Britain Today

Everyone has to stick to the previous Government’s ridiculous version of the events at Salisbury, as if some Home Counties WI cake stall overseer who had accidentally become Prime Minister should be given the last word.

And no one must appear on RT, for fear of being asked a question. Politicians should instead stick to their cocaine-snorting and sexual partners at the BBC. New Labour lives, and God help us all for that.

Having materialised without trace on the day that Keir Starmer became Leader of the Labour Party, what is Nick Thomas-Symonds for? He would seem to be there as a shield for Starmer.

“You hate me,” Starmer is able to say to his party, to its voters, and to the voters whom it lost in 2019, “but the alternative to being led by an upper-middle-class London Fabian is being led by the other side of the Labour Right, and you know exactly what that would mean. Look, here it is. It’s unmistakable.”

Indeed, it is. Thomas-Symonds could not be anything else. But rumour has it that he has the mildly bookish pretensions that do occasionally manifest themselves among the thuggish enforcers of Labour’s municipal and trade union Right.

Some of us remember when John Reid was held up in all seriousness as an intellectual, and not at all as the man who had come to break your teeth on behalf of “The Party”. Oh, no. Oh no, indeed.