Labour party

The Labour party must dig deep into roots if it is to survive. The Blairites cannot do it, they are finished now. The far left is triumphant but they are a tiny force in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and nowhere near as popular in the country as their deluded supporters imagine. In the middle sit the broad mass of social democratic Labour MPs, and they do not know what to do. The leadership campaign showed that they could not inspire, although I thought that Yvette Cooper found her voice in its final weeks. They don’t know whether to sit in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet or to stand by their principles and retire to the backbenches. Corbyn humiliates those who try to be loyal. They thought that they were serving a pro-EU leader, then Corbyn implies that maybe they are not.

You cannot work for a party’s press operation and not have your fair share of disasters. During my time working for the Liberal Democrats, our party leader pontificated about his colleagues on a plane, made the odd unfortunate sartorial decision (the ‘double-fleece look’ being the example that aroused the most incredulity in the office) and there were gaffes, snubs, rows and all the other unfortunate moments that cause former press officers to shake their heads and write smug blogs saying it was all much smoother in their day. These things happen in politics, and when the media has tasted blood, there is often nothing you can do. But I have never seen such a concentrated period of haplessness as we have at the start of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Jeremy Corbyn wants to forge a new kind of politics, answering public discontent with the way things are done in Westminster. One of the things that voters often say they don’t like about politicians is the way they appear to abandon their principles in exchange for power. The idea that power acts as a sort of fire extinguisher on principles has been debated rather exhaustively through the leadership election. But Corbyn won that contest in part because people admired his ability to stick to his principles even when that appeared inconvenient. As an obscure backbencher being principled to the point of unpopularity was easy.

Perhaps the most teachable moment in the BBC’s coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the TUC came around the 38 second mark in the video here. Corbyn is reaching an emotional climax.

Labour has issued a line on why the party's leader didn't sing the National Anthem at today's Battle of Britain memorial service: 'Jeremy attended today’s event to show respect for those who fought in conflicts for Britain. 'As he said in the words issued this morning, the heroism of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain is something to which we all owe an enormous debt of gratitude. 'He stood in respectful silence during the anthem.' It's not quite clear what the difference between respectful silence and stony silence is. But what this tells us is that the new Leader of the Opposition is currently prepared to display his principles even in symbolic ways that some may consider disrespectful, given the setting.

Jeremy Corbyn has delivered the second speech of his leadership at the TUC conference in Brighton this afternoon and it was a slight improvement on the first. The idiosyncratic address Corbyn gave after winning the Labour leadership contest was long-winded and repetitive. His TUC address shared some of these characteristics but it was a little bit more polished — in particular, the section where he slammed David Cameron and George Osborne for being ‘poverty deniers’: ‘They call us deficit deniers. But then they spend billions cutting taxes for the richest families or for the most profitable businesses. What they are is poverty deniers: Ignoring the growing queues at food banks. Ignoring the growing housing crisis.