Chuka umunna

As Jeremy Corbyn made his speech to conference, Labour's new frontbench did their best to put on a united front on the front row. As for the frontbenchers of Labour's past? Well, it could hardly be described as a show of solidarity. Both Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt were nowhere to be seen at the speech, with ITV's Chris Ship reporting that they had already left Brighton on a train: https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/648805512826503168 While Hunt did at least tweet supportive messages to Corbyn during the speech, Umunna has maintained a radio silence.

In Brighton, eyes are on two rising stars who are tipped to replace Jeremy Corbyn. The first is Keir Starmer, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who is popping up at several fringe events about the future of the party. The second is Dan Jarvis, the former shadow justice minister, who made his only appearance at a Huffington Post fringe event this afternoon. Jarvis revealed that running for the Labour leadership this time around was ‘never on the table’ and Jeremy Corbyn did not offer him a job (contrary to previous reports) in his shadow cabinet — even though he turned it down. Just like the other moderates who have spoken at this conference, the MP for Barnsley Central said he could still ably serve his party from the back benches.

Chuka Umunna proved the Labour moderates still have a fan base at his first fringe appearance in Brighton. At a packed out Demos event, the former shadow business secretary and one-time leadership contender, said that a difference of opinion over the EU referendum was not the only reason he didn’t take a job in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Despite the Labour leader's new position of campaigning to remain In come what may — outlined in this op-ed — Umunna suggested he still wouldn’t take a position: ‘We had a good discussion and quite of that actually was really thinking about things in this reshuffle, but there were a number of issues and the EU was one of them.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Corbyn's first few days as Labour leader" startat=1015] Listen [/audioplayer]No one watching Jeremy Corbyn walk around the Palace of Westminster would imagine that he had just won the Labour leadership by a landslide. He seems to spend his time practising the blank stare he gives to television cameras, his eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance. He doesn’t seem too keen on his colleagues either. There is none of the back-slapping bonhomie that normally surrounds a new leader. When he first addressed Labour MPs, there was no cheer when he entered the room which is, for a new leader, unprecedented. Corbyn is the accidental leader.

Chuka Umunna’s call for Labourites to unite around their new leader and show 'solidarity' does show a growing acceptance that Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of being installed as the party’s new chief in just ten days’ time. But it also shows that the Blairites in the party are finally starting to come up with a plan for dealing with the rise of the hard left. Labour’s centrist modernisers have spent the summer scratching their heads at the Corbyn phenomenon, which they hadn’t predicted at all - indeed, I was initially briefed by one of their number that ‘we will get hundreds of thousands of new supporters. Social media has changed how we communicate in a way we can’t grasp and it has blown open this leadership contest too.

This Labour leadership contest is almost as notable for who isn’t standing as for who is. First, there is the former paratrooper turned MP Dan Jarvis who declined to stand despite many on the Labour side’s belief that he is the answer to the party’s problems. Then, there is Chuka Umunna who initially did enter the race but then pulled out almost immediately, depriving the contest of the one current Labour politician with undoubted star power. But, perhaps, even more telling by their absence are those Labour figures who aren’t even in parliament now. The most discussed of these is David Miliband, who quit the Commons after losing to his brother in 2010.

After pulling out of the Labour leadership contest himself, Chuka Umunna has given his star-studded endorsement to Liz Kendall, along with his leadership team of Emma Reynolds, Stephen Twigg and Jonathan Reynolds. In an article for the New Statesman, Umunna writes: ‘For us, our next leader must get this vision right. On all these big subjects, Liz Kendall has asked the tough questions and started to chart a course to the answers. She has been courageous in challenging conventional wisdom. She has no compunction in moving Labour beyond our comfort zone and is determined to build a team ready to chart a route forward. This is exactly what our party needs and that is why we are nominating her to be the next leader of the Labour Party.

Chuka Umunna has surprised many today with the news that he has withdrawn from the race for the Labour leadership. Explaining his decision he said that the 'added level of pressure' had not been a 'comfortable experience'. Mr S can already hear the sighs from the many Chuka supporters who had seen him as the man to make Labour a pro-business party once more. Earlier this week the business entrepreneur James Caan, who is Chairman of the UK Government's Start Up Loans Scheme, had confided to Mr S at the Quercus Biasi Foundation Spring Gala at Claridges, that he would support Chuka. He went on to say that he could be the 'English Obama': 'I think he's an outstanding candidate.

Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated. There are three groups of voters that Labour failed with at this election, I argue in the magazine this week. Aspirational voters who went Tory, the left behind working class who went Ukip in England and SNP in Scotland and Nationalist-minded ones north of the border. What the Labour leadership candidates have to explain is how they would win these voters over.

In the last few minutes, Chuka Umunna has confirmed that he will be standing for the Labour leadership. The Streatham MP made the announcement in a video on his Facebook page while in Swindon - presumably to start undoing any claims his rivals will make that he is a candidate who only appeals to Londoners. He said: ‘I’m pleased today to be announcing that I will be standing for the leadership of the party. I think we can and we should be winning in seats like in Swindon. North, South, East, West we can absolutely do it as a party.’ Umunna added that he didn’t have much truck with the idea that Labour now needed to take 10 years to rebuild.

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master).

With polling day less than a week away, it was a case of no rest for the wicked this weekend as politicians took part in some last minute campaigning. While Ed Miliband dreamt about erecting an 8ft 6in stone in Number 10, other members of the Labour party attended a campaign event. Organised by councillor Ansar Ali Khan, Labour members including Tom Watson, Liam Byrne and Jack Dromey joined supporters in Birmingham for a rally: https://twitter.com/JackDromeyMP/status/594177392979083264 However, at the event women in the audience were segregated from men. This issue did not go unnoticed by the party's critics, with many taking to Twitter to ask why Labour, which claims to be a party for equality, would support segregated audiences.