Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen
YouGov included Yvette Cooper in its list of seven potential Labour leadership candidates for its poll of party members. (See 9.51am and 10.21am.) But, according to a story by Jason Groves in the Daily Mail, Cooper is expected to announce that she won’t be standing, because she has concluded that her opposition to Jeremy Corbyn would make her unelectable given how popular he is with members. Groves quotes a “friend” of Cooper’s as saying:
From the way Yvette is talking, she is not going to stand. The way the party is now, it is going to be very difficult for anyone who has criticised the Dear Leader, as she has. It’s ridiculous when he’s just lost us another election. It’s also a crying shame. Yvette is one of the few grown-ups we’ve got left – she’s probably our best chance.
The New Statesman’s Stephen Bush has written a good blogpost about the YouGov Labour leadership poll. He says that it feels “about right” as an account of opinion in the party at the moment, but that a lot could change. It is worth reading the article in full, but here’s an extract.
One of the many, many errors that people make in reporting the Labour party rank and file is imagining that it is a hyper-engaged and incredibly online group of people. This is not the case. The average Labour member is a socially concerned person who gets their news via the Guardian’s website and the BBC. They are also not particularly factional: Momentum, the organisation that grew out of Corbyn’s first leadership election, is the largest factional organisation in Labour politics by some distance: but only one around one in every 10 Labour party members is a Momentum member.
The moment when Jeremy Corbyn sealed the deal with Labour members in 2015 was not on Twitter, or even on Facebook. It was in the first televised debate of the race. That was when, according to the private polling I obtained at the time, he first opened up a lead among Labour members.