No sooner has my interview with Owen Smith begun than it is interrupted. Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle has just entered its 50th hour and Labour’s chief whip Rosie Winterton is calling. After the promotion of Emily Thornberry to shadow defence secretary, Smith, the shadow work and pensions secretary, needs a new deputy. The following morning it is announced that opposition whip Angela Rayner has been given the post (she, however, has still not been replaced).
When Smith returns from the front room of his office, I ask him whether Corbyn was right to hold a reshuffle. He stonewalls: “You ain’t going to get nothing out of me about the reshuffle, other than to say ‘we’ve had a reshuffle, you sat in the stairwell for 30-odd hours and I feel sorry for you because in the end it turned out to be a bit of something of nothing.’ What happened? Two people were moved, a couple of new people are going to be moved into some of the frontbench roles, a few frontbenchers resigned. Those sorts of things happen in politics in every era, in every party.”
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