It's Your Party v Your Party in court

Things continue to go brilliantly at Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s exciting new operation. The Labour breakaway aims to be a refuge for leftists disaffected by Keir Starmer, though many now seem to have joined the surging Greens instead.

Back in September, Sultana and Corbyn appeared to have fallen out after the former launched a website without the other’s sign-off to gather membership fees from more than 20,000 of the party’s initial supporters. She claimed it could have raised £1.1 million.

Corbyn’s allies scrambled to get Sultana to take down her post, and hours later, the former Labour leader used X to urge his supporters to ignore her membership email and cancel any direct debits that had already been set up. As a result, Sultana claimed to have been “effectively frozen out” of Your Party’s social media accounts and that she had “been subjected to what can only be described as a sexist boys’ club”.

Now with the band back together – Sultana has rather hopefully compared Corbyn and herself to Oasis’s reunited Gallagher brothers – the launch has taken another twist, with the party preparing legal action against a group of its own founders after a final deadline to hand over at least £800,000 in donations passed without payment.

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Figures close to the party claimed to the Guardian that directors of MoU Operations Ltd (MoU) had “gone rogue”, holding supporters’ funds to ransom and undermining its founding process “despite direct pleas from Jeremy and Zarah”.

MoU Operations Ltd is a company set up by former Labour mayor of North of Tyne Jamie Driscoll, former member of South Africa’s national assembly Andrew Feinstein and former Labour MP Beth Winter. The three helped set the movement up before, as is inevitably the way with these things, there was a falling-out.

The latest row threatens to overshadow and affect the party’s first national conference in Liverpool next month, where members are due to approve a draft constitution and elect a 21-member executive. Ahead of the party’s regional assemblies which have taken place so far, members who joined under Sultana’s slightly previous original system had to jump through additional hoops, including showing proof of payment. The dispute also covers the control of thousands of supporters’ data collected at that initial launch.

Meanwhile, there’s been no public comment by the only person listed as Your Party’s leader in its registration with the Electoral Commission, Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps he’s been busy: yesterday it was announced he would be playing ‘the Wizard of Oz-lington’ in the pantomime Wicked Witches: A Popular Panto at the Pleasance Theatre in North London later this year. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn…