The Road To Wigan Peer?

Wigan Council got so sick of people turning up at its inland town and expecting to see a pier, that it put one up on the canal. And Josh Simons has three small children, so he has not just given up £98,599 per year. He must have been offered something. Was it a peerage once Andy Burnham became Prime Minister? That would enable Burnham to make Simons a Minister straight away, but I very much doubt it.

Today, Wes Streeting welcomed Burnham’s candidacy at Makerfield while saying that he himself would contest any Leadership Election. But the rules have been changed to make a contested Leadership Election extremely difficult unless an incumbent exercised his right to contest it without needing to be nominated. Streeting knows that he cannot beat Burnham, so he is talking about the next time. Burnham is 56. Streeting is 43. Simons is 32. And they all went to Cambridge. The next in line will already have been identified, and not in The Grapes, Heaton Norris. This is a long way from the great traditions of the Labour Party, according to which it should be Oxford. How did Burnham, Streeting and Simons wind up in politics from Cambridge? Did they fail as comedians? I do hope that people still joked about who might be the first ever Prime Minister from Durham.

Look up everything to do with Labour Together, which has changed its name online to ThinkLabour (I ask you), but which remains registered at Companies House under its original name and with the same directors. Burnham, an immensely experienced politician, has made himself beholden to that. No, of course the prospect of his Premiership has not spooked the bond markets. Yields were already even higher than they had been under Liz Truss. That ought not to have surprised anyone, and it will not have surprised regular readers of this site. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Truss’s prospectus to Conservative Party members, but it supported every single one of the others. Had Kwasi Kwarteng’s loony list ever been put to a Commons vote, then the Labour whip would have been to abstain, and any rebellion in favour of it might very well have been larger than any against. The present situation has nothing to do with a by-election that has not yet been held, nor with a politician who dropped none of his current hints, and they are no more than that, when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

That by-election will be on 18 June, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, but Burnham is casting himself more as Napoleon III. Maggie Oliver has declined the Reform UK nomination, and one day we may know why, but Reform was in second place at Makerfield in 2024, with 12,803 votes, amounting to 31.8 per cent. Its candidate, Robert Kenyon, became a councillor in the recent Reform landslide. And what luck, he is plumber. Rupert Lowe is dropping hints, but would he call his candidate Makerfield First rather than state Restore Britain’s real name? Ben Habib is taking soundings, no doubt in the hope that unlike at Gorton and Denton, Advance UK might at least manage more votes than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Even David Owen’s continuing SDP was only ever beaten by that once, and he responded by dissolving it. But if more than 100 Labour MPs are right that Keir Starmer ought to remain Prime Minister, then will an Independent candidate be fielded in that cause? If not, why not?

The Rise and Fall of Josh Simons

The next MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jody McIntyre writes:

On Thursday afternoon, Labour MP Josh Simons announced that he would be “giving up” his Makerfield seat for Andy Burnham, the Labour Friends of Israel-veteran currently being paraded as the saviour of the party. Simons was forced to resign from Keir Starmer’s cabinet after revelations that, whilst serving as a director of Labour Together, he ordered private investigators to go after journalists looking into Morgan McSweeney.

Before considering the democratic implications of an MP essentially attempting to donate their seat to the mayor of Greater Manchester, it is worth reminding ourselves of how Simons secured the Makerfield constituency in the first place. At the time, Simons said that he was “honoured to be selected”, but no selection contest ever took place. Indeed, when local publication the Manchester Mill contacted Jenny Bullen, then the deputy mayor of Wigan council, her response was curt: “Makerfield constituents want a local candidate and have made that abundantly clear. Nothing else to say, bye bye.”

Despite the desire for a quick coronation, Burnham will not face an easy ride in Makerfield. At the 2024 general election, Reform UK increased their vote share in the constituency by 18.7%, and at the local elections this month, Labour lost ALL of the 22 Wigan council seats they were defending. Reform gained 24 seats.

Like Burnham, Simons has his own links to the Israel lobby. In February, it was revealed that he had failed to properly declare a donation from Trevor Chinn, the former Labour Together director and funder who, after being nominated by Labour Friends of Israel, received an Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor for “skills and work to the benefit of the State of Israel”. In 2013, Chinn told an LFI meeting: “I’ve spent my entire life working for Israel, for a better image for Israel, for success for Israel.” At the 2024 conference of the Jewish Labour Movement, Simons spoke alongside former Israeli spy Assaf Kaplan at an event that promised to teach the audience “how to run a good campaign”.

Last June, Simons received £5000 from Mike Craven, a former press officer for Tony Blair. Craven, still listed as a director of Labour Together Limited on Companies House, has previously attacked Jeremy Corbyn “and the far left” for not recognising the Israeli state’s “right to exist”. Then, in October, Simons received £30,000 from Francesca Perrin, a Labour Together donor who also served as a director until her resignation three weeks ago.

Simons is a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Israel, which states its purpose in the following terms: “To create a better understanding of Israel and to foster and promote links between the UK and Israel; to unite parliamentarians from across both Houses who are proud to be friends of Israel; and to make the case for Israel and for the UK’s bilateral relationship with the Jewish state.” The Israel APPG’s co-chair is Damian Egan, a vice-chair of the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. Egan is married to Yossi Felberbaum, a former IDF soldier who used to recruit officers from the deadly Unit 8200.

Simons has previously mentioned having “friends and family in Israel”, a state with compulsory military service, and in a parliamentary debate with Conservative MP Kit Malthouse last June, he asserted his “right to claim citizenship in Israel”. Two months later, Simons was part of a group of “Labour Friends of Israel-affiliated MPs” who confronted National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell in a “testy and emotionally charged conversation” regarding the government’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

Some have posited that Simons may be giving up his seat for Burnham as a way of seeking “redemption” for his actions at Labour Together. Perhaps there is also a desire to avoid the fall-out from recently released Subject Access Requests from Labour Together, which relaunched with the new name “Think Labour” (but the same company number) this week.

On Thursday, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had his Subject Access Request, which came in at a whopping 583 pages, returned to him. We learn that in January 2024, whilst serving as a director of Labour Together, Josh Simons sent an e-mail to an unknown recipient: “I f***ing hate Jeremy Corbyn.”

All in all, sounds like a lovely guy.

A Bit Rich

Did Christopher Harborne give Nigel Farage five million pounds “so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life”, or “as a reward for campaigning against Brexit for 27 years”? If the former, then why did Farage turn down free Police protection? What did he not want the Police to see? He need not have worried, since they managed not to see the drug dealers by appointment to Prince Harry. Or might both explanations be true? Might Harborne have given Farage at least two personal gifts, which are tax-free, of five million pounds? Might anyone else in Reform UK also have taken such gifts from Harborne? Might Farage or anyone else have taken them from other generous benefactors? Welcome to scrutiny, as UnHerd exemplifies:

Several outlets have picked up on the news that Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based businessman who has donated sizeable sums of money to Reform UK, has entered the Sunday Times Rich List for the first time at No. 6. Yet a study of the full list highlights several other billionaires with close ties to Nigel Farage’s party. After years of the Conservatives being the party of wealth, has Reform become the natural home of Britain’s ultra-rich?

Shortly before he announced his intention to stand as a candidate in the 2024 general election, Farage accepted a personal gift of £5 million from Harborne, with the Parliamentary Standards Committee this week launching an investigation into whether the Reform leader broke Commons rules by failing to declare the payment. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Harborne, who has an estimated wealth of £18.2 billion, gave £9 million to Reform UK the following year. It remains the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party. Later in 2025, he donated a further £3 million to Reform.

Higher up this year’s Rich List, occupying second spot with a fortune of just under £28 billion, are brothers David and Simon Reuben, whose income principally derives from property and data centres. Having donated almost £1 million to the Tory Party since 2008, the Reubens this year gave £100,000 to Reform UK. Also in the top 10 is Ineos founder Jim Ratcliffe, who reportedly met with Farage earlier this year. In February, after the billionaire claimed in an interview that Britain had been “colonised by immigrants”, the Reform leader said: “I believe, firmly, that Jim Ratcliffe is right.”

At No. 14 in the Sunday Times list is Anthony Bamford, the boss of construction firm JCB who last year donated £200,000 to Reform. At the same time, he gave an equivalent sum to the Conservatives. Thanking JCB, Farage said: “They’re giving us some money because they know we are pro-entrepreneurship, they know we are pro-startup, they know that we are pro-small business.” In 2024, Bamford funded an £8,000 helicopter trip for Farage to tour a JCB site, and the company was a prominent exhibitor at Reform’s annual conference the following year. Bamford’s companies had previously donated over £10 million to the Tories since 2007. Having been made a peer by the party, he retired from the House of Lords in 2024.

Since it was founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, Reform has received more than £35 million from 333 donations. The largest single donor is Harborne with £22.2 million. According to data from the Electoral Commission, Reform received more money in donations than any other political party last year. Its total of £10.3 million was almost four times the amount the Labour Party received in donations, and more than twice as much as the Conservative tally.

Never having claimed to be a trade unionist, Malcolm Offord MSP says that he will donate his Holyrood salary to something that is rather amusingly called the Badenoch Trust. But that charity has precisely two trustees, namely Lord Offord himself since its registration in 2007, and only since 2021 his PA at his private equity company. Last year, that Trust’s total income was £1,252. The basic annual salary for a Member of the Scottish Parliament is £77,711. Out of the public purse, Offord’s election has increased sixty-twofold the income of a charity that he has completely controlled for the whole of its existence. And then there is the JCB Pothole Pro, which is clearly a topnotch product from its use by councils of all colours, but which was namechecked on the election leaflets only of the party to which JCB had given £200,000. Who knew that Reform was such a cheap date? Harborne must be kicking himself.  Oh, yes. Welcome to scrutiny. 

Makerfield or Breakerfield?

Britain is about to have a direct Presidential Election, but the only electors will be in Makerfield. If Andy Burnham won, then he would in very short order become the First Lord of the Treasury, the man who wrote the next King's Speech, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, the man with a seat at the G7 and on the UN Security Council. At the Kinross and West Perthshire by-election, Alec Douglas-Home was already Prime Minister. We have never seen anything like this.

What legitimacy could Burnham claim as Prime Minister? The legitimacy of the victorious 2024 Labour manifesto, which promised 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, but not to erode the right to trial by jury, or to end the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, or to impose digital ID, live facial recognition, and access to our NHS data on the part of Palantir.

Will Burnham plant his flag on that ground? No, of course not. For that, you need Amendment F to the Humble Address, defending the right to trial by jury and the right to access public services without digital ID, and tabled by Adnan Hussain with the support of Jeremy Corbyn, Ayoub Khan, Rosie Duffield, Iqbal Mohamed and Shockat Adam. Sectarians obsessed with abroad are such a blight on our polity.

Not that Burnham has won Makerfield. In 2024, second place went to Reform UK with 12,803 votes, amounting to 31.8 per cent. Its candidate, Robert Kenyon, became a councillor in the recent Reform landslide. And what luck, he is plumber. Yet the talk is of Maggie Oliver, who on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, and unlike the subsequent Reform grandee Ann Widdecombe, was highly sympathetic towards India Willoughby in what was supposed to have been an all-female celebration of the centenary of votes for women.

Mention of Celebrity Big Brother calls to mind a rather better potential candidate of a rather better party. And it tells the fortune of Wes Streeting. In 1995, when Michael Portillo pledged his full support to John Major, then it became inevitable that Portillo would end up presenting Great Railway Journeys. The absence of a formal challenge in Streeting's resignation letter was a comparable moment. As to what would happen if Burnham failed to win Makerfield, no one knows.

God Is Gone Up

Alleluja, alleluja. Ascendit Deus in jubilatione, et Dominus in voce tubæ. Alleluja.

As the future founding Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain, I need to give thought to the form of my own and my successors' Fèsta de ƚa Sènsa. All suggestions gratefully received.

Question Time, Indeed

Jenny Chapman is on Question Time. It would be awful if the fall of Keir Starmer saw her thrown onto the slag heap. But if Josh Simons is out of Parliament, then will there be no investigation into Labour Together, which today relaunched itself as Think Labour, chaired by Nick Forbes, whose deselection by his own local party removed him as Leader of Newcastle City Council, on which there were now only two Labour councillors, the same number as on Surrey County Council?

Did Christopher Harborne give Nigel Farage five million pounds "so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life", or "as a reward for campaigning against Brexit for 27 years"? If the former, then why did Farage turn down free Police protection? What did he not want the Police to see? He need not have worried, since they managed not to see the drug dealers by appointment to Prince Harry. Speaking of drugs, the Green Party, and specifically how did Zack Polanski have the gall to question Sadiq Khan in detail about Council Tax when he himself was not paying it, nor even living in a household that did? Why did Polanski not vote in the local elections last week? And how could a Party Leader who went around missing votes possibly aspire to be Prime Minister or, far more probably in Polanski's case, Mayor of London?

A Green Mayor of London would be a bad thing overall, but not in every particular. When will the King be visiting Ishmail Hussein? Who, if anyone, either paid or radicalised Moses Edwards and Dominique Charles-Turner to set fire to a building that was being turned into a mosque? Why is Mark Rowley lying that the Met had changed the route of Saturday's Gaza march because of "persistent attempts" to assemble, march or finish near synagogues, something that had never happened, and which would in any case be irrelevant in a free society, as the Met acknowledges by making no attempt to reroute the Unite the Kingdom march away from the many mosques that it will pass? Why has Rowley banned the utterance of certain phrases that had never been uttered on these occasions, and will he react similarly to repetitions of the last Unite the Kingdom's calls for the expulsion of millions of British citizens, calls for the foreign invasion of this country in order to overthrow its Government, tearing up of the Palestinian flag, and physical violence against Police Officers?

Seven Votes, Four Counts

Jason King writes:

Social media posts alleging vote-rigging in Birmingham’s Glebe Farm and Tile Cross ward have attracted hundreds of thousands of engagements over recent days. They deserve a considered response, because the questions they raise about electoral integrity are serious ones — even if the answers, on this occasion, are rather less dramatic than the posts suggest.

The ward returned two councillors. Jess Ankrett of Reform UK came first with 1,394 votes. Shehryar Kayani of the Workers Party of Britain took the second seat with 1,163 votes, finishing ahead of Reform’s second candidate, Satnam Tank, by a margin of single figures. John Cotton, the Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, lost his seat with 896 votes. The strongest Labour candidate, Marje Bridle, finished fifth on 1,035. Neither Labour candidate was within reach of either seat.

Two recounts on Saturday returned identical results. A full second count on Monday — a more thorough process than a recount, involving the physical re-examination of every ballot paper — found seven papers that had not been recorded in any previous count. The result was unchanged throughout: one seat to Reform, one to the Workers Party.

The viral claims built around those seven ballots share a common flaw: they misread, in some cases dramatically, what the numbers actually show.

The most straightforward error appears in a post asserting that the Workers Party won by a single vote, with the clear implication that fraud had delivered them a seat they would not otherwise have held. This is wrong on both counts. The margin was six votes, established in the first count and maintained in every subsequent one. More fundamentally, the Workers Party did not gain their seat through the recount process — they held it throughout. The recounts, if anything, represented a risk to their position rather than an opportunity. It is worth noting that Reform UK, whose candidate Tank stood to benefit most directly from any change in the result, has raised no formal objection.

A second claim — that the seven additional ballots were cast for Labour with the intention of returning Cotton to his seat — requires only a moment’s arithmetic to dismiss. Cotton finished 267 votes short of the second seat. No configuration of seven ballots, however cast, could have altered that position. The claim does not survive contact with the result sheet.

A third post, which attracted the greatest engagement of all, was more carefully constructed than either of those. It recited the counting timeline with sufficient accuracy to lend itself an air of authority, then built upon that foundation a series of rhetorical questions implying that something corrupt had taken place. It stopped short, deliberately, of making any direct allegation. What it also stopped short of mentioning was that Cotton was never in contention, that the result had been consistent across every count, and that the parties who would have had legitimate grounds for complaint have made none through the appropriate channels.

That said, the seven-ballot discrepancy is not a matter to be waved away. Under the Representation of the People Act 1983, the Returning Officer carries a clear legal obligation to document and account for any variance between the verified ballot paper total — established and witnessed before counting begins — and the figures produced by the count itself. That documentation has not yet been made public. Agents from all parties were present throughout the process, as is their legal entitlement, and their accounts of events will be material to any proper assessment of what occurred. A variance of this kind, however small in percentage terms, sits precisely at the threshold where formal explanation is not merely desirable but required.

The discrepancy is a legitimate question, and it deserves a legitimate answer — from the Returning Officer, through the proper process, and on the record. What it does not warrant is the conclusion, stated or implied, that the result of this election was fabricated. The votes were counted, recounted, and counted again. The result was the same every time.