Labour

When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory. There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls. ‘If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.’ Instead, Andy Burnham said: ‘This is mine,’ and calmly slotted it into the corner. ‘It was a perfect penalty.

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.

British by-elections are often prolonged affairs, dragging on for months. Yet in the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton – once home to Myra Hindley and the Gallagher brothers – campaigners are on a frantic dash to canvas the 82,000 voters before polling day on 26 February. ‘It is a proper three-horse race,’ says one. ‘And it’s coming down to a photo finish.’ Gorton has been red since the days of Ramsay MacDonald – but now a WhatsApp scandal threatens to end Labour’s hegemony. Andrew Gwynne, the departing MP, has quit over a series of lewd messages. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, blocked from standing to replace him, has instead become the spectre of this contest.

With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the political bomb disposal expert he has become. Brexit is the greatest political issue for a generation, yet Keir Starmer has chosen to put this softly spoken Welshman in charge of defusing it. The Cabinet Office minister, responsible for post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, is following in the footsteps of Olly Robbins and David Frost, but his lack of public notoriety says much about how things have changed as we approach the tenth anniversary next year of the vote to Leave.

The Labour conference in Liverpool was a curiously upbeat affair. Much of the good spirit came from schadenfreude at the misadventures of Andy Burnham. The Mayor of Greater Manchester scuttled out of Liverpool just before Keir Starmer’s speech, having united the party in mutual contempt at his posturing in recent days. ‘A fucking clown’ was the verdict of an ex-cabinet minister. ‘He did an Eric Heffer,’ remarked one Labour official – a reference to the cantankerous Liverpool MP who stormed out of Neil Kinnock’s conference speech 40 years ago. ‘It was the worst coup attempt since South Korea,’ says a former aide. Burnham, however, is merely a symptom, not a cause of Labour’s woes. Serious rivals are unlikely to telegraph their ambitions quite so blatantly.

The ‘nonce party.’ That’s how Zarah Sultana described the Labour party at a rally in Brixton last night where the independent MP for Coventry South addressed supporters of her new movement, Your Party. She claimed to have posted numerous images of Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein on her X account, but her warnings went unheeded by Labour strategists. The lively rally opened with a videotaped greeting from Jeremy Corbyn, co-leader alongside Sultana, who affirmed his support for ‘Net Zero by 2030’, and a handful of benefit increases. After this formality, his name was barely mentioned. Sultana topped the bill ahead of seven activists who urged the crowd to oppose ‘the far-right on the streets.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I have a better serving suggestion. How about revenge plated up simmering, every single day, again and again, inescapable and eternal? For surely that is the intended outcome of Emily Thornberry’s plan to – maybe, possibly – run for the position of deputy leader of the Labour party. Even that ‘possibly’ caveat has the air of somebody turning the knife. How she must delight in dangling this ‘I might, I might not’ eventuality before Keir Starmer. Because it was Starmer, after all, who stabbed her in the front after the 2024 election, chucking her unceremoniously out from her shadow position of attorney-general and handing this plum job to his old chum Lord Hermer.

Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Candy Brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not. Papers get to call it a ‘third home’ because she has the use of a ministerial apartment – ‘grace and favour’, obviously, to make it sound extra posh – in Westminster, but she’s not exactly going to be flipping the place in Admiralty House for a profit when she leaves office.

Shortly after he was elected as Britain’s youngest council leader last month, 19-year-old George Finch of Reform UK had a conversation with Monica Fogarty, the chief executive of Warwickshire county council, about which of them was really running the show. In Finch’s telling, this was a watershed moment: he offered a ‘professional working relationship’ but the relationship quickly soured. ‘I know you’re trying to get rid of me,’ Fogarty said, according to Finch. ‘Well, you can’t get rid of me. The way it works around here is: your councillors play ball.’ Finch allegedly replied: ‘Are you joking? You have to work with us. It’s not the other way around. We’ve been put here by the electorate. You haven’t.

Couldn’t we just skip to the end? I’m old enough to have seen this so often: must I sit through each dreary succeeding scene again? Parties in government are animals: they have natures; their natures do not change; they are incapable of being different animals; and what follows, follows. A Labour government finally runs out of money and enters a period of slow-motion disintegration, ending in a chaos of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, still whimpering about social justice as the bailiffs move in. Already the suspense has gone. There will be many twists and turns, probably over years rather than months, before this government pulls apart at the seams; but, honestly, knowing where we’re going, I do ache to fast-forward. I’m 75.

You may have noticed that for some while the BBC News people have stopped referring to Reform UK as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’. That’s not because Nigel Farage has tacked to the left a little on such policies as nationalisation; one characteristic of the left is that if they consider you ‘far right’, they will not commend anything you say, even if they fervently agree with it. You will never gain their favour, even if you join Greta Thunberg on her stupid and narcissistic boat expedition to Gaza and then pronounce your solidarity with all trans folk. This is one of the mistakes often made by people who are right of centre and have said or done something that has aroused the fury of the left-wing mob.