Victoria Derbyshire seemed very anxious as Labour’s two-hour-long hustings between Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn wore on this morning to move the debate away from the many internal messes that the party is in (Jewish members not feeling safe any more, online abuse, the chasm between the PLP and the membership: you name it, they covered it) and onto policy. At first, it wasn’t entirely clear why the programme’s producers had been so worried about covering policy: there is barely a cigarette paper between Corbyn and Smith, and that’s exactly how the challenging candidate wants it. The only big points of disagreement are on Trident renewal and the odd £0.5bn of spending pledges for building this and that. Smith wants to make this election about competence, not policy, and to that end he is trying as much as possible to agree with Jeremy on everything in order to get a hearing from the Labour membership.
The problem with this, as well as it just not looking very credible, is that Smith fell into the trap of trying to out-Corbyn Corbyn, with fairly spectacular results.
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