Uk politics

After Harriet Harman announced that Labour would ‘let the public in’ to its leadership contest, the BBC has announced that it will broadcast a hustings with the candidates on 17 June. The programme, which will be broadcast on BBC Two (which might give a clue as to how popular BBC executives think this example of public service broadcasting will be), will be presented by Laura Kuenssberg. The venue is quite instructive. Harman said this week that the contest need to take place in places where Labour wasn’t winning, rather than the party’s strongholds. So the hustings will be broadcast from Nuneaton: the constituency that showed the demise of Labour’s hopes of victory on election night by staying Tory.

Now that Liz Kendall has enough MPs backing her to make it on to the ballot paper for the Labour Party leadership contest, the three main candidates are all starting to think about how to appeal to those party supporters who will vote for the leader. This involves contacting constituency Labour parties, trade union branches and so on in order to canvass. Each of the three main candidates also needs to overcome a key perceived weakness. For Andy Burnham, it is that he is the trade union candidate and just a populist figure of the Left. For Yvette Cooper, it is that her experience which her supporters see as a strength is also an unpalatable link to Labour's past, and also that she needs to set out in greater detail what she believes in.

Wolfgang Schäuble’s decision to link the British renegotiation to changes to the governance of the Eurozone is highly significant. In an interview the German Finance Minister told the Wall Street Journal that he has discussed George Osborne ‘coming to Berlin so that we can think together about how we can combine the British position with the urgent need for a strengthened governance of the eurozone’. Schäuble went on to say that ‘the structure of this currency union will stay fragile as long as its governance isn’t substantially reinforced. Maybe there is a chance to combine both goals’. Schäuble’s comments are the most encouragement that the government has had on the renegotiation front.

There seems to be a checklist for Labour leadership hopefuls which all of them are very keen to tick off. When launching a campaign, a candidate must say that their party has just suffered a terrible defeat from which a number of profound lessons must be learned. These lessons all seem to be rather similar, and have led the candidates to say the following things: ‘We didn’t speak enough to aspirational voters’ Mary Creagh: ‘People felt that Labour didn't understand their aspiration to earn money and provide a better life for their family.’ Chuka Umunna (when he was standing): ‘We need to… focus on what is the new agenda that is going to get a Labour government elected in 2020.

As far as endorsements go, Andy Burnham is winning the Labour leadership contest hands down. He has managed to recruit Dan Jarvis - someone who has gained huge respect and admiration despite the fact no-one knows very much about him - as his latest backer. Jarvis tells the Mirror that Burnham ‘has the strength, experience and character needed to bring our party together and restore Labour’s connection with the British people’. Now, firstly this is a bit of a clue as to where Jarvis’s own politics lie: he’s a little more left wing than someone people who are caught up in his compelling back story may have noted.

Michael Gove has been keeping a relatively low profile since being made Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor last weekend. I understand that he is keen to master the brief, and particularly the complexities around the creation of a British Bill of Rights, before he starts hitting the TV studios. But an address he gave to staff at the Ministry of Justice on Wednesday gives some clues as to the direction he is heading in. Interestingly Gove didn’t simply declare that the Tories would be scrapping the Human Rights Act. Instead, he said, ‘We’ll be seeking to ensure that human rights are enhanced and preserved by modernising and reforming the framework of rights in this country’.

George Osborne has moved to strengthen his personal, political operation by hiring the political editor of the Daily Mail James Chapman as his director of communications. This beefing up of his media team will be seen in Westminster as a statement of political intent by the Chancellor; it gives him a more formidable operation than any of the other likely contenders for the Tory leadership. I am told that Chapman will be handling communications for Osborne in his role as both Chancellor and First Secretary of State.

It has been alleged that Nigel Farage never formally resigned from Ukip as part of what party sources have told the Spectator was a stitch up to avoid a leadership contest. It is claimed that the Ukip leader never wrote a letter to the party’s chairman tendering his resignation. He told the media on Friday that he would write to the party resigning. When it met on Monday, it is said the National Executive Committee had still not received a letter. A source tells me that when someone asked where the letter was, they were told ‘it is being typed out as we speak’. The source says the letter never appeared.

In the midst of a glorious election night for the Conservatives on 7 May, London stubbornly resisted the swing across the rest of the country and went a darker shade of red. Why is that and why does it matter when overall we have a majority Conservative government for the first time in 18 years? The loss of four London seats (including mine) to Labour may have been offset by the high profile gain of Vince Cable Twickenham, and by us retaining Labour’s number one target of Hendon after a spectacular result from Matthew Offord. But to ignore what is going on elsewhere would simply put future working Conservative majorities at risk.

The Labour party has decided on a medium-length campaign to elect its new leader, the Press Association reports, with the announcement on 12 September. This is slightly odd, given NEC members were still on their way to the meeting where they’ll vote on the timetable, but there you go. If that date is approved, it is a halfway house between the short campaign that some were arguing would stop the party from descending into lengthy navel-gazing while the Tories got away with introducing policies that weren’t properly scrutinised by the Opposition, and the long campaign that the unions wanted so they could sign up more members - and that some of the less well-known candidates wanted too in order to establish themselves.