The Londoner: Labour’s proxy war spills into MEP list

Further to our story last week about Momentum’s Laura Parker having initially been placed at No 3 on the candidates list for Labour’s London MEPs, her demotion to No 4 was due to an extraordinary skirmish between Momentum’s founder Jon Lansman and officials close to Jeremy Corbyn.

There were already signs of a gap between Lansman and Corbyn over the party’s approach to anti-Semitism, but Lansman’s inability to secure what he wanted for his close colleague Parker, below right, show how far the gulf has widened between the two creators of the Corbyn project.

Lansman, who chairs the selection committee that chose London’s MEP candidates, initially wanted to promote Parker to the No 1 slot, defying the convention that the sitting MEPs, Claude Moraes and Seb Dance, should take the first and second positions. He failed to achieve that. However, as a result of a deal with the GMB union he did succeed, initially, at placing Parker at No 3, with a GMB candidate Taranjit Chana at No 4.

This relegated Corbyn’s ally Katy Clark, far left, his former political secretary who now works in Labour’s headquarters, to the lowly No 5 slot.

Clark, and those close to her, were incandescent and complained to Labour’s ruling NEC, which investigated and reversed the decision, bumping up Clark to the No3 slot and relegating Parker to No 4.

A Labour source says this is important because it is, in effect, a proxy battle between Lansman, who in the past was seen as Corbyn’s greatest supporter, and Corbyn himself.

The pair are consistently at loggerheads over the two issues that dominate: anti-Semitism and Brexit. Parker reflects the pro-referendum views of Momentum members.

Though a leader’s office source says Clark is not Eurosceptic, she reportedly supported the Labour Against the Euro campaign and campaigned against the European Constitution.

Guerrillas in our midst

While pro-EU campaigners turned out for Change UK’s Euro election launch yesterday, a guerrilla campaign is being waged on London’s streets. Posters have started appearing on bus stops in Lambeth North and Kennington and on Tube carriages on the Northern and Metropolitan lines imploring voters “don’t throw migrants under the bus” and asking them to “Stop Brexit”.

“There’s a culture of street art or graffiti across the world but not here in Britain,” a source in the Another Europe campaign, which is behind the posters, told The Londoner. The group hopes to “deliver a stark political message on Brexit”.

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AFTER Michael Gove’s roundtable with green activist Greta Thunberg yesterday, classicist Mary Beard has a point. “There seems something strangely inconsistent in British parliamentarians listening hard (& rightly) to a 16-year-old Swedish campaigner talking about the future, while denying 16-year-olds a vote for their future in elections.”

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Peep Show could have been so different, says David Mitchell. “We’d co-written a pilot with Sam [Bain] and Jesse [Armstrong] for BBC Choice before Peep Show was commissioned,” he tells Adam Buxton’s podcast. “It was called All Day Breakfast.. set in the living room of a flat... more in the comic area of something like Father Ted.”

We’re all in a jam, the young Ian learned

Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach, says a seminal moment in his career as a writer was his discovery as a teenager of Resistentialism, a parody of existentialism.

He says the book he was reading at the time mentioned “the Clark-Trimble experiments in Cambridge in 1935, where heavily buttered and marmaladed toast was dropped over a series of surfaces ranging from silk to hessian crude canvas”, McEwan dryly tells the Penguin Books Podcast.

“The marmalade-facing-down index rose with the quality of the cloth. So it proved that the world was against us.”

A Name check for Juliet and Emma

Old friends Emma Thompson and Juliet Stevenson were all hugs and smiles on the red carpet last night as they arrived for a gala screening of Say My Name at the Odeon Luxe on Leicester Square.

The film is the first screenplay by Australian comedian Deborah Frances-White, presenter of The Guilty Feminist podcast.

It depicts the romps of a couple — played by Lisa Brenner and Nick Blood — who end up in jail after a one-night stand.

Frances-White was in attendance and was joined by fellow comic David Baddiel and Thompson’s daughter, Gaia Wise.

True to Thompson and Stevenson’s activist credentials, the event was held in aid of Amnesty International.

Thompson joined the Extinction Rebellion climate protests last week and was spotted aloft its now-defunct pink boat in Oxford Circus. “We’re not doing anything violent,” she said.

Stevenson, meanwhile, has been deeply involved in supporting refugees in Calais.

SW1A

Nicky Morgan has gone public with some of the abuse she receives as an MP. The former education secretary shared an email she received with the subject line, “betrayal of the British people”. “If you can’t stand the heat you shouldn’t have gone into the kitchen [sic],” the sender wrote. “I can’t wait for the next general election to see the back of you and your fellow traitors.” Morgan captioned the post: “For anyone who still believes that the language MPs use about Brexit doesn’t immediately encourage others to follow their example you just need to read this.”

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Diane Abbott has been crowned the most popular Labour MP after winning a “World Cup” contest on Twitter started by activist Owen Winter. Abbott beat Jess Phillips MP in the final, with Keir Starmer in third place and Jeremy Corbyn in fourth. Phillips conceded: “Well this has been fun, know when I’m beat, I’m off to M&S after work to celebrate with a mojito.”

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