what is extreme about owen jones? hes a bit whiny and annoying to listen do but i would not describe him as extreme left!
The problem with Jones is that he's not really 'one of them', in the sense that he is far more of a social democrat than he is a revolutionary Marxist, and as such they don't fully trust him. He did his dues doing campaign work for McDonnell but McDonnell is much more pragmatic and business like than Corbyn and most of the genuinely extreme people floating around the Labour party these days.
Jones is also not stupid and knows exactly how bad Corbyn is for the party. He has written as much. But now that Corbyn is de facto in control of the party with zero opposition, Jones is out in the cold, and for the last 2 years he's been bending over backwards, aping positions he does not hold, acting less as a correspondent and more as a PR officer for a leadership office that routinely takes the piss out of him. Bar one or two differences Owen Jones holds more or less the exact same politics as I do, which they'll hold against him forever. It's like he's caught up between the dream of what could happen but won't (a more socialist, movement based politics in the UK) and what is actually happening (entrenched divisions, the breakup of the labour coalition and the seeming permanency of the Tories).
He is also conscious of the absolute necessity of winning and being in government, more so than most of the Corbyn media.
He's defended some awful things from our side and as such it's hard to drum up sympathy for him, except in cases like this where it's clearly unwarranted and disgusting. The homophobia is laughable when you consider who the leading brexiters actually are. It is absolutely worth pointing out that Jones is on the receiving end of the sort of abuse he's been handwaving away when it's been directed at Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge. He's also defended some atrocious stuff from the fake news Corbyn media outlets like Skwawkbox and Bastani.
MPs get far more shit than any of you realise. I saw some of the correspondence that led to Pat Glass stepping down, utterly vile from both sides of the divide, and she was as inoffensive a safe-seat, working class Labour MP as you're likely to get. Fuck this 'giving it to the elites' nonsense, it's just cover for violence.