Through Casements Darted Their Desiring Eyes

Truly, this is the land of Shakespeare. A faction at court has laid the groundwork for a pretender long banished to the provinces, where he has become a mighty warlord, to ride into the capital city and seize power. In Britain. In 2026.

What if Andy Burnham made Ed Miliband Chancellor of the Exchequer, and nothing happened? No Liz Truss meltdown, nothing? What would the City failures and the perpetual mediocre Economics undergraduates of the right-wing media and their parties say to that?

Like Burnham, Miliband was in the Cabinet of Gordon Brown. He is no John McDonnell, with whom again the City and the markets would have coped without difficulty, having always wargamed the outside chance of a Left Labour Government. It was Tufton Street that they could not even begin to accommodate, or vice versa.

In any case, as he prepares to become the First Lord of the Treasury, Burnham is taking the advice of Andy Haldane, former Chief Economist of the Bank of England; of Richard Hughes, former Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility; and of Jim O’Neill, former Chair of Goldman Sachs. Make of that what you will, but here we are. A former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, indeed.

Keir Starmer’s remaining bodyguards are Steve Reed, who is up to his neck in the rigging of at least one parliamentary selection that will now be going to a criminal trial, and Peter Kyle, who is up to his neck in a whole lot worse. Knowing that there were not the numbers for a Starmer continuity candidate such as Darren Jones, Starmer’s ultras are saying that the Opposition would have a point if it called for a General Election because Burnham was implementing policies that had not been in the 2024 Labour manifesto.

Well, what about the things that were? This Government was elected to abolish leasehold, to make employment rights begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, and to equalise the national minimum wage regardless of age. When are those going to happen? When is anyone going to resign because they had not?

Instead, the Government has delivered fiscal drag, falling growth, galloping inflation, mass unemployment, a 50 per cent increase in workers’ bus fares, an increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, a measure to force working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, a proposal to restrict trial by jury and to end the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, an impending social media ban that would necessitate universal digital ID, and attempts to remove the Winter Fuel Payment from almost all pensioners, to persecute the disabled to death through the benefits system, to retain the two-child benefit cap, and to cancel the local elections of 4.6 million people.