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Starmer’s challengers are merely rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic

Labour must grasp markets, incentives and the Government’s part in our economic malaise Daily Telegraph 17/05/26 This week promises to be a significant one, both politically and economically. The news and political sections of just about all the media are, of course, dominated by the wranglings over who, if anyone, will succeed Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. But this subject has come to dominate the economics and business pages as markets try to assess the significance of the various candidates for economic and market performance. The truth of the matter is that there is probably not a cigarette paper to be put between them. On what we have heard so far, their different posturings correspond to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The fundamental reason is that all of the leading candidates for the top job are, unsurprisingly, shot through with Labour’s basic ideology, namely that fairness and the distribution of income are the main issues before us. And state-led acti...
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Andy Burnham is destined to be a disappointment

You cannot endlessly tax and borrow your way to prosperity, no matter how worthy the spending sounds daily Telegraph 15/05/26 The King of the North is assembling his troops, preparing to march on Westminster. Andy Burnham has finally found a seat for his long-awaited chicken run, hoping Labour’s National Executive Committee selects him as the candidate for Makerfield after Josh Simons stepped aside in the Wigan constituency. Simons was once touted as a Labour rising star before allegedly attempting to smear journalists investigating questionable accounting at Labour Together, the think tank he used to run. Simons says he is making way for a leader with the “radicalism, energy and immense courage to meet the moment”. Burnham certainly thinks he is the country’s saviour. He claims Labour has already “made changes to make life better” during its first two years in Government. Really? Voters appear unconvinced. At last week’s local elections, Reform secured 50 per cent of the vote ...
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Labour’s civil war is bizarre, shambolic and pointless

Politics is supposed to be about ideas and visions for dealing with the country’s challenges. Where is the great debate about these? Daily Telegraph 15/05/26 Winston Churchill famously wrote of the role of prime minister: “The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.” Good advice. And we all now know that Keir Starmer is no good at being Prime Minister. When he trips, he blames others. When he makes mistakes, it’s in the full glare of daylight. He’s a dud. Yet even now the Labour Party seems reluctant to conclude that he has to go. Even now Wes Streeting can’t quite bring himself to launch a leadership challenge and calls instead for a transition timetable. Personally I’m convinced Starmer is done for, but who could blame him for trying to tough it out against opponents so infirm of purpose? Things could ge...
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Labour is about to unleash total hell on Britain

Starmer won power on a deceptively moderate manifesto but paved the way for a full Left-wing takeover Daily Telegraph 13/05/26 Hurrah! Sir Keir Starmer is surely history, his catastrophic, incompetent premiership almost over, his catalogue of lies, obfuscations and untruths having finally caught up with him. There is still, it would seem, some justice in this world, some penalties for utter, abject failure. And if he does trigger a leadership contest this week as expected, I will commend Wes Streeting for calling time on the Prime Minister. The Health Secretary might well have grasped that this was his one chance to take the top job before Andy Burnham could make a return to Westminster, but in a Cabinet of cowards, charlatans and narcissists, he will still have displayed an unusual amount of courage. Yet I doubt Streeting, a social democrat, will end up in No 10; when Starmer eventually goes, we are far more likely to be left with a proper socialist like Angela Rayner, Ed Miliba...
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The pathological vanity of Keir Starmer

His refusal to step down is an act of contempt for the public. Spiked 13/05/26 So this is how technocracy ends – not with a bang but with the whimpering of one of its chief proponents as he hunkers down, hiding from the judgement of the people. This is the vision we now have of Keir Starmer: alone, reviled, skulking in his bunker at Downing Street. He’s a dead man blathering, talking about staying the course even though the people and much of his party would rather he didn’t. He’s ‘resolute’, say his dwindling band of apologists, but to the rest of us it just looks like pathological vanity. These are extraordinary events. Following last week’s local and devolved elections – in which Labour lost vast swathes of territory to Reform UK and others – the heat has been on Sir Keir. As if it wasn’t humiliating enough to lose council seats across England, and control of the Senedd in Wales, and four seats in the Scottish parliament, polls now suggest 70 per cent of Brits view Starmer ‘unf...
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Andy Burnham is just Starmer in northern drag

Labour’s prince over the water is the embodiment of the very political class that voters are desperate to eject. Spiked 12/05/26 Are there two other words that better capture just how lost the Labour Party is than ‘Andy Burnham’? Yes, that Andy Burnham – the long-lashed, Blair-era frontbencher who crashed and burned in two successive Labour leadership contests (in 2010 and 2015), before decamping from parliament to become mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. At the time, he described life in Westminster as ‘poisonous’ and a ‘living nightmare’. As incredible as it may seem, a party that once roundly rejected Burnham as its leader is now touting him as Britain’s next prime minister. Inside the Labour Party and among its media sympathisers, this hitherto unremarkable career politician is being presented as the answer to their party’s and the nation’s woes. It doesn’t even matter that he is not actually an MP at the moment. With the Parliamentary Labour Party finally set to evict Kei...
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Delaying Starmer’s departure will fail

The PM risks sliding into irrelevance as potential successors battle for his crown Daily Telegraph 11/05/26 Sometimes in Westminster, politicians latch on to a buzzword that spreads like a particularly nasty virus from every mouth. Today that word is timetable. One after the other, Labour MPs are calling on the Prime Minister to set a timetable for his departure. The reason is obvious: they want him gone, but not until Andy Burnham has returned to Parliament to be crowned as Sir Keir Starmer’s successor. The alternative of having a leadership contest immediately would mean having to choose between Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, neither of whom they much fancy. So the phrase “resign now” is very much out of fashion. The problem is that if Sir Keir granted their request, announcing what would probably be a summer leadership contest and a change of leader around September, he would be not so much a lame duck as a dead duck. There would quickly be a new buzzword in Westminster, a...
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