Steerpike

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.

Tonight's exit poll has predicted that the Conservatives are heading for a bumper majority of 86 – a remarkable result. And while the exit poll is still just a prediction at this stage, that hasn't stopped Labour's various Corbynistas melting down at the result. Here are the best reactions so far: https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1205246679835910145 https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy/status/1205247150751387648 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1205248597975031814 https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1205247632135872516 https://twitter.com/novaramedia/status/1205246893325987841 https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1205250528080539648 https://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/1205246584319086592 https://twitter.

The actor Steve Coogan has started his traditional round of election broadcasts, supposedly in an attempt to whip up support for Labour. Unfortunately for Steve, he had a bit of an Alan Partridge moment earlier today when he told Sky News that Labour is 'encouraging prejudice'. Mr S would sadly have to agree.