Twenty four hours is all it takes, or less even to change the political landscape. It may not be obvious but strange things are afoot.
Firstly Smiffy has accepted defeat. How do I know? Well not from his interview on the BBC this morning which I dipped into where he did say 'I'm determined that if I win... ' at which point I stopped listening.
No, I know because he told me himself.
Isn't that thoughtful of him? He must have known I was writing this and sent me a nice email to get me started. I have asked him not to send me stuff, but apparently he now sends it through the Labour Party and I haven't blocked them in case they feel the need to suspend me. It would be useful to know if this happens so I am keeping lines of communication open. Anyway this email was all about 'what's next'. He bangs on in his enthusiastic way about the thousands of 'members and supporters' he has met since he started his campaign. He says the one question he has been asked time and time again is, 'What happens next'. He then reiterates that he is Labour to his core. Maybe we should cut him open to find out if this is true. Then he lists Labour's achievements including the NHS, minimum wage, workers rights, and so on, at the same time managing to suggest that he had some major part to play in all of them, then he says on Saturday we shall know who the next leader is and we need to unite the party.
He finishes with 'The fight is only just beginning.'
He is of course referring to the fight against this Tory government, conveniently ignoring the fight we have been having for the last three months or so, as a result of him deciding to challenge the elected leader of the party. Thanks for those pearls of wisdom Owen, much appreciated. Now if you could just explain to a simple man like me how challenging your leader helps to hold the government to account, I am all ears. You see I am not a political sophisticate, indeed I am not really any sort of sophisticate, but to use a sporting analogy: if you are in a cup final and instead of defending against the opposition and trying to put the ball into their net you encourage as many members of your own team as you can persuade to listen to you to spend the entire match hacking at the ankles of your own captain, what do you think the result will be? I think I know.
However to get back to Owen's kind message to me (with a separate one to my wife too, no effort spared) it is pertinent to notice that he at no time seems to assume that he will become the leader. Is this the beginning of his nemesis, following his former hubris? Maybe the penny started to drop when John Pienaar asked him if he still thought he could win and when he said yes, replied, 'Really? Well you're the only person I've spoken to today who does.'
Smiffy is obviously looking at the future, and it is definitely Back-Bench (a new shade of green in the Farrow and Ball Autumn Catalogue). What are the odds that we see a career change at the next election, even without de-selection? That's what happen when you burn your boats Owen. David Cameron lasted a few weeks on the back benches, can you?
So Smiffy has given up all hope of leading the party into the mysterious mist shrouded uplands which are his real policies. What else has changed?
Well basically both Channel 4 and the BBC have scored own goals in our putative cup final. I'm not sure which side they were actually on, but I do know it didn't play in red. Perhaps this was a new triangular form of the game, or even multi-dimensional. I really don't know. What is clear that both broadcasters had current affairs programmes on Monday night, just two days before the voting closed, which were designed to, at the very least, hinder the progress of Jeremy Corbyn.
And neither of them really succeeded.
I, like many of the Corbyn school of thought, had braced myself for a rocky and shouty evening. I didn't really want to watch either programme but I made myself in order to be able to write about them with some authority.
The Channel 4 Dispatches was billed as an exposé into what is really going in Momentum. It turns out that nothing very startling was going on at all. They had a plant working undercover for six months, I repeat, six months, and the best they could come up with was a discussion about deselection (we have these at the dinner table here), some question about whether Unite knew that Momentum was using an office in their headquarters (they do now), and a question of who actually paid the spy, apart from the production company for whom she was also working. I'd like to think she gave one of her wage packets to charity but I don't expect she did. There was blurry footage of a public meeting, a couple of bits from some left wingers, and that was about it. I expected at least a naked sabbat and human sacrifice. I felt like demanding my money back.
John Pienaar was slightly more professional on Panorama, over on the BBB, but he too shot himself in the foot. For a start he concentrated far too much on Brighton, which is a nice place to visit in the Summer, and the CLP has been suspended there, but watching the programme you would be forgiven for thinking that Momentum was a south coast phenomenon. Given the fairly mind-bogglingly rightwing views of the Labour MP Peter Kyle it is small wonder that there is a certain amount of tension between MP and CLP. If I were a Labour voter and he was my MP I'd be pretty pissed off too.
There were many similarities in the two programmes which should not come as too much of a surprise as they were both apparently made by Films of Record, MD: Neil Grant, an old enemy and one time assistant of Ken Livingstone. Both programmes featured the 74 year old Neil Kinnock, fresh from expelling Militant from the Party, which is the last thing of any note he did, if you discount dragging Glenys into the sea in front of the world's TV cameras, saying or at least agreeing with assertions put him. In Dispatches they wheeled out Gavin Millar QC a colleague of Cherie Blair and brother-in-law of Alastair Campbell to provide them with some impartial legal opinion. I wonder what he charges per hour.
Effectively what seems to have started out as an attempt to destabilise the Corbyn campaign at the eleventh hour, although as pretty much every Corbyn supporter I have had any sort of contact with voted weeks ago, what they thought they were going to achieve I am not sure, has ended up being something of a reassurance to those non party members who are worried about the infiltration of the 'hard' left. There just doesn't seem to be any worth speaking of. No anarchists with suspicious fizzing bombs and big beards, no trots, just enthusiastic people of all ages, inexperienced maybe, but evil, definitely not, with no real hidden agendas. There will be one or two, just as there are un-reconstructed fascists hanging around the fringes of the Conservative Party, and vegan shock troops in sandals and duffel coats in the Lib Dems, but they are few and we, the ordinary supporter are many, very many.
Both programmes were billed as hard hitting investigations, but what they found was, honestly rather disappointing. Panorama: Labour: Is the Party Over?; Dispatches: The Battle for the Labour Party. Big titles for bugger all really.
There may have been good programmes to have been made here, but when Zac Goldsmith tweets “Dispatches was weak. It will only reinforce the view that the establishment wants to trash Corbyn. Suspect it'll have the opposite effect.” then it hasn't gone well. Both programmes missed their goals with the unerring accuracy of the England team faced with a penalty shoot-out, and for that I for one am grateful.
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