Red Carpet, Red Nose

I will contest whichever parliamentary seat contained Lanchester at every General Election for the rest of my life. The Boundary Commission wants to put us in North Durham, as should be borne in mind by those in the Labour Party up there who had history with me, and who were weighing up the fact that Kevan Jones would be 60 by then. Moreover, in at least one of your cases, your candidacy would declare that the Labour Party held out no hope of taking back overall control of Durham County Council a few months later.

More broadly, Jeremy Corbyn is guaranteed to hold his own seat with or without the Labour Party, and to place either first or second for Mayor of London, with Labour in third place or below. It is universally taken as a given that those things are going to happen.

As well they might, since Christian Wakeford has been automatically reselected without any kind of process, Ian Byrne is on course to be deselected, and Johnny Mercer has had to be allowed to attend Cabinet in order to prevent him from defecting to a Labour Party that would have welcomed him with open arms, declaring him on the spot to be its candidate for his seat.

Mercer's only fixed principle is that past and present Armed Forces personnel should be above the law. The red carpet treatment for him both contextualises, and is contextualised by, the failure to oppose most, and the lack of policy to repeal any, of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, and the staggering Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. The same approach has been adopted in relation to the even more stunning Public Order Bill.

Just as Labour opposed only the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, while supporting every other mini-Budget measure that the Government itself has since abandoned, so Labour did not oppose the "legal but harmful" clause that the Government itself is briefing that it may drop from the Online Safety Bill. Keir Starmer himself was a major player, both in the general persecution of journalists through Operation Elveden, and in the specific persecution of Julian Assange.

This is the Labour Party that has revived the identity card scheme that Tony Blair long ago adopted and hardened in order to outflank its originator, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. Whose papers would the Police demand to see? A 15-year-old Etonian, such as David Cameron was when he took cannabis? Or 15-year-old Child Q, who had not in fact taken cannabis at all? A Just Stop Oil exhibitionist? Or a striking trade unionist, picketing to protect her children's food supply?

Yvette Cooper has given a "not in front of the children" rebuke to Stephen Kinnock, who has all the intellect for which his family has always been famous. But she is the monster that inflicted the Work Capability Assessment, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, while he locked himself in his car to avoid being breathalysed, just as Starmer avoided breathalysation by running away from the scene of an accident that he had caused. Ponder that business at Durham Miners' Hall, consider that Starmer's nose grows redder with each Prime Minister's Questions, and think on.