I Used To Think That The Day Would Never Come

After Andy Burnham’s entrance to New Order’s True Faith, all Party Leaders should be made to come on stage to tracks about heroin. But which one for which Leader, and why? With the same question, the practice might be extended to the taking of seats in the House of Lords. Which one for Sadiq Khan, and why? He would have been given a peerage anyway, but it is still a pointed statement that he will never be returning to the Commons and can never become Prime Minister.

Why is there no one from Reform UK on the new list of peerages? Reform only had one name and, well, here we are. While they might usefully have said nothing at all, that there was no sign of a political motive for the murder of Ann Widdecombe was true when the Police said it. That they have since found the possibility of one only reinforces the point that that sort of running commentary was a bad idea.

How Nigel Farage must wish that he had ennobled Count Binface, the only other candidate with any serious chance of winning the Clacton by-election, and for the moment the candidate with the most chance of doing so out of the 34 on the ballot paper. Many years ago, in circumstances best left undisclosed, I was told that a party could legally nominate more candidates than there were seats to fill. At Clacton, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party has three. As Screaming Lord Sutch used to ask, “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?”

Even or especially in the absence of a Restore Britain standard-bearer, several of the other candidates have emerged from the cesspit that the young of that tribe now preferred to Reform. Last weekend, that subculture did more damage in Northern Ireland than the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and the GRU Volunteer Corps put together will ever do in the United Kingdom. Whose house here has any of those ever burned down? Notice that none of the newly proscribed organisations is linked to China, which makes the British Army’s uniforms. Yet if you oppose the renationalisation of British Steel, even if that does not quite mean what it sounds like, then you are siding with the Chinese Communist Party.

The Loyalists brought over French Nazis, who are many things but who are not Protestants, and who graffitied Belfast in support of Dominique Pelicot. So much for protecting women. When are Rightists going to be visited, and their devices searched, over their enthusiasm for Javier Milei, and for the Trump Administration that now explicitly supported Argentina, as of course Israel always has? As Margaret Thatcher might have put it, the Enemy Within. Yet who is Burnham bringing in? Matthew McGregor and Alison Philips of Hope Not Hate, which published this about Widdecombe, and whose evidence at committee stage of what became the Online Safety Act was given by a paedophile.