Breaking: Chuka Umunna withdraws from Labour leadership contest

In the past few minutes, Chuka Umunna has announced he is not standing for the Labour leadership after all, citing ‘pressure’ that he found uncomfortable. This is odd, although Friday is the day when Sunday journalists get to work on big stories, and Umunna may have got wind of something that he felt was particularly intrusive. No Sunday journalists I’ve spoken to have a story on him. Thus far the main unpleasant write-up he’s received has been on a blog that claimed he was too old to have a girlfriend, which seemed easy enough to laugh off. It might be that he was receiving repeated questions from a number of outlets about something, rather than there being one story in particular. It could be that Umunna also feels that it is too soon to stand for Labour leader, and that the party is about to go into a long period of soul-searching in which leading Labour would be a thankless task followed by another defeat in 2020.