Stephen Daisley

Campaigning starts again tomorrow, but in his speech in Carlisle today Jeremy Corbyn made what is – for any Labour leader – a fairly obvious point: 'You cannot protect the public on the cheap. The police and security services must get the resources they need not 20,000 police cuts. Theresa May was warned by the Police Federation but she accused them of "crying wolf".' In a radical departure for Corbyn, that is exactly what happened.

Paul Nuttall doesn't want to be a hangman after all. There was some doubt over the weekend when the Ukip leader said he'd bring back the death penalty and would even pull the lever himself.   This left Andrew Neil somewhat curious and so he used his election interview to enquire if Nuttall had been signalling a career move. But it turns out he wasn’t. He’d be up for stringing up nonces to make a point but wasn't seeking new opportunities in that sector. 'I don't want to be Albert Pierrepoint,' he told Neil. 'That's not what I want to go into after politics.

We learned something important from Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil: The Labour leader wants to be Prime Minister and will do whatever it takes. His soppier critics often announce their sympathy for a man who would be much happier on the backbenches. Do not believe a word of it. Listen instead to what he told the BBC presenter and you will hear a man trying to rewrite his record and trusting that most voters know too little to challenge him.  Corbyn told Neil: 'I didn’t support the IRA. I don’t support the IRA. What I want everywhere is a peace process.’ This is a lie. Corbyn opposed the Anglo-Irish agreement. He reportedly lobbied the government on behalf of IRA prisoners.

The security services are a rum lot. All that intrigue gets to you eventually, and that’s not counting those who sign up with less than laudable intentions. Harold Wilson was paranoid but not necessarily wrong.  So when Jeremy Corbyn’s MI5 file finds its way onto the front page of the Daily Telegraph, even those not well-disposed to the Labour leader could be forgiven for arching an eyebrow. Are the spooks spooked by the possibility of Britain’s first Marxist prime minister?  For those who came up with Corbyn in 1970s and ‘80s, those heady days of the hard-Left when revolution was ever round the corner, this is obviously the case.

The Conservatives are going to win the election -- that much we know. The question is what kind of opposition Britain is going to be left with. If a slew of moderate Labour MPs are swept out, the Corbynite grip on the party will strengthen. The leader will not go and Labour will take a great leap forward in its journey to oblivion.  Tories should not relish this outcome. It would do serious violence to our parliamentary democracy, which was not designed to cope with one dominant party and no real opposition. Legislation would not face proper scrutiny, ministers would become less accountable, and the business of government would be less transparent. Tory MPs, eager to be 'team players', would begin to soften their questions and pull their punches.

Prime Minister, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you have been denounced in the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. One correspondent huffs: 'I wonder if Theresa May and her small group of advisers closeted in Westminster are aware of the fact that each initiative they introduce in an attempt to win over traditional Labour voters risks having the opposite effect on traditional Conservative voters.’ Another damns your energy price cap as ‘wrong-headed’ and even accuses you of ‘play[ing] into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn’s muddle-headed electioneering economics’. Lord Tebbit echoes these fears: 'The further Labour goes Left, that would mean the further we go Left. We need to stick to sensible, Conservative economics.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Labour, Noam Chomsky goes and endorses Jeremy Corbyn. 'If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him...He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer,' Chomsky told the Guardian. But the more you read of Chomsky's endorsement, the more you wonder if he was put up to it for a bet. He says that: 'The shift in the Labour party under Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives.' Tony Blair, that infamous electoral dud. Chomsky is regularly cited as the world's 'top public intellectual'. It's a slippery phrase. Friedrich Hayek called his ilk 'the secondhand dealers in ideas'. I certainly wouldn't buy a used ideology from Noam Chomsky.

Theresa May spent the weekend in Scotland and not even the civilised bit. The Prime Minister was posted to the wilds of Aberdeenshire, which are handsome and underpopulated but not exactly a commuter hub. Journalists grumbled about the remoteness of the location, well aware that inaccessibility was the point. May has not been campaigning in this election so much as touring the nation’s emptiest rooms, occasionally bringing along another borough councillor who will be elected to Parliament in five weeks’ time. The punters have been kept far away from the Prime Minister for reasons of security — political security. Party strategists have long memories. They remember the name Sharon Storer.

In this, as in all things, Paul Keating was right. It was the former Aussie Prime Minister, a Beethoven of political invective, who called his country’s Green Party 'a bunch of opportunists and Trots hiding behind a gum tree trying to pretend they’re the Labor Party’. Keating's acid scherzo could apply just as readily to our own Greens, self-appointed conservationists of righteousness. Caroline Lucas, their only MP, has been at the forefront of calls for a 'progressive alliance' between left-wing parties.

Len McCluskey has seen off a challenge to be elected to a third term at the helm of Unite. And what a seeing off it was. When the votes starting to come in, and reportedly showed the top two contenders neck-and-neck, McCluskey’s rival was promptly suspended. Gerard Coyne was stripped of his duties as West Midlands regional secretary - although it’s not clear what he’s supposed to have done wrong or who his accusers are. Coyne has been a thorn in the side of the McCluskey hierarchy for some time. The Guardian points out that he was given a written warning in 2016. His offence? Speaking at an event hosted by moderate Labour MPs Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt.  His challenge certainly was not welcomed.

I worked on the first TV debate of the Scottish referendum. I was involved in countless more. I was to be found on the production team for televised clashes during the 2015 general election and the 2016 vote for Holyrood. So I speak with some experience when I say TV debates are a terrible idea. Theresa May's refusal to participate in any is the first good news to come out of the general election. When the format debuted in 2010, I was optimistic. Here was an opportunity to extract a good deal more honesty and accountability from the overspun and media-managed Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Cleggmania (remember that? Come to think of it, remember him?

I’m not a member of a trade union, but I should be. As a freelance journalist, my employment situation is precarious — yet it still wouldn’t occur to me to join the National Union of Journalists. My reasons are both personal and political, but mostly practical: the NUJ talks tough but, in the end, seldom achieves more than a few quid extra in your redundancy package. Still, the union movement seems bent on wooing me; at least that’s how I’m interpreting Gerard Coyne’s campaign to oust Len McCluskey as Unite’s general secretary. Coyne’s manifesto touches on expected areas — better value for membership dues; a Brexit focus on training and skills — but it is in the main a prosecution of McCluskey’s leadership.

Listen to Douglas Murray and James Forsyth debating Ken Livingstone's non-expulsion: In the past, Labour has been quick to take a stand against bodies where racism, sexism, and homophobia were allowed to fester. Discrimination was discrimination, and institutions in which it routinely took place were culpable for it. But anti-Semitism now routinely takes place in the Labour party - and party members must acknowledge this. By its own definition, the Labour party is institutionally anti-Semitic.  No fair-minded person can read the failure to expel Ken Livingstone from the party any other way.

In the early, sunlit days of New Labour, the left-wing comedian John O’Farrell had a skit on how the Tories, after a generation of dominating British politics, found their party and its principles rejected by the electoral mainstream. ‘Now the Conservatives are like a lunatic fringe party,' he said. 'Soon we can expect to see them outside Woolworths next to the Socialist Workers on a Saturday afternoon shouting "Daily Telegraph! Get your Daily Telegraph! Britain out of Europe!"'  A generation on, the Tories are in power, Woolworths is gone, the Socialist Workers are running the Labour Party, and Britain is indeed coming out of Europe.