Safeguard This

Owen Jones and I have had our differences, but it is a badge of honour that he has been kicked out of the conference of Donald Trump’s Labour Party. The official reason given is “safeguarding”. Owen should sue. Keir Starmer left the stage with someone in a red dress for which we all know that Lord Alli will have been paid, but we are none the wiser as to whether it was Lord Alli wearing the dress. How safeguarded is anyone around a public figure when three Ukrainian rent boys had been charged with arson with intent to endanger life in relation to attacks on his rented out house, his old flat, and his old car?

Will Trump’s praise of Starmer be toned down in response to Starmer’s categorisation of Nigel Farage as “the Enemy”, recalling Margaret Thatcher on the miners, and now as then permitting unrestricted persecution? Not even when Ed Davey freed up a seat at the Banquet did Trump’s recent State Visit involve Farage in any way, and if Trump had minded that, then he would have said something. Fans of both need to face the fact that Trump barely knows who Farage is. Fans of either Trump or Starmer need to face the fact that they came as a pair.

The old Blairites were privately proud of Tony Blair’s personal and political closeness to George W. Bush, and they were in dread of a victory in 2004 for John Kerry, who had been known to lend his house to Gordon Brown, and whom they fully expected to launch a CIA coup in Britain within hours of taking office. Of course, there would have been no troops on the streets. There would have been no need. Bush’s reelection relieved them more than anyone else on Earth. And they said so. Meanwhile, the Bush hero-worshippers on the official British Right were unable to explain their Blair predicament. Today, the British Right’s confusion has doubled, with Trump not only gushing over Starmer, but also appointing Blair to run Gaza. Nigel who?

As for Blair’s willingness to work for Trump, there are a lot of people with whom that should be taken up, notably Matthew Syed, who is being cheered to the skies for having joined the Conservative Party of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick because it was the Labour Party for which he had been a parliamentary candidate in 2001. Get out of that one, well, an awful lot of people, really. That is right up there with Shabana Mahmood’s need to explain how a policy could be racist on Sunday, but not when announced by her on Monday, although apparently again when denounced from the same stage by Starmer on Tuesday. Mahmood’s version of it was the most for which Farage could have hoped, and must therefore have been what he had wanted all along. Either of them will get my digital ID over my cold, dead body.