Starmer will fight Corbyn's new party by aping Macron

It is easy to mock the new party launched in a struggle between its joint figureheads, but that is no reason to pass up the chance.

- JOHN RENTOUL

It takes a special skill for one figurehead (Zarah Sultana) to announce the founding of a new party only for the other figurehead (Jeremy Corbyn) to deny, a day later, that it had happened (“discussions are ongoing”).

Then, when Corbyn, three weeks later, announced that it was indeed “time for a new kind of political party”, which appeared to be called Your Party because that was the name of the website, Sultana snapped on social media: “It’s not called Your Party!” It turned out that Your Party was a placeholder name and the real name will be decided democratically at the inaugural conference, details TBC.

Mockery is always useful, because it reminds us how incapable the Corbynite tendency usually is at organising anything more complicated than a split. But it cannot be the whole story, because we know two other things. One is that there is a big pool of potential support for soft Corbynism, if it can suppress the doctrinaire Marxism, the disdain for Britain and the accusation of antisemitism (denied by Corbyn, of course) that is never far from the surface.