20 Years On

20 years ago today, Dr David Kelly died. Those who then surrounded Tony Blair, now surround Keir Starmer. A suicide was baldly announced well under an hour after the discovery of the body. The files on that medically impossible official verdict have been closed until 2073. There has never been a Coroner's Inquest. In June 2017, Dr Kelly's body was exhumed and cremated. It is all here.

Speaking of body counts, the Royal United Services Institute has today been addressed by Yvette Cooper, the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment. Her ubiquitous husband lost his seat to Dame Andrea Jenkyns. In the last week alone, Jenkyns has wondered why teachers did not strike in the school holidays, and has averred that Magna Carta dated from 2015, the year of her own entry into Parliament. After 10 years of Ed Balls, the voters preferred that.

Cooper said something about clamping down on the activities in Britain of the Wagner Group, of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and of China. A little over three weeks ago, the Wagner Group was briefly supposed to have been our side, but poor Cooper can work only with what RUSI gives her. Wagner's activities in Britain are what, exactly? Hey, ho, she is not there either to ask questions or to answer them. PPE at Oxford is not one of those rip-off degrees.

Thus has the ground been laid for Suella Braverman, who will claim tomorrow that Russia, China and Iran, three of the principal targets of what at least used to be al-Qaeda and IS, were in some unspecified way using those networks to attack Britain in order to foment hate and division here. Look forward to a spate of such attacks, or perhaps to one or two enormous ones, in order to blame them on one or more of Russia, China and Iran, in the runup to the General Election.

Who is to make a stand? With all of 11 Councillors in the entire country, Reform UK averages six per cent where it can find 10 people to put it onto the ballot paper at all, the rest of those factions are even more marginal, and they all acquire seats on anything almost exclusively by defection before losing them again. The Reclaim Party has recruited one sitting MP but has no Councillors, while neither UKIP nor the Heritage Party appears to have any elected representation whatever. Now that the Change UK three per centers are no more, then there is nothing less popular than the "populist" Right. Boris Johnson was brought down by his failure to adhere to the lockdowns that most people supported, thinking only that he had imposed them too late and lifted them too early. Over the age of 12, a mere six per cent of the population is unvaccinated. There is that figure again. Six per cent.

But recent local elections have been quiet triumphs for left-wingers who had either been expelled from the Labour Party or had resigned from it in disgust. In 2022, a party to the left of Labour gained more seats in Tower Hamlets alone than Labour did in the whole of England, while Lutfur Rahman took back the Mayoralty; with 24 Councillors, Aspire has more than twice as many in Tower Hamlets as Reform UK has in the UK. 2023 saw the election of three Liverpool Community Independents, the biggest electoral breakthrough in that city in 30 years, with Alan Gibbons taking four times the Labour vote, and nearly four times as many votes as all his rivals put together.

Alison Carpenter and Helen Price put Labour into second-to-last place as they were returned by the Clewer and Dedworth ward of Windsor. Yes, Windsor. In Portsmouth, Cal Corkery not only beat Labour, but was then emailed by it as "Keir Starmer" to thank him for his help, because it thought that he was still a member. Alas, Heather Skibsted in Peterborough had turned Green before holding her seat under that colour, although perhaps she had felt that she had had to do so for the electoral resources, much like Cornel West. But last Thursday, Mehmood Mirza trounced a member of Starmer's staff in Newham.

This afternoon, Jamie Driscoll has declared his Independent candidacy for Mayor of the North East, raising in less than two hours the £25,000 that he had given himself until the end of August to come up with, although fundraising is very much ongoing. Against him, Labour has selected Kim McGuinness with 76 per cent of the vote, but it refuses to say how many of the 14,000 or so eligible votes were cast. 12 years before she kept Nicu Ion off the shortlist, McGuinness tweeted, with this punctuation, "fuck off! I am not a gypsy!" The apologetic Diane Abbott remains without the Labour whip. Yet the unapologetic McGuinness is the Labour Party candidate for Mayor of the North East, and is Northumbria's Police and Crime Commissioner.

The venerable YouGov has found Jeremy Corbyn to be Britain's most popular politician. His rating is only 30 per cent, but that is still higher than anyone else's. Corbyn will certainly be the First Past the Post at Islington North. A high profile candidate against Starmer at Holborn and St Pancras ought to be announced fairly soon. Cooper was first elected in 1997 with a majority of 15,246, and it was 14,499 as recently as 2017, but last time it fell from that to 1,276. A candidate to the left of Labour could easily wipe that out. And so on.

Onwards and upwards, then, to a thinktank, to a weekly magazine of news and comment, to a monthly cultural review, to a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually to a fortnightly satirical magazine. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the news magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year. If you do not like that, then carry on doing your worst.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in 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.