Oh, Jeremy Corbyn - Your Party beset by more splits

Things continue to go brilliantly at Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s exciting new operation. Last week independent MP Adnan Hussain quit the Labour breakaway group, citing its “pattern of clique-like behaviour and gatekeeping” and thus becoming possibly the first politician to quit a party that doesn’t really exist yet.

Now it appears that Sultana faces being barred from speaking at the inaugural conference of the party she co-founded amid fresh infighting and concerns about how to counter Zack Polanski’s Greens, who, while Your Party was scrapping among itself, stole a march and surged ahead in the polls to the point that some show it neck-and-neck with Labour.

Sultana and Corbyn are daggers drawn in what some close to the operation say is a generational battle in the nascent party. Sultana, 32, is said to respect Corbyn but doesn’t have much time for the close coterie he surrounds himself with – basically the same Islington crew he’s been with since the 1970s.

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Those close to 76-year-old Corbyn, meanwhile, think that Sultana, with her near-570,000 Instagram followers, is determined to make it all about her, with one ally telling the Times: “We don’t want this to become the Zarah show”.

Corbyn’s allies also accuse Team Sultana of withholding hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations to actually run the conference, which is taking place in Liverpool at the end of the month. She has agreed to return more than £500,000 in membership fees raised through a website launched without Corbyn’s sign-off, but has said she will only do so in tranches and once costs are deducted.

Now Team Corbyn has said Sultana would need to be on speaking terms with those organising the conference in order to get a slot, which she very much isn’t. In return, Corbyn has not been invited to or was aware of a rally hosted by Sultana set to take place on the eve of the conference, an unofficial event for which tickets are being sold via Sultana’s personal Action Network campaign.

And all this comes just weeks after Sultana told the BBC that Your Party was not about protests but aimed to be “running” the government. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!