Et Pocula Sacra?

So strongly supported by Peter Mandelson that Mandelson feels the need to deny it to the Daily Mail, Wes Streeting is presenting what to some of us is always one of the most delicious of spectacles, namely that if the criterion is working-classness, then any Northerner automatically outranks any Southerner even if they both went to Cambridge. The South makes the rules and usually benefits from them. But every once in while. For example, now. Streeting is also an Anglican while Andy Burnham is a Catholic. In the prolier than thou stakes, Streeting does not stand a chance. And again, who decided that?

Does Burnham's denunciation of 40 years of Thatcherism include his own time in the Cabinet, including as Chief Secretary to the Treasury? He is the only Health Secretary ever to have privatised a hospital. On 15 December, it will be 50 years of what came to be called Thatcherism. It began under a Labour Government. That was why we used to talk about 40 years of Thatcherism in the early Corbyn years, a decade ago.

Nothing in Burnham's extensive record would suggest that he intended to do anything practical about the problems that he had suddenly noticed. Yet his mere observation of them has summoned "the bond markets". When social democratic measures beyond anything proposed by the Labour Party since at least 1983, and far beyond anything suggested by Burnham, are assumed as basic facts of life under Christian Democratic, Gaullist and similar governments, then does anyone ever mention the bond markets? Do those markets take the slightest interest? But Britain is a very special place to the Epstein Class. This is the only country where it expects no dissent whatever.

Streeting's call to rejoin the EU is obviously intended to scupper Burnham's chances at heavily Leave-voting Makerfield, but even if that worked, then the only effect would be to skip a generation. The Cantabrigian Succession that went Burnham-Streeting-Simons, 1970-1983-1993, would simply start with Streeting, who would still owe Josh Simons for having made possible the excision of Burnham. At Spook Central among the Fens, the next in line has already been identified. I do not know who he is. But we all will. At the appointed time.

Makerfield: The Little Referendum

Paul Knaggs writes:

Labour holds 404 seats in the House of Commons. And yet, when the crisis comes, the party’s great hope is a man who has not sat in the Commons since 2017 and currently manages the buses in Greater Manchester, being parachuted through a cleared seat in a constituency where Reform won every ward last week, to fight an election where his position on the defining question of the decade is public record and will be weaponised against him from the first day of the campaign.

This is not a problem of personnel. The bench is full. Wes Streeting has resigned and declared. Angela Rayner, cleared by HMRC, is circling. Ed Miliband is being briefed as the soft-left alternative. Behind them sit David Lammy as Deputy Prime Minister, Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office, Bridget Phillipson at Education, Lucy Powell as elected deputy leader, and the wider cabinet behind them. There is no shortage of names. There is a shortage of leaders.

And the irony cuts deep. The same Labour Together operation now opening gates for Burnham, run for years by Josh Simons and Morgan McSweeney, spent the last decade engineering the very vacuum it now claims to fill by paving the way for Burnham. Selection panel by selection panel, NEC vote by NEC vote, the machine placed its own through the door and pushed working-class candidates and the dissident left out of it. They built the desert, ignoring all the warnings, they carried out their little spiteful purges, ignoring all the signs, the warnings the history. Tony Benn, four decades ago, told them exactly where the road would end:

“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.”

Read that again. Read it slowly. Then look at the Makerfield wards Reform took last week, the Red Wall seats slipping toward Farage, the working-class voters who have stopped voting Labour because Labour stopped speaking to them. Benn saw it coming. Labour Together saw it coming too, and built it anyway. Now they drag in Burnham and pretend that a single drop of water is an oasis in a dry exhausted desert.

Here we are with a commons of 404 Labour MPs and not one of those left standing carries the stature of a Bevan, the conviction of a Benn, or the working-class authority that a moment like this demands. Not one speaks naturally to the towns Labour has spent a decade losing. That is the deeper indictment. It is not that the party lacks candidates. It is that with 404 MPs and the full apparatus of government in its hands, the best Labour can produce is a mayor smuggled in through a by-election and a former health secretary calling for the country to undo the largest democratic decision of the modern era, Brexit.

And then there’s the cost of it all.

Five Million in Public Money

That is the state of British politics, measured in one grim number: £5 million.

That is the combined estimated cost in public money of the Makerfield by-election and the Greater Manchester mayoral contest that would follow if Andy Burnham succeeds in returning to Westminster. The by-election alone could cost up to £226,000, the maximum the returning officer can claim from central funds to cover ballot papers, IT, staffing and administration. A snap poll to replace Burnham as metro mayor is expected to add another £4.7 million to the bill.

That is what it costs when a political party forgets how to produce leaders from within its own ranks and has to go shopping in Manchester.

The Trap in the Gate

Josh Simons, once a staunch Starmer loyalist, announced he was standing aside so that Burnham could “return to his home, fight to re-enter Parliament, and if elected, drive the change our country is crying out for.” The language of noble sacrifice. But look at the terrain on which that sacrifice is being made.

As we examined in detail in The Burnham Gambit, Makerfield voted 64.91 percent in favour of Leave in the 2016 referendum. It is not a marginal Leave area. It is one of the heaviest Leave constituencies in Greater Manchester. In the eight Makerfield wards contested at the local elections earlier this month, Reform took approximately 45 percent of the vote to Labour’s 32. Most recent MRP polling puts Makerfield down as a firm Reform win.

And Simons knows all of this. His career was not built on naivety. He entered politics through Jeremy Corbyn’s office, then turned on Corbyn and contributed to the machinery that destroyed him. He built Labour Together, the vehicle that engineered Keir Starmer’s rise. This is not a man who acts without calculation. The gate has been opened. The question is who left it open, and why.

The same No. 10 that blocked Burnham from Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister casting his own vote against, has now stood aside for Makerfield, where the constituency voted nearly 65 percent for Leave, where Reform are polling at roughly 45 percent, and where the candidate has said publicly that he hopes in his lifetime to see Britain rejoin the European Union.

The Europhile Twins and the Betrayal They’re Handing Reform

Wes Streeting, speaking at the Progress conference on Saturday, confirmed he will stand: “We need a proper contest with the best candidates on the field, and I’ll be standing.” He used the occasion to call for Britain to rejoin the European Union, describing leaving as a “catastrophic mistake”, arguing that in a dangerous world, Britain must club together with its neighbours to rebuild its economy and trade.

So there it is. The two leading candidates to save Labour from itself are both Europhiles who have placed EU membership at the front of their pitch to a country that voted to leave. Burnham made his position clear at Labour conference last autumn. Streeting has now made his in public, from a conference platform, into a bank of microphones.

Streeting warned that unless Labour changes course, it risks becoming “handmaidens of Nigel Farage and the breakup of the United Kingdom.” It is a vivid phrase. But by planting a rejoin flag in the opening days of a leadership contest, both he and Burnham have handed Reform exactly the ammunition they need across every Leave heartland in the country. Millions who voted to leave, working-class voters of left and right, who made a democratic decision that the political class spent years trying to reverse, will watch this and feel not just disagreement but recognition. They have seen this before. They know what betrayal looks like, because betrayal has become the defining experience of their relationship with the Labour Party. 

Reform will not need a sophisticated response. They will play the clips on a loop.

The Demolition

If Burnham wins Makerfield, he enters Westminster as a force to be reckoned with. If he loses, his national career is finished, and a Starmer with no challenger left standing is not a weakened Prime Minister. He is a liberated one. The arithmetic of Makerfield may be less a coronation route than a controlled demolition, with Burnham as the charge.

And here we are. A party with 404 MPs should not need a saviour smuggled in through a by-election. The fact that it does is not a sign of strength. It is an epitaph, written in the language of democratic process, costed at £5 million in public money, and paid for by the same working-class communities now lining up to vote Reform.

What Labour needs at this point is not a saviour. It needs a necromancer. And those are in even shorter supply. 

Have no doubts this will be a little referendum.

Inevitably, whichever way this falls, the fight will be fought on Brexit. And the cost may well be democracy.

Herewith, by the same hand and mindful that the NEC had now approved Burnham, The Burnham Gambit: Labour Civil War:

A Coronation or a Cliff Edge?

The King of the North is coming home. Or so the story goes. It is a story constructed almost entirely from conditional clauses, each one balancing on the last like a conjuror’s act that requires everyone in the audience to look away at precisely the right moment.

Andy Burnham will contest the Labour leadership, if the National Executive Committee can be persuaded to grant him permission this time, having blocked him from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister himself among those who voted against. He will return to Westminster, if he can win the Makerfield seat that Josh Simons vacated yesterday in what has already been noted as the first time in over sixty years that a sitting MP resigned specifically to clear a path for someone outside Parliament. He will unite the party, if the membership, the trade unions and enough of the Parliamentary Labour Party can be brought to believe that the figure presenting himself represents something genuinely different from what went before. That is a great many ifs. And behind each one sits a question the Burnham camp would rather you did not pause to consider.

The NEC: The First Gate Has Not Opened

Begin with the NEC. Burnham has confirmed he will request permission to stand. He has not received it. The same committee that blocked him in January, with the Prime Minister casting one of the eight votes against, must now rule again. Those who argue the political weather has changed since January are correct. But a committee with the Prime Minister’s allies on it does not become a different committee simply because his authority has weakened. The first if remains precisely that.

The Cliff Edge: What the Numbers Actually Say 

Then there is the seat itself. Makerfield is being presented in some quarters as a vehicle for Burnham’s return, a formality to be processed before the real business of the leadership contest begins. The polling says something rather different. In the eight Makerfield wards contested at the local elections earlier this month, Reform took approximately 45 percent of the vote to Labour’s 32. The Greens, resurgent under Zack Polanski’s leadership, came in at 19 percent across Greater Manchester and are not standing aside for anyone. Nigel Farage has already confirmed that Reform will, in his own words, throw absolutely everything at the by-election. Most recent MRP polling puts Makerfield down as a firm Reform win.

If Burnham wins, he enters Westminster with a narrative no other leadership candidate can match. If he loses, his career as a national political force is effectively finished. The cliff edge is real, and the fall is a long one.

There is one further fact that the Burnham camp has been notably reluctant to address in its briefings to a sympathetic press. Makerfield voted 64.91 percent in favour of Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. It is not a marginal Leave area. It is one of the heaviest Leave constituencies in Greater Manchester. And Andy Burnham, at the Labour Party conference last autumn, told delegates in his own words: I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin. That is not a nuanced position carefully calibrated for a Leave audience. It is a public, on-record commitment to EU membership, delivered into a microphone, in a room full of journalists. Reform will play that clip on a loop from the day the by-election is called to the moment the polls close.

The Kingmaker: A Study in Shadow

History offers a useful shadow for Josh Simons. Richard Neville, the sixteenth Earl of Warwick, was the great kingmaker of the Wars of the Roses: a man who placed Edward IV on the throne, grew impatient when Edward refused to remain his instrument, and then attempted to unmake the king he had created. The romantic telling casts Warwick as a man of thwarted principle. The accurate telling is less flattering. Warwick was not a democrat. He was an operator whose loyalty was always to his own proximity to power, and who treated the crown as a piece to be moved rather than an office to be served.

Simons is a more contemporary variation on the type, though the darkness around him runs considerably deeper than any medieval parallel can fully illuminate. He entered politics through Jeremy Corbyn’s office, then turned on Corbyn and contributed to the machinery that destroyed him. He built Labour Together, the vehicle that engineered Keir Starmer’s rise and oversaw the systematic removal of the party’s democratic socialist wing. He sat at the centre of the operation that contracted a public affairs firm to compile dossiers on the personal backgrounds of journalists whose only offence was investigating Labour Together’s finances. His career is not the biography of a man who keeps finding new causes. It is the biography of a political operative who has served the apparatus throughout, and whose loyalty has never been to the Labour movement but to the circle of power that captured it.

If Josh Simons is a true believer, one is entitled to ask who exactly he believes in, because the evidence of his career answers that question with a clarity that is not flattering, and the answer is not the democratic process, and it is not the Labour party he helped to hollow out. 

The Open Gate: Who Benefits? 

Which makes his sudden generosity toward Andy Burnham the most interesting question in British politics this week. The same No. 10 that blocked Burnham from Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one, with the Prime Minister casting his own vote against, has now stood aside for Makerfield. Makerfield, where the constituency voted 64.91 percent for Leave in 2016. Makerfield, where Reform are polling at approximately 45 percent to Labour’s 32. Makerfield, chosen as the stage for the return of a candidate who told Labour conference last autumn, in his own words, that he hopes in his lifetime to see this country rejoin the European Union.

Warwick at least had the courage to declare his hand openly. What is happening here is quieter, and in politics, quieter things are usually more dangerous. The gate has been opened. The question worth sitting with is not why Simons opened it. The question is who calculated that opening it served their interests, and whose interests those are. Because the arithmetic of Makerfield, for a pro-rejoin candidate in a 65 percent Leave seat against a Reform machine throwing everything at it, is not the arithmetic of a coronation. It is the arithmetic of a controlled demolition.

The Record: What Burnham Actually Stands For

Set aside for a moment the question of whether Burnham can win the seat. Consider what he is proposing to do if he survives it. His supporters argue that he is the only figure with sufficient political weight to hold off the Reform insurgency and speak credibly to the voters Labour has been haemorrhaging across the post-industrial towns of the North and Midlands. This argument deserves serious engagement, because those voters are real, their anger is legitimate, and Reform’s capture of their loyalty represents a structural crisis for the left.

But Burnham is a man with a record, and that record deserves examination rather than hagiography. He voted for the invasion of Iraq, loyally, as a foot soldier of the Blair project. He later expressed regret. Regret, at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives and the permanent destabilisation of a region, is the minimum acceptable response to that decision, not a credential for leadership. He remains a member of Labour Friends of Israel. At a moment when the British public is watching the destruction of Gaza in real time, when younger voters and communities of colour are expressing not mere unease but outright revulsion, one is entitled to ask whether his foreign policy would differ from Starmer’s in substance or merely in the warmth of its accompanying language. His record suggests the latter.

The case for Burnham rests on the assumption that Labour needs a figure who looks like change without being change: someone who can reassure the party’s institutional funders and the centrist press while projecting enough northern authenticity to recapture the seats lost to Farage. It is a theory of political management, not political transformation. And if there is one lesson from the Starmer years that the party ought to have absorbed by now, it is that management without vision produces precisely the situation Labour currently finds itself in: a majority government with no discernible purpose, declining poll ratings, and a leader whose grip on his own party loosens with every passing week.

The Reckoning

If Andy Burnham clears every obstacle before him, wins Makerfield against a Reform machine throwing everything it has at the seat, secures the NEC’s blessing, gathers his 81 nominations and walks through the door of Westminster only to offer the party Starmerism with a Mancunian accent and a warmer handshake, then Labour will not have found its future. It will have found a more charismatic iteration of its present.

However, Nietzsche wrote that what does not kill you makes you stronger. Remember that, because it applies here with a precision that should concentrate the mind.

If Burnham fails in Makerfield, if the gamble collapses in a Leave heartland against a Reform machine that has already taken the area ward by ward, then Starmer does not fall. He survives. And a Starmer who has watched his most dangerous rival destroy himself on the wrong side of a Brexit-scarred constituency is not a weakened Prime Minister. He is a liberated one. What follows that liberation is not difficult to predict from the evidence of his conduct so far: a Digital ID programme that the public never voted for and Parliament has barely scrutinised; a managed drift toward EU structures that stops just short of the mandate the country was never asked to give; and the continued, methodical removal of the civil liberties and democratic norms that his administration has treated, from the beginning, as inconveniences to be quietly retired.

A Starmer with no challenger left standing is not a Starmer who moderates. He is a Starmer with nothing left to lose. That is the outcome the gate at Makerfield may have been designed to deliver. And it is the outcome the British public, whatever it thinks of Andy Burnham, should be most afraid of.

The working class of this country deserves better than a movement that mistakes a change of voice for a change of direction.

The King of the North may yet sit on the throne. The question, when the dust settles and the votes are counted, is whether anyone left a kingdom worth ruling.

A State of Necessity

Nothing could be more obviously schismatic than to confer the Episcopate in express defiance of the Roman Pontiff. Lefebvrism is certainly not "just traditional Catholicism", or even just Catholicism as widely practised during the Pianische Monolothismus. Rather, it makes sense only in certain very specific terms peculiar to France. Terms that, for very French reasons, it assumes to be universal when they are not. Lefevbrist devotional and disciplinary practice is an obvious expression of, if not direct Jansenist influence, though probably so, then at least the strain in the French character that made it receptive to Jansenism. Likewise, Lefebvrist theory and organisational practice are no less obviously expressions of a very advanced Gallicanism indeed.

For example, rule of the Society of Saint Pius X is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it was considered an aberration that the last Superior-General was a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would have been subject, and once again are. Shades of the extreme Gallican attempts to prove a Dominical institution of the office of parish priest. And shades of the structural arrangements of Anglo-Catholic traditionalism, echoing the extent to which that movement has always tapped into the same English and Welsh organisational traits that made Congregationalism so popular, and many of the same English and Welsh devotional traits that made Methodism so popular, just as Lefebvrism has tapped into the same French traits that had previously manifested themselves as Gallicanism and Jansenism.

Lefebvrism gives perhaps the first ever formal institutional shape to the situation created by the seventeenth century, which began with three competing parties in the French Church, but which ended with two, the Gallicans and the Jansenists having effectively merged against the Ultramontanes due to the deployment of Gallican ecclesiological arguments against the Papal condemnations of Jansenist soteriological ones. By the wayside had fallen such features as Jansenist belief, with the sole if notable exception of Blaise Pascal, in the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, and Gallican use of belief in Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as a mark of party identity due to its having been defined by the Council of Basel. The popular attraction of the SSPX clergy in terms of the old Latin Mass and traditional or "traditional" devotions echoes that of the Gallican clergy in terms of the old diocesan Missals and Breviaries and a sympathy for the entrenched local devotional practices reviled by the Ultramontanes.

The French Church, or an idea of the French Church, is assumed to be fundamentally autonomous, so that the incompatibility of Dignitatis Humanae with a very specifically French Counter-Revolutionary theory of the relationship between Church and State means that it is the Conciliar Declaration that must yield. This is simply taken to be self-evident. In reality, such a position is as schismatic and as heretical as John Courtney Murray's attempt to conform Dignitatis Humanae to the American republican tradition's reading of the First Amendment as taught to high school students, an approach comprehensible only within Manifest Destiny and all that. American "conservative" Catholicism sees the American Church as autonomous as surely as does American "liberal" Catholicism, and freely disregards Catholic Teaching on social justice and on peace as surely as the other side freely disregards Catholic Teaching on bioethical and sexual issues. As a result, both alike are blind to the Magisterium's unique and brilliant global witness to the inseparability of all of those concerns. In both the French and the American cases, there is a strange inability to recognise that what one was taught at 13 or 14 might not always be the last word.

The Dutch Remonstrant Brotherhood, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Socinian 'New Licht' within the early Free Church of Scotland, the rise of Unitarianism among the English Presbyterians, and the descent of New England Puritanism into "the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston": all alike are stark and timely warnings of the perils of hyper-Augustinianism. Efforts at Catholicism-without-the-Pope, always of the view that they would in principle accept the Papacy if it did this or that of the schismatics' own haeresis, have similarly sorry histories of doctrinal error, political extremism, sexual deviancy, and either an obsession with, or a disregard for, ceremonial minutiae.

The Old Catholics, with their Jansenist and Gallican roots, have combined both fates. So, too, did the Petite Église of always Gallican and often Jansenist dissidents from the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and from the Napoleonic Concordat. Like the Bezpopovtsy, the Petite Église ended up with no bishops and thus no priests. So instead the local congregation chose its leading layman to administer Baptism and to lead a service of popular non-sacramental devotions. Slow but inexorable decline followed. The Old Catholics are not far from that, with the Lefebvrists only a couple of generations behind.

Or else they will apply their purported argument from necessity to the conferral of sacramental Ordination by certain abbots, including one in England, to whom Medieval Popes had granted that privilege, which the four Cistercian Proto-Abbots were exercising without hindrance in respect of the Diaconate into the seventeenth century. Of course, they would simply ignore the need for a special exercise of the Papal power for the valid exercise of this potestas ligata contained, like that to confirm, in the priestly power of consecration. If, that is, any such potestas ligata existed at all. It would exist to them if they said so.

In either event, their adoption of a presbyterian or a congregational polity alongside the advanced liberal theology of those who were once Augustinian, but who had had no Magisterial restraint on their pursuit of that system to whatever fallacious conclusion, will conform to a very easily recognisable historical pattern. As will, and as already does, their accumulation of theological, political, sexual and general oddballs who believed that there ought to be a Pope, so long as he agreed with them. In the absence of such a Pontiff, they just do as they like. The line between the most exaggerated devotees of Saint Augustine and the perennial reemergence of Donatism is always a fine one. It is an old story, and the Lefebvrists are about to become, as they are already becoming, only the latest in the long line of those who have acted it out.

Big Change?

Where were the Whips? Kate Ferguson writes:

Josh Simons secretly met with Andy Burnham a year ago and told pals afterwards: “Keir Starmer is finished – the next PM has to be Andy.” The Labour politician sensationally quit his Makerfield seat this week to allow Mr Burnham a chance to challenge the PM – blindsiding No10. Mr Simons has claimed he only made the decision this week after quizzing the Greater Manchester Mayor at his home about his ideas for government.

But The Sun on Sunday can reveal that he actually spent A YEAR weighing up splitting from Sir Keir and throwing his weight behind Andy for PM. A Labour MP said: “He was talking about breaking with Keir last summer. He went to see Andy to speak to him about his ideas. “Then he said the PM was finished and that the next leader had to be Andy Burnham.”

The bombshell revelation came as Wes Streeting announced he WILL run for Labour leader as he launched a blistering attack on Sir Keir Starmer and called to rejoin the EU, Andy Burnham said he is running to “save Labour” and the party needs to return to its working class roots, senior Keir loyalists privately admitted he would have to quit and there would be an “Andy coronation” if Mr Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election, and City insiders warned an Andy Burnham premiership would trigger market meltdown.

Mr Simons stunned Westminster when he announced on Thursday that he was quitting so Mr Burnham could run and have a tilt at the leadership. His bombshell decision blindsided No10 and plunged Sir Keir’s premiership into turmoil. But now The Sun on Sunday can reveal that he has been toying with the decision since last August after a meeting at the pub with Mr Burnham. The pair spent the sunny evening “sinking pints and putting the world to rights”.

Mr Simons had been impressed with Andy before this after the Greater Manchester mayor helped him when his local area was flooded. But it was this crucial evening on a balmy summer’s evening that left Mr Simons convinced Sir Keir was finished and only Mr Burnham could save Labour. A pal of Mr Simons said: “They sunk some pints and put the world to rights. He left thinking only Andy could reconnect Labour with its northern, working class roots and fix the big problems facing Britain. He doesn’t think Andy is the messiah. There is no saviour for Labour. But he thinks Andy can get things done and connect with people. And that really matters.” Mr Simons was still a Cabinet Office minister at the time.

Embattled Sir Keir is battling to cling on to his job as PM after 96 Labour MPs called for him to quit over the local election bloodbath. He has insisted he will not quit as PM, but even his closest allies privately admit he will have to go if Mr Burnham wins a byelection against Reform and returns to Westminster. And No10 has ditched talk of Sir Keir having a decade in power.

Then again, Jessica Elgot, Alexandra Topping, Hannah Al-Othman and Josh Halliday write:

For weeks, Andy Burnham’s supporters had told MPs to “hold the line”, that he had a seat in parliament in his sights and that he would be a contender in any leadership contest. That was never the full truth.

His path to No 10 – if he makes it – is littered with more failed attempts than almost any other politician. Two leadership contests, a block on a return in Gorton and Denton, and quite a few aggrieved MPs in the north west who have had to spend weeks batting off suggestions they will give their seats up for him.

By Thursday this week, with almost all the likely contenders ruling themselves out, Burnham’s backers in parliament were getting desperate. Only the tiniest handful of the Greater Manchester mayor’s closest advisers knew the truth: there was finally a seat coming which no one expected.

When Wes Streeting announced at 1pm on Thursday that he was resigning from Keir Starmer’s cabinet, it set off a bombshell ; outwardly, things did not look hopeful. Streeting had not launched a leadership bid, and Burnham still ostensibly had no seat in Westminster from which to make his own challenge.

Locked out of parliament, Burnham seemed to be no further on than when he made his last leadership tilt, which was ended by the Labour national executive committee’s refusal to let him run in the Gorton and Denton byelection.

The mood among his supporters was bleak. “It’s a shit cocktail,” said one. “We’re all doomed.” But Burnham, as some other famous northerners once said, got by with a little help from his friends. Behind the scenes, his team got to work and finally, on Thursday, an opportunity appeared.

“It was always a case of just sitting and waiting,” said one source close to Burnham. While there was not an obvious seat, the sense was that Labour’s dismal performance in Gorton and Denton, plus disastrous results in the local election, could “unlock that route back”.

The confidence of hindsight, however, masks what has been a fraught week for team Burnham. As the guessing game of who would give up their seat took hold in the parliamentary press gallery, names and refusals began to stack up.

Paula Barker, the MP for Liverpool Wavertree, said she would be delighted if a seat could be found for Burnham, but, asked by the BBC if she’d give up her own, the answer was: “No.” Five MPs whose seats had been linked to a Burnham leadership bid all refused to stand down.

Over the previous weekend, those close to the Burnham campaign are understood to have had a seat in mind, the Manchester Rusholme seat of Afzal Khan. But Khan is thought to have changed his mind, with some MPs suggesting interventions from No 10 played a part.

Marie Rimmer, the MP for St Helens South and Whiston, was said to hold the other seat in play. Not according to her. “I just said: ‘No, absolutely not,’” Rimmer told The Guardian when asked about being approached by allies of Burnham. “I was appalled, actually. Really insulted and disgusted.”

Behind the scenes, nerves were jangling. One Labour source said team Burnham had attempted to “bully people into stepping down” and had even offered the Greater Manchester mayoralty in exchange for a parliamentary seat. Khan was rumoured to have been offered a seat in the Lords. But he dismissed the suggestion, telling The Guardian: “There was never any question of me giving up my seat, it’s not true.”

By Tuesday, Burnham was on the west coast mainline in an effort to win over MPs and unions in person while negotiations intensified. Several MPs told Burnham they backed him, but were worried about the financial implications of losing their jobs.

Then a wildcard arrived out of nowhere. Talks opened with Josh Simons, the 32-year-old Makerfield MP who has long been disillusioned with Starmer and came to believe Burnham should be the next prime minister more than a year ago. The pair became close over the last two years, after Burnham, not Whitehall, came to his aide after major floods in Platt Bridge.

“I think being a constituency MP radicalised Josh to how broken the country is,” said one friend. “He is so young, it is such a sacrifice.” Another close friend said: “Burnham knows how to advocate for the people and not for the system.”

Simons only began to seriously consider giving up his seat this week, The Guardian understands. The final decision was made after Burnham went to see Simons at home with his wife, Leah, an American economist who Simons met at Harvard and who has recently given birth to their third child. They spent two hours asking in-depth questions about Burnham’s plan for government, his economic strategy, his position on financial markets, and what he could really do in office.

Then, at 5.14pm on Thursday, a little over five hours after Streeting’s resignation, Simons announced he was stepping aside to pave Burnham’s way to Westminster.

But while the veteran politician has finally cleared the first hurdle, others remain. Labour’s majority in Makerfield was just 5,399 in 2024 and Reform UK won all the constituency’s wards in last week’s local elections. Nigel Farage has said his party will “throw absolutely everything” at the byelection, while the Greens have indicated they will properly contest it.

Burnham’s success was therefore existential, Simons told The Guardian. “The electoral story perfectly encapsulates the moral story; it’s the fight of our times,” he said.

“We are where the Democrats were in 2021, hurdling towards oblivion with an out-of-touch PM. It just needed something that could change the story. Burnham winning in Wigan, that does it.”

Just 25 minutes after Simons announced he would be stepping aside, Burnham confirmed he would run. “There is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester,” he said in a statement. “This is why I now seek people’s support to return to parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.”

And, as the candidate took to the streets around his home for a jog in a vintage football shirt on Friday, the message was clear: he’s running.

But across it all, Cameron Baillie writes:

Keir Starmer and his government have been roundly despised since the very beginning of his time in No.10. His approval tanked like few PMs in living memory. It’s not hard to see why: disability payment cuts, refusal to negotiate on the Birmingham bin strikes, abandoning pensioners in a winter energy poverty crisis, providing military intelligence and diplomatic support to Zionist genocide war crimes, racist scapegoating, appointing Jeffrey Epstein’s “best friend” to ambassador, the list goes on. Now, add to that Starmer’s general treachery and disregard for honesty and public wellbeing, and we’re left with a clear picture of widespread contempt. It’s fair to say that few will miss him, across the political compass. As Starmer appears set to exit, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is touted as a sensible, moderate replacement for PM — if only he can navigate a sinister NEC.

The ‘Big Burnham’ push

Burnham is considered by many to be on Labour’s “soft-left,” somewhat removed from Westminster bubble thinking, and representing a popular, alternative vision of Labourism. With his routine floating as PM replacement for months now, it almost feels like a done deal. But now it’s really happening. His Wigan-based colleague, journalist intimidator Josh Simons MP, stepped down and publicly told him to run for the top spot. . This might be a welcome turn of events for some on the left — less right-wing is always better, no? Novara Media are hard-soft-backing Burnham; no doubt The Guardian will anoint him Keir’s heir. He is floated as the only positively-rated politician in Britain. But I suggest that Burnham should not be considered a progressive or any-type “left” voice. I first had doubts about Burnham when he refused to comment on the bloody business dealings of Gulf oligarchs whose money he gladly funnels into Manchester. Man City’s owner is now under intense scrutiny for funding atrocities in Sudan.

Why Burnham is not in the ‘Mainstream’ 

Barely a year into Starmer’s premiership, a new political organisation named Mainstream was co-founded within Labour. Burnham and Clive Lewis were co-founders alongside others committed, at least in pixels, to a “democratic socialist future.” So far, so good? Sure — it would be swell if Labour was less ragingly right-wing. Fewer drab Starmer Speeches would be welcome. Clive Lewis offering to sacrifice his own seat to achieve that suggests a degree of principle I won’t scoff at. But I simply don’t think Burnham will deliver that future. To understand why I’m poo-pooing Burnham, who is no doubt popular across much of Greater Manchester. That said, Reform UK are now too. Much of what he supports, or has historically supported, is in fact widely unpopular — even if the man himself is well liked. His historical record in office makes my case.

Burnham’s burning record

In 2003, Burnham voted to declare an entirely and foreseeably disastrous war on Iraq. He also backed the notoriously debunked UN Security Council resolution pressuring the country to disarm weapons it didn’t have, three weeks prior. That war killed at least one million Iraqis, triggered societal collapses, enabled endemic corruption, and cost the lives of many British soldiers and civilians alike. Oh, and he also voted against the inquiry into that war.  He’s not alone in that, having joined Labour Friends of Israel. He wasn’t quiet about his “friendship”, labelling the peaceful, righteous BDS movement “spiteful” and praising the Balfour Declaration. Incredibly, he called Israel a beacon of democracy with “a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights.” Yeah, right (-wing).

He’s made conciliatory statements around Palestine — Middle East Eye makes a more sympathetic case for him. But he hasn’t, for example, pressured Greater Manchester Pension Fund to divest its many millions from Israeli genocide and apartheid, like it did against apartheid in white-dominated South Africa. Burnham was even criticised by arch-neoliberal Cameron’s government for “posturing” against NHS privatisation, while supporting it during the Blair-Brown years. Not to mention he’s remained comfortably prominent through Blairism, Corbynism and now Starmerism (if something so definable exists), suiting himself to each guise.

Never trust a shapeshifter

I’m not deluded enough to think that Burnham isn’t popular and he would be better than Starmer – it’s not a high bar. If Burnham wins and gives us all proportional representation, I’ll eat my words. But I don’t trust Burnham’s promises. How can I trust someone who votes for an illegal, murderous war based on lies, flip-flops between both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian coloniser-colonised dynamic, and backs NHS privatisation? It’s clearly not just me that mistrusts Burnham — or, at least, I hold actual knowledge about Burnham’s record against his constant aura-branding. The public shouldn’t based on his record, like him as much as they do. How can we forget that millions marched against the Iraq War, most Britons dislike Israel, and 84% support a publicly owned, socialised NHS?

Covering the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, I met Labour-gone-Green and Labour-gone-Reform voters alike. Many said they would’ve voted for Burnham if he wasn’t blocked. Many cited his well-branded ‘Bee’ bus network and capped fares, his Covid-era posturing or his supposed personal charisma/brand/vision. Some liked his so-called “Manchesterism.” But we’ve seen where Labour’s fluid, PR-branding politics gets us — exactly where we are today. When Burnham tried and failed to stand against Jeremy Corbyn for leadership in 2015, he did so on a vacuous platform of “big change” — sound familiar? It’s almost as if the Starmer script was written in advance by the Blairite-Mandelson core, and they tried to run it sooner but failed. Now, it seems, they will fail again. Burnham might be a shot better than Starmer, sure. But don’t be fooled into thinking he can be trusted. Why trust a man who’s shapeshifted so often throughout his career? He’ll only shift again.

Shabana Mahmood Has Misled The Public

Kate Knowles writes:

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has misled the public about her role in a 2005 election fraud trial in Birmingham, The Dispatch can reveal. Evidence from the court transcript shows that Mahmood’s postal ballot was mentioned in court and that she submitted evidence, contradicting her statements earlier this month that she had no involvement.

The transcript suggests that her ballot documents were passed to the Crown Prosecution Service after doubts about the “unsustainable” discrepancy between two signatures on her voting forms, although no action was taken.

In another major development, the judge in the case, Richard Mawrey KC, has told us he doesn’t recognise Mahmood’s claim that allegations of elections fraud against the family were “dismissed”. When we showed Mawrey the explanation offered by Mahmood’s spokesperson, which was also given to the Daily Mail when they followed up the story on 4 May, the recently-retired deputy high court judge said that it “appears to bear no relation to reality as I recall it”.

A highlighted passage from the court transcript. ‘The director’ refers to the Director of Public Prosecutions

In early 2005, a special election court was convened to examine widespread allegations of voting fraud, including ballot theft and forgery, during the 2004 local election. After a two-week trial, Mawrey found that “there were corrupt and illegal practices committed by the Labour Party Respondents and their agents”, saying the wrongdoing would “disgrace a banana republic”. Mawrey voided the elections of six Labour councillors, including three in Bordesley Green, where Mahmood’s father was the party’s election agent.

Mahmood’s spokesperson says the misleading statements about her involvement in the case were an innocent mistake. “This will just be a case of misremembering one element of something that happened 20+ years ago,” they told The Dispatch. They say that prosecutors did not pursue action against her.

The home secretary is a key player in the ongoing Labour leadership intrigue, and is said to have put pressure on the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer to set out a timetable for his departure earlier this week. She is unlikely to run for the leadership, but “has nonetheless been seen as a future leader and a rising star representing the right of the Labour Party,” reported the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, we published evidence that:

• Mahmood’s postal ballot application form and her ‘declaration of identity’ form bore signatures that appear strikingly different;
• The then 23-year-old barrister voted using her brother’s ballot — not the one assigned to her by the elections office;
• Her sister’s application to vote by post bore a signature that looks almost identical to the one on Shabana’s application.

‘No involvement’

On Friday May 1, the evening before we published our first story, Mahmood’s special advisor Joshua Williams sent a letter to The Dispatch that made a series of serious legal threats if we went ahead with our story about her involvement in the case. In that letter, the advisor wrote: “Shabana Mahmood had no involvement in the proceedings arising from the Birmingham election petitions whatsoever.” He added: “She did not give oral evidence, did not provide a witness statement, and was not called or asked to participate in any capacity.”

We have now obtained the transcript from the trial, which shows that — contrary to her advisor’s statement — Mahmood was named in court and submitted a witness statement. She was named by the barrister representing her father Mahmood Ahmed, who was accused of being “party to the forgery” because the declarations of identity used to certify the postal ballots of Shabana and various members of the family were alleged to be forged.

Shabana Mahmood and her siblings told the court via written statements that the ballot declarations were genuine, but this created a further problem: that the signature provided by them on their declarations appeared very different from the ones written on their applications for postal ballots.

The two signatures from Shabana Mahmood’s postal ballot documents, displayed next to each other for comparison.

Addressing Ahmed’s lawyer in court, Mawrey clarified the argument the lawyer was making to prevent his client from being named in the judgement and therefore barred from voting and standing in elections for five years. “So if you are able to show that the signatures on the declarations of identity are genuine, and there is no evidence to show that your client participated in or knew of the false signatures on the applications to vote, because obviously they must be false if they are not the same as the ones which have been tested as genuine,” Mawrey said to the lawyer. “So in that circumstance you would argue that I could not be satisfied on the heightened civil standard of proof that Mr Mahmood Ahmed had been guilty of the corrupt or illegal practice.”

“That is precisely Mr Ahmed’s case,” the lawyer replied.

Graham Brodie, the barrister representing the petitioners in the case told the court that the family’s claim that they had signed the applications to vote was “unsustainable” and that the documents were being passed to prosecutors.

‘On the substantive merits’

In his letter, Mahmood’s advisor Williams told us on 1 May that allegations that the family’s postal ballot paperwork was forged “were dismissed on the substantive merits of the evidence” over 20 years ago by the judge overseeing the historic case. A similar statement was given to the Daily Mail.

The Dispatch now has proof that this statement is untrue. At the close of the trial, Mawrey made a point of saying that people whom he had decided not to examine for possible “naming and shaming” – including Mahmood Ahmed, the home secretary’s father – should not claim to have been exonerated. “They may assert they have been cleared [but] in my view they have neither been cleared or condemned,” he said.

The story on page 2 of the Daily Mail on May 4, including Mahmood’s statement that the allegations were “tested and dismissed”.

Mawrey maintains this position now. We went back to him several times via email, and he confirmed that Mahmood’s account of the claims against her family being “dismissed” is not accurate. At the time, he decided against singling out individuals such as Ahmed because the process would have been too cumbersome and time-consuming to justify the cost to taxpayers, an account that is confirmed by contemporary press reports.

“I was aware that they would claim to be cleared and it appears they still do,” Mawrey told us last week. “In reality my judgment makes it clear that the frauds were orchestrated by the Birmingham Labour Party and were not just a local effort by the individual respondents,” he wrote, referring to the councillors he ultimately unseated. Mawrey added: “The reason why all the documents weren’t fully examined was purely time and expense.”

Because of Mahmood Ahmed’s prominent role in the Bordesley Green Labour election campaign, and because he had witnessed his family members signing their declarations, the judge considered naming and shaming him along with 18 other Labour activists. The 19 men had to submit arguments why they should not be named and were invited to appear in court.

The test was limited to whether Ahmed could provide substantial evidence that the signatures on the declarations of identity he had witnessed were genuine. Shabana and her brother and sister provided witness statements saying they had signed their declarations. As a result, Mawrey said he was “minded not to name” Ahmed, which would have disqualified him from voting and running for office for five years.

The possibility that forgery took place on the sisters’ applications to vote was never considered by the court, which means that the key allegation in our story was not “dismissed”.

The Mahmoods also claimed in their statements to Mawrey’s court that they had each signed their own application forms. Here are the signatures on Shabana and her sister’s applications for comparison. We have redacted the sister’s first name because she is not a public figure.

The signature on Shabana Mahmood’s postal-vote application (top) and her sister’s (bottom).

Brodie, the barrister acting on behalf of the petitioners in the case, said: “Our position is that this man was the election agent for the Labour Party candidates and must have been aware of the corruption in support of their election.”

He stressed that the petitioners were not disputing the declarations but the applications: “The signatures between the declarations of identity and the applications for a postal vote differ because he forged or was responsible for forging the applications for postal votes.”

A highlighted passage from the court transcript, showing Brodie referring to the discrepancy as ‘unsustainable’.

“They have all said that they themselves signed the applications for postal votes,” Brodie said of Mahmood and her siblings. “On the face of it that is unsustainable and these documents are to be passed to the Director.” He was referring to the Director of Public Prosecutions. A spokesperson for the CPS was not able to confirm what happened next, citing the gap of more than 20 years.

Mahmood’s spokesperson reiterated her stance when we got in touch last week, saying: “The false allegations within this reporting were tested and dismissed, with no adverse finding, over twenty years ago. Shabana Mahmood is a dedicated public servant, who serves Birmingham, this country, and has long championed our democracy.”

Worcestershire Sauce

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Even when the gander is Alan Amos. Although the Conservatives are now the second largest party on Worcestershire County Council after Reform UK, they have accepted a Green as Leader of the Council so that an administration, also involving Independents and the Liberal Democrats, could be formed in place of Reform's chaotic minority effort, which had its chance, and which did very little apart from put up Council Tax by nine per cent. Even Nigel Farage has said that he wished that Reform had never bothered with Worcestershire. In response, the Conservative Party has suspended its Group Leader, Councillor Adam Kent. Yet in 2021, when a century of Labour control ended on Durham County Council, the Conservatives as the second largest party after Labour accepted a Lib Dem Leader so that the one Green could get the Grand Coalition over the line. No one was suspended for that.

Ezra Levant, Avi Yemini, Joey Mannarino, Valentina Gomez, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Filip Dewinter, Dominik Tarczyński, Ada Lluch, Don Keith, and at least two others, have been banned from entering this country so as to prevent them from addressing the Unite the Kingdom rally later today. That's keeping out hate preachers, however many may have been let in before, and even fêted in Downing Street as the new President of Syria. In several cases, that's Brexit benefits. In the case of Tarczyński, who is a sitting MEP, that's a double Brexit benefit.

But will any member of either the Conservative Party or Reform be suspended for attendance at Unite the Kingdom? With 11 slots to fill, will any member of either the Conservative Party or Reform be suspended for stepping in and speaking from the platform? Especially since at the Gorton and Denton by-election, from his home in Spain, the Irish citizen Stephen Yaxley-Lennon endorsed Advance UK, even if it did then take fewer votes than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Participation in Unite the Kingdom would still be support for the man who had issued that endorsement, and thus a clear disciplinary matter in any serious political party. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Even when the gander is "Tommy Robinson".

Nothing Cryptic

Boris Johnson has always shown you what he was. Based on his time as Mayor of London, he was always going to become the Prime Minister of Stonewall, of Net Zero, of the Boriswave, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, of the war in Ukraine, of the absolute conviction that the restrictions that he had imposed on everyone else did not apply to his own circle, and of the “legal but harmful” clause of his and Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill. If you had projected something else onto him, then that was your problem. For many of you, it still is.

With that in mind, we know what Josh Simons, Mr Digital ID, sees in Andy Burnham. The speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name.

In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable. Indeed, we have already surrendered far too much democratic political control over our economy. And for what? Even lower economic growth, and even higher unemployment. Was it not supposed to have been impossible to have both mass unemployment and galloping inflation? Funny how well we seem to be managing it. To the people responsible, that is as it should be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard it as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and as it is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

Consider that as British Gas is 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. If Burnham offered any improvement on this, then Wes Streeting would not want him back in Parliament, much less would Simons have resigned his seat to bring that about.