Construction and Roofing

Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, or anyone else, it is a yes-no question: will you release the Mandelson Files as required by the Intelligence and Security Committee in accordance with the Humble Address? If not, then you are unfit to be Prime Minister.

Against Burnham at Makerfield, Advance UK has endorsed Restore Britain, so the endorsement of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is no doubt imminent. At Gorton and Denton, that secured Advance fewer votes than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which is also standing this time. But Burnham versus Robert Kenyon is a much more serious contest, so do not be surprised if the vote for Rebecca Shepherd, however small, was larger than the margin of victory. Rupert Lowe has already denied Reform UK overall control of Norfolk County Council.

And the questions about Nigel Farage's money are not going to go away. Nor are those about Zack Polanski's. He broke the relevant marina agreement by living full-time in his houseboat to the point of registering to vote there, not that he did in fact in the recent local elections, but he did not register to pay Council Tax at that, his home address. "Paying it back" does not pay the debt to society. We have not seen the like since David Laws, who stole more than it would have been possible to have stolen in Housing Benefit, yet who was not only never prosecuted, but back attending Cabinet little more than two years later, continuing to do so for the rest of the Coalition.

Still, nothing about either Reform or the Green Party, and they have strikingly similar and indeed connected subcultures, is anything like as odd as the arson trial of Keir Starmer's Ukrainian gentlemen callers. Roman Lavrynovych has been declared mentally disabled, having scored 66 on the general ability index, with anything below 70 being considered "intellectual disability". Yet he is the sole director of the construction and roofing company that bears his name. Think on.

At First Sight

Robert Kenyon would have wiped the floor with any Labour candidate other than Andy Burnham, so Kenyon versus Burnham will be a proper contest, as it should be. As to other candidates, electoral pacts are wrong in principle, because votes belong to voters, not to parties. Something similar is true of that suddenly fashionable thing, "vetting". By the way, unlike the BBC, Channel Four is an old-fashioned publicly owned company the way British Gas used to be. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher. Do you want to own Married at First Sight, or Virgin Island, or Naked Attraction? But the vetting of parliamentary candidates is fundamentally and ultimately a matter for us, the electors.

For example, Burnham, whom the universe rewarded for his promise to stick to the fiscal rules of Rachel Reeves by announcing a rise in unemployment to five per cent, one in 20, with a youth figure of a resignation-worthy 16 per cent. What was that about what would happen if the national minimum wage were equalised regardless of age? Or about the impossibility of mass unemployment and galloping inflation at the same time? Three years ago, to the month, Rishi Sunak urged the supermarkets to cap the prices of staple foods, and food inflation was nothing like it is now. If the Right is opposed to Government interference in the setting of food prices, then the Conservative Party, Reform UK, Restore Britain and the Liberal Democrats will presumably all be going into the next General Election on a commitment to the abolition of farm subsidies. Thankfully, they will not. Not that I trust this Government to go about any of this in anything but the most catastrophic way, but even so.

Or any available Government, in fact. HS2 that must have diamond-encrusted platinum tracks. The Leeds trams are costing £2.5 billion, so far, to arrive no earlier than the late 2030s. This is the country of your ever-increasing utility bills, of PPE, and of the money paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year. The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there was no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us. It was obviously a complete rip-off that we were paying £400 million per year to rent the Bibby Stockholm, an engineless barge, now 50 years old, that could not have been worth more than a few million pounds. Last month, Corporate Travel Management admitted to having overcharged by £118 million, but that would seem to be a very conservative estimate. Yet will even that be repaid? Political kickbacks? What do you think? And to only one party? What do you think? In that spirit, Kensington and Chelsea Council knowingly fitted Grenfell Tower with flammable cladding because it was otherwise considered an eyesore by its rich neighbours. Did they just ring up and ask? Think on.

Pending The Outcome

Right next door to Steve Reed, Harrison Galliven writes:

Four Labour activists, including a former Croydon MP hopeful, have appeared in court for the first time over allegations that a party database was manipulated during the selection of a parliamentary candidate.

Joel Bodmer, 40, his wife Shila Bodmer, 41, former Croydon councillor Carole Bonner, 69, and former Southend councillor Gabriel Leroy, 24, appeared before Westminster Magistrates' Court on Tuesday (May 19).

The defendants spoke only to confirm their names, dates of birth and addresses.

Joel Bodmer, who previously sought selection as Labour's parliamentary candidate for the Croydon East constituency, is charged with perverting the course of justice over the alleged alteration of phone records.

The original selection process for Labour's Croydon East parliamentary candidate was abandoned in November 2023 amid alleged irregularities. It was then re-run four months later, with Joel Bodmer not taking part in the revised process.

Shila Bodmer, Leroy and Bonner are charged with conspiracy to commit offences under the Criminal Law Act and the Computer Misuse Act.

Lead Magistrate Paul Goldspring sent the case to Southwark Crown Court for a pre-trial hearing on June 16. All four have been suspended from the Labour Party pending the outcome of an investigation.

Joel Bodmer remains employed as a regional organiser for UNISON, although the union has confirmed he is currently on unpaid leave.

Following Joel Bodmer's removal from the selection process, Natasha Irons was chosen as Labour's candidate for Croydon East and went on to win the seat at the 2024 general election. Last month, Ms Irons told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that she was relieved the case is being treated "with the seriousness it deserves", while stressing she could not comment on the proceedings.

Speaking after the four were charged last month, Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service's Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, said: "Our prosecutors have worked to establish that there is sufficient evidence to bring this case to court and that it is in the public interest to pursue criminal proceedings.

"We have worked closely with the Metropolitan Police Service as it has carried out its investigation. We remind all concerned that criminal proceedings against these defendants are active and that they have the right to a fair trial.

"It is vital that there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings."

Than At Any Point

There was no recession on the day of the 2010 Election, as there had been none for years when the polls opened in 1997. Likewise, no one down the Dog and Duck gives a dog or duck about your growth figures or your IMF forecasts. They do not believe you, and they never will.

Nor are they the only ones. According to Wes Streeting, whom you have always wanted to be Prime Minister eventually, Brexit, which you have always opposed, has been "a catastrophic mistake" that has "left us less wealthy, less powerful and less in control than at any point before the Industrial Revolution". Yes, he really did say that. And he is planning to make a resignation statement to the House of Commons. So which is it? Is Britain going gangbusters under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? Or are we poorer than ever before?

And Everything As You See Me

Cork City Council is thinking of putting up, “a statue to the mosquito or midge that bit Oliver Cromwell during his siege of the city, later causing his death through ‘Cork fever’ (malaria); and that this statue shall be the ‘world’s smallest public statue’.” Cromwell lived for nine years after the Siege of Cork, but why let that spoil things?

Well may Rupert Lowe charge £2500 per annum for membership of his Cromwell Club. Anticipating the bourgeois capitalist revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789, the regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and to “time out of mind”. In 1661, Cromwell’s corpse was dug up, tried, convicted and hanged. Today, his statue appears to guard the entrance to Parliament. But as Alex Nunns, the Labour Left’s preeminent present chronicler of itself, once said to me, “John Lilburne himself would pull down the statue of Cromwell, if he were not 350 years dead.”

The proposal to erect that statue nearly brought down the Liberal Government of the day. It went up only because the Liberal Unionists decided that making a point against the Irish Nationalists was even more important than making a pro-Tory one. So they voted for it against the ferocious opposition both of the Irish Nationalists and of their own Tory allies. It is pointedly not inside the Palace of Westminster, and not a penny of public money was spent on putting it up even where it is. In fact, it exists only because of a donation by the Liberal former Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry. He then gave an address at its unveiling. But almost no one knew that that was why he was the speaker. His donation had had to be made anonymously.

Places Like Ours?

“Politics isn’t working for places like ours,” says Andy Burnham of the place where he has been Mayor for the last nine years. Mayor of Greater Manchester. One of the most powerful subnational positions in Europe. Speaking of Europe, Burnham would not seek to rejoin the EU, but he may as well, since he would stick to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. I have just heard (“I didn’t like to call you during Corrie”) that Ed Miliband was reconsidering his endorsement of Burnham in return for the Chancellorship if the Chancellorship were going to mean that.

Yields have been going up the world over, so that was never anything to do with Burnham. Now, though, what is? Well, there is always devolution. In the areas that Burnham has in mind, how many councils does Reform UK have to take, or at the very least does Labour have to lose? Labour is tied with Reform for a distant second place at Holyrood, where it has not governed in 19 years, and it is in a very distant third place in the Senedd. Dawn Butler has rowed back on the suggestion that she might stand for Mayor of London, since the Greens are highly likely to take it, heaven help all concerned, and even more so without Sadiq Khan. There have been seven elections to the London Mayoralty, and Labour has only ever won four of them, three with Khan and the fourth with a man who, having already wiped the floor with Labour as an Independent, would have done so again.

And there is always Proportional Representation. But the arguments for that and the arguments for First Past the Post are both rubbish in their own terms, so the case for change has not been made, while at the same time the change itself would not be the end of the world, even if organisationally it might very well be the end of the Labour Party. Under the supposed Holy Grail that is the Single Transferable Vote, every Taoiseach has been the Leader either of Fianna Fáil or of Fine Gael. In any case, Burnham is surrounded by people who would want to put it to a referendum. The electoral system for directly elected Mayors has changed twice without a referendum. There was no referendum on the introduction of STV for local government in Scotland, which entertainingly led to a reduction in the number of Liberal Democrat councillors, nor was there a referendum on the drastic alteration of the arrangements for electing the Senedd. But Burnham’s associates would insist on one. Call it the Stopped Compass.

Holding out for something better, Angela Rayner turned down Health Secretary, so the opponents of assisted suicide have lost the position. James Murray is also a departure from Wes Streeting, whatever Streeting’s other faults, in that while Streeting was ambivalent, or inconsistent if you prefer, about gender identity, Murray is a true believer who now runs England’s NHS while unable to define a woman. And where does this preposterous idea come from, that Jeremy Corbyn would have the slightest desire to be back in the Labour Party? An interviewer should ask him. Like them or not, he has always given very straight answers. We former members of the Labour Party get everywhere. Lee Anderson, who was a Labour councillor into his fifties and well into the Corbyn Leadership, is now the Chairman of Reform UK. It is notable that he has been given that job while remaining Chief Whip. It is, though, wholly unremarkable that he should have it while having been Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party under Rishi Sunak. Not Boris Johnson. Not Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak. Think on.

Account Ability

Anna Gross writes:

Nigel Farage’s claim that he paid for a £1.4mn house with his fee from a reality TV show has been challenged by corporate accounts that appear to show that the income remained on his company’s balance sheet after the property purchase.

Farage bought a £1.4mn house in Surrey on May 10 2024, just weeks after receiving £5mn from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, but did not register the gift in his MPs’ register of interests after taking office the following month.

On Thursday, the parliamentary standards commissioner announced he had launched an investigation into the Reform UK leader’s failure to declare the gift, which Farage has said was to pay for his security.

Farage’s spokesperson told the BBC on Friday that he had paid for the Surrey property with his fee for participating in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! in late 2023, which was roughly £1.5mn before tax, and that he had not used the money given by Harborne.

The Reform leader told the FT last year that his earnings from the reality show were paid to his personal media company Thorn in the Side Ltd.

Accounts for the company show its cash position increased from £300,000 on May 31 2023 to £1.7mn on May 31 2024, and suggest that no dividend was paid out in the period.

Property records show that Farage, not Thorn in the Side, bought the Surrey home and that there is no mortgage on the property. Nimesh Shah, a tax expert at accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, reviewed the company accounts for the FT and said that they suggested money from Farage’s reality TV show appearance was not used to purchase the house.

He said Reform’s claim that the house was purchased using money from the reality TV appearance fee “needs to be clarified because the company’s accounts are not consistent with their statement”.

If Farage is found to have breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare a gift, he could be suspended from the House of Commons and a by-election could be triggered in his constituency.

Responding to a question about the source of the funds for Farage’s house purchase, Reform said: “Nigel has multiple sources of income, as you can see from his parliamentary register.”

The apparent inconsistency in Reform’s explanation adds to questions about Farage’s transparency over the purpose of the £5mn gift, which Harborne gave to him about two months before Farage announced that he would stand to be MP for Clacton at the 2024 general election.

Farage has repeatedly said that Harborne gave him the money to pay for his security, saying earlier this month that “Christopher is an ardent supporter who is deeply concerned for my safety.”

But on Thursday he told The Sun that the money was a “reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years”.

MPs are obliged to report financial benefits they receive in the 12 months before being elected. Farage was elected in July 2024 and did not record the gift in his parliamentary register of interests.

There is an exemption in the parliamentary rules for strictly personal gifts, “which could not reasonably be thought by others to be related to membership of the House or to the Member’s parliamentary or political activities”.

Harborne, who has lived in Thailand for the past two decades, donated £12mn to Reform last year, making him one of the biggest donors in British political history.

According to Farage’s register of interests, the Reform leader made about £1mn on top of his MP salary in his first year in office, including from his role presenting on GB News, videos for the Cameo platform, speaking engagements and his ambassador role for Gold Bullion.