The Toll of the Bell

Ivor Caplin has left Twitter, this time presumably forever. Perhaps he is being lined up to sit on what looks increasingly like the inevitable national inquiry into grooming gangs? There would be no point holding that unless the right people were on it, but it seems to be coming. Will it address the role of social media? The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with responsibility for online safety, is Peter Kyle, Caplin's closest friend and ally of several decades' standing.

Then again, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Pensions, which is apparently now an entry level position, is Torsten Bell, who goes beyond Kemi Badenoch's call to means test the triple lock by wanting to abolish it altogether. Thus speaks the Department for Work and Pensions, whose official consultation on the predetermined conclusion of three billion pounds in cuts to disability benefits has been found by the High Court to have been misleading and unlawful. While it was delivering that finding, Keir Starmer was signing Britain up to pay three billion pounds to Ukraine every year for the next hundred years, three hundred billion pounds in total.

The Independent Alliance may be, but no party in the House of Commons is opposed to that. When it came to saving the triple lock, though, the Independents, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and all of the Northern Irish parties are true believers, while Reform UK has an electorate to cultivate, as do the Liberal Democrats. Even Ed Davey's call to rejoin Ted Heath's Customs Union, and no doubt also Margaret Thatcher's Single Market, is welcome in that it opens up a debate that has in fact been going on the length and breadth of the country. I for one retain full confidence in our case. Let battle be joined.