Tyne and Weary

JEREMY CORBYN’S opponents in Parliament have at last agreed on a candidate to challenge him for the leadership of the Labour Party. On July 19th Angela Eagle, a little-known MP of the soft left, stepped aside, leaving Owen Smith, an even-littler-known MP of the soft left, to compete for the job in a vote in September. The news came as a YouGov poll found that Mr Corbyn’s popularity among Labour members had grown since last year, even as it remains low among voters at large. It is Labour’s half-a-million members—many of whom have signed up within the past year specifically in order to vote for the far-left Mr Corbyn—who choose the leader, not the party’s MPs, three-quarters of whom passed a no-confidence motion against him last month. So Mr Corbyn is likely to win. But battles going on far from Westminster could prove more significant.