La Vista, Baby?

I always said that Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg had endorsed Liz Truss because she would be so easy to remove at and as the Restoration. Boris Johnson won the last General Election, so no one could possibly suggest that he lacked a mandate to be Prime Minister, and he is already streets ahead in terms of nominations by Conservative MPs. The likelihood that more than one candidate might garner 100 of those is deliberately remote in the extreme. What would happen if no one managed it?

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have ended in a Labour landslide, but Starmer versus any other Conservative Leader will end in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society. I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.