Labour party

As Corbynmania continues to divide the Labour party, it appears that casting directors at ITV are keen to bring the party’s inner turmoil to the small screen. With several Labour MPs resigning from the frontbench after Jeremy Corbyn was announced as the new leader, producers have been sniffing around disillusioned  party members in the hope of luring them onto this year’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Jamie Reed writes in the Guardian that he has declined an offer asking him to take part in the ITV reality show. He says he received the offer three days after he resigned as the party’s shadow health minister in response to Corbyn’s election: ‘Three days later, sitting in my Westminster office, surveying

Seumas Milne’s appointment as Labour’s new head of communications and director of strategy has generally been met with his dismay in the party — but it does tell us something about Jeremy Corbyn: compromise is not a phrase in the Corbynite dictionary. John McDonnell’s appointment as shadow chancellor was the first hint that beneath Corbyn’s cuddly beard lies a tough ideologue. Milne’s appointment adds credence to that notion. One former Labour staffer describes Milne’s appointment as the ‘icing on the cake’: ‘This is who Jeremy and John wanted from the start. This is who they really are. This is what their politics is about.’ John McTernan, Tony Blair’s political secretary and a former adviser to Jim Murphy takes a slightly

Lord Warner has resigned the Labour whip in protest at the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn is taking the party, Patrick Wintour has revealed tonight. Warner was a minister of state at the Department of Health under Tony Blair. Now, Corbyn supporters will be quick to point out that Lord Warner is hardly a household name and that he was at the far Blairite end of the party. Both of these statements are true. But Warner’s departure should still worry Labour. All parties are coalitions and no leader should want to be losing former ministers from the party at any point in their leadership, let alone this early. One footnote

The Labour leadership has abandoned plans to effectively neuter the party’s whips office after realising it is quite useful, Coffee House has learned. I understand that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn had considered making the whips’ office more of an administrative entity which didn’t try to herd MPs into the right lobby. There had also been plans afoot to get rid of Rosie Winterton, the party’s chief whip, as she had initially been identified as someone hostile to a Corbyn leadership who represented the old way of doing things. But the vote on the fiscal charter this week was much less troublesome than the Labour leadership had anticipated, thanks to

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour’s new leader, few of his colleagues have been more supportive than Diane Abbott. As well as defending John McDonnell on the Today show this week over his fiscal charter U-turn, the shadow secretary for international development — who reportedly once enjoyed a romance with Corbyn — took it upon herself to defend Corbyn’s honour at a PLP meeting last month when Jess Phillips criticised him over the lack of women in his shadow cabinet. With Phillips responding by telling Abbott to f— off, it’s safe to say that Abbott’s new role as Corbyn’s champion has not gone down well with some Labour MPs. In fact, one

Over 20 Labour MPs rebelled against their party whip and abstained on the government’s fiscal charter this evening. The Labour party claimed there were 20 abstentions, but the Tories claimed the number was closer to 28. This is the full list of abstentions which didn’t include authorised absences (some of whom would have been would-be rebels who were encouraged to find a speech to make or ailing relative to visit in another part of the country at the last minute) from the Labour whips office: ​​​​Fiona Mactaggart Rushanara Ali ​​​Ian Austin Ben Bradshaw Adrian Bailey Shabana Mahmood Ann Coffey ​​​​Andrew Smith Simon Danczuk Jamie Reed Chris Evans ​​​​Graham Stringer ​​​​Frank Field ​​​Gisela

Whenever the Parliamentary Labour Party meets, journalists gather outside the room in the hope that those leaving the meeting will reveal what went or that the argument will get so heated that they will be able to hear what is going on behind closed doors. Those of my colleagues who turned up to tonight’s PLP meeting were very much in luck. George Eaton reports that Ben Bradshaw, the former culture secretary, left declaring the meeting ‘a total f*** shambles’ and that Emily Thornberry could be heard loudly upbraiding MPs for texting journalists about what was going on inside this supposedly private meeting. So, why was his meeting so rowdy? Well,

At this year’s Tory conference Jeremy Hunt defended the government’s tax credit cuts, claiming they would make the British people work as hard as the Chinese. While Hunt has since claimed that his comments were misinterpreted, tonight Labour’s Helen Goodman hit out at the Health Secretary for the comments. She says if things are so great in China then why did Hunt’s wife Lucia — who is from Xi’an, China — move to Britain: Given that the personal dig hardly fits in with Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of ‘a new kind of politics’, Labour supporters have been quick to call on Goodman to apologise. Speaking on Westminster Hour this evening, Lady Basildon — the Labour

Political party conferences have, in recent years, felt like an empty ritual. They used to be convened in seaside towns, so grassroots activists could find affordable accommodation. Now they are usually held in cities, so lobbyists can find better restaurants. Activists have been supplanted by members of the political class who are charged £500 a ticket. In the fringe debates, speakers face a volley of questions from people paid to ask them — on pensions, subsidies for green energy and the like. Politicians spend all day talking to journalists, and real politics vanishes. This year, however, politics has returned. The protesters who shrieked and spat at anyone entering the Tory

The mood at the Conservative party conference this week was a little subdued, and no wonder. As those who watched the television coverage will know, everyone entering the secure zone had to run a gauntlet of potty-mouthed protestors, their faces twisted into masks of hate. It’s not easy to celebrate after you’ve just been showered with spit and called a ‘Tory murderer’. Jeremy Corbyn made a point in his conference speech last week of asking his supporters to treat their opponents with respect and not descend to personal abuse, but I’m not sure how many of them got the message. If the atmosphere in Manchester was anything to go by,