Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn will shortly address the Labour conference with what is officially known as the ‘parliamentary report’. An accurate ‘parliamentary report’ would include an in-depth discussion about relations between the parliamentary party and its leader, who has gone from being one of the most rebellious backbenchers to demanding loyalty from his colleagues. Normally before a leader’s speech, pundits pick over what it is that the leader needs to cover. Normally, this involves variations of rousing the party faithful, announcing a policy or two that give us an idea of who the leader is and their vision for the coming year, and facing down any critics, whether in rival parties or their own.

Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech includes the normally unremarkable but currently remarkable assertion that he wants Labour to win the next election. Given the debate that has raged within the Labour party over the past few months about purity vs power, that the re-elected Labour leader is saying this at all is significant. He will say tomorrow that he expects a general election next year and that ‘we expect all our members to support that effort, and we will be ready whenever it comes’. Some Labour MPs will point out that this will require a dramatic shift from some members who haven’t yet delivered any party leaflets but are still threatening to de-select them.

Whether or not to serve on Labour’s frontbench is a question of the same order of asking whether the deck chairs on the Titanic should face north or south. But Labour MPs do have to work out what’s best to do while their ship is being captained by Jeremy Corbyn - and we’re starting to see signs of splits within the moderate camp on how best to do this. This evening, centrist MP Johnny Reynolds is reported to be returning to the Labour frontbench as City Minister, which may mean Labour actually holds meetings with people in the City as opposed to ignoring them. But it is also a completely different approach to that being mooted by a number of his like-minded colleagues.

Labour conference is now firmly underway in Liverpool, as is the ‘World Transformed’ festival organised by Corbynite grassroots organisation Momentum. Labour MPs and long-time activists are wandering about in a state of bewilderment at the change forged in their party over the past year, perhaps best embodied by the joyful appearance of former Militant bigwig Derek Hatton in the conference hall. Hatton was wearing a press pass, which will leave Corbynistas bewildered: aren’t they supposed to hate journalists? Everyone is trying to appear to be terribly nice to one another now that Corbyn has his even bigger mandate.

The Labour Party is in a sour mood at present, that much we already know. Usually, most of the sourness expressed by MPs is directed at their own party comrades. But this afternoon, at the Labour Women’s Conference, speaker after speaker decided to turn fire on Theresa May. Angela Rayner congratulated her on being the second female Prime Minister of this country, but said ‘I cannot celebrate her arrival’. Kezia Dugdale attacked both May and Nicola Sturgeon for not being real feminists, saying: ‘Look at Theresa May - she has the audacity to wear a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt.

Tomorrow just before noon, Jeremy Corbyn is set to be crowned leader of the Labour party for a second time, possibly, according to insiders, with an even bigger mandate than the one he’s spent the past year waving at his own party. And after months of resignations, fighting, and a leadership contest where the challenger failed to capture the Labour membership’s imagination, Labour MPs are considering what they should do now. Their options are as follows: 1. Leave the party, either by defecting to another or setting themselves up as an independent Labour MP on the benches in the Commons. There is no suggestion that any MP is seriously considering doing this.

The leaking - accidental or otherwise - of a list of Labour MPs allegedly guilty of abusive behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn is yet another illustration of quite how divided the party is, and quite how messy things are going to be when Corbyn tries to reassert his authority following what looks certain to be his re-election to the top job. We now have MPs such as Neil Coyle consulting legal opinion on whether to sue their party leader. If you wanted the antonym of ‘happy ship’, the Labour Party is a pretty good option. The Labour leader and John McDonnell today took questions on the matter after a speech on the economy and public services (awkwardly trailed as ‘pubic services’ in a press release), and both insisted they were trying to heal the party.

Is Theresa May planning an epic battle with some of her own MPs to introduce new grammar schools in England? When Justine Greening gave her statement in the Commons this afternoon, she repeated many of the Prime Minister’s own lines about selection already existing through house prices and so on. But her language was much more conciliatory, with the Education Secretary telling MPs that ‘this is the beginning of a consultation that sets out a debate that we need to have’.

Why on earth did Owen Smith say that he might consider re-joining not just the European Union but also the euro and Schengen? Some of the Labour leadership contender’s colleagues have been asking the ‘why on earth’ question a fair bit this summer, not least when he made the interesting decision to out-Corbyn Corbyn on the small matter of Islamic State. But today the Pontypridd MP told Andrew Marr that if certain conditions, such as a further recession, privatisation of the NHS and so on, were met, ‘I think the sensible and responsible thing for a Labour government to do is to say we’re better off in the European Union’.

What can you fill your time with if you’re a former Labour frontbencher left twiddling your thumbs as a result of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership? Well, as Caroline Flint and Chuka Umunna have shown this week by launching themselves into campaigns to replace Keith Vaz, chairing a select committee is a pretty attractive option, particularly when it is one as prestigious as the Home Affairs Committee. But both have also shown over the past few months that it is possible to be a forlorn former frontbencher and still achieve something. Umunna was on the airwaves on Monday morning talking about migration controls: a slot his Shadow Cabinet colleagues might only dream of.

There were two striking things about today’s urgent question on grammar schools. The first was that MPs were told far less by Education Secretary Justine Greening than the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs was told by the Prime Minister last night. As James revealed yesterday, Theresa May explained the policymaking process for new grammars to her MPs, but today Greening would merely say that: ‘We are looking at a range of options, and I expect any new proposals to focus on what we can do to help everyone go as far as their individual talents and capacity for hard work can take them.

One of the big political rows of the autumn will be over the proposed changes to constituency boundaries. Labour is unhappy about this (and everything else) because the proposed changes could lose the party around 30 seats which it could ill afford at the best of times. And this is the worst of times. But though the recalculation will help the Tories, there are nerves about whether every Conservative MP who wants to stay in Parliament will be guaranteed a seat. There are also grumblings that this change is not being proposed alongside a reduction in the number of ministers, which will make the executive loom even more powerful in Parliament, thereby weakening the legislature’s ability to scrutinise and hold ministers to account.

Labour MPs have just voted 168 to 34 in favour of bringing back Shadow Cabinet elections. This doesn’t mean there will be elections for the Labour top team straight away: the measure, proposed by Clive Betts, now goes to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee, which is now dominated by Corbynites. If the NEC so chooses, it can propose the rule change at the party’s conference. This is, however, another example of the PLP, which had been fading as a parliamentary force compared to the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, asserting itself against Jeremy Corbyn.