Rolling coverage of all the developments from the Labour conference in Liverpool, including Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show

8.16am BST

You might expect Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour conference to be dominating the news headlines this morning, but events in Liverpool are being slightly overshadowed by a Conservative party story – excerpts from a book by David Cameron’s communications chief, Sir Craig Oliver, saying Cameron felt “badly let down” by Theresa May during the EU referendum.

Mail on Sunday front page:
How Theresa torpedoed PM Cameron#tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/sTDcZa2HrD

Related: Corbyn ‘vindicated’ as he pledges more power to Labour members

The Labour Party risks extinction unless Jeremy Corbyn drops plans to take revenge on his critics following his landslide win in the leadership election, Sadiq Khan has warned.

The London mayor said bitter divisions between Corbynistas and moderates meant his party was in “more serious” danger of splitting and then dying out than in the early 1980s, when the Gang of Four broke away to form the SDP.

Labour MPs are steeling themselves for a long war of attrition with Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-left supporters that many fear will end in a “catastrophic” general election defeat.

There was dismay after their attempt to oust Corbyn backfired and his victory over rival Owen Smith was confirmed in a half-empty conference hall in Liverpool at noon yesterday, with one former frontbencher saying: “I feel sick.”

An exclusive message from the newly re-elected Labour Leader ahead of our special programme live in Liverpool tomorrow at 10am @itv #Peston http://pic.twitter.com/kcNvublbMF

#Murnaghan is live from #Lab16 tomorrow with @johnmcdonnellMP, @HackneyAbbott, @SeemaMalhotra1 and @Patrick4Dales http://pic.twitter.com/T03n8jgKY3

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Rolling coverage of the announcement of the result of the Labour leadership election

8.14am BST

At 11.45am the Labour party will announce the result of its leadership contest at its conference in Liverpool. Jeremy Corbyn is widely expected to win and, as we report in our overnight lead, insiders are predicting that he will get 65%. That would be an even bigger win than he achieved last year when Corbyn got 59.5% of first preference votes. A result like this would be a big disappointment for Owen Smith, the former shadow work and pensions secretary who is challenging Corbyn and who, at the very least, hoped to make a dent in Corbyn’s lead.

Last night Corbyn issued a statement appealing for unity.

We must win the next General Election so that Labour can rebuild and transform Britain – so that no one and no community is left behind. We can and must do that together.

That includes those who have voted, volunteered and campaigned for Owen Smith.

This summer, we have had a debate about the future of Labour and the future of Britain. It has been robust, and at times difficult, but it has been overwhelmingly respectful in tone.

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Share breaking news, leave links to interesting articles online and chat about the week’s political events in our open thread

8.08am BST

I’m not writing my usual Politics Live blog today so, as an alternative, here’s Politics Live: readers’ edition. It is intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.

Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day’s political stories – just as you do during the daily blog. It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments – breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting.

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.18am BST

It’s such a quiet day this morning that on the Today programme they resorted to reading out poetry, Keats’ Ode to Autumn. The Commons is in recess, and the main political parties are getting ready for their party conferences. Labour’s starts at the weekend and, to mark it, the New Statesman has published a special edition, leading with an article by David Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary, despairing at what has happened to his party. Like the Ode to Autumn (which an academic on Today said was partially influenced by the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre), Miliband’s article laments loss. But, unlike the Ode, it’s not great poetry, and it’s much more specific.

Miliband makes the routine claim (for people from his wing of the party) that Jeremy Corbyn is “unelectable”, but he gives the argument a new twist. Rather than claiming that Corbyn’s policy objectives are fine, but that Corbyn is just the wrong person to be able to implement them (which broadly was Owen Smith’s argument in the leadership contest, with some exceptions), Miliband says that Corbyn has the wrong policies.

The party has ended up pre-New Labour in policy and culture, when we need to be post-New Labour. This year’s leadership election has spent a lot of time debating how to “bring back” various lost icons, such as nationalised railways, rather than focusing on new ideas for the future.

The main charge against Jeremy Corbyn is not just that his strategy is undesirable because it makes the party unelectable. That is only half the story. The real issue is that his strategy makes the party unelectable because it is in many aspects undesirable.

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.05am BST

Finally the Labour leadership contest is coming to an end. The ballot closes at 12pm today, and the winner will be announced in Liverpool on Saturday, just before the start of the party’s annual conference.

Jeremy Corbyn has always been the favourite to be re-elected and, since a YouGov poll at the end of last month gave him a 24-point lead over his challenger, Owen Smith, the result has been seen as a foregone conclusion.

I think we’re going to win.

I think it’s going to be really tough to get the 59.5% that we got last time around because of the numbers that have been prevented from voting. Some will argue if we dip below the 59.9% that somehow Jeremy’s mandate has lessened. If we win, no matter what, his mandate is still in place.

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Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Tim Farron’s speech on the final day of the Lib Dem conference

9.11am BST

The Liberal Democrats are today heading into the fourth and final day of their autumn conference but, with only eight MPs, very little leverage over power at Westminster or anywhere else and Labour’s civil war hogging the headlines, they have struggled to leave much of a footprint on the national news.

Today, though, they have a chance to make some headlines. The leader’s speech is generally the most important showpiece event at any party conference and Tim Farron is closing the conference this afternoon.

And let’s stop being complacent about our NHS. We have of course a brilliant NHS, the best staff in the world, free care at the point of access…but we are spending at least far less every year than we need to make sure that we have a health and care service that really will provide for you and your family from cradle to grave.

So we need to face the hard truth that the NHS needs more money – a lot more money – not just to stop it lurching from crisis to crisis but so that it can meet the needs and the challenges it will face in the years ahead. So that it can be the service we all need it to be for the long-term. To provide confidence in our health service for the next fifty years.

Related: Lib Dems will turn NHS into National Health and Care Service, says Farron

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

8.36am BST

The “good cop/bad cop” routine is a familiar one in any negotiation and it is a strategy the Labour leadership seems to have been adopting as Jeremy Corbyn ponders what to do about the majority of MPs who do not support his leadership. Some of his allies are quite happy to issue threats to the dissidents, as the Guardian reports in its splash today.

Related: Len McCluskey: disloyal MPs ‘asking for it’ and will be held to account

I have made it my business to talk to quite a lot of Labour MPs and will continue to do so and I hope they will understand that we’ve been elected as Labour MPs …

It doesn’t mean everybody agrees on everything all the time – that I understand – but the general direction of opposition to austerity, opposing the Tories on grammar schools, those are actually the kind of things that unite the party.

That then becomes, surely, a very strong campaigning basis for the Labour movement, becomes a campaigning factor in towns and cities where there’s never been very much activity before. That does begin to change the debate and national mood. I think you’ll begin to see that play out, particularly in local elections next year and after that.

I’ve been at political rallies all my life, of various sorts. What I find exciting and nice, but slightly depressing, is when I know half the people at the meeting I go to. I go to these events all over the country, and some of them, I don’t know anybody. I don’t know anybody at all, and they’re people who come up to me who say ‘I’ve never been involved in politics before, I’m interested in what you have to say, because I’m interested particularly in the economic argument that you have to rebalance society away from inequality towards equality’.

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Rolling coverage of the Ukip conference in Bournemouth, including Nigel Farage’s final speech as leader and the announcement of his replacement

9.18am BST

The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) starts its autumn conference in Bournemouth today. Its supporters would claim that it is the most successful party in the history of British politics. Its detractors would claim that it is one of the most shambolic and useless. Both descriptions are reasonably accurate.

Ukip has only won one national election (the European elections in 2014) and it only has one MP, but if you judge a party by whether it has achieved its key objective, then Ukip’s record is hard to fault. Just over 20 years after it was founded, it got exactly what it wanted: a referendum on EU membership, and a vote to leave. No other party can make this boast. There is an argument to be had about quite how important a part Ukip played in the EU referendum campaign itself. (Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP, told the Guardian at the weekend that leave only won because Vote Leave ignored the approach favoured by Ukip’s leader Nigel Farage.) But Ukip was decisive in ensuring that the referendum was held in the first place. David Cameron has a hearty dislike for Farage and Ukip, and he conceded a referendum because he was under pressure to do so from Tory MPs, but those Tories had leverage because the Ukip started soaring after the 2010 general election and Cameron concluded that, without offering a referendum, the Conservative party could not win in 2015 (and/or he could not survive as leader).

Related: Nigel Farage aide defects to Tories claiming a mass exodus from Ukip

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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen

9.01am BST

Unite has welcomed the announcement, saying 25,000 jobs will be created by the Hinkley Point C project. This is from Unite’s national officer for energy, Kevin Coyne.

Our members are shovel ready and dead keen to start work on the country’s first nuclear power station for a generation. It is excellent news that that the uncertainty caused by Theresa May’s decision to put Hinkley Point ‘on hold’ has now been dispelled and that the Government recognises the role of nuclear in a mixed energy economy. It means that the lights will remain on in the UK in the decades ahead and it heralds an economic renaissance for the West Country, with the accompanying creation of thousands of skilled jobs and the positive ripple effects to the supply chain across the UK.

8.53am BST

Finally we’ve got the confirmation that the government is giving the Hinkley Point C power station the go-ahead. Theresa May halted it in July, just before contracts were due to be signed because she wanted to review it, but this morning the government has announced that it will go ahead – but with new rules governing future foreign investment in British nuclear power stations.

This is crucial because in some respects the the concerns about Hinkley are not really about Hinkley at all, but about Bradwell. China is a minority investor in Hinkley Point, but it is investing as part of a deal that will also see it play a minority role in building a new nuclear power station at Sizewell, in Suffolk, and that will also see it take the lead in building a new nuclear plant at Bradwell, in Essex. For the Chinese Bradwell is the real prize because they believe that establishing successful Chinese-designed nuclear power station in the UK will lead to them breaking into many other markets in the West.

Related: Hinkley Point C nuclear power station gets go-ahead

Having thoroughly reviewed the proposal for Hinkley Point C, we will introduce a series of measures to enhance security and will ensure Hinkley cannot change hands without the government’s agreement. Consequently, we have decided to proceed with the first new nuclear power station for a generation.

Britain needs to upgrade its supplies of energy and we have always been clear that nuclear is an important part of ensuring our future low-carbon energy security.

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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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