Living By The Sword

Whether I got to see it may depend on what the doctor had found by then, but on what used to be called the other side tomorrow, look forward to the same line-up as last week. The coronation of Penny Mordaunt continues apace. She is at least as important in her party as Angela Rayner is on, again, what used to be called the other side. The Conservatives are the party of gender self-identification.

They may not be the only one. The one in that link also seems to want to throw Jody McIntyre under the bus, but it cannot do so because the candidate against Jess Phillips, with a real chance of winning or at least of influencing the result, is too high-profile and promising to be disowned. From the top, there is silence on both cases.

To return to Mordaunt, she is a beneficiary of a very British sort of gender-bending, the advancement of women who appealed to men whose heterosexuality had been wired wrongly by adolescences that had been spent with no outlet apart from each other or worse, though also male. Historically a Conservative phenomenon, and still very much so, it is nevertheless, or therefore, heavily influential among the Labour Party's all-powerful staff, and thus on the impending Labour parliamentary intake. Look at the present Labour frontbench, and see what I mean. That is what they like, and there is a reason for that.