Labour party

Could Jeremy Corbyn come out of the Labour leadership contest with an even bigger mandate? Few would be surprised and a new poll on the front page of the Times today suggests that such an outcome is highly likely. The YouGov survey indicates Corbyn is beating his rival Owen Smith by 62 per cent to 38 per cent amongst Labour voters - a result which would gift him a three per cent spike on last year's vote, when he won 59.5 per cent. This would spell disaster for those challenging Corbyn and make it almost certain that the Labour leader would still be in place come a 2020 general election.

Owen Smith desperately needs to make up ground in Labour's leadership contest (bookies’ odds, perhaps more reliable than the polls, suggest Corbyn has an 84 per cent chance of winning next month). What's more, with voting soon drawing to a close, he has less and less time to do so. Which all explains why last night's leadership hustings in Glasgow was much more bitter than any of the others which came before it. The main topic of contention yesterday? The referendum - something which Smith is trying eagerly to make his own cause and his reason for being. Earlier this week, he said he wanted to block Brexit - a strategy which perhaps wasn't as fruitful as he hoped it would be.

It's exactly one month until Labour conference and the party's security shambles just got a whole lot worse. After the NEC voted to boycott G4S, the only firm willing to do the job were Showsec, a non-unionised security firm. This option was deemed unsatisfactory and so the party have had to go 'cap in hand' to G4S. Alas, the Telegraph reports that the firm rejected Labour's offer over concerns about 'staff safety'. So, will the conference be cancelled? There is another option. The party could ask the police for extra security. However, this would cost them as where security workers for Showsec cost around £9 per hour, a PC comes to £59.65 an hour. By way of assistance, Mr S has come up with a rough estimate of what the party should start put to aside for this.

What follows is an appeal to Jeremy Corbyn supporters to think again. It's from Chris, a Labour party member, who does not want to give his full name for fear of abuse. He has compiled a vast, but by no means exhaustive list of the moral and political failings of the Labour leader. He told me: I've noticed that a few of my very clever, thoughtful, moderately left-wing friends were pro-Corbyn, which amazed me. What I discovered was that they knew almost no facts about him or his fellow travellers. I then noticed that any given critical article about Corbyn only listed one or two facts about him.

It won't come as much as a surprise to many that Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, has backed Owen Smith in the party's leadership contest. In July, Dugdale said that with Jeremy Corbyn in charge Labour faced being wiped out at the ballot box. As if that wasn't a clear enough indicator of who she would back, today she's confirmed it. Dugdale had this to say: 'Owen Smith gets my vote. I believe Owen can unite our party, and move us on from the divisions that exist under the current UK leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.' The sentiment is clear and Dugdale is one of the highest-profile elected female figures in the Labour party to come out against Corbyn. But as with Sadiq Khan's endorsement of Owen Smith, it's unlikely to help very much at all in helping Smith defeat Corbyn.

With just over a month to go until Labour party conference in Liverpool, the party ought to be turning its attention to setting the agenda for the year ahead. Instead, there are doubts over whether the event will even take place. Earlier this month, a leaked memo to Guido revealed that the party was facing a conference crisis. Following a decision to boycott G4S after over 20 years working together, the party had approached five firms but only one - Showsec - was willing to provide security for the event. As Iain McNicol -- the general secretary -- pointed out, this was an unsatisfactory option as the Liverpool-based firm do not have a unionised work force and, as a result, are in a row with the GMB union. Three weeks on and things have taken a turn for the worse.

In the past few minutes, the Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of the Labour Party’s block on anyone who joined after 12 January 2016 from voting in the party’s leadership election. This means - until there is an appeal to the Supreme Court - that around 130,000 members, most of whom are believed to be sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, will not be able to vote. As I explained earlier this week when the High Court ruled in this matter, the impact of this may merely be the size of the victory that Jeremy Corbyn wins against Owen Smith. But it does also make the Labour party more divided and the contest still more bitter.

Another honours list comes and goes and yet again my name is not on it. I don’t think either the Prime Minister or Jeremy Corbyn realises the hurt that this flagrant oversight engenders, both in myself and of course in my public. For countless years I have tried, selflessly, to make the world a better place, to illuminate the poor and the downtrodden with the light of love. I have endeavoured, wherever I can, in my own way, to bring comfort to the sick — not only those who are physically infirm, but also mentals. And yet — nothing, nix. More pertinently, with regard to the latest honours list from David Cameron, I was at a party at the end of last year and offered Sam Cam a fag.

We are still not entirely sure when the Labour leadership contest will end, but in these dusty days of recess, it is certainly keeping everyone nicely busy. Today Owen Smith received a boost from trade union GMB, which decided to endorse his bid to take over from Jeremy Corbyn. Its members voted 60-40 to endorse Smith, and General Secretary Tim Roache said ‘GMB members cannot afford for Labour to be talking to itself in a bubble for the next five years while the Tories run riot through out rights at work, our public services and our communities’. This drew yet another combative - and slightly curious - response from Team Corbyn after yesterday’s conspiracy theories fun.

Imagine the reaction of Her Majesty’s Opposition if the government announced that it was to introduce a new ‘voter charge’ – a levy which citizens had to pay before they were allowed into the polling station. Just as they did with the ‘Community Charge’ over a quarter of a century ago Labour would undoubtedly – and quite reasonably – call it a ‘poll tax’. How could a democracy possibly try to exclude the poor from the vote, they would ask, before backing a legal challenge on the grounds of human rights? Why, then, is Labour so determined to introduce its own internal poll tax?

Spare a thought for Eddie Izzard. Every campaign the cross-dressing comedian attaches himself to has a tendency to end in failure. After backing Ed Miliband in the General Election, Izzard found himself on the losing side once again in the EU referendum campaign when his tour of university campuses failed to swing it for Remain. Today he has missed out on a place on Labour's National Executive Committee. Izzard had hoped to be elected onto the party's NEC as part of his efforts to carve a career in politics. However, he ended up coming eighth, with the six available seats going to more Corbynista candidates. https://twitter.