Rolling coverage of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith in the final Labour party leadership debate, on Sky News
8.45pm BST
Jeremy Corbyn has tweeted a plug for the debate.
Join myself and @OwenSmith_MP for the last hustings of the #LabourLeadership contest. Live on Sky News at 9pm #LabourHustings
8.42pm BST
The Labour leadership contest is finally coming to an end and tonight we’ve got the last TV hustings, hosted by Sky News. Jeremy Corbyn is the clear favourite and he sailed through last week’s BBC Question Time hustings (which I covered here) quite easily. Owen Smith’s main argument has been that Corbyn does not have the leadership abilities to win an election but he will find that case a little harder to make than usual this evening in the light of the fact Corbyn’s performance at PMQs today was a rare triumph.
Corbyn and Smith are debating at Sky HQ before an audience of around 200 Labour supporters. According to Sky, they are split one third Corbyn supporters, one third Smith supporters and one third undecided. The presenter is Sky’s political editor Faisal Islam, whose interviews with David Cameron and Michael Gove were two of the TV highlights of the EU referendum campaign.
Here I am talking because I want people to know, as they come to vote, that if they inflict Jeremy back on us again, even if we all pledge loyalty to him, if we go and serve, he will not deliver electoral victory because he does not know how to.
Look, we all make mistakes. Jeremy and I have never been on frontbench positions. He’s been in parliament 30 years, I’ve been in parliament nearly 20 years, we’re all learning rapidly. I want to learn from our critics. In that way we can just come back together and form an effective opposition.
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Sig Nordal 