Neither Honourable Nor Members

There is no Purple Momentum. If anything, expect some of the European Research Group to be deselected. But even that is unlikely.

While David Cameron has come out to express his regret at Conservative defections to the Independent Group, Tony Blair remains silent as to Labour ones. That silence speaks for itself. We can all see who is the Leader here.

But in this day and age (and yes, I am now so old that I use that one), no one would join a political party in which membership did not confer the right to vote in a Leadership Election.

Yet Chris Leslie has just publicly set his face against such a franchise in whatever the Independent Group eventually became. 

He actively does not want anyone outside Parliament to join the New Party. Politics is something to be done to the plebs, not by the plebs.

That is why it is now considered acceptable for a private company to have more parliamentary clout than the 689,901 people who voted either Green or Plaid Cymru, even though those parties won seats in the House of Commons.

If Leslie and the rest of them had the public support that they claim, then all of those millions of people, or at least a large proportion of them, would have paid three quid apiece and kept Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Leadership.

Or they would have joined the Labour Party, eventually to get rid of him, but in the meantime to stop the deselection of sitting MPs.

That neither of those things has happened proves, proves, that the Independent Group speaks for absolutely nobody at all.