Affairs of State

In itself, a Prime Minister's affair need not bother anyone. But a Prime Minister's making his mistress a Peer and then a Minister would properly bother us all. Yet what man could resist? Banishment to the Alli Pally would seem a very small price to pay.

Though which Alli Pally? There turns out to be at least one more, a townhouse in Soho, less than a mile from the penthouse in Covent Garden, and used as an off-the-books General Election campaign headquarters, not by the Labour Party, nor even by the Starmer Party, but by the Alli Party, under the titular Leadership of Keir Starmer.

Even when it came to things that Starmer could be bothered to put through the books, then we already knew that his stay at the penthouse had been worth five times more than he had registered, that he and his son had stayed there from well before the GCSE exam period until well after it, and that he had fraudulently listed his clothes from Alli as office items. £32,000 is almost the national average annual wage for full-time work. Out of sheer curiosity, I want to see his clothes that cost that much. And what was his son doing there?

In his entry for football tickets, Starmer has listed only the cost to the club, not the market value. And the Government has used an economically illiterate paper paid for by the water companies to argue against renationalisation, after Steve Reed took £2000 from them in Chelsea tickets and hospitality. There will be a lot more of this. People on Universal Credit buy their own clothes. But our rulers have that classic combination, a sense of entitlement and a lack of self-respect.

North Yorkshire was exceptionally resistant to challenges to the Conservatives even in the different world that existed on 4 July. As one last favour to his party, Rishi Sunak might vacate his seat along with the Leadership, causing a by-election that Labour would always have lost, but which might now see it drop from second place to fourth or below. When Parliament reconvened after the 2025 Party Conferences, then any Conservative Leader who still looked set to lead the party to second place would be removed by the people who really ran it, and who were neither the members nor the MPs.

But then, the same would be true, and probably well before next autumn, if either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch looked like running the risk of leading the Conservatives to victory, or at least to being the largest party. Ask Jeremy Corbyn. Or Lord Alli.