Night of the Long Eyelashes

This is Labour without factionalism, is it? All that is missing is the icepick. I am loving every moment of it. Except that each announcement is made with a little video of Andy Burnham and the appointee hugging. They are becoming as bad as footballers.

The demotion of Yvette Cooper is news in which I have particular personal cause to rejoice, while the whole nation may dance in the streets at the demise of Rachel Reeves, Steve Reed and Peter Kyle. The appointment of Angela Rayner to Housing is very funny, as is the elevation of Louise Haigh, and as is giving Lucy Powell most of the job of Bridget Phillipson, whom Powell defeated for Deputy Leader.

The end of David Lammy is presumably the end of his ruse to abolish most jury trials and the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court. Although check the small print, the abandonment of digital ID was always going to render impossible the ban on teenagers from accessing any political opinion from outside the Epstein Class; the eviction of Liz Kendall is a very good sign, although her equally ghoulish successor, Pat McFadden, remains at the DWP.

The appointment of a Foreign Secretary who kept us for a time out of the war for al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State that sadly won in the end in Syria, needs to be set alongside the appointment of a Chancellor of the Exchequer who does not really see the point of any public spending beyond unlimited subventions to the arms companies.

And as would also become apparent if Burnham tried to make good on housing in general or on public transport, neither social care nor rough sleeping could be addressed by devolution; if anything, they call for the reversal of what there already was. Both on those points and on greater powers for local government, the Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate across all policy areas throughout the Kingdom. Whining from the SNP or Plaid Cymru should be met by asking which of these things the complainants thought that the English should have but that the Scots or the Welsh should not.