Cross The Mersey

Four years after Grenfell Tower, when are the Commissioners going to be sent into Kensington and Chelsea? But sending them into Liverpool is a gift to Keir Starmer. Merseyside is the only conurbation other than Greater London that remains rock solid for Labour, and Starmer desperately does not want another such base.

Least of all does he want it there. With the coalfields, Liverpool was one of the two places that fell furthest in the 1980s because they had had the furthest to fall. New Labour defined itself by keeping them down. Only the Southern middle class is allowed to be economically prosperous, and only the London upper middle class is allowed to be culturally important. It is the law.

Starmer had made a good start with the Mayoral selection, and by supporting the invasion and occupation of Liverpool, then he can turn the place as implacably against him as it already was against Boris Johnson. What he does not grasp is that that would not amount to disenfranchisement. Alternative arrangements would be made. Alternative arrangements are already being made.

In London, where Starmer can presumably see it happening, he is making a very similar mistake. The desperation to keep a Black Lives Matter list off the ballot paper for the London Assembly is a sign of things to come. Labour is resigned to always having enough General Election votes and House of Commons seats to be the Official Opposition, even if it never had enough to be the Government. It does not want them outside London and a few very metropolitan areas elsewhere. It does, however, expect to keep hold of those.

You could still be the Official Opposition with fewer than 100 seats. But these are vain, arrogant and entitled people. Their parents, their teachers and Tony Blair promised them that they could become Prime Minister if they did exactly what they have therefore done. Now approaching, at or beyond the age both of Blair and of David Cameron on assuming that office, they are angry, bitter and vengeful. The consequences are going to be hilarious.