Isabel Hardman

Can Boris Johnson really cut violent crime by 20 per cent? James reported recently that the Prime Minister has set his Cabinet this target, and is demanding that every department get involved in realising it. Most people have focused on the most salient political problem, which is knife crime. But if the Prime Minister is really serious about driving the overall violent crime statistics down, then he already has a piece of 'oven-ready' legislation which could help him do this - if he's prepared to spend a bit more money on it. The Domestic Abuse Bill is returning to Parliament very soon, after just making it through all the prorogation jamboree in the autumn.

Emily Thornberry is the straggler in the Labour leadership contest. Unlike Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, she's not going to get on the ballot with trade union nominations. She currently only has two nominations from constituency Labour parties, and doesn't poll well with members. She needs a breakthrough moment - or at least an explanation of why she's standing. This evening she had her grilling with Andrew Neil, where she struggled once again to explain how she would take the Labour Party on a different course, away from its catastrophic election defeat. Her main pitch seems to be that a Thornberry-led party would be Corbynism but without the disorganisation.

In the past few minutes, Jess Phillips has confirmed that she is pulling out of the Labour leadership race, saying the party needs a candidate who can unite people across its movement. In a video message, she said: 'I have to be honest with myself, as I said I always would be throughout this campaign, that at this time that person isn't me. In order to win the country, we need to find a candidate in this race who can do all that and then take that message out to the country of hope and change for things to be better.' https://twitter.com/jessphillips/status/1219635765698678784?

Keir Starmer has made it through to the final round of the Labour leadership contest, having secured the backing of shop workers' union Usdaw. The party's rules state that a candidate needs to get the backing of three affiliated organisations, of which two must be trade unions (or the nomination of at least 33 constituency Labour parties), and along with the earlier backing of Unison and Labour's Environment Campaign SERA, Starmer has made it. Usdaw also nominated Angela Rayner for the deputy leadership, and she is now also through to the final round of her contest. This is a big week for nominations from affiliates, with both the GMB and Unite unions holding hustings with the candidates on Tuesday and Friday respectively.

Jess Phillips' campaign slogan is 'speak truth, win power', but in yesterday's party hustings, she seemed to think that the extent of the truth that the Labour Party needs to hear is that it needs to win elections again and it had a few duff ideas in its manifesto that voters didn't believe. The candidate herself didn't appear happy with her performance when she popped up on Pienaar's Politics this morning, confessing: 'I think that maybe I have started to decline in telling people what they don't want to hear a little bit and I decided yesterday after the hustings the I'm going to actually just be myself again.

The first hustings of the Labour leadership campaign was not particularly inspiring. It did not suggest that any of the candidates either believed their party would win the next election or that they were capable of telling the membership what it really needs to hear in order to get as close as possible to winning. One of the problems was the format: candidates had 40 seconds to answer each question and couldn't interrupt one another or take one another up on points they had made. It meant everyone could make their point properly, which was useful, but it also took a lot of the energy out of the session, and the leadership hopefuls struggled to inject their own passion.

'You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.' One of Neil Kinnock's most famous and admirable moments was when he turned on the Militant tendency in his party from the stage at the 1985 Labour conference in Bournemouth. When he reached this section in the speech, he was heckled from the floor by Derek Hatton, the deputy leader of Liverpool Council, who called him a 'liar' for his attack on Liverpool council's conduct. Kinnock then addressed Hatton directly, saying: 'I'm telling you, and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services or with their homes.

Do we already know the top two candidates in the Labour leadership contest? Tonight a poll by Survation for LabourList puts Rebecca Long-Bailey narrowly ahead of Keir Starmer for first preference votes on 42 per cent and 37 per cent respectively. There is a huge gap between these two and the other contenders: Jess Phillips is on 9 per cent, Lisa Nandy on 7 per cent and Emily Thornberry on 1 per cent. The most powerful effect of a poll like this would be to polarise the contest so that members who want to stop the continuity Corbyn candidate, who is Long-Bailey, will think that Starmer is the only game in town.