Labour catastrophe bulletin: confusing court case, bad polls, anti-women selection, and more

Here is today’s Labour catastrophe bulletin, your one-stop digest of all the bad news about the takeover of the Labour party‎ by people on the far left who are destined to deliver Theresa May and the Conservatives a majority of more than 150 seats at the next general election.

1) ‎Something has happened in the court case over whether or not new party members will be allowed to vote in the ongoing re-election of Jeremy Corbyn, the poor deluded soul currently destroying Labour. The court case remains too complex and boring to understand or explain. I tried to tune into it this morning, but it made my head hurt.

2) A pair of new opinion polls make terrible reading for the party. TNS puts Labour on just 26%, with the Tories on 39%. YouGov is better, showing a gap of seven points with the Tories on 38% and Labour on 31%. But you would have to be an idiot to think that those latter numbers are encouraging for an opposition party after months in which the Tories have been at war with themselves. In an unrelated development, Lord Prescott, tweeted that he was much encouraged by the YouGov poll and called for party unity.

3) Dig into the ‎polling numbers on older voters – who tend to vote – and it is clear that Corbyn is leading Labour over a cliff. Among voters over 55, when pressed they prefer May as PM to Corbyn 62 to 10. His supporters, hypnotised by rallies of the faithful, also seem to be clueless about what the Tories would do to their man and the far left during a ruthless general election campaign. Middle Britain didn’t vote for Ed Miliband – even though Labour looked quite well-placed in the polls at key moments before the 2015 contest. Even fewer will vote for Corbyn and his band of clowns.

4) Man up: in a piece for the Guardian‎, Labour MP Jess Philips observes that the party has a woman problem. It has not had an elected female leader when the Tories are onto their second female Prime Minister. The party’s candidates for the new mayoralties are all men. What is Labour’s problem? Why is it such a boy’s club? Pass.

5) And finally. Times commentator Tim Montgomerie is urging May to go for an early landslide, sorry, to go for an early election. It is advice she may take, but expect the suggestion to be played down heavily in the interim, so that the Tories avoid a repeat of Gordon Brown’s dithering, retreat and implosion over an early election, a sequence that set in train events which saved Cameron and accelerated the destruction of Labour.

That was today’s Labour catastrophe news.