Guest Post: Owen Smith

Look, I want to clear this up once and for all. Because there have been some pretty scurrilous accusations flying around about me on the interweb. Lies mostly. Can I just say here and now I am not nor ever have been a sexist. I'm just a normal 'wife and two kids' kind of bloke, and like all blokes I've a tendency to put my foot in my mouth where the ladies are concerned.  Let's face it, they take offence at practically anything, don't they? Even someone as sensitive as I am. The comment about Nicola Sturgeon stuffing her mouth with enormous gobstoppers was meant to be a bit of harmless banter. I mean, I don't even know the woman, but she seems alright in a mouthy kind of way. They seem to go for that in Scotland, don't they? But it was certainly not meant to imply she should shut up. I doubt if anything a bloke like me said would ever make her shut up, to be honest. But I am in no way shape or form a sexist. No way. I'm a radical feminist since way back.

Look, it's not that I don't like Jeremy. He's a decent sort of bloke and I respect that. He might not be the type I'd want to socialise with, I mainly hang out with Pfizer executives, but I can see his heart's in the right place. But this is politics and as Tony once said, if your heart's in the right place you should get a transplant. And there's a lot of sense in that.

My vision for Labour is a strong party of government. I didn't come into politics to be in opposition. Shame I couldn't get selected for the Tory party since they seem to be a shoo-in these days, despite all their awful policies. But as Labour leader I would make the party as good as the Tories.  Because there's no point in having principles if no one ever votes for you. Not that nobody votes for us, but the right of kind of people aren't voting for us and under Jeremy's leadership they never will.  So it's all well and good Jeremy standing by his principles, they're just the wrong principles. That should be obvious.

I resigned from Jeremy's cabinet because I could see he was unelectable. If a party wants to be electable it must have a leader who is electable. And Jeremy just isn't. It doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands rally to his public meetings, that's just a fact and I've never been one to shirk an unpleasant truth.