Election rules that would have made Stalin blush

If the lunatic new rules for Labour's leadership contest have been explained correctly, there are only two very narrow categories of people who will not be eligible to pay £25 and vote in the election -

1) People who have already paid to become full members of the Labour party over the last few months.

2) Members of other parties.

That's it.  In theory, there is absolutely nothing to stop millions upon millions of Tory and UKIP voters from paying £25 and voting for Angela Eagle (unless they've left a trail of evidence of their political views on social media), and yet more than 100,000 full Labour members will be totally banned from taking part.  It's very, very hard not to read this as a method of flushing out the people keenest on voting for Corbyn by fraudulently telling them that paying up and joining the party will make them eligible to vote - and then slapping a ban on them instead.  Many of those people will have been £3 registered supporters from last year's contest who were warned that they would need to become full members to be sure of taking part again - and having taken that advice, they now find that they still can't vote, and are practically the only people in the UK not eligible to become a registered supporter this time around.  'Cynical' doesn't even begin to cover this stunt - it would have made Stalin blush.

The only consolation is that anyone who took the advice of the Murdoch press and joined Labour recently to vote against Corbyn will also be banned from participating - but by all accounts they are only a small minority of the new members.

In spite of the laughably blatant gerrymandering, Corbyn should still be the favourite to win.  A closed shop based on the membership in February ought to favour someone who had a clear lead even among full members in the election last September.  The recent YouGov poll gave him a 10% lead over Eagle among members - and remember that the fieldwork was conducted when all the momentum seemed to be against him.  The mood music has got considerably better tonight.

And it's perfectly possible that the plotters may eventually look back on what happened today and conclude that they shot themselves in the foot.  Any victory for Eagle is now going to be of questionable legitimacy - but if Corbyn wins, they'll have to live with the humiliation of knowing that they couldn't even win with the help of a crooked franchise.