Labour party leadership campaign

Labour Party leadership candidate John McDonnell says he's within striking distance of getting his name on the leadership ballot.

A full and rowdy house of trade union activists has rolled up for this evening's John4Leader public campaign event in Euston. The attendees are not all geriatric either: the youth wing of the Labour left is a noticeable force now at many McDonnell events.

The star turn appears on excellent form, not least because the government isn't. Lord Levy has just been chucked in the jug again, and McDonnell tells his very enthusiastic audience that the word - and the hope - on the ground is that one A C L Blair might not be too far behind.

'I think there is a prospect that the Blair government will unravel very quickly now,' McDonnell says with no small pleasure, as he outlines the many encouraging potentials offered by Levy's second exit with the fuzz. 'Things could speed up [with the investigation] even over the next few days.'

If they do, McDonnell says, he and the large number of union members, young activists, reinvigorated leftwing Labour party members and everyday punters who are turning out to these meetings up and down the country will take the opportunity to tell the voting public all about the real traitors to the Labour party.

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The young moderates

You can read Labour young socialists' views on the Labour party's future here

Labour party member Tom Miller, 21, thinks that the party desparately needs a leadership contest, not a Gordon Brown coronation: he just doesn't think that John McDonnell offers much by way of credible competition. 'I don't think that John McDonnell is an alternative. We are not a socialist revolutionary party. He [McDonnell] will not get on the ballot paper and he would not win an election.'

That said, Miller hasn't a lot of time for the party's 'Blairite outriders' either. 'I think that Blair has annoyed the bulk of the party.' And that said, he thinks that Brown is probably the party's best leadership option. 'He has made indications that he could bring the soft left and the soft right together. You can't help feeling that he will be more distributive.'

Fair and equal distribution of life's happier aspects is one of Miller's preoccupations as a party member. He joined the party when he was 16, just a few months before Blair decided to go to war with Iraq. ('I felt like ripping my [membership] cards up [when the war began], but I decided that I didn't want the Labour party to be dominated by extremists, right or left.'). He joined the party because he thought that party membership would complement his A-level studies. Now, he's a final-year law and politics student at Manchester University and a member of the Labour students group there.