The Norwich Canary?

402 Labour MPs are not Keir Starmer, yet none of those is considered capable of replacing him and then winning a General Election, so Clive Lewis is said to be preparing to resign his seat in favour of the man whose name was on everyone’s lips, Andy Burnham. In 2024, Lewis’s majority over the Greens was 13,239. But that was then, this is now, and Norwich is by every measure a long way from Manchester.

On Thursday, the Green Party took overall control of Norwich City Council, as it did of Hastings Borough Council. It has had overall control of Mid Suffolk District Council since 2023. Norwich, Hastings and Mid Suffolk are noted for the prevalence of Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali at the farmers’ markets, and Norwich is famous for its Sharia-compliant paucity both of churches and of pubs. It was in Bradford that the Greens experienced a net loss of one seat, while Reform UK went from no councillors to 29, making it the largest Group on the council.

Rightly or wrongly, the Stafford Hospital scandal has never stuck to Burnham. Similarly, the Conservatives never mentioned Gordon Brown and the gold until the 2010 General Election, 11 years and two Labour victories after the event, and by which time Brown had already been Prime Minister for nearly three years. They failed to win an overall majority against him. Before that, they had banged on about Brown’s “raid on pensions” for a decade, throughout which Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at the end of which he became First Lord of the Treasury. Nearly 20 years later again, Brown’s own generation of pensioners does not appear to be doing too shabbily.

The huge 2024 intake’s umbrage at the clamour for Burnham, and at the resuscitation of Brown and of Harriet Harman, has coalesced with Catherine West’s stalking horse for Wes Streeting, who could not win a General Election and indeed will probably lose his own seat, but who could spend the rest of this Parliament implementing all the unfinished business of Peter Mandelson, Josh Simons and Morgan McSweeney, who have been made even more vengeful by the Greens’ having become the largest party on the Labour Together flagship of Lambeth. They will not stand for Nigel Farage, of all people, as the Prime Minister who completed the Blair Government’s signature domestic policy of privatising England’s NHS, so that has to be done in this Parliament.

The idea of NHS privatisation existed only on the fringes of the thinktank circuit until Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan took office in 1997. Since then, it has been the policy of all three parties except under Jeremy Corbyn, and of most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers continuously. Only Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider. Mandelson’s and thus Jeffrey Epstein’s Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was “restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS”, and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that “With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health”, but that, “The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones.” When were the expulsions and the proscription?

Burnham’s position was called “profoundly worrying”, and its endorsement by Unite was branded “insulting and ignorant”, by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don’t laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle. The utterly ruthless determination to install Streeting is because those who set the line are only 99.9 per cent certain about Burnham on NHS privatisation, a 0.1 per cent deficiency that is enough to make them hate him to the marrow of their bones, whereas they have absolutely no doubt about Streeting. Nor should they have, as may be attested by that Mandelson client, Peter Thiel’s and thus Epstein’s Palantir, which has laid waste to Gaza, which is laying waste to Lebanon, which is permanently minutes away from laying waste to Iran, and which has perfected the art of tracking people via their health records for the benefit of ICE or of anything like it in, say, Britain, where Blair’s daughter-in-law would transfer oodles of our money to his Institute to deliver it.