Anything But Fluffy

He has self-identified as a cat, so there is no danger to Fluffy the XL Bully. The noises that he makes as I stroke him are purrs, and if you dispute that, then you need to be educated out of your bigotry by Charlotte Nichols MP, who would change the gender of the dead.

Although she holds no view that would preclude office in the present Government, Nichols is part of that freakshow pseudo-left which the Labour Party continues to tolerate in case anyone asked to see a left-winger. As is observed by everyone who has ever read a book, gender self-identification is in fact the logic of Thatcherism, of the self-made man or the self-made woman. Hence its emergence out of nowhere only since the arrival, in 2015, of the first Conservative overall majority to have been returned since 1992.

In the best traditions of New Labour, Nichols is a noted Gypsy-baiter, as is Kim McGuinness. Things are relatively quiet on here because my weekly magazine and my thinktank are very much taking shape. But while chasing things up in person, we cripples are allowed the odd pint between buses, and if you know the right pubs, then you might run into one of the 57 Varieties. Famously, none of those ever received The Letter. None has ever set eyes on it to this day. Nor was it ever produced in court, where a "computer reconstruction" of the "lost" document was admitted. Such was life before the Post Office scandal.

As the beer and whisky flowed in the land where the afternoon met the evening and freelancing crossed over with retirement, my interlocutor casually assumed that "You must be on the Bench by now", requiring me to explain that it was unlikely to be David Lindsay JP for a very long time, if ever. That one had never before occurred to me in 30 years of political activism. Mind you, someone in a position to do so has run an Enhanced DBS check on me to see what happened, and swears that it came back clean. Officially, except in relation to the community liaison work that I did for many years, the Police have never heard of me.

Following that exchange, I was treated for the umpteenth time to the invariable description of McGuinness as, "perfectly nice, but never going to set the world alight." Yet she recently came to Lanchester and I was confined to my home for fear of being mistaken for a Gypsy by her and her goons, or indeed for a Palestinian by the entourage of Kevan Jones, even though they had known me by name for decades.

Elsewhere in the North West Durham constituency that is to be dismembered, see the Labour candidate for the new seat of Blaydon and Consett, Liz Twist. A failed applicant for the North West Durham nomination in 2010, the MP for Blaydon is another of those contrived "like your favourite auntie" characters of the right-wing Labour machine. Yet not only did she fail to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza, but she returned to the frontbench by taking the place of someone who had resigned in order to do so. She is the Blaydon Racist. Bloody Betty, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide. And prove to me that McGuinness's husband is not flying arms to Israel from the British bases on Cyprus, or bombing Yemen from them. Do not risk endorsing either of those actions by voting for her. Vote for Jamie Driscoll.

The boundaries of Blaydon and Consett are such that only one or both of two foreign states could have insisted on their creation for a most valuable asset. Yet if that seat had existed in 2019, then Labour would have won it by only 3,250 votes. The loss of Whickham to the new constituency of Gateshead Central and Whickham does preclude an alliance between the Liberal Democrats' stronghold there and their relative strength in Consett, but the old Chopwell tradition should produce a candidate against being gerrymandered into a Likud seat, with TUSC having contested the council ward last year, and with the Workers Party having done rather better there in 2021.

Meanwhile, the wards of Benfieldside, Burnopfield and Dipton, Consett North, Consett South, Delves Lane, and Leadgate and Medomsley, none of which has ever had Twist as its MP, return all of three Labour councillors out of 11, part of a trend that is more than 20 years old. During that period, none of them has continuously returned only Labour councillors. Of the three such now, none is electorally comfortable, two are in the same ward, and one of those was still writing for Tribune in December. Two are Conservatives, in what I remember as an unopposed Labour ward, and two are Lib Dems, while the four Independents are formidable local operators of vast experience, one of whom led the old Derwentside District Council for a very long time, while another contested the North West Durham parliamentary seat three times, retaining his deposit twice.

Many a tide is turning. A cancelled event today suggests that David Lammy can no longer set foot in Tottenham, meaning that he cannot possibly be its MP. There is, though, a danger that they might try and send him north. As Haringey Borough Council's Cabinet Member for Housing and Regeneration, Alan Strickland was a key player in the scheme to demolish Tottenham and to build an all-white, luxury, gated community on top of it, a Triomf to its Sophiatown. For the usual kickbacks, of course. In the midst of serious talk of the deployment of the IDF to clear any resistance, in the manner of clearing resistance to a West Bank settlement, the then Leader of Durham County Council signed a letter to The Guardian in support of the then Leader of Haringey, Claire Kober. Her number two, so to speak, is now the Labour candidate for Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor.

Still, the change in Lammy's fortunes is obviously to be welcomed. More broadly, Labour nominations are being doled out purely and simply for having had sex with Wes Streeting, admittedly a high price to have had to have paid. Has Strickland paid it? Here in post-satirical Britain, Streeting is the Shadow Health Secretary precisely because he has gone into politics in order to privatise the English NHS in the interests of his financial backers. He is unaffected by the literal demolition of the Captain Tom scam. He dreams of such grifts as the norm. Ask yourself why. But we can cost him his seat. Leanne Mohamad needs to concentrate as hard on the NHS as on Gaza, on the genocide at home as on the genocide abroad, both of which are noticeably supported by centrists and by right-wing populists alike.

Simon Danczuk's Reform UK candidacy at the Rochdale by-election, with no suggestion that he has changed his mind, is yet another proof that centrism and right-wing populism are both con tricks, designed to sell the same extreme and unpopular economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. In reality, the average Guardian writer or Labour MP leads a much more conventional life than many a counterpart on the Conservative benches or the Telegraph. And hegemony belongs to the social and cultural purpose of neoliberalism and basis of neoconservatism.

Or, at least, it does until we take possession of the Telegraph Group, the flagship publication of which now carries little comment beyond thinly, if at all, veiled letters of resignation by those whose free speech absolutism demands state licensing of newspapers and whose free market fundamentalist insistence that even foreign states should be able to own anything in this country, no mater how vital to day-to-day life and to national security, stops at their own small circulation newspapers and magazine. Spooky MPs have extolled those outlets as spooks' sewers, and supposedly rivals hacks who are adamant that the Conservative Party will soon be out of office for 10 years are screaming blue murder, as it were, over the fate of the paper that directs who should be that party's Leader. Post-satirical Britain, indeed.

My office at the Abu Dhabigraph would contain Damian Thompson, stuffed and mounted. He has been both many times before. But not in that order. I would charge people to be photographed with him, and I would sell plastic miniatures of him, ideally ones that glowed in the dark. What tune should I wire him up to play, how much money should punters have to insert to hear that, and whereabouts upon him should they insert it? A comment on an earlier post suggested that I was already doing victory laps around the Telegraph as we had known it. I shall certainly dance around my walking stick, like Charlie Chaplin, on its grave. Give or take, I have waited half my adult life for this, and a third of my entire life. He took it for £150,000 in damages 20 years ago, when that was very serious money, so George Galloway will no doubt dance around his hat on the old Telegraph's final resting place.

First, though, we need to get George elected at Rochdale. Later this year, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would 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. The very names of our paper and of our thinktank will declare the fact that we were the true populists whose position was the true centre. I really must get back to work.