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A new biography has revealed how the Labour leader and his allies planned his challenge in advance of the election
Keir Starmer had assembled a leadership team about six months before the Ddecember 2019 general election that led to Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation as Labour leader.
The team, codenamed the “Arlington Group”, began planning in earnest how Starmer could capture the leadership from June of that year – including a detailed breakdown of how Labour’s membership could be convinced to support him.
Dramatic findings point to Conservatives losing every red wall seat that they secured at the last election
Labour is currently on course to win a landslide victory on the scale of 1997, according to dramatic new modelling that points to the Conservatives losing every red wall seat secured at the last election.
The Tories could also lose more than 20 constituencies in its southern blue wall strongholds and achieve a record-low number of seats, according to a constituency-by-constituency model seen by the Observer. Deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, defence secretary Grant Shapps and leadership contender Penny Mordaunt are among those facing defeat. Some 12 cabinet ministers face being unseated unless Rishi Sunak can close Labour’s poll lead.
Half of all Tory voters take a dim view of the former prime minister whereas the ex-president has a strong Republican support
There are two very big differences between the situation confronting Boris Johnson and that facing the man with whom he is frequently compared, Donald Trump – namely, popularity and context.
Johnson is weaker than Trump. First, because he is less popular with Conservative voters than Trump is with his Republican supporters. About half of 2019 Conservative voters disapprove of Johnson’s performance in office. And at the time he left office, 40% or more rated him as untrustworthy, dishonest and/or incompetent.
Experts say while party failed to win a seat they may have denied Boris Johnson a landslide by splitting vote
Nigel Farage’s Brexit party may have saved up to 25 Labour seats in the Midlands and the north at the 2019 general election, denying Boris Johnson a landslide majority of 130, according to new analysis.
Farage’s party failed to win a single seat in December 2019 as Boris Johnson sought to hammer home the message that the Conservatives would “get Brexit done”.
Opinium poll for the Observer also reveals 47% of public think Putin’s government affected UK’s 2019 general election
Almost half the British public believes the Russian government interfered in the EU referendum and last year’s general election, according to a poll. The latest Opinium poll for the Observer found that 49% of voters think there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, with 23% disagreeing. Some 47% believed Russia interfered in the December general election.
The poll findings come after the long-awaited publication of the report into Russian interference by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee last week. It found that the government had not attempted to investigate potential Russian interference in the referendum. It said the UK had “badly underestimated” the Russian threat.
Foreign secretary accuses Russia of seeking to interfere in last year’s general election by amplifying an illegally acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign. Raab also confirms reports that Russian state-sponsored hackers are targeting UK, US and Canadian organisations involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, describing it as ‘completely unacceptable’.
British foreign secretary says Russia amplified an illicitly acquired NHS dossier on social media
Russian actors “sought to interfere” in last winter’s general election by amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said.
Labour has a “mountain to climb” if it is to get back into power, according to a major review of the 2019 general election defeat, which paints a picture of dysfunctionality, toxicity and drift inside the party’s election-fighting machine.
Negative perceptions of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, doubts about the manifesto and the party’s ambivalent Brexit stance reinforced each other in a “snowballing” effect to deliver December’s catastrophic result, the 150-page report by the party group Labour Together argues.
Change of official line is first admission that Kremlin may have distorted UK elections
Ministers have been told they can no longer say there have been “no successful examples” of Russian disinformation affecting UK elections, after the apparent hacking of an NHS dossier seized on by Labour during the last campaign.
The dropping of the old line is the first official admission of the impact of Kremlin efforts to distort Britain’s political processes, and comes after three years of the government’s refusal to engage publicly with the threat.
The next leader should focus on building support among young people, families and precarious workers around urban centres
The candidate who secures the mandate of the Labour membership in April will require humility and subtlety. Humility, because the size of the Tory majority is formidable; subtlety, because the electorate is changing in ways that suggest there is no easy path to revive Labour’s vote share.
To win the most seats at the next election, let alone form a majority government, the new leader will need to engineer a breakthrough in several parts of the country simultaneously, from politically ambivalent Cornwall to the new SNP strongholds in Scotland. Along the way, of course, large chunks of support will need to be clawed back in the so-called “red wall” areas of the post-industrial north and Midlands, which turned so decisively blue in 2019.
Exclusive: Report on Russian interference depends on prime minister appointing committee
The SNP’s leader at Westminster has written to Boris Johnson demanding that he take immediate steps to allow the suppressed report into Russia’s interference in the British political system to be published.
Ian Blackford, the leader of the third-largest party in the Commons, called on the prime minister to begin appointing members of parliament’s intelligence and security committee, necessary to allow the controversial document to be released.
Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents
An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles.
More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” is set to be released over the next months.
The election was bad, but the aftermath is worse for a divided party
Labour leadership contests are normally traumatic events held in very unhappy times for the party. The election of Ed Miliband in 2010 followed a general election defeat that ended 13 years of Labour government. Five years later Jeremy Corbyn was installed after Miliband failed to return the party to power. Then in the summer of 2016 a revolt against Corbyn by his own MPs sparked another contest, which saw the incumbent win again and take revenge on the mutinous parliamentary party.
Inevitably these contests cause internal ruptures as rival candidates set out opposing visions and their supporters divide into camps. The 2010 campaign had its tragic aspects too, as the Miliband brothers, Ed and David, fell out while fighting each other for the right to succeed Gordon Brown.
A former Labour whip who lost his seat in the general election has had his clothes and private documents mistakenly incinerated by parliamentary staff.
Graham Jones, the ousted parliamentary candidate for Hyndburn in last Thursday’s general election, returned to Westminster this week to clear his office, which is close to the House of Commons chamber and Strangers bar.
Emily Thornberry has declared she is entering the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, revealing she warned the Labour leadership that backing a Brexit election would be an “act of catastrophic political folly”.
The shadow foreign secretary set out her pitch to be the next Labour leader in an article for the Guardian, arguing she has already “pummelled” Boris Johnson across the dispatch box and knows how to exploit his failings.
Here’s a host more middle and junior-ranking ministerial appointments just announced by No 10:
A mooted plan to merge the department for international development (DfID) and the foreign office (FCO) risks allowing British aid money to be spent on “UK foreign policy, commercial and political objectives”, rather than on helping the world’s poorest people, more than 100 charities warn.
Merging DfID with the FCO would risk dismantling the UK’s leadership on international development and humanitarian aid. It suggests we are turning our backs on the world’s poorest people, as well as some of the greatest global challenges of our time: extreme poverty, climate change and conflict. UK aid risks becoming a vehicle for UK foreign policy, commercial and political objectives, when it first and foremost should be invested to alleviate poverty.
By far the best way to ensure that aid continues to deliver for those who need it the most is by retaining DfID as a separate Whitehall department, with a secretary of state for international development, and by pledging to keep both independent aid scrutiny bodies: the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Development Select Committee.
Labour said to have ‘dug its own grave’ with Corbyn as leader as social change mantra failed to cut through
“I feel excellent,” said David Cliffe as he strode across Peterborough’s Cathedral Square, having contributed to a thumping Conservative majority. “I didn’t want to have a communist regime,” said the 71-year-old retired warehouseman. “The country would have been on its knees.”
Cliffe, who was on his way to book his mother a Christmas holiday in Scarborough, could not stop beaming about Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide, which he reckoned meant Brexit was all but done.
Emmanuel Macron has warned Boris Johnson that the UK must remain “loyal” to EU standards post-Brexit for British companies to maintain access to the European market.
In comments echoed by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president demanded continued regulatory harmonisation as the price for protecting the flow of trade, a demand that will be a cause of concern for the Conservative government.
We will leave the EU in a few weeks. But it’s far from clear what kind of relationship with the bloc an emboldened PM will seek
Well it is truly remarkable. Not so much the result of the election, which is surprising enough. But, rather, the fact that following the “Brexit election”, one in which traditional party loyalties seem to have been stretched to breaking point by the leave-remain divide, we emerge not knowing what kind of Brexit the prime minister intends to deliver.
In the short term, there is now no doubt that he will be able to “get Brexit done” in the sense of taking the UK out of the EU by the end of January. And no, that does not mean that Brexit will, in fact, be done (on which more in a minute) in a practical sense. But it may – may – be possible for the government to give the impression that it is in a politically persuasive way.
Most EU nationals living in the UK cannot vote – leaving many feeling like pawns in a political game
In a threadbare youth centre in Bradford, Vie Clerc, who got off a Eurostar from Paris 19 years ago with £50 in her pocket and never left, laments the irony. “It’s the first one I’ll actually be able to vote in,” she said. “Shame I’ve never felt less British.”
In a bright mezzanine office in Bristol, Denny Pencheva, who landed in 2013 from Bulgaria via Copenhagen and now teaches at the university, bemoans politicians “who use us to score their political points, but don’t actually have to consider us – because politically, we don’t count”.