Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne and Claire Fox

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The final item in Kevin Maguire's latest Commons Confidential column for the New Statesman reveals the existence of a hitherto undiscovered circle of hell:

Labour criticising Johnson’s award of a peerage for the Brexit Party’s Claire Fox, who once said she didn’t think child porn ought to be removed from the internet and has in the past defended the IRA, prompted a senior figure to recall Jeremy Corbyn halting an onslaught against the ex-MEP. 

Printed leaflets highlighting her record were pulped instead of being delivered on polling day in the 2019 Peterborough by-election. Disgruntled Labour campaigners suspected that Seumas Milne’s friendship with Baroness Brexit kiboshed the plan.

How Seumas Milne undermined the Labour Remain campaign

From Laura Kuenssberg on BBC News this morning:

Documents passed to the BBC suggest Jeremy Corbyn's office sought to delay and water down the Labour Remain campaign. Sources suggest that they are evidence of "deliberate sabotage". One email from the leader's office suggests that Mr Corbyn's director of strategy and communications, Seumas Milne, was behind Mr Corbyn's reluctance to take a prominent role in Labour's campaign to keep the UK in the EU. 

One email, discussing one of the leader's speeches, said it was because of the "hand of Seumas. If he can't kill it, he will water it down so much to hope nobody notices it". 

A series of messages dating back to December seen by the BBC shows correspondence between the party leader's office, the Labour Remain campaign and Labour HQ, discussing the European campaign. It shows how a sentence talking about immigration was removed on one occasion and how Mr Milne refused to sign off a letter signed by 200 MPs after it had already been approved. 

The documents show concern in Labour HQ and the Labour Remain campaign about Mr Corbyn's commitment to the campaign - one email says "what is going on here?". Another email from Labour Remain sources to the leader's office complains "there is no EU content here - we agreed to have Europe content in it". Sources say they show the leader's office was reluctant to give full support to the EU campaign and how difficult it was to get Mr Corbyn to take a prominent role.

Given Milne's sympathy for authoritarian leaders like Stalin and Putin, we should not expect him to be a supporter of liberal democratic institutions like the European Union.

"Labour is standing up, not standing by"

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That's what Jeremy Corbyn told the Welsh Labour Conference in February.

And that phrase has since been adopted as the party's slogan for this week's local elections.

But is it any good as a slogan?

Standing up for your principles or your friends is admirable. So is standing up to bullies.

Just standing up, however, is a pretty neutral act. (And it can be irritating to stand up if everyone else was sitting down.)

And then there is standing by.

Standing by while others suffer is a bad thing, but for the most part standing by is something positive. It means you are ready for action or there if you are needed.

If disaster threatened, you would be relieved to hear that the emergency services of the Army were standing by. It is what you would expect them to do. And, in the mean time, you wouldn't care if they were standing up or sitting down.

So "Standing up, not standing by" doesn't really work.

I suspect at the back of it there is an attempt to match Tony Blair's "I will not pass by on the other side."

But that a richness and biblical echoes (it came, after all, from Blair's early Son of God period) that Corbyn's slogan lacks.

Back to the drawing board, Christopher Robin.

Six of the Best 589

"Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within." Read Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

Evan Harris claims Hacked Off are not hypocrites for their stance on John Whittingdale.

You can never have enough takedowns of Seumas "Christopher Robin" Milne. This one by Peter Wilby is particularly good.

Felicity Cloake asks why eating has become so complicated.

Backwatersman pays tribute to the England batsman James Taylor, who has been forced to retire because of a heart condition: "When he took on ... great lummoxes like Andre Nel and Tremlett he might have been Chaplin outwitting Eric Campbell with a deft swish of his walking cane. In fact, one of the many things I remain hugely grateful to him for is allowing me to recapture (quite late in life) that childlike pleasure of having a favourite player, one whom I liked more than I could ever quite rationally account for."

"The locks known as Caen Hill ... rise 237 feet over two miles – with 16 of them virtually back to back.Each trip up and down takes five hours." David Hencke and friends take on one of the inland waterways' greatest challenges.

Six of the Best 583

Andrew Grice reminds us that David Cameron and George Osborne should not forget the Lib Dems know where the bodies are buried.

Jeremy Corbyn is "acting as though he is the leader of a 3rd or 4th party, rather than leader of the opposition," says William Barter.

"As Milne walked down a corridor, the six-foot colleague approached from the other direction. They smashed into each other, sending Milne flying, along with the papers he was carrying. 'Seumas was in shock,' recalls an onlooker. 'No one had ever done that to him before. He expected people to show deference to him.'" Alex Wickham profiles the Winchester-educated Stalinist who is Labour's executive director of strategy and communications.

A reader sent me a link to Futility Closet, where Alfred Kahn's concept of the "tyranny of small decisions" is discussed.

Hunter Oatman-Stanford takes us to Scarfolk, a strange land built on the public information films made to terrify children in the 1970s.

"In the 1960s, trip boats from Little Venice would take extended tours across the Thames into the depths of Peckham and Camberwell, and even in the 1970s, some insisted the canal should be saved." Peter Watts on the loss of the Grand Surrey Canal.