Tom Goodenough

With Labour’s bloody leadership contest behind them, John McDonnell wants to get back to business. This is a man who lists 'fermenting the overthrow of capitalism' as his pastime on Who's Who. Now he is the Labour Party's shadow chancellor. So with the renewed Corbynista mandate, what now? Having picked the brains of Ed Miliband and others, he says a Labour government would be defined by its willingness to step in - but only gently - to help out business. For McDonnell, that plan to intervene would take the form of a mammoth spending scheme backed by a national investment bank pumped with £100bn.

Jeremy Corbyn promised to wipe the slate clean following Labour's fractious leadership race. Now that he's officially clinched victory, it's time for the party to try and do just that at Labour's annual conference, which kicks off at 11am today. Here, The Spectator has put together a guide of the main events to look out for. This is what's on today: 11am: Labour’s conference starts The NEC’s chair Paddy Lillis speaks shortly afterwards Fringe events: 5.

Jim O’Neill, who was somehow overlooked in Theresa May's purge of the Osbornites, has become the first person to resign from her Government. A few weeks ago, the former Goldman Sachs chairman said he wanted assurances that she remained committed to the Northern Powerhouse agenda. It seems that no such undertakings were received. In his somewhat terse letter this morning, he had this to say: ‘I primarily joined however for the specific purpose of helping deliver the Northern Powerhouse, and to help boost our economic ties with key growing economies around the world, especially China and India and other rapidly emerging economies.

The Brexit bounce continues. HM Treasury has today released forecasts of the economists it follows, as it does every month. Last time, there was a flurry of downgrades and forecasts of an immediate recession. Now, these forecasts are being torn up by everyone, including by the FT (although you can bet the FT won't report on the upgrades as eagerly as it did the downgrades). The average new forecast suggests GDP will grow by 1.8 per cent this year, far better than the 1.5 per cent forecast last month. This back to where the consensus was before the Brexit vote. The OECD, which had previously predicted "immediate" uncertainty after a Brexit vote, has today also upgraded to 1.8pc for this year, saying instead that the pain will be felt next year (it predicts 0.9pc growth).

Tim Farron’s hardest task in his conference speech today was convincing people to actually listen. A test of how successful he was will be how soon into the 6pm news tonight he pops up on screen (following Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's reported split, the signs don't look good). So what did Farron do to try and get people to sit up? Banging the anti-Brexit drum was one of his main tactics. Farron promised... 'Not a re-run of the referendum, not a second referendum, but a referendum on the terms of the as-yet-unknown Brexit deal' The Lib Dem leader did, to be fair, do his best to empathise with those who voted to ‘Leave’ but instead he’s more likely to have left them rather wound up.

The big question in Labour's leadership contest is not whether Jeremy Corbyn will win, but how much he'll win by. There is, it seems, an inexhaustible supply of Corbynistas standing ready to join the party - so the moderates who had hoped that a formal leadership challenge would be a vehicle of deposing him have had to think again. Neil Kinnock said this weekend that he'll probably never live to see another Labour government. So Labour's only hope, for now, is that the 67-year-old Corbyn might change. During his interview on Today this morning we've been offered a taste of what his leadership will look like if (or, rather, when) he wins. The depressing news for Labour MPs is that it looks like it will be business as usual. But with a smiling face.

On the morning of the 24th June, Britain woke to find its stock market shattered and its pound pummelled. It appeared – for a brief moment – like all the prophecies of the Brexit doomsayers, not least the Great Seer Osborne, had come true. But then, from the wreckage of that mid-summer morning, green shoots began to appear, and now, more than two months down the line, it seems that Britain has bounced back. In his cover piece this week, Ross Clark argues that the Remain campaign fell victim to the perils of believing their opinion to be ‘objective fact’, and that economic recovery has humiliated the Treasury, Bank of England, and the other grand institutions who swore that Brexit would leave us poorer. So is he right?

In the referendum run-up, we were inundated with warnings and messages of doom and gloom about the untold damage Brexit would unleash - and unleash immediately. It took a pub boss - Tim Martin, the founder of JD Wetherspoon's - to add a bit of perspective. Why, he argued, would consumer sentiment plunge of a majority voted Brexit and got what they wanted? Why, if we wouldn't actually leave the EU for two years, would the economy fall of a cliff? At the time, he was mocked for knowing nothing more than how to pull pints. But now, with the prophecies of economic woe having failed to materialise, it seems he was more on the money - a point he has made.

Theresa May has told Tory MPs she won't 'turn back the clock' on grammar schools. But she also didn't rule out some expansion in the system of selective schools. How those two thoughts reconcile with each together will become clearer when the Government reveals its plans for school reform soon (this being Theresa May, we won't be expecting a running commentary). Yet even the scant details which have emerged so far have provoked a predictably mixed reaction. Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner said the plans were 'shambolic'. You can listen to her criticism here: And Alan Milburn, who chairs the government’s social mobility commission, is perhaps the most outspoken voice this morning. In the Guardian, he says that these plans would be 'disastrous'.