Fairweather Friends?

Peter Mandelson thought that he had installed a generational intake of Labour MPs, yet not only might a lot of them turn out to be one-termers, but when Keir Starmer needed to send for the cavalry, then he called in Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, neither of whom most of the class of 2024 would ever have met, or probably ever will. Rachel Reeves is significantly reduced, while Jess Phillips, whose constituency now contains no Labour councillors, is effectively redundant.

Harman's whipped abstention on cuts to benefits for families with children make her a startling choice for Adviser on Women and Girls, although adherence to that whip did make it impossible for either Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham to become Leader of the Labour Party, clearing the way for Jeremy Corbyn. Despite the best efforts of some of us since before at least one Minister in this Government was born, the story about Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange has become background noise. But there is no story about Gordon Brown and the gold; perhaps you are thinking of the £500 billion that Margaret Thatcher lost the nation in oil rights, just for a start with her?

And if financial skulduggery is your thing, then other than Nigel Farage, did anyone in Reform UK take gigantic gifts from Christopher Harborne? Did Farage or anyone else take them from anyone other than Harborne? Daniel Devaney was a Reform candidate in the Clayton and Fairweather Green ward of Bradford City Council. Too late to be taken off the ballot paper, he announced that he did not want to be a councillor and that he was going on holiday. He topped the poll, so his resignation is no doubt winging its way from wherever he was holidaying. If that is not Skegness, then why not? We must not entertain the scurrilous suggestion that he might be at Great Yarmouth.

Saiqa Ali, theatrically arrested in revenge for Zack Polanski's questioning of the Police treatment of Essa Suleiman, was returned to Lambeth Council by the voters of Streatham St Leonard's. But at Birmingham's Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, where two recounts confirmed that Council Leader John Cotton and another Labour councillor had been unseated by one member of Reform and one of the Workers Party, there is to be a third recount, on Monday. Such are the credible coalitions or otherwise that power on Europe's largest local authority hangs in the balance, and with it the existence of the right-wing Labour machine, which is the only Labour Party that still exists.

The Labour Right used to be unique in that, by almost or almost always controlling the great majority of the most populous municipalities in England and Wales, plus the Senedd, it had an independent fiscal base, and that was putting matters politely. It controlled Council Tax, business rates, pension schemes looking to invest, sweeteners and backhanders from property developers and others, the allocation of jobs with the council, the allocation of better council housing, and the allocation of any council housing. But under Starmer, its citadels have fallen as if under nuclear attack. Labour Party membership is not cheap. If not to secure access to those goodies, then why bother?