Spotlight

Keir Starmer is too weak to sack Mike Tapp, and Shabana Mahmood is too weak to resign. Still, after 20 July, the one thing that Tapp will never again be is a Junior Minister. What Cabinet Minister would have him? There were people who wanted another three years of this.

Those people's latest line is that Andy Burnham is unqualified for the Premiership. In reality, Burnham joined the Cabinet six and a half years before the earliest date on which Starmer could possibly have joined the Labour Party. Like Tony Blair and David Cameron, Starmer became Prime Minister without ever having been an MP for the governing party. But like them, he passed the class and regional tests, since no one ever really quite believed that Blair sat for Sedgefield, a place with nothing to show for 10 years of representation by the Prime Minister, and his family home was always in London.

Burnham will be the first Prime Minister to be a male product of a mixed secondary school, something that the Epstein Class is peculiarly desperate to stop, just as, at least in Britain, it has a peculiar scorn for the very word "buses". We saw that when Jeremy Corbyn once tried to raise bus services at Prime Minister's Questions, and we are seeing it again from, of all people, John Major of the Cones Hotline.

Not that the Epstein Class is doing well. Having demanded the death penalty for Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and 176 years in prison for Julian Assange, John Bolton himself now stands convicted under the Espionage Act. Reform UK, which Peter Thiel presumed to endorse when James Orr invited him to speak at Cambridge, is falling apart, with David Bull telling Nigel Farage to get lost because he was an embarrassment, and with Zia Yusuf admitting on Question Time that he had been refused selection as a by-election candidate, something that the party extended even to Robert Kenyon. And an oddly precise £1,539.45 has had to be handed back to Zack Polanski because he had not been on the electoral register when he had given it to the party of which he was already the Leader, the Green Party of Noam Chomsky and of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's protective elder brother.

Speaking of the King, if he and the Queen are not going to be living in the residential part of Buckingham Palace, then who is? While it is possible to resign from His Majesty's Privy Council, as Jeffrey Donaldson has done, it is not possible to resign an honour. Only the King may take that away from you; for example, for all that he sent back his medal, Elizabeth II never stripped John Lennon of his MBE, with which he died whether he liked it or not. But the King was always going to deknight Donaldson, who is still engaging in pure cant.

He is not the only one. There is no way that the BBC made this between Monday and Friday, and its main message is in any case that everyone who was anyone always knew about Donaldson. Of course the British State uses kompromat. And a "gay sauna" operated for years right opposite MI6 in Vauxhall, just over the water from the Palace of Westminster, but we are expected to believe that two senior officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland just happened to see Donaldson go into it as they were passing? Pull the other one. So to speak.

The whole thing is as fanciful as this, which was purportedly made in a single afternoon, which has sunk without trace along with Blair's heavily hyped recent intervention, and which the Police have gone so far as to insist publicly had no basis in fact, with neither Roman Lavrynovych nor Stanislav Carpiuc sentenced as a terrorist, as absolutely any convict may now be at the judge's discretion, despite supposedly having acted on behalf of a foreign power to firebomb the Prime Minister's old house, very old flat, and old car. Starmer is under pressure to compile a Resignation Honours List after all. Look out for the team behind that Panorama, or they would have legitimate cause for complaint, having made complete and utter fools of themselves. Did Two Year Keir's resignation really have nothing to do with his babymommas, his sugar daddies, or his rent boys? Burnham will bring many things to Downing Street. But those will not be among them.