Coach and Horses

As the coaches leave Manston, Suella Braverman is effectively aboard, carrying what little remained of the dreams of the British Right. Rishi Sunak set her up as its fall gal, and her fall is well underway.

Jeremy Corbyn is now a columnist on The Independent, presaging all manner of mainstream media work for a man who is still very big box office indeed, but Braverman can no longer aspire to a gig eating a kangaroo's penis. The same is true of anyone associated with the Truss Government, which will have planned for strikes and even for riots, but which had no idea who was really going to bring it down. 

As they themselves would readily tell you, those forces had worked out in detail, with the man himself, how they were going to work within John McDonnell's fiscal events. But their only possible reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng's was to bring down the Government in six weeks, which would have been three if the old Queen had not gone and died.

At its very lowest ebb, Corbyn's Labour Party was never as far behind in the polls as Liz Truss's Conservative Party was from the day of the mini-Budget, which gave effect to the programme on which she had won the Leadership, to the day that the man whom she had defeated, the man behind behind the furlough scheme, replaced her without a vote's having been cast. Since then, the Labour poll lead has been falling like a stone, with Sunak and Keir Starmer statistically tied, within which Sunak is sometimes formally ahead.

Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result 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.

Meanwhile, Braverman, Kwarteng, Truss and the rest of them may secure work on the same American circuit that hosted Katie Hopkins, although Braverman and Kwarteng would have to be lucky beyond words to manage that, and Truss is not as entertaining as Hopkins.

In Britain, they would eke out their days trying and failing to negotiate mergers and alliances among all the funny little Rightist sects. But the very words "Liz Truss" and "Suella Braverman" already render that whole subculture utterly toxic. Watch out for Fleet Street sackings.

While, I say again, Corbyn already has a column on The Independent, and several of his old standard-bearers are also breaking out precisely because they were at or near the heart of the project that came within 2,227 votes of becoming the Government in 2017. The business of business is business, and a weekly, print-only column by Corbyn himself would sell that day's edition of a newspaper like nothing in this country since the rise of the Internet, creating a whole new generation of purchasers of newsprint from a shop.

Public appointments will be next. Call that tokenism if you will, but tokens are as tokens do, and at least they are going to be given the chance. Unlike the project that became the Government for a few mad weeks in 2022. No one wants to talk about that. And sure as hell, no one wants to talk to it, or to hear from it. As the coaches leave Manston, Suella Braverman is effectively aboard, carrying what little remained of the dreams of the British Right. Rishi Sunak set her up as its fall gal, and her fall is well underway.