It is hard to overstate the level of shock in moderate Labour circles at last night’s YouGov poll showing Jeremy Corbyn heading for victory in the Labour leadership race. Regardless of whether the poll is accurate, they fear that it will damage Labour in two ways. First, it will skew the contest further to the left as Burnham and Cooper both seek to halt the Corbyn advance and to position themselves to pick up second preferences. Secondly, the idea that Corbyn could win is hardly going to reassure those voters who worry about Labour’s economic competence.
Another worry is that the hard left could, seeing how close Corbyn is to victory, sign up en masse to vote in the contest. If a huge number of registered supporters joined up before 12 August, that could boost Corbyn even further.
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Happy new year Nick Clegg. The onetime Deputy Prime Minister has spent much of the past decade collecting oodles of cash from the social media giant formerly known as Facebook. Clegg has served as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s senior executives at Meta since October 2018, living out of a £7 million mansion in Silicon Valley.
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