Jeremy Corbyn: could more Labour MPs be ready to depose him?

Jeremy Corbyn has been taking questions from Labour MPs for the first time this year.

But there’s been a coordinated attempt by some of Mr Corbyn’s few backers in the PLP to shore him up. They’ve attacked divisions in the PLP in a way which one member said sounded like MPs were being lined up for the blame if the Party had a bad time in the May elections.

I get a sense from recent chats that there is an increase in the number Labour MPs who are ready to try to depose Jeremy Corbyn straight after the May elections. “We have to fire bullets early and just keep firing,” one of them said. Another said: “nothing gets better, we’ve got to move” and dismissed the point made by some that such an uprising would distract from the EU referendum campaign. Two MPs argued to me that getting rid of Mr Corbyn on the grounds of his coolness on Europe would be an argument for going early though some of his staunchest critics argue it would be monstrous if MPs started an attempt to remove him when the focus should be on the EU. One MP, Barry Sheerman made a passionate plea for Labour figures at the top of the party to show passion for Europe. Mr Corbyn said he would campaign vigorously (which many of his MPs doubt).

Anyway, Team Corbyn appears to have sniffed the air and sensed the need to head off imminent danger. The leader was snippier than usual, one critic said, and though “dire,” according to one MP, clearly trying to take on his critics.

One staunch critic of Mr Corbyn said it was a “0-0 draw,” which given previous encounters and general expectations I suspect Mr Corbyn’s team might pocket as a triumph.

Elsewhere in the political news we have seen the unlikely elevation to heroic status of John Longworth, formerly of the British Chambers of Commerce. Brexit campaigners speak in hushed tones of his martyrdom and you half expect to hear of plans for stained glass windows on his memory.

The interest here is not so much whether Number 10 wielded the knife but the readiness of senior Tories to say they did. Boris Johnson is on a promise of a Cabinet job from the PM. Tomorrow he sits round the Cabinet table for “political cabinet” ahead of the real thing. But he’s happy to talk about the BCC man’s “crushing by the agents of fear.”

In The Sun today, Trevor Kavanagh writes of how one pro-Brexit Cabinet Minister has talked of leaving the Cabinet in protest at Project Fear before the referendum. It’s not clear who that is but Iain Duncan Smith has been ratcheting up the rhetoric attacking Government scare-mongering. I was particularly struck by his use of the toxic term “dodgy dossier” to describe a Government pro-Remain analysis 12 hours before it was actually published.

There is no sign that the Tory High Command have a clear plan for putting the party back together again, always assuming it’s up to them and Remain have won. There is every sign they’ve been taken unawares by just how feistily the Brexit Tories have hit back.

There was mockery of Jeremy Corbyn for talking of the PM of Czechoslovakia, a country which ended its existence in 1992, mockery too for his slip of the tongue when he told Labour MPs that “Tories are strong… er … they are not strong they are divided.” Maybe everyone can agree that both main parties are very strongly divided?

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