Isabel Hardman

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.

Greece has already had one election and a referendum this year. Now it's going back to the polls again with Alexis Tsipras announcing his resignation and snap elections. Tsipras says he has a moral duty to go to the polls after securing Greece’s third bailout, arguing that ‘we did not achieve the agreement we expected before the January elections’ and that he wants voters’ approval before continuing with the programme. But this is also his attempt to secure authority by calling an election at an advantageous time for him, given he was facing a no confidence vote. He had lost the backing of many of his own MPs after his bizarre decision to call a referendum which then made little difference to the way he conducted negotiations over Greece’s bailout.

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.

Yvette Cooper has rounded on Andy Burnham this evening, demanding that the Labour leadership contender oppose Jeremy Corbyn or stand aside. Burnham gave a speech this morning that was widely reported as him snuggling up to Corbyn, in which he praised his rival’s ‘energy’ and said ‘I want to capture that and would involve Jeremy in my team from the outset’. Cooper and Liz Kendall have both urged their supporters to use their second and third preferences on their ballot paper to block Corbyn by supporting any of the other three candidates, but Burnham has not joined them. A spokesman for Cooper said that ‘if [Burnham] isn’t prepared to offer an alternative to Jeremy, he needs to step back and leave it to Yvette’.

So, funnily enough, Gordon Brown's speech about his party's leadership election hasn't been that well-received by some quarters of Labour. There are some interesting people who are inevitably claiming he's a Tory, but what's more interesting is the way it has gone down with Labour MPs. Clive Lewis, for instance, seems to be quite keen to help the Tories out by saying that the guy who was Labour Chancellor and then Prime Minister during its last time in power isn't credible: https://twitter.com/labourlewis/status/632899854641971200 Graham Allen thinks Brown should have been talking about something else: https://twitter.com/JasonCowleyNS And supporters of rival camps are starting to do the Twitter equivalent of mud-wrestling: https://twitter.

At least Andy Burnham is keeping us all on his toes with his leadership campaign. If you’d stopped paying attention to the Labour leadership election for a couple of hours, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Shadow Health Secretary thinks it is a bad idea to attack Jeremy Corbyn. This is what he had to say on the matter yesterday: ‘I would say the attacks we’ve seen on Jeremy I think misread the mood of the party because what people are saying is they’re crying out for something different, they are fed up with the way politics has been, particularly the way Labour has been conducting politics in recent times.