The next prime minister?
Now that Parliament is in recess, Labour MPS have been left wondering what to do with themselves, said Isabel Hardman on her Spectator blog. They’ve spent the past two summers holed up in windowless rooms, “listening to contenders for the [party’s] top job”. But they now face the prospect of having to go to the beach, because for the first time in three years, there isn’t a leadership contest to fight. Jeremy Corbyn is sitting pretty. After his unexpectedly strong performance in the election, he’s now seen as the man who put Labour back on the path to power, not – as critics used to cast him – “the man who killed the party”.
Don’t be deceived, said Marie Le Conte in the New Statesman. While MPS are on holiday, a “quiet civil war” is taking place inside Labour for control of the party machine. No longer the underdogs, the Corbynites are turning up in droves at constituency meetings to wrest control from the centrists. “We’re trying to make it more open and more accessible to younger people,” says a Momentum spokesperson, in particular to the 20,000-plus who have joined Labour since the election. Some are calling for the mandatory reselection of MPS. As the man in the Corbyn T-shirt declares in one of the many Corbynista videos trending on Facebook: “There’s only one game in town and it’s getting our boy J. Corbz into Downing Street.” That looks a lot less likely now he’s having to spell out his policies, said Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail. On The Andrew Marr Show this week, Corbyn had to come clean about his belief that Britain must leave the single market; he even blamed immigration for harming the lives of British workers. That places him on a collision course with shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, and with all 49 Labour MPS who voted for a single market amendment to the Queen’s Speech. Corbyn also had to admit he’d been less than honest on student fees, said Iain Martin on Reaction.life. Before the election, he’d upped Labour’s manifesto pledge to scrap the system (cost: £11bn) by suggesting he’d also scrap pre-existing student debt. But as that would cost a whopping £100bn, he had to tell Marr it was just an “aspiration”. Corbyn’s “pious pitch that he is not like all the other politicians” has been revealed as “utter tosh”.
But here’s the thing, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman: Corbyn’s reassertion of his Eurosceptic beliefs won’t do much harm to party unity, because most Labour MPS agree with him. Those who don’t – the Remainer MPS defending majorities in big cities and university towns – can rest easy in the knowledge that Remain voters are in tune with him on most other issues. Nor will the young be put off by Corbyn’s failure to grasp the economics of student debt reduction, said Katy Balls on her Spectator blog. Fully 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Labour in this year’s general election (up from 43% in the 2015 election): but they did so not because they thought he was a “sound mathematician”, but “because he represented change”. More than that, said Julia Blunck in Prospect, they voted for Corbyn because, unlike all the other politicians, he did for them what every demographic longs for a politician to do: he didn’t take them for granted.