Iain McNicol, Labour’s departing general secretary, has just emailed all party staff a farewell message, which you can read in full below.

A couple of points worth noting: firstly there is an interesting contrast with Simon Fletcher’s farewell message to party staff when he quit his role in Jeremy Corbyn’s office. That message was widely interpreted as an implicit rebuke to Corbyn's’s remaining staff. There is no equivalent subtext here. Instead, McNicol is seeking to mend fences and to recast his reputation as a general secretary who inherited an organisation in pieces and passes on one in good health. (And while Labour’s wealth and size is wholly down to the Corbyn surge, the party had already returned to solvency thanks to McNicol’s tenure pre-2015. While it is certainly true that he was no Corbynite, he can claim some credit for the fact that the Corbyn surge made Labour financially well-off instead of merely mopping up the party’s late Noughties debt)

Note also the promise to stay on. It has been widely suggeated thst McNicol will recieve a peerage in the next round of nominations and Corbyn’s farwell message appeared to hint at that. Whatever the truth of McNicol’s exit, he has gone out of his way to do it non-acrimoniously.