Growth is up, inflation and waiting lists are down. What’s not to like under Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership?
I write a little in jest, but to make the point that we have a month before the Makerfield by election and any Labour leadership election. As we know to our cost, a lot can happen in that time. The government seem determined to try and govern. There is a renewed focus on cutting the cost of living. Plans are afoot to get closer to Europe and the planned fuel duty rise is off.
With the growth and inflation figures currently going in the right direction, it could be that the frenzy of the last fortnight eases a little.
If it ends up with Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting squaring off, might Sir Keir believe he can come through the middle?
However,before then it hasn’t taken much to destabilise the government over the last two years and No 10 will be worried that the effects of the Iran war have not yet fed through. Also, there are suggestions that the, still to be released,
Mandelson files will once again throw the spotlight on one of the Prime Minister’s biggest mistakes.
Meanwhile things are getting rough in Makerfield. Mind you not as rough as four hundred years ago when St Edmund Arrowsmith became one of the Catholic Martyrs to be hanged drawn and quartered with a relic left in a church in Ashton-in-Makerfield. I’m sure Sir Keir does not wish such a fate on any of the by election candidates! I am indebted to my dear friend and former BBC producer Liam Fogarty for this information. He’d have had me doing a piece to camera outside St Oswald’s church if we were still in harness!
But I digress. The contest is becoming clearer with Andy Burnham hoping his impressive figures as the most popular Labour politician (there isn’t much competition) and huge name recognition will overwhelm the local plumber and Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon.
It was a difficult decision for Reform UK. Go for the local man who will represent the constituency while Andy Burnham is strutting himself on the world (or particularly) the European stage; or select one of their impressive former chairmen Zia
Yusef or David Bull, who briefly was a North West MEP.
The stakes are high, even if the odds are currently in favour of Burnham. Voters sometimes react against being manipulated and there has been plenty of that south of Wigan. The outgoing Labour MP, Josh Symonds, has had an interesting career. Working for Labour Together, a Starmer project to remove the Corbynites, he was forced to resign his ministerial post over allegations he ordered an investigation into Sunday Times journalists who were probing Labour Together’s finances.
Then with Burnham’s search for a seat. He was getting reported rejections from MPs in St Helens, Blackley and Rusholme.Then Symonds ends his parliamentary career (for now) at the age of thirty-two. Inevitably there is speculation about what he has been offered, but to be fair to Josh, he has fronted up on the media since he quit rather than hiding away.
Then there is the small matter of the cost of all this political game playing. The Makerfield by election and possible mayoral contest in Greater Manchester could be five million pounds, all to sort out Labour’s leadership problems.
