Next month will be the fifteenth anniversary of Guido’s digital incarnation. We have seen rivals come and go. One thing we have never forgotten is that you the readers make us what we are. You provide us with tips, you encourage and admonish us. We always remember that it is our job to inform and entertain you.

The number of hits from visitors has increased from 20-a-day in 2004 to some 200,000-a-day last month. Our coverage of the Tory leadership battle generated a record 6,218,561 reader hits in July. A new all-time traffic record for the website…

More than three quarters of Labour Party members are now drawn from the most affluent social classes in Britain, making somewhat of a mockery of Jezza’s claim to be leading a workers’ movement. Professor Tim Bale’s Party Members Project finds that 77% of surveyed Labour members are in the ABC1 social group. ABC1s are Britain’s richest and most-educated, working in professional or managerial jobs. The proportion of ABC1 Labour members has also increased since the last survey (and since Corbyn became leader): ABC1 members are up 7% from from 70% in 2015. The C2DE classes – who work in manual jobs, and whom Labour traditionally represents – now account for just 23% of the party’s membership. Naturally, in its exclusive write-up of the findings, the Guardian buried this demographic info in the second-to-last paragraph. Up the ABC1s!

The Twitterati is getting very upset with newspapers and MPs for questioning the ages of the ‘child refugees’ arriving in the UK. Historical data however shows this is not an unreasonable question to be asked. Last year the Home Office queried the ages of nearly 600 asylum seekers who claimed to be children, finding that two thirds were in fact adults. Since 2006 nearly 5,000 adults have sought asylum claiming to be children. Whatever your views on the migrant crisis, the numbers don’t lie…

The Labour moderates, formerly known as Blairites, are crying into their mocha lattes this morning that Eddie Izzard not only lost out (as usual) on getting a place on the NEC, he also cost them up to three seats and any chance of a majority.

The two charts above show the clean sweep of the top six places by the the hard-left (reds). If Izzard’s votes were redistributed to the moderates (pinkos), which is mathematically possible if not probable, they would have won three more seats and regained control of the NEC. “It was Izzard wot lost it for the moderates. Had that ego-maniac not run, we’d have had 71,000 more votes up for grabs that could have gone to moderates. He’s basically given an NEC seat to the Corbynistas. When it comes to politics, Eddie is a very good comedian” laments a Blairite die-hard. By Guido’s calculations if just over half of Izzard’s votes had gone to moderates, Ellie Reeves, Bex Bailey and Johanna Baxter would be holding the line against the Corbynistas on the NEC…

The Owen Smith-supporting Labour First faction emailed supporters optimistically that

Contrary to some of the online and media reaction, this does not give full control of the NEC to Corbyn. There is a net change of just one seat as the PLP section saw a seat go from left to right. When the new NEC takes office after Annual Conference, the solid vote for the Hard Left will be 16 if they all turn up, with 17 others. Thus NEC meetings will continue to be finely balanced and hinge on the personal decisions of the more independent-minded members like Ann Black, and the stance taken by the GMB and Unison. We will win some votes and lose others just like we did in the pre-leadership election meeting. 

Though they go on to say pointedly

If we can avoid a split moderate vote in future contests (Eddie Izzard ran as an independent when we would have been happy to support him if he had asked us) that will help!

It woz Izzard wot lost it…

Theresa May has so far spent most of her campaign talking tough on immigration, including a threat to EU migrants currently living in the UK. Her team know this is her weak spot – in the next two months we will hear a lot about how May failed to deliver on immigration while in office. The above graph is a snapshot of all fourth quarter immigration estimates during her time as Home Secretary. An estimated 3,443,000 migrants entered the UK, with 1.2 million of those coming directly from EU states. Since 2012, EU immigration has increased every single year, with 2015 proving the highest year since records began in 2006. May’s campaign thinks a few “Go Home” vans are enough to secure her credentials as the strongest candidate on immigration… 

News from Eastbourne suggests that their new Tory MP Caroline Ansell has come off the fence and decided for Leave. In her newsletter, she said: “I had first hoped to remain in a reformed EU. The renegotiation deal says everything about today’s EU – that it is only moving in one direction: ever increasing centralisation.”

Click here to view the entire spreadsheet.

That puts the number of Tory MPs who openly disagree with David Cameron and George Osborne at 143 or some 43% of the parliamentary party…