Happy Birthday, Rachel Reeves

Yes, really. 46 today. Blaming the staff is cheap, but technically five and a half years is "the better part of a decade". Take out Rachel Reeves's study leave, though, and she was at the Bank of England for less than five years, so her repeated and sometimes scripted use of the term was a lie. Her claim to have "spent a decade" there was plainly and simply false. Once she had moved to HBOS, from late 2008 she was required to account for her expenses every month, in person. In May 2009, she was sacked. Her CV claimed that she had left HBOS that December, but in fact she appears to have been unemployed for a year before her election to Parliament in May 2010. Once there, her parliamentary credit card was suspended because she had overspent by four thousand pounds. She is now the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is no wonder that the British economy grew by only 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of 2024, that Britain is probably in recession now, and that the crucial measure of GDP per capita has just fallen for the sixth time in the last eight quarters. Reeves is still in office because there is no one else.

After all, look at the First Lord of the Treasury. Under Keir Starmer, the Crown Prosecution Service withheld from the Criminal Cases Review Commission the evidence that would have freed Andrew Malkinson 13 years before his conviction was quashed. There is no doubt about that. It is a matter of record. Why, then, has Starmer not been arrested? Does someone have to call the Police? If so, then Mr Malkinson should do it now that his compensation threatened to deprive him of his social housing. Since he took it in public, when shall we see the results of Starmer's HIV test? Has such a test been taken by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, with whom Starmer has a child?

Then there is Starmer's close friend ally, and constituency neighbour, Tulip Siddiq, who remains in receipt of the Labour Whip despite the United Nations Human Rights Office's devastating report into the Awami League, her aunt's political party, which Siddiq has represented officially at and to the UN. Right-wing Labourites are normally very particular indeed about having links only to narrowly defined "sister parties" abroad. The Awami League is not one of those. It is not even nominally Socialist, or anything like that. If Siddiq is a member of it, then how is that compatible with membership of the Labour Party? The Awami League has huge influence over the Labour Party in Camden.

Not that foreign influence over British political parties is particularly unusual. The one that today's polls would give an overall majority sells itself quite explicitly as the way to vote for Donald Trump. That said, Nigel Farage, flanked by Richard Tice, yesterday called for NATO membership for Ukraine. Vote for Reform UK, and you would be voting for that. Its parting of the ways with Rupert Lowe can only be a matter of time now that he has not only agreed that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was a political prisoner, but also turned out to have solar panels on his farm. Reform's preferred guest of His Majesty would be Pavlo Lapshyn, who in 2013 murdered 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham, before putting bombs outside three mosques in this country. Lapshyn belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its "political ideologist", Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

Uniquely entitled to Universal Credit from the moment that they set foot here, these people would certainly not be easier to integrate than Palestinians, among whom even the Hamas supporters are enemies of the al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State entities that committed acts of Islamist terrorism in Britain. Yesterday in the House of Lords, the Government's ban on citizenship for refugees who "had made a dangerous journey", and its introduction of that change without reference to Parliament, proved too much even for David Blunkett. As we pondered our peace dividend of three billion pounds per year for the next 100 years from the end of the Second Crimean War, think on.