Labour party

The Scottish speech is normally a neglected part of the Labour Party conference but has more potency now that there's less than a year to go to the referendum. Johann Lamont, leader of Scottish Labour, is an important actor in the battle to save the union. The Tory vote in Scotland has been reduced to staff members and blood relatives so much depends on whether Labour is able to pack a punch. And Ms Lamont certainly is. She rather cleverly mocked the way that Salmond is in full hyperbole mode, declaring every second day an 'historic' day — to create the idea that we're building up to some Braveheart-style Independence Day.

This is not the backdrop that Ed Miliband would have wanted for Labour conference. Labour’s poll lead has—according to YouGov—vanished, Damian McBride is dominating the news agenda and there’s talk of splits and division in this inner circle. But, as I say in the cover this week, you can’t write Ed Miliband off yet. He has three huge, structural advantages in his favour. The boundaries favour Labour: Type Thursday’s YouGov poll, the best for the Tories in 18 months, into UK Polling Report’s seat calculator, and it tells you that Labour would be three short of a majority on these numbers. It is a reminder that if the parties are level pegging, Labour is winning.

Damian McBride's memoirs will naturally make uncomfortable reading for the Labour party, but the current occupants of Downing Street will also be feasting on his lesson in the dark arts, and wondering if there is anything they can take from it too. This sounds like an odd thing to say when so much condemnation for the poisoned operation of the Brownites (and, as Peter Oborne points out, the operation around Blair too) is flying about today. But the question of whether the current government needs its own Damian McBride is one that has occupied Tory MPs who like to think about these things for a while.

Trouble is, I suppose, there’s so much space to fill these days, in the papers and on cyberspace, on your TV screens and on the wireless. And not filled with the same old stuff, but filled with something different. And so if you’re a columnist the pressure’s really on: what the hell is there that’s new to say? What attitude can I strike that would be different from what Aaronovitch had to say yesterday, but also different to what Heffer’s saying today? That’s the only explanation I can come to for three articles within a week saying what a bloody genius Ed Miliband is.

The Chippenham Labour Party has decided that its candidate to contest the 2015 general election will be one Andy Newman. As the anti-totalitarian blogs Howie’s Corner and Harry’s Place have already argued he is almost certain to be the worst politician to stand for a mainstream party. An innocent observer, who believes the British Left’s protestations that it is for workers’ rights and against sexism, racism and homophobia, could go further wonder how such a man could get close to the Labour Party – let alone close enough to run on a Labour ticket. Newman manages the laughably named “Socialist Unity" website: laughable, not just because it engages in vicious factionalism, but because it indulges the religious strain of far-right thinking.

A rather irritable Paddy Ashdown has just told Andrew Neil that the Lib Democrats are ‘a left-wing party’ but that their next coalition would be determined by the voters. Ashdown, whose chairing the Lib Dem election campaign, claimed that it simply wasn’t accurate to say that Lib Dems had a preference for who they’d like as their coalition partner. This is, to put it mildly, a dubious statement and Ashdown did feel the need to concede that senior Lib Dems did have ‘private likes and dislikes’. But he claimed that this wouldn’t influence their decision about who to go into government with.

The Lib Dem conference rally was never going to be the same without Sarah Teather and her comedy routine. With Teather persona non grata following her decision to step down, it was duly a much tamer affair. The only risqué jokes were about Lembit Opik being bitten in the nether regions by a sausage dog. But seeing as Lembit has infuriated party loyalists by again calling for Clegg to go, they got a laugh from the leadership. The message of the conference rally was that the Liberal Democrats are the party of jobs. Nick Clegg claimed that the Tories weren’t the party of jobs, but the party of fire at will; a reference to the Beecroft proposals. But Clegg seemed much happier when he moved on to attacking the Labour party.

Toby Young has rattled some Labour cages by publicly mooting a bid for the Tory nomination for Hammersmith. ‘Z List Toryboy celebrity Toby Young wants to be an MP’ spins a Labour adviser Imran Ahmed. Then came the hammer blow: ‘Think he's gotten House of Commons mixed up with Big Brother house.’ Oh, that one will hurt. Should have saved it for the leaflets! So who is Ahmed? Well he last hit the headlines after he was accused of ghost-writing tweets for his old boss Andy Slaughter - the Labour MP for Hammersmith. Could he be speaking with Slaughter’s voice again?

I see the new Newsnight editor, Ian Katz, is in trouble for having 'tweeted' about the performance of one of the programme’s guests in an ungallant manner. He described the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, as being 'boring snoring' during her interview with Paxo. The Labour Party has demanded an apology and suggests that Katz’s comments 'undermine the neutrality of the programme'. As a party member, could I just be allowed to say 'piss off Labour?'  Katz’s tweet – and why he feels the need to utilise this medium Christ alone knows – revealed no such thing. In fact, I suspect Katz is a Labour supporter.