Points Mean Prizes?

Newsnight managed to cut to the weather right as the result was being announced, but if next to no one voted in Greater Manchester, then why did it take so long to count the votes? And that failure to declare the first round totals before moving on was not standard practice.

But Reform UK picked up hardly any second preferences from people whose first preferences had been either for Restore Britain or for the Conservative Party, which managed fewer votes than Restore in a conurbation that also showed little appetite for the Greens and none for the Liberal Democrats. Neither Kemi Badenoch nor Ed Davey merits the hype, while Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski are outright liabilities.

Nationally, the latest approval ratings are +1 for each of Badenoch and Davey, -20 for Polanski, and -24 for Farage. Westminster voting intentions are 12 per cent for each of the Greens and the Lib Dems, 17 per cent for the Conservatives, and 23 per cent for Reform. For Labour, the figure is 27 per cent, an increase of five points, and for Andy Burnham it is +16, an increase of 20 points. Twenty.

The bitter Starmerite rump has joined the long line of people who screamed abuse at Diane Abbott, although they are unable to name any sitting Labour MP who agreed with them. If you truly believed that your party had extended its whip to an anti-Semite, then you would leave it. More and more people would agree with her views on Ukraine, and most people in Britain who knew anything about Syria would regard her statements on that as pure common sense.