This isn't just about replacing one man. It's about challenging his ideas.

The launch of Owen Smith’s campaign for the Labour leadership has left impartial observers rather bemused.

Surely, if the mainstream in the Labour Party wants to defeat Jeremy Corbyn, they should be rallying around a single candidate? Splitting the anti-Jez vote between Smith and Angela Eagle seems utterly self-destructive.

Within a short time, however, it has become apparent that Smith intends to replace Eagle as the candidate.

The argument advanced by his supporters is that he is better placed to beat Corbyn because he is seen as more left-wing by party members. He will therefore ‘peel away’ people who despair of Corbyn’s incompetence, but can’t embrace Angela Eagle’s political world view.

While this may be plausible at one level, we have to be realistic that the chances of either of these candidates beating Corbyn are fairly minimal right now. This is because the Corbynistas are well entrenched and the maths simply doesn’t look that good. But let’s, for argument’s sake, imagine that Smith could win and Eagle couldn’t. What would his victory actually represent?

We could see it as the replacement of an incompetent man with someone who seems fairly competent.

But that’s only a fraction of what this trench warfare is actually about.

Corbyn’s personal failings are legion, but it’s his ideology – his ‘pickled dogma’, if I can borrow Neil Kinnock’s famous phrase of the 1980s’ – that we actually need to confront.

I feel that Eagle represents a far greater ideological threat to Corbyn than a man who was clearly reluctant to leave the shadow cabinet in the first place and has spent recent days locked in meetings trying to find a ‘compromise’.

There is no compromise with the climate that led to a brick being thrown through Angela Eagle’s window and threats of violence becoming the norm.

There is no compromise with John McDonnell’s expletive-laden ranting and commitment to extra-parliamentary socialism.

There is no compromise with the return of the very worst of the 1980s.

Things have now gone too far.

Corbyn needs to be faced down by someone who actually wants to reclaim the Labour Party and wave good bye to the destructive forces that have wrecked it in under a year. Not someone looking naively for hopeless deals.

This is now make or break.

After more than 30 years, I leave Labour at 11.46am tomorrow.

Barring some kind of minor miracle - on a par perhaps with CETI announcing first contact with the Vulcans or the Great British Bake Off returning to the BBC – Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected on Saturday as Leader of the Labour Party. The announcement is due at around 11.45 am. So after three decades or so of membership, my association with the party will end at 11.46. Yes, that’s all folks. I’m afraid I really do mean it this time. Party card in the shredder. Standing order cancelled. It’s goodnight from me. And it’s goodnight Vienna from Labour. I threatened to quit when the Jezster was first elected, but people persuaded me to stay on in the hope that the situation could be rescued. I wanted to go when Angela Eagle was unceremoniously dumped in favour of Owen Smith, but was told I couldn’t desert at such a critical moment and should rally behind the PLP’s chosen challenger. Stay and fight, my friends say. But over what? The burnt-out shell o

Time for Red Ken to head into the sunset

Voice for 2012: Oona best represents modern Londoners Pin there, done that: Livingstone's campaign is a throwback to the 1980s Ken Livingstone may have lost his grip on power, but he hasn’t lost his chutzpah. The former London mayor was full of chirpy bluster a week ago in Southall, west London, when I popped over to listen to him debate with his rival for the current Labour nomination, Oona King. The contrast between two candidates couldn’t be more striking. Oona is chic, whereas Ken is pure cheek. She talks passionately about the threat posed by gang warfare which currently divides kids in her East London neighbourhood, while he waxes nostalgically about his working-class childhood in post-war council housing. It’s clear that Livingstone has been cryogenically preserved and then defrosted. The only question is when exactly the wily old geezer was put in the freezer. The mid-1980s would be a fair bet, which is when I remember him on a stage in Jubilee Gardens on the south bank

The friends, the facilitators and the failures. They now owe us all an apology.

I keep hearing Corbyn’s tenure referred to as an experiment. But how many experiments continue for four years, despite a toxic chemical haze billowing out of the mad inventor’s lab? The hard-left project should have been stopped in its tracks countless times. As far back as 2015, Joe Haines – Harold Wilson’s Press Secretary – suggested that the Parliamentary Labour Party should make a unilateral declaration of independence. They could have appointed their own leader in Parliament and bypassed the socialist relic the members had chosen to elect. Instead, they prevaricated. They agonised. They muttered to each other in corridor recesses at Westminster. The frightened bunnies were at first bemused and disoriented, allowing Corbyn and his cabal to consolidate their position. And subsequently, they were frightened. Mainly frightened of the swollen membership of three-quid flotsam and jetsam who had invaded their constituencies pledging allegiance to the sage of the allotments

Sea Change

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