Tribune

It's good to know that Tribune's diary columnists are bothering to read this blog, it having been a while since they last had a go at me - in fact the last time they did I got a nice hand-written apology from Mark Seddon, the then editor, admitting they had got their facts wrong.

Their faux outrage that I had posted the approximate outcomes of the Labour NEC nominations process is a bid strange, seeing as all I had were guesstimates (given to me by three separate sources, none of them "leaking" Party staff, within 24 hours) whereas their own columnist, the ever-plugged in Kevin Maguire has published exact figures (though I don't think even those are the final, final ones).

I also would have expected Tribune to think it was the interests of internal Party democracy that the numbers and indeed names of CLPs nominating NEC candidates should be published - after all, what's the point in having a nominations process if no one knows the outcome of it? Members shouldn't have to rely on me or Kevin Maguire to find out who was nominated by whom.

Tribune's grasp of maths is almost as dodgy as their politics. They crow that "the Grassroots Alliance have at least 570 votes between their ... candidates –... and the Labour First leadership loyalists trail with around 425" but that's accounted for, and then some, by the GRA running six candidates when, in a spirit of pluralism and not seeking to exclude other strands of opinion from the NEC, Labour First only ran five, with many mainstream CLPs nominating the GRA's Ann Black as their sixth candidate.