The Labour Party is now fighting like cats in a sack, and the Prime Minister risks being ousted after May’s elections unless he is brave enough to make the case for undoing Brexit, our Writer at Large Neil Mackay argues

For anyone in doubt that Labour under Keir Starmer is now in full ‘slug-taking-a-bath-in-saltwater’ mode, please watch Tuesday’s Newsnight.

It was clear the programme was going to be rather deranged from the moment the leftwing Labour MP Barry Gardiner waltzed, seemingly uninvited, into the studio and plonked himself down opposite Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of the socially-conservative Blue Labour faction which has the Prime Minister’s ear.

As a guide to where Glasman sits politically, he favours “public humiliation” like putting shoplifters in the stocks and “pelting them with rotten fruit”. So slightly to the right of Vlad the Impaler.

If the intention was to quell speculation about Labour disintegrating and the possibility of a challenge to Starmer by someone like Wes Streeting, then the pair went about it in a spectacularly weird way.

Glasman called Streeting an “apparatchik out of the student union”. Gardiner responded by saying the Labour government cared “more about extirpating the people who disagreed with it than they have about setting out a clear programme … Circle the wagons and you end up in a circular firing squad”.

The public, Gardiner went on, don’t know what Labour “is about”. He said Starmer had abandoned his ten pre-election pledges, and: “The public is fed up and that’s reflected in the polls.”

Gardiner claimed Number 10 has been briefing against cabinet colleagues and “attacking all the people who are closest around them........

© Herald Scotland