Just when you thought the Lab leadership contest couldn’t get any more exciting

Just when you thought the Lab leadership contest couldn’t get any more exciting

The next Labour leader might have to keep the Blairites and Communists happy, that might not be possible.

The major news overnight was the Sunday Times story on calls to Harriet Harman to suspend the Labour leadership election because of hard left infiltration, see the tweet above. I suspect the election isn’t going to be suspended because the Sunday Times conclude their article with this

A Labour source said several thousand new members had been rejected for administrative reasons, such as not being on the electoral roll, but just a handful were turned away because of their political affiliations.

A Labour spokesman said all applications were verified against the electoral register and those not sharing the aims or values of the Labour party were denied a vote

Whoever wins the Labour leadership election is going to have a challenge keeping all the disparate elements of the Labour party together, one of the consequences of the great polling disaster of 2015 is that the next Labour leader will not be able to rely on the polling to protect their leadership in the way Ed Miliband did from people wanting to see him replaced.

All of this whilst having to deal with the King over the water, David Miliband, as the latest YouGov poll for today’s Sunday Times shows, all four leadership contenders put off more voters than they attract, but only two Labour figures gain more voters than they lose, one of them is David Miliband the other is Alan Johnson.

So the next Labour leader may well have to deal concurrently with the likes of the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain and David Miliband, the Blairite standard bearer, that may well prove to be an insurmountable challenge for the new leader, no wonder people are wondering if an SDP type split is going to happen in the next few months and years. Given all the potential problems the new leader faces, this might be a good leadership election to lose

TSE

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