Those of you of a certain age and who have gone through this will know how disruptive the surgery and the recovery process can be. I can’t actually make it into my home study at the moment, so this is the first time I’ve tried posting an article using my iPad. And the reason I can’t get into my study is simply that I’m not sure how well I could navigate the mess therein using my crutches.

A yes, crutches. I was using a walking stick just before the operation and I expect I’ll do so again before this process is done. But in the meantime, I can’t go anywhere without two crutches, and without putting as little pressure as possible on my right leg.

Also, I have been so dependent on pain killers, especially in the first week after the operation, that I honestly couldn’t trust myself to write something that wasn’t nonsense all the way through, if my morphine-induced dreams were anything to go by.

But there has been progress: I’m now on the lower-strength painkillers and I feel fortunate because I don’t seem to have the need to take them more than once a day, usually just before bed time. The exercises I must do, pretty constantly, throughout the day are painful and uncomfortable but even I can see they’re having a positive effect on my mobility and flexibility.

The pain started in 2020 or 2021, but I wasn’t actually placed on the waiting list in Glasgow NHS until 2024, for reasons too dull to explore here. Eventually, I was offered the operation by a neighbouring health board, Forth Valley, which had more availability than my own board. If I could have jumped at it, I would have.

On the day of the operation, I was given a local anaesthetic (an epidural) and a sedative, after which I lost consciousness completely and woke up in my room a couple of hours later, feeling oddly awake, not remotely nauseous and suffering only a minimal level of pain. The nursing staff were fantastic and very patient. After a single night, I was put through my paces re the exercises I had to do, and then released back into the wild. The most painful episode was transferring from a wheelchair into the passenger seat of my car, which I was forced, reluctantly, to allow my youngest son to drive just to get me home.

Carolyn has been a star, adding her invalid husband to her already large pile of duties around the house. It’s lovely being waited on hand and foot (and knee) and I will have to buy her something nice at the end of all of this. Days are comprised mostly of using my crutches to get up and down stairs to the bathroom and back, watching Reacher and Silo on Amazon Video and Apple TV and scrolling through Twitter (no change there).

Anyway, now that I’ve worked out how to post using my iPad I hope to get back on to producing a steady stream of articles. I just wanted to explain that their absence recently was not entirely down to my being a lazy sod.

Viewer discretion recommended: This is my knee five days after the operation:

At the risk of sounding like a participant in the famous “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, things were different in my day.

The Labour Party, I was brought up to believe, was the party of the working classes (this was in the 1970s, when we were still allowed to talk about class and didn’t have to replace “working class” with “working people” or, worse, “hard-working people”). This was the political template on which British politics were based: the Tories were the party of the middle classes and the Labour Party was the party of the working classes. There was also the Liberal Party, for some reason.

Things started to change in the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher made more and more traditional working class people reach upwards on the social ladder and suddenly working class aspiration was a thing. Of course it had always been a thing – my own mother, as working class as they came, would yearn for enough of an income to send her children to private school (although this was combined, paradoxically, with a weird determination never to buy our home, despite Thatcherite legislation giving us the opportunity to do so). But now working class aspiration could be acknowledged as a good, positive thing. Why shouldn’t people who lived on a council estate want to own their own home, go on foreign holidays and buy a new car?

And so the social map changed and many of the certainties with which I’d grown up started to blur and fade, replaced by new ones about meritocracy. All of this happened just as Thatcher was playing her own disgraceful part in helping create what we now call the “under-class”, that unemployable minority that society would prefer to ignore so long as they don’t bother the rest of us. “Working class”, by the end of the 1990s, had ceased to have any meaning at all if it included people with no intention to work.

And so we end up in 2025 with a YouGov survey showing that Britons earning more than £70,000 were now more likely to vote for Labour than any other party. Poorer voters had turned to Reform, whose popularity at the time was soaring in the polls. Nigel Farage declared that his party is “now the real party of the working class”.

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We all understand the crisis of modern politics, right? We just don’t believe politicians any more (if we ever did). Too many promises made and then broken, too many inspiring visions unfulfilled, too much language that sounds focus-grouped (“As we’ve made perfectly clear. . .”).

But as Andy Burnham seeks to reset British politics in a way that hasn’t been attempted since Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994, it’s worth reconsidering one of the great truths of politics: authenticity is the most important quality any politician can possess. If you don’t sound authentic, if you yourself don’t sound like you believe the words you’re actually saying, then you’re on a hiding to nothing. Why should your audience believe you when it’s clear that even you don’t believe you?

Policy matters, of course. But even the greatest, most effective, soundest policy can fail disastrously if the people promoting it don’t sound as if they have faith in their own project. The problem with authenticity is that too often in recent political history, it has been seen as something that only unelectable mavericks possess. National treasures like the late Ann Widdecombe or the late Tony Benn or the former MP for Bolsover, Dennis Skinner, were beloved by their own followers and respected even by their critics because they obviously believed what they said. Yet those same views barred them from achieving the highest office (though Benn made it as far as Cabinet). Does this mean that authenticity, while valued by the voters, must be discarded the higher up the greasy poll you climb, that it is incompatible with the most senior positions of political leadership?

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If you’re the kind of person who obsesses about the Lords and its unelected nature, this will no doubt enrage you. Most people, I think, have better things to do with their time. Personally, I don’t begrudge Anas this promotion – and oh, yes, it is certainly a promotion from what he’s currently doing – and I certainly don’t blame him for accepting the prime minister’s offer. Whether this is all part of a grand conspiracy – Anas was the first senior Labour figure to call for Keir Starmer’s resignation earlier this year and this feels like a quid pro quo from Andy – I am not qualified to say. I just know Anas will be happier doing an actual, responsible job with budgets and executive authority and the chance to actually achieve something rather than wrestle with Malcolm Offord every Thursday for the chance to ask the first question for John Swinney to ignore at First Minister’s Questions.

More important is the future of the party he is leaving behind and the prospect of a leadership contest. Rarely has the phrase about “two bald men fighting over a comb” been used more appropriately, especially given the follicly-challenged nature of at least one of the likely candidates. The more serious point is that leader of Scottish Labour is largely irrelevant these days, especially given the party’s woeful result in the latest Holyrood elections – which is one of the reasons why there is some grumpiness at Sarwar’s perceived “failing upwards”. I’m familiar with the kind of person who feels somehow cheated (as if it’s anything whatever to do with them) when a politician loses an election and then confounds his or her critics’ expectations by going on to pursue an alternative, successful career. I know of at least a few such people who were visibly disappointed that not only did I not have to sell the family home and seek employment as a pizza delivery man after I lost my seat in 2015, but that I instead had (and have) a successful career in journalism and public affairs.

Scottish Labour will need a new leader and, despite its irrelevance to the Scottish political scene for now, the question as to whether it can steer a path back to relevance and even some degree of electoral success will depend largely on who the party chooses to lead it. I won’t go into personalities (I may do so at a future point once we know exactly how the contest is shaping up) but the ideas that certain candidates will espouse and encourage the wider party to adopt are reasonably clear already.

There is already – let’s face it, there has always been – a great deal of chat among the usual suspects in the media class about the constitution. Wishing to talk about the relatively easy subject of independence v devolution rather than the rather more mundane, important and difficult (and boring) subjects of education, health and transport has always been a weakness of the Scottish media. What is Scotland’s democratic path to independence if the UK government refuse to devolve powers to hold a rerun of the 2014 vote? Should Scottish Labour be a genuinely independent party, separate from its UK party, rather than just a “branch office”?

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I like to think I’m all about generosity of spirit, of the magnanimity which should usually be shown towards fallen foes, even when the foes in question are clowns of the first order.

I refer, of course, to Keir Starmer, who is, as I write, spending his last ever full day as the UK’s prime minister and who, tomorrow, will hand in the keys to Number 10 to His Maj.

I’ve said and written previously of how, on the few occasions when I’ve met and talked with Starmer (it is a matter of some pride that I have met and spoken with every Labour leader since Jim Callaghan), I’ve had a reasonably positive impression of the man, or at least a sympathetic one. I will never stop being amazed by the fact that someone with such a lack of political skills ever became an MP, let alone PM, yet he came across, to me anyway, as basically decent.

But he wasn’t, was he? Basically decent, I mean.

There was one issue on which he was a coward and a knave, and I’m not sure if anyone can earn the reputation of “decent” when he has behaved in such an unforgivably egregious way on this one issue. I refer to his historic attitude to trans issues or, more specifically, his attitude towards the women in his party who suffered horrific abuse from trans activists for defending women’s sex-based rights and who should have been able to rely on their party leader to come to their aid. He didn’t, though. Because of the whole coward thing mentioned earlier.

We all remember, presumably, the verbal and intellectual contortions Starmer got himself into when, as Leader of the Opposition, he was challenged publicly on whether only women could have a cervix. Rosie Duffield, Labour’s Canterbury MP, had dared to Tweet the biological fact that this was an appendage that only women had. And she was right because I’ve checked and men definitely don’t have one.

But this caused a firestorm of mostly men threatening and abusing Rosie publicly: how dare an MP place science and fact above gender ideology! And when challenged to support or reject Rosie’s view, Starmer – shamefully and embarrassingly – said something along the lines of “That’s not something that should be said.” He couldn’t even bring himself to be a full-blown “ally” by asserting, as others in the Parliamentary Labour Party continue to do, the meaningless Stonewall Catechism that “Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid” (Have I got that right?- ed).

No, Starmer was clearly annoyed and discomfited by the question and almost physically squirmed, obviously wishing that the whole subject would just go away.

But it didn’t. On a later occasion, he told LBC News that “99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis.” Hmm. I think you need to revisit the arithmetic, there, Keir. It was all very strange and unnecessary. Starmer, not being a politician and in thrall to the north London Labour lawyerly culture to which he had been subjected his whole adult life, simply didn’t have the gumption or the sense to question the assertions of the likes of Stonewall. The very last thing he wanted to do was lead on the issue, and so he followed.

Meanwhile, Rosie continued to get so many rape and death threats – from her own party – that she chose not to risk going to Labour conference in 2021. The enormity of that still strikes home with me: a female Labour MP unable to risk going to Labour conference in case she is assaulted because of her defence of women’s rights. In 2021. Jesus fucking Christ.

Had Starmer been a real leader, had he possessed the skills and the courage to do the job he had been elected to do a year earlier, he would have contacted Rosie personally the instant he heard about the abuse. He would have pleaded with her to come to conference and would have guaranteed her safety. He would have made sure a front row seat was reserved for her during his leader’s speech and he would have made special mention of her, warning every person in the audience that those who felt they could abuse and threaten any woman for their entirely legal and sensible views did not belong in the Labour Party.

Of course, he didn’t, because that would have meant displeasing a few people in his front bench team and in the Parliamentary Labour Party and in some of the trade unions. And anyway, what good did it do Neil Kinnock by taking a stand against Militant and the NUM in 1985?

Allow me a slight but relevant diversion here.

One of the shadow cabinet members he might have risked displeasing was David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, the very embodiment of Godwin’s Law, a man so dim that during Cervixgate, he told a radio interviewer that not only could men have a cervix, it was “something that you can have following various procedures and hormone treatments.” The fact that, like Starmer, Lammy subsequently resiled from such demented views when the change in political atmosphere allowed it, illustrates that he adopted that view in the first place entirely for political convenience. Which is even worse than actually believing it.

And in the week that has seen the appalling murder of former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, and a revival of the debate about the use of language to describe political opponents, let us remember that Lammy is the worst offender in the House of Commons. In the period which, in his over-active imagination he doubtless calls The Wilderness Years, when he was out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet yet still nurturing his ambitions to do great things for his country, he addressed a People’s Vote (no, not those people, not the thick, working class ones – the right people, the nice, sensible, middle class ones who voted Reman) in Parliament Square:

I’m just looking over there at Winston Churchill. On the 30 September 1938 he stood in parliament and said we would not appease Hitler. I’m looking across to Nelson Mandela, who would not give in to apartheid. We say, we will not give into the ERG [European Reform Group of Conservative MPs] We will not appease.”

Naturally, lacking the intellectual confidence to admit he’d made a mistake, Lammy subsequently doubled down when asked by Andrew Marr if he thought it acceptable to compare democratic politicians in Britain with the Nazis.

Andrew, I would say that wasn’t strong enough. In 1938 there were allies who hatched a plan for Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia, and Churchill said no, and he stood alone. We must not appease. We’re in a situation now, and let me just be clear, I’m an ethnic minority.

You’re an ethnic minority, Dave? Well, blow me down. I’d never noticed and it’s not as if you’ve ever mentioned that before. Also, why is that relevant?

It was Lammy who also described Widdecombe, before her murder, as a “poisonous bigot”. But there have been plenty other examples of (mostly Labour) politicians calling their opponents the worst, dehumanising names – remember the then Labour Deputy Leader, our Ange, telling a Labour conference fringe event that Conservatives were “scum” and that their MPs were homophobic, racist and misogynist? Since Widdecombe’s murder, other examples of name-calling by MPs who should know better have been exposed – including Jess Phillips who called her a “little fascist beast”.

The basic liberalism of the Labour Party has been lost. There was a time when Labour was synonymous with the fight for freedom of speech, but in recent years the party’s MPs have become champions of free speech only for those who happen to agree with them. We’re no longer in Voltaire country where Labour could say “I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Nowadays, if you depart from the accepted orthodoxy, you’re on your own; at best, ignored and abandoned, as Rosie Duffield was, or at worst, condemned and smeared with inaccurate and dangerous World War II metaphors as certain Tory MPs were.

Thank God nothing violent has happened to Rosie. If it had, the Labour Party and its leadership would have been held at least partly responsible for failing, not only to support her right to speak, but for failing to ensure that all those who attacked her verbally were expelled from the party and, therefore, its conferences.

When MPs denigrate and smear other politicians, why shouldn’t the public do the same? If I genuinely believed that local Conservative activists were the reincarnation of actual German Nazis, transported through time somehow from 1940s Berlin, I would join the mob to attack and kill them – of course I would. They’re Nazis, for fuck sake!

Except they’re not. Of course they’re not. But in the current febrile political atmosphere there are countless people of limited intelligence and access to weaponry who might be persuadable. That’s why it is so irresponsible to go down the Lammy route just to big it up in front of a friendly crowd.

How infantalised British politics has become when MPs – who are supposed to be the cream of the crop when it comes to political exponents – respond to views with which they disagree by name-calling instead of with considered, reasoned arguments. And when one of your own MPs is in actual danger, when she’s had actual threats of attack from activists for the crime of pointing out that 2+2=4, then you take action: visible, high-profile, unambiguous action against the actual bigots and extremists and in support of your MP. Keir Starmer failed to do that because he was too scared or too stupid or both. Either way, it exposed him as unfit for high office. Mind you, taking the knee in his House of Commons office weeks after becoming Labour leader should have given us all a big hint on that score.

Rosie Duffield has now abandoned the Labour Party and sits as an independent. No- one could seriously criticise her for that; it was a perfectly sensible, grown-up response to a dysfunctional party with an ineffective leader. I would love to see her back in parliament after the next general election, because we need her uncompromising voice on those green benches. But to be honest, I fear for her chances in Canterbury if she ends up standing as an independent. Make no mistake: I will personally lend her a hand if that’s the course she chooses to take. But I would be much more relaxed about her chances if she feels she can return to the Labour benches, who would be lucky to have her.

That, I guess, is a judgment for Andy Burnham to make. He has an opportunity to prove that he is a braver and more principled leader than his predecessor. That wouldn’t be hard, mind you. Let’s see if he takes it.

The Herald newspaper has kicked off another bout of political introspection by launching a debate that is of precisely no relevance whatever to the vast majority of their readership or, indeed, to people beyond Scotland’s borders.

And it’s all Australia’s fault. Every time some bright spark from a think tank or Left-wing publication makes the case for compulsory voting, they inevitably point to Australia as an example of a developed country which hasn’t fallen apart because adults are being forced, on pain of a fine, to cast a vote on polling day.

I have no doubt that such a policy, were it adopted for either Holyrood or Westminster, would result in higher turnouts. Being unworkable is not the core of my strong objection to such a change. No, my objections are that in a democracy, we all have a God-given right not to give a toss who governs us. It’s a stupid position to take, for sure, and I would always recommend everyone uses their vote. But if they don’t want to – and, crucially, even if they can’t be bothered, if they have other things they consider to be more important than voting, like watching a daytime soap or having a snooze on the sofa – then that is up to them. Not you, not me and not the government; them.

Every fan of The West Wing recalls a speech by President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) in the season one finale, “What Kind Of Day Has It Been?”, in which he tells an audience of enthusiastic young people: “Decisions are made by those who turn up.”

Damn right they are. And if you don’t vote, you don’t have a say. That seems to me to be a perfectly equitable and fair civic arrangement. I also reject the quaint notion that “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain afterwards.” This is also bullshit. Of course everyone has the right to complain about the government or anything else they feel like, irrespective of their voting record. Who decided that non-voters couldn’t complain? Where is that written? If they’re residents or citizens of this country, they have the right to express themselves about anything they like. It’s just that you and I then have the equal right to ignore them. Isn’t democracy wonderful?

But the dinner party circuit wants to change all this. The same people who bleat on about proportional representation (not a specific form of it, of course, just PR in general, as if that means something) and electing the Lords reckon that turnout at elections could be improved if people were forced to leave their homes on polling day and head down to the local primary school to place an “X” in a box or – and this is always their “solution” to those who claim it’s undemocratic to force people who don’t want to vote for any specific candidate – to place it under the box marked “None of the above”. How very clever of them!

But voting for “None of the above” solves nothing if your reason for not voting is apathy. if you don’t care who wins an election and you’re not interested in the outcome, that’s your valid choice. Just because a bunch of do-gooders will feel better about life if turnout for Holyrood elections goes over 70 per cent should not impact on anyone else’s freedom to do whatever they like. Or not do it, as in this case.

Better that those demanding compulsory engagement in the democratic process ask themselves why barely half of Scots voted in last May’s Holyrood elections and start addressing some of the possible reasons why it has become an exercise in apathy every five years. First, how about reducing the term back down to four years, like we were promised in the White Paper on which the decision to endorse a devolved parliament in the 1997 referendum was taken?

And isn’t it just possible that a low turnouts at Holyrood elections is caused in part by the evident low quality of candidates being presented for our delectation? We’re a long way away from when the parties stood candidates of the calibre of Donald Dewar, Alex Salmond, Jack McConnell, Sam Galbraith and Margo MacDonald. Maybe if the parties took the contest more seriously, the voters might follow suit.

Enthusiasm among Scots for Holyrood elections, as evidenced by turnout figures, has been consistently lower than for UK general elections, which has been a perpetual cause of indignation and even outrage among the devocracy in Scotland. Maybe that’s because Scots still consider Westminster to be a more important forum than Holyrood? Just a suggestion.

The tendency of the chattering classes in Scotland and across the UK to blame ordinary voters for their lack of engagement is the very epitome of arrogance. How about challenging our political classes, our rulers, to up their game and start saying things that actually appeal and inspire? Or how about recognising that there will always be those who just have no interest in voting and that taking money off them as punishment for how they feel is hardly likely to make them feel more engaged? They have their own reasons, and to be honest, if they don’t want to share them with the rest of us, that’s up to them.

A final thought: from a certain point of view, turnout in May was not 51 per cent. That was the figure representing the proportion of registered voters who actually exercised their franchise. If you want to know the proportion of voters who voted, it was probably around the 85-90 per cent mark. Being listed on the electoral register doesn’t make you a “voter” any more than possessing a driving licence makes you a driver. You’re only a voter if you actually go out and vote, at least occasionally. It seems odd to describe someone who has never voted and has no intention of doing so in the future as a voter. Turnout of actual voters was pretty high and healthy. So stop worrying about it and stop trying to control every damn thing everyone does.

There are arguments against deporting Shabir Ahmed, one of the ringleaders of the Rochdale rape gangs, now that he has been released from prison. It’s just that, since no one is making them, I’ve not heard them.

So let us guess what they might be.

The first is that deporting him would be illegal under the current law. Which is true, but that’s more of an argument about the necessity of changing the law rather than a defence of Ahmed himself. It’s not saying “He shouldn’t be deported”; it’s saying “He can’t be deported”, which we already knew.

Others might argue that his age should prevent his removal. A 73-year-old might not be expected to live that long in his home country of Pakistan. Again, this isn’t much of an argument against deportation. In fact, it makes me want to deport him even more.

Then there is the more sensible (but not by much) argument that, having lived here for more than 53 years, removing Old Ahmed would be a cruel and unusual punishment. Yes, it probably would, but so what? Did I forget to mention that old git raped 30 young girls? And those are just the ones the court could prove. So, cruel and unusual? Arguably. Justified? Definitely.

What about the impact on poor Ahmed’s loving family as they wave a tearful goodbye at Gatwick as he boards his one-way flight? Well, those who told everything they knew and suspected about Ahmed’s extracurricular activities – his involvement in gang rape and torture – to the police have my deepest sympathies and respect. Not my admiration, as such, because telling the police about anyone’s criminal activities, especially when they involve crimes as evil as those committed by Ahmed and his pals, is the very minimum you would expect from anyone living in our country. But they would have my (and the victims’) gratitude at least. That doesn’t entitle them to Ahmed’s company here in Britain for the rest of his pitiful life, in the few years of oxygen theft he still has ahead of him. He can use the oxygen in Pakistan if he must.

And there are those that say it would be unfair to impose a punishment today that wasn’t available at the time of his conviction. Again, this is bullshit. “Fairness” doesn’t come into it; justice does. And anyway, the man who led the prosecution of Ahmed in court, Nazir Afzal, said recently that he had expected him to be deported after he was convicted, so there was obviously a genuine prospect of this happening at the time.

Of course, even if we could get round the legal barriers, there’s the little problem of Pakistan not wishing to welcome Ahmed home – and who can blame them?

To return to the main obstacle, a Number 10 spokesman poured water on the prospect of Ahmed’s deportation because it would conflict with the Immigration Act 1971. But this is to regard the law in the same way that Americans regard the US Constitution – as a set of rules carved in stone, impossible to get around and difficult to amend. UK law is not like that at all. It only remains unchanged if our political leaders choose not to change it, and that requires only a simple majority in each house of parliament. The Immigration Act could be repealed or amended and it could literally be done in a single day (with the co-operation of the Lords). If that doesn’t happen, it’s because our government doesn’t want it to happen.

But maybe the next one will. This is what our Prime Minister Presumptive Tweeted on Tuesday:

Now, it may just be Andy wanting to be part of an ongoing story and desperate to be popular. But I’m optimistic that it’s more than that. If he hadn’t meant that “nothing is off the table” he didn’t have to say it. He can hardly come back and say, “Well, I tried but it’s just not possible,” so long as there remain a few things still on that table, like an emergency sitting of parliament and the revocation of existing laws preventing Ahmed’s removal. As for the likely refusal of Pakistan to accept him back (and who could blame them?), there are a few things “on the table” that could persuade them to change their minds. Refusing to issue any more visas to Pakistani citizens hoping to come to the UK, for instance, or the cancellation of all international aid that currently goes from London to Islamabad. We could inflict a great deal of hurt on Pakistan, and all of it could be avoided if they just accept one man. Plus any other child rapists who are from Pakistan. It’s not much to ask.

So let’s see what will happen. It is obviously unconscionable to have Ahmed strutting around his former turf where many of his victims still live. The decision as to whether he is deported must be based on those women’s entitlement to justice and safety, not remotely on Ahmed’s “rights” to live here.

And that’s what it comes down to – who is more important to the government – the victims or the perpetrator? Any minute now, heading towards this conversation with unjustified confidence, is someone about to quote Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons:

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

Two points to be made here: (1) this is real life, not a West End play (and I doubt More, the murderous old bastard that he was, ever talked like that, or sounded as clever as Paul Schofield did in the role), and (2) things change. And when things change, the law must change to accommodate the new reality that the old law doesn’t.

Had those who drew up the Immigration Act 1971 been able to see into the future and to see the obscene evil that Ahmed and his compatriots from Pakistan were going to wreak on his community, they would have written a caveat into the legislation to ensure that the rights of Commonwealth citizens were at the very least qualified.

Removing Ahmed to Pakistan would be cruel and heartless. It’s the least he deserves.

Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out, Shabir.

Andy Burnham’s speech in Manchester this morning was impressive, despite raising a number of unanswered questions. I wrote about it here for The Telegraph.

Our presumptive prime minister, naturally enough, wants to have a controversy-free three-week period between now and his triumphant entry into Downing Street on July 20. Which is why, in today’s speech, he avoided two reasonably high-profile issues that will demand his attention as soon as he walks across the threshold of that famous building.

The first and most obvious one is immigration. It’s a bit odd that Andy thinks he can avoid this one, because it is, in some ways, the reason he is where he is. He was chosen (perhaps “chosen” is the wrong word; “emerged” might be better) as Labour’s new leader because he is seen as having the best chance of defeating the Reform challenge. And Nigel Farage’s party has been leading the polls for more than a year specifically because of voters’ unhappiness with mass immigration.

But Andy avoided talking about that today because he knows that his primary audience, Labour MPs, who could yet choose to nominate a candidate to stand against him when nominations open the week after next (even though they won’t), would prefer to talk about almost anything else. Most Labour MPs have no problem with nearly a million new arrivals heading to the UK every year; if anything, they view pre-1997 levels of net immigration, which was about 45,000 a year, as immoral or even racist.

Yet Andy, being human and realistic and having just finished a gruelling month-long by-election campaign will be in no doubt about how voters, especially working class voters of the kind Labour used to represent, feel about mass immigration and the impact it has on their communities. And it is not positive.

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It will be interesting to see which of the current Cabinet will still be in post by the time Andy Burnham completes his first reshuffle of the cards he’s been dealt by Keir Starmer.

Rachel Reeves is expected not to be the chancellor after July 20, which might mean a return to the back benches rather than the humiliation of accepting a more junior post. David Lammy could be for the chop, but then, his demise has been so frequently anticipated before (not least by me) that I wouldn’t be surprised if he survives.

Bridget Phillipson? Now, there’s a conundrum for Burnham. She has come under severe criticism in recent months and weeks because of her very class conscious approach to education, not just deliberately pricing some families out of private education via the imposition of VAT on private school fees (a policy that, hilariously, is only possible because of Britain’s status as a non-EU country), but other decisions, including scrapping the state school Latin Excellence Programme and vetoing a new free school in Middlesbrough, co-sponsored by Eton College.

But she can hardly be moved now, not after Kemi Badenoch had a right go at her during last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), at which the Tory leader described the education secretary as “spiteful”. This sort of language was just too much for most Labour MPs who staggered and swooned at Badenoch’s words, clutching pearls and petticoats in theatrical abundance. But whether deliberately or not, Badenoch was doing Phillipson a favour, effectively guaranteeing that Burnham cannot afford to move her, since it would look like he’s capitulating to the opposition.

Also, most Labour MPs and activists actually agree with Badenoch. Yes, Phillipson is being spiteful against wealthy, mostly Tory-voting families – isn’t it great? This is what they came into politics for (well, after their devotion to the EU and to fighting for trans people’s rights to use women’s changing rooms): to promote class warfare and stick it to rich people.

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Andy Burnham is being accused of mounting a coup against Keir Starmer and I wonder if those making the accusation understand what a coup actually is.

Certainly, the circumstances that led to the prime minister’s decision to quit are unique and unprecedented. Burnham has never, to my knowledge, publicly given up any ambition one day to lead his party. Even when he buggered off to Manchester in 2017 rather than continue to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, you could tell he was still eyeing Number 10, albeit from 200 miles away.

And so what? As Tony Blair once said of Gordon Brown’s ambition to succeed him, wanting to serve as prime minister is a “noble ambition”. And it is certainly true that Burnham has made it clear, publicly and on the record, that he is not Starmer’s greatest fan. But let’s be clear: he has done so mostly in guarded, moderate terms. His criticism has been couched in such reasonable, ambiguous terms that you might almost believe that Burnham considered himself bound by the collective cabinet responsibility that obliged Starmer’s Westminster colleagues to bite their tongues.

Burnham’s honesty about his ambition almost led to his downfall. He overplayed his hand at last year’s Labour conference, misjudging the mood of delegates and MPs who accused him of disloyalty to the leader, and returning to Manchester with his tail between his legs. The media were almost unanimous in their verdict that this meant the end of his plans to lead the country. But that analysis missed a key factor: Keir Starmer.

It would take too long and take up too much space to list the mistakes and calamitous errors of judgment that have come to define Starmer’s premiership, but here are just three recent ones. First, his absurd decision to prevent Burnham from putting himself forward as a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, on the spurious grounds that the party didn’t want to risk a second by-election for the Greater Manchester mayoralty, which would be caused should Burnham succeed in Gorton. And yet, just weeks later, the same Labour Party body gave Burnham the green light to stand in Makerfield, which has led to a by-election for the mayoralty of Greater Manchester. So why was he prevented from standing in the first by-election, a move that could have (I think would have) prevented a humiliating loss to the Greens?

Then there was Starmer’s utterly bizarre response to his party’s cataclysmic results in May’s local and devolved elections (the election results themselves would make a reasonable fourth example of Starmer’s drag on his party’s support). The day after the results became known, Starmer proudly announced the return to government of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, the leadership team that had led the party to defeat in 2010. Brown would become an envoy on something or other and Harman a special adviser on Important Stuff.

Seriously? If the answer was Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, what the fuck was the question? And why didn’t anyone but Starmer hear it being asked?

And then there was the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), a definitive project for a prime minister who has repeatedly claimed that defence of the realm is any government’s number one priority. But it was so flawed and under-resourced that it led to the resignation of the defence secretary, John Healey, and the armed forces minister, Al Carns, exposing Starmer’s real view that while defence is his number one priority, funding it still isn’t as important as tons of other stuff the government is doing.

Again, this was Starmer’s doing; he didn’t have to tell the nation repeatedly about his commitment to defending the realm; that was his choice. And then he couldn’t follow through.

So about that coup. . .

The dictionary definition of the term is:

a sudden, illegal, and often forceful seizure of government power.

Okay, let’s get into it, shall we?

Sudden? In what respect has Andy Burnham’s push for power been sudden? He’s spent the last nine years not hiding that ambition, and the willingness of his parliamentary allies to step aside to allow him to return to the Commons has been telegraphed explicitly for a very long time.

Illegal? In what way? Not only has Burnham not acted illegally (or unconstitutionally – see yesterday’s post), neither has he acted in any way, literally or in spirit, against the party’s rule book.

Forceful seizure? You’re having a laugh now, aren’t you? Who has been forced to do anything? You might argue that Starmer was forced to step down, and you would be right. But by whom? Could Burnham have persuaded him to fall on his sword by the power of his own, isolated arguments? No, he certainly could not. Starmer resigned because his own MPs and ministers lost patience with him and told him to his face that he simply wasn’t cut out for politics, and certainly not for political leadership. And they were right.

If Burnham hadn’t been waiting in the wings, those difficult conversations between the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues might have happened at a (slightly) later date. But they would certainly have taken place. And the outcome, as far as Starmer’s departure is concerned, would have been the same. The only difference would have been that someone else, other than Burnham, would have replaced him.

Those who say Burnham has mounted a coup have clearly not been paying attention in the last two years. From a surprisingly early point in his premiership, Keir Starmer has demonstrated his complete unsuitability for high office, or for politics in general. It has been clear – I would say since late 2024 – that he had very little chance of making it to the next general election as leader of the Labour Party. Burnham played no part at all in this reality becoming clear to everyone. He just happens to have benefited from Starmer’s defenestration. Someone had to.

Social media has made experts of us all.

Remember when Covid arrived, we were all suddenly expert epidemiologists, lecturing each other – but more importantly, the government – about how best to deal with the pandemic, not to mention offering sage advice (geddit?) on the vaccine rollout?

Brexit was another, earlier example of online expertise. Suddenly we were all familiar with what a customs union was, the qualities of the single market, what the World Trade Organisation actually was, the peculiar economic impacts of tariffs and what the exact consequences of a “no deal” Brexit would actually mean.

And now we’re all constitutional experts, weighing in, often with unjustified confidence, to the tempestuous debate about whether Andy Burnham will have any “legitimacy” when, next month, he becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

The problem we are told, is that Keir Starmer (look him up) had a mandate to be prime minister for the duration of the 2024 parliament, and that any replacement would lack that vital legitimacy as national leader that only a general election victory can give you.

So please allow me to play the part of the armchair constitutional expert. I have the advantage of being right.

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When it comes to Andy Burnham, much has been written about very little. That “very little” is the amount of detail our next prime minister has given away about how he will govern and what policies he will implement after Keir Starmer’s removal men have departed Downing Street.

One particular area of concern is in regards to women’s rights. Previously, Burnham had followed the Labour line that just because a woman happens to have a cock doesn’t mean she [sic] should be excluded from using women’s spaces or taking part in women’s sports.

Now, I know Andy a bit, though not well. We were MPs together for 14 years and I genuinely like him. Of all the members of the spadocracy who held sway in the Labour Party during the Blair/Brown/Miliband eras, he was the one who you could have a pint with and who seemed human. Maybe fighting and losing two leadership contests will do that to you.

But he never came across to me as someone particularly interested in trans rights (admittedly, that wasn’t really an issue in parliament until after I left in 2015). When he recently defended the right of trans-identified males to use women’s toilets, I assumed (I think correctly) that he was hoving to the safest course within Labour, seeking to shut down the conversation rather than lead it.

And then, during the Makerfield by-election, among a handful of other policy U-turns (on rejoining the EU, compensating the WASPI women for their carelessness in not looking out for letters from HMRC, supporting migrants’ access to benefits) that he performed, was one on his previous position on trans rights. Following the publication of the Code of Conduct for single-sex services published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Andy acknowledged that the law was the law and that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 should be implemented.

Now that Burnham is a shoo-in for prime minister, gender critical activists are starting to become nervous about his real views: were they accurately represented in his previous comments, when he said “trans women” (men) should be able to use spaces reserved for women? Or is his latest position, in support of the EHRC, the one he will adopt in government?

No one, least of all me, knows for sure. But I’m prepared to offer an educated guess, based on what I know of Andy. I doubt very much if he wants his premiership to be bogged down by a fight, either with the courts or with the various gender-critical feminist groups who have been campaigning effectively on the issue, over trans rights versus women’s rights. I think this is the very last thing he wants to get embroiled in, that he would prefer it if the whole thing just went away. Therefore, I think we are about to see a perfect example of what many of us predicted and hoped for when the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in April 2025: a politician using the law as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card when it comes to this emotive issue. The law is the law, Burnham will say. If only it weren’t, he might say with his effortless and instinctive Mancunian shrug, but there we are.

The biggest problem arising from this is not that he will seek to bin the EHRC code of Conduct or even seek a change to the original legislation. The biggest problem is that, having disappointed some LGBTQI+ voters, he will want to balance his pragmatic policy with something a bit more palatable to his critics. Therefore I fear it is likely that he will want to press ahead with Starmer’s insane plan to introduce a “trans-inclusive” ban on “conversion therapy”, which risks making criminals of parents who tell their children not to be silly when they start claiming they were born in the wrong body.

Much will depend on who is put in charge of the legislation, and we will have to wait to see the make up of his government before we can draw any firm conclusions. The problem is that however many gender-critical Labour MPs there are, precious few of them have had the bottle to speak out publicly about them. So what are the chances of getting a GC minister willing to face down the hysterical shrieking of the trans lobby?

It would certainly have been better to have a candidate for prime minister who was unequivocally and unapologetically in favour of putting women’s and girls’ safety and privacy over the entitled demands of trans-identified men. But then, maybe, the way politics works today, such an individual would not have been able to make as much progress towards the top as Andy has. I am prepared to be proved wrong – let’s face it, just because that has never happened doesn’t mean it won’t at some point in the future – but I reckon Burnham’s apathy on the subject – alongside constant scrutiny on the topic from refreshingly gender-critical Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch – is the best sign that gender criticals have that the current progress out of the trans madness will continue in the direction we want, even under Andy Burnham’s premiership.

I don’t like football. There, I’ve said it. That Simpsons episode had it right: the only way to enjoy 90 minutes of watching 22 men chasing a ball around and only very occasionally putting it in the back of one of the nets is to consume as much alcohol as possible in advance and hope the experience passes as quickly as possible.

Neither my dad nor my two older brothers were interested either. Maybe that was the problem: maybe if my dad had been a fan and took me to regular matches, I would have developed an interest. But I doubt it. When I was a teenager, my mum took drastic action and, worrying that I was too obsessed with “unmanly” things like science fiction and Doctor Who, she persuaded me to attend some St Mirren matches (Mum was originally from Paisley) in the company of a friend of hers who worked at the same factory. So week in and week out, I would pretend to be delighted at the prospect of heading to Love Street or whichever ground the team were playing away at. And this was in the days before all-seated stadia, when you had to stand in the freezing cold for the whole game.

I even attended a few internationals, but didn’t enjoy them any more than the club games. I vividly recall having to avoid other fans pissing where they stood (because why should they have to walk a few yards to the loos?) and one memorable heckle from a nearby fan when Scotland were playing against Belgium at Hampden: “That’s the last time we help you in any fuckin’ war!”

For a whole year this prevailed and for a whole year I was utterly miserable. The prospect of wasting an entire Saturday afternoon watching football ruined my whole weekend. When I finally returned home each week, cold, tired and bored, only then could I get on with enjoying what was left of the weekend, and trying not to think about having to go through the whole rigmarole a week later.

Eventually, Mum recognised I was not enjoying myself (I wonder what gave the game away?) and told me I didn’t need to go to matches any more. What a relief! The punchline to all of this didn’t drop until shortly after Mum’s death in 2004 when I was speaking to my big brother, Kenny, at some family event, where I must have had some sort of epiphany, triggered by something he had said. “Did Mum think I was gay?” I asked him. “Aye, of course she did. Why do you think she wanted you to start going to football matches?”

So that was Mum’s great masterplan to convert me out of being gay (which I wasn’t): force me to go every week to watch 22 young, fit, sweaty men in shorts chasing each other around a field for two hours. I wonder if this is one of the “conversion practices our governments intend to ban in the next few months?

Anyhoo, back to that betrayal.

For me, football is what politics is to everyone else: I get slightly more interested in it when the World Cup rolls around every four years, just as for most ordinary people, politics feels slightly more relevant and interesting when a general election is happening.

It’s not that I couldn’t get on board with what Jim Sillars, the former Labour and SNP MP, once referred to as Scots’ “90-minute patriotism”. During the 1978 World Cup I was swept up in football fever as much as everyone else around me and started to believe we could actually win the tournament in Buenos Aires – right up until the Scotland squad played its first game. That’s when things started to go badly wrong for Ally’s Tartan Army.

Talking of which, it didn’t feel like it at the time but if you release a World Cup song that includes the words “England couldnae dae it ‘cos they didnae qualify!”, then frankly you deserve all the humiliation coming your way.

And humiliating it was, as we drew 1-1 with Iran (Iran!) and went down to a 3-1 defeat to Peru. Our third match was against Holland, so no one expected much from us, except, being Scotland, we kind of surprised everyone, including every Scot watching, by taking a 3-1 lead. Had we scored one more goal we would have progressed into the next round. Sadly, bitterly, we conceded another goal. Still, we beat one of that year’s finalists, so that’s something, innit?

In the summer of 1990 I was working at the Paisley Daily Express and the whole news desk, most of whom were avid football fans, were getting very excited about Scotland’s prospects in that year’s competition taking place in Italy. Scotland’s third (and, it turned out, final) match was against Brazil whose team, I was reliably informed, had a decent enough track record in the competition. But despite predictions of defeat, we were all patriots and I, as the youngest reporter on the team, was despatched to Ladbroke’s to put a collective bet on Scotland winning 1-0. We all chipped in a fiver.

But when I got to the bookie’s there was a note attached to the teller’s window. As I already knew, a 1-0 victory for Scotland was being offered at 8/1 odds, which seemed fair. But wait, what was this? Odds of 6/1 were being offered on a 1-0 victory for Brazil. I placed the collective bet on behalf of the office and then I took out another fiver and placed another bet on a Brazil victory.

Now, I should explain: I genuinely wanted Scotland to win. I just didn’t think they would. I wasn’t betting according to what I wanted to happen, just according to what I thought would happen. It’s like that old bet I still have on PaddyPower that Ed Miliband will succeed Keir Starmer as prime minister: I don’t want that to happen, I don’t think it should, I just thought at the time that it was as likely as any other scenario and also I was being offered 66/1 against, so why not have a flutter?

Anyway, you know what happened next: Brazil won 1-0. So next day I walked into the same Ladbroke’s branch in Paisley, to a loud outcry of “Oh, here he comes! Here comes Judas!” from the assembled staff (in a good-natured sort of way, I should add), who had been waiting for me to show my traitorous face. “Here’s your 30 pieces of silver!” said the girl behind the counter as she passed me my 30 quid winnings (plus original stake).

I have not placed a bet for or against my national team in advance of tonight’s game against Haiti and of course I wish the Scotland team success, if only for the sake of all those fans who have crossed the Atlantic to show their support. But I’m not so much of a fan that I’ll stay up to watch – the kick-off’s at two in the morning, for goodness sake! I don’t mind being a 90-minute patriot (Sillars meant the term to be a pejorative one, incidentally) but only if it doesn’t interfere with my sleep pattern. Or dinner.

So, good luck, Scotland. And to England, of course, who I’ll be supporting so long as they’re not playing Scotland. See? That’s another betrayal. Call that No. 1412.

I do not like being on the same side of any argument as Nigel Farage.

I’ve met the guy. I even like him. But his politics are not for me. They wreak of opportunism and easy answers to complex arguments, and I am always rightly suspicious of that. Wanting him to be right is not the same as believing him to be right.

Yet here I am again, siding with the leader of Reform UK against the great majority of MPs in the House of Commons. I’ve written about this a couple of times already in my Telegraph column, but I wanted to explore the issue in greater depth here.

When Farage stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions this week to raise the issue of Henry Nowak’s tragic death, he was almost howled down by MPs on both sides of the chamber. Farage’s sin was mentioning “two-tier policing”, which, a few minutes later, the prime minister, Keir Starmer dismissed entirely. As if! This is Britain, after all – we would never countenance two-tier policing or justice.

Except, were it not for the intervention of Shabana Mahmood, when she was justice secretary, that is exactly what we would already have. Last year, Mahmood had a set-to with the Sentencing Council, an unelected and unaccountable quango that decides how long sentences should be for all classes of crime. It had announced that it was issuing new guidelines which would have meant courts handing down less harsh sentences for members of ethnic minority communities and, inevitably, trans people. Being a sharp politician, Mahmood recognised that such a change would be disastrous: imagine serving a longer sentence for the same crime just because of the colour of your skin! That would be unacceptable if it were the other way around, if courts were mandated to hand down tougher sentences for black people than for white defendants; so it was obviously just as unjust to do the reverse.

The esteemed members of the Sentencing Council did not take kindly to an uppity MP telling them what they could and couldn’t do, but eventually Mahmood, with the support behind her of the entire government, prevailed and the new guidelines were shelved (though not ditched entirely). During this period, Mahmood herself, now the home secretary, explicitly described what the sentencing council was proposing as “two-tier justice”.

So is it really that much of a leap to suggest that other aspects of the justice system have been similarly contaminated by modish new theories about “white privilege” in the Critical Race Theory mould? Obviously not. If a full-scale public inquiry into Mr Nowak’s needless death were held, we could find out for sure whether modern police training included treating different races, and what they say, in different ways.

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Today marks the ninth anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing, when an Islamist terrorist murdered 22 people and injured more than 1000 others using an improvised explosive device packed with nuts and bolts, just to make sure the damage and injuries were as extensive as possible.

The bomber, Salman Abedi, was also killed, which is the only good news in the whole dreadful story. His brother, with whom Salman organised the attack, was convicted of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 55 years.

The British state’s reaction to this terrorist outrage at the time was appalling: even today, on its anniversary, leading politicians never mention the cause of the attack – Islamism, the same ideology that has caused so many other innocent deaths in Britain and throughout the world, most notably on 9/11 and in London on July 7, 2005. But instead of naming and confronting this disease, the authorities decided that what was needed was “healing” and “unity”, not to mention the mourning crowd’s open-air rendition of Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back In Anger”. This was a weird and unnatural reaction that could only happen because it was mandated and facilitated by the state. Back in the real world, it is perfectly natural – I would even say healthy – to look back in anger at such an outrage, to feel absolute fury that a religious fruitcake like Abedi should take so much offence at young girls attending an Ariana Grande concert that he felt urged by his god to take revenge on them in the most barbarous fashion imaginable.

So yes, look back in anger. If you don’t feel anger, then you’re a weirdo.

It’s a small example of the establishment’s point blank refusal to even try to understand the realities of the threat that Islamism poses to the western world. Take the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013, which, by an unhappy coincidence, also happened on May 22 – exactly 13 years ago. I was an MP at the time and sat through the short debate on the murder that happened a few days after Rigby’s death. You could have been forgiven for thinking that the incident in question had been an attack on a Muslim soldier, so concerned were my colleagues about the reaction to Rigby’s killing and the negative impact it might have on Muslim communities. The late American comedian, Norm Macdonald described (and mocked) this phenomenon best:

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On May 7, everything changed, according to opponents of the United Kingdom’s very existence, which include not only the SNP, but Plaid Cymru (PC) and the former political wing of the IRA.

What they mean by “everything changed” is that Wales elected a PC First Minister.

That was it. There was already a Sinn Fein First Minister in Stormont and an SNP First Minister in Bute House. So the big political earthquake that was supposed to get Unionists shivering in our Union flag underpants was that Wales joined them in electing a nationalist First Minister. Wales, where Labour has lost the confidence of its former heartland, elected a Senedd with 43 PC members, 34 Reform, nine Labour (!), seven Conservatives, two Greens and a single Liberal Democrat.

Plaid won just over a third of the vote, with 35.4 per cent. In other words, Welsh voters voted for pro-UK parties by a margin of almost 2:1, and that’s before we consider the fact – well established in post-election surveys – that many ex-Labour voters chose to vote tactically for PC only to beat Reform. Even if PC had included a commitment to an independence referendum in their manifesto (they did not), this would hardly be seen as a massive step forward for the cause of Welsh independence.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, support for the SNP dropped nearly ten per cent since the last Holyrood elections and the party lost six seats. Together with the Greens, 40.5 per cent of those who could be bothered voting (there was only a 53 per cent turnout) voted for independence-supporting parties. That John Swinney will find it easy to be re-elected as First Minister says more about the danger of splitting the opposition vote in a predominantly first-past-the-post electoral system than it does about the popularity of either the SNP or independence.

But these facts haven’t prevented Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neil, Northern Ireland’s First Minister, from seeking to undermine the UK’s territorial integrity – the UK being, let us remember, a foreign nation, according to Sinn Fein’s political philosophy. It’s undignified and highly unprofessional for someone who considers herself an Irish, rather than a British, politician to openly embrace the cause of either Scottish or Welsh independence. It smacks of bitter, spiteful anti-Brit sentiment that the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to have dispensed with nearly 30 years ago. But perhaps we should be grateful that Sinn Fein at least limits itself these days to nonsensical political rhetoric rather than its strategies of the past, like car bombings and kneecappings.

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I used to think I knew a fair bit about politics.

And why shouldn’t I? I joined the Labour Party at the age of 20, in 1984, and became immediately embroiled in its activities. I canvassed, leafleted, debated, read books about about Labour history, scoured the newspapers for anything political. I became a journalist because of my love of politics and then went on to work for the Labour Party, mixing with such luminaries as Donald Dewar, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Smith. Eventually I became an MP, spending 14 years in the Commons before being chucked out in 2015.

But my education didn’t stop there. I quickly started writing on a daily basis for the Telegraph Online, charting Labour’s travails under Jeremy Corbyn and then Keir Starmer. That is still my main job. I’m paid to understand what is going on in politics, particularly in Labour politics.

And after the last few days, I have to admit something: I know nothing about politics. I give up. Starmer has defeated me, the wily old fox! He’s run rings around me. I used to pride myself on perceiving motives and strategies that were hidden from the eyes of less experienced observers. But no longer. Keir Starmer is a law unto himself. It’s not just that he doesn’t play by the rules: he doesn’t even acknowledge that such rules even exist. Perhaps he doesn’t know of them. If he does, he doesn’t care.

Consider events since Friday, when it emerged that the more pessimistic predictions of Labour losses in England’s local elections were also the most accurate. The party lost 1500 councillors in a single day. That’s an existential crisis in terms of scale. Naturally, there is great unhappiness in Labour’s ranks. Well, of course there is: even before polling day there was a growing recognition among Labour MPs that Starmer was out of his depth, a man with no political instinct whose only ambition, it appeared, was to remain in Number 10 for as long as possible. He was the “accidental prime minister”, the man who only became Labour leader because he wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn and only became prime minister because he wasn’t Rishi Sunak.

Last Thursday marked the point in the calendar when, I assumed, it would all come crashing down for Starmer. In fact, I still think that. He’s doomed; it’s just a matter of time now.

But Starmer genuinely seems not to believe that. Consider his actions since Friday. On Saturday, having surveyed the battlefield and the dead political corpses of Labour council leaders strewn lifeless in the mud, the victims (mostly) of Reform UK artillery, he unveiled his latest initiative that would allow him to bounce back from the edge of disaster. He told a stunned world that he was appointing former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown as an envoy on global financial co-operation (whatever that means) and he was also appointing Harriet Harman as an adviser on the rights of women and girls.

Wait, what?

Can someone please explain to me the thought process of a prime minister who faces the biggest crisis of his career genuinely believing that Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman are part of the solution? Was it perhaps reported back to Downing Street from the doorsteps of Hartlepool and Wigan that voter discontent either had its roots in the absence of the 2007-2010 leadership team from Downing Street, or could at least be be ameliorated by their return to frontline politics?

How many disgruntled Labour voters reluctantly embraced the Reform cause while mumbling sullenly under his breath that if only Gordon and Harriet could be brought back, they would be only too happy to continue voting Labour?

Reform’s USP is antipathy to multiculturalism and to the high levels of immigration that made it inevitable. Gordon, meanwhile, is the man who famously defined the 2010 general election – and guaranteed his party’s defeat – by referring to a northern woman as a bigot because she opposed high levels of immigration. And Keir Starmer believes Gordon is the right man to bring back right now, when Reform is breathing down Labour’s necks.

It might also be mentioned at this point that since leaving office, Brown has become something of a folk hero among Labour members and activists. But he is also a painful reminder to Starmer – or should be – of what happens to a political party when an unpopular prime minister (and Gordon really was unpopular during almost all of his tenure at Number 10) refuses to take the hint and make way for a more electable successor.

Similarly, Harriet’s reappearance on the political scene is oddly timed. The government has come under some pressure – not nearly enough, in my humble opinion – for its relaxed approach to publishing the code of practice produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on single-sex spaces. These are the guidelines that campaigners hope will clarify the Equality Act 2010, as interpreted by the Supreme Court last year, namely that “sex” in the legislation refers only to biological sex, not assumed or self-identified gender. In other words, the code of practice spells bad news for men who identify as women and who have been under the illusion for 16 years that the Equality Act gave them the legal right to use women’s facilities such as toilets, changing rooms, women’s refuges and rape crisis centres.

True, the government “welcomed” the Supreme Court’s ruling, if only through gritted teeth. The women and equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, only recently confirmed that despite the absurd delay in publishing the guidelines, they will finally be laid before parliament soon after last week’s local elections. Women’s groups and those who genuinely care about women’s and girls’ safety have welcomed this news. Trans groups and men’s rights organisations? Not so much. But the law is not on their side.

So back to Harriet. She is on the record as saying:

Women are women who are either born women or who have transitioned to be women. There are all different sorts of women, including biological women and trans women. If you allow somebody to transition, I go with the flow of that and say ‘I’m not going to call you a man anymore, you’ve transitioned to being a woman.’

Such luxury beliefs are acceptable in certain north London, Labour lawyerly circles, where the fight for equal pay is more about whether certain female Guardian columnists are paid more than their male colleagues, rather than whether you’re paying your Estonian cleaner minimum wage or not.

A government that is clearly uncomfortable with the Supreme Court ruling that women’s rights to privacy and safety matter more than men’s entitlement to occupy their spaces is already viewed with deep suspicion by women’s rights campaigners. It is the reason why many of them could not bring themselves to vote Labour last Thursday. And now along comes Harriet with her “inclusive” word salad that really boils down to supporting the removal of women as a sex class because some men would find that convenient.

And so on to today’s latest fightback speech from Starmer, his latest “reset”, number 44 in an endless series. The centrepiece of the speech, which he delivered tieless with his sleeves rolled up because that’s the way the cool kids who sit and smoke at the back of the bus dress (and by the way, the last politician that look worked for was Juan Peron: make of that what you will), were three seismic policy changes that would remind the country that they need not regret voting for him and his party in July 2024.

The first promise: steel nationalisation. Fine, but I thought that had been done ages ago.

The second one: an EU youth mobility scheme. Oddly, Starmer didn’t describe this as a U-turn, but it certainly is. He and his ministers fiercely resisted EU pressure, in the early months of this administration, to adopt it. And now they have, and all those lovely Tarquins and Bens and Poppys can go and spend their gap yahs abroad without having to apply for visas. This initiative was part of the bigger announcement to put Britain back at the heart of the EU (but not full members, either of the EU itself or of the single market or customs union, so no change whatever, then).

But in what way is this an answer to anything? Specifically, in what way will this random assortment of warm, pro-EU words help prevent even more Labour votes being siphoned off to Reform?

The third policy was pretty baffling. Turning to his favourite bogeyman, the “far-Right”, a term that can include pretty much anyone these days, Starmer announced he was going to stop far-Right agitators from getting into the country to attend a rally in London next week. Well, fine. But shouldn’t Keir have sought to address the small problem of the rise in hate crimes against Britain’s Jews and the role played in that increase by the pro-Hamas hate marches that we have had to endure almost every week for the last two years? What about the hateful demands to “Globalise the Intifada”? What about all those Islamist hate preachers who spread vile misogynist, homophobic and anti-Semitic hatred in the name of their prophet? Many of them have no legal right to be in the country, many more arrive on our shores every week. Exactly how much more globalisation of the intifada will be necessary before Starmer fulfils his previous pledge to do “everything necessary” to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Jew violence?

Now, to the point of this column (did I hear a “Thank God!” at the back?).

The appointments of Gordon and Harriet to high-profile posts in the government, the announcement of these three policies that are either pedestrian and pre-announced, utterly baffling or profoundly misdirected – when these were discussed in Downing Street, someone, perhaps Starmer himself but there must have been others, said “Cool”. Or words to that effect. Grown up people, adults with serious, responsible jobs for which they are well rewarded from the public purse, people with degrees from the best universities, read those policies, pored over Gordon’s and Harriet’s appointments – and did so, remember, in the context of last week’s gubbing in the local, Scottish and Welsh elections – and said, “Yes, that’s fine. That’ll do it.”

And yet those people still have jobs. No one has yet chased them out of Downing Street with a big stick and a pack of dobermans. It’s truly astonishing, isn’t it? The most important speech in the prime minister’s career, the one that everyone knew would either make or break him, contained nothing of substance or importance, no mea culpa, no humility; just another series of Starmer clichés – “Labour values”, “a war that isn’t in our interests”, “dangerous times” – and some policy ideas that were, at best, interesting and, at worst, perplexing.

It should have been clear to any adviser worth the money that this was not going to cut it. But obviously no one told the prime minister. No one took him aside to say, “Look, prime minister, I know this is the best we’ve got, but it’s complete shit. I wouldn’t bother, to be honest.”

Even more Labour MPs have written open letters to Starmer since his press conference, politely expressing their hope that he will walk away with some dignity, while he still has some left. Two ministerial aides quit this afternoon. His gambit didn’t work. It didn’t deserve to.

But he’s still there as I write. And so I come to the conclusion I stated before: I know nothing about politics. The dead brainy types who work in Number 10, they’re the ones who obviously know more than I do, but it’s like we speak different languages. I can normally understand why a politician does something, even if I disagree with it. Starmer is a different kettle of fish. I will never understand him. Perhaps that is his genius. Perhaps he’s secretly running rings around all of us.

You never know.*

*We do know

I had lunch recently with a friend and former parliamentary colleague, an ex-minister like me, and a general all-round good egg. You know, politically sound and reassuringly bewildered, like the rest of the country, by the general incompetence and lack of direction of the current government.

I have always considered his opinion worth listening to, even when I disagreed with it, which I occasionally do. But I was genuinely bewildered by his response to my question on the placement of men in women’s prisons. Men who identify as women should be accepted on to the women’s estate on a case-by-case basis, he told me. With a straight face.

Well, now.

For me (and I told him this), the issue was one of those rare ones in politics where there was no glimmer of grey in the reasoning: the notion that any man, whatever he was convicted of, should be allowed to serve out his term in women’s accommodation was so beyond the pale, so counter-intuitive, so flagrantly a breach of women’s rights, so downright mad that I was perplexed as to why it was even debated. We agreed to disagree and ordered our desserts.

The colossal mountain of evidence that placing men in women’s prisons is a terrible idea is there for all to see. Just take a look at this thread from J.K. Rowling this morning. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. But we shouldn’t even have to present these cases to our government(s) as examples of why placing men (or as the BBC prefers to call them, “transgender women”) in women’s prisons is a very bad idea. The experience of existing on this planet for a few years, the ability to observe events and people around you, the ability to think – these are all you really need in order to understand that a man’s place is in men’s places.

Tragically (and that word is specifically and deliberately chosen), the fools who govern us pretend not to be able to see the world that exists around us. Ministers at Westminster, in Edinburgh and Cardiff have all chosen to believe, against all the available evidence, not to mention the law, that there are occasions when it is acceptable for men to serve their time in a women’s prison.

Setting aside the fact that the Supreme Court confirmed that this practice is illegal (and there is no need for official guidance on the matter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on this point), ministers across Britain have been presented with plenty of examples of men who identify as women being sent to women’s prison subsequently assaulting their fellow inmates, often sexually. Well, of course they do – have you never read The Frog and The Scorpion?

Alan Baker was sentenced for the murder of John Weir in 2013 (Baker stabbed Weir 16 times at his West Dunbartonshire home). Now going by the name of “Alexandra Stewart”, he was sent to the women’s facility at HMP Greenock, where he has now been arrested for an alleged sexual assault attack on a female prisoner.

Doubtless, our fearless First Minister, John Swinney, will refuse to discuss the case or any topic related to it because – his favourite excuse for avoiding accountability for his own government’s policies – of a live criminal investigation. You can hardly blame him. Imagine the absurdity of whatever defence he might try to deploy for approving a policy that allows violent men to share accommodation with women prisoners: however flexible your verbal and intellectual contortions, there really is no defence against the charge that they implemented a misogynist, dangerous policy knowing that it would put women at risk.

Yes, they knew that there was a risk that female inmates at women’s prisons would be at risk from male prisoners. The Scottish Prison Service, which has been entirely captured by gender ideology and Stonewall propaganda, knew that there was a risk to women prisoners from the policy. But still they pressed ahead with it. Why? Because in any official assessment of the risks to men – what might happen to men who now claim to “present” as women, for example, if they were sent to a men’s prison – and women – the likelihood of their being attacked and exploited by a violent inmate – they inevitably judged that the former was more important than the latter.

Ministers made the same judgment. Baker claimed to be trans. Trans people are “among the most discriminated against and vulnerable groups in society”™, we are so frequently told, and therefore their needs must come before women’s. Yes, a woman banged up for possessing drugs or shoplifting (and the vast majority of incarcerated women are, unlike men, guilty of non-violent offences) might get raped by a man sharing her space, but on the plus side, at least a man who stabbed someone 16 times will be less likely to suffer male violence himself.

Seriously. That is the thought process of the fools, misogynists and charlatans who currently infest the Scottish Prison Service and who provide advice to our dim-witted and gullible Scottish ministers.

It would be reassuring to think that it is only Scotland that has chosen to defy the Equality Act by offering cross-dressing violent men accommodation in women’s facilities. But in March last year there were a reported 64 “transgender” men in women’s prisons in England and Wales. That situation remains unaltered more than a year after the Supreme Court clarified what most of us already knew: that a “woman” is defined by her biological sex. UK ministers are choosing to defy the law for the sake of men’s safety and at the expense of women’s.

We need to be clear about why incarcerated women – who actually are the most vulnerable people in our society (sorry, lads) – are seen as so disposable and inconsequential by ministers across the country. It’s partly because most of them can’t vote (if you’re sentenced to less than a year in Scotland you can vote in local and Holyrood elections, though vanishingly few of them have taken up this magnanimous offer). So why bother addressing an injustice inflicted on a group of people who can’t even vote for you?

The second and more important reason politicians really don’t give a fuck if a man in a dress rapes a woman in her jail cell is because she’s a woman. Simple as that.

I don’t really know John Swinney. I’ve met him a few times and his reputation lives up to the reality: in person he’s friendly, professional, empathetic and charming. An all-round good bloke, you might say. But he is also going to court to defend his government’s right to continue to place evil people like Alan Baker in women’s prisons. This latest allegation of a sexual assault in HMP Greenock will do nothing to change his mind because he knew it would happen anyway, somewhere; and now that it has (allegedly), nothing has changed.

If a senior politician is willing to sacrifice the safety of vulnerable women on the altar of gender ideology and for the sake of indulging the personal whims and fantasies of male murderers, can he really still be described as either “nice” or “honest”?

Hungary does not sound like the kind of place you’d want to be if you were gay or trans.

Fortunately, laws that made life difficult for such minorities look set to be revoked now that Péter Magyar has replaced the hardline Victor Orbán as the country’s prime minister. But it was the European Court of Justice (ECJ), rather than Magyar’s electoral victory, that came to the rescue of Hungary’s minority groups. The court, whose job it is to enforce EU law in every member state, has ruled that current laws discriminating against gay and trans people are incompatible with EU law and must be changed to reflect the EU’s more inclusive approach.

Which is good news. As far as it goes. It is not, however, good news for children or women in Hungary and across the EU because the court has ruled that it is illegal for any state to oppose the promotion of gender change to under-18s.

Much of what the Hungarian government did in respect of gay rights was abominable: banning Pride marches, for example, and allowing discrimination against gay and transgender people. And now that the EU have swooped in to save the Hungarian people from themselves, conditions should surely improve for those minorities.

But did the ECJ understand that its ruling would make Britain’s return to the EU fold that much less likely?

There has been a great deal of excitement among those with EU flags in their Twitter and BlueSky profiles (mostly BlueSky) because of the prime minister’s stated policy of “realignment” with the trading bloc we left six years ago. They scent a major victory ahead: perhaps Britain rejoining the customs union or even the single market. They have even allowed themselves to indulge in the dream that full membership of the EU is finally within their grasp, putting to bed all that nonsense about respecting democracy and listening to the views of people who live in council houses and don’t have degrees.

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Phil Woolas, the much-loved and respected former minister and MP, and a stalwart supporter of modernising Labour leaders since Neil Kinnock, was laid to rest last week, with a well-attended funderal service at St Margaret’s Church, right next to Westminster Abbey.

Kinnock himself attended, as did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Blair gave the eulogy, Brown read out an affectionate message from the actress and national treasure Joanna Lumley, with whom Woolas had crossed swords when he was immigration minister. It was one of those rare ocasions when the entire Labour family gathered to remember one of its fallen, to reminisce, to have a laugh and a cry.

Our serving prime minister attended also. No one is quite sure why, since he didn’t know Phil and is thought never to have even met him. While Kinnock, Blair and Brown clasped hands with and hugged hundreds of comrades, Keir Starmer was notable for his reluctance to talk to anyone. The reluctance was mutual. He seemed isolated, alone, apart from his wife, Victoria, unable to mingle because of an inability to find common ground with those attending: MPs, former MPs, trade unionists, party staffers (and ex-party staffers) – people who had worked tirelessly during the bad days as well as the good for a Labour government.

But Starmer just didn’t fit in. According to one lifelong friend of Phil’s, the prime minister simply didn’t know anyone there. It was embarrassing, he told me.

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