Chuka umunna

Chuka his toys out of the pram? Umunna misses Corbyn’s speech

As Jeremy Corbyn made his speech to conference, Labour’s new frontbench did their best to put on a united front on the front row. As for the frontbenchers of Labour’s past? Well, it could hardly be described as a show of solidarity. Both Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt were nowhere to be seen at the speech, with ITV’s Chris Ship reporting that they had already left Brighton on a train: Somewhere between Brighton & London Victoria stations is a train carriage with @ChukaUmunna @TristramHuntMP & @MaryCreaghMP escaping #Lab15 — Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) September 29, 2015 While Hunt did at least tweet supportive messages to Corbyn during the speech, Umunna has maintained a radio silence. On top of failing

Dan Jarvis’s only conference appearance is pleasant, but devoid of policy detail

In Brighton, eyes are on two rising stars who are tipped to replace Jeremy Corbyn. The first is Keir Starmer, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who is popping up at several fringe events about the future of the party. The second is Dan Jarvis, the former shadow justice minister, who made his only appearance at a Huffington Post fringe event this afternoon. Jarvis revealed that running for the Labour leadership this time around was ‘never on the table’ and Jeremy Corbyn did not offer him a job (contrary to previous reports) in his shadow cabinet — even though he turned it down. Just like the other moderates who have spoken at

Steerpike

Ghosts of Labour’s past at New Statesman conference bash

As Labour conference kicked off on Sunday on Brighton pier, it was a case of the ghosts of Labour’s past at the annual New Statesman party. The magazine’s editor Jason Cowley told attendees who had their journeys affected by train works not to worry as ‘Corbyn has a plan for the railways’, before reflecting on what had happened to the party in the space of a year.  ‘At our party last year in Manchester Ed Miliband was standing beside me and I introduced him as our next Prime Minister,’ he told partygoers at Brighton’s Al Fresco restaurant. While Miliband stayed away this time, the party’s new leader was also notably absent. With Lucy Powell locked deep in conversation with her

Chuka Umunna: I still won’t serve under Corbyn, despite EU u-turn

Chuka Umunna proved the Labour moderates still have a fan base at his first fringe appearance in Brighton. At a packed out Demos event, the former shadow business secretary and one-time leadership contender, said that a difference of opinion over the EU referendum was not the only reason he didn’t take a job in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Despite the Labour leader’s new position of campaigning to remain In come what may — outlined in this op-ed — Umunna suggested he still wouldn’t take a position: ‘We had a good discussion and quite of that actually was really thinking about things in this reshuffle, but there were a number of issues and the EU was one of them. I

Corbyn puts the EU referendum on a knife edge

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Corbyn’s first few days as Labour leader” startat=1015] Listen [/audioplayer]No one watching Jeremy Corbyn walk around the Palace of Westminster would imagine that he had just won the Labour leadership by a landslide. He seems to spend his time practising the blank stare he gives to television cameras, his eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance. He doesn’t seem too keen on his colleagues either. There is none of the back-slapping bonhomie that normally surrounds a new leader. When he first addressed Labour MPs, there was no cheer when he entered the room which is, for a new leader, unprecedented. Corbyn is the

Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents are finally starting to show political nous

Chuka Umunna’s call for Labourites to unite around their new leader and show ‘solidarity’ does show a growing acceptance that Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of being installed as the party’s new chief in just ten days’ time. But it also shows that the Blairites in the party are finally starting to come up with a plan for dealing with the rise of the hard left. Labour’s centrist modernisers have spent the summer scratching their heads at the Corbyn phenomenon, which they hadn’t predicted at all – indeed, I was initially briefed by one of their number that ‘we will get hundreds of thousands of new supporters. Social media

Nick Cohen

Labour’s centrists have held up the white flag of surrender

Smart political operators are often the stupidest people. In conventional Westminster terms, it was smart of Labour’s Chuka Umunna to say last night that everyone in Labour should work with Jeremy Corbyn. Received wisdom expects us to applaud Umunna as he bows his head to conventional pieties and says Labour should get down with the kids, ‘celebrate’ the Corbyn-supporting yoof, ’embrace’ them and ‘harness’ their energy to revitalise Labour. We are expected to nod sagely as political journalists tell us that Umunna is calculating that ‘if Corbyn, the clear frontrunner, is to fail, Umunna’s wing of the party must not have done anything to make it responsible’. Clever move, we

The missing candidates in the Labour leadership contest

This Labour leadership contest is almost as notable for who isn’t standing as for who is. First, there is the former paratrooper turned MP Dan Jarvis who declined to stand despite many on the Labour side’s belief that he is the answer to the party’s problems. Then, there is Chuka Umunna who initially did enter the race but then pulled out almost immediately, depriving the contest of the one current Labour politician with undoubted star power. But, perhaps, even more telling by their absence are those Labour figures who aren’t even in parliament now. The most discussed of these is David Miliband, who quit the Commons after losing to his

Chuka Umunna endorses Liz Kendall for Labour leader

After pulling out of the Labour leadership contest himself, Chuka Umunna has given his star-studded endorsement to Liz Kendall, along with his leadership team of Emma Reynolds, Stephen Twigg and Jonathan Reynolds. In an article for the New Statesman, Umunna writes: ‘For us, our next leader must get this vision right. On all these big subjects, Liz Kendall has asked the tough questions and started to chart a course to the answers. She has been courageous in challenging conventional wisdom. She has no compunction in moving Labour beyond our comfort zone and is determined to build a team ready to chart a route forward. This is exactly what our party

Portrait of the week | 21 May 2015

Home The annual rate of inflation turned negative in April, for the first time since 1960, with deflation of 0.1 per cent as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, so that a basket of goods and services that cost £100 in April 2014 would have cost £99.90 in April 2015. But, measured by the Retail Prices Index, inflation continued at a rate of 0.9 per cent. Marks & Spencer reported its first rise in annual profits for four years. Police trying to find the gang that broke into safe-deposit boxes in Hatton Garden last month arrested nine men. A botanist claimed unconvincingly that Shakespeare was depicted in the frontispiece of

Chuka Umunna was the victim of an old-fashioned Westminster character assassination

A few months after Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader I met with one of his supporters in the shadow cabinet. Who, I asked, were ‘Ed’s People?’ He began reeling off a list of names. ‘Chuka Umunna, Peter Hain, John…’ ‘Chuka?’ I said. ‘But he’s walking round the Commons with a giant target on his back. They’re out to get him.’ He was, even then, the bookies’ favourite – which, in politics, normally means that you are a dead man walking. The shadow minister smiled. ‘Well, they haven’t got him yet.’ Well, now they have. Umunna has finally been cut down, withdrawing from Labour’s leadership race just three days after entering. There

Chuka Umunna will no longer be the ‘English Obama’

Chuka Umunna has surprised many today with the news that he has withdrawn from the race for the Labour leadership. Explaining his decision he said that the ‘added level of pressure’ had not been a ‘comfortable experience’. Mr S can already hear the sighs from the many Chuka supporters who had seen him as the man to make Labour a pro-business party once more. Earlier this week the business entrepreneur James Caan, who is Chairman of the UK Government’s Start Up Loans Scheme, had confided to Mr S at the Quercus Biasi Foundation Spring Gala at Claridges, that he would support Chuka. He went on to say that he could be the ‘English Obama’: ‘I think

Ross Clark

The simple test Labour’s next leader must pass

With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall is the only one who has passed. On yesterday’s Newsnight she was straightforward: yes, Labour did spend too much. Yvette Cooper, by contrast, said on Radio 4 this morning: ‘I think there were things that we were spending wrongly on, there were issues that we would have been spending money, too much money on –

The three groups of voters that Labour needs to win back

Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated. There are three groups of voters that Labour failed with at this election, I argue in the magazine this week. Aspirational voters who went Tory, the left behind working class who went Ukip in England and SNP in Scotland and Nationalist-minded ones north of the border. What the Labour leadership candidates have to explain is how

James Forsyth

Making Labour work

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thelastdaysofmiliband/media.mp3″ title=”Dan Hodges and Andrew Harrop discuss the final days of Miliband” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]The Labour party is in a worse position today than after its defeat in 1992. Then, the electorate sent Labour a clear and simple message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put taxes up and select a more prime ministerial leader. This time, the voters have sent the party a series of messages, several of which are contradictory. The reasons Labour failed to win Swindon South are very different from why it lost Morley and Outwood and the reasons for that defeat are different again in Scotland, where almost all seats fell to the

Real life | 14 May 2015

The ‘I’m Voting For Chuka’ posters in my rich neighbours’ front windows pushed me over the edge. There is nothing so likely to galvanise one’s inner Tory than the sight of the biggest, poshest houses in the neighbourhood displaying left-wing conceitedness. ‘Of course they’re voting Labour, they’re the only ones who can afford to,’ said the builder (boy)friend, who had popped round to my house for supper. I know, I know. It’s confusing. But we are always going to be on-off, so everyone is going to just have to deal with it. And he is a beacon of common sense at election time, I can tell you. Just the sort

Chuka Umunna confirms he will stand for Labour leader

In the last few minutes, Chuka Umunna has confirmed that he will be standing for the Labour leadership. The Streatham MP made the announcement in a video on his Facebook page while in Swindon – presumably to start undoing any claims his rivals will make that he is a candidate who only appeals to Londoners. He said: ‘I’m pleased today to be announcing that I will be standing for the leadership of the party. I think we can and we should be winning in seats like in Swindon. North, South, East, West we can absolutely do it as a party.’ Umunna added that he didn’t have much truck with the idea

Podcast special: Cameron’s new cabinet and runners and riders for Labour leader

In this View from 22 podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I discuss the beginnings of David Cameron’s new Cabinet and how the ministers announced so far demonstrate the Prime Minister’s reticence to shake the boat. Does Michael Gove’s new role at Justice show he’s repaired his relationship Cameron? Will Mark Harper manage to keep the Tory backbenchers in step with Downing Street? Plus, we look at the runners and riders in the Labour leadership contest and why Chuka Umunna and Andy Burnham are the early favourites. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Starting gun fires on Labour leadership contest as candidates set out their stall

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master). He also says: – Labour didn’t engage effectively with fears that

Labour stays silent over gender segregation at party rally

With polling day less than a week away, it was a case of no rest for the wicked this weekend as politicians took part in some last minute campaigning. While Ed Miliband dreamt about erecting an 8ft 6in stone in Number 10, other members of the Labour party attended a campaign event. Organised by councillor Ansar Ali Khan, Labour members including Tom Watson, Liam Byrne and Jack Dromey joined supporters in Birmingham for a rally: However, at the event women in the audience were segregated from men. This issue did not go unnoticed by the party’s critics, with many taking to Twitter to ask why Labour, which claims to be a party for equality, would support segregated audiences.