His high spirits aren’t all that surprising.
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But Mr Owen will have the summer to persuade numerous 500,000 Labour members, as well as the 183,000 people who signed up this week as registered supporters and affiliated supporters in the unions, that the party would fare better under his leadership. They are clearly not, which is why we have a leadership contest.
To cheers from supporters, he said: “This party is going places, this party is strong, this party is capable of winning a general election”.
“It is very unfortunate and another example of why really we need a new leadership rather than Jeremy Corbyn”, she said.
It comes after Labour suspended its Brighton constituency party and annulled a vote that installed officers supportive of Mr Corbyn in key roles.
A Labour MP has accused Jeremy Corbyn of considering using his father to “bully” him following comments the MP made in an interview. However, the party ranks have swelled by 100,000 new recruits since the June referendum.
The Corbyn team’s decision to focus on gender equality reflects the frustration among many Labour members, particularly women, that the leadership will once again be held by a man.
Mr Corbyn won the leadership with 59.5 per cent of the vote past year but has now lost the support of most of his MPs.
It is hard to imagine anyone more removed from the values of Jeremy Corbyn than David Miliband and unless councillor Green wants a return to the failed policies of the New Labour project, I suggest she reviews her analysis of the present situation. It’s them that have been up there, not me.
“There is a huge amount of talent on the Labour benches”.
Mr Corbyn also signalled his willingness to move on from the spat, saying he had an “ability to very conveniently forget some of the unpleasant things that have been said” to and about him over the past few weeks.
“It’s the job, it’s the duty it’s the responsibility of every Labour MP to get behind the party at that point and put it there against the Tories …”
“And I’m very surprised and actually very disappointed that they should say that because politics has to be about bringing people in and I think we have done that spectacularly well. I don’t know that, but I do know that it’s got to be stamped out in Labour”.
Mr McGinn said that a Twitter account using the name Frank Ryan – which claims to have a close association with Mr Corbyn – subsequently posted that he was a “traitor” and no longer welcome in his home village of Camlough.
Smith, who pitches himself as the candidate who can “save” the party, also faces criticism for his past as a lobbyist for the pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer and his support for the Iraq war.
“The injustices that scar society today are not those of 1945. want, squalor, idleness, disease and ignorance”, he said.
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“I will see how the contest unfolds and look forward to contributing to the debate about our party’s future”.
