Egg all over Iain McNicol's face
As Private Eye has observed (above), the Blairite bureaucrats running Labour HQ ended up with egg on their faces on the night of 8 June.
Having fallen for their own propaganda of ‘electoral meltdown’ – being far too removed from the grassroots members, any one of whom would have told them differently – the hapless right-wingers apparently prepared what was intended as a coup, ‘changing the locks’ (or rather, deactivating the entry cards) to prevent Jeremy Corbyn’s team from accessing the 'Southside' London offices of the Labour Party.
The sheer arrogance of this is as staggering as the extent to which the party’s bureaucracy (and its right-wing MPs) are out of touch. Even if Labour had done badly in the General Election, there was no obligation for Jeremy to stand down – and indeed, having won two election contests overwhelmingly, with a huge majority of members determined that he should not go, there was every expectation that Corbyn would continue to stand firm.
Yet the Blairite relics were convinced they could just lock him and his team out of the building.
Labour Briefing can confirm that deactivating the door passes was not the limit of right-wing arrogance and idiocy at ‘Southside’ that night. According to a very senior Labour source, the email accounts of Corbyn’s team were also shut down.
There is definitely a need for some deactivations – and some desk-clearing – at Labour’s HQ. But it’s not Corbyn and his support team that should be marched out by security clutching their possessions in a cardboard box.
