Forward

Robert Jenrick and Jake Berry are together again. Both of them were active in the Remain campaign, and as Ministers they signed off Towns Fund payments to each other's constituencies. But has anyone heard from Roger Helmer, whom Jenrick overspent to keep from winning the Newark by-election, in addition to the Liberal Democrat tactical voting that made Jenrick the closest thing ever to a Coalition MP?

First elected to public office in 1999, and a full-time and high-profile politician even if not always an elected one ever since, Nigel Farage thinks that Reform UK needs more career politicians if it is to be considered a serious party of government. He thinks that even though Reform has been ahead in the polls for a considerable period of time, and even though that view is very much the opposite of the position of its supporters, even more so than the records in office of Jenrick on immigration, of Nadhim Zahawi on vaccines, and so on.

But Jenrick had been fighting hard against the attack on trial by jury and on the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court. Please read these submissions to the Justice Committee by His Honour Geoffrey Rivlin KC, and please sign this petition. If Nick Timothy held firm, and he came up through the Home Office so do not hold out too much hope for him on this or on several other issues such as digital ID, then he might go some way to atoning for his role in the removal of Craig Guildford. You can take the special adviser out of Theresa May's war with the Police, but you cannot take that war out of him.

Think of all the circumstances under which senior, or indeed any, Police Officers have not resigned, nor even, as in this reassuringly old school case, been pensioned off. Yet here we are. There are plenty of football clubs with violent and racist fan bases, so wait for the next one that was allowed into this country without let or hindrance. Ayoub Khan is the only Birmingham MP to have stood with West Midlands Police against Maccabi Tel Aviv, which rioted again this week because of course it did, and he has been the only Birmingham MP to have stood with the bin workers. He is now one of The Many's candidates for the Central Executive Committee of Your Party, the list of Jeremy Corbyn rather than the list to which he was added without his consent.

Of the 10 parliamentary constituencies covering Birmingham, one is too posh to have it in its name, the Workers Party came a close second in two, the Independent Left won one (an MP who proceeded to appoint one of those Workers Party candidates as his Chief of Staff), its two rival candidates took more votes than the Labour victor at one, and it came within an inch of unseating Shabana Mahmood. Britain's three most populous cities are London, Birmingham and Glasgow, and only Roy Jenkins has ever been an MP for all of them. But he never returned to the House of Commons after he had lost his Glasgow seat to a man who has since also sat for a London constituency, though not yet for Birmingham. Is it time to complete the set? With Charlie Falconer's having told the House of Lords today that financial poverty would and should be grounds for assisted suicide, the need has never been greater.