Andy burnham

It is hard to overstate the level of shock in moderate Labour circles at last night’s YouGov poll showing Jeremy Corbyn heading for victory in the Labour leadership race. Regardless of whether the poll is accurate, they fear that it will damage Labour in two ways. First, it will skew the contest further to the left as Burnham and Cooper both seek to halt the Corbyn advance and to position themselves to pick up second preferences. Secondly, the idea that Corbyn could win is hardly going to reassure those voters who worry about Labour’s economic competence. https://twitter.com/LadPolitics/status/623619130680320001 Another worry is that the hard left could, seeing how close Corbyn is to victory, sign up en masse to vote in the contest.

Relations between Andy Burnham and Harriet Harman must be disintegrating quickly. After the leadership favourite abstained during last night's vote on the Welfare Bill, Burnham attempted to his logic on the World at One. Burnham said his mind hadn’t changed and he has always been in favour of a ‘reasoned amendment’ — but he was unhappy with how the vote went: ‘Let me be clear: this was still a compromise position and it wasn’t a strong enough position for me. But I as leader firstly would have opposed this bill outright last night and would do so if elected leader.

Despite frequent claims from both sides of the political spectrum that Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn is 'unelectable', he has so far managed to win the endorsement of Unite as well as the highest number of nominations from constituency Labour parties. Could he now be on his way to an endorsement from the Guardian? Steerpike only asks after the Labour leadership hopeful was the guest of honour at today's news conference at the paper. While it was Andy Burnham's turn last week to grace the newsroom, Mr S is assured that Corbyn was the more popular of the two guests. In fact, such fan-mania hasn't been witnessed since Hollywood star Benedict Cumberbatch paid the paper a visit: https://twitter.

The four Labour leadership contenders took part in another televised hustings today, this time chaired by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics. With just over 50 days left of this contest, the candidates are now more comfortable in each other’s company and seem much happier to attack each other. Although no one spectacularly won or failed, a few moments did provide some insight into the current state of the race. Here are five key points from today’s hustings. 1. Corbyn is comfortable running as the far left candidate. The rise of Corbynmania has overlooked that he has no frontbench experience and little idea of how to do serious politics.

In an impressive cross-party signing, the government has appointed Lord Adonis, the former Labour transport secretary, to oversee delivery of the HS2 railway. Lord Adonis gave birth to the idea of HS2 prior to the 2010 election and has remained a vocal advocate for the project ever since. The transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said in a statement he was ‘extremely pleased’ that Adonis is joining the board of HS2 Ltd as a non-executive director. Adonis himself described HS2 as a project of ‘national significance’: ‘Patrick McLoughlin has been a powerful advocate for the project and the government has risen to the challenge of thinking about the long-term by putting in place a strong team to deliver it.

It is often said that British ambition and influence in the world are on the wane. But there can be few greater demonstrations of this than our country’s lack of attention to one of the biggest issues of our time. I am in Washington at the moment, and have been admiring how intensely the Vienna negotiations have been on the political and news agendas here. But in Britain? Obviously the British Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, has been involved in the P5+1 talks. But it would have been easy to miss the fact. There has been no meaningful criticisms from within the Conservative party to the deal which Philip Hammond has just put this country’s name to.

When Andy Burnham attended London Pride, the Labour leadership hopeful proudly sported a t-shirt which read 'never kissed a Tory'. While Mr S is yet to track down a Tory who found romance with Burnham, there are doubts that the same can be said for his wife, Marie-France van Heel. During Victoria Derbyshire's Labour leadership hustings this morning, Burnham revealed his wife's cross-party past: 'My wife and I have been together for 25 years but in the early days she was on Blind Date and she was the picker, and to add insult to injury she picked Will from Surrey, who ended up being the director of communications for the Conservative party.

Throughout his career, Andy Burnham has been keen to point out that he is not one of the 'metropolitan elite'. The Labour leadership hopeful says that 'for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party'. So Mr S was curious to learn the venue for a talk he is giving next week. Burnham will appear at the Soho House private members' club on Tuesday to read 'a short story about equality and justice'. While Steerpike is sure Burnham's words will be sincere, he worries that the venue - which is popular with Hugh Grant, Madonna and Kirsty Young - may distract from the message.

The Houses of Parliament are falling down. According to the Independent Options Appraisal of the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Programme - a group of engineers and project managers commissioned to have a butcher’s - the Palace of Westminster is 'partly sinking, contains asbestos and has outdated cabling', is 'infested with rats and mice and in an advanced state of disrepair' and will take £5.7 billion and 32 years to put right, unless MPs and Lords shuffle off somewhere else for a bit, in which case it’ll be £3.5 billion over six years. Without such repairs, 'major, irreversible damage' looms.

Liz Kendall is continuing to push herself as the ‘change everything’ candidate for the Labour leadership. During a speech at Reuters this morning, Kendall called for the party to make a big shift on fiscal responsibility if it has any hope of winning the next election — a task some think is beyond Labour in its current state: ‘If we continue to stick with the politics that we had at the last election or, indeed, over the last seven or eight years, we will get the same result. Einstein said the definition of madness was to continue doing the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result. We need big changes.

Alan Milburn has told Labour something it does not want to hear: Tony Blair was as great for the party as Margaret Thatcher was for the Tories. At a breakfast with the Centre for Social Justice this morning, the former health secretary argued that  Labour ‘could not have got it more wrong’ at the last election and urged the party to snap out of its ‘self-delusion’ that New Labour and Blair were all bad: ‘Great leaders always have a big purpose. For Churchill it was victory in war, for Thatcher victory against a stifling state. For Blair it was victory against old-fashioned attitudes and institutions that held our country back. Today, to be blunt, voters are no longer sure what Labour is for. They do not see a compelling core purpose.

Yvette Cooper addressed a lobby lunch today and put on an impressive performance. In contrast to her slightly wooden performance during last night’s debate, Cooper came across as straightforward and articulate — and surprisingly funny. She joked that alongside the ten meetings to sign off the Edstone, there were seven meetings for a ‘fiscally responsible water feature.’ She also told the gathered hacks ‘we want more Haribo!’ in reference to the sweet factory in her constituency. Unsurprisingly, Cooper spoke confidently on the economy, demonstrating her years of experience on the frontbench.