Uk politics

Yvette Cooper has just given a rather fine, bold speech on the refugee crisis. Some reading will disagree with her plea for Britain to take 10,000 refugees, rather than 200. But that’s part of the point: the Labour leadership contender has decided to take a stand on something, even if it annoys some. To be fair, it is probably an issue that Labour members will applaud her taking a stand on, rather than something that makes the party feel uncomfortable with, but it is much less like the ‘on-the-one-hand-this-and-the-other-that’ style of campaigning that Cooper has been criticised for at times during this contest.

It’s not entirely surprising that Tony Blair fancied one last chance to plead with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. And it’s not particularly surprising that his piece in today’s Observer is attracting exactly the sort of reaction he expected. But what is surprising is not just the former Prime Minister’s rather sarcastic tone - he says that ‘someone else said to me: “If you’re writing something again, don’t blah on about winning elections; it really offends them.” It would actually be quite funny if it weren’t tragic.’ - but that he’s not really pleading with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn at all.

In this week’s Spectator, I profile the 2015 intake of Tory MPs: a bright, pragmatic bunch who don’t like to call themselves Thatcherite. Ministers who have sat in the Commons Chamber and heard maiden speeches from this new bunch have been seriously impressed, with some remarking that they’ve wondered what they’ve done with their own lives after hearing the extraordinary experiences that the new intake have brought with them into the Chamber. Those extraordinary experiences include working as postmen, teachers, doctors, rural auctioneers, and nurses. There are very few political animals who’ve slaved as special advisers before becoming MPs, or whose families are political dynasties.

As well as it being rather amusing that a party officially committed to the abolition of the House of Lords has stuffed a few more of its grandees into the Upper Chamber, it’s worth looking will be wearing the ermine. There seems to have been a bit of a desperate hunt to find people. The MPs who lost their seats or stood down might be fair enough. But some party figures are scratching their heads rather at the appointment of one party member who was a councillor for just four years. Shas Sheehan did also stand as a parliamentary candidate (and lost, twice), but then so have many others in the Lib Dems and they haven’t been made peers.

Nigel Farage is trying to block Suzanne Evans from becoming Ukip candidate for Mayor of London with a covert campaign to install a less threatening, loyal party colleague in her place, sources have told Coffee House. Ukip will select its mayoral candidate this weekend. Evans is the bookies’ favourite and the best-known outside the party. But it has moved from a one member one vote system within the London party for picking its choice for the mayoral elections to a private selection. The six-strong panel for the selection includes a number of Farage loyalists, including Chris Bruni-Lowe, Paul Oakden and Mick McGough. Party insiders are furious that this panel seems to be set up to deliver the candidate the leader, rather than the wider party, wants.

Labour is holding a meeting tomorrow morning with the different leadership camps to discuss how the party is dealing with infiltrators into its membership. The campaigns are particularly keen to find out the scale of the infiltration from each side - Tory and hard left - and how local parties are dealing with it. I understand that one camp will ask for proportions of left-wing infiltrators from parties such as the Greens, Communist and TUSC, and from the Conservative side, as this is something Labour HQ hasn’t yet supplied. Opinions vary as to whether the hard left or Tories present the bigger problem. There will not be any demands to halt the contest, though.

Charles Moore asks in this week's Spectator what the 'right looks' are for a leadership contender, comparing Margaret Thatcher's appeal to Tory backbenchers to the appeal of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the Labour contest. The obvious answer, of course, is that the 'right look' involves wearing clothes for working in the House of Commons, rather than a diving suit or paint-smattered overalls. It's a 'look' Cooper, Kendall and their male rivals Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham pull off on a daily basis, so presumably the question is quite easy to answer. I must confess what when I first read Charles's column, I wondered why he was posing the question at all. And yet male politicians also worry about whether they 'look' like leaders.

Some Labour party members are currently finding out that they can’t vote in the leadership election after all because they’ve been picked up as being insincere members. A number of them are furious about this, understandably, but what’s also understandable, perhaps, is that the party is struggling to consider them as sincere members given they were actively campaigning for other parties until recently. Marcus Chown is angry at being purged, even though he is the ‘twitter lead’ for the National Health Action party, and stood against Labour as a candidate for the NHA in the 2014 European elections.

Why haven’t some Labour MPs ever met Jeremy Corbyn? Mr Steerpike picks up on the discussion between former Miliband aide Anna Yearley, and MPs Barbara Keeley and Lucy Powell about his non-attendance at PLP meetings and the fact that Powell has ‘never, ever met or spoken to him’. This is odd: Corbyn has been a member since 1983 and has managed to find time to befriend Ukip’s Douglas Carswell, who cheerily offered to introduce Yearley to Corbyn in the tearooms at some point. It’s not unusual, though: on Sunday night Tory backbencher Mark Field was singing the praises of the friendly Corbyn on Westminster Hour.