The World Turned Upside Down?

The "far-left" policies that Kamala Harris has borrowed from Keir Starmer must be why Dick Cheney is supporting her. Starmer's real policies might indeed have had that effect, if either Cheney or Harris had ever heard of either them or him.

It is obviously hilarious that the Americans, of all people, should complain about foreign interference in elections. But the complaint is sound in principle. And Donald Trump is a vengeful, vindictive man. Imagine that he were to ban from the United States those named in his lawyer's complaint: Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, Matthew Doyle, Deborah Mattinson and Sofia Patel.

People who were taught about the American Revolution at school hear in the word "Tory" something in relation to their own country that has never become wholly anachronistic. James Cleverly had been negotiating much the deal that was eventually struck over the Chagos Islands, but no Conservative Government would ever quite have signed up to paying for the American base practically in perpetuity.

The right wing of the Labour Party, on the other hand, can never do enough for the Americans. Both of the previous betrayals of the Chagossians also happened under Labour Governments, and were indeed perpetrated by those whom the Right regards as its two greatest lost Leaders since Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey and David Miliband.

Labour Rightists often speak in a weird mid-Atlantic accent, use New York or Californian turns of phrase, think that The West Wing (which I also loved) was real or at least realistic, and bang on about things like Thanksgiving, Saturday Night Live and the Superbowl in the sincere belief that such preoccupations were mainstream in Britain. For its party and factional Leader, and other key movers and shakers, to be sanctioned by the President of the United States, even if that President were Trump, would plunge the Labour Right into an existential crisis.

Meanwhile, rumour abounds that at the conclusion of the Conservative Leadership campaign, Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden are to relinquish their seats in the House of Commons, at least in Dowden's case for one in the Lords. Trump would look like a hypocrite if he endorsed the by-election candidates of Reform UK, but when has that ever bothered him or his supporters?

Moreover, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as he would have to call himself on a ballot paper, has returned to these shores, and is unarrested in a clear case of two-tier policing. He should declare himself a candidate at one or other of those by-elections. What would Trump say then? More to the point, what would Nigel Farage, who has diverted to Trump's campaign £33,000 in British donations?

Both Richmond and Northallerton, and Hertsmere, are normal Conservative seats in that the second placed party is either Labour or the Liberal Democrats; in both of those cases, it is Labour. All five Conservative seats in Scotland, the same number as Reform's overall total, have the SNP in second place. Across the Kingdom, the Conservatives are second in 293 seats, of which 219 are held by Labour and only two by Reform, while Reform is second in 98 seats, of which 89 are held by Labour and only nine by the Conservatives. If the aim were to supplant the Conservative Party on the self-identifying Right, as Trump had supplanted the Republican Party of old, then "Tommy Robinson" could not possibly do any worse than Reform.