Electoral Calculus has an extraordinary poll finding this week. At this point it should be taken with an ocean full of salt, of course, but the prediction is: Conservatives 178 seats, Reform 175 and Labour 174.
There are provisos aplenty. We are four years away from an election and everything will change. Keir Starmer remains the most popular – well, least unpopular – party leader. The Tories are still in chaos. Reform has no organisation as such and even with only five MPs at the moment, and of the past 191 by-elections since the general election they have won only 11 seats. In local government, they have only 71 seats from just under 20,000 across the country.
Clearly these figures would mean a hung parliament, hung like never before, between three parties. It looks as though government would be an unholy alliance between Tories and Reform. But at their present rate of movement rightwards don’t count out Labour, who seem determined to outflank Reform in performative cruelty and set at nought all the principles the party has stood for throughout its history.
Labour may be about to choose a door through which one doubts whether there can ever be a return. Our principal party of the left may be no more.
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These are depressing times, but there is a smouldering little spark of hope in this poll, notwithstanding all those provisos mentioned. Can we really see Reform and the Tories working together? At the moment it seems more likely that the Conservatives would be trampled underfoot. If that were so, then it would tell us there is only room for one right wing party, and for many voters it would then be the wrong one.
There are Tory voters who simply couldn’t bring themselves to support a far right government, so where would they go? By then, Labour may no longer be recognisable as moderate left. (They are currently showing so much ankle to Reform voters as almost to reveal their private parts.) So were the Liberal Democrats and Greens to get their acts together and aim at the centre ground, this could be their breakthrough.
Your diarist has to warn readers, however, that betting your house on that happening would be a serious mistake.
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Readers complain about the publicity given to Reform in the national media and wonder whether East Anglia Bylines should cover them too. Why not feature the Liberal Democrats and Greens more often?
These issues are under constant discussion at EAB, among none more so than the tightly knit cadre of cryptologists, intelligencers, troublemakers and dobbers-in who lurk behind the secret door at Bylines HQ and produce this diary every week. An easy decision was made not to feature any of Reform’s self-promoting stunts. We would only write about their dissembling, their destructive far right views, dubious business arrangements and criminal records.
But unfortunately, even from only five MPs, those shenanigans could fill the diary every week. So: do we expose their right-wing views and personal money-making schemes, or let them get away with them?
Coverage of the Greens and Liberal Democrats could not be more different. Since Labour went to the dark side, they appear our only progressive parties left. But to get their spokespeople to talk to us is like pulling teeth. Their comparative absence from this mighty organ is perhaps something party members should take up with them.
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So what of the Labour membership? Where do they stand on the coup which has so brutally taken over their party? Pecksniff has been taking soundings, and you will be disappointed if probably not surprised, dear reader, to hear there are very few signs of revolt. Labour members are prepared to swear black is white if that is what Keir Starmer requires of them. For many, the party is the love of their life, and as so often, love triumphs over our better angels and all the principles we thought we held dear. It is difficult to see any way back to the party’s liberal (let alone socialist) principles.
You will hear very few claims these days from Labour members regarding all those liberal causes they thought they espoused. They are no longer considered suitable for polite drawing room conversation.
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Meanwhile, Nigel Farage (Clacton) made his bi-annual visit to his constituency in order to be photographed as always posing in front of the pier – the only recognisable part of the town. But for some, his hail-fellow-well-conned shtick may be wearing thin.
“Again!” protests one constituent on Facebook about the pier picture. “Is that all he ever does? Stand about like a spare pr*ck at a wedding.”
Then, amid some heated local vernacular making the unlikely link between the essential requisites of the male member and TV’s Emmerdale (don’t ask), another contributor asks: “Why doesn’t he attend parliament? Not a single one of his MPs attended the recent vitally important debates on issues that affect us.”
So if we can look beyond the Thesaurus-full of alternatives to the word ‘penis’ for a moment, perhaps some of Mr Farage’s voters are beginning to notice. And remember, he has to keep up the man-of-the-people pretence for another four years yet.
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“There are two problems in my life,” Alec Douglas Home complained. “The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.”
His reputation does not suggest he would be the source of interesting quotes, but he also remarked: “My wife had an uncle who was a bishop and who could never walk down the nave of his cathedral without wondering whether it would take spin,” which marks him down rather snugly almost as a character from Wodehouse.
But we digress. Regarding the first quote, this week we could imagine Keir Starmer echoing those thoughts, but the second? Not so much. Sir Keir does not seem Wodehousian in any way, whereas several of his recent predecessors have had that something about them. Perhaps that is his problem, and perhaps ours.
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The government’s plans for a comprehensive reorganisation of local government have predictably set councils all over the country in a tiswas. Morale among staff has plummeted, councillors suddenly look to their seats and anxiously wonder what the plans hold for them. Councils themselves fight for their lives and jealously guard whatever rights and privileges are left them when the dust settles.
So the panic can bring some interesting rumours. One is that, with Suffolk to lose all its councils, to be replaced by one mega authority, Ipswich are contemplating a land grab. Their version of lebensraum would like bits of Babergh and Mid Suffolk, in order to expand their boundaries and their population, so goes the claim, to bring them up to a magic figure which would see Ipswich as a unitary authority and give them powers to wake from the dead the idea of an Ipswich northern bypass.
Nonsense, everybody claims, it can’t work. So it can’t. But Jack Abbott (Ipswich) is a canny politician and he is urging a return to the abandoned bypass idea, and flogging dead horses has never featured high in his c.v. Other whispers about the ghost of the bypass haunting the leafy meadows north of Ipswich again have also been slipped into the press in recent weeks. So what’s afoot, eh?
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Whatever the outcome, Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds) makes a mischievous suggestion which would certainly upset the apple cart. The big beasts of Ipswich and Norwich circle each other, vying to become the newly appointed capital of East Anglia and the Byzantium of the new Norfolk/Suffolk mayoralty.
But Dr Prinsley suggests as the new capital… Bury St Edmunds.
As he says, it would get round the potentially poisonous rivalry between Ipswich and Norwich, and after all, Norfolk doesn’t have a second urban centre with the grace and history and style of St Edmund’s capital.
Pity about the rail link though…
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Last week this diary reported scurrilous attacks on Nik Johnson, the mayor of Peterborough. Since then we learn that Mr Johnson has had enough, and will not be standing again. This has to be a pity, since outside the foetid ramblings of the city’s Tory group he seems to have been generally recognised as one of the good guys, and heaven knows there are few of those left these days.
But another scandal may be looming. In its usual way of tramping into delicate politics in pit boots, there are whispers that Labour’s national executive committee may parachute somebody in as Mr Johnson’s successor. Their brutal habit of doing this has inflamed local parties across East Anglia, though naturally that will be eau desactive d’un dos de canard to them. However, if it happens the local response will be savage.
For those engrossed, any more on this is inevitably bound to appear first in the CambsNews.
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Rupert Lowe (Gt Yarmouth) has installed solar panels on his Cotswold farm, in order to save money; while at the same time his Reform Party claims renewables are more expensive. Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice describes renewable energy as a “massive con”, while Mr Lowe runs a company which installs batteries for renewables and claims solar energy is a good way to reduce energy bills.
Certainly there seems to be a massive con here somewhere, though readers may feel that Mr Tice has located it in the wrong place.
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But Rupert Lowe is the subject of a fawning story in the Express this week. In backing him as a potential Reform leader, it declares: “Mr Lowe knows what it’s like to take a team to the cusp of victory. When he was chairman of Southampton FC the Saints reached the cup final in 2003.”
It fails to declare that four years later they were in administration and relegated, with 10 points deducted for breaking the financial rules.
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This week, ITN investigated far right political groups across the UK. Pecksniff’s own investigations reveal a supposed ‘sports club’ which appears to be something more, located near Eye in Suffolk. In a statement, they deny political aims, though dear reader, it is left to you to judge. The statement reads:
“Our land has been a breeding ground for the warrior and a bastion of defence against those who look to harm our Folk for over a millenia (sic). We carry that torch and strive to embody strength and courage in a time of national cowardice and weakness.”
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… Every time Pecksniff orders the voluminous file on Liz Truss to be taken down into the catacombs here at East Anglia Bylines HQ and there to moulder for eternity, the woman says something even dafter. Imagine how many unfortunate geese have been plucked to supply all those quills which have recorded her idiocies over the last few years.
We cannot commit her file to the darkness, however, without recording this week’s blockbuster. It turns out that the Conservatives were ground into the dust at the last election because they (checks notes) … banned plastic drinking straws.
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EAB is a penurious organisation, without two sous to rub together. So we are at pains not to draw the attention of m’learned friends of the legal profession. In case the diary happens to be written after a particularly free-thinking evening among the wise men at the Muckrakers and a tad too much of the throwing bitter, the editor – the editor– personally scrutinises your diarist’s copy every week before publication.
So it was that, last week, one entry had to be removed: not through fear that it was incorrect, but that the subject of the story might recognise it was only too accurate.
Apologies from this writer, therefore, in case last week’s diary was not quite as bumper fun-filled as usual.
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Thanks go to Ben Smith, Jess Knopp, Celina Bledowska and Karl Whiteman.
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