Your Party: a Pythonesque shambles

Has there ever been a “more delicious, predictable, pathetic” political spectacle than the unravelling of Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, asked Stephen Pollard in The Daily Telegraph. Corbyn and his Your Party co-leader, Zarah Sultana, fell out on the day that it was launched in July. They fell out again, in even more spectacular fashion, last week, when Sultana invited people to become paid-up members via an online portal.

Hours later, Corbyn sent out an “urgent” message telling prospective members to cancel their payments: the portal was unsanctioned; he was taking “legal advice”. In a fury, the Coventry South MP then claimed she was being sidelined by a “sexist boys’ club” made up of Corbyn and the party’s four other male MPs. Even by the Pythonesque standards of the far-left, it was farcical, said John Rentoul in The Independent. Before it had even properly come into existence, the party had split into factions that were ferociously denouncing each other.

Your Party ‘couldn’t organise a mailing list’

Corbyn’s opponents are delighted, said Zoë Grünewald in The i Paper, but for those of us on the Left, it’s an incredibly depressing situation. Some 600,000 people had originally registered interest in Your Party. There is a genuine appetite for a socialist movement that would make the case for reducing inequality, take a stand on Palestine, and call out the anti-migrant politics of the Right. “Yet while Tommy Robinson could summon up to 150,000 citizens onto London’s streets in defence of white nationalism, six independent MPs couldn’t organise a mailing list.”

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Still ‘tripwires’ ahead

Corbyn and Sultana have now apparently made up, said Jonny Ball on UnHerd. But Your Party’s problems appear to be terminal – not least because Corbyn’s “merry band” of independent MPs remain divided over crucial issues such as trans rights and Ukraine. If they can’t even decide on a name (Your Party is provisional), then it’s hard to see how they’ll navigate those “tripwires” in the coming months. If their woes continue, Keir Starmer won’t be the only one laughing. The Your Party shambles leaves a big gap – and right now, the Green Party’s charismatic new eco-populist leader Zack Polanski is “emerging as the only viable Leftist alternative” to fill it.