Britain’s new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak must lead as a conservative, but to do so he also has to confront Labour’s leftwing programme of government.
The first big test for the new Conservative leader will come next week when he stands to face a challenge from the left which was a key reason for Brexit.
The choice by Labour of its new leader will be the latest sign of that party’s growing strength.
After being reduced by the 2017 election, and then by the scandal in which its deputy Leader Tom Watson was exposed as having lied about his own sexual history, Labour is now the third biggest party in the Commons, the largest share on the list of opposition parties after the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
Despite these changes Labour remains the largest single party and the second largest in terms of seats at Westminster. On a recent visit to Scotland, the party leader Jeremy Corbyn boasted that he still had the support of two-thirds of Scottish voters and an even higher figure on the island of Ireland.
The main challenge facing the Labour leader is the task of rebuilding his team, which is still relatively weak and badly in need of the kind of new ideas and energy that might lift his party above the many challenges now facing it in government.
His greatest challenge will be to build a party that can also offer a credible alternative for those parts of the electorate who are looking to the Liberal Democrats for reform.
The big question for Labour is whether or not it is able to build a broad, credible programme which can offer voters a fresh path forward for them after the chaos of Brexit and the disastrous general election in May.
The next general election has not been called but the odds are that it will see voters flock to a different, new and, if not necessarily better, party. The question now is whether or not Labour can offer both a stable government and a stable opposition.
Labour has a problem with its leftwing, anti-establishment manifesto and the leadership has to face up to the realisation that the party still has much work to do before it can truly claim to have a “progressive” and anti-establishment agenda.
In order to build a viable alternative for those voters looking to the Liberal Democrats for reform, the Labour leader
