Ending The Presumption

I hate to have to tell Keir Starmer this, but a cease and desist letter from a deranged old bat could be the beginning of many, many years. Not that he has only that to worry him. Rumour reaches me from Their Lordship's House of a Labour rebellion against the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the most un-Blairite Government Bill this century, and dutifully being opposed by Neil O'Brien, whose political party would be impossible to guess in a blind test.

To position herself as a potential successor to Starmer, Bridget Phillipson has to dismantle the most abiding domestic political legacy of the Blair Government. The old hands up the corridor, who prided themselves on their bad relations with their party's staffroom base, are spitting tacks. But notice that Wes Streeting does not need to go easy on the NHS privatisation if he wants to be Prime Minister. The Labour Party is not what most people think that it is.

That party is tied with Reform UK for the top of the poll, with each on 25 per cent support. Feed the results into the mincer, and they would produce a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party, so it is still technically ahead of Reform. But the business with the grooming gangs is cutting through. Phillipson might amend her Bill to provide for an inquiry, thereby defying the Blairite ultras in both Houses to vote against that by voting against it. Andy Burnham is on manoeuvres.

Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not? Underage groupies have always been integral to rock 'n' roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

No one was ever more groomed than Shamima Begum, but the main argument against bringing her back is that she herself would no longer have any reason to come, since the side to which Five Eyes intelligence trafficked her from her native London has won, giving her every hope of a good position in the new regime. Syria is a land of opportunity. Not every London Bangladeshi girl can be Sheikh Hasina's niece.