The Labour leadership may be rowing back from the idea of having a second, female, deputy leader, but that isn’t stopping those who, like Emily Thornberry, fancy a shot at the top job one day. While the Shadow Foreign Secretary was totally loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when she spoke at a Times fringe this lunchtime, she started by talking movingly about her backstory, touching also on the need for a leader who has experience of the frontbench, and repeatedly referred to the importance of members in the Labour Party. It is well-understood that Thornberry would, one day, like to run for leader, and today’s performance not only underlined that, but also showed why she should.
On the anti-Semitism row, Thornberry also played to the audience, telling the event that Corbyn had found the whole experience very hard personally, saying ‘I think Jeremy has been through a great deal this summer’. She even argued that it was easy to see how Labourites might accidentally end up being anti-Semitic, saying:
‘Anti-Semitism changes in nature over time and I think that it is quite understandable… there may be people on the fringes of our party who are virulently anti-capitalist, virulently anti-Israel and you can see how the two can meld together into an anti-Israeli and then getting very closely into anti-Jewish and then end up falling into anti-Semitic tropes which have changed in nature over the years.
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