The leaking – accidental or otherwise – of a list of Labour MPs allegedly guilty of abusive behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn is yet another illustration of quite how divided the party is, and quite how messy things are going to be when Corbyn tries to reassert his authority following what looks certain to be his re-election to the top job. We now have MPs such as Neil Coyle consulting legal opinion on whether to sue their party leader. If you wanted the antonym of ‘happy ship’, the Labour Party is a pretty good option.
The Labour leader and John McDonnell today took questions on the matter after a speech on the economy and public services (awkwardly trailed as ‘pubic services’ in a press release), and both insisted they were trying to heal the party. The Shadow Chancellor said:
‘We will be meeting with all our MPs on any of the issues of concern to them, of course we will. That release came from the campaign. It didn’t come from Jeremy. And we’ve apologised. It was just inappropriate. One of our researchers saw a bit of incoming flak and then did a list of all the statements that have been made by other MPs, some of which were not particularly kind, let’s put it that way. It was a briefing note. It shouldn’t have gone out. And we apologised for that.’
Corbyn himself joked about growing an olive tree on the balcony of his office as part of his efforts to have a full frontbench team after the contest.
This hostile list obviously makes it rather hard for any of the 13 MPs named on it to agree to serve on the Labour frontbench, but given who is on that list, it was unlikely they would be asked and even more unlikely that any of them would have said yes. And the bigger problem for the party is that no amount of olive branches from Jeremy Corbyn’s balcony will cover up the fact that there are two warring factions: the ‘moderates’, who do not want the hard left in the party, and the hard left, who do not want the moderates there. Until one faction actively surrenders, there will be no peace
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