Like Baldrick, Andy Burnham has a cunning new plan – politicalbetting.com
Like Baldrick, Andy Burnham has a cunning new plan – politicalbetting.com
Allies of Andy Burnham have identified a fresh path for the Greater Manchester mayor to return to Westminster and potentially run for Labour leader, via elections to the NEC over the summer www.ft.com/content/2310…
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-last-stand-at-steve-bannons-gladiator-school
The only other promotion place is a cage fight between the next six teams, of which one is the mighty Carlisle United.
I do think Starmer should be replaced. He is too Trump like in his narcissm. Not so flamboyantly deranged, but the same sense of no limits to be set on his actions.
Appointing Mandelson (no vetting needed to know his misdeeds over the years) was not just bad in itself, but also shows a lack of understanding on the limits of power.
I am angry with Peter Mandelson
Some attempt to deflect and plainly laughable
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/14/zelensky-says-kyiv-seized-a-russian-position-with-drones-and-robots-is-this-a-game-changer-a92497
No humans in the action. The Russians surrendered to machines made of metal and plastic.
Starmer will tomorrow make the most personally consequential statement to the Commons of his time as prime minister. If he is to hang on to the job, he will have to formally apologise for misleading MPs and the public about the Mandelson scandal.
There’s no doubt that the prime minister did mislead. After a deep background dive, the security vetters conclude Mandelson is unfit to occupy the juiciest post in the diplomatic corps, a role with access to extremely sensitive material. The Foreign Office gives him the OK regardless. And no one tells the bloke who is supposed to be running the country! Is this remotely believable? Sir Keir needs it to be so because the crux of his defence is that he misled parliament because he was misled himself.
Weirdly, it is kind of plausible that the first he heard about it was last week. Those of us who delve into the inner workings of Starmerland often find the centre of it occupied by a bizarrely detached prime minister. Insiders report that he hates it when people bring him problems. “Keir doesn’t like bad news and he doesn’t take to people who bring him bad news,” says one senior Labour figure. “So no one wants to be the bearer of bad news.”
You don’t need to be an expert reader of the runes to see that this is hugely damaging. It was a terrible mistake to send Mandelson to Washington in the face of prescient warnings not to do it from Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, who also complained that the process was “weirdly rushed”. It looks even more foolhardy now we know that he was given the thumbs down by the security vetting. “Oh god, it’s shocking,” groans one cabinet member. “It is another sinkhole that has emerged in front of us.”
The prime minister’s position, which seemed to have stabilised somewhat since it was in high peril back in February, is again precarious. Those who want him out of Number 10 are fired up. Even if this doesn’t do for him, it has entrenched the view of many Labour MPs that Sir Keir can’t possibly lead them into the next general election. Anxieties about his judgment and grip are acute. And his excuse for misleading parliament is that he was kept in the dark. Ignorance is a wretched alibi for someone who is supposed to be in charge, but it is the only defence he's got.
But will Badenoch fluff her lines as Kinnock did?
If he was selected for a seat the Gorton and Denton polls showed he would have squeezed the Green and LD votes more than a standard Labour candidate too so he would probably hold a seat he stood in
First, Badenoch isn't as good at politics as Kinnock.
Second, the right seem to be going for 'Starmer lied' rather than 'Starmer was hopelessly incurious '. Which seems a much harder case to make, and I wonder if it's an unconscious attempt to avenge for Boris.
Go further back and even Theresa May had her supporters on here.
You can call it deflection but others call it loyalty - it really depends on which side of the line you sit. If you think "getting rid of" a Labour Prime Minister would be some kind of political triumph for the Leader of the Opposition, fine. If, as a Labour supporter, you think there would be a better leader than Starmer, I respect and understand that.
There are even those who think there are better leaders for their party than Farage, Davey, Polanski and Swinney - again, all credible views.
Politics is a rough trade as someone once said and there's a curious double standard where loyalty is concerned - defending your own leader is seen as virtuous but when someone tries to defend a leader you don't like, it's laughable.
Yes...
He DIDN'T KNOW!
She can bleat "liar liar liar" all she likes, there is no Smoking Gun.
Her personality traits and defects mean she will play straight in to Starmers hands if she goes "lie lie lie" he just needs to anser back "prove it or withdraw the allegation" in fact that s=could get VERY VERY TASTY indeed if she did outside of Parliamentary protection.
The obvious question is WHY DIDNT HE ASK THE QUESTIONS!
He can defend with "the process means no PM or No 10 would have been told if they' asked due to protocols" - he may well come prepared with a shed load of example of that from Tory years - God knows the Civil Service nust have shed loads of Red Flags on Boris! but it is an argument harder for him to deny.
Sadly for the Tories that have a Leader with very limited intellect, massively inflated ego and arrogance and who cannot adapt and probe beyong the scripts she is given.
They need to let David Davis loose on the subject matter and stick Kemi back in the pavillion asap !
He thinks Starmer may have misled Parliament
“Many years ago when I lived in the US, I often heard it wryly said that if the 1787 Constitution was so marvellous, why had no other nation ever copied it? Now we know. It is dependent upon the conduct in power of reasonable people, recognising bounds of decency and discretion. In the absence of these things, there are no effective checks and balances. The rest of us can only stand by and recognise the extraordinary, almost unbearable truth: the US is no longer our friend, and stands on the cusp of becoming our enemy.”
That doesn't mean the Mail is telling the truth, but your suggestion that it's impossible is simply wrong.
Kendall blaming Mandelson for the PMs problems when it was the PM who appointed the sleaze bag to Ambassasor before vetting says it all
Do we have to go back to Wilson before Truss? And before him Attlee?
I be fairly happy to see Starmer sacked, though the messy aftermath, and quite possibly an even poorer replacement, wouldn't do much for our governance for the next couple of years.
But it's a bit much to trash the reasonable comments from his defenders along with the unreasonable.
The route to that is simple. He is nominated to the Lords and become Labour Leader in The Lords.
He is then appointed as Deputy Leader of The labour Party by Labour Party Members (in the role Lucy Powell now holds) and would have NO House of Commons role but could be given a Cabinet Role in a set department (as Lord David Cameron was as Tory Foreign Secretary.
It may appease those who follow him with damp lillets and his Manc cronies and possibly help the sort of Poll bounce that many pollsters indicate may happen. He'd also be untfettered of the day to day grind of actually being PM
That sort of role could only really work with one likely leadership Candidate, his good friend and increasingly close "soul mate" Angela!
.
Then the plotting al makes very perfect sense
The Leader of the Opposition would love his scalp, to keep her position secure. The Conservatives would LOVE to be going into the local elections with Labour leaderless, rudderless, catastrophically short of a message to sell. Ditto the LibDems, Reform, the SNP, Plaid - none are going to give him an inch. His argument that he didn't know is implausible at best, damning of his abilities in its own right. But that he lied is the easier conclusion to reach. And they will say so. He has misled the House - and if believes he is in the clear, he has misled himself.
But the other parties are just a sideshow. The people he needs to worry about sucking air through teeth and chuntering "he has to go" are behind him. They have a perfect view of his back in which to plunge their knives. The last thing those with ambitions for his job - sat alongside him - will want is time for Burnham to be seen as the standard bearer for change. So if Starmer is to fall - better he does so now. The Labour Party are going to get a kicking in less than three weeks anyway. Starmer and his disastrous management style can own that, not the new leader.
Stoney silence is the best he can hope for. Anybody singing his praises is going to look like the most self-serving buffoon, immediately putting their career at the bottom of the heap for advancement with the new Boss. So let him twist in the breeze.
Could be quite the spectacle.
So he totally fxcked up on Mandelson but the public need to balance that against what could have happened if Farage or Badenoch were in charge.
The public aren’t kept awake at night over the Mandelson affair but are really worried about paying the bills and should realize that Farage and Badenoch would have supported action that made that worse . This really is the message that Starmer is likely to go with .
At least Man Utd surprised on the upside to beat Chelsea away moving 10 points clear of them and with no recognised defence
Actually maybe Starmer will hope to do the same, but he is not talented like Bruno Fernandes, surely the player of the season
'The leader and deputy leader of the Party shall be elected or re-elected from among Commons members of the PLP in accordance with Procedural use in Chapter 4 Clause II below, at a party conference convened in accordance with Clause VI above.'
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/rulebook-2020.pdf#page8 (Or page 4 accreting to the contents page)
Not that I think he will be forced out, as Labour are so terrible at regicide.
Every constitution is dependent on the conduct of reasonable people.
A MAGA type movement in the UK with a parliamentary majority might be yet more unbound by constitutional limits.
Blair also had plans although many of the more significant ones came from Brown. Independence for the BoE, Surestart, a focus on failing schools that had largely been ignored before. Lots of other silly stuff as well of course.
Cameron inherited an absolute disaster zone which I think threw most of his ambitions into the bin. Everything was driven by the need to restore our finances but his "fix the roof while the sun is shining" drove his government. Socially liberal too with gay marriage etc.
Sunak faced almost as bad a situation as Cameron. The lack of money for any ambition has been a common theme for all PMs since 2010.
The more worrying answer is simply there was no plan because there is no plan. I called it "the death of ideology" a while back - Thatcher had a plan of sorts though it was really the 1983 victory which allowed her to pursue it. Attlee had circumstances quite unlike anything before or since.
Before that, perhaps Asquith in 1906 - the three radical reforming Governments of the 20th century.
Now, there is no radical, reforming ideology out there - the centre left has had no economic policy since 2008, the centre right knows austerity (whatever that means) doesn't work and has no ideas. The populists have filled the gap but their plans are fiscally incoherent.
To her credit, Badenoch has started to see a way forward but unfortunately, in order to win power, she has to get votes and that means uncosted promises so she too will end up having questions to answer about the financial viability of her party's proposals.
So, successive Prime Ministers are in office but not in power to use a hackneyed old expression. There's a worrying retreat into ethno-nationalism on all sides -the old sense of "looking after our own" (however that is defined). The adversarial nature of modern politics prevents the kind of cross-cutting concensus which might drive forward meaningful reform.
No one wants to touch pensioner benefits because pensioners vote and in large numbers whereas, it seems, younger people don't. The other side of that is the aspirational minority are also ignored - those who simply want better lives for themselves and their families (yes, they are praised and called "hard working" but that's often not through choice).
The "solutions" peddled round on sites like this become increasingly nonsensical - some have argued cutting benefits by 50%. No Government is going to do that, ever.
With Thatcher, (also a reply to @DavidL ) I think her ideas were mostly slogans. She talked, for example, about curbing the unions but at first had little idea of how to go about it. Indeed, if anything they did it to themselves with the disastrous strike at British Steel. She also talked about stemming inflation but her policies on how to do it were fairly unclear. It is true she did eventually come up with some ideas to turn them into some form of reality but they often seemed to be rather a long way from what she talked about.
Such a sneering attitude to other people’s charitable giving is beneath you. All giving should be encouraged.
I wouldn’t have chosen those causes myself but for the last 15 years they given £300k per year to fund all the overheads for a social mobility focused charity that I used to be involved in).
(FWIW did you know that Westminster has one of the highest percentages of kids on free school meals in the country? Scholarships for local kids to the University of Westminster - which is what they fund - offers a fantastic route out of poverty for many who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity.)
If they'd listened to the Biden administration they would have conscripted all their young men and sent them to the front to die instead of developing machines to do the fighting for them.
Early in the war I was mocked for suggesting that Ukraine might end up chasing Russia out of Ukraine with drones. That possibility comes closer to becoming reality.
Instead? Starmer is over. But as there aren't any alternative leaders who would be better, there is a serious risk that he limps on, abandoned in office. Again.
Text for those not wanting to click link
Here's the official government position on the Mandelson vetting scandal this morning, according to Liz Kendall:
* Olly Robbins was 'wrong' not to tell the PM that Mandelson had failed security vetting, he was 'wrong' again not to do so when the PM repeatedly claimed in public - incorrectly - that due process had been followed
* The PM would not have given Mandelson clearance if he knew that he had failed UK Security Vetting
* No 10 asked 'repeated questions' about Mandelson's vetting and was told 'due process' had been followed. These questions, and the responses, are now key
* Starmer allies are warning allies that changing leaders now - at a time of global and economic instability - would be reckless
*********
Does not hold up. If he would have not given clearance why did he not ask if UK Security Vetting had failed or passed?
If X then I cannot grant Y, you have to know X.
But, of course, all he was interested in was 'due process' having been followed.
The eggs had been broken, therefore there must be an omelette
I for one think he should have resigned long ago. But he’s not going to and no amount of huffing and puffing is going to change that.
The idea this is anything on the scale of Boris Johnson I find quite absurd in all honesty.
People can witter on about GDP per capita but I think a large majority of people in the UK would reject the kind of racketeering that goes on in the US. A broken country.
Starmer: Mene, mene, tekel upharsin
Admittedly the SCOTUS ruling on Presidential immunity was a blow and the politicisation of the judiciary is a huge problem in the US .
However there’s an argument that there are still more checks and balances in the US .
If you had a very malign politician in the UK with a commons majority the damage they could do to the country is immense .
There is little recourse to courts that’s why Reform must get nowhere near power .
But like Starmer, there is this idea he will be a good one just because he isn’t Starmer. Burnham’s previous attempts at running for leader were pretty bad.
Now maybe he’s improved a lot since then but I’m not really seeing this cabinet of ideas others are. No doubt he’s a significantly better speaker than Starmer though and I suspect Labour will lead the polls if he takes over. But it may well be a very short honeymoon as reality bites.
His comments on the markets though give me great cause for concern.
Boycott Gilead.
The reality is that he isn’t resigning. He should, but he isn’t going to.
But whilst a big new Idea that unlocks more easy prosperity would be nice, I fear it's like the tale of the time Richard Feynman was in a meeting with army top brass about how science could help the national defenses.
"What we really need is a tank that is powered by sand."
Sometimes there are no new ideas. Or as in many arts, the new ideas are clearly worse than the old ones. Perhaps we just have to accept two unpalatable old ideas.
First, that a nation costs, and broad-based taxes are how we should pay. Second, that we've spent ages not paying enough, and are going to be paying more for less for quite a while.
The artillery has been hammered this week - 464 pieces whacked. It seems as soon as they open up, the drones now locate and destroy them, using operators many miles distant. The chance of the Russians hitting back at those attackers are minimal. Destroying Russian artillery ends Russia's ability to wage war the way it likes: flatten a town with artillery, send in troops to capture the rubble, advance the artillery, repeat. Drones now mean grey areas tens of miles wide. Any advance into that grey area ends in carnage - before the Russians even see a Ukrainian position. Hence you get reported kill ratios of 25:1.
Any rational army would retreat, knowing it is beaten.
Under Putin, any rational generals would be sent to lead from the front.
Meanwhile, the schools, hospitals, markets, residential tower blocks of the Ukainian populace get hit - because that is the only war Russia can now wage: terror.
If the Ukrainians were to respond in kind and flatten Moscow and St. Petersburg schools, hospitals, markets, tower blocks, then Putin would have only himself to blame. But rather tha terrorising the Russian population, Ukraine is doing something far more effective: destroying the Russian economy.
The Labour line which is what I suggested last night is for Starmer to accept it’s a clusterfxck, apologize then hammer Badenoch and Farage on the Iran War.
The mantra I fxcked up but on the most important decision I got it right whilst the other two got it wrong .
Deflection and reminding the public who supported their bills going up seems the only course of action as Operation Save Starmer kicks in.
Oh, sorry, not that sort of party?
Imagine we’d been dragged into that. What would people be saying now?
In power he’s little better.
To me he’s just as bad, if not worse, than Johnson given his posturing about the issue prior to the election.
We have supplied aircraft to shoot down drones attacking our business partners around the Gulf. We have let the B52's use Fairford. Who knows what their targets actually were whilst saying we restricted them to "defensive" actions. We have not restricted the use of USAF bases in Suffolk/Norfolk as part of a supply network from the US.
Tell me what more Starmer would have actually done if he had gone in with full-throated support for Trump's war?
I've posted before, and hold to the view, that appointing Mandelson to deal with a slippery (at best) customer like Trump could have turned out to be a good idea. However, clearly Mandelson was even dodgier than Starmer thought (?knew) he was. After all, he had a significantly suspicion-arousing background.
But I really, really do not understand why, if someone fails a vetting procedure, the person who is likely to need the information isn't told. And if the person appointing isn't told, why on earth was the question not asked: if X has gone through the vetting process, was everything satisfactory?
What, otherwise, is the point of the 'vetting procedure'; if the result of such procedure is that the subject is found to be totally unsuitable, surely then the candidate should be ruled out?
I think unfortunately the idea he’s not really driving the train has become very accurate.
The war is into its fifth year. Where is this going for Russia? Wheat harvests look set to be up this year on last year's absolute disaster but they are still down 10% on before the war. Oil production has rebounded from the absolute crash in mid-2022 but is still down about 8%. Oil exports are down more, at closer to 10%. Gold production is down 14% too.
Russia's economy has survived much better than expected but it is still not doing well. Two more years of this would not be helpful for it although Trump is doing his best to support them.