Steerpike

Flailing leadership hopeful Clive Lewis has weighed in on the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle debacle, telling those at his campaign launch this morning that Britain needs another referendum - this time on the existence of the monarchy. Unsatisfied with the degree of discord sown in the wake of 2016, Lewis has decided that we need another national bust-up (never mind the fact that monarchists outnumber republicans by nearly three to one). After criticising the 'racist' British media for their reporting on Meghan, Lewis told the assembled room of reporters: 'One of the things I always talk about is democracy.

At present, it seems like the bells of the Elizabeth Tower will remain silent at 11pm on 31 January, as Britain leaves the EU. Although the new Speaker Lindsay Hoyle vowed at the end of last year to not block Big Ben ringing on Brexit day, an attempt to legislate the matter, by amending Boris Johnson's Withdrawal Agreement Bill, failed this week. Currently the clock tower is undergoing restoration and so only rings on special occasions, such as New Year's Eve. But one MP has not given up the fight for Big Ben to bong for Brexit. Today the Conservative MP Mark Francois stood up in the House of Commons to extoll the virtues of ringing the bell as Britain finally leaves the EU.

Jeremy Corbyn is a two-time election loser who condemned his party to a dismal defeat at the hands of Boris Johnson last month. So how would those vying to replace Corbyn rate his time at the top? Asked to give a mark out of ten, Rebecca Long Bailey had this to say: 'I thought Jeremy was one of the most honest, kind, principled politicians that I ever met...I'd give him ten out of ten because I respect him and I supported him all the way through.' https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1214583725381603328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Mr S wonders what Corbyn's score would have been had he actually succeeded in winning an election...

Oh dear. It's not even 2020 yet and already the Labour leadership contest has descended into farce. Despite numerous private conversations over Jeremy Corbyn's successor ahead of Labour's election disaster, the Corbynistas have so far been unable to unite around one candidate. John McDonnell's preferred successor Rebecca Long-Bailey has taken so long to get her campaign going that seeds of doubt has begun to grow among what ought to be like-minded supporters. Rumours abound that her flatmate Angela Rayner – who had been expected to back Long-Bailey – could be considering her next move. Long-Bailey has today at least finally confirmed that she is interested in the leadership with an op-ed in the Guardian promising 'progressive patriotism'.

In previous years, Boxing Day has proved an occasion in which high profile Tories can find themselves in the firing line for taking part in various fox hunts across the country. However, this Boxing Day, it's another political figure making headlines for their interactions with a fox. Step forward Jolyon Maugham QC. The Remain-supporting lawyer and campaigner took to social media this morning to share his thoughts for the day. Only it wasn't a message that related to the UK's impending departure from the EU. Instead, Maugham announced that he had kicked off Boxing Day by killing 'a fox with a baseball bat' after it tried to get inside his hen house and became trapped in the process: https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1210110735189233665?s=20 https://twitter.

The newly re-elected MP for Leeds West Rachel Reeves has never got on particularly well with the far-left wing of her party. When Corbyn was elected as Labour leader back in September 2015, Reeves announced she would not be serving in his shadow cabinet. Since then, she has regularly criticised Corbyn, suggesting that he should have 'learnt the lessons of the 1980s'. Given Labour's catastrophic election result, Mr S would have to agree... So when the PLP met last week following that disastrous result, Reeves surely felt a degree of vindication when she told the outgoing Labour leader that he was to blame for the result and that the party had sounded 'economically illiterate' during the campaign.

And so, with little fanfare and somewhat inevitably, The Independent Group for Change (formerly Change UK, formerly The Independent Group) has announced the gradual cessation of all party activity. In reality, the party was over the moment Boris Johnson successfully managed to engineer a general election, and probably well before then. Undoubtedly this announcement will be a bitter blow for the remaining handful of TIG faithful (no sniggering, please). The party promised a radical transformation of British politics. But these promises were somewhat undermined when TIG revealed that they had been forced to change their name following legal action by the petition website Change.org. The old Twitter account was then hijacked by Leave supporters.

As the week rolls on, the recriminations just keep coming. One thing is for sure, its still not Jeremy's fault. So, despite the best evidence to the contrary, Mr S has decided to update the list of reasons given by Corbynistas as to why their leader fell so flat. The 'print media' Dawn Butler was asked on Sky News on the night of the election whether voters' dislike of Jeremy Corbyn was responsible. Not so, she said. 'The media contributed to it,' she insisted. Butler also suggested that adverts placed by the Tories didn't help matters. Meanwhile, Corbynistas on Twitter were more specific in who was responsible: the Observer. In a damning leader just before the election, the paper called out what it described as 'Corbyn’s disgraceful anti-Semitism crisis'.

As soon as the exit poll was released on Thursday night, showing that Labour had been decimated in the general election, most people expected that the party would spend the next few months (or longer) tearing itself apart. Even so, few expected that that its representatives would have begun suing each other so soon after the result. Apparently not though. This morning, Emily Thornberry, the party's Shadow Foreign Secretary, announced that she was taking legal action against the former MP for Don Valley, Caroline Flint. Flint claimed that Thornberry had said she was glad her constituents weren't as 'stupid' as another MP's Northern, Brexit supporting voters.

At 10:10pm last night, the shadow chancellor began the inevitable firefight against claims that it was Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership itself that lost the party this election. John McDonnell told Andrew Neil: 'We knew it would be tough because Brexit has dominated this election... As I say, I think this was a Brexit election... I hate to use this expression but I think [the voters] most probably did want to "get it done" and that will be it.' This has set the tone for the fierce debate that has followed. While prominent pro-Corbyn figures have blamed the media, tactical voters and even global political forces, it is Brexit that has received the lion's share of the blame. Even the Labour leader himself has come out and denied that he was the problem.