From The Throne To The Thrown Out?

The Government's majority is less than 184, and the latest tally of Labour MPs who have called on Keir Starmer to resign is 92, so to whom will the King really be giving his Speech? It will begin "My Lords and Members of the House of Commons", but one of the former, whose effective usurpation of the position of Jess Phillips undoubtedly contributed to Phillips's resignation, is Harriet Harman, who tweeted the offer of a peerage to Arooj Shah following her resignation as Leader of Oldham Council because Labour had lost overall control.

Shah is up to her neck in Oldham's mishandling of the rape gangs, but she is clearly ideal ennoblement material from the point of view of Starmer's Adviser on Women and Girls. Also heavily implicated is Shah's predecessor but two or four, depending on how you counted it, Jim McMahon MP, who is expected to be knighted in the King's Birthday Honours List. Shah is very close to Mohammed Imran Ali, known as "Irish Imy", who is a convicted heroin trafficker and the convicted getaway driver of the convicted cop killer Dale Cregan, but who has since set up vigilante patrols on the streets of Oldham.

Mind you, most parties have such types. Reform UK's initial candidate for Leeds Central and Headingley at the 2024 General Election was Jack Denny, who had done time both for fraud as a bent copper, and for possession of indecent images of children. If Labour raised Shah to the ermine, then why should Reform not elevate Denny? After all, Shaun Davies has just been made an Assistant Government Whip in place of someone who resigned for Wes Streeting before Streeting did not resign, and Davies was Leader of Telford Council when he actively campaigned against a national inquiry into the rape gangs.

The Labour Whips' Office has been a cesspit at least since Phil Woolas, Dan Norris and Ivor Caplin were all in it under Hilary Armstrong, who went on to introduce both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords, and who in those days was advancing both Anna Turley, and Caplin's close friend, closest ally, sometime lover, and now constituency successor, Peter Kyle. Norris has lost the Labour whip, yet his proxy vote is still cast religiously by the Labour Whips. Armstrong and Kyle went on to support the brief 2015 Leadership campaign of Phillips, a campaign chaired by Streeting, who recently accompanied Kyle to The Devil Wears Prada 2. But they will not have been joined by Al Carns, who registered this domain name as long ago as February. And his supporters do not come with puns. They come with guns.