Labour

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.

Keir Starmer still clearly misses opposition. He spent almost as much of his reset speech complaining about the Tories and the mess he feels they made of things as he did talking about what he is actually doing. It’s almost as though government has turned out to be harder and less enjoyable than even he had predicted. He spent the first few minutes of his speech listing in his usual exasperated tones the ways in which the Conservatives had failed the country, deploying his analogy about tackling damp in a household by using a hairdryer, before saying: ‘Stabilising the economy, fixing the foundations, clearing up the mess – so we can take the country forward with our missions.’ What the Prime Minister actually wants to do is ‘challenging’, he claimed.

The news that Labour is sending volunteers to assist Kamala Harris’s campaign is an outrage. In what world is it acceptable for a foreign political entity to interfere in the democratic process of a sovereign nation? If the Tories were shipping off their operatives to help Donald Trump, the shrieking harpies would be crying foul, calling election interference. But it favours Kamala Harris, suddenly, the lines of legality and ethics are blurred, if not outright erased.  I don’t like it, clearly, but in some ways it’s laughable Inarticulate, policy-challenged Kamala Harris has bumbled her way through high-stakes interviews, fumbled crucial debates, and remains woefully underqualified in foreign affairs.

Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language of politics. Doubtless we shall be encountering it (though never by name) in Rachel Reeves’s looming Budget. If you step away from levying the new taxes you must then cut the goodies they were to pay for But we’ll start at my mother’s knee. I was five, and she was teaching me reading: an activity I viewed with displeasure. I did, however, like sugar-coated almonds – very much. So Mum undertook to give me one sugar-coated almond for every chapter I read aloud to her from my First Reading Book.

It’s an iron law of politics that when the staffer becomes the story they have to go. Dominic Cummings had to leave Boris Johnson, and Theresa May’s joint chiefs Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy both took the blame for the disastrous 2017 election result. The reshuffle resolves a perplexing political question Lobby journalists leaving Liverpool at the end of Labour conference had concluded that Sue Gray would have to leave the role of as chief of staff to Keir Starmer. Yet her resignation yesterday came as a surprise. This is of a piece with Starmer’s leadership – he doesn’t brief his intentions in advance, but he can often be swift and ruthless. The appointment of Morgan McSweeney as chief of staff is a recognition and a resolution.

This Labour conference has largely been about Keir Starmer and his ministers making the argument for what they are doing, rather than giving any details of how they plan to achieve it. Wes Streeting’s speech to the hall in Liverpool this morning fitted that pattern. He didn’t announce anything new. Instead, he set out quite how big the challenge was, and made the argument for what Labour planned to do. He told members: We can only deliver recovery through reform. Without action on prevention, the NHS will be overwhelmed. Without reform to services, we’ll end up putting in more cash for poorer results. That’s the choice. Reform or die. We choose reform.

Keir Starmer has his big speech today at Labour conference and, like Rachel Reeves’s offering yesterday, the Prime Minister plans to strike an upbeat tone while warning he can’t offer ‘false hope’. He will tell the hall in Liverpool that there’s ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ if the government takes ‘tough decisions now’.  He will talk about his project of ‘national renewal’, saying: The politics of national renewal are collective. They involve a shared struggle. A project that says, to everyone, this will be tough in the short term, but in the long term, it’s the right thing to do for our country.

With the elections over, it might be time to reflect on what Sir Keir Starmer means by ‘rot’ in the ‘foundations of this country’. What foundations are those? Political? In the democracy (‘citizen-power’) invented by the Greeks, men over the age of 18 meeting in assembly took all decisions that our politicians take today and, aged over 30, all decisions in the courts. It lasted for 180 years (508-322 bc), but did not survive, being characterised as ‘the rule of the poor, looting the rich’.  The Romans invented republicanism (‘the people’s property’). The Senate, drawn from the elites, both made the laws and occupied the various official positions – legal, financial, military etc. – of government.