumours abound that the leadership’s solution to this unhappy spectacle is to draft in James Schneider of Momentum to ease Milne’s workload ahead of what looks set to be a bitter winter for a party fully expecting a fatal general election in the spring. In fact, Schneider was sent out to spin at party conference in place of Milne but denied he was working for Labour. His support for Boris Johnson in 2008, the Liberal Democrats in 2010 and the Green party in 2015 suggests he might struggle with sticking to the message.
Back to the backbenches
Back in Westminster, Labour’s moderates are taking a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach to the party’s renewal. While most are focused on the heavy-lifting of policy work, some are looking at community organising and others are aiming to preserve a fragile link between Labour and business (it has not gone unnoticed by businesses that there was no shadow business secretary speech at conference).
There is no shortage of new groupings appearing, but hitting the ground running is the new Clause I Group which organises within the parliamentary Labour party. With a membership of over 100 parliamentarians, the group aims to defend Labour’s core values as set out by Clause I of the party’s constitution – which states that above all our party’s purpose is to take the parliamentary road to socialism. It has plans to hold Labour moderates together on the backbenches and attempt to ensure Labour has at least some credible policies.
Perhaps as a result of this renewed organisation, a significant number of those who resigned in the summer decided against going back. With the customary competence we have come to expect from the leader’s office, the reshuffle was spread out over two weeks while last year’s ‘make it work’ brigade of shadow ministers were contacted to offer them their old jobs back. A handful were even offered promotions to the shadow cabinet by aides in the leader’s office before Corbyn overruled them, saying he did not want to move anyone who had filled in over the summer.
As this column noted last month, many MPs had already chosen to focus on saving their own seats by distancing themselves from the unpopular leader. It was no coincidence that MPs were turning down frontbench roles on the same day an ICM poll gave the Conservatives a 17-point lead.
One former shadow minister, on being approached by the leader’s office during the reshuffle, simply questioned why they should go back when the only thing that has changed is that everything has got a lot worse.
Shameless Shami
It is far easier, of course, to keep your seat if you have one for life. So it was maybe with this in mind that Shami Chakrabarti agreed to appear on Peston on Sunday shortly after her appointment as shadow attorney general.
Mired in another avoidable story about school selection hypocrisy, Chakrabarti decided to defend herself by telling viewers that, ‘I live in a nice big house and eat nice food’ because of her ‘charmed and privileged life’. Far from promoting Labour, Chakrabarti did little more than provide quotes for the next round of United Kingdom Independence party leaflets.
But what has really irked some Labour MPs was the fact she was there in the first place. Joining the party in April while carrying out an ‘independent’ inquiry into antisemitism, she was in the House of Lords by August and the shadow cabinet by October. At this rate we can expect her to be party leader by December and prime minister by February.
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Cartoon: Adrian Teal