Is the New Left Party Over Already?

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Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left party is crashing out – as the kids say – and this time, it might be over for good.

Let’s break down what happened. At 11:20am on Thursday, the estimated 800,000 people already registered with Your Party received an email saying the membership portal had opened. The time had come to join the party. In just two hours, 20,000 people had joined, according to Zarah Sultana on X.

However, all was not well.

Just after 2pm, a second communication landed in supporters’ inboxes. This time it was from the other Your Party founder, Jeremy Corbyn. Marked URGENT, he called on anyone who had set up a direct debit to immediately cancel it, calling the earlier email “unauthorised” and saying “legal advice is being taken”.

This statement was signed by the ‘independent alliance’ MPs Corbyn, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Shockat Adam. Sultana’s name was notably absent.

Then, at 2:44pm, Sultana dropped a statement of her own – and it was a bombshell. She claimed to have been “sidelined” by the above MPs, subjected to a “sexist boys’ club”, excluded and “treated appallingly”, and specifically called out longtime Corbyn ally Karie Murphy as an opponent.

By 7:15pm, the factional split looked even worse, with a Your Party statement defending its “process rooted in inclusivity and mutual respect”, refuting Sultana’s claims about Murphy – “a trusted and dedicated volunteer” – and escalating the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

A struggle for control between the two co-founders’ camps appears to have fractured Your Party before it could really get going.

On one side, Corbyn’s allies from the Peace and Justice Project and those who surrounded him as leader of the opposition, including Murphy, are in charge of the Your Party mailing list. On the other, Zarah’s camp – and a company registered as MoU Operations Ltd under directors Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll and Beth Winter which controls Your Party finances and donor information. This was a fudged way to ensure nobody held all of the power, but now has come unstuck.

Driscoll denies that he, Feinstein and Winter are part of any camp and says they have been explicitly trying to broker mediation for some weeks.

Sultana’s fears about being squeezed out – and her unhappiness about being the sole person from her camp with voting rights (Corbyn’s faction of five independent alliance MPs would outweigh her significantly) seemingly prompted her unilateral action yesterday in opening the membership portal.

One insider told Novara Media that Sultana allies Driscoll, Feinstein and Winter have been “told to fuck off”, leading to stalemate, dysfunction and a whole host of people who really should know better refusing to work with others.

Missing in action for some involved in Your Party appears to be a sense of political urgency. We are faced with EDL founder Tommy Robinson’s far-right rally garnering up to 150,000 attendees in central London last Saturday and the looming threat of a Reform government in 2026 mirroring authoritarian Trumpism. The response from some of the leading leftwing figures in the country has descended into a farce.

Sultana took a gamble in opening the membership portal – and Corbyn’s camp could have chosen to meet her there, while keeping internal disagreements behind closed doors.

They did not, and the chaos spilled publicly – with Sultana facing accusations online that she’d taken money from supporters “under false pretences”.

Politico’s evening Playbook newsletter last night was predictably flavoured with gleeful lobby snark, calling it a “total shit-show” that “gave MPs something to smile about”. Similar centrist smirks about leftwing pissups and breweries abounded on X. The Daily Express’s Christian Calgie reported a Labour party source saying “Pahahahahah”.

Could this ever have been a healthy coalition? For some, the writing was on the wall when someone in Corbyn’s team briefed the Sunday Times against Sultana back in July, after she fired the starting pistol to get Your Party off the blocks in another unilateral action.

This second big “unauthorised” swing from Sultana and the refusal of Corbyn allies to move with her feels difficult to recover from. A devastated source told me the past three months have been “a mutual failure”.

The big winners? Farage, Starmer and the ever-hustling Zack Polanski with a huge party mandate – the Greens now appear a safer place for signups, donations and energy.

The confusion and frustration of voters who really wanted this new left party to work is palpable. As another insider I spoke to said yesterday, “no one is covered in glory” over this sorry episode. You can say that again.