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.

Subject To That Public Interest Test

If Keir Starmer resigned tomorrow, then would there still be a King’s Speech on Wednesday? If so, then would the new Prime Minister have written it from scratch overnight, like some of our university essays of old? We shall know that Starmer’s time was up when he insisted that he could remain Prime Minister, “and you can have whoever you like to lead your precious party.” In the final moments, Margaret Thatcher said that, and Tony Blair did not say “precious”. But each of them had been Prime Minister for 10 years, not two. Still, their three-figure majorities could not save them, just as Starmer’s will not save him.

Joe Morris has just resigned as PPS to Wes Streeting, calling on Starmer to resign. Jas Athwal, Streeting’s constituency neighbour and very close ally, has also made that call. It’s on. MPs of two years’ standing are being hailed as elder statespersons, just as every Labour MP who criticised Jeremy Corbyn was always called “senior”, even though they had rarely, if ever, been in Parliament, as he had, since 1983. But as a journalist as well as a very seasoned politician, Corbyn knew how the game was played. Starmer, on the other hand.

“Full national ownership of British Steel” is a welcome step but does not mean what most people would probably think that it meant, and that would be incompatible with reaccession to Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. Revisiting Brexit would be madness. I was no supporter of the Coalition, but it was far more stable, and in its own terms got far more done, than any of its successors. Post-referendum Britain, in which we are still living, has frequently been compared to post-War France and Italy, but those enjoyed considerable economic growth even amid the constantly changing governments in the long shadow of a World War that had also been a civil war, with the victory of the Allies at both levels looking very different once the Cold War had started.

As to what a Streeting Premiership would look like, it is worth quoting Laura Hughes in full:

NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform.

The change, first outlined in an internal briefing note seen by the FT, relates to the National Data Integration Tenant, described as a “safe haven for data” before it is “pseudonymised” and transferred to other systems.

The NDIT is an area within the Federated Data Platform, a tool that connects disparate NHS data into a single system, which Palantir won a £330mn contract in 2023 to build.

Under the plan, NHS England has agreed to create an “admin” role, which the briefing acknowledges “permits unlimited access to non-NHSE staff” to the NDIT and the identifiable patient information held within it.

As well as Palantir employees, this could include staff from consultancy firms who have been drafted in to work on the FDP.

The change marks a significant departure from the current practice, which requires any individual working with the NDIT to apply for clear data access for specific data sets.

The briefing document, written by a senior NHS data official in April, acknowledges that granting enhanced permissions could mean there is a “risk of loss of public confidence” when it comes to “safeguarding patient data and ensuring appropriate use and access to it”.

While all-round access was originally intended only for NHS England employees with security clearance, the briefing noted that external workers had requested the same permissions “as it is too inconvenient to apply for all of the necessary individual CDAs”.

A doctor in blue scrubs with a red stethoscope uses a tablet device, likely checking patient records.

It added: “This is not only about Palantir, hence we have referred to non-NHSE staff, but there is currently considerable public interest and concern about how much access to patient data Palantir/Palantir staff have.”

The note recommends that a cap be placed on the number of external admins with access to the NDIT, which should also be time-limited and regularly reviewed.

Officials confirmed that the recommendation in the briefing note had been accepted in recent weeks but said it would apply to only a small number of non-NHS staff.

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Commons technology committee, said: “This somewhat cavalier attitude to data security demonstrated how this whole [FDP] project does not have security by design at its heart.

“The public will be rightfully concerned that data privacy is not the first concern.”

NHS England has committed to five “data promises”, which include transparency about who can access data and what they can see. Referencing the pledge, the briefing warned that “being sure exactly who is accessing what patient-identifiable data at any one time” is a top concern.

“The more people have unrestricted access, the less that aim can be met,” it added.

An NHS England spokesperson said: “The NHS has strict policies in place for managing access to patient data and carries out regular audits to ensure compliance — including monitoring the work of engineers helping to set up the central data collection platform that will track NHS performance and help improve care for patients.

“Anyone external requiring access must have government security clearance and be approved by a member of NHS England staff at director level or above.”

Palantir’s involvement in creating the FDP has increasingly become controversial because of its work in the US defence sector and immigration enforcement.

Its co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp, has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, and some NHS staff have refused to work on the FDP due to ethical concerns about the company.

Supporters of the FDP have praised its ability to bring together operational data, such as waiting lists and operating theatre schedules, and improve patient outcomes.

A Palantir spokesperson said: “To the NHS, and all our customers, we are designated by law as a ‘data processor’, with our customers “data controllers”.

“That means that Palantir software can only be used to process data precisely in line with the instruction of the customer. Using the data for anything else would not only be illegal but technically impossible due to granular access controls overseen by the NHS.”

That is the Palantir of Jeffrey Epstein’s Peter Thiel, the Palantir that was a client of Epstein’s Peter Mandelson, the Palantir with which Mandelson and Starmer had off-the-books meetings in Washington while Mandelson, under whom Streeting had learned so much, was Ambassador there. Ofcom has been unleashed against GB News, ostensibly over Bev Turner’s interview with Donald Trump, but the Thiel connection to the coming regime, and indeed to the present one, means that it will be safe from anything more than performative attacks from Reform UK and its media, in the way that Nigel Farage’s undeclared and untaxed five million pounds from Christopher Harborne has not been allowed to bring him down, as would have happened to a politician who was not in the club.

Likewise, after Zack Polanski’s never having been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, never having been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and never having worked for the nonexistent “justice assessment committee” of the Ministry of Justice, he turns out not to have paid Council Tax on his narrowboat despite having been registered to vote there, but no real blows are being landed. Nor will they be, since the Greens are the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, so they are part of the Epstein Class.

You are outside that only if, like Shehryar Kayani of the Workers Party, you could be put through four recounts before Birmingham City Council had no choice, at eight o’clock on the Monday evening, but to declare that you had indeed unseated the Leader, John Cotton. The count and the first two recounts had all shown Kayani six votes ahead, but seven more ballot papers turned up this morning. They must have disappeared again, because Kayani has beaten Satnam Tank of Reform by six votes after all, with Reform and the Workers Party taking the first four spots, so one seat each, and with Cotton in fifth place. Fifth. But there would have been none of this palaver if both seats in Glebe Farm and Tile Cross had turned turquoise.

Standing Strong?

As I await the twelfth Prime Minister of my lifetime, and probably the second to be younger than me, I have been unable to confirm the story about a member of Zack Polanski’s family. But never having been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, and never having been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, Polanski also turns out never to have worked for the Ministry of Justice, much less for its “justice assessment committee”, which has never existed.

Meanwhile, Reform UK needs to explain how it secured the signatures of subsequently successful council candidates who were either dead or had never been alive, but there is nothing new about councillors who thought that they were MPs or even Cabinet Ministers, even if I had never previously heard of one who had stood down within hours of election because of the shocking discovery that that was not literally the case. As for quitting immediately because the position had turned out to be unpaid, there is a basic annual allowance of £13,300 here, with extra for additional responsibilities, or no one would do it.

Alongside Kemi Badenoch, Richard Tice addressed the Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally hours after he had refused to condemn Reform’s Councillor Glenn Gibbins of Sunderland, who has called for Nigerians to be melted down and used to fill in potholes, and whom the party has still not suspended. Badenoch did not call Tice out on that, and nor did anyone on Reform’s Councillor Jay Cooper of Bootle, who has branded the Holocaust a hoax on the grounds that there were not six million Jews in Europe at the time. Again, I can find no record of Councillor Cooper’s suspension from Reform.

The Norwich Canary?

402 Labour MPs are not Keir Starmer, yet none of those is considered capable of replacing him and then winning a General Election, so Clive Lewis is said to be preparing to resign his seat in favour of the man whose name was on everyone’s lips, Andy Burnham. In 2024, Lewis’s majority over the Greens was 13,239. But that was then, this is now, and Norwich is by every measure a long way from Manchester.

On Thursday, the Green Party took overall control of Norwich City Council, as it did of Hastings Borough Council. It has had overall control of Mid Suffolk District Council since 2023. Norwich, Hastings and Mid Suffolk are noted for the prevalence of Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali at the farmers’ markets, and Norwich is famous for its Sharia-compliant paucity both of churches and of pubs. It was in Bradford that the Greens experienced a net loss of one seat, while Reform UK went from no councillors to 29, making it the largest Group on the council.

Rightly or wrongly, the Stafford Hospital scandal has never stuck to Burnham. Similarly, the Conservatives never mentioned Gordon Brown and the gold until the 2010 General Election, 11 years and two Labour victories after the event, and by which time Brown had already been Prime Minister for nearly three years. They failed to win an overall majority against him. Before that, they had banged on about Brown’s “raid on pensions” for a decade, throughout which Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at the end of which he became First Lord of the Treasury. Nearly 20 years later again, Brown’s own generation of pensioners does not appear to be doing too shabbily.

The huge 2024 intake’s umbrage at the clamour for Burnham, and at the resuscitation of Brown and of Harriet Harman, has coalesced with Catherine West’s stalking horse for Wes Streeting, who could not win a General Election and indeed will probably lose his own seat, but who could spend the rest of this Parliament implementing all the unfinished business of Peter Mandelson, Josh Simons and Morgan McSweeney, who have been made even more vengeful by the Greens’ having become the largest party on the Labour Together flagship of Lambeth. They will not stand for Nigel Farage, of all people, as the Prime Minister who completed the Blair Government’s signature domestic policy of privatising England’s NHS, so that has to be done in this Parliament.

The idea of NHS privatisation existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Only Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Mandelson’s and thus Jeffrey Epstein’s Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was “restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS”, and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that “With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health”, but that, “The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones.” When were the expulsions and the proscription?

Burnham’s position was called “profoundly worrying”, and its endorsement by Unite was branded “insulting and ignorant”, by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don’t laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle. The utterly ruthless determination to install Streeting is because those who set the line are only 99.9 per cent certain about Burnham on NHS privatisation, a 0.1 per cent deficiency that is enough to make them hate him to the marrow of their bones, whereas they have absolutely no doubt about Streeting. Nor should they have, as may be attested by that Mandelson client, Peter Thiel’s and thus Epstein’s Palantir, which has laid waste to Gaza, which is laying waste to Lebanon, which is permanently minutes away from laying waste to Iran, and which has perfected the art of tracking people via their health records for the benefit of ICE or of anything like it in, say, Britain, where Blair’s daughter-in-law would transfer oodles of our money to his Institute to deliver it.

Streeting Ahead?

Wes Streeting has let it be known that, while he would not challenge Keir Starmer, he would stand if Starmer were pushed out. Starmer would remain Labour Leader until a successor had been elected, but he would cease to be Prime Minister instantly, with the King undoubtedly appointing whoever the Cabinet wanted. Angela Rayner is not in the Cabinet. Catherine West, previously best known for calling Sir Geoffrey Cox “pompous” because she had never heard oratory before, is not in the Cabinet. Andy Burnham is not even in Parliament. But Streeting is a Secretary of State, and Labour kept control of Redbridge Council, shoring up both his position and that of the neighbouring slumlord.

Candidates for Leader of the Labour Party now need to be nominated by 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party, something that only Starmer managed last time, and he was not the Prime Minister then. The prospect of two candidates’ meeting that threshold would be effectively nil even if one of them were not already the most powerful man in the country, never mind if he were. Heaven help us, but only Ed Miliband now stands between England and having no NHS except to make all of our data available to ICE and the IDF via Palantir thanks to a Prime Minister who had learned an awful lot under Peter Mandelson.

The Epstein Class is closing ranks. On Enfield Council, the Greens, for whose party Noam Chomsky would vote, have agreed to support a Conservative minority administration. At Birmingham’s Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, two recounts have confirmed that Council Leader John Cotton and another Labour councillor had been unseated, although by one member of Reform UK, yet also by one of the Workers Party. So tomorrow, there is to be a third recount, the only one in the entire country. Dare they declare the victories, either of two members of Mandelson’s party, or of one of those, presumably Cotton, and one member of the party for which Peter Thiel would vote? If Birmingham is a Sharia-governed ghetto where English is no longer spoken, then why has it just elected certainly 22 and probably 23 Reform councillors, the largest bloc on the council? Such are the credible coalitions or otherwise that power on Europe’s most populous local authority hangs in the balance, and with it the existence of the right-wing Labour machine, which is the only Labour Party that still exists.

The Labour Right used to be unique in that, by almost or almost always controlling the great majority of the most populous municipalities in England and Wales, plus the Senedd, it had an independent fiscal base, and that was putting matters politely. It controlled Council Tax, business rates, pension schemes looking to invest, sweeteners and backhanders from property developers and others, the allocation of jobs with the council, the allocation of better council housing, and the allocation of any council housing. But under Starmer, its citadels have fallen as if under nuclear attack. Labour Party membership is not cheap. If not to secure access to those goodies, then why bother?

Radicalism, Energy, Immense Courage?

Writing as Josh Simons, Peter Mandelson announces that the always planned hour has come to replace Keir Starmer with Mandelson's schoolboy protégé, Wes Streeting.

Streeting is 43, Simons is 32, and the line is assured to sell the NHS to Mandelson's client Palantir of ICE and IDF infamy, a privatisation that will be among the very many things dependent on issuing us all with the Tony Blair Institute's digital ID, all to be overseen through Sovereign AI by Suzanne Ashman, Blair's daughter-in-law.

When Starmer sacked Mandelson, then we knew that that nexus would have its revenge. And here we are.

She’s Had Her Oats

Ed Dutton will be pleased to know that Catherine West is a Quaker. She neither wants to be Prime Minister, nor will she be. But on 8 December 2021, she asked, “Will the Prime Minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on 13 November?” Boris Johnson replied, “No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.” We know the rest. It is always the quiet ones that you have to watch.

No, the Cabinet cannot elect a Leader of the Labour Party. But it would nominate a Prime Minister if the incumbent resigned, or indeed died. And it would hardly be as if the King would say no to that name. Already in office as Prime Minister, that person would then go into a Labour Leadership Election in the extremely unlikely event that there might be one, a contest rendered even more improbable by the fact that the rules had been changed to make it as good as impossible for more than one candidate to be nominated for Leader of the Labour Party.