LABOUR THINKS ITS BEST BET IS TO SAY AND DO NOTHING

AFTER a summer of relentless electioneering, MPs are beginning to wonder if Jeremy Corbyn has gone into hibernation as the autumn draws in.

Aside from his weekly appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions and the occasional speech to Left-wing rallies, the Labour leader has returned to a minimalist approach to his job.

The veteran socialist’s strategy appears to be to watch and wait in the hope that Theresa May’s Government will implode.

Opposition parties that lose elections usually embark on a major overhaul of policy to find out how to win over the electorate at the next opportunity. That is not Mr Corbyn’s way. His inner circle shows every sign of being complacently convinced that their election manifesto of vast spending promises was such a triumph that no improvements are necessary.

Mr Corbyn’s do-little approach has been encouraged by the surrender of the party critics who were once desperate to oust him. “The civil war in the party is over,” one Labour MP on the moderate wing of the party told me.

Rather than developing new policy ideas, the main preoccupation of the Labour leadership at present is to campaign for the voting age to be lowered to 16. The party mobilised hordes of younger voters at the last election with offers of multibillion bribes to cancel student tuition fees. Now the Corbynites want to widen the pool of potential voters in time for the next general election.

MPs yesterday debated a private member’s Bill tabled by Labour backbencher Jim McMahon to enfranchise 16 and 17-year-olds. A petition has been launched to further the campaign and a series of videos featuring frontbenchers arguing for the change are circulating on social media. “For too long the political establishment has excluded young people from our democratic process,” Mr Corbyn claims in one.

His team hopes that in a hung parliament a cross-party coalition can be assembled to force the franchise change through the Commons. Under Mr Corbyn Labour is far more interested in tinkering with the voting system for its own benefit than in having a genuine debate about the country’s future.