Does Jeremy Corbyn stand a chance at being re-elected?

Good morning. An interview in which Keir Starmer told Virgin Radio he will continue to have “protected time for the kids” after 6pm on a Friday has led to the Labour leader being attacked by the Conservatives. (Transcript of Starmer’s remarks here.)

The row won’t change much in the final week of the election, but will assume outsized importance if the polls are overstating Labour’s lead or the Tory party does worse than expected.

What might actually impact the results — or at least, the composition of the House of Commons — are the various independent candidates running against Labour in some of their “safe” seats.

Chris Cook, Anna Gross and Max Harlow have crunched the numbers on where Labour is sending its activists — give it a read, it has a very cool scrollable chart. Just as with the Conservative party, which is moving resources very deep into Tory territory, and the Liberal Democrats, who are sending Ed Davey into more and more ambitious targets, Labour is behaving as if the polls are about right.

There is one exception in the Labour strategy: the party is also resourcing a small number of nominally extremely safe Labour seats that it already holds. Activists are being deployed to constituencies with large Muslim populations as the party grapples to minimise the electoral damage of Labour’s now-abandoned position on the Israel-Hamas war. How it will play out in those seats, I don’t know: Labour parliamentary candidates believe many of these contests could go either way.

The most high profile of these battles involves a former Labour MP and leader: Jeremy Corbyn, who is running again in his Islington North seat. Some thoughts, largely on what we don’t know about that contest.

Left adrift

The most useful historical analogies for Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Islington North constituency are George Galloway’s various victories over Labour and Dave Nellist’s failed attempt to retain his seat in 1992, after he was expelled from Labour in 1991 due to his support for the Militant tendency.

Although Galloway has beaten Labour as recently as this year in a by-election, he has done so just once in a general election, in my hometown of Bethnal Green and Bow. He won a little over a third of the vote (35.9 per cent) in 2005. That’s a very good showing for a candidate outside of the major political parties.

Nellist, an assiduous constituency MP (he had won the Spectator’s backbencher of the year) with a following outside of his seat due to his far-left politics, came close to holding his Coventry South East seat in the 1992 general election. He got 28.9 per cent of the vote.

Corbyn, an assiduous constituency MP with a following outside of his constituency due to his far-left politics . . . has a puncher’s chance of similarly doing about as well as Galloway in 2005 or Nellist in 1992, which might be enough to win the seat.

Constituency polling is notoriously difficult, but one poll of Islington North shows Corbyn finishing in the Nellist zone. It is an impressive performance for an independent, but one that leads to a heavy defeat.

That said, I wouldn’t put too much stock in constituency polling. It tends to be wrong in quite a predictable way, overstating the number of politically engaged people, but the annoying thing about the Islington North contest is that you can make very reasonable assumptions about who that hurts. On the one hand, a constituency poll is probably going to underestimate the number of people who will vote for Corbyn because he has helped them or their family over the years as a constituency MP. On the other, a constituency poll is probably going to overestimate the number of people who are going to vote for the 75-year-old because they share his broader politics. So Corbyn could be doing better than this poll, a little bit worse than this poll, or the poll could be exactly right.

At this point, the useful thing to remember is simply that Corbyn has a decent shot at being re-elected: as do at least some of the other independents running against Labour.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? while writing my column.

Top stories today

• Suits you | Keir Starmer accepted £76,000 worth of entertainment, clothes and similar freebies from UK donors since the 2019 general election, more than almost any other MP, according to FT research.

• ‘Brexit celebration event’ funds funnelled to Brexit party | Nigel Farage’s Reform UK benefited from almost £1mn from a group intended to be a cross-party effort to support Brexit. In early 2020, Leave Means Leave — a campaign group run by Reform chair Richard Tice — made the donation to Reform, which was called the Brexit party at the time.

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• From Siberia with love | Sky News’ Ed Conway reveals the links between a British company and a lucrative trade exporting gas from Russia to Europe. “The sanctions regime on Russia just turns out to be significantly more porous than you might have thought,” writes Conway.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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