Party Pieces

At North Shropshire, Labour's contentiously imposed candidate used to be Owen Paterson's intern. He is only 26, so that must have been in the very recent past. Welcome back to the one party state that existed for 23 years between the defeat of Bryan Gould and the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn.

In the run-up to the 2010 Election, when we were all being told that there was going to be a Cameron landslide in order to bully us into delivering one, then it was casually reported on the inside pages that, as the most natural thing in the world, Peter Mandelson, Andrew Adonis and others were going to be remaining in office, without any suggestion that they might therefore have had to have left a party that would by then have been led by David Miliband. And here we are again.

The Restoration's only obstacle is a Prime Minister who does not really believe in anything, but whose opportunism has come to express itself as the levelling up that is made possible by Brexit. The coup against him is therefore either underway, or it very soon will be. You do not have to think that Boris Johnson is fit for office to prefer him to any available alternative. These are not the glory days.

Entirely reasonably, the Labour Party is the school and shiver of the Baby Sharks; of whatever generation of Thatcherism, also known as Blairism, that we are now onto. There, they can and do pursue permanent austerity at home and forever war abroad, with extreme poverty actively cultivated in order to frighten the plebs into submission with the fear of it, and with general economic inequality contrived in order to inflict its intentionally consequent indignities on that great mass of the population which obviously had not tried hard enough at "Education, Education, Education".

The market for this dwindles by the day. If the result at Batley and Spen were to be overturned, then it would add to Labour's lengthening list of impending by-election disasters. It is not going to win North Shropshire. It is not going to win Old Bexley and Sidcup. It is not even contesting Southend West, which it would not have won, anyway. At Leicester East, its best case scenario would be the return of Keith Vaz.

And Batley and Spen would be a straight fight between the Conservatives and, assuming that he were not already the MP for Leicester East, George Galloway. Next up, the seats of the disqualified Kate Green, Matt Western, Catherine West, and whoever employed that staffer on the same Zoom call.