Stephen Daisley

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.

It wasn’t quite our answer to the West Wing — too young, too cynical — but it filled a Bartlet-shaped hole in the TV schedule. Party Animals followed a clique of sexually bipartisan political advisers at Westminster in the dying days of New Labour. Matt Smith and Andrea Riseborough played researchers to a Caroline Flintish Home Office minister, pragmatic and idealistic in the right measure, while Shelley Conn and Pip Carter worked for her shadow number, a sort of dishy Ed Vaizey eager to modernise the Tories one decriminalised spliff at a time. There was little in the way of Sam Seaborn idealism and the implausibly attractive leads seemed to switch romantic allegiances in the time it took to power-walk down a corridor in Portcullis House.

Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was instrumental in saving the Labour Party, back when the Labour Party was something that could still be saved. It was Kaufman who pithily pegged the 1983 manifesto as 'the longest suicide note in history'. He knew the phrase would hang around the far-left and dog any attempt to dodge responsibility for the calamity.  In his heart, he was a radical, but he parted ways with the 1980s Labour left in its mush-headed confusion of ends and means. The mush is now party policy but Kaufman expended considerable wit keeping it at bay during the Kinnock years.