Since Jeremy Corbyn’s surprisingly good election defeat, his MPs who previously plotted to get rid of him have been queuing up to pledge their allegiance to the Labour leader. They have been doing this partly because they did make some rather dire predictions about the impossibility of holding their own seats, or indeed of Labour surviving at all with Corbyn at the helm, and partly because most of them are under pressure from the Corbynites in their local party to apologise and show loyalty from now on. Luciana Berger’s local party is demanding an official apology from her to Corbyn for her previous criticisms of his leadership – something she has thus far steered away from offering. In fact, the only centrist Labour MP I’ve spoken to who claimed he hadn’t had a waterfall of emails from Corbyn-supporting members demanding an apology for his opposition to the Leader was then interrupted by his secretary, who said she just hadn’t shown him the pile of such messages that she’d printed out.
But even though everyone is pretending to get along in Labour, the fundamental problem hasn’t gone away, which is that the party contains two different groups of people with fundamentally different ideas about politics, elections and policy.
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