I am honoured that the voters of Houghton and Sunderland South put their trust in me again. But I know from countless conversations on the doorstep that too many lifelong voters felt badly let down by Labour, and could not support us. We must now seek to re-build, select a…

I suspect it will be months before we have anything more than a fairly broadbrush understanding of what happened in last week’s election, and while the results did not surprise me, the points I really want to make are about the immediate pitfalls to avoid rather than the longer term…

We love nostalgia in the Labour Party. We pepper our politics with references to people in office seventy years ago. Sometimes we seem to drench our party political broadcasts in a sense of how things were better in the past, an implicit promise that our future will be a recapturing…