At First Sight

Robert Kenyon would have wiped the floor with any Labour candidate other than Andy Burnham, so Kenyon versus Burnham will be a proper contest, as it should be. As to other candidates, electoral pacts are wrong in principle, because votes belong to voters, not to parties. Something similar is true of that suddenly fashionable thing, "vetting". By the way, unlike the BBC, Channel Four is an old-fashioned publicly owned company the way British Gas used to be. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher. Do you want to own Married at First Sight, or Virgin Island, or Naked Attraction? But the vetting of parliamentary candidates is fundamentally and ultimately a matter for us, the electors.

For example, Burnham, whom the universe rewarded for his promise to stick to the fiscal rules of Rachel Reeves by announcing a rise in unemployment to five per cent, one in 20, with a youth figure of a resignation-worthy 16 per cent. What was that about what would happen if the national minimum wage were equalised regardless of age? Or about the impossibility of mass unemployment and galloping inflation at the same time? Three years ago, to the month, Rishi Sunak urged the supermarkets to cap the prices of staple foods, and food inflation was nothing like it is now. If the Right is opposed to Government interference in the setting of food prices, then the Conservative Party, Reform UK, Restore Britain and the Liberal Democrats will presumably all be going into the next General Election on a commitment to the abolition of farm subsidies. Thankfully, they will not. Not that I trust this Government to go about any of this in anything but the most catastrophic way, but even so.

Or any available Government, in fact. HS2 that must have diamond-encrusted platinum tracks. The Leeds trams are costing £2.5 billion, so far, to arrive no earlier than the late 2030s. This is the country of your ever-increasing utility bills, of PPE, and of the money paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year. The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there was no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us. It was obviously a complete rip-off that we were paying £400 million per year to rent the Bibby Stockholm, an engineless barge, now 50 years old, that could not have been worth more than a few million pounds. Last month, Corporate Travel Management admitted to having overcharged by £118 million, but that would seem to be a very conservative estimate. Yet will even that be repaid? Political kickbacks? What do you think? And to only one party? What do you think? In that spirit, Kensington and Chelsea Council knowingly fitted Grenfell Tower with flammable cladding because it was otherwise considered an eyesore by its rich neighbours. Did they just ring up and ask? Think on.