Confidence and Supply

These things do not always synchronise, but today investor confidence collapsed to a level even lower than it was under Liz Truss, while Labour lost its poll lead for the first time in 934 days. Labour and the Conservatives are now tied on 27 per cent, so well under 30 each, while Labour is on course to lose 23 seats to Reform UK, including here at North Durham, one of 17 where the Green vote would be higher than Reform's margin of victory, just as it was higher than the Conservatives' margin of victory here at North West Durham in 2019. Never, ever, ever tell voters that they "have nowhere else to go".

You see, most Reform second places are to Labour. The Conservatives need only lose a by-election to anyone other than Reform, a far more likely development than a loss to it, and the Leadership of either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick would become even more precarious than it had always been with the support of no more than one third of the party's MPs. A second such loss, and that Leadership would become untenable. Reform is the very least of the Conservatives' worries.

As for Labour, it turns out that possibly raising about two per cent of the education budget by putting VAT on school fees, thereby enabling the richest commercial schools to turn an additional profit by claiming it back on capital projects over the previous 10 years, does not compensate for retaining the two-child benefit cap, or for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from 10 million pensioners.

Nor would it for going through with the previous Government's planned withdrawal of £1.3 billion in the disability benefits that I do not receive. Just as I do not receive any of the £3 billion that Liz Kendall is planning to withdraw from the mentally ill, so soon after Kim Leadbeater posed in her yellow socks for mental health in between drafting her Bill for the State to exchange preventing suicide for assisting it, a measure for which Kendall has voted in the past.