Roll up, roll up for the Labour circus of chaos
Boris Johnson’s top adviser Dominic Cummings, had planned to disregard the Westminster convention that sees political parties maintaining a respectful silence during each other’s party conferences.
There’s always a bit of a noise, but generally it’s considered fair play to let each party have the field to themselves for a couple of days a year, so the government doesn’t schedule big announcements for the day of the opposition leader’s speech, for example.
But if Cummings has his finger hovering over the send button, ready to hurl grenades at Labour’s conference in Brighton, he has good reason to pause and reflect on the old advice: never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.
Labour’s conference hadn’t even begun when pro-Corbyn activists attempted to purge Tom Watson from the role of Labour’s deputy leader. Watson described the move, which failed, as a drive-by shooting – and the party’s seething divisions were all anyone talked about as MPs and delegates arrived at the seaside town.
Watson, whose disappearance from public life wouldn’t exactly be mourned, was deemed insufficiently loyal and so the leader’s Praetorian guard decided to act. They were unsuccessful, this time, and the row rumbles on.
In addition to personality clashes, policy splits dominate and nowhere is this clearer than on Brexit. While Corbyn did his best to tell the BBC that not having a position on Brexit was, in itself, a very clear position, his shadow foreign secretary was dressed in an EU flag and leading a pro-Remain march along the seafront.
Meanwhile, party members were getting themselves in a mess inside the conference hall where, in true socialist-style, the votes descended into chaos with members unsure of what they voting on.
Little wonder, perhaps, that one of Corbyn’s most senior aides has handed in his notice, complaining of “a lack of professionalism, competence and human decency”. Andrew Fisher, who wrote Labour’s 2017 manifesto, said: “I no longer have faith we will succeed.”
One senior and long-standing Labour official last night told this newspaper that the conference was “predictably awful” and “the project is collapsing from within”.
Nobody can claim the Tories are a picture of unity, but they’re riding high in the polls. A glance at the circus in Brighton is enough to explain why.
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