Rafael Behr: The final act hasn’t been played yet
Like actors in a touring theatre troupe, Labour’s leadership candidates know their lines so well, having delivered them in dozens of venues around the country. The challenge is to keep the script fresh for every audience. While the contest has at times been rancorous, there is now a degree of bonhomie among the contenders – an esprit de corps that arises from having shared stages, green rooms and cars non-stop for nearly four months. They could probably understudy one another if for some reason one couldn’t make it.
That doesn’t mean their positions are interchangeable, but the differences have coalesced into clearly defined roles. The plot of the play is established. Jeremy Corbyn is the main protagonist. It was his entry stage left that generated most of the excitement in what was otherwise set to be more amateur dramatics workshop than news spectacle. It was clear in Thursday’s hustings that Corbyn’s positions have set the baseline against which other candidates are being judged by many Labour supporters. He was cheered on to the stage before a word had even been said. In the mild-mannered cadences that his supporters celebrate as the antidote to orthodox political posturing, he then expressed the disappointed socialist critique of modern British politics: it is too much in thrall to tall Tory tales about the economy, immigration, Europe, the benefits system.
The other candidates tried to claim a piece of the outrage while reaching as best they could towards the notion that winning over swing voters may require more than denouncing as “myth” opinions they hold with some conviction. Liz Kendall plays the part of Cassandra – the least forceful voice, easily now ignored, warning that parts of the country may need slightly different messages. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham make up the chorus, harmonising with Corbyn more than flatly contradicting him. The final act hasn’t been played yet, but there is unmistakable momentum towards the coronation of the front runner. For some in Labour that is a tragedy. Many in tonight’s audience clearly felt it would be a story of heroic triumph.
John Harris: Can I have Corbyn’s principles and Kendall’s steel?
What a difference four months (and Jeremy Corbyn) makes. It’s easy to forget how this contest began in the uneasy, doomy days after 7 May: with all that talk about “aspiration”, unsettling messages about benefits, and the sense that the Labour party was more scared of its own shadow than ever before. But now, listen to the fire, brimstone and old-time religion that pours forth from Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham – rather more, tonally at least, than Jeremy Corbyn, who sticks to his measured, slightly stilted kind of oratory, but manages to come up with applause-line after applause-line.
As has been the case for me since the JC surge began, ambivalence rules. It’s good to hear a full-throated defence of social security as a basic principle of civilisation, and a reiteration of the madness of renewing Trident; pleasing too to behold how much Burnham and Cooper have had to belatedly frame their arguments in terms of fundamental principle.
But given the scale of Labour’s woes – which, notwithstanding those hundreds of thousands of new people, are still grave – there is something a little too cosy about all this. If that feeling was summed up by anything at the debate, it was the consensual reduction (by Corbyn, Cooper and Burnham, anyway) of political difficulties with benefits and immigration to “myths”. That won’t do: after 12 September, it may well end up sounding all but delusional.
To go against the social media grain, there was one candidate who spoke with candour and clarity about a lot of Labour’s predicament, and the often freezing-cold political waters out there in the real world. I disagree with a lot – most, in fact – of her conclusions, but if anyone is now trying their damnedest to “widen the debate”, it’s Liz Kendall. As I said at the end, I’d ideally like some Frankenstein-esque combination of her willingness to stare into the void with JC’s immovable principles. Obviously, I can whistle for it.
Anne Perkins: Corbyn probably won on the clapometer, but not by much
What do you want from a hustings? A clear idea of where each of the candidates stands. Some excitement, some argument, some fire. Astonishingly, considering that the four candidates for the Labour leadership had already done this 23 times before, they delivered all of that.
So did the audience. There was a great cheer from the small queue on the rainy street when Jeremy Corbyn arrived, but in the hall all four candidates got a good hearing, and no one was booed or jeered, even though Liz Kendall bravely stuck to her mission, as one observer joked early in the campaign, to upset every left-leaning voter in the country by defending the old-New Labour formula of needing to give enough voters a reason to trust Labour to win an election.
And although Corbyn probably won on the clapometer, it was not by much. Maybe Yvette Cooper had a point when she asked who, after 8 May, believes the polls. Certainly the debate dispelled the sense that the race is Corbyn’s to lose. At least, it did for as long as it lasted.
Throwing open the choice of the party leader to a wider audience is unmistakably a wild success in terms of energising support for the party. But it is clear that Andy Burnham, and to a lesser extent maybe Yvette Cooper, have rebalanced their message to talk to the selectorate rather than the future voters in a general election.
Fair enough, maybe. It’s five years away. Yet I was left with the lingering impression that the terms of debate had shifted to woo the voters they needed, and it was going to be a bit of a handbrake turn to face the nation. Except for Jeremy Corbyn. And that carries its own message.
