Steerpike

It seems that Karen Danczuk's glittering post-politics career isn't going quite to plan. The estranged wife of Labour MP Simon Danczuk -- who used to work for her husband as a secretary before they split -- is currently looking for a job. Alas, the former Labour councillor seems to be discovering that experience in the bubble doesn't necessarily count for much outside of Westminster: 'I have over 10 years experience in the world of politics, I am a former Cllr and have had the privilege of also working for Parliament for over 5 years!! Experience, that most don’t have!! Yes this is some record when it comes to Public Relations!!

According to some of the more far-left members of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman is a Tory. The somewhat surprising claim came after she told her party to abstain on the Tories' Welfare Bill, leading 48 MPs to break whip and vote against it. However, seemingly keen to silence the naysayers -- in an interview with the Guardian -- Harman, who has three children with Jack Dromey, has given an account of the lengths she has gone to to avoid socialising with Tories. The acting Leader of the Labour Party says that she once hid in a side corridor to prevent Margaret Thatcher -- who she likens to a witch -- from meeting her baby son: 'Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her at the other end of the corridor.

Although much has been made of Andy Burnham's admission in an interview with GQ that he owns an Armani suit, perhaps the most embarrassing revelation lies further down. When asked for the Gentlemen's Quarterley's September issue who he would like to lead the Labour party if he doesn't win the leadership election, Burnham plays it safe and chooses a politician who is not even running for the coveted position: 'Alan Johnson is somebody that I think has that authentic Labour voice that the public can relate to, and somebody who embodies aspiration in a good way.' Pity then that Johnson came out in support of his rival Yvette Cooper just two days before its publication, when the magazine had already been sent to the printers.

In an interview with Sky News Australia, David Cameron's former election strategist Lynton Crosby has today offered his thoughts on the Prime Minister's rivals. Unsurprisingly, his conclusions are hardly flattering. However, the man who has taken the brunt of Crosby's ire is Nigel Farage. Crosby claims that Ukip does not have 'a long-term future'. Furthermore, instead of trying to win a Westminster seat again, Farage would be better advised to look for chat show work in Australia: 'They are very reliant on the performance of their leader Nigel Farage and even he couldn't win a seat. Sixth or seventh time he's tried to win a Westminster seat. I think he might be better coming to Australia and doing talkback radio than trying to run another seat in the UK.

Labour's verification process has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent weeks as more and more Tories have claimed they have successfully joined as a supporter of the party in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and 'condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness’. Labour insist that they have a crack team successfully weeding out non-Labour supporters from the genuine new joiners. This is a point that they seem rather keen to make known. Today the party's press office has tweeted the Tory MP Tim Loughton to tell him that his application has sadly been declined: https://twitter.com/labourpress/status/628912795862605824 While Loughton's actions have been criticised by members of Labour, former Tory MP Louise Mensch has also weighed in: https://twitter.

Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership bid has so far managed to inspire a legion of new supporters to join the Labour party. Alas, his unexpected popularity is also causing a problem for some members of the media. After the Guardian launched an in-house investigation into whether their own Corbyn coverage was bias against him, Emily Maitlis, who has interviewed him for tonight's Newsnight, has written a gushing blog post titled 'Prepping to meet "the man of the moment"'.  In it, she says that his tendency to veer off from textbook politician answers caused her a problem when preparing for the interview: 'On the train to Leeds my producer Ed Brown and I are putting together a list of questions for Jeremy Corbyn.

It's only lunchtime but the Guardian may have already reached 'peak Guardian' for the day. The paper has published an article penned by Chris Elliott chronicling an in-house investigation into their coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership bid. They decided to do this after a number of Corbynistas complained that the left-wing paper had shown bias against Corbyn, with one reader going so far as to claim that their reporting of his leadership bid was worse than the paper's coverage of the Vietnam war: 'I’ve been a regular reader of the Guardian (Manchester Guardian as was) since 1958. Despite the low point reached in the 60s when you supported the US war in Vietnam for a while, I still continued with it.