Colonel of Truth?

Champagne corks will soon be popping like cherries in Freshers' Week, but I must not overindulge, since I am on a pretty tight diet to stop people from assuming that I had been hypnotised by Zack Polanski, a sitting member of the London Assembly who by his own admission has not paid the GLA precept for three years.

The four Cabinet Ministers who have been in to tell Keir Starmer to go include David Lammy, who was Foreign Secretary when Peter Mandelson was appointed; Yvette Cooper, who took the job when the operation to keep Mandelson in post was at full throttle, having sat with him in Gordon Brown's Cabinet; and Wes Streeting, who learned more under Mandelson than could ever be articulated in words. The fourth is Shabana Mahmood, she of the electoral irregularities in 2004.

People would once have been musing about Dan Jarvis, who by the way managed to be an MP while Mayor of South Yorkshire. But the role of potential de Gaulle seems to have passed to Al Carns, who was a Conservative-voting Colonel in the Special Forces, nudge nudge wink wink, until June 2024, when he resigned his commission and joined the Labour Party after the General Election had been called. He was then parachuted in a new sense, into the Birmingham Selly Oak seat that had been vacated at the last possible moment by Steve McCabe, Parliamentary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The General Election was on 4 July. On 9 July, Carns was made a Defence Minister.

But Labour has held only one council seat in Birmingham Selly Oak, the same number as the Conservatives. A ward of which a very small part was in that constituency has returned two members of Reform UK, and every other councillor on Carns's patch is now a Green. Still, while you do have to be a member of the House of Commons to be Leader of the Labour Party, Alec Douglas-Home was Prime Minister for two weeks while a member of neither House of Parliament. In a Commonwealth Realm, Mark Carney repeated the trick for more than three times as long last year. Andy Burnham, think on.