Labour party

Given that Jeremy Corbyn is a Hamas sympathiser with an IRA sympathiser as his Shadow Chancellor, I imagine he didn't think too much about promoting a little-known Scot named Mike Watson. He is a Labour peer, who now takes a place in Corbyn’s frontbench as education spokesman. He is also a convicted arsonist, who quit the Scottish Parliament in disgrace after being caught drunkenly setting fire to a set of curtains during the Scottish Politician of the Year ceremony 2004. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, which he served in HMP Edinburgh. Watson's undeserved rehabilitation says much about how Corbyn is having to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for people willing to serve under him.

Hats off to John McDonnell. We've all been fretting about how the Corbyn gang would cope against the media slick Tories. We all think that, despite the appeal of conviction politics, a shadow chancellor such as McDonnell will be eaten alive by the Tory front bench. John McDonnell's performance on BBC Question Time last night suggested otherwise. Question Time is a good test for politicians: they have to look and sound passionate while saying nothing much at all. McDonnell did exactly that, and with gusto. He masterfully shrugged off his 'joke' about killing Margaret Thatcher. When asked about his support for the IRA, he managed almost simultaneously to apologise and to take credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

Today marks one year since the Scottish independence referendum and many of the key figures are reflecting on how politics has changed. Alistair Darling, the former Labour Chancellor and leader of the Better Together campaign, spoke on the Today programme about Scotland, but it was the remarks on his own party that were the most striking. He said Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader thanks to the ‘disillusionment’ of people who are ‘fed up with the established order’. But Darling said ‘I honestly don’t know’ whether John McDonnell will ever become Chancellor: ‘Just at the moment, it seems to me to be difficult [to judge] but I’m willing to be surprised.

With four days to go until the result of Labour’s leadership election, a call from the Sunday Times. Would I like to write a piece, along the lines of the opening chapter of my 1980s novel A Very British Coup, about the first 100 days of a Corbyn government? Anything up to 3,000 words, he says. I am sceptical that the sense of humour of the censors at Murdoch HQ will stretch to the prospect of a Corbyn government, however fanciful. Especially since any such government is likely to be interested in breaking up the concentration of media ownership. What they are really looking for, I suspect, is tale of chaos, mayhem and a breakdown of the social order. Nevertheless he is bursting with enthusiasm. After nailing down terms I decide to give it a go.

When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed, its name was the Labour Representation Committee. Its goal was gradually achieved, and then, from the 1980s, gradually annihilated. With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader is supported by only 10 per cent of the party’s MPs, and yet it is imagined, at least by his backers, that he will eventually be able to get into government with them. It is an impossible situation. What is needed today is the opposite of how it all started — a Parliamentary Representation Committee in the Labour party. When the history of Corbynism comes to be written, many will assume that his form of leftism arose as a protest against the Thatcher era. This is not so.