The revolution falters as Your Party descends into farce

Kat Brown, The Independent

Given the disasters surrounding the Budget, Your Party should have been thrilled. It’s made their last three months of in-fighting, budgetary arguments and leadership squabbles seem borderline competent. Yet within moments of these wannabe leaders launching their first conference, the clown car started filling up. First, a load of members were ousted, following rumours that the Socialist Worker Party was planning a disruption. Second, Jeremy Corbyn’s welcome speech ran late. Third, there was no sign of his co-leader, Zarah Sultana. Fourth, it later turned out that Sultana was boycotting her own conference due to, fifth, “faceless bureaucrats” doing the ousting. Your Party was due to be renamed this weekend; it may as well stay thus so that Sultana can yell it at Corbyn.

“We’re here to do something dramatic — and may I say the hall looks absolutely fantastic — to found a new socialist party in Britain,” Corbyn said, peering out at his anoraked audience. As an opening gambit to a new political party, this was more like welcoming a busload of sightseers to a talk by the local WI. The hall was free of decorations, with some chairs and screens, but as their £800,000 in donations have been withheld by the party founders, presumably they’ve had to save on the bells and whistles. Given how much of the audience was still clad in winter hats, they must have decided to keep the heating off, too.

Jeremy Corbyn is the star of Your Party, but he’s not a gripping speaker. Certainly, Keir Starmer is no showman, unless he’s quipping at PMQs. But watching Corbyn speak is like watching your least public-facing schoolteacher being rolled out on Speech Day because everyone else came down with food poisoning.

“We've got to come together and be united,” said stand-in headmaster Corbyn, eyeing the anoraks beadily, “Because division and disunity will not serve the interests of the people that we want to represent.” Meanwhile, Sultana was furiously briefing the press outside the conference hall. May the left wing never change!

The launch of Your Party — or Our Party, or Popular Alliance, For The Many, or whatever name the 50,000 membership agrees upon in Liverpool this weekend, if indeed it can, is supposed to be a chance for something new, exciting, to send a rocket up the bottoms of the ungrateful voting public. Instead, it’s more of the same, which is rather ironic given Jeremy’s gripes about Labour’s bureaucracy. In the same breath as he decried the “top down” bureaucracy of his former party, he called for an elected executive, a members’ oversight committee and more non-bureaucratic bureaucracy. “I've had enough of top-down parties,” he said, while Sultana’s team briefed about party witch hunts. “I spent a lifetime in the Labour Party, mostly fighting Labour Party bureaucracy. I don't want to repeat that in Your Party. I don't want to repeat that experience.” He added, without turning a hair: “And that will also go in the handbook.”

The stand-in teacher was also wearing his most revolting jacket. There is a particular form of arrogance in dressing quite so badly. I would say that no woman would be so sartorially sloppy, but then Sky News kept showing old photos of Zarah Sultana in a light blue blazer with tortoiseshell buttons, which didn’t help.

Clothing matters. It’s 20 years since Meryl Streep spelt that out in The Devil Wears Prada. What does this blazer say, then, this lumpen, oversized monstrosity with its crimped lapels? Is it the couture equivalent of a burlap sack? Is there nothing better for an audience who have coughed up to be there on a Saturday morning when they could have been marching in support of something (some mournful chants of “Free, Free Palestine” suggested they’d rather have been there instead). How could anyone trust a man who, faced with a wardrobe, a shop, could reach in and somehow decide that yeah, this is fine.