Labour’s next great battle

In February, a member of John McDonnell’s team accidentally forwarded his diary to a Labour party colleague. The errant email has been a source of gossip among Corbynistas ever since. Among the mundane schedule of meetings were a series of slots allocated for something rather out of the ordinary: ‘Transition planning.’ McDonnell’s aides swear up and down that these meetings are nothing untoward and warn against ‘putting two and two together and coming up with a million’. But the fact that it even raised eyebrows is telling.

The red half of Westminster is rife with rumour that the shadow chancellor covets the Labour leadership — that behind the scenes a repeat of the Blair-Brown psychodrama is being played out, a sort of comic version of the TeeBeeGeeBees. McDonnell even tweeted a denial: ‘Media and right-wing dirty tricks and lies trying to divide me and Jeremy’ — which only fanned the flames of parliamentary scuttlebutt.