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Nov 30, 2025
Headline: Your Party’s spectacular own-goal squanders a golden opportunity
Sud-headline: A chunk of Keir Starmer’s core vote were there for the taking, but Jeremy Corbyn’s party has instead succumbed to the hard-left’s self-destructive tendencies
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/your-party-conference-jeremy-corbyn-3rwg75hzz
Patrick Maguire
chief political commentator
Patrick Maguire is chief political commentator for The Times. He is the co-author of Left Out, the definitive history of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, and Get In, the Sunday Times bestselling account of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power.
Despite appearances, it really didn’t have to be like this. Jeremy Corbyn’s friends and advisers despair that the traumatic birth and chaotic infancy of Your Party — which struggled to come of age at its ill-tempered inaugural conference in Liverpool this weekend — has legitimised the tired but irresistible clichés they have spent a lifetime trying to escape.
Dave Spart, the People’s Front of Judea, Corbyn present but not involved: usually the hard left feels affronted by this vein of mockery. But speak to them in private and they admit, by turns angry and despondent, that for once their detractors might have a point.
By and large, Westminster struggles to suppress its collective impulse to laugh at Corbyn in particular and the organised left in general. Like all addictions, it is a self-destructive habit. More than once the Labour establishment has learnt that to its cost, and last year’s election suggested that their assumptions and entitlement would again end up shattered by a political force they prefer to ignore.
Corbyn and four other independent MPs who won seats Labour ought to have won at a canter had created a historic opportunity. For decades movements to the left of the Labour Party have comprehensively failed to prove the existence of an electoral coalition large enough to put their candidates in parliament.
Editor: Reader imagine this brodacast on a 21 inch black & white television screen in 1952! Patrick Maguire script writing lacks verve!
It is an impenetrable row but not an entirely pointless one, for it clarifies exactly whether Your Party will ever speak to anyone but a few thousand activists. Worryingly for Team Corbyn, there are signs Sultana might be winning it. On Sunday morning delegates narrowly voted to endorse the model of collective leadership she had championed: activists will now run and speak for the party in public, and not an individual MP. Neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be able to run for the leadership until the rules are reviewed in 2027, by which point, judging by the rancorous scenes on the conference floor, Your Party may no longer exist.
One senior party official, aligned with Corbyn, privately derides Sultana’s approach as the “0.7 per cent strategy”, a reference to the share of the vote they believe Your Party will win if it chooses the dogma of Trotskyist groupuscules over the populist politics that won the Gaza independents their seats. “She wants to be queen of the ashes,” the official complained. After this weekend, there is unlikely to be much more than that left.
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