The West Road

I do not know why my lowly 414 votes are blamed, although not by Laura herself, for the defeat of Laura Pidcock. Richard Holden's majority was 1,144, and 1,173 people voted for the engaging Dr David Sewell of the Green Party. There could be only one excuse to vote Green, and that would be to vote for Dr Cornel West, who has needed to go that way for the ballot access.

A roaring critic of cancel culture, not that some of us have ever not been cancelled, and of identity politics by reference to class politics, West is already polling around six per cent. He is a viable Presidential candidate who sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the Classic Learning Test, and whose answer to why he is not a Marxist, since his views and alliances invite the question, is that dialectical materialism is incompatible with incarnational theology.

This candidacy opens the way for a successor who recognised that incarnational theology could not be separated from fidelity to the Petrine Office, with implications that were far more radical than anything that Marxism could ever formulate, much less deliver. Or than could ever be grounded in the obsolescent, Baby Boomer liberal Catholicism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There is already a liberal Catholic President. How is that working out?