Bow and Arrows

According to Who's Who, Richard Holden is a member of Consett Steel Club. That must be why he has declared for Rishi Sunak rather than for Liz Truss. It will be one thing for him to go in there in a Tony Blair combo of a business suit and an open collar shirt. But it would have been quite another for him to have done so in a Margaret Thatcher pussybow blouse.

Those of you who are still on Twitter tell me that #BringBackBoris is trending. Clearly, members and supporters of the Conservative Party think that all of the candidates to lead the Conservative Party are rubbish. Might Lord Cruddas really set up a Boris Party? Neither Jacob Rees-Mogg nor Nadine Dorries would have any hope of office either under Sunak or under Penny Mordaunt, so it would start off with three MPs, all of them Privy Counsellors, and with a Peer. But whom would it attract? To defend Johnson's legacy would be to defend the lockdowns, Net Zero, the treatment of gender self-identification as if it were already the law, and the taking of a side in Ukraine.

There will be no shortage of parties like that. Rachel Reeves has already committed the Labour Party to whatever Departmental spending limits it happened to inherit on the day after the next General Election. At the time of writing, the Exchequer still has a Chancellor who is committed to a 20 per cent cut to everything. Vote Labour, and you would be voting for that.

Keir Starmer has also told City A.M. that, now that he believed in the 2017 manifesto version of Brexit after all, then he wanted to use it to "slash red tape" in the manner of the European Research Group. Perhaps the members of the ERG would defect to Labour once a Sunak Government were realigning Britain with the Single Market and the Customs Union, which would be the only thing worse than being in them and thus at least having some small say over them?

It is welcome that Starmer has opened up the space in which to advance instead the vision of Brexit that has been held by those of us whose political tradition has uniquely always believed in it. But if you voted Labour, then you would be voting for Singapore-on-Thames. It does not bear thinking about, what Singapore-on-Thames would look like on the banks of the Derwent or the Wear. It is therefore no surprise that, while half a dozen or so Labour parliamentary candidates have been selected today and will be every Saturday for the rest of the year, the process here at North West Durham has not even begun.