Their Party Back

Yes, they have got their party back. Fewer than a thousand people, whose seven figure houses are all within a mile of each other and a lot of whom are in fact constituents of Jeremy Corbyn's, have indeed got their party back. As it haemorrhages members and as its poll rating hurtles towards the centre of the earth, they are welcome to their party, and it is welcome to them.

Corbyn should have stood again for Leader in 2020. He would have won, and Labour never did as badly under him as it is doing now, when it is polling worse than it did at the last General Election. Defined as it is against him and his Leadership, the Labour Party as it now exists is that old perennial, a right-wing breakaway from a left-wing party. Parties like that never stop moving rightwards, because people like that never stop moving rightwards. They have no outer right flank. There is no line that they will not cross. As we now see.

I shall always regret that I did not contest the 2017 General Election, since that would have meant that I had been a candidate at two of them while on bail awaiting trial. Especially on this side of the Irish Sea, how many people have ever done that even once, as of course I did in 2019? But Claudia Webbe intends to carry on sitting and voting as a Member of Parliament while on bail awaiting sentence. She is my heroine.

She ought to fly unannounced to Tehran, smartphone in hand, and tweet only as her plane was landing that she would not be leaving without Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. That would dare Paul Goldspring, Senior District Judge (Chief Magistrate) of England and Wales, to send her to prison and thus complete the lynching that he had arranged with Keir Starmer in order to give the seat of Leicester East back to Keith Vaz, who has continued to maintain two staffed offices there in competition with hers.

It is unsurprising that the people who know who has been paying for all that are not saying. It is no longer surprising that the people who are paid to ask them are not doing so. They are probably the same people. They have got their party back. They are welcome to it. As it is to them.