In The Pink?

That Reform UK is the most popular party among gay and bisexual men will come as no surprise to those of us with ecclesiastical backgrounds. If anything, the wonder is that it is not Restore Britain, and even then only for want of anything even further to the right.

But what of the rest of the Reform electorate? Since the dawn of time, those people have at least pretended not to notice that preponderance in everything from the Conservative Party and the right-wing media, via the public schools and the grander groves of academia, to the Royal Households and the clergy. But that is no longer the etiquette. They never asked what it was about their old party that made it so attractive to men of that inclination. Will they ask about their new one?

Similarly, Reform and Labour are tied for the top spot among public sector trade unionists, who are a pretty middle-class lot and hitherto the core supporters of Tony Blair and Keir Starmer. Labour needs to reckon with their obvious disappointment, but not half as much as Reform needs to ask itself about the attractiveness of becoming their voice and vehicle. Even the broadest church needs walls.

The Tangled Web

Paul Knaggs writes:

The second tranche of documents relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the United States arrives in Parliament this week. It is, according to the government, among the largest publications ever laid before the House. Whether it answers the questions that matter is an entirely different proposition.

THE DRIP AND THE DELAY

Sir Walter Scott wrote it in 1808, and British politics has been illustrating it ever since: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.” The Mandelson affair has become the definitive case study of that tangled web, strand by strand, delay by delay, redaction by redaction.

Monday, we are told, brings the second tranche. A government spokesperson has called it one of “the largest publications ever laid in Parliament.” That is a remarkable boast for a government that initially opposed releasing any of it at all. Number 10 has refused to confirm the publication date, performing the by-now-familiar ritual of managing revelation by controlling the drip. The timing, as ever, is everything: Parliament returns from recess on Monday, and the documents land precisely when scrutiny resumes, not a day before.

The question that precedes every page of every release remains the same one this publication has been asking for months: what is not there? What has been redacted, withheld by the Metropolitan Police as part of its ongoing investigation, or quietly excluded under the elastic rubric of national security? The gap between what was said and what was done is where this story lives. The documents do not fill that gap. They illuminate its edges.

The government initially opposed this disclosure. It required a parliamentary ambush to extract it. That fact should preface every sentence of every analysis of what is published.

WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW

The first tranche, published in March, was instructive enough. It confirmed that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been advised, nine days before Mandelson’s appointment was confirmed in December 2024, that the peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein posed a “general reputational risk.” The advice note informed the Prime Minister that Epstein and Mandelson’s relationship had continued across 2009 to 2011, that Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s house while the predator was in prison in June 2009, and that Mandelson was known as an advocate for closer UK-China relations.

Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, described the appointment process in a summary of a fact-finding call as “weirdly rushed.” Powell noted he had raised his concerns with Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s then-chief of staff, and been told the issues had been addressed. They had not been addressed. They had been managed. There is a difference, and it is not a small one.

We now know that UK Security Vetting concluded Mandelson presented a “high” overall concern and recommended his clearance be denied. The concerns included his business ties to Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, his connection to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, his relationship with former Israeli military intelligence general Tamir Hayman, a one-million-pound loan to invest in an Israeli start-up, and a potentially compromising relationship with a British individual. The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office, then under David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, said yes. Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office permanent secretary, overruled the vetting recommendation and granted Mandelson his clearance. Robbins has since been sacked. Lammy remains in Cabinet.

The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office said yes. That sentence alone should end several careers. / Starmer told the country he knew nothing about the failed vetting until the Guardian’s confirmation broke in April 2026. Opposition parties disputed this promptly and with cause, pointing to exchanges showing Downing Street had been contacted about the failed vetting seven months earlier. David Maddox, political editor of The Independent, broke the story of Mandelson’s failure to clear MI6 vetting on 12 September 2025. It was raised in the House of Commons four days later. The Prime Minister and his office were not uninformed. They were, at best, incurious.

THE MINISTERS WHO WENT QUIET 

The second tranche brings something the first did not contain: Mandelson’s direct communications with ministers and government officials during his time as ambassador. It also brings, according to reporting by The Telegraph, a revelation of a different order. Cabinet ministers attempted to conceal their messages with Lord Mandelson from Parliament. 

Government officials dealing with the Mandelson files were forced to ask ministers to hand over their messages more than once, after initial reluctance. Under the terms of the humble address motion, ministers, officials and special advisers were required to submit all WhatsApp and email messages exchanged with Mandelson. Yet civil servants received “nil return” responses from some ministers known to have a close relationship with the peer. Some argued that their conversations with the US ambassador were not strictly ministerial, and therefore fell outside scope. Civil servants, The Telegraph reports, were dismayed. 

This is the texture of a cover-up. It does not require a single smoking gun. It requires a pattern: initial opposition to publication, belated compliance, narrow interpretations of scope, ministerial reluctance, and civil servants pressing again and again for material that should have arrived without asking. Every delay, every reinterpretation, every nil return is another thread in Scott’s web. 

The Intelligence and Security Committee accused the government of applying redactions far too broadly, of withholding documents it had no authority to withhold. The watchdog was not speculating. It had seen the material.

THE NETWORK NOBODY NAMES 

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has resigned from the government. There is a thread running underneath all of this that the document releases will not resolve, because documents do not answer structural questions. They record transactions. They do not explain the obligations that preceded them. To understand those obligations, you need to look at who funds whom, who is married to whom, who was placed where, and who held the whip when the vote came.

Labour Together, the think tank built by Morgan McSweeney and then run by Josh Simons, now a minister in Starmer’s government, funded 111 Labour MPs ahead of and during the 2024 general election. Of the 123 total parliamentary candidates the organisation backed, 111 won their seats. That is not a network. That is a parliamentary army. Labour Together donated more than two and a half million pounds to Labour ahead of the 2024 general election. Fourteen serving ministers received financial support from the organisation, including Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Yvette Cooper and John Healey.

Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones, who is now responsible for propriety and ethics in government, received 57,400 pounds from Labour Together ahead of that election. Jones is now in charge of publishing the Mandelson documents under discussion.

Among those backed and endorsed by Labour Together for the 2024 election was Imogen Walker, elected MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley with a majority of 9,472. Within months of taking her seat she was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By September 2025 she had been elevated to assistant government whip. Imogen Walker is married to Morgan McSweeney. Wikipedia records that McSweeney used his position to aid his wife’s selection as a Labour candidate. That is a fact, not an allegation. It sits in the public domain, and it sits uncomfortably there.

But Walker’s support did not come only from Labour Together. As Labour Heartlands reported in February 2026, in June 2024, just weeks before polling day, Peter Mandelson personally attended a fundraiser for Walker and her fellow Scottish candidate Gregor Poynton. Mandelson, the man whose relationship with Jeffrey Epstein would bring down this government’s first year, was in the room, microphone in hand, raising money for the woman who would become the wife of his most loyal protege. The photograph exists. The event happened. The connection is not alleged. It is documented.

Starmer put McSweeney in control of selecting Labour’s candidates. He included his wife, Imogen Walker, in that selection This is the network made visible. McSweeney learned politics from Mandelson. McSweeney built the machine that made his wife an MP. Mandelson fundraised for her. Walker became a whip. And on 28 April 2026, Parliament voted on whether to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee over his conduct in the Mandelson affair. McSweeney spent the day testifying before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, admitting his “serious mistake” in recommending Mandelson’s appointment. While he did so, his wife worked the lobbies. The motion was defeated 335 to 223. Fifteen Labour MPs defied the whip. The Speaker noted that some members voting against investigation were heckled with cries of “shame” as they walked through. It was raised from the floor of the House that McSweeney’s wife, now a whip, was among those pressing Labour MPs to vote against any scrutiny of the man her husband had championed and Mandelson had fundraised for.

Mandelson fundraised for the woman who became the whip who enforced the vote to protect the Prime Minister who appointed Mandelson on her husband’s advice. At some point, coincidence stops being a useful word.

THE FAMILY THAT GOVERNS 

It would be easy to dismiss the following as mere coincidence, and some will. Dismiss it if you like. But account for it first.

Rachel Reeves is Chancellor of the Exchequer. She is married to Nicholas Joicey, a senior civil servant who is Second Permanent Secretary and Group Chief Operating Officer at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and who was formerly a speechwriter to Gordon Brown when Brown was Chancellor. The Chancellor’s husband sits at the heart of the civil service machinery the Chancellor oversees. Her sister, Ellie Reeves, is Solicitor General, appointed in September 2025. Ellie Reeves is married to John Cryer, now Baron Cryer, who served as Labour MP for Hornchurch and then Leyton and Wanstead, and who was Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 2015 to 2024 before being elevated to the House of Lords following the 2024 election.

But of course it’s just like one big family.

The Commons and the Lords, taken together, contain an extraordinary concentration of relationships that the mainstream record rarely joins up. Sisters who are government ministers. Husbands who are peers. Spouses who are senior civil servants. Wives who are whips. It is perfectly normal, of course, for spouses to keep their maiden names. It is perfectly understandable that people who work in politics meet partners who also work in politics. None of this is, individually, improper. But the aggregate picture is one that any serious democracy should be willing to examine honestly, rather than treat as impolite to mention.

These are not accusations. They are facts, properly sourced and verifiable. The question they raise is not whether any individual acted wrongly, but whether a political culture that concentrates power so tightly within a network of family, financial, and ideological loyalty is capable of subjecting itself to meaningful scrutiny. The answer, on 28 April 2026, was 335 to 223. The whip held.

I point these things out as I point out the corruption and decay in a house that is our seat of democracy.

WHAT THE SECOND TRANCHE CANNOT TELL US 

No document release, however large, will answer the question that sits beneath every other question: why was Peter Mandelson appointed to the most important diplomatic post in British foreign policy in December 2024, against the advice of the vetting agency, against the concerns of the national security adviser, against the reservations of the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant, and with full knowledge of a relationship with a convicted paedophile financier that stretched from before Epstein’s first conviction to years after it?

The official answer is that Mandelson lied about the depth of his relationship with Epstein. Starmer has repeated this position with such consistency that it has acquired the rhythm of a prepared statement, which is precisely what it is. The documents show, however, that the risks were known. “General reputational risk” is not a phrase used by civil servants who are uninformed. It is a phrase used by civil servants who are recording, for the protection of everyone involved, that they have told the minister what they know and the minister has chosen to proceed.

The appointment was rushed. The vetting was overruled. The warnings were filed and ignored. The minister who overruled the vetting remains in Cabinet. The chief of staff who pushed the appointment resigned but was back in the building. The think tank that funded those who would later vote to limit scrutiny is under criminal referral. And the wife of the man at the centre of it all was working the lobbies while her husband answered questions about his role in the affair.

Scott’s line ends with a couplet most people forget. After “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive” comes this: “How tangled becomes the web when we attempt to make the world believe.”

The world is watching. The questions will not go away. The silence around Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together will not end because the government has published what it was compelled to publish. Transparency imposed is not transparency offered. The distinction matters, and so does the price of forgetting it.

A government that required a parliamentary ambush to begin telling the truth about itself has not suddenly become honest. It has become unable to sustain the lie at its previous cost.

Sentence, Structure

If Nicola Sturgeon is “serving a sentence for a crime [she] did not commit,” then is she serving it on the same wing as a rapist? She put other Scotswomen in that position. She gave a “no comment” interview to the Police before, days later, sending them a written statement that was copied to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, headed by the Lord Advocate in the Cabinet, which without further examination by anyone promptly decided not to prosecute her. Will this now be standard practice? Someone must have the file that Police Scotland sent to the Crown Office. This is what the Internet is for.

Sturgeon had better hope to have concluded her sentence well before the next Conservative Government, since, in yet another sign of the restoration of Blairism, that party has adopted the old New Labour groupies’ idea of replacing cash benefits with payment cards that could be used to purchase only approved items. Chris Philp wants this to be only for people serving non-custodial sentences or released on licence. But of course that would be only in the first instance. Even for them, would it extend to the state pension? If not, why not? Likewise, Universal Credit payments to those in work, who are two in five claimants. The administrative costs of this whole thing would make it more expensive than the present arrangements, but that is never the point, just as no one who decided anything would care that this gimmick would drive people into the black economy so that they could buy a pint at a birthday party. So much for rehabilitation.

Rather fewer workers might be on benefits if work paid enough to live on. Agree or disagree with equalising the minimum wage regardless of age, but Pat McFadden told Trevor Phillips today that it was not the Government’s job to do. Then whose is it? And why was it in the Labour manifesto? “Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage,” it said on page 45. McFadden also claimed that, “Today, around seven in 10 young people claiming health and disability benefits are still claiming a decade later.” That was a lie. Those people will have been on Disability Living Allowance for under-16s, the application form for which is 40 pages long and requires the support of numerous specialist reports. Nearly half of severely disabled children live in poverty, and nearly a third of DLA recipients in childhood have their claims for Personal Independence Payment rejected when they dare to live another day.

But neoliberalism is reaching its outer limits. There is far more tax fraud then benefit fraud, yet tax frauds get to cut deals with HMRC and pay back as much or as little as they pleased. When he is not endorsing Restore Britain, then Elon Musk is privatising space. And the latest antics of Bonnie Blue, whose endorsement Reform UK has welcomed, are enough to test anyone’s commitment to the “free” market in general and to the non-personhood of the unborn child in particular.

The Radical Centre?

What chance would Andy Burnham stand of winning a General Election if he had needed the Greens to stand aside for him at a by-election, or at least to have behaved as if they had done so? Likewise, if Caroline Lucas thinks that only Burnham can beat Reform UK, then why is she still in the Green Party? That is as much a question for it as it is for her. But Burnham, like Keir Starmer or Wes Streeting, has no intention of removing from the Labour Party the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.

To end the war in which Tony Blair did not want Britain to pretend to be less than fully involved, not that that pretence has ever convinced the Iranians or their allies for one moment, the proposed deal includes a $300 billion “international investment fund” for Iran. Yes, the Iranian regime is appalling. The Ukrainian regime has just reburied with full state honours the Nazi collaborators Andriy Melnyk and Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, and the former President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose constitutional term of office has long since expired, has purportedly conferred the title “Heroes of the UPA” on the Independent Special Operations Centre (North) of the Special Operations Forces. Israel and Poland are in understandable uproar. But just as big, bad Russia can take only a small of corner of Ukraine, so big, bad America has so completely failed to take Iran that it is going to have pay what were effectively reparations and richly deserved as such. Still, there will be contracts in it. Trump and Blair themselves will not be out of pocket.

Blair may also be having some luck in domestic policy, as the Government has announced, “300,000 new training and work experience placements across construction, social care and hospitality to tackle youth unemployment.” Hospitality? In the present climate? But anyway, with no promise of a job at the end of it, this is a Blairite revival of Margaret Thatcher’s old Youth Training Scheme, giving a year of two of free labour to private companies that clearly had the work to do, but which did not feel like recruiting at the rate for the job, not even now that that rate would be only the reduced minimum wage for those deemed too young to deserve the full one for the same work. The 2024 Labour manifesto promised to end that iniquity, but instead the State is to pay that rate so that politicians’ corporate donors and rather more generous future employers did not have to.

It is not worth considering the possibility that the Tony Blair Institute would have no lucrative role in this. But the former Prime Minister with seven living successors does not speak for the centre, radical or otherwise. That is we who seek to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to sex (“biological sex”), the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any of the three parts of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the NHS and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Right To Warn

John Pring writes:

New government research has proved disabled activists were right to warn that receiving employment advice on top of NHS talking therapy would push many people with mental distress further away from the jobs market.

Mental health system survivors, anti-cuts activists and allies have been campaigning for more than a decade to warn that linking NHS treatment with employment advice could have serious consequences for many people with mental distress.

And now a study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows they were right.

The government-funded study examined the impact of providing voluntary sessions with employment advisers alongside NHS talking therapy, checking the progress of those taking part three years after they first received support.

The study shows that, for those already in work or off sick from a job, adding employment advice to talking therapy reduced average earnings and the probability of being in work, compared with those only receiving talking therapy.

It also showed that, for most groups who were not working, providing voluntary employment advice sessions on top of talking therapy led – on average – to increased earnings and a higher probability of being in work.

But crucially, for those who were out of work and had the highest barriers to employment – those described as “long term sick or disabled” – the addition of employment advice to regular talking therapy made it less likely that a disabled person would be in work and reduced average monthly earnings, compared with those only receiving NHS talking therapy.

For this final group of disabled people, three years on from starting the employment advice sessions, the probability of being in paid employment fell by four percentage points (3.6), while average earnings fell by nearly £150 a month (£148.30), compared with those who were just receiving talking therapy.

Dr Jay Watts, a disabled activist and consultant clinical psychologist, said: “For a decade, disabled people’s organisations and survivor-led groups warned about exactly this: that bolting employment support onto therapy doesn’t add help — it changes what therapy is.

“The therapy room is meant to be the one place a person isn’t appraised for their economic usefulness, and the moment the work-and-welfare system is let into that space, the therapy itself is contaminated.

“We were marching on jobcentres over this while the professional bodies equivocated, and now it is borne out in the government’s own data.”

She said the data showed the impact on people who were long-term sick and disabled was “the exact opposite of what was promised”.

Watts called on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to finally listen to disabled-led groups about the scheme’s impact on mental health.

She said: “Being handed ‘support’ and then watching one’s life deteriorate does not land neutrally; in the clinic it deepens shame and hardens the conviction of personal failure, and under a welfare system that equates worklessness with worthlessness, that is precisely the pressure that corrodes mental health rather than restoring it.

“None of this means employment support helps no-one – for people who were out of work [and not long-term sick or disabled] and actively seeking it, it did raise earnings and employment, and that matters.

“But an intervention that rewards those who choose it and harms those who are unwell is the very last thing you make compulsory.

“These were people who volunteered, who wanted the help and were harmed anyway.

“If something people actively chose can still worsen outcomes for sick and disabled people, then forcing similar interventions on almost everyone out of work, as [government adviser] Alan Milburn appears set to recommend, is ideology in the teeth of the evidence.”

Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said that adding employment advisers to a mental health service “only pushes people in mental distress further from the workplace”.

She said: “Campaigners have said for years that people in serious mental distress and trauma need investment in mental health services, crisis management and time to deal with their trauma without the additional trauma of dealing with an employment adviser giving advice on top of talking therapies.”

She said that successive governments “keep getting it wrong” by under-investing in mental health services while “pressuring people in mental distress to think about employment outcomes when they are simply not ready to do so”.

Peters said this results in mental health services being seen as “an unsafe space” and “a place of coercion and pressure to improve work outcomes”, leading people to disengage with services.

The ONS study was published as former New Labour minister Alan Milburn is set to publish his interim report this morning (Thursday) into the rising numbers of young disabled people not in education, employment or training (NEET).

He told MPs last week that he believes work can be a cure for the “tsunami of distress” affecting young people, and he appears to be set to recommend, in his final report later this year, that nearly all young disabled people – including those with significant levels of mental distress – will have to engage with DWP employment support programmes.

The ONS study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), which itself is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

The employment support tested in the study is funded by the Joint Work and Health Directorate, which is jointly sponsored by DHSC and DWP.

But neither ONS nor DWP nor NIHR would comment on the findings that showed the negative impact of talking therapy and employment support on long-term sick or disabled people.

ONS said the findings relating to those in employment suggest that “people in employment are moving to lower-paying jobs or reducing their working hours, among other lifestyle changes to manage their mental health”.

But ONS declined to comment on the figures showing the negative impact on those who were out of work and long-term sick or disabled, or on whether these findings suggest that adding employment advice to talking therapy can push disabled people with higher barriers to work further away from employment.

ONS suggested that NIHR, which funded the study, was better placed to comment.

NIHR told DNS that it was not appropriate for it to comment and questions should be directed to ONS and DWP.

DWP declined to say if it was surprised by the findings; how it explained them; whether adding employment advice to talking therapy can be damaging for many disabled people and push them further away from work; and whether ministers would take the findings into account alongside the reports from the Milburn review.

Instead, it said in a statement: “Employment advisors in NHS Talking Therapies is an innovative programme that ensures patients get the support they need to overcome barriers to work while receiving clinical treatment.”

It also said the following, which is not an accurate representation of the ONS findings: “We are pleased the ONS found it has had a significant impact on employment outcomes for those out of work – especially for those aged 18-35 – and we will apply these findings as we continue the roll out of WorkWell, which is due to help up to 250,000 people across the country.”

A Waypoint On The Road

Like the Derwentside of old, no one would ever say that they were from Makerfield. It is a collective name for several distinct suburbs of Wigan. Halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, Wigan is an old coal town, making it both fiercely independent, and part of the wider country-within-a-country of the coalfields. And it is “King of the North”, from Daniel 11. Not everything is from Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. But Andy Burnham is not the King of the North. Most of the North is north of Manchester, and almost all of it is either north of Manchester, or east of Manchester, or both. Burnham has done nothing for us, and as the Mayor of Greater Manchester, why should he? With all of that in mind, Aris Roussinos writes:

In his 2004 song “Irish Blood, English Heart“, the Manchester-Irish songsmith Morrissey proclaimed he was “dreaming of a time when/ To be English is not to be baneful / To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful” and “The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories.” It is a mark of Britain’s transformation since then that these sentiments, quixotic and cancellable two decades ago, now represent the driving force of national politics. To escape the harsh winds swirling around them, Westminster’s ruling party has been forced to huddle in fear around the saviour figure of Andy Burnham, the least hated candidate they can find, as the only force standing between them and electoral destruction. Like it or not, we live in Morrissey’s England now.

Yet in this battle between the two visions of the nation, it’s ironic that Burnham himself holds the rare distinction of having been directly scolded by his musical hero. The would-be prime minister, who once rather Pooterishly wrote that while “not in tune with his views now, I can’t deny how important Morrissey was to me”, faced the singer’s wrath for imprecisely characterising the 2017 Manchester bomber as merely “an extremist”.

The Manchester Arena bomb, for Morrissey “England’s 9/11”, and the subject of his unreleased song “Bonfire of Teenagers” — in which “the silly people sing: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’… I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die” — came only two weeks into Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, in what already feels like a different country. Were it to happen today, it is hard to imagine a restive public responding as warmly as it then did to the comforting platitudes of swaying “togetherness” rolled out by Burnham. In his 2024 political manifesto of no-nonsense Northernness, Head North, co-written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham (whose own daughter was at the concert), Burnham discusses the atrocity more or less like an unfathomable act of God. Particular censure is reserved for the slow response of the emergency services, presented as yet another failure of Westminster state capacity.

That the bomber’s very presence in this country — as a member of a family granted asylum precisely due to their involvement in jihadist opposition to Gaddafi; who was himself returned to Britain from Libya by the Royal Navy while an object of interest to MI5 for his jihadist activity; and who paid for his bomb’s components with taxpayer-funded benefits doled out to his mother — of course represents an infinitely greater state failure. None of this figures in Burnham’s manifesto. Yet it is precisely this grievance — against the strange and cruel punishments that the British state, through a perverted sense of benevolence, wreaks against its own people — that has underwritten Reform’s rise and Labour’s catastrophic fall. Only in his 2025 postscript does Burnham note that, “One of the features of the age in which we live is its extreme volatility… The appalling murder of three young girls in Southport was sickeningly exploited and, for several days after, Britain felt like a country we have not known before… it feels as though we are approaching a political reckoning.” If the numbers are right, Burnham will soon find himself ruling this strange and unknown country. Yet uneasy lies the head that wears the Northern crown: according to the polls, if he enters power at all, it will only be because the threat from Reform, in this once dependable Labour heartland, has been dissipated by the electorate’s unexpectedly strong interest in the more radical Restore party.

Burnham himself warns of the “risk” that “a progressive government could serve only one term and be replaced in 2029 by the most right-wing one Britain has ever seen”, presenting his Northern manifesto as “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right.” Is Burnham’s localised success replicable nationwide? As others have noted in their dissections of Burnham’s self-proclaimed “Manchesterism”, presiding over a booming and dynamic citystate is not quite the same as being the cause of its success. That the Northwest, with its Irish links so lauded by Burnham, has become the epicentre of violent revolt against the asylum system and its unintended consequences, first in Knowsley in 2023 and then after the Southport murders, suggests other narratives are possible.

Yet Burnham’s contributions to Head North are more interesting than the Westminster discourse, focused on the economics of Burnhamism, would so far imply. Buried in the text is a one-line summation of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, in which the root of British decline, and latterly its political dysfunction, is traced to the Westminster state’s anomalous failure, when compared with peer nations, to have undergone a successful bourgeois revolution.

“Britain,” Burnham declares, “unlike other countries, has never had a moment of modern nation-building. Our system of governance has slowly evolved from the feudal state, the remnants of which are still clearly visible in Parliament today.” The result, Burnham writes, is that “Britain is one of the most politically centralised and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world.” Rather over-egging Manchester’s distance from the capital — we are led to imagine him like Robert Bruce sheltering from the rain in his cave, ruminating on London’s iniquities — Burnham declares that only in his Northern exile did he reach the conclusion that “the Westminster system was our problem and, in its current form, could never be our solution”.

While Farage and his Right-wing challenger Rupert Lowe echo, in southern English accents and perhaps unconsciously, the discourse of Britain’s peripheral nationalists, Burnham’s critique of the failing Westminster state is more startlingly explicit. The Celtic comparisons are fully intended: his “experiences outside of Westminster”, he tells us, have inspired “a much better understanding of the feeling long building in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland”. He rails against an “establishment prepared to play public opinion against parts of the North of England, Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland whenever it has suited them”. He claims that “they do it because they fear nothing more than the regions and nations uniting in common cause against a system that doesn’t have their interests at heart”. The Hillsborough disaster is repeatedly likened, rather dubiously, to Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland “has big similarities to the North West of England,” Burnham asserts, without informing the curious reader what these similarities might be.

Yet Burnhamism, in its constitutional sense, represents something that does not meaningfully exist in Northern Ireland: he is an Irish Catholic Unionist, a Home Ruler through and through. This Redmondite quality comes through most clearly in his 2025 interview with Tom McTague. Proud of his great-grandfather’s self-sacrifice in the First World War, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity,” we are told, fuelling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”. Bearer of an identity more commonly found among non-white minorities and Ulster Protestants than Labour’s defected voter base, now merrily flagging their neighbourhoods with St George’s Crosses, “Being British rather than English”, Burnham tells McTague, “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth.” Or English last, Morrissey might archly note.

For having outlined the similarities between the North — and for Northern England, Burnham only ever really means the urban Northwest — and the Celtic nations, Burnham suddenly tacks in a different direction: insisting that “unlike some in those places, we would never advocate for the break-up of the UK”. He thus utilises the Nairn-Anderson thesis for novel Unionist purposes, using it to save what its originators believed could not be saved. The answer to Britain’s many problems, he argues, is a further round of devolution, breaking up England into powerful city-regions with their own hinterlands, each comparable in size to the Celtic nations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in turn, are to be encouraged to devolve more power away from their parliaments towards their towns and cities, which, “collaborating” across the UK’s internal borders in a hazy fashion, would weaken the “inevitably tense and political” relationships between their national governments and Westminster. For all that Tony Blair’s latest intervention in national politics is read as an assault on Burnhamism, Burnham’s own constitutional experimentation is a turbo-charged Blairism, both completing New Labour’s unfinished revolution and, Burnham believes, ameliorating the centrifugal pressures it introduced.

But it is here that we see Burnham’s characteristically Labourite weak point, his absence of national feeling except towards the very Westminster state he claims to oppose. Burnham’s assertion on the outdatedness of nationalism is not borne out by political events, as the May elections showed. The very building block of electorally ascendent Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism is their sense of national sentiment and the sense of political destiny it leads towards, a destiny its adherents believe to be frustrated by Westminster rule. Rather than cooperating with a Burnham government, won over by his misty-eyed Celtic reveries and performative distaste for the capital from which he must rule, Burnham’s proposed strengthening of Unionism through devolution would present peripheral nationalists with a mortal threat. Why would they give up their hard-won power to serve explicitly Unionist ends? Why would they abandon their political projects at the behest of Westminster’s latest (and surely short-lived) ruler, thrust to power only as a result of crisis and desperation in the political centre?

And what is true of the Celtic nations is also true of England. Burnham’s analysis of the urban Northwest as the artificially suppressed engine of British modernity, laid low by the rentier capitalism of Southeast England and a creaking and antiquated Westminster state, equally overlaps with that of Tom Hazeldine in his excellent 2020 book The Northern Question. Its history punctuated by occasional rebellions, its dialects divergent from the state’s prestige form, its governance marginal to distant London, Northern England in many ways presents an analogue to the Celtic nations. Yet it never developed its own comparable nationalism. The reason, Hazeldine never quite clarifies, is surely that the inhabitants of Northern England are, politically, English before they are Northern. As such, Northern English dissatisfaction has always expressed itself in trying to reform Westminster rather than seceding from it: and for all that he claims to be Northern first and English second, this is also Burnham’s chosen path.

Yet to save the United Kingdom, Burnham must carve up England, an instinctively conservative country, into a collection of urban metropoles whose cosmopolitan voters will outweigh their suburban and rural hinterlands in the exercise of power. Why would Reform, with its keen if unspoken appreciation of the demographic limits of its appeal, agree to such gerrymandering? Perhaps the march of history compels us, Burnham muses: “If the nineteenth century was the century of empire, and the twentieth was the century of the nation state, the new thinking was that the twenty-first would be led by a network of cities around the world,” he declares, revealing himself as less a daring avatar of national rebirth than as a provincial Sadiq Khan.

We can, no doubt, expect all manner of constitutional novelties from a future Burnham premiership. In its terminal throes, Labour is making the explicit choice to replace a leader who believes the Westminster state still fundamentally functions with one who demands “nothing less than a complete rewiring of Britain”: even Labour now accepts that Britain needs reform. Yet beyond England — for Burnham merely an unappealing menu option between dynamic city-states, the wider Union and an even greater European union still — none of the dominant peripheral nationalist parties have anything to gain from Burnham’s vision of “the regions and nations uniting in common cause”: unless it is to accrue more power, to be utilised in the service of secession. A Westminster creature through and through, to save the Labour project it is England Burnham must dismantle, whose own brewing bourgeois revolution he feels history commands him to suppress. If Northern England is now the engine of the nation’s politics, its voters’ ever more determinedly-expressed wishes present far more of a threat to Burnhamism than an endorsement.

Nevertheless, there is something, and potentially something of great power, to be found in appealing to shared conceptions of British identity beyond the reach or confines of the Westminster system. Yet attempting to do so from Whitehall, exerting power through the same system he condemns, will prove as challenging for Burnham as it later will for Farage. Once ensconced in Downing Street, he will no longer be the King in the North, but just another Labour prime minister, trying and failing to manipulate the broken levers of the state. More likely, the English revolt will soon do for Burnham as it already has for Starmer. Even so, Burnham is significant as a waypoint on the road we are condemned to travel: it is a marker of our political moment that to rule from Westminster, our next prime minister must claim to despise it.

On devolution to 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. There have been seven elections to the London Mayoralty, and Labour has only ever won four of them, three with Sadiq Khan and the fourth with a man who, having already wiped the floor with Labour as an Independent, would have done so again. The Greens are highly likely to take it next time.

Meanwhile, the arguments for Proportional Representation and those 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.

And speaking of Compass, because it is still there, Caroline Lucas has today used its conference to endorse Burnham at Makerfield. She wanted an electoral pact with Change UK or whatever it was calling itself at the time, but there never was one, whereas this time she is calling for a vote for the Labour candidate when there is a Green candidate available. How is that compatible with her Green Party membership? We also learned today that appointments would be made this summer to a new “Council for a Progressive Majority”, comprised of two Burnham allies from each of the Labour Party, the Green Party, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Liberal Democrats of Coalition infamy. That Council will meet four times per year to determine how to “mobilise the progressive majority”, including by means of electoral pacts. Five parties now need to review certain people’s membership, while potential voters for any of those five now need to have a word with themselves.

Water Marks

A water shortage in Britain is almost comically absurd even before considering how wet this spring was. Opposition to the renationalisation of water, leading to the National Grid that was proposed in the Labour manifesto of 1979, is as ridiculous as support for the nationalisation of every corner shop. Massively in control of drought-stricken Kent, does Reform UK agree? If not, why not?

Reform has never repudiated the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, who has made her own singular contribution to the water debate, and its candidate at Makerfield was a Remain voter, as was its candidate at Gorton and Denton. This is starting to look like a pattern, or even a policy. Still, it does compel Remainers to claim as their own the desire to smell and lick the backside of Carol Vorderman. What a rare and welcome point of unity between them and Reform supporters, with Remain voters now the majority of people who still voted Conservative. To be so broadly appreciated, how fortunate is Ms Vorderman.

Facing Robert Kenyon is Restore Britain's Rebecca Shepherd, whose husband in a Dutch-Indonesian immigrant. Is he a Muslim? At any rate, their business model is purely parastatal, consisting entirely of the provision of therapeutic equine activities to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Service of Wigan Council. To my mind, that is a noble pursuit. But would Restore voters agree? Would Rupert Lowe?

Restore has just given Reform control of Norfolk County Council after all, so how many local authorities have to be run by either or both of them before Andy Burnham reconsidered his Old New Labour fixation with regional devolution? Labour is also 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. There have been seven elections to the London Mayoralty, and Labour has only ever won four of them, three with Sadiq Khan and the fourth with a man who, having already wiped the floor with Labour as an Independent, would have done so again. The Greens are highly likely to take it next time. Yet Burnham even wants to give councils responsibility for providing asylum accommodation, as if the relevant committees would still be made up of his dad's mates from the union and the Catenians.

If Burnham won Makerfield, though, then that would be a sign of the changing times. Palantir is still everywhere, which urgently needs to be addressed, and which would not be so by Burnham. But Peter Thiel himself has fled to Argentina, of course, while JD Vance has had to go so far as to issue an official denial that he was abandoning his hopes of the Presidency in 2028. When you have to say it. And Reformers and Restorers alike, what do you think of Thiel's new host, Javier Milei? He thinks that the Falkland Islands are part of Argentina. As, presumably, does Thiel. So that as, presumably, does Vance.