My dears, where to start? When No.10 says the prime minister has full confidence in Morgan McSweeney, we know of course it’s actually Morgan McSweeney declaring the prime minister has full confidence in Morgan McSweeney. The trouble is, he probably does: because Morgan McSweeney has advised him accordingly.
There are many ramifications in this complex political quadrille, but there is remarkable unanimity in the criticism levelled at how Keir Starmer runs his government. (Or, at the nub and as many would have it, the way Morgan McSweeney runs Keir Starmer’s government.) That impression of the PM having outsourced almost everything except shaking hands with important foreigners begs the question: what then would happen to the PM and his government were Mr McSweeney to vacate his position?
If we believe the rather persistent narrative, the whole shape of Labour strategy is down to MMcS. In particular that means the extraordinary volte face in making an internationalist party like Labour into Brexit-supporting Little Englanders; and coat-tailing Reform on opposing immigration, when they (and pedants in particular) know perfectly well that we need far more immigrants, not less fewer.
Would these positions change? Without the Machiavellian Mr McSweeney, why should they hold? And in the lack of his chief of staff, Sir Keir would become acutely vulnerable. Might his MPs demand he also looks at electoral reform as their price of keeping him in No.10?
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Pecksniff is grateful for these acute observations from the Economist:
As your diarist has commented to the wise men: This is painful and dreadfully sad too. Keir Starmer increasingly looks like a good man lifted to a position not really of his choosing and for which he shows little aptitude. He has fallen foul of the ideology and the machinations of the henchmen who put him there and may well end his political career in arguably undeserved ignominy.
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There are still three weeks before the by-election at Gorton and Denton, so still early days to play the raisonneur and pretend a prediction. But already we see the contest taking shape. There are five ‘serious’ parties involved, two of which we can discount here. Those two tell the story of how domestic politics are changing.
The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the snotty kids left outside the pub with a still orange and a packet of crisps, noses pressed to the window to watch the ruckus going on in the bar. Those two parties have been part of the warp and weft of our political culture, but are they sliding into irrelevance?
Labour of course are the crusty old warriors, holding half the vote here last time and looking to their local organisation (and – let’s face it – a sense of privilege) to hold on. The challenge comes from the two new kids on the block, Reform and the Greens. Reform has also felt a sense of privilege over the past couple of years. Because of the execrable politics of both Labour and Tories, they are used to just walking into both council and parliamentary seats.
At the moment there is little evidence of the voters; opinions on the doorstep, but on the face of it any one of the three could take the seat. The Greens are, remarkably, the favourite of all the bookies, though all that tells us is that punters reckon they could make a few quid on them. The party has shown formidable organisation when they focus their resources, but this would be their first by-election win.
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It is worth considering what the result of the by-election – however it goes – would mean for our politics. Labour support was in question before the Mandelson scandal broke: what has it done for their vote share now? We only have straws in the wind at the moment, but the wind blows cold. We have to say, in present circumstances, a Labour victory feels unlikely. Nevertheless, the presence of two parties of the left is bound to split the vote, and perhaps dramatically. So it is likely that one of Labour or Greens will come third.
Anything but a victory for Reform would bruise their amour propre, and dent the sense (partly engendered by shabby news reporting) that the party is unstoppable. As Pecksniff has frequently pointed out, that is a long way from the truth. If on the other hand Reform were to come third, any pretence of the unstoppable surge of the right would be punctured.
If Reform do win, then that is going to mean the Tory vote has been squeezed to the point of embarrassment, and no amount of bluster from Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) will disguise the fact that she is leading her party towards oblivion. More grist to the mill of the new Prosper faction, the beginning at last of a moderate Tory fight-back.
A Green victory however would bring the most seismic shock. For the first time they would have beaten all other parties in a high profile by-election. The three traditional parties which have become ensconced in our political culture would have to face potentially existential questions.
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By the way, we learn that Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, suggests childless couples should be taxed for their impertinence. Would those infertile be exempt? How would you tax a couple who separate without children, and anyway how long would they be given in order to procreate? Would childless couples suddenly begin fostering simply as a means of avoiding tax? Would there be comparable rebates for those with large families? Presumably that would be reflected in increased social benefits? Then how does that fit in with his party’s policy of restricting child allowance? Has freedom of choice any part to play here? No doubt Mr Goodwin will be pleased to address these issues.
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In a former life, your diarist was engaged in arranging EU grants to encourage businesses within the bloc to merge with those, usually penurious, in emergent member states. But fast forward a couple of decades, and all that pump priming has worked. Those emergent economies of eastern and central Europe are standing on their own feet and providing lucrative export markets for the rest of the EU bloc.
Sadly of course, and because of Brexit, Britain’s exports market has withered, along with the economy in general. So for the first time ever, because of the EU’s foresight and Britain’s lack of it, Britain is now poorer than the EU.
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The astute reader – and at East Anglia Bylines we expect nothing less – will have noticed that Reform has throttled back on its anti-immigration rhetoric, since of course net immigration figures have plummeted. Instead, they are promoting the slogan that ‘Britain is broken’. (Perhaps a difficult position to hold, since those trying to make the case these days would mostly be turncoats from the Tory party who broke it.)
This follows news that the Tories have accepted they can’t outpace Reform in their contempt for immigration, and instead they are attacking them on their economic policies. If so, then it would appear that the only party still enthusiastically focusing on keeping down immigration is, er, Labour.
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‘Ah, did you once see Farage plain? / And did he stop and speak to you? / And did you speak to him again?’
Thus wrote Browning… well almost, and it is still the tenor of conversation in The Old Lifeboat House in Clacton. And if the gentleman at the bar had seen Farage plain, it would have been in a pub and, of course, during his election campaign: not since. (By the way, Nigel Farage is best known for bludging from anybody with money: do we know if he ever buys a round? I think we should be told.)
The point is, dear reader, the mystic power of his own respect for money increasingly suggests it is beyond his capabilities to behave with even comparative rectitude. These days he is only superficially invested with the characteristics of a public servant. He carries with him a perpetual air of being up to something furtive and not wholly within the canons of acceptable behaviour.
He claimed a six-figure sum in public money as furlough during the Covid years, and once it was safely trousered he blithely condemned the scheme. And he accepted a £50,000 trip to Davos from an Iranian billionaire. And so it goes on.
Yet still, in the Lifeboat and the Queens Arms and Tom Peppers, even as the punters continue to cough up his MPs’ salary of £93,904 (plus expenses) and ‘Nine Jobs’ Nigel tarts himself around to earn another million quid on other jobs in the time he should be spending on his constituents, still all they want is to touch his raiment.
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Nigel Farage is not a man one would usually associate with embarrassment. But social media this week must surely cause discomfort. Among the hysterical claims made on his behalf are that Mr Farage turned water into beer granted the grotesquely implausible last dying wish of a little girl with cancer for her hero, Nine Jobs himself, to visit her in the hospice. Another is that Clacton’s finest has paid for and built a ‘Nigel Farage Medical Center’. The give-away – if one were needed – is of course the word ‘center’ is spelt in the American fashion.
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There was confusion among Reform MPs in the Commons this week, not (it has to be admitted) for the first time. Four of the party’s MPs voted for what is understood to be Reform policy – keeping the two-child limit on benefits – while two voted to get rid of it. They were recent converts Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. Mr Jenrick was seen desperately trying to call his glorious leader on his phone, but Nigel Farage was not contactable. Nor was he anywhere to be seen in the lobbies.
Yes, he had ducked yet another vote, no doubt having a prior and no doubt more lucrative engagement.
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With a happy disregard for veracity, last weekend Kemi Badenoch proclaimed she had been responsible for winning compensation for the ill-used sub-postmasters. “I got sub-postmasters their compensation,” she says. “I fought and I won.”
This is an assertion which of course entirely lacks the merit of being true. As Hansard shows, she failed even to mention the scandal until it became a public outrage with the TV drama. This is all the more remarkable, given that she was the secretary of state for business and trade, under whose auspices the scandal was played out.
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Now who is that face? Didn’t he used to be an MP? Indeed he did, dear reader, and wannabe leader of the Conservative Party too until his campaign team rather cocked up their tactics. They wanted to face Robert Jenrick in the play-offs, rather than Kemi Badenoch, you may recall, so they boosted his votes. Only it worked too well and it was – Yes! That’s the name! – James Cleverly (Braintree) who lost out.
He’s still an MP though, not for the first time this week courting ridicule. He claims Keir Starmer’s judgement on Lord Mandelson is “deeply unsound”. Yet what is this? Mr Cleverly using his own sound judgement to praise the qualifications of Liz Truss at the time she was busy bankrupting the economy.
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Yasmin Gregory, Liz Crosbie, Malcolm Lynn, Helen Forte, James Porter, Stace Richards, Celina Błędowska, Karl Whiteman, Mary Marshall and David Patey.
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