William Atkinson

We live in a time of ifs and wills. If Reform and Restore split the right-wing vote in Makerfield, will Andy Burnham win this Thursday’s by-election? If he does re-enter the Commons, will he challenge Keir Starmer for Labour’s leadership? If he does so, will it be a contest or a coronation? If Burnham wins, will he then call an election? And if he does so, will Labour win it? I cannot go inside Burnham’s head; as Lara Brown has highlighted, there isn’t much in it, except the Happy Mondays. But I can read polls. The two hypotheticals that have been done with Burnham give Labour a slim lead. In our current era of multi-party politics, that could be enough to eke out a slim majority or at least to be the largest party in a hung parliament capable of cobbling together a government.

For all of the squabbling between Reform and Restore, the Right’s best chance at a by-election win on 18 June may not be in Makerfield, but 300-odd miles further north – in Aberdeen. The beneficiary wouldn’t be Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, but Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. The Tory candidate is now ‘quietly confident’ It’s unsurprising that this contest has been largely overlooked. My Westminster colleagues treat the suburbs of Manchester as being almost unfathomably distant, so the North Sea coast seems like an alien planet. But Aberdeen is also a city used to being ignored. According to the Centre for Cities, between 2010 and 2020, household incomes in the city fell by almost 7 per cent; between 2010 and 2023, it was one of only two cities in the UK to lose jobs.

The Shetland Islands The SNP have had better weeks. It’s strange to think that it was only this month that the party won a staggering fifth term in office, despite independence being no closer, and a record of failure on everything from education to drug deaths. Perhaps the most remarkable result for the SNP leader John Swinney was the election of Hannah Mary Goodlad in the Shetland Islands. Since 1950, this was the first time these islands had voted for someone other than the Liberals or Lib Dems. Goodlad triumphed after a vigorous campaign featuring windswept social media videos and three visits from Swinney; before her election, she ran an outdoor sauna business.

Plenty of narratives can be pulled out of last Thursday’s elections. Labour’s shattered hold over its Northern and Welsh heartlands; the imperviousness of Scottish voters to the inadequacies of SNP rule; the onward march of Reform; the continuing irrelevance of the Lib Dems; the foaming of the River Tiber heralded by sectarian success. But one that cannot – if you still want to be able to look yourself in the eye in the morning mirror – is that they were good for the Conservatives. Trying to turn these results into a victory only leaves Badenoch looking like Comical Kemi Kemi Badenoch was out in front of the cameras early, surrounded by beaming activists, heralding her party’s success in taking back Westminster from Labour.

I have little interest in what Keir Starmer will say in the Commons later today. I’ve only been in political journalism for four years, and I’m already onto the fall of my fourth prime minister. The death drawls of a premiership have a familiar and tedious air; whatever Starmer says about l’affaire Mandelson, the original sin was appointing an old chum of the world’s most famous nonce as our man in Washington. The exact details of who knew what when are secondary to that mistake. The Prime Minister’s speech will allow for various itches to be scratched.

Is Shabana Mahmood ‘one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had’? Tory MP Edward Leigh thinks so. The Father of the House lavished praise on the Home Secretary in the Commons yesterday after Mahmood announced a ban on the annual al-Quds Day march. He isn’t the only right-winger to fall for Mahmood. Many have failed to clock how unpopular Mahmood has become with her own party Since her promotion to the Home Office, Mahmood has focused on restricting immigration, lengthening settlement periods and requirements for long-term migrants, limiting refugee status, offering money for voluntary departures and banning visas from certain countries.

Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch is reportedly planning a ‘root and branch’ shadow cabinet reshuffle. Those most at risk are said to be her top team of Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. For Lam, there are plenty of reasons to defect to Nigel Farage’s party The intention, the Daily Mail suggests, is to promote younger MPs ‘to energise the battered Tory brand’. Stride is said to ‘lack energy’, Patel ‘reminds voters of record levels of migration’, and Philp is believed to ‘no longer [be] fully focused on the job at hand’. None of these is a surprise.

Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick Until a year or so ago, Poilievre was the Prince Across the Atlantic – a punchy and pugnacious Conservative would who had united his party around a popular and populist message of more housebuilding, tackling inflation and championing those working-class voters that Canada’s Liberals had taken for granted for too long. He built a hefty lead over Justin Trudeau and topped the polls among young voters.

Being a mildly Celtophobic Tory from Metro-Land, I’m an unlikely Welsh nationalist. Aside from once sharing a Christmas dinner with Cerys Matthews, I’ve few ties to the Principality. Nonetheless, last week I found myself at the conference of Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales. If Wales did become independent, it would be a tragic loss, born from neglect My interest was piqued by last October’s Caerphilly Senedd by-election. Despite the confident assertions of Reform outriders that Nigel’s boy would walk it, Plaid won handily. Naturally, the London press rushed to interview the losing candidate, ignore the victor and forget the whole affair.

If Kemi Badenoch makes a speech during a war with Iran, does anyone hear it? Following the Gorton and Denton by-election – but seemingly before President Trump had decided to set fire to the Middle East – the Conservative leader had intuited that it was time to outline her party’s new approach to our fraught multi-racial democracy. For now it is all buzzwords and no bite Emphasis on multi-racial, not multicultural. Badenoch said she had seen what a true multicultural society looked like while growing up in Nigeria: a country divided, despite a shared skin colour, by religion, culture and priorities. A country that she had left to come to a Britain defined by fairness, the rule of law and a tolerance for minorities, especially Jews.

‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Keir Starmer seems to have mirrored Juliet after deciding to move on Chris Wormald on as Cabinet Secretary. Yet the young Capulet was asking not where her lover was, but why he must be Romeo – a Montague. ‘Deny they father and refuse they name’, she implored, so that the pair could be together. With Antonia Romeo widely expected to be Wormald’s successor, a similar chorus of 'whys?' seems to be pricking up across Whitehall.