Isabel Hardman

Theresa May didn’t choose a quiet life when she appointed David Davis as the Brexit Secretary, Liam Fox as the International Trade Secretary and Boris Johnson as the Foreign Secretary. Mostly, the men have bickered amongst themselves up to this point. But today the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman put some distance between May and her minister charged with Brexit negotiations. Yesterday Davis had told the Commons that he thought it unlikely that Britain would be able to retain single market access while also controlling EU migration. He said: ‘This government is looking at every option but the simple truth is that if a requirement of membership is giving up control of our borders, I think that makes it very improbable.

Running through the summer like the writing in a stick of rock was the continually disappointing and dismal performance of Owen Smith in the Labour leadership contest, and Jeremy Corbyn’s spectacular ability to make party members love him more by confecting his own rows about trains and women going out for drinks. The post-match analysis in the Labour moderate camp has already begun, with few bothering to make any greater defence of the Smith campaign than ‘it might be a bit closer than the polls suggest’.

Today, in a highly unprecedented move, the Labour party actually managed to achieve something. It has just signed a deal with a security firm, OCS, for its autumn conference in Liverpool. This is a huge relief to those in the party with a sense of professionalism, like its General Secretary Iain McNicol, who had feared that the whole conference might have to be cancelled, which would be yet another illustration of the terrible, potentially terminal, mess that the party is in. But McNicol was able to say this afternoon that ‘We look forward to working together on what will be an excellent event’.

All political parties are a mess: coalitions of people with different beliefs, stitched together — like Frankenstein’s monster — into a body that can grunt coherently, and perhaps even achieve something. Most of the time, these bodies lumber about reasonably effectively, if a little clumsily. But every so often, as now, when the political system is in turmoil, the suturing starts to bulge and everything seems at risk of coming apart. Such is the case with the Labour party which may soon be torn asunder — or give way to a new grouping called the Co-operative party. There’s a certain degree of logic to this.

Sadiq Khan’s endorsement of Owen Smith is rather handy for the ailing Labour leadership contender, given Khan is one of the few Labour politicians who has actually won something: that something being the largest personal mandate of any politician. This enormous mandate is rather handy when Jeremy Corbyn starts waving his own huge mandate about, but it may not be attractive enough for Labour members, who largely seem besotted by the idea of Corbyn as leader.

Victoria Derbyshire seemed very anxious as Labour’s two-hour-long hustings between Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn wore on this morning to move the debate away from the many internal messes that the party is in (Jewish members not feeling safe any more, online abuse, the chasm between the PLP and the membership: you name it, they covered it) and onto policy. At first, it wasn’t entirely clear why the programme’s producers had been so worried about covering policy: there is barely a cigarette paper between Corbyn and Smith, and that’s exactly how the challenging candidate wants it. The only big points of disagreement are on Trident renewal and the odd £0.5bn of spending pledges for building this and that.

In the past few minutes, the Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of the Labour Party’s block on anyone who joined after 12 January 2016 from voting in the party’s leadership election. This means - until there is an appeal to the Supreme Court - that around 130,000 members, most of whom are believed to be sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, will not be able to vote. As I explained earlier this week when the High Court ruled in this matter, the impact of this may merely be the size of the victory that Jeremy Corbyn wins against Owen Smith. But it does also make the Labour party more divided and the contest still more bitter.

Talking to Labour MP these days is a pretty miserable business, to the extent that many journalists are starting to wonder if they should charge by the hour for counselling. Among their many moans is that there no longer seems to be a centre-left, pro-European force in British politics any more. But when I try to cheer them up by pointing out that the Lib Dems surely fulfil that description, those miserable MPs shrug their shoulders. None are considering defecting to Tim Farron’s party. While many moderate Labour MPs are asked the whole time why they don’t ‘f*** off and join the Tories’, no-one makes the same suggestion about their suitability for joining the Lib Dems. Why is this?

We are still not entirely sure when the Labour leadership contest will end, but in these dusty days of recess, it is certainly keeping everyone nicely busy. Today Owen Smith received a boost from trade union GMB, which decided to endorse his bid to take over from Jeremy Corbyn. Its members voted 60-40 to endorse Smith, and General Secretary Tim Roache said ‘GMB members cannot afford for Labour to be talking to itself in a bubble for the next five years while the Tories run riot through out rights at work, our public services and our communities’. This drew yet another combative - and slightly curious - response from Team Corbyn after yesterday’s conspiracy theories fun.

Is anyone in Labour getting along? Currently the party is trying to appeal against a High Court decision in favour of its own members, and its own grassroots campaign group Momentum is sending a petition to the party to tell it not to appeal that decision. Today the Deputy Leader and the Leader had a row, with Jeremy Corbyn of all people accusing Tom Watson of ‘peddling baseless conspiracy theories’. Baseless conspiracy theories are indeed one of the hobbies that Watson should, if he hasn’t already, list in Who’s Who, but Coffee House readers can judge for themselves whether his comments to the Guardian fall into that category.

Theresa May’s plans to limit both the number of special advisers and the way in which they are appointed are rather curious, given how influential and essential her own advisers were when she ran the Home Office. As I explained in the magazine recently, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill held a great deal of power in that department, and not just when it came to briefing the media. They were an essential part of the running of the Home Office and its many arms-length bodies such as the Border Force.

Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to strike a contrast between his beliefs and those of his Labour leadership rival Owen Smith would have rather big implications or medical research in this country. The Labour leader told the launch of his campaign to hold on to his job that pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer shouldn’t take on medical research: ‘I hope Owen will fully agree with me that our NHS should be free at the point of use, should be run by publicly employed workers working for the NHS not for private contractors, and medical research shouldn’t be farmed out to big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and others but should be funded through the Medical Research Council.

Is the new government under Theresa May going to ditch the target to drive net migration into the tens of thousands? Amber Rudd and Boris Johnson signalled a change of policy from the back-of-a-fag-packet plan yesterday by saying the aim was to ‘bring migration down to sustainable levels’, though Downing Street insisted that this was not an end to the target, saying ‘the Prime Minister does see sustainable levels as down to the tens of thousands’. It would be odd, given May’s personal commitment to the net migration target, and her personal frustration (and that of her aide Nick Timothy) that it wasn’t met as a result - in her view at least - of special pleading from other ministers, especially George Osborne and ministers in the Business department.

In the past few minutes, Angela Eagle has pulled out of the Labour leadership contest, citing insufficient nominations in the race with Owen Smith. ‘I’m withdrawing from this race and supporting Owen with all of my enthusiasm and might,’ she told reporters in Parliament’s Central Lobby. This means that Labour now has its unity candidate to fight Jeremy Corbyn, and even those MPs who feel rather politically distant from Owen Smith will have to pull behind him in the name of dislodging Jeremy Corbyn.