Labour’s Tradition of Treachery

Paul Knaggs writes:

Why the Plotters Always Win in Labour’s Westminster

The Westminster village loves a conspiracy. Turn on the radio this week and you will hear the story being assembled in real time: the people who were most disloyal to Keir Starmer are the ones who have been most richly rewarded. Cry’s of plots and rewards.

Andy Burnham has begun his premiership in that traditional manner.

John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary is cast as the coup de grace, the fatal blow from which Starmer could not recover. And now, the broadcasters note with raised eyebrows, Healey sits in Number 11 as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The arithmetic of reward is not difficult to follow. Wes Streeting, who led the calls for Starmer to resign after the local elections when he quit as health secretary, has been appointed Defence Secretary. Louise Haigh, who managed Burnham’s Makerfield campaign, is now First Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, deputy prime minister in all but name. Rachel Reeves and David Lammy are among several senior ministers leaving government, cleared from the board with the old regime.

And then there is Anas Sarwar, a case so perfect it belongs in a museum of Westminster patronage. In February, Sarwar became the most senior Labour figure to call for the prime minister to stand down. The gambit failed to save him. He led Scottish Labour to their worst defeat since devolution, returning just 17 MSPs. In May, asked directly whether he would accept a seat in the Lords, he answered: “No. I’m focused on being first minister of this great country.” This week he is to be elevated to the upper chamber to take up a ministerial post. One Labour source described it to LBC as “falling upwards as an extreme sport”.

So yes, the disloyal have been paid. The pattern is real. But before Westminster disappears entirely into its Shakespearean fantasy of daggers and Brutus, let us state the plain truth the political class prefers to avoid. 

Keir Starmer was not assassinated. He was rejected.

Starmer Needed No Assassins. His Own Record Destroyed Him 

No shadowy conspirators were required to destroy this premiership. Starmer did it himself, methodically and in plain sight, and the British people watched him do it. 

He won the Labour leadership on ten pledges: public ownership of rail, mail, energy and water, the abolition of tuition fees, opposition to illegal wars, stronger trade unions, higher taxes on the wealthy. One by one the promises were diluted, abandoned or reinterpreted until almost nothing remained except the man who had made them. A promise is political credit. Starmer spent the lot before polling day.

Once in office, he turned an office of state into a concierge service. Parliament’s register recorded £16,200 in work clothing from Lord Waheed Alli, spectacles worth £2,485, football hospitality, concert tickets. By September 2024, the gifts and hospitality accepted since 2019 had passed £100,000. No wardrobe brings down a prime minister on its own. But millions were being told that public services required restraint and pensioners must tighten their belts, while their prime minister appeared unable to dress himself or attend a concert without somebody wealthy reaching for the bill. Symbols matter. The country read this one fluently.

His government’s gaze travelled relentlessly upwards. Starmer and Reeves hosted BlackRock’s Larry Fink in Downing Street, with correspondence showing senior Labour figures speaking of a close partnership with the world’s largest asset manager. Starmer toured Palantir’s Washington headquarters alongside Peter Mandelson, whose former lobbying firm had worked for the company; months later the Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir a £241 million contract for military artificial intelligence. These facts do not by themselves prove an improper bargain. They show the company Starmer kept and the doors his government opened, while protest, dissent and internal party democracy were treated as problems to be managed.

The authoritarian without authority 

Inside Labour, Starmer confused control with strength.

Candidates were blocked. MPs were disciplined. Jeremy Corbyn was prevented from standing as a Labour candidate. Party members learned that unity meant obedience to the leadership, while factionalism meant disagreement with it.

Outside the party, protest and dissent were increasingly spoken of as problems to be managed rather than democratic rights to be defended. 

Starmer did not merely abandon his earlier programme. He attempted to eliminate the political constituency that remembered he had ever offered it.

He endlessly invoked his father, the toolmaker. It was biography used as body armour. The toolmaker was summoned whenever the son needed working-class credentials, then sent back to the workshop while BlackRock came through the front door. 

And when he restored Mandelson to the centre of government and sent him to Washington despite his long-documented association with Jeffrey Epstein, Starmer told the country whose world he inhabited. He treated proximity to the Epstein class as less disqualifying than proximity to the Labour left. That choice, more than any plot, sealed the public’s verdict. 

When the local elections arrived like a wrecking ball, the Parliamentary Labour Party did not execute a Machiavellian masterstroke. They panicked. Driven by pure self-preservation, MPs went looking for a new figurehead to save their seats, and Starmer’s closest lieutenants were left to sink with the wreckage of his ship. On Monday he stood outside Downing Street and declared “My work is done”. On that, at least, the country agreed with him. 

THE CORBYN PRECEDENT: TREACHERY PAYS 

Labour’s revolving court

British politics likes to dress patronage in administrative language. Allies are “brought into government”. Rivals “return to the back benches”. Failed politicians are “elevated” to the Lords, where democratic rejection is treated as an inconvenient clerical error. 

The reality is older and uglier. Loyalty is rewarded. Dissent is punished. Those who help remove a leader expect payment from the successor. 

Labour has rehearsed this ceremony before. 

For Starmer’s surviving allies now to cry retribution requires a memory span of roughly six years, and we have written the record they would prefer forgotten. This party is institutionally treacherous, and the wheel they are strapped to is one they built. 

When Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, his parliamentary opponents did not merely disagree with him. Angela Eagle launched a leadership challenge against him. The PLP resigned in choreographed formation, briefed against him and delivered a vote of no confidence by 172 votes to 40. The membership answered by re-electing him with 62 per cent of the vote. The PLP had asked the members a question, received the wrong answer, and carried on as though nothing had happened. One of the choreographed resignations, dated 27 June 2016, came from a shadow Brexit secretary named Keir Starmer, who wrote that with so many colleagues gone his position was simply untenable. Ten years later his own Cabinet performed the identical arithmetic on him, note for note. 

And the saboteurs were paid. Consult the leaked report into the party’s Governance and Legal Unit, the document at the heart of LabourLeaks, and then consult the roll of the House of Lords. Iain McNicol, the general secretary who presided over the machine that document describes, became Lord McNicol of West Kilbride. Tom Watson, mentioned in that report thirty one times, the deputy leader who spent Corbyn’s tenure preparing the ground for his removal, was nominated for his peerage by Keir Starmer himself after the Lords Appointments Commission had already rejected him once. When Watson took his seat in scarlet robes, standing beside him was Lord Mandelson. John Mann, John Woodcock and Ian Austin, three of Corbyn’s most dedicated parliamentary enemies, the latter two having urged the country to vote against their own party, were all handed ermine by a Conservative government. Angela Eagle, for her trouble, is now a Dame. 

Read that list again. The general secretary named in the sabotage report, a lord. The deputy leader named in it thirty one times, a lord, on Starmer’s personal nomination. The men who campaigned against a Labour government, lords, by Tory appointment, proving that when the establishment needs a threat from the working class crushed, party lines evaporate. A movement founded to carry working people into Parliament became remarkably efficient at carrying its own wreckers into the Lords. / Sarwar’s peerage is simply the newest carriage on a very old train.

THE CASE FOR THE CROWN, FAIRLY STATED 

Burnham’s defenders have a reasonable answer, and it deserves a fair hearing. A new prime minister must appoint ministers he trusts. Starmer’s government had failed, and keeping the same people in the same offices would have made Burnham look captive from his first morning. There is an irony worth crediting too: in 2016 Burnham sat in that same shadow cabinet and refused to join the coup against Corbyn, keeping his knife sheathed when it was fashionable to draw one. He has begun with recognisable measures: on his first day he announced plans to scrap VAT on domestic electricity bills from October and pledged to end rough sleeping, and in his opening address he admitted “We have not been good enough, and we need to be better.” Honesty of that kind has been absent from that podium for some time. 

Grant all of it. Grant the warmer tone, the regional sensibility, the genuine record of fighting Whitehall centralisation from Manchester. 

None of it answers the harder questions. Burnham arrives in Number 10 having been handed the premiership on 24,937 votes in Makerfield, a seat vacated for him by a sitting MP in the first by-election manufactured specifically to parachute in an outsider since Leyton in 1965. A governing party with a huge majority could not produce a single credible leader from its own benches. And none of it changes the machine he now operates: fiscal rules welded shut, private monopolies gripping energy and water, a state that has spent years extracting wealth from working communities to feed corporate balance sheets. Tone does not pay an energy bill. Without a complete break from the market orthodoxy Starmer championed, this premiership will be managed decline with a softer voice.

THE UNITY HYMN 

Burnham’s first plea, inevitably, was for unity. Corbyn called for unity while the party apparatus sabotaged his campaigns. Starmer called for unity while purging the left. Burnham calls for unity while clearing Starmer’s people from government. In Labour, unity is the hymn sung by whichever faction has just seized the organ. 

The displaced will not sing along for long. Darren Jones has already tested the acoustics, tweeting that the new government’s plans are unfunded, a hand grenade lobbed for the simple reason that he can. The dining clubs will form. The helpful briefings will flow. Every poll will be studied for the moment loyalty can again be safely withdrawn, because Burnham has inherited a parliamentary party trained to remove leaders the moment its own seats look endangered. The MPs who tolerated Starmer’s broken pledges did not recover their consciences. They recovered their survival instinct. 

That is the real enemy here. The Labour machine itself: a machine that converts principle into patronage, dissent into disloyalty, and public rejection into another private rearrangement at the top. 

And the machine has form, because Labour’s oldest tradition is fighting itself. Ramsay MacDonald abandoned his own government in 1931 and took the establishment’s side against the people who built the party. The Gang of Four walked out in 1981 rather than accept the members’ verdict. The chicken coup of 2016 tried to overturn the largest leadership mandate in the party’s history. Every generation, when the interests of the working class and the interests of the Westminster machine pull in opposite directions, the parliamentary party chooses the machine. The centre never holds, because the centre was never holding anything except its own position. 

Six centuries ago, when the peasants of England first rose against their masters, the authorities cut the rebel priest John Ball into four pieces and sent them to the corners of the kingdom as a warning. All they achieved was to make sure his question, why should some be lords and some be serfs, reached every one of them. Westminster can shuffle its Cabinet, distribute its peerages and whisper about revenge as much as it likes. Until a government arrives prepared to dismantle the rigged markets and serve the people who actually build this country, every new king will inherit the same shaking throne. 

The face in Downing Street has changed. The court has changed. The people who own the castle have not.

Caused and Exacerbated

James Tozer writes:

A judge has condemned calls to legalise cannabis after a son killed his estranged mother during a severe mental health episode when he developed paranoid schizophrenia following his habitual smoking of the drug. Judge Steven Everett warned cannabis was a 'terrible' substance which 'caused and exacerbated' mental health issues. And he said campaigns to decriminalise it - led by politicians including Labour mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey and the Green Party's Zack Polanski - were 'wholly misconceived.'

The judge hit out after hearing how drifter Simon Carter made a 245 mile trip from his rented room in Devon to batter his widowed mother Gwyneth, 73, to death with such ferocity he broke his own hand. Just two days before the fatal assault at the elderly victim's home in Macclesfield, Cheshire, Carter, 50, had admitted himself to a hospital. He admitted a history of abusing cannabis and claimed he had been attacked by mystery assailants before being forcibly injected with heroin. But he was allowed back on the streets because doctors had no 'mechanism' or proper reason to have him detained. He has since been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and having delusional beliefs.

At Chester Crown Court, Carter was ordered to be detained in a secure psychiatric unit having admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Judge Everett told him: 'This is just further evidence as far as I can see that those who talk about cannabis being somewhat of a positive drug in the community are wholly misconceived. 'You are not the first and sadly won't be the last with mental health issues to appear before me and say: "I smoke cannabis." There is a wealth of evidence that use of that terrible drug causes and exacerbates mental health issues. Whatever else it causes it is clear your bizarre behaviour and comments to your doctor were there for all to see. But there was no reason or mechanism to keep you out of the community when you were seen by the hospital in days leading up to your mother's death. What was going through your mind is difficult to assess but I am quite sure it was affected by significant mental health issues. You intended to carry out some sort of, as you saw it, wrongly, retribution upon your mother and it appears that you still now have those delusional beliefs.'

Carter had been estranged from his parents since 2006 and was unaware his father Norman had passed away. Tragedy struck when he decided to pay his family an unexpected visit on the pretext he wanted to see his children. On July 12, 2025, Carter travelled to Macclesfield where great grandmother Mrs Carter lived alone. She contacted her sister Janis to say he had arrived 'out of the blue', prosecutor Martin Reid KC said. 'Mrs Carter described the defendant as acting very strangely and she couldn’t work out whether he was drunk or on drugs, and that he just didn’t feel like her son.' On being told his father had died, she said he 'did not seem bothered and he only stayed for 10-15 minutes'. The following day he was admitted to an unnamed health facility where he reported being attacked 'multiple times' and injected with heroin whilst living in Torquay.

'He said he used to smoke cannabis but had stopped a month ago,' Mr Reid said. 'He appeared confused, uneasy, talked excessively and asked: "Do you think I’m mad?" But medical examinations revealed no findings and he was discharged.' Then on July 16 Carter was seen carrying a rucksack containing a saw before loitering outside his mother's house. A neighbour heard a 'lot of banging and shouting' and heard Mrs Carter pleading ‘No’ and then what sounded like a heavy suitcase being dragged down the stairs. Her body was found in the living room two days later after her sister - who had been trying in vain to contact her - gained access to the property. Tests showed she died from multiple head and neck injuries.

As police investigated, Carter admitted himself to Macclesfield Hospital A&E where he was treated for a broken hand. Asked about his injury by a nurse, he replied: 'Oh, I punched something.' He was arrested shortly afterwards as he walked through Macclesfield town centre. In a victim personal statement Janis Slater said:

'Gwyneth was just getting back to her usual self after a few years of sadness following the death of Norman. She started to believe that she had a life again. Then she rang me around tea time on a Saturday and said: "Guess who has turned up after 19 years?" I started to worry about Gwyneth with Simon being around and I told her to lock the doors and windows and hide her jewellery. There had been issues before he left and Gwyneth said he would not be coming back. I just wish you had told me when he came again. Before you answered the door, I would have been there in five minutes. I miss you dearly. Our day trips out, our shopping, our meals out, our chats and conversations. I miss your laughter which was loud and infectious.'

In mitigation, Owen Edwards KC, said Carter's life had been 'marred by drug use and significant mental health issues'. 'He has fixed ideas as to that which has happened to him and to individuals that he believes are close to him,' he added.

Statements of Intent

Neil Davenport writes:

Andy Burnham has pledged to do politics differently. He certainly wants to change the look of politics, if not necessarily the substance. In his inaugural speech yesterday, out went the official lectern. So too, it seems, will the protocol of formal dress normally associated with high office. Burnham let it be known last week that he intends to wear a suit and tie only in the House of Commons.

So, we face the grim prospect of the UK prime minister conducting affairs of state in ‘figure-hugging’ black t-shirts, jogging bottoms and expensive trainers, as though permanently recovering from a rave in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The tieless days of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell may soon come to look positively Edwardian. Whether nose piercings and neck tattoos make an appearance in cabinet meetings remains to be seen.

Does any of this really matter? Isn’t attachment to the suited-and-booted look merely a fogeyish affectation, the last refuge of people who still iron their handkerchiefs?

Not really. Clothes are never just clothes. They are statements of intent. They tell us how an institution sees itself and how seriously it expects to be taken. Burnham’s determination to import work-from-home aesthetics into the highest offices of state is a strangely adolescent gesture. The office becomes an extension of the sofa. Government becomes just another Microsoft Teams meeting.

For centuries, the workplace has deliberately distinguished itself from the home. The transition from private to public life was symbolised by changing how one dressed. We still understand this instinctively. We put schoolchildren into uniforms not because wearing blazers improves their maths skills, but because uniform marks the transition from the private world of the family into the public world of shared rules, responsibilities and expectations. Dressing differently encourages behaving differently.

That principle once applied even more strongly to high office. Putting on the suit, the gown or the uniform was never simply about appearances. It was a ritual acknowledgement that the office mattered more than the individual occupying it. Ministers were expected to adapt themselves to the institution rather than expecting the institution to adapt to their personal brand.

Burnham’s declaration implies the opposite. The message is that public office should accommodate the lifestyle preferences of those who hold it. It reflects the broader cultural assumption that institutions should become more ‘authentic’, more casual and more like us, rather than expecting us to rise to their standards. It is a curious inversion. The prime minister is no longer expected to look like the prime minister – instead, he is expected to look like everybody else.

Dress codes have always signalled seriousness. Judges still wear robes. Military officers still wear uniforms. Diplomats still dress with painstaking formality because clothes communicate respect – for the occasion, for the office and for those with whom they are dealing.

Nobody imagines that a well-cut suit makes someone more competent. But it does say that the occasion deserves more than whatever happened to be hanging over the back of the chair. Winston Churchill famously wore his informal ‘siren suit’ during the Blitz without diminishing his authority. But Churchill understood that this exceptional clothing reflected exceptional circumstances.

Dress also marked the divide between the old Britain of duty and the new Britain of perpetual youthfulness. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell understood perfectly well that loosening the tie was never just about comfort. It symbolised a broader rejection of the formality and restraint of the pre-New Labour world. Politics would become more informal, more conversational, more relaxed – and, inevitably, more personal.

Since then, every institution has been encouraged to ‘dress down’, flatten hierarchies and blur distinctions. Universities resemble tech start-ups. Bank managers look like marketing executives. Senior civil servants often dress like they are on their way to Glastonbury. The assumption is always that informality breeds creativity, even though it more often breeds familiarity and lowered expectations.

There is, after all, a reason why nobody wants to see airline pilots flying in hoodies or surgeons operating in cargo shorts. Uniforms and conventions reassure us because they communicate professionalism before a word has been spoken. We instinctively associate standards of appearance with standards of conduct, even if we know intellectually that the relationship is imperfect.

None of this means politicians need to resemble Victorian undertakers or City solicitors. But symbols matter because politics itself runs on symbols. Ceremonies, traditions, robes, despatch boxes, Black Rod and yes, even suits and ties, all remind us that democratic government is larger than the personalities temporarily passing through it.

Andy Burnham’s wardrobe may seem a trivial matter. Yet it reflects a deeper instinct of contemporary politics. The irony is that, in trying so hard to look ordinary, politicians risk making the extraordinary responsibilities of government appear ordinary, too. Keir Starmer proved that a suit and tie are no guarantee of good government. But it is difficult to believe Britain will be better governed by a prime minister who looks as though he’s just nipped out of PureGym.

Water Features

Any water shortage in Britain would be downright laughable, except that it is not funny at all. While betting the farm on solar energy, our lords and masters cannot cope with the Sun in the summer. There are restrictions on water use despite a spring that would have given Noah a run for his money. But by what authority does a private company impose, for example, a hosepipe ban? By what means does it enforce such a prohibition? British Gas has been forced to pay £20 million into a redress fund after it broke into people’s homes and installed prepayment meters. Obviously, no party suggests renationalising the energy companies, as the huge majority of the electorate would favour. There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence. That merger was also evident from the way in which everyone in politics seemed to be tied to Fujitsu when the Post Office scandal broke, and it is evident now in relation to BlackRock, Palantir, and others. Yet Andy Burnham talks only of “public control” rather than public ownership. State ownership of key national infrastructure is fine as long as it is someone else’s state, which our own will permit and assist to enforce itself upon and against our people not only in their own homeland, but even in their own homes.

Apart from Chile, where it was bequeathed by General Pinochet, only England in the whole wide world has privatised water, the failure of which is total. Lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. What would you pay for shares in the water companies? They are worthless. “The value of your investment may go down as well as up.” The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

Yet who is to make this case? Kemi Badenoch? Rupert Lowe? Nigel Farage, whom Badenoch calls a Corbynite as if that were still an insult? She does not appear to be alone in that view. It is possible that Barry Gardiner and Emily Thornberry have declined appointments, but it is still notable that not even they have been made Ministers. There is nothing for Jon Trickett, who was in the Shadow Cabinet of Ed Miliband, having been Parliamentary Private Secretary to Gordon Brown. There is nothing for Rebecca Long-Bailey or Andy McDonald, both of whom were initially in the Shadow Cabinet even of Keir Starmer. And so on. Gardiner, Thornberry, Long-Bailey and McDonald all nominated Burnham, as did most of the Campaign Group, with no member of it nominating anyone else. And for what? Think on.

Uncap The Wells To Cap The Fares

The affordability of the two pound cap on bus fares was not questioned in the slightest when my then MP, Richard Holden, introduced it as a member of the last Conservative Government. And of course the personal tax allowance should be raised from £12,750. Never mind the £6000 in savings that you were allowed without a reduction in your Universal Credit, two in five claimants of which are in work. Inherited from the predecessor benefits, that has been the same for 20 years.

Beginning with the full exploitation of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, let us harness the sovereign power of the State, to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

A Warm Welcome

Oh dear, Darren Jones. One day you’re cock of the walk, the next a feather duster. Andy Burnham’s abolition of VAT on domestic electricity is a Brexit benefit that would have been illegal if we had still been in the European Union. That is why it will not apply in Northern Ireland. In Great Britain, it may not save us very much, although every penny counts, but it beats Keir Starmer’s opening move, which was the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Allowance from most pensioners.

And Darren, sweetie, you have just said that Starmer’s flagship policy of digital ID, for which you were responsible, had been uncosted all along. The VPN ban had already been dropped, while the ban on social media for under-16s, and the imposition of a curfew on the 16 and 17-year-olds whom you had wished to give the vote, have been rendered impossible by the abandonment of digital ID. No one wants to hear from the man who said in October that, “We have to build a New State and shut down the Legacy State, with digital ID making people’s experience of that New State fundamentally much better.”

Facing Justice?

Congratulations to the Police on managing to apprehend Joshua Kerry, who has more faces than a town hall clock.