Expectation Management, Indeed

To hold elections while campaigning was illegal would come very close to rigging them in favour of the incumbents.

But if preparing for 400 losses at the local elections, including the loss of control of several councils, is Labour’s idea of expectation management, then what must it really be expecting?

The party’s MPs wanted Keir Starmer as Leader. This is on them. And they should bear in mind that the seats lost had been held, or in a few cases gained, in 2017, under Jeremy Corbyn.

Starmer also wants to vaccinate teachers ahead of everyone else, and damn the sick and the old, because like the Government he is completely obsessed with reopening the schools, and damn the sick and the old. Own it, Labour MPs. Own it.

You may remember the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Well, its new Chair, who has of course been appointed by the Conservative Government, does not support the IHRA Definition, calling it, “extremely poorly worded and probably unactionable in law.” Yet you cannot be a member of the Labour Party unless you subscribed to the IHRA Definition.

Mind you, until very recently, you could be expelled from the Labour Party if you suggested that Holocaust Memorial Day might be extended to cover genocide in general. Perhaps you still could be. Yet this week, that became the position of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. You may remember that, too.