President Obama has delivered a withering verdict of Jeremy Corbyn: Labour is “disintegrating” because under Jez they have lost touch with “fact and reality.” Obama was speaking in an interview with David Axelrod in which he appeared to forget the Labour leader’s name:

AXELROD: Just a couple more things. Are you worried about the Corbynization of the Democratic Party? Saw the Labor Party just sort of disintegrated in the face of their defeat and move so far left that it’s, you know, in a very — in a very frail state. And there is an impulse to respond to — to the power of Trump by, you know, being as edgy…

OBAMA: On the left.

AXELROD: … on the left.

OBAMA: I don’t worry about that, partly because I think that the Democratic Party has stayed pretty grounded in fact and reality. Trump emerged out of a decade, maybe two, in which the Republican Party, because it had to say no for tactical reasons, moved further and further and further away from what we would consider to be a — a basic consensus around things like climate change or how the economy works. And it started filling up with all kinds of conspiracy theorizing that became kind of common wisdom or conventional wisdom within the Republican Party base. That hasn’t happened in the Democratic Party. I think people like the passion that Bernie brought, but Bernie Sanders is a pretty centrist politician relative to…

AXELROD: Corbyn.

OBAMA: Relative to Corbyn or relative to some of the Republicans.

Can’t wait to hear what President Trump thinks…

Remember those clandestine tape recordings of Labour events which mysteriously made their way into the press during the election? Guido has been sent one of Spencer Livermore, Labour’s campaign director in 2015, speaking on Tuesday night. An enjoyably candid assessment of why Miliband lost.

“The accepted wisdom is that in 2015, Labour had the wrong strategy to win the election. But my experience is not that the strategy was wrong, but that it was absent. I don’t that that we had the wrong strategy, I don’t really think we had much of a strategy at all. I think that none of the elements that I would associate with strategy were present in the run up to 2015. There was no identified electorate that we wanted to pursue. There was no attempt to de-position our opponents. There was no attempt to frame the debate on our terms. There was no coherent or persistent narrative. I think what we had was not a strategy but a credo. It was an ideological project based on a mistaken assumption that the country has shifted to the left… There was ideology there, but there was no strategy there”.

Odd when Labour paid their “senior strategic adviser”, one David Axelrod, £223,572 and Stewart Wood was Miliband‘s director of strategy…

David Axelrod has the last word on his rival campaign managers…

“My operant theory about politics is you’re never as smart as you look when you’re winning and you’re never as dumb as you look when you’re losing.”

David Axelrod praises Tory TV tactics…

“The one thing they did that was particularly shrewd was they insisted that all the parties participate in the debate. They didn’t do that out of a sense of equity and fairness. They did it because they wanted to give the Scottish National Party a platform and the result is the situation you see today.”

“The thing I’d say to you though about this, these people are less powerful than they used to be,” Ed Miliband told Russell Brand during their enlightening discussion about his critics in the newspapers. Someone should tell the man Labour are paying £300,000 to consult on messaging.

In an interview with Politico today, David Axelrod is asked whether he thinks Britain’s right-wing press is more powerful than Fox News, beamed into 87,058,000 American households. He replies:

“Yeah, I do.”

He goes on to admit he only visited the UK six times while working for Ed. That’s £50,000 a trip…

David Axelrod flew into London for a couple of days, had a look around, shook a few hands, sent a couple of tweets then got on a flight back to Chicago. Axelrod managed to find time to pen a plea on behalf of Labour’s election campaign coordinator, wee Dougie Alexander, who is being run very hard by the SNP in his own Paisley seat. Well worth his £300,000 fee? At least on this visit he managed to spell “Miliband” correctly…