Tower Hamlets, Barnet, Cardiff and now back to London – it’s been a busy few days for Labour switchers to the Liberal Democrats:

The author Robert Harris … so despairs at Labour, the party to which he once donated wads of his hard-earned writing cash, that he now supports the Liberal Democrats.

Despite encouraging others to join Labour to oust Corbyn last year, he says: “When my membership lapses I shan’t renew it. I don’t believe in the leader and I don’t believe in the policies.”

The party is “dead”, he says, just “a sect like the Seventh Day Adventists or Scientologists”. Corbyn himself is “testy and peevish”, and to those who point to the leader’s supposed goodness, he says: “A great deal of evil is done in the world by people who are well-meaning.”

Perhaps Corbyn’s biggest crime in Harris’s view was his damp rag of a campaign to stay in the European Union. “At the top of Labour there was a definite feeling that they secretly hoped we’d leave. There’s an element who want to bring on calamity and catastrophe in order to smash the world and make it anew. I think the paradox is that Europe, which was supposed to split the Tories forever, has unified them, and it’s actually split and destroyed the Labour Party. But that’s Corbyn’s leadership.” [Evening Standard]