Credit Facility?

Tonight, it turns out that Richard Sharp helped to arrange a credit facility of £800,000 for Boris Johnson so that he could maintain his lifestyle while he was Prime Minister. That facility was provided by Sam Blyth, a foreign national to whom Johnson is distantly related, but whom he had met only through Sharp, who used to manage Rishi Sunak at Goldman Sachs. Johnson then appointed Sharp as Chairman of the BBC, the position that he continues to hold.

In the last days of Johnson's Premiership, Nadhim Zahawi insisted on being made Chancellor of the Exchequer or he would join the ever-lengthening list of resignations. Zahawi was already under investigation by HMRC, with which he settled while he was Chancellor. A penalty of a mere 30 per cent is the one for carelessness, as if anyone had ever been merely careless over £3.7 million. With the interest, the total figure must be around five million. Very soon after his appointment, the incumbent Second Lord of the Treasury managed to garner only 25 votes to become the First Lord. Everyone knew.

Sunak has now paid more in fixed penalty notices than his wife has paid in tax, since he refuses to confirm that she has in fact given up her non-domicile status, a refusal that speaks for itself. HMRC has just named three schemes linked to Michelle Mone's husband as tax avoidance. Britishvolt took £1.7 billion of public money to do nothing. Jeremy Corbyn's much derided plan for universal free broadband would have cost only half as much as the track and trace app that did not even work. Even without ever having become law, the mini-Budget has cost at least £30 billion. Who knows how much we have already spent on being defeated by a private company of odds and ends in Ukraine, never mind how much that war is going to cost us in the end?

And so it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Tell me how settling the strikes would be unaffordable? The Government has admitted that it had already spent more on fighting the rail strike than it would have cost to have settled it. Yet the supposed alternative is not on the picket lines, but at Davos. Awash with cocaine and prostitutes, the World Economic Forum is the world's greatest gathering of white trash, so Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves fitted right in.

But who was their target audience? Tony Blair will be 70 this year, and unlike certain existing septuagenarians, he could no longer be elected to anything, anywhere. If Corbyn had turned up at Davos, then the other attendees might have been taken aback, but they would at least have known who he was. The people who did the sessions with Starmer and Reeves no longer know who they are. If they ever did.

Whatever they had said, it would not have been anything that might have saved the British steel industry, another triumph of the privatisation and globalisation to which, unlike the Conservative Party or even the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party is constitutionally committed. The best that can be said of Blair's proposed global database of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is that the timing of the WEF to clash with the Chinese New Year demonstrates how little it still matters. It is no wonder that Sunak has other places to be.

As has Emmanuel Macron, who is busily condemning "repression" in Iran while beating down the enormous demonstrations against the raising of the pension age to 64. Here in Britain, we are letting that age go up to 68, the age at which my father died, and their small size must be why the demonstrations against that, like all demonstrations at home, are never reported on Sharp's BBC. That, and the fact that all demonstrations here have been made illegal.

The Davos Labour Party did not even vote against that ban, much less would it repeal it. It actively supports further increases in the pension age, based on average life expectancy even though the difference in the life expectancies of the richest and of the poorest has more than doubled under Starmer's and Reeves's preferred economic system.

That system is what has made levelling up necessary at all, as Labour figures ought to be reminded. Some of us remember the North East under the last Labour Government, which would be the model for any future one. The idea that Labour would repeal the latest round of anti-union legislation is unworthy of serious attention, although things are not helped by, for example, the decision of the Welsh national men's football team to take a pay cut so that the pay of the women's team could be increased. That is never, ever, ever how to do it.

Sajid Javid can call openly for charges for GP appointments and for visits to A&E, because Wes Streeting has given permission for such proposals to the people who have been itching to make them for 50 years. There is no suggestion that, as Health Secretary, Streeting would abolish such charges if they were already in place. NHS privatisation would now face no Official Opposition. On Sunday, Starmer endorsed Streeting's views, effectively naming Streeting as his successor as Prime Minister in the course of the next Parliament, at the end of which Starmer will be 67 to Streeting's 46.

In the rising world of Eurasia and Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific, they know what's what. The elected President of Mexico has just accused the people who now ran the Labour Party of having weaponised anti-Semitism against Corbyn, and he has pointed out that Ruth Smeeth's Index on Censorship was funded by the same American government outfits that funded the Mexican Right. The CIA has long classified Smeeth as "closely protect".

Andrés Manuel López Obrador considers Corbyn worthy of that level of defence because, whatever the failings of either of them, Corbyn and Johnson are unique among each other's opponents in being anything more than purely parochial and factional figures. People are always going to turn up to hear them, whether in huge numbers in Corbyn's case or for huge fees in Johnson's. Books by or about them are always going to sell. There will be films and television programmes about them from time to time for the rest of all of our lives.

Yet it was Sunak's coronation that was planned for decades. Last summer, the disappearance of Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl from BBC iPlayer was a track-covering confirmation that, since it was broadcast when he was not quite 21, Sunak must have been handpicked as the generational voice of the haute bourgeoisie when he was still in his teens. The tribal elders of the Tory Deep State had been out in force at his campaign launch. A few hours later, needing 20 votes to stay in the race, he had been 20 votes ahead of his nearest rival.

It has ever been thus. No one becomes Prime Minister in his early forties by any means than this. There are still those who keep up the pretence that Blair was politically "a late developer", but it is quite some late developer who becomes an MP at 30 and Prime Minister at 43, the age at which David Cameron also attained the Premiership, in his case after a mere nine years in the House of Commons. Sunak has beaten all of that, though. An MP of only seven years' standing on entering 10 Downing Street, he was 42 years old. Planned for decades.

Meanwhile, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions from 1st November 2008 to 1st November 2013. On 13th December 2014, a mere 13 months later, he was selected by the Labour Party as its candidate for its very safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras, beating other shortlisted applicants who included both the Leader of Camden Council and her predecessor. This boggles the mind of anyone who has ever been a member of the Labour Party, as does its election of a Leader who had been an MP for a mere five years, and a member of the party for barely longer than that. Whatever might be going on?

Well, in 2011, Starmer had obtained for himself as DPP a new power of veto over arrest warrants, after Westminster Magistrates' Court had impertinently issued one for the former Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, thereby delaying her planned visit to London. And now, a plain and simple Israeli spy has been appointed to a position in Starmer's publicly funded office, from which to spy on Labour Party members and on who knows who else. That job was "advertised" in September 2020. One month later, Assaf Kaplan moved to London. For this, Priti Patel's Home Office had issued him with the visa that he still holds.

The people who wrote the EHRC report into Labour anti-Semitism under Corbyn have since been sacked by the Conservative Government. That report is now a dead letter, and best ignored. But no one in 2011 or in 2014 thought that Corbyn might ever have become Leader of the Labour Party. This flagrant Mossad project to make Starmer a Labour MP, then Leader, and eventually Prime Minister, would have happened with or without the Corbyn phenomenon. The question is whether any foreign state should be able to groom and cultivate its favourite all the way to the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But Starmer's dishonesty is becoming a story. He lied to his party members to get their votes, so he would lie to anyone else to get their votes. We are heading for a hung Parliament. 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, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.