Three years ago he decided to spend his energy on something that might actually save lives. He co-founded Early with the designer Thomas Heatherwick, and I’ve watched him pour everything into it since.

A third of cancers are still diagnosed in A&E, when the patient is already acutely sick and the options have narrowed to almost nothing. Diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease follow the same pattern. The warning signs sit there for years before anyone notices, usually because nobody was looking. We wait for symptoms, then we wait for an appointment, then we wait for a treatment we didn’t much want in the first place.

Early’s answer is urine rather than blood. Nobody enjoys being jabbed and an annual health MOT catches a snapshot when what you actually need is a pattern over time. A small disposable test reads a handful of biomarkers linked to bladder cancer, diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease risk, then feeds the results into a home unit that reports back through an app within five minutes. Find something persistent and it tells you to go and see your GP. That’s the whole pitch. I’m naturally wary of anything that promises to make healthcare simple. But the science behind it is not a gimmick.

Early’s chief medical officer, Mark Emberton OBE, a professor of interventional oncology at UCLH, puts the case in one line: “We need to detect disease at a point when we can still cure it, less invasively and more kindly.” Heatherwick frames it differently. He points out that we produce litres of health information every day and asks why we’ve seen urine only as waste, when it carries so much we could be using. earlyhealthMed-Tech Insights

D-J has spent three years assembling scientists, engineers and clinicians around that question, and the investors backing the company did their own diligence on the science before writing cheques. The first Labs go on sale in Spring 2027, in limited numbers, to people who register interest now.

I know this newsletter probably reads like a paid advert. I promise you it isn’t. I’ve signed up because I believe in D-J. Thirty years is a long time to watch someone, and I’ve never seen him take on anything half-heartedly. This team has it in them to save thousands of lives and transform the world of home diagnostics.

If you want to join the waitlist, it’s at earlyhealth.com.

The most significant development in Westminster this week is the appointment of Kanishka Narayan as the first AI minister to attend Cabinet. I’m so pleased. It matters because there isn’t enough money to do all the things Andy wants as PM, unless the public sector makes significant productivity gains fast, and the only route to that is AI.

Done right, more people will be scheduled for surgery and outpatient appointments, courts will deal with cases more quickly and policing will be more effective. Labour can win the next general election on the back of it. Kanishka is not just the AI minister. He’s the single most important delivery minister in Andy’s cabinet.

Sadiq Khan entered the AI debate this week too. The London mayor’s AI and Jobs Taskforce, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, busted the jobs apocalypse myth. AI, it found, changes the nature of work, improving decision making and giving greater agency to those who use it.

This challenges the usual debate about “sovereign AI”, which several ministers seem to think means national ownership of the stack: Britain owning the chips, the data centres, the pipes and the models.

What unites AI evangelists and the tech doomsayers is the assumption that the coming general intelligence will be extraordinary. And I know this is heresy in certain circles, but what if general intelligence turns out to be just mediocre, or rather, just average?

Back in the early 90s, when I had decided to change the world rather than read computer science, I struggled through the introduction to political thinkers module in my first year at Hull University. John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville were both on the list. Tocqueville crossed America in 1831 to look at the prison system and gleaned a bigger danger. He found: “A middling standard is fixed in America for human knowledge. All approach as near to it as they can; some as they rise, others as they descend.” He was nearly two hundred years ahead of himself when it comes to general artificial intelligence.

_{Alexis de Tocqueville and John Locke}

A general model is trained on everything we have ever written. It drags us to a consensus, the average of us, the middling standard fixed by machine. And that standard is high, make no mistake; the machine’s average would beat most of us on most days. A study in Science Advances two years ago (Doshi and Hauser) found that generative AI makes individual writers more creative and their collective output more alike. (NB I use AI all the time to enhance my writing, and though it reads better, it makes me feel, well, just a little less feisty as a polemicist)

I’m not saying the models aren’t brilliant. I love them. This barely matters strategically though, because they’re brilliant for everyone all the time, provided you pay for it in monthly tokens. For a company, that means zero competitive advantage; your competitor gets the same brilliance for the same tokens.

There are two brains in this argument. The general one, which anyone can rent. The particular one, which only an institution can build.

Tocqueville chimed a second warning, against mild despotism and “an immense and tutelary power”. He asked: “What remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” Swap the paternal state for the rented superbrain from OpenAI or Anthropic, and aren’t we in the same position? I won’t hazard a guess at how many FTSE 250 companies are pouring their IP into large language models, but I bet it’s more than half. Our danger isn’t that the machine can’t think well enough. It’s that it spares us the care of thinking. An institution that rents its mind grows mediocre even when the mind is exceptionally gifted.

A decade ago in the Guardian I called automation “the most urgent issue facing the country”. At the time, George Osborne envisaged driverless lorries on our roads. A decade later, they’re not here. The only driverless vehicle I’ve seen was a taxi going the wrong way on a west London road earlier this year. I asked how the robots’ wealth and time would be shared with displaced workers whose labour was taken. Maybe I was only half right. The machines have not just come for the labour. They are taking the institutional learning.

Back in the day, when I was at the Cabinet Office, I set up the Power of Information Taskforce to release as much government generated data into the public domain as we could. People started doing inventive things, like overlaying public transport travel times on maps to see how long it would take to commute from a new flat.

As a country, it feels like we have been arguing about who owns the data ever since. The better question, it turns out, is a couple of centuries older. Who owns the learning?

Locke, if I remember my first year correctly, has a lesson for us. Property, he argues in the Second Treatise, begins when we mix labour with the world. Today, property is made when a nurse schedules a day of consultations in a hospital, and an engineer teaches a model what a failing bearing sounds like. Human endeavour mixed with a model’s output creates new understanding, and it belongs to the institution that did the work.

So here’s what I think sovereign AI ought to mean, and it isn’t a Union Jack flying over a data centre. Call it cognitive sovereignty. Use the best intelligence in the world, wherever it comes from, and keep the learning it creates under British control.

An interest to declare: I sit on Palantir UK’s public policy committee, so discount what follows accordingly. I’m not a technologist or a data lawyer. I’m the bloke who wrote the home help scheduler, forty years on.

The company’s conviction that an institution should own its own data and ontology runs deep. The persistent myth, that Palantir somehow wants to privatise Britain’s medical records, doesn’t survive the paperwork: NHS England remains the data controller, and Palantir processes data only under NHS instruction. The intelligence can come from anywhere. The learning stays where the work is done. Somewhere in the NHS today, a scheduler is relieving someone of pain by connecting them to a clinician, and this time the machine can learn from them. What is learnt, the collective wisdom of the front line, becomes a permanent public asset, for you, for us, the proud owners of the NHS.

Across the economy, a manufacturer should keep its engineers’ knowledge, and the AI model it trains, within the company; a bank its staff’s financial judgement; a government department the business processes crafted between smart civil servants and a model owned by HMG.

The worst thing a new minister used to hear, and I have, is: “Minister, you are responsible for a government IT project.” Senior managers used to treat technology as something to buy and hand down to passive employees. Give it instead to the people who understand the problems and let them build, adapt and improve the systems they use. The worker not an appendage of the machine, the machine expanding the worker’s capacity to act. That is my vision of a nation’s sovereign AI.

The test for ministers is not whether an AI system cuts costs, though it should, but whether it leaves an institution more capable: does it improve the judgement of the people using it, capture what they learn, keep the knowledge under the institution’s roof, let the people closest to the problem shape the system? With billions going to start-ups, compute capacity and specialist talent, it will be wasted if hospitals, courts and police stations stay passive renters of intelligence created elsewhere.

My fear is this. If Kanishka cannot persuade the nation to adopt AI in a way that retains the wisdom of workers, the workers will use the tools anyway, and the learning will end up owned by Anthropic or OpenAI. Tocqueville feared democracy would settle for the middling standard. We cannot let Britain accept this. We need cognitive sovereignty, not just our own data centres.

Use the best intelligence available. Strengthen the people doing the work. Own the learning, the wisdom.

Good luck, Kanishka. You have the biggest job in government.

Next week, I receive test results that I hope will confirm I am free of prostate cancer. This is my second time through treatment. If the cancer returns again, the treatment pathways will be more aggressive.

I cannot control what the results say. I can do something about the physical condition in which I receive them. I need to be fit and ready for whatever comes next.

This has led me to what I call the FFS programme: Fatness, Fitness and Strength.

The initials also capture my reaction to having to do all this again.

I have been lucky to find Ethan, a gifted personal trainer near where I live, who has helped me turn a vague intention to get healthier into a proper programme. My week is bookended by sessions with him on Monday and Friday, with another on Wednesday when I can fit it in.

We do weekly weigh-ins and baseline tests every six weeks. Ethan then revises the programme, usually by finding new ways to expose muscles I had forgotten existed. Ten weeks in, I am already worrying about what fresh misery awaits me in week 13.

But the structure works. The sessions are in the diary. Someone is expecting me to turn up. The exercises become harder as I become stronger. I no longer have to negotiate with myself every morning about whether I feel like training. Mostly, I do not. I do it anyway.

The nutrition is going well too. I am close to full keto and drinking almost no alcohol, apart from occasional pit stops for events such as my son’s graduation. I did not even have a pint to celebrate Andy becoming Labour leader, although I was delighted for him.

My food is simple: protein, plenty of vegetables and an industrial quantity of cauliflower rice and gallons of extra virgin olive oil and Hunter and Gather avocado oil.

Breakfast is what I have come to think of as my Super Bowl: chia seeds, psyllium husk, assorted seeds, Skyr yoghurt, raspberries and olive oil. It’s not Michelin star but it does keep everything moving. Keto can bung you up. There is no elegant way to put that, so I will not try.

After ten weeks, I have lost nine kilograms and ten centimetres from around my belly. Against the distance I still have to travel, that is only a tiny start. But it is a real start, and I am pleased with it.

The main lesson I have learnt is that fitness returns much faster than fatness disappears.

Your heart and lungs improve. Your legs become stronger. You recover more quickly. You can feel dramatically fitter while the mirror remains moderately unimpressed. It is entirely possible to make genuine progress in the gym while still losing a fight to get your favourite shirt to fit.

Some clothes I could not wear at the start of the year now fit again though. I was particularly pleased that my favourite The Cure T-shirt fitted last week. Others remain a work in progress. I would say my wardrobe is offering encouragement but not full on applause just yet.

I am aiming to lose about two pounds a week. I know I could lose more by eating less, training harder and turning the whole thing into a military campaign. But I am trying to find an equilibrium. A programme I cannot sustain is just a more elaborate way of failing later.

Strength is also becoming more important to me. I do not just want to weigh less. I want more muscle, better balance and enough physical reserve to cope with treatment if the cancer returns. The number on the scales counts, but so does what my body can do.

Calling this the FFS programme is a joke, but not entirely.

I once lost eight stone and have since put nearly all of it back on. Only an idiot would do that, I sometimes tell myself. FFS indeed.

But self-abuse cannot last for ever. Losing the weight proved that I could do something difficult. Regaining it showed that losing weight and living permanently at a lower weight are different challenges, even though I managed it for five years. It’s a head game and the first diagnosis of prostate cancer kept me away from Lime bikes and lifting weights for too long.

So this second attempt cannot be another race towards a target date or a triumphant declaration of victory. My FFS approach meant there is no finish line. There is only the next meal, the next session and the next decision.

Next week’s test results will tell me something important. I hope they bring good news. Whatever they say, I will receive them nine kilograms lighter, ten centimetres smaller and considerably stronger than I was ten weeks ago.

I am doing it all again. This time, I intend to make it stick.

FFS.

When I was a boy, my week ran on two appointments: Top of the Pops on a Thursday, then the chart countdown on Radio 1 at Sunday teatime. Millions of us heard the same songs at the same moment, and on Monday morning the playground held the inquest.

That world has gone, and I do not want it back exactly as it was. But I have just finished six years as chair of UK Music, and the closer I looked at how British music now reaches British ears, the more convinced I became that we have lost something we will regret.

Britain remains extraordinary at making music. The roll-call comes easily: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Queen, the Clash, the Smiths, The The, Blur, Oasis and Radiohead. It is one of the few corners of national life where world-leading is a statement of fact rather than a press release. But notice the trap. I reached for greatness and came back with history. Every artist on that list broke through before the smartphone was ubiquitous.

Here is what should worry us, and it is no longer a hunch. In 2025, only 15 of the UK’s 40 biggest albums were made with the involvement of a British artist. Only five were frontline releases; the other ten were back catalogue albums. In 2024, not one British artist ranked among the world’s 20 most-streamed artists, compared with three the year before.

Annabella Coldrick, chief executive of the Music Managers Forum, calls this “the unspoken crisis” in British music. She is right, and her warning deserves careful reading. British artists have not stopped making great work. The system that should carry that work to the public is failing too many of them, and the charts hide the failure because old albums and old certainties flatter them. In a sense, the future is having to fight its way through the past.

The BPI points to a brighter picture. Twenty-seven British albums topped the chart in 2025, and its chief executive, Dr Jo Twist, greeted the year-end numbers with a flourish: artists such as Olivia Dean, Lola Young and Sam Fender were “now chart-topping sensations at home and are making their presence felt in key markets around the world”.

She is not wrong. Dean, Young and Fender are the real thing, and their success is the best news the British music industry has had in years. Dean and Fender, at sixteen weeks, currently have the longest running non-consecutive number one song in UK chart history.

But three breakthroughs do not amount to a functioning pipeline. The acts that cut through prove talent can still beat the machine. They tell us nothing about the ones the machine never let us hear.

The deeper problem is discovery. A generation ago, the path from a local audience to a national one was imperfect but visible. Radio, television, record shops, clubs and word of mouth formed a ladder. It did not work for everyone. But the ladder existed.

Streaming swept it away. Most people no longer search for music; they open an app and the machine decides what comes next. The machine is not neutral. It rewards scale. It feeds the already fed.

For Britain, the effect is brutal. France, Italy and Denmark are watching their own artists thrive because recommendation algorithms favour music in the listener’s own language. In Denmark, 16 of the top 20 albums in 2024 were by Danish artists performing in Danish. We share ours with the largest music market on earth, so the tide comes straight in. A young artist in Manchester or Belfast stands in open water against the full force of the American pop machine.

If you want to see where this ends, look at Australia. Its recorded music market grew by 28 per cent between 2021 and 2024. Revenue from Australian acts fell anyway; their share of the market dropped from 12 per cent to 8. One music economist called Australia “the global poster child for market failure in recorded music”. The same research warns that Britain and Canada are not far behind.

What should we do in the UK?

We do not need to copy anyone wholesale. Canada uses content rules. Ireland runs a weekly Irish Homegrown Top 20. I am not calling for a grim cultural checkpoint where someone in a lanyard inspects your playlist for insufficient patriotism. British listeners will always love American music, and so they should. The point is not to force anyone to listen to British music. It is to make sure British music can be found.

Which is why the BBC should bring back Top of the Pops.

Not the old programme, dragged from the archive in a cloud of dry ice. The format is a period piece; the idea has never been more useful. It created a shared weekly moment when new music became visible. It gave artists a national stage. It told the country what was happening now.

Build the digital-age version for the world as it is: iPlayer-first, clip-friendly, live where it can be, serious about curation. Put the official chart alongside a new chart for UK-made music. Draw on the whole BBC estate, from BBC Introducingthrough 6 Music to local radio, the finest new-talent network in the world, currently whispering into the void.

The BBC already knows how to do this, because it does it every summer. Glastonbury is the model: a huge, messy, living event handed to the whole country with scale and imagination. Now do that every week: the biggest songs, yes, but also the fastest risers, the bands emerging from small venues and the producers working from bedrooms.

This cannot be the BBC’s job alone. The Official Charts Company, working with the BPI, could build a proper chart for UK-made music and answer a more useful question: not which catalogue we can rediscover every Friday, but who is breaking through right now.

Then the flywheel turns. The chart gives the BBC something solid to build on. The BBC gives the chart cultural force. And the streaming platforms face a healthier kind of pressure: not censorship, but a public alternative. Here are the artists the algorithm missed. Here is the country’s own sound, caught before it vanishes into the global wash.

Some will say young people will not watch. I think they will watch performances, clips, live sessions and playlists on the platforms they already use; they simply need something worth clipping. The job is not to rebuild Thursday night in 1974. It is to build a national stage for 2026.

Others will say this is not the BBC’s role. But I think it is precisely its role, the founding one: to do well what the market, left to itself, does badly. And the case is not only cultural. British recorded music exports were worth £794 million in 2024. Music is jobs, venues, tourism, soft power and national pride.

So yes, bring back Top of the Pops. Not because people my age miss the theme tune, but because British music needs a regular national stage again. The artists are there. The BBC has the reach. The charts have the data. The industry has the responsibility.

The playground still exists, by the way. It meets in group chats now. Give it something British to argue about on Monday morning.

That is why Andy Burnham’s recent movement on the EU is important. At Labour conference last September, he said he wanted Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. More recently the line became more guarded. He acknowledged a long-term case, but said rejoining would not be his immediate offer. This was reported as a row-back. It may yet prove to be something more useful: the beginning of a strategy.

For that, Andy should study Harold Wilson.

Wilson’s European story is usually remembered as failure. In May 1967, his Labour government applied to join the European Communities. In November, Charles de Gaulle vetoed the opening of negotiations. Wilson lost the 1970 election. Ted Heath took Britain in. Heath got the credit. Wilson got the footnote.

But the footnote is where the lesson lies.

Wilson turned towards Europe because Britain’s faced “contracting options”. The Commonwealth was no longer the economic answer many had pretended it could be. The special relationship brought American support, but on terms increasingly set in Washington. Sterling was under pressure and the European Community economy was growing faster than Britain’s economy. Wilson was reaching an accommodation with a difficult reality, and it took brutal economic truth to convince him that the old world role could not be preserved.

That is the first lesson for Burnham: changed facts require changed politics.

Wilson’s route to that conclusion was neither quick nor tidy. He had been sceptical. He attacked the Conservative terms and worried about Commonwealth interests. The 1964 manifesto still said a British government’s first responsibility was to the Commonwealth, and his government took office with no intention of renewing Macmillan’s failed application.

But he was not doctrinaire. Before he became Labour leader, he had asked whether Britain could afford to stay out of European arrangements. In the 1959 EFTA debate he distinguished Europe’s “dreamers and idealists” from the practical machinery they had created, and he worried that Western Europe would attract investment and leave Britain a scientific backwater.

That history saves Wilson from the charge of opportunism. He shifted because he weighed the costs and benefits and the scales moved.

The comparison with the present is not exact. But they are familiar. Britain has again been told that sovereignty matters more than economic interest. Michael Gove recently argued that Brexit made Britain “a full parliamentary democracy once more” and restored the ability of voters to punish governments for failure. He may be right about the constitutional theory. The political reality is harsher: voters are punishing governments for the economic failure Brexit helped create. Distance from Europe has not made Europe less important. It has made the cost of distance harder to ignore.

Burnham is unusually placed because he is not the obvious carrier of reheated Remain politics. He is a northern politician whose appeal is rooted in place, transport, wages and work. If the European argument is to return as a serious national argument, it cannot sound like a reprimand from London. It has to start where people live. Wilson’s scepticism was his credential. Burnham’s distance from the Remain campaign is his.

The pressure on Wilson was economic before it was anything else. He came to office in 1964 with a majority of four and an £800m balance of payments deficit, and his refusal to devalue left him dependent on the United States. The Commonwealth still mattered emotionally and diplomatically, but in 1950 it had taken nearly half of British exports; by 1970 the figure was below a quarter. Between 1960 and 1965, real GNP per head grew at 3.9% in the six Community states against 2.6% in Britain. Britain sat outside a successful common market, with few compensating gains.

The sterling crisis of July 1966 tipped Wilson from guarded interest into determination. The crash exposed the failure of domestic policy and the danger of relying on America to prop up the pound. George Brown wanted a more radical break: devaluation and retrenchment. Wilson was not ready for that. The European application became a third way between the old fantasy of world power and the humiliation of becoming a diminished regional state.

Wilson and Brown toured the capitals of Europe. Brown recorded that their line grew firmer as the tour went on, until they had virtually decided to make the application. The tour convinced Wilson that membership was desirable and that the application could not be hedged too heavily. Britain would have to accept unwelcome consequences, as the other members had.

Before he could negotiate with Europe, Wilson had to negotiate with his own party. Castle and Crossman described Cabinet meetings in which Wilson finessed his colleagues: reassuring them that no final decision had been taken, wearing them down through long sessions, warning that without the European road Britain could end up as America’s dependant. Tony Benn’s phrase, that they were a “defeated Cabinet”, captured how far economic crisis had narrowed the government’s room for manoeuvre.

In April 1967, the Cabinet came round, and the Commons approved the application by 488 votes to 62. Thirty-six Labour MPs voted against and 50 abstained despite a three-line whip. Six parliamentary private secretaries were sacked. Wilson had contained dissent but at a cost.

De Gaulle’s answer came in two stages. Within days of the announcement, his “velvet” veto of May 1967 signalled that France was unpersuaded. Some contemporaries concluded the application had only ever been a public relations exercise. The record says otherwise. Through the summer and autumn, the Foreign Office planned for a French “non”. Con O’Neill argued that a veto should be the moment for “not taking no for an answer”: if France said no, the Five should keep saying yes, and the application should stay on the Council agenda until the French position changed.

The formal veto came on 27 November 1967, nine days after sterling was devalued by 14.3%. Devaluation was meant to put beyond doubt Britain’s ability to accept the obligations of membership. It did not move de Gaulle, who rejected the opening of negotiations and offered association instead.

Wilson refused to walk away. He answered de Gaulle point by point and told the Commons that the application remained on the table. Cabinet backed the assertive course, and at the Council of Ministers in December the Five sided with the Commission on the need to open negotiations, leaving France isolated. The solidarity was imperfect and the veto held. But Wilson had kept Britain inside the European argument. He could not control de Gaulle. He could control whether Britain gave up.

That is what political seriousness after defeat looks like. And yes, I am thinking this is very unlike David Cameron resigning after the referendum.

This is also why the easy Heath-Wilson contrast fails. Heath deserves credit for taking Britain in on 1 January 1973, but he inherited officials, negotiating briefs, a timetable and relationships prepared under Wilson, who kept the application alive between 1967 and 1970.

And the story has a coda. De Gaulle did not last. He resigned in April 1969, and within eight months the Six had agreed at The Hague to open enlargement negotiations. The door opened because Wilson had refused to let it close, and because the man holding it shut was not permanent. No veto is. The obstacles to Britain’s return, a tired public, a nervous party and a press that treats the question as settled, are political facts, not laws of nature. That is the second lesson: the side that stays at the table outlasts the side that walks away.

The third lesson comes from 1975. By then Labour was divided again, and visibly so. Wilson renegotiated, held a referendum, suspended collective responsibility and allowed ministers to campaign on different sides, and still secured a national decision to remain: 67.2% on a 64% turnout. This was not ideological purity. It was political management. Wilson understood that the leader’s task was not to make every faction feel the same thing. It was to create a process large enough to hold disagreement and still carry the country to a decision.

Burnham does not need to announce immediate rejoining as a test of faith. That would comfort those already persuaded and alarm many who are not. But he cannot allow “not now” to be the end of it.

John Major is useful here. He has said Britain should aim to rejoin the single market within five years, as a step towards the longer-term goal of membership, and he puts a number on Brexit’s damage: an estimated £100bn a year in lost trade and £40bn in lost tax receipts. The figures can be debated. The political point cannot: a serious Conservative tradition once understood Europe as a question of national interest.

That does not make rejoining easy. It makes evasion harder.

The case Burnham could make is not sentimental. It is not a plea to go back to 2015. It is a practical argument about trade, investment, research, security and influence. The old Brexit argument asked voters to choose an identity. The next European argument has to ask a plainer question: what works?

That is the Wilson method. Keep the destination alive. Build the route. Manage the coalition. Tell the truth about the trade-offs. And do not confuse a hostile moment in history with a permanent settlement.

That’s a route back to Europe worth considering.

“I am going to give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs.”

“No 10 North.”

Andy Burnham’s speech deserves to be taken seriously because it contained something rare in British politics: an argument about power.

The Westminster Lobby, bruised by the absence of a questions slot, briefly mistook its own inconvenience for the story. It was not. The story was that Burnham had made a speech about the structure of the British state.

His case is that Britain is too centralised, too departmental, too slow, too remote from the places where growth must be created. He is not making the familiar argument that Whitehall should listen more politely to local leaders. He is saying something harder: that the centralised state is now one of the causes of Britain’s economic weakness.

Burnham was blunt about the condition of local power: “The stark imbalance in resources between national government and local government is holding back growth.” Then came the line that will have landed in every town hall in the country: “If councils can’t fix potholes, what chance do they have of bringing forward major regeneration schemes to get growth going?”

Local power without fiscal power is permission, not devolution.

That is why the speech should not be filed under local government, mayoral ambition, or northern mood music. It belongs in a larger Labour tradition.

The comparison is Harold Wilson.

On my desk is the Penguin volume Wilson: Selected Speeches 1964 - Labour’s Plan: The New Britain. It includes two speeches delivered a week apart: The New Britain, made at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday 19 January 1964, and Labour’s Economic Policy, delivered at Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, on Saturday 25 January 1964.

They are an attempt to describe why Britain was failing and how a Labour government might renew it. Wilson’s argument was that Britain possessed energy, talent and technical ability, but its institutions were not fit to mobilise them. The old Britain was too deferential, too amateur, too class-bound, too centralised and too dominated by short-term financial control.

Wilson wanted what he called “the New Britain”. Burnham’s language is different, but the family resemblance is clear. Both start from the same proposition: the country has more strength than the state knows how to use.

In Birmingham, Wilson argued that the failure lay not in the British people but in the way the country was governed. He attacked a closed society in which birth, wealth, accent and inherited advantage counted for too much. The Tories, he said, had “frozen initiative” and “petrified imagination”. The New Britain would be more open, more technical, more educated and more purposeful.

He also said something that now reads like a direct challenge to modern Whitehall: “Not all wisdom abides in London.” For a Labour leader in 1964, that was not a casual aside. It was a challenge to the geography of power.

The link with Burnham is direct. Burnham’s case is also that talent is everywhere but power is not. He is not asking for Manchester to replace London as the only place that counts. The point is to build a state in which the North, the Midlands, the South East, the South West and every other part of England have the institutions, fiscal powers and civic confidence to shape their own economic future. Devolution is not regional favouritism. It is national modernisation. A country becomes stronger when its places stop waiting for permission and start taking responsibility for growth.

Wilson’s New Britain had three purposes: “economic purpose, social purpose and world purpose”. Economic purpose meant production, investment, exports, skills, technology and the end of the old stop-go cycle. Social purpose meant security by need, not wealth; decent housing; better schools; stronger public services; and wider ladders of opportunity. World purpose meant a country no longer trapped by imperial nostalgia, but still confident enough to act with independence and moral force.

Wilson did not treat growth and fairness as rival claims. He thought each required the other. Without production, there would be no social advance. Without social advance, production had no moral claim on the country.

Burnham’s argument is strongest when he makes growth concrete. Growth means buses, houses, colleges, high streets, wages, skills, energy, local pride and routes to status for people who do not want, or cannot get, the university path.

But Wilson’s most useful lesson for Burnham lies elsewhere. It lies in his fight with the Treasury.

Wilson thought the Treasury had come to stand for a larger failure of British government: short-term financial control over long-term national renewal. He did not oppose financial discipline. He opposed the elevation of financial control into the ruling philosophy of the state.

In Swansea, Wilson put the point plainly:

“Finance must be the index, not the determinant, of economic strength.”

It is one of the best sentences in post-war Labour politics. It accepts the reality of finance while denying its supremacy. Money and Budgets count. Sterling counted then; debt interest counts now. But finance should measure and support the real economy, not decide the outer limit of national ambition.

Wilson wanted a growth department to challenge a control department. That was the logic of the Department of Economic Affairs, created under George Brown after Labour won office in 1964. The Treasury kept tax, spending, monetary policy, sterling and the Budget. The DEA was given planning, industrial strategy, prices and incomes, regional economic policy and consultation with industry.

It was a bold arrangement, or at least a bold-looking one. The Treasury would guard discipline. The DEA would press for expansion. The phrase used at the time was “creative tension”. In modern government, tension is usually easier to make than creativity.

The flaw soon became clear. The DEA had the plan. The Treasury had the purse. The DEA could argue; the Treasury could refuse. The DEA could talk about production, regions and long-term renewal; the Treasury controlled the Budget, sterling and the spending machine.

There is the warning for Burnham.

You do not build a growth state by putting a northern sign above the door while leaving the Treasury in charge of the keys. Do not put the language of growth in Manchester and leave the machinery of control in Whitehall.

If you devolve Number 10 to the North of England, you have to devolve Number 11 as well. Otherwise No 10 North is not a circuit-breaker. It is a branch office.

This is not an argument for fiscal fantasy. Britain cannot spend without limit. The bond markets exist. Debt interest exists. The public finances are real. A government that forgets that soon receives a reminder, usually from people with a Bloomberg data feeds and trading terminals.

But fiscal discipline is not the same as Treasury rule. A state can manage money without allowing one department’s instincts to define the country’s future. Britain needs a government machine that can distinguish between waste and investment, between cost and capacity, between short-term pressure and long-term strength.

Wilson saw the danger of stop-go government. In Swansea, he rejected “stop-go-stop policies”. He argued that deflation did not strengthen the economy. It weakened investment, hardened restrictive attitudes and left the country less able to compete. His answer lay in production, exports, technology, skilled labour, import substitution and regional development.

His regional argument could have been written for the age of metro mayors. Regional development, Wilson said, was not just a question of “the location of industry”. It required “social development”, “urban renewal”, land use, housing and regeneration. It required planning machinery across departments. Above all, it required “a real willingness on the part of Whitehall to delegate authority”.

That is the phrase Burnham has to make real. No 10 North will be judged not by where it is based, or what it is called, but by whether Whitehall actually gives up authority.

Burnham is not trying to revive the 1960s National Plan, and he would be unwise to try. The world is different. Capital is more mobile. Industry is more complex. Technology has altered the scale and speed of economic change. Climate, AI, ageing and migration all impose pressures Wilson did not face in the same form.

But the institutional question remains. A modern growth state needs someone inside government with the authority to argue for place: to pull transport, housing, skills, energy, health and industry into one account of national renewal; to say to the Treasury that a proposal is not local pleading but a contribution to national strength.

That is the test for No 10 North. Will it shape the Spending Review? Will it influence capital priorities? Will it change the Green Book, procurement, housing finance and transport appraisal? Will it give mayors durable fiscal power rather than another set of permission slips?

If not, Whitehall will absorb it in the usual way: welcome the language, praise the intention, establish the board, agree the minutes, commission further work, and return power to its usual owners.

That is how British government often defeats reform. Not by opposing it. By processing it.

Burnham’s opportunity is that the country’s anger is real. People are tired of being told that change is coming while their town centres decline, buses disappear, councils shrink to statutory survival and their children face narrower routes to success. The right has turned that anger into grievance. Burnham wants to turn it into agency.

Where Farage offers victimhood, Burnham can offer power.

Where Farage offers scapegoats, Burnham can offer common purpose.

Where Farage offers nostalgia, Burnham can offer a country that works again.

But to do that he must solve a larger problem of language and identity. He knows how to speak for Manchester. He must now speak for Britain with the same force. Devolution cannot sound like the dispersal of national purpose. It has to sound like its recovery.

The task is to connect pride in town, city, county and region to pride in the country. A Britain that trusts its places. A Britain that makes and builds. A Britain that leads in Europe, stands up for its values, backs human ingenuity and gives young people real ladders of opportunity.

Wilson called for “the New Britain” because he thought the country had more talent than its institutions could use. Burnham now makes the same argument in the language of devolution.

The question is whether he can avoid Wilson’s fate.

Wilson saw the Treasury problem but did not solve the power problem. He built a department for expansion while leaving too much authority with the department of control.

Burnham has now entered the same argument.

No 10 North is the start.

No 11 North is the test.

But the speed of the exit has created an odd and potentially damaging gap. Andy Burnham is now being treated as a prime minister-in-waiting, but he does not yet have the authority, structure or protection that normally comes with that role. He will face a media siege, intense pressure from MPs, and an endless queue of civil society leaders, unions, businesses and public bodies wanting to know what comes next.

Until he is leader, he cannot presume to act as leader. Until he is validly nominated, his first job is not transition but nominations. That is the pinch point.

The relevant rule is not obscure. It sits in Chapter 4, Clause II.2 of the Labour Party Rule Book: “Election of leader and deputy leader.” The rule requires a candidate in a leadership vacancy to secure support from 20 per cent of Commons members of the PLP, and then either enough CLP support or enough affiliate support.

The NEC timetable opens PLP nominations on Thursday 9 July and closes them at 6pm on Wednesday 15 July. Affiliate nominations then run until 16 July. If there is only one validly nominated candidate, a special conference can confirm the result on 17 July.

That may satisfy the rules. It does not fully meet the political moment.

The difficulty is not the threshold. Nor is it the need for a proper process. The difficulty is the avoidable period of uncertainty before the process formally begins. In Labour politics, there is a strange understanding of what “nominations open” means. Tradition dictates that nomination papers are only distributed to MPs on the day nominations open.

This is not a digital process. It is an analogue one. MPs do not simply click a button or send a signal to party headquarters. They have to sign a nomination paper and physically hand it in at the office of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In other words, the process still depends on people, paper and place. That may sound quaint but in a compressed transition, it becomes a problem.

Nominations open on a Thursday, when many MPs will already be heading back to their constituencies. Some will not return to Westminster until Monday 13 July at the earliest. The formal deadline is then 6pm on Wednesday 15 July. In theory, MPs have just under six and a half calendar days. In practice, the parliamentary window may be closer to two and a half working days.

That is a ridiculous squeeze for a governing party choosing the next prime minister.

Meanwhile, the Government is already slowing down. Downing Street has decided not to approve even minor decisions. Discipline is fraying. The briefing against Shabana Mahmood is a prime example. When a departing operation starts using its remaining authority to settle internal scores, it means one thing: the longer the uncertainty, the greater the political damage done.

Just look at the rampant speculation about which ministers will survive the transition and which will not. Burnham is in an impossible position. He cannot possibly confirm or deny his thinking about future appointments while he is still in the middle of a nominations process. Every silence is read as a signal. Every informal speculation hardens into a supposed fact. The process is not protecting him from that speculation. It is feeding it.

There is a simple fix that would not undermine the integrity of the contest.

The party should issue nomination papers immediately. MPs could sign a nomination paper in favour of Andy Burnham or any other candidate and publicly reveal that they had done so. That would not bind the process until the papers were formally submitted and accepted during the official nominations window. Any MP who wanted to stand would still have the same right to do so. The threshold would remain unchanged. The timetable would remain intact.

But the political facts would be visible sooner.

I can imagine MPs displaying their signed nomination papers on social media. That may sound like Westminster theatre, but it would serve a useful purpose. It would show where support actually sits before the formal process begins, while preserving the formal authority of the official nominations window.

Given the scale of Andy Burnham’s support, publicly revealing signed nomination papers may quickly show that he has the required number of nominations. It may also show something more decisive: that so many MPs have signed for him that it becomes mathematically impossible for any other candidate to reach the required threshold.

That matters because Labour is not choosing an opposition leader with the luxury of time. It is choosing the next prime minister while the Government is still trying to function. A leadership process in those circumstances is not only an internal party matter. It affects Whitehall, markets, public confidence and the authority of the state.

This tweak would not abolish a contest. If another candidate can command the support required under the rules, they should be free to stand. But if the parliamentary party has already made its view clear, the country should not be left waiting because of an administrative convention about when pieces of paper are handed out.

This is a unique situation. The ship needs steadying. Issuing the papers now, and allowing MPs to reveal that they have signed them, is one small way to do it.

The title is built to sound muscular. Strip away the framing and you find something unprecedented. This is a Bill about freeing a minister from the law.

Clause 2 requires the Home Secretary to build and maintain at least 24,000 immigration detention places. That’s not a target, it’s a statutory floor. The sites must sit within areas listed in a Schedule of the Bill. Schedule 1 is blank. The text reads, in full, “The list of permissible areas will be inserted in due course.” The places are then allocated between those areas, wherever they turn out to be, at the Home Secretary’s “absolute discretion”.

There is a phrase to make a parliamentary draughtsman’s heart miss a beat. “Absolute discretion” is not the language of democratic administration.

What follows is the heart of the thing. Clause 3 disapplies a long row of legal protections, one after another. Planning law goes. Procurement law goes. The Detention Centre Rules go. Immigration bail goes. Modern slavery protection goes. The child welfare duty goes. These statutes exist because the state, when it locks people up and spends public money doing it, needs watching.

Take them in turn, because the detail is the argument.

Planning law would no longer apply. Local authorities would lose their ordinary role. Communities would lose their normal routes of objection. The Home Office would not ask whether a place is suitable. It would announce that a place has been chosen. You can picture the consultation. It begins with a press release and ends with a security fence.

Procurement law would go too, and this is no small thing. A detention estate of this size means large sums, major contracts and serious temptation. Procurement rules are not there to pad the statute book. They are there because public money is your money. Remove the rules and you remove the transparency and the value for money pressure.

Then the detention safeguards. The Detention Centre Rules govern how these places are run, the welfare, the healthcare, the treatment of the vulnerable. Immigration bail is one of the few means by which unlawful or excessive detention can be tested. Modern slavery protection exists because trafficked people often look, at first glance, like immigration offenders. The child welfare duty exists because children are, well, they’re children.

The Bill then widens the hole. Clause 3 does not stop at the named laws. It says any other legislation, subordinate legislation or policy may also be disapplied where the Home Secretary considers it “necessary or expedient”. That last word does a great deal of ugly work. “Necessary” is at least a test. “Expedient” means useful, convenient, politically helpful. It lets a minister set aside a legal duty because the duty has become inconvenient.

Then comes the sentence that should stop any reader who believes in the shape of our unwritten constitution. Clause 4 lets the Home Secretary direct any person, including a local authority, to act or not act. And clause 4(3) goes further. The Home Secretary may direct a person “to comply or not to comply with any applicable provision of law”.

Read that again, slowly. A minister may direct someone not to comply with the law.

There is an old word for that spirit, and it is not a word with happy associations. Dispensing. The dispensing power was the claim that the Crown could excuse itself, or others, from laws it found inconvenient. Parliament broke that claim in 1689 and spent the centuries since making sure it stayed that way. This Bill gives the power back to a future Home Secretary.

And then, in case any judge is still watching, clause 5 closes the door. A court “must not question” the exercise or purported exercise of the powers, nor any decision under them, nor even “the limits or extent” of those powers. That last phrase is the giveaway. It is one thing to tell a court not to second-guess a political judgement. It is quite another to tell it that it may not ask whether a minister acted within the power Parliament gave him at all. That question lies at the heart of judicial review. It is how the courts hold the line between lawful authority and abuses of power.

Parliament is sovereign, and Reform’s defenders will reach for that word as a shield. But sovereignty is not the same as executive licence. It means Parliament may legislate. It does not mean a minister should be handed a blank cheque, a blank Schedule and a rubber stamp, then told the courts will not be allowed to look.

I did not have to prise this Bill out of anyone. Reform published it. The text sits as a PDF on a campaign website the party launched in May, and the website tells you, with no embarrassment at all, what the absolute discretion in clause 2 is for.

Enter a postcode and it offers to tell you whether your area will be “prioritised to receive a detention centre”. The promise is plain. No centre will be built in any constituency with a Reform MP or any council Reform controls. The sites will go, by preference, to areas that vote Green. Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put it out there: vote Reform and you are guaranteed no detention centre near you; vote Green and there is a good chance you will get one.

So the blank Schedule was never an oversight. It was the mechanism. The “absolute discretion” was never loose drafting. It was the instrument for choosing sites by voting record.

The question is not only what this Bill would do. It is what it reveals.

What kind of government would Nigel Farage lead? The answer, on this evidence, is not hard to see. One that treats the law as an obstacle, local democracy as a nuisance, courts as a problem and political opponents as people to be punished by postcode.

The lawyers have noticed. Joelle Grogan, who presents Radio 4’s The Law Show, calls the policy “almost certainly unlawful”. She makes the judicial review case briskly: it is irrational, because no sensible authority sites a detention centre on the basis of how the neighbours voted; it is unlawful, because planning and immigration law give nobody the power to detain people according to local voting patterns; and it is improper, because it turns on an irrelevant factor, the vote, instead of a relevant one, the suitability of the place.

Jeff King of UCL goes further back, to the precedent that fits this like a glove. In the 1980s Westminster Council sold council homes in wards where the residents were thought likely to vote Conservative. The homes-for-votes scandal. In Porter v Magill the House of Lords found the council leader guilty of wilful misconduct and laid down the rule that elected officials cannot use their powers for the electoral advantage of their party. King says a court would be well-placed to find this policy made “in bad faith”, and that any attempt to legislate around the judges would face a “hell of a ride through parliament”.

This is why the Bill deserves attention beyond the immigration debate. It gives us a glimpse of a governing method. First identify an unpopular group. Then claim emergency. Then centralise power. Then disapply law. Then dare the courts to interfere.

This Bill should worry more than the people it targets. Powers like those proposed by Farage do not stay in the box they were built for. Today the justification is small boats. Tomorrow it will be protest or strikes.

The law is not a kindness shown to the deserving. It is a discipline imposed on the powerful. This Bill forgets that. Or worse, it remembers and proceeds anyway.

PS

I know this article is niche when compared to the momentous events happening in SW1 today. I’m not ignoring the massive leadership speculation. I’ll write something about this if/when anything happens later today.

My connection with Carns is thin. I once offered him a word of encouragement in the Strangers’ Bar when he was first appointed. I am fairly sure he had no idea who I was. But even then, he had presence. Some politicians enter a room. Carns occupies it.

A colleague told me a story. He knocked on a door and the man on the step told him he was voting Labour now. Carns had saved his brother. The brother had been shot, and Carns had carried him off the mountain, under fire. I cannot stand the story up and I am not going to try. But I understand why a story like that could turn a vote, and why it follows Carns the way such stories once followed another soldier who went into Labour politics.

Clement Attlee came back from the Great War as Major Attlee and wore the title for life. At Gallipoli he was carried down to the beach himself, felled by dysentery, then returned to command the rearguard at Suvla Bay and left on one of the last boats out. “I left with the last party just before General Maude,” Attlee wrote in his 1954 autobiography, As It Happened, with the flatness of a man describing a bus queue.

That is the comparison worth making, and the only one I will make. Not the medals, though Carns has more than Attlee. The instinct. The man who stays to the end of the evacuation. The commander who does not leave his people stranded. The leader who has been carried and who carries others in turn.

The dots, and how they join

Start with the facts, because they are remarkable. Multiple tours of Afghanistan, a Military Cross, a Distinguished Service Order and an OBE. A London to Everest summit and back journey completed in seven days. A resignation letter, sent last week, that read less like an exit note than an opening argument. Those are the dots. The question is how they join.

Seasoned hands will have noticed the slightly amateurish media plan that followed his resignation. For about 36 hours, Carns seemed to say yes to every interview going, delivering several messages at once and leaving people less than clear about why he had walked out. I found myself wanting to tell him to do up the second button on his shirt, and kept wondering why nobody had put him in a tie. Yet that rawness may be part of the appeal. His Instagram account is compelling for exactly that reason. It is direct, physical, unvarnished and oddly modern. The very things that made Westminster wince have made him travel online. In a week, he has gone from Labour establishment figure to Labour insurgent.

The parliamentary admirers have no doubts. “He’s the only Labour politician I know that can walk onto my council estates and demand immediate respect,” one MP told me. “He gets what it is to grow up there, he connects his values to that background to the Labour Party.” Another praised his way of leading, military in the best sense: “he listens, he takes advice, but he is willing to decide”. A third, a Scot, put it most carefully of all. “He has his own kind of version of rights and wrongs and fairness and opportunity which fit a Labour agenda without coming from any ideological Labour source.”

Even among those who like him, there is a note of caution. “He has come from a hierarchical career where you have to prove yourself to progress,” one minister told me. “He will learn that politics is much the same.”

Set against them the sceptics, the MPs who look at the medals and see a blank space where a politics should be. “He’s got a great backstory,” one said, “but most MPs feel burned by choosing someone as leader who had no real political hinterland and it turned out had no politics so we fear doing that again.” Ouch!

As for Carns himself, the picture is fuller than either camp quite captures. Royal Marine at 19, an officer by 22, mentioned in despatches at 27, special forces, brigadier-in-waiting. “I became a Marine because I wanted to expand my horizons, get out of Aberdeen and serve,” he told the Times last year. “I became an officer because I believed I could deliver change, then I left the military because I believe I can deliver change faster via the ballot box rather than the bullet.”

What lies beneath

The change he has in mind, pieced together from resignation statements and interviews, is a politics of resilience and seriousness, one that treats the first duty of government as keeping people safe and reads safety as more than tanks and troops. We grant defence the long view but patch everything else year to year, so the costs of failure rise and rise. Mental ill health costs England £300bn a year. A government review puts the annual cost of almost a million young people outside work, education or training at £125bn. Reoffending costs billions more, and a prison place now carries a cost close to £60,000 a year. We are paying for failure, he says, at the most expensive end. The tone is Carns to the core. “I want to take this country by the scruff of its neck and make it great again.”

The roots of that politics are not hard to find. He was raised by his single mum in a working-class corner of Aberdeen, one of five children, the family moving to Heathryfold when his parents separated. At sixteen, a barbecue accident burned eleven per cent of his body, the defining trauma of his youth. Then came a car crash, a titanium pin in his leg, a failed Marine medical because of his colour vision, and rejection by the Paras because of the pin. So he went back and joined from the bottom. “After that, I doubled down on never failing,” he told the Independent.

His old history teacher, the one who came to sit by his burns ward bed when many others had drifted away, has a simple verdict. Humanity, humility and humour, the three Hums: that was the boy he taught. Two decades on, with the medals to go with the scars, Labour has to decide whether those qualities are enough to carry a party, and whether the boy who ran four miles to school every morning is ready to ask the same discipline of everyone else.

On the day of the Makerfield by-election, with Labour’s future in question, one thing is clear to me. Al Carns is a wholly unusual Labour MP. His talents, experience and character cannot be allowed to drift on to the back benches. It will paralyse him. Whatever he does next, and right now the leadership looks a steeper summit than Everest, the party needs him in a serious role. MPs may decide he is too untested for the top job. That is a fair caution. But in a party with no shortage of doubts, Carns is forcing the hardest questions into the open: what Labour is for, how it protects people and whether it can still speak with moral force. I admire him for that.

It was an unfashionable thing to do in 1987. It would be close to unthinkable now, and the unthinkability is the point. Here is the paradox, stated plainly. A party that refuses to say what it believes does not thereby become more practical. It becomes thinner, then managerial, then empty, and it does not escape ideology by the refusal. It simply borrows someone else’s and stops noticing it has done so. Roy grasped this when much of the party had decided the opposite. Labour, he thought, needed more than a programme. It needed a reason to exist, and Choose Freedom set out to write that reason down.

The deeper paradox, and the one he relished, is that he made the case for ideology at the precise moment many in Labour had decided ideology was the disease they were recovering from. He saw it the other way round. The danger was never too much conviction but bad conviction or inherited conviction or worse, conviction denied.

His own argument was simple. Freedom is worth little to people without the means to use it. A person with no decent housing, no health, no schooling, no security and no work is not free, however often they are told otherwise.

Equality, for Hattersley, was not the enemy of liberty. It was what turned liberty from a possession of the already comfortable into something everyone could use. He put it better than any summary of mine. “As we evangelised for equality,” he wrote, “we should have made clear that without it, for a majority of the population, the promise of liberty is a cruel hoax. Liberty is our aim. Equality is the way in which it can truly be achieved.”

This was democratic socialism in its old and best sense, moral and practical and out of all patience with the gesture politics that mistakes private virtue for power. He stood in the line that runs from Tawney through Crosland, and he knew his place in it, The tradition matters here, because Hattersley belonged to a generation of Labour thinkers for whom inequality was not a campaigning theme to be reached for at an annual conference. It was the thing that woke them in the night. They had seen, or their parents and grandparents had seen, what the absence of equality did to a life, and they did not need polling to remind them it was wrong. Choose Freedom did not defend a set of policies. It explained what the policies were for, which is the harder and rarer thing, and the thing a Budget can never do alone.

His socialism did not live only on the page. It lived in Birmingham living rooms, in Labour clubs, in council memories and old loyalties and the unwavering belief that politics existed to enlarge the lives of people with too little power. I felt a particular pull towards him because our lives ran an oddly similar course. He was born in Sheffield, went to the University of Hull, represented a West Midlands seat, became deputy leader of the Labour Party and ended in the House of Lords. So did I. Hull, he liked to point out, had produced more deputy leaders of the Labour Party than Oxford. That is roughly where the resemblance gives out. Roy did not pass through those places. He marked them.

Birmingham’s Sparkbrook constituency was not the backdrop to his career. It formed it. He understood the working city and the changing one, the immigrant city, the clubs where politics was argument and friendship and duty and the occasional grudge entered carefully into the minutes. His stories from the campaign trail with the Labour brethren were comic and fond and never once condescending. The Labour party was his unusual family of stout hearts, all doing their best to make the world a better place: men like Khalid Mahmood’s father, who organised Kashmiri immigrants in inner-city Birmingham, and the late, great Sir Dick Knowles, who once impounded Roy’s car from a council car park after the two of them had fallen out.

The humour was one of his sharper weapons. Not the gag-writer’s or the waspish but something slower and better armed, because it came with timing and a long memory. There were Jenkins stories, of course. In a car leaving the funeral of a parliamentary colleague, Jenkins observed, lugubriously, that it was the second-best funeral he had attended that week, after Martin Luther King’s on Tuesday. And Jenkins spent the last weekend of his life with Roy, in his house in the Peak District. As he got into his car, Jenkins whispered to his old friend, “Have no fear, comrade, I’ll put in a good word for you with the Duchess of Devonshire.” It is a perfect line, affectionate and absurd and class-conscious and wicked all at once, and it tells you the shape of Hattersley’s world. He could love Jenkins and decline to follow him. He could enjoy the company of the grand and stay tribally Labour. He could laugh at politics without once losing faith in it.

Jenkins was the friend and also the road not taken, and this is where the long view earns its place. Roy Jenkins left Labour for the SDP in 1981. Hattersley stayed. The decision carried more weight than is now remembered. To the disappointment of the hard left, who would have relished the spectacle, he did not flounce or sulk or defect. He stayed and fought for his corner of the party. Had he gone with Jenkins, the ballast inside Labour would have shifted, perhaps fatally. The split might have become a collapse, the moderate and governing social democratic tradition walking out in numbers large enough to leave the thing past saving. We know now that the SDP did not break Labour. It was a close-run thing, and it was made closer or safer by exactly the choices that people like Hattersley made in 1981, and history seldom records the disasters that did not happen for want of one man’s refusal to leave. Neil Kinnock supplied the public courage of the rescue after 1983. Hattersley supplied much of the intellectual weight. Tony and Gordon banked the proceeds, even as they came to find Roy an awkward reminder of arguments they had half-buried.

He had a gift for friendship across disagreement and a gift for disagreement without hatred, and both are rarer than they look. Modern politics confuses conviction with performance and loyalty with obedience. Hattersley’s loyalty was the harder and more honourable kind. He stayed because he thought Labour worth saving. He argued because he thought it worth improving. He never mistook the one for the other.

The public career was long and substantial. He served under Wilson and Callaghan, became deputy leader after the catastrophe of 1983 and stood beside Kinnock through the years when Labour had to fight its way back to being taken seriously. He was combative, clever, sometimes infuriating and frequently right. He wrote more books than most full-time authors and better sentences than many professional journalists, and he could move from democratic socialism to biography, from history to the novel, from Lloyd George to Buster his dog, without ever seeming to have wandered into the wrong room.

He had, too, the quality Labour seldom rewards and constantly needs. He would not budge. Late in life he remarked that he had ended on the left of the party without changing his views. The remark was a stinging judgement dressed as a joke. The party had moved around him while he stood still, arguing for equality and decency and Europe and the moral duty of the state to enlarge the lives of people handed too little. Stubbornness is not usually counted a virtue in politics. Over a long enough span it can be the only thing that keeps a tradition alive while the fashions blow over it.

That is why Choose Freedom still speaks. It reminds the party that its deepest argument was never only about spending or taxation, regulation or reform. It is about the kind of freedom a decent society owes its citizens. Not the thin freedom of being left alone in your insecurity, but the fuller freedom of having the means to make something of a life. The book came out in 1987, the year Kinnock stood at the Welsh party conference and asked why he was the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to reach university, and answered that it was because there had been no platform on which the others could stand. The two men were making one argument by two routes, Neil Kinnock from the platform and Hattersley on the page, and it was their whole generation’s argument: that freedom without the means to use it is an illusion.

A few years ago, during one of those Labour crises when courage was required, a letter arrived from Roy. It was dated 5 March 2019. Above the typed text, in his own hand, he had written, “Dear Tom Watson.” It said, “I write to express my admiration for the courage and determination with which you are tackling the crisis in the party. You have my complete support. If there is anything that I can do to help, I am at your service.”

[Insert image of Roy Hattersley’s letter here]

When the letter arrived, I nearly wept. It mattered not because it was long, for it was not, but because of who had written it. Roy Hattersley knew what it cost to fight for the soul of Labour, and knew what it felt like to be denounced by people who thought passion excused stupidity and purity excused cruelty. He understood that the democratic socialist tradition had to be defended on two fronts at once, against those who would abandon its egalitarian heart and against those who would render it unelectable and call the result virtue.

The letter led, later, to dinner at his home, with Roy and Maggie and my friend Fraser Kemp, who was very close to Roy. It remains one of the happiest political evenings I can remember, generous and funny and argumentative and lit by two or three glasses of red. Roy told stories as though he had been appointed unofficial registrar of the twentieth century, and there was no pomp in any of it, only a large mind, a generous host and the conviction that politics, properly understood, is a human comedy with serious consequences.

He never led the party. He never became prime minister. That was his disappointment, though I am not sure it was his tragedy. The real tragedy would have been for the argument to die with the man, and it has not. It survives because it was always larger than the career that carried it, which is the most that any thinker can finally hope for, and more than most achieve.

Roy Hattersley chose to stay and argue. He chose ideology when politics was being told to go managerial, and equality when equality was going out of fashion, and he spent a lifetime insisting that Labour take back the word freedom from the people who had shrunk it. The party owes him more than it has always remembered. I hope, now, it remembers properly.

* It is worth being exact about what he meant by equality, because the word has been made to carry both more and less than he intended. He did not mean sameness, and he was impatient with anyone who pretended he did. He had no quarrel with excellence and no fantasy of a world in which everyone ended in the same place. What he wanted was the wide distribution of the things that make a life one's own: not income alone, though income mattered, but security, education, health, housing and, above all, power. He took the measure of a society not by how much freedom it promised in the abstract but by how many of its citizens were actually placed to use it. A person with a stake in their own circumstances is free in a way that a person without one is not, whatever the law says, and that, for Hattersley, was the whole point of equality. It was never the levelling that interested him. It was the freedom on the other side of it.

Also, and just to show the continuing parallels, here is a pic of my new dog, Cara the miniature schnauzer!

I first met Dan in 2011, when I was sent to Barnsley to talk to the team about the shape of his by-election. Making conversation, I asked him whether he had any hobbies. “I like the odd run,” he said. On prompting, it emerged that the odd run meant seven marathons in seven days, in a desert. The canvass teams soon learned what that understatement concealed. They would come back from doorknocking sessions complaining that they couldn’t keep up with him.

That is Jarvis in miniature. The flat Nottingham vowels, the mild manner, the instinct to undersell, and underneath it a capacity for endurance that borders on the supernatural.

The biography is by now well known, though it bears repeating because so few politicians have one like it. A comprehensive school in Nottingham. International politics at Aberystwyth. Sandhurst at twenty-three. Fifteen years in the Parachute Regiment, with tours in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, and an MBE along the way. As a young captain in Kosovo he stood yards from General Sir Mike Jackson during the standoff at Pristina airport, listening as Jackson told the American General Wesley Clark he was “not going to start World War Three for you”. Jarvis later called it “a very surreal moment in my life”. Jackson liked what he saw and made him his personal staff officer. By Helmand, Jarvis was commanding a company against the Taliban in night fighting of the kind most of his parliamentary colleagues have only read about.

The harder story ran alongside the military one. His first wife Caroline was diagnosed with cancer while he was still serving. She died in 2010, at 43, leaving him with two young children. Months later, with a by-election Barnsley looming, Jarvis became the first soldier since the Second World War to resign his commission to fight it. He won and has held the seat and its successor ever since. His memoir of those years, Long Way Home, took him five years to write and won Best Memoir at the 2020 Parliamentary Book Awards. It is a book about grief written in the register of a soldier’s report: here are the facts, draw your own conclusions. It is all the more devastating for it.

Then came the long wait. From 2015 onwards, Jarvis was the leader Labour’s moderates kept almost drafting. He declined to stand against the post-Miliband field (Burnham, Cooper, Corbyn), saying his young family came first, and later admitted he regretted not thinking harder about it. His 2016 speech at Demos was the boldest thing he has said in public: “New Labour’s approach wasn’t enough. It didn’t get at the root causes.” He understood before most of his colleagues that globalisation had delivered cheap consumer goods and cheap labour in the same container. He flirted again in 2019 and again stood back. Instead he became the first Mayor of South Yorkshire, steering the region through Covid and the floods, then returned to the front line as security minister after the 2024 election. He has spent two years immersed in the threat picture: Iranian plots, Russian sabotage, the hard wiring of the national security state. Nobody arrives at the Ministry of Defence better prepared.

He arrives, though, over the body of a good man.

John Healey deserves an honourable political obituary. The son of a Wakefield family who finished his pre-university education at one of the most prestigious private schools in the country before Cambridge, he came up through the disability rights movement and the TUC, where he was campaigns director. He has sat in the Commons since 1997, served Tony and Gordon as a well respected minister, shadowed defence for four years and then did the job itself with distinction: leading Europe’s support for Ukraine, delivering the Strategic Defence Review, securing the biggest forces pay rise in nearly twenty years. He was among the most capable ministers in this government. His resignation letter pulled no punches: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” Fairness requires one caveat. The Defence Investment Plan had been delayed for the best part of a year on his watch, to the fury of industry and the dismay of allies, and there is a respectable argument that he should have forced the issue sooner. But a cabinet minister resigning over a point of principle is rare enough to command respect. He goes with his reputation enhanced.

Which makes Jarvis’s task brutally clear. He inherits a settlement his predecessor judged a danger to the country: spending creeping from 2.6 per cent of GDP next year to 2.68 per cent by 2030, an extra £13.5 billion against the £28 billion the service chiefs say they need. The armed forces minister Al Carns, another decorated soldier, walked out alongside Healey. In resigning after John, Carns showed that however stellar military his career, his political judgement was poor. The causes he proclaimed in his resignation letter required him to be on the inside, not on a tour of the resignation interview circuit.

The defence community, from the chiefs to the supply chain, is distinctly irritated, and worse: it agrees with the Secretary of State who just resigned. Jarvis’s biggest challenge is convincing that community he can hustle up the defence budget across Whitehall, against a Treasury that has just faced down a defence secretary and won.

My guess is that he can. Here is why. The single biggest question being put to the various candidates for the Labour leadership, despite there being no vacancy, is where do you stand on defence and the defence budget. Wes Streeting has gone to the backbenchers to build his platform. Andy Burnham circles with his. Every contender knows that credibility on national security is now the entry ticket to the contest, just as Jarvis himself argued back in 2019 when he said a Labour leader “had to be credible when it comes to the economy and when it comes to national security”. A prime minister fighting for his political life cannot afford to lose two defence secretaries over money in one parliament. Jarvis knows it. The Treasury knows it. That is leverage, and leverage is what Healey, for all his virtues, never quite had.

There is a deeper shift underneath. For a decade the party’s centre of gravity ran through health, housing and the cost of living. It now runs through the defence of the realm. Politics has moved, at last, onto Dan Jarvis’s ground: the man with the medals, the comprehensive education and the marathon habit, who has waited fifteen years while lesser CVs overtook him in the queue.

The defence establishment is angry, the budget is short and the government is wounded. Cool under fire is no longer a line in his memoir. It is the job description. This is the coming of the Dan, and the question that has trailed him since Barnsley, whether there is more to him than the back story, is finally about to get its answer.

Jones is good on the media. He is good at the despatch box. He is also good at something rarer: remembering that policy consists not only of a soundbite on Radio 4 but of decisions, money, people, timetables, milestones and consequences.

He always sounds as though he has read the file, not skimmed it. His manner is calm and forensic. He does not arrive at the despatch box looking for his Martin Luther King moment. He takes the issue apart, identifies the working parts and tells the House which bit has failed.

This was useful today this week because the issue was Peter Mandelson.

There are names in politics which do not just describe a person but summon a whole fantastical world. Peter Mandelson is one of them. To my generation he was not just a colleague, strategist, fixer, enemy or saviour. He was the one of the biggest planets in the solar system.

Tony and Gordon may put it differently now, but New Labour had three red giants: Tony, Gordon and Peter.

To mix metaphors wildly, Tony had the sunlit uplands; Gordon had the engine room; Peter had the wiring and the fuse box and secret buttons only he could press to illuminate or darken the stage.

Darren Jones has the advantage of temporal distance. He was born in 1986, a year after I first met Peter. When Labour won in 1997 Darren was ten. While some of us were living through the New Labour psychodramas, he was engaged in matters such as maths homework, football stickers and what his mum was making for tea.

For Jones, Mandelson is history rather than intoxicated memory and scar tissue. No fascination. No buried grudge. These conditions made him the right minister for the big day.

In a previous media round Jones had already said the crucial point out loud: Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. Yesterday he was dealing with the consequences of this flawed decision.

There was a cold clarity in that. He did not try to make the appointment look less indefensible by placing it under the dim yellow light of process. Nor did he turn it into one of those solemn Westminster sermons in which everyone agrees that lessons must be learned. He jettisoned Peter with the brutal calm of a man cutting loose spoiled cargo before the ship hits the rocks.

He did not try to dazzle the House with indignation. Nor did he sink into the blancmange of officialese. He plainly explained the documents, the redactions, the police requests, the missing messages and the process still to come.

There is another clip I will put below because it shows the same quality under more enjoyable conditions. Jones was answering an urgent question with the Prime Minister behind the eight ball and Kemi Badenoch leading the charge. The Opposition sensed danger to the Government and became overexcited. Jones began in a difficult chamber. The Labour benches wanted reassurance. The Conservatives wanted a scalp. The Prime Minister wanted it all to end. Then Jones changed the weather.

He did not do it by bellowing, Prescott style. He did it by finding the weak point in the Opposition’s case and pressing on it. He exposed the overreach. He made the attack look less like scrutiny and more like shallow opportunism.

The Labour benches came alive behind him. It was a bravura performance precisely because it did not advertise itself as one. The best Commons performers are not always those who produce the finest phrases. They are those who understand the mood of the House and move it half a yard in the right direction. Jones did that.

His biography helps explain the steadiness. He was born at Southmead Hospital and grew up in Lawrence Weston, in the Bristol North West seat he now represents. His mum was a hospital administrator. His dad was a security guard. Money was tight. New Labour investment reached his community, including a ‘gifted and talented’ scheme that helped point him towards university. He became the first in his family to go. For the flat in the area he lives in, this was unusual.

Jones read human bioscience at Plymouth, worked for the NHS, trained as a solicitor and specialised in technology law, including energy and telecoms. He chaired the Business, Energy and Industrial Select Committee. He became Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This is a steep and fast climb. It does not feel accidental.

Like Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, he comes from humble origins and talks about them without turning the violin up to eleven. He does not ask to be admired for where he started but to me, where you start matters in politics because it gives an indication of your tenacity.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he entered the department where Cabinet ministers’ dreams go to die and his first job was to administer the poison. Yet this Guardian interview on the spending review shows the wider Jones project. He was not just counting out the money or trapping ministers fingers in the till as he slammed it shut. He was trying to connect fiscal discipline to Labour purpose, with child poverty close to the centre of the argument.

This is the right sort of Labour politics. Not sentiment but method. The child who needs a better start in life is the moral end. The route is less stirring: spending envelopes, negotiations, reviews, departmental settlements, performance measures and the small dull gears by which government either works or does not. Jones sees the mission and uses the machinery.

He’s quietly achieved something that several ministers over the decades have completely failed on: civil service pay reform, pushing through one of the biggest changes to senior civil service pay in decades, introducing performance-related pay for top officials. The easy version would have been a large speech attacking Whitehall and a private retreat before the unions arrived. Jones chose the harder route. He worked with the unions and the system to get the reform done.

This is his method. Reform without media drama. The Mandelson statement was not the of day any ambitious politician dreams of. No one enters public life hoping to explain redactions, missing messages and a former ambassador’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. But politics has a way of testing ministers not on centre stage but at the mop cupboard.

Jones did not make the Mandelson story disappear. No minister could. The documents are too awkward and the history too heavy. But he stopped the Government from digging a deeper hole than the one they have already dug.

There is a brutal symmetry here too. A child whose life chances were widened by the social ambition of the New Labour years stood in the Commons and helped draw a line under one of New Labour’s great architects.

One generation built the ship. Another is trying to keep it off the reef.

Westminster produces too many people who become famous before they become useful. Jones appears to be attempting the rarer route. He is becoming useful first.

I like the cut of his jib.

For new readers, the short version is this. In 2017 I began a weight loss journey that eventually saw me lose 126 pounds at my lightest. I wrote a book about it. I talked about it. I became, for a while, the bloke who had beaten type 2 diabetes into submission and changed his life.

By 2022, even after Covid had added a few pounds back on, I could still run 5k in under half an hour. I lifted weights. I rode bikes. I walked everywhere. I led an active life. I felt, if not invincible, then at least in reasonable working order.

Then several juggernauts hit me at once.

I had spent three months in Cornwall with my sister and brother-in-law, helping give my stepfather a loving death. An important relationship imploded. I was, for a while, basically homeless. I returned to the House of Lords in Westminster, with all the media scrutiny that comes with it, and it was a shock to the system.

The weight nudged back up. By the spring of 2023, I was still lifting weights three times a week and riding Lime bikes around London most days like a teenager. I thought nothing of walking 5,000 steps to a meeting. Looking back, my alcohol intake had crept up from virtual teetotal to probably around the national average. Nothing like the good old days, by which I mean the bad old days, when it was very much higher than average. But still, it had crept up. I also developed a mild obsession with my friend’s stash of Nutella that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Then, in March 2023, the mother of all juggernauts arrived. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Fuck. Cancer. The Big C. The thing you think happens to other people until it happens to you. My invincibility cloak blinked out.

Diagnosis, treatment and recovery took about six months. I will spare you the details, because some details are best left to consultants and the other people who have had prostate cancer. Prostate cancer makes clever people invent new words. My favourite is “bladmin”. But lifting weights and riding bikes were not on the menu for several months.

Actually, it turns out they were not on the menu for more than three years. A three-year fall. Over a thousand days of drift and denial.

I was busy voting on important things at 1am. I had stopped being homeless and bought a house, which meant the house immediately started needing things doing to it. I had to earn a living. I got distracted by a very high stakes civil litigation with the brave Prince Harry. Even when I got the all-clear from cancer, that renewed subscription to the gym proved elusive.

I was a busy guy. Or so I told myself. Unbeknown to me, a toxic entity had entered my body. To me, it was almost worse than prostate cancer. Denial.

I knew the weight was piling on because my clothes no longer fitted me. I did not know how much I weighed because the denial toxin was flowing through my veins again. Today’s transgression would always be compensated for on another day, at an undefined time, in a future that was somehow both inevitable and never scheduled. Weight, blood pressure and blood glucose were the only things I was strong enough to push upwards.

There were interludes when I thought I was back on track. Mounjaro worked quickly. I lost 20 pounds, but I did not enjoy being glued to the loo seat and I put the weight back on almost immediately after coming off the drug.

Then life hit me on the head with a sledgehammer.

Not only was I obese again, but the cancer came back earlier this year. Is it weird to say this was the wake-up call I needed to choose life again? Perhaps it is. But it is true.

This time, I knew I had to build life around health again. Not bolt it on. Not squeeze it into whatever was left after work, travel, stress, email, politics, family, deadlines and the general admin of being alive. I had to put health at the centre and let everything else arrange itself around it.

If I am fortunate, it is because I am now in a position in life to prioritise time over income generation. At my age, time is the rarest commodity I have. Not money. Not status. Not another meeting in another room with another bad cup of coffee.

Time.

So I have taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords for treatment and recuperation. Initial tests suggest the cancer has gone, though I will not know for certain until more tests in the summer. Despite the uncertainty, I feel good. Chipper, in fact.

Two months ago I gave alcohol a pause. Most days I am in bed before ten and certainly before eleven. I am back on a ketogenic diet, which means plenty of steak, fish, broccoli and cauliflower rice. I have quadrupled my average step count from slug-like to respectable. I walk for 15 minutes after meals. Most importantly, gloriously and with some creaking from the older parts of the machinery, I am lifting weights again.

I will tell you about my exceptional PT in another newsletter, but he is helping me with old people’s things, such as co-ordination, balance and how to stretch your adductor muscles without snapping something necessary for transit. I have also been enrolled into the most competitive steps accountability group since the invention of the Olympic Games. All tricks and strategies are deployed to get daily bronze, silver and gold medals in the group.

It is very early days. Just under a month in to my new programme, I am eight pounds lighter, 5cm tighter around the waist and clearer headed for more of the working day.

There are only another 94 pounds to go. That number would have crushed me once. It doesn’t now. I know it is possible. I have done it before. I know the terrain. I know the traps. I know denial now when it slithers into the room pretending to be reason.

I also know this time cannot just be about losing weight. It has to be about finding stress free environments, staying present for my kids. Keeping my brain active. Staying well enough to write, think, laugh, cook, walk, lift, travel and love.

The first time I lost 100 pounds, I thought I was proving something to the world. This time, I think I am proving something to myself.

So here I am again. The second journey.

The next 100.

Confessional over. Thanks for getting this far.

Tom

PS My kids have convinced me that I should get a dog. They say it will get me out of the house early each day. This will give me the edge in the steps accountability group. It’s a little known fact that dog walkers live longer than non-dog walkers and fish owners. More on this in the weeks ahead.

His prescription is growth, reform, technological seriousness, a more capable state, cheaper energy, serious skills policy, a firmer approach to illegal immigration and a structured relationship with Europe from a position of national strength.

I have just read his end of term report card for the Labour government. Sadly, I endorse most of it. But his analysis misses the new context Keir Starmer inherited and, more importantly, it does not fully address the new social contract voters now require.

The country Tony governed was not this country. The economy is weaker. Trust is lower. Housing is more punishing. Work is less secure. The state is more strained. The future feels like decline rather than the heady optimism of 1997.

If I have to wear labels, and I have always hated them, today I will reluctantly pin his radical centre badge to my lapel. I still prefer liberal social democrat. It has more depth. It carries a tradition of liberty, equality, security, Europe, constitutional reform, public service, cultural seriousness, economic realism and a belief that politics should enlarge human possibility rather than merely manage decline.

Tony is also right about the Labour Party’s tendency to delusion. Several of my close personal friends, whom I admire deeply and of whom I am immensely proud, have lost their senses in the last few weeks. At best, they have succumbed to socialist romanticism. At worst, they are clinging to any alternative to their present predicament, however underpowered, untested or uncosted.

This is not new. Labour has always had a weakness for turning emotional angst into political strategy. It can persuade itself that a lost voter has not really left or that an electoral warning is merely proof of insufficient purity. Anyone who has lived inside the Labour family knows that self-delusion is not a passing infection. For much of our history, it has been a recurring condition.

Yet Tony is also writing from a different economic memory. He led Labour for thirteen years and served as Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007. His premiership sat inside a long expansion. The ONS says that after the early 1990s downturn, the UK experienced almost sixteen consecutive years of economic growth, the longest continued expansion on record.

That made some choices possible. Keir Starmer inherited a harsher landscape: austerity’s legacy, Brexit’s 100 billion drag, Covid’s damage, inflation’s aftershocks, war in Europe, high housing costs, low trust and public services that often feel close to exhaustion. Growth is essential. But growth without a distributional purpose will not rebuild trust.

This is the important distinction. The success of New Labour was not Tony alone. It was Tony aligned with Gordon. One understood change, the requirement for national adaptability and the need to make Britain face forwards with a powerful story. The other understood inequality, had a focus on poverty and knew how the state could alter life chances. They would both be irritated by my sweeping generalisation, but I suspect they would also recognise the distinction.

That was in its own unique way the social democratic synthesis of nineties and noughties. It was not always harmonious. It was not even always civilised. But it worked for more than a decade because it held together two truths that must never be separated: Britain has to adapt to the future, and the future has to be made fair.

Tony’s new note is strong on the first truth. It is weaker on the second.

That is the central problem. The radical centre cannot be only a doctrine of adaptation. It must also be a doctrine of equality. Not equality as a slogan or a conference applause line. Equality as the test of whether economic change improves people’s lives or merely improves national statistics.

A liberal social democrat in the radical centre should be losing sleep over young people’s unemployment and the social consequences of AI. The House of Commons Library says there were 729,000 unemployed 16 to 24 year olds in January to March 2026, with youth unemployment at 16.2 per cent, up from 14.2 per cent a year earlier. These numbers represent stalled beginnings.

Your first job is not just a payslip. It is structure, confidence, habits, colleagues, self-respect and a first adult place in the world. If AI removes entry level tasks, if firms stop hiring juniors, if training becomes something everyone praises and nobody funds properly, the consequence will not just be lower productivity. It will be national anxiety, resentment and a politics of further division.

Tony sees AI as the central challenge of government. He is right, sort of. But a social democratic AI agenda cannot stop at productivity, procurement and state capability. It has to ask who owns the gains, who bears the risk, who gets trained, who gets left behind, and whether young people are offered work with dignity.

That is where equality returns. I am hesitant about some of the proposals now being made by potential new leaders. They need testing, costing and stress testing against the real economy. But at least they are policy alternatives of the type Tony demands. He has asked the right question, and they are beginning to answer it.

That is why Wes Streeting’s proposal on capital gains tax deserves serious treatment. He has argued for equalising capital gains tax with income tax, describing it as a wealth tax that works. Reports suggest it could raise up to £12 billion a year. There are design questions. There are always design questions. But the instinct is recognisably social democratic: income from ownership should not automatically be treated more gently than income from work.

Andy Burnham is offering another missing piece: constitutional reform. He has argued for proportional representation, replacing the House of Lords with a Senate of the Nations and Regions and changing the whipping system. This is not constitutional hobbyism, and you clearly cannot deliver it all in three years, but it goes to the question of whether the state can command consent. A politics that feels overcentralised and remote cannot be fixed only by better delivery from the same machinery.

Tony diagnoses the “politics” bubble. But he does not quite follow that diagnosis far enough. If politics itself has become trapped, then the answer cannot only be better policy from cleverer people in stronger central departments. It must include the dispersal of power, stronger local leadership, serious devolution, possible further electoral reform and a democratic state that treats people as citizens, not as passive recipients of government services.

This is the larger tradition of liberal social democracy. It distrusts the unregulated market, but it also distrusts the remote state. It wants power dispersed rather than hoarded. It wants citizens who can shape the services they rely on. It wants equality without diluting difference and liberty without leaving people alone. It also means security: the security of work, home, health, neighbourhood and childhood. To be fair to Keir Starmer, I think he is trying to deliver that.

(Full disclosure: I sit on the Palantir UK public policy committee). That is also why the recent Palantir row matters. Tony says Labour is not yet serious enough about AI adoption in the state. The Met decision is a practical example of the problem. Sadiq Khan’s decision to block the proposed £50 million AI deal with Palantir has been reported in unattributed briefings as resting on corporate ethics in procurement. The decision looks to me like City Hall has succumbed to narrow pressure group lobbying at the very moment when the Met says it urgently needs better tools to modernise policing.

The price may be weaker anti-corruption work and weaker data alignment across the Met. That means weaker capacity to identify dangerous patterns, dangerous officers and the most dangerous men to women. This is exactly the kind of argument Labour cannot avoid. The answer is not blind adoption. But it is not moral panic either. It is transparent procurement, legal safeguards, democratic oversight, clear accountability and the confidence to use modern tools where they improve public safety.

And then there is culture. It saddens me that Tony barely mentions it. It saddens me more that almost nobody in the leadership argument has made culture central to the future of the country.

Culture is not an optional extra. It is part of national confidence, education and place. It is one of Britain’s strongest global assets. The radical centre should defend culture because, if it does not, no one else will do it with enough seriousness.

Andy Burnham could be the first Prime Minister who had once been Culture Secretary. Wes Streeting, from personal experience, is a serious music fan and a lover of wider culture. Both should know that music, libraries, museums, theatres, film, games, publishing, grassroots venues and creative education are not marginal to the national story. They are part of how a country becomes confident enough to change.

This is where the old social democratic test returns. “What a wise parent would wish for their children, so the state must wish for all its children.” That sentence, attributed to R. H. Tawney, remains one of the cleanest statements of Labour’s moral purpose. It is demanding. It asks whether the state is ambitious for every child, not just the children of the already secure.

That is the missing social contract. People will accept change if they believe it is being made with them and for them. They will not accept it if they think AI, tax reform, welfare reform, policing technology and public service reform are being done to them by people who will not live with the consequences.

So my slight disagreement with Tony is not that he is wrong. It is that he is incomplete.

He is right that Labour needs a project. Right that the centre must be radical. Right that policy should come before personality. Right that Britain needs a serious account of AI, geopolitics, Europe, growth, welfare and state reform. Right that Labour cannot drift into a leadership contest without first deciding what it is for.

But the next Labour project cannot be a memory of New Labour. The last successful Labour project worked because it combined adaptation with redistribution, modernity with equality, reform with public investment, security with liberty and national confidence with a moral concern for those excluded from opportunity. That combination is harder to achieve today, but it is more necessary.

Today, Tony has laid down a gauntlet to Keir, Andy and Wes and anyone else who considers leading the Labour Party. He is putting the questions many Labour MPs will be asking, especially those who did not sign letters, did not issue ultimatums, did not resign from posts and did not make demands from radio or television studios. I may quibble with what is missing in his analysis, but his challenge needs to be answered by our potential future leaders and Prime Ministers.

What do you stand for?

What are your policies?

What is your plan?

Today has been a sad day. I do n…

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A leadership election while in government cannot become a factional scramble. It must be swift, orderly and fair. That means fairness to Keir Starmer if he chooses to defend his leadership. It means fairness to Wes Streeting and any other candidate if they secure the support required to stand. And it means fairness to Andy Burnham if a route back to Parliament can be found in time.

No one should have the rules rewritten for them. But nor should the timetable be used to shut out a serious candidate before MPs and members have had the chance to judge the field properly. The NEC’s responsibility is not to favour one contender over another. It is to create a process that commands confidence.

If Makerfield is the route, then the members there must be treated with respect. They decide who their candidate is going to be. The voters of Makerfield decide who represents them in Parliament. No constituency should be treated as just a mechanism in a national leadership contest.

That is why I believe the NEC should make every reasonable effort to set a timetable that accommodates a leadership election in which Andy Burnham can stand if he finds a route back to Parliament in time. This is not about the party engineering a seat for one candidate. It is about ensuring that the process is not designed, deliberately or otherwise, to exclude him before MPs and members have had the chance to judge the field.

That goes against some of my instincts. Voters do not like unnecessary by-elections and nor should they. Parliament is not a private members’ club. Seats belong to the electorate, not to parties or personalities. But these are unusual circumstances.

Mayors are now a significant part of our democracy. They hold substantial mandates and exercise real political authority. Andy Burnham is also a major figure in the Labour movement. If anyone outside the Commons has earned the right to be tested in this way, he has the strongest case.

But this cannot drift. If a by-election route is to be opened, it must be opened immediately. If a leadership election is triggered, the NEC should proceed without delay, with a timetable that is fair to the sitting Prime Minister, declared challengers and any credible candidate seeking a route back into Parliament.

That is the only way to produce a result that commands confidence inside the party and beyond it.

The process also needs clear standards of conduct. Members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should not attack candidates through newspapers, broadcast studios or anonymous briefings. They should argue openly, honestly and directly inside the party’s democratic process. A contest for the leadership of the governing party is not a media entertainment. It is a decision about who should serve as Prime Minister.

I know this party well enough to know that if any serious candidate is seen to have been blocked, that grievance will follow the outcome from day one. Labour cannot afford that. Whoever leads the party and the Government after this process must have authority, legitimacy and room to act.

They will need the political latitude to change the factors that have held the Government back and contributed to last week’s defeat. I tried to set out some of those issues in a recent newsletter, though I do so as someone who has retired from frontline politics.

This is a serious moment for the United Kingdom and a critical moment in Labour’s history. It is not the time for MPs to posture on broadcast media or brief against one another. It is the time for discipline, judgement and speed.

The right course is clear: run a process that gives every serious candidate a fair chance, respects local members and voters and produces a Prime Minister with the authority to lead.

My thoughts are with Labour MPs as they make very difficult decisions in the days ahead. Members should also make clear to the NEC that the party needs a process that is quick, fair and worthy of the responsibility Labour now carries.

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It was cruel, obviously. But it was also mesmeric television. This was before I’m a Celebrity, before Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, before the nation learned to process emotional collapse by voting for someone to eat a kangaroo’s private parts.

I once asked a seasoned lobby journalist why they became so obsessed with prime ministerial scalpings. He replied, with the calm authority of a man describing a wine list in a Soho restaurant “We all got a taste of it in 1990 and we’ve been chasing the high ever since.”

This was before Twitter and TikTok, before the narcotic little reward system of social media made television look like a Church of England jumble sale, before every political rumour came with its own mini film crew, graphics package and man from a polling company pretending not to enjoy himself.

These days it’s much worse.

Lobby journalists like to post social media clips of themselves outside Number 10, standing there in the rain as though democracy is a hostage situation and only their boom mic can catch the sound of machine gun fire inside Number 10.

Five hundred years ago, political journalists would have been the ones nearest the gallows at a Whitehall hanging, not out of cruelty, you understand, but they needed to make sure there was no pulse.

Churchill, Attlee and even Wilson would not have lasted ten minutes in the digital age. Churchill would have survived Hitler only to be destroyed by a breakfast clip involving Pol Roger and a dressing gown. Attlee would have been written off after a podcast appearance on ‘The Westminster Meat Grinder” in which he answered every question in five words and refused to describe his “leadership journey”. Wilson would have been finished by a TikTok explaining the pound in your pocket, while a producer shouted, “Great, but can we make devaluation more relatable to a younger demographic?”

You can hear the tremor in journalists’ voices whenever a Prime Minister starts to wobble. Nick Robinson’s voice climbed two semitones this week, and accelerated into that special Today programme register reserved for wars, resignations and arrests

The House of Commons isn’t much better

In a crisis, Parliament moves onto MP time. MP time is not like normal time. Normal time has hours, lunch and perhaps a walk after tea. MP time is lived in minutes. Each minute contains a factoid, a WhatsApp, three rumours, a lobby journalist asking whether you are “hearing anything” and someone you barely know texting, “Where’s so and so?” as though the Labour Party is missing a child in a supermarket.

Everyone gets involved because not being involved is the same as political death. If you are not in a WhatsApp group, you may as well be in a crypt. If you have not been asked to sign a letter, you are the undead. If you have not been quoted anonymously, even inaccurately, you begin to wonder whether you still exist.

When there is no new development, the lobby, fuelled by adrenaline, sleep deprivation and Pret coffee, starts to go a bit mad. Speculation hardens into analysis. Analysis curdles into “mood”. Mood becomes another graphic. The graphic foretells a constitutional crisis. MPs then feed this machine because they, too, need the little dopamine pellet of seeing their own unattributed thought appear on the Twitter account of someone from Sky News.

I know this because I have been there. I have fed the beast. I have been the beast’s sous-chef. I have diced the onions of intrigue and plated up the garnish of doom. Watching it now is anxiety-inducing.

This week I have developed a quiet respect for the roughly 150 Labour MPs who have spent the last 72 hours doing precisely nothing. They have not resigned. They have not been promoted. They have not signed a letter demanding something, opposing something or urging a “process” towards something. They have put their heads down and done their jobs, an act so eccentric in modern politics it may soon require its own sub-genre in undergraduate political science classes.

Naturally, this will irritate everyone who has done something. The activists of the coup, counter-coup, pre-coup, soft-coup, non-coup and vibes-based-coup cannot understand why their colleagues refuse to perform. “Why won’t they move?” they ask, like disappointed generals watching a battalion of squares remain seated.

And to every MP who has stayed off broadcast media, well done. If there were an award for remaining calm under fire, I would give it to you. Not at a ceremony, obviously. That would attract cameras and then you would have to go on Politics Live to explain why you accepted it.

I have taken more interest than I should in the minute-by-minute tribulations of the poor Prime Minister this week. Most of it has been wall-to-wall hyperbole, of course. But one comment deserves to be placed in a glass case, lit from beneath and studied by future historians of political self-harm.

One Labour MP said on Times Radio that bond markets “will have to fall into line” with Andy Burnham’s policy agenda.

Hahahaha.

No, really.

Hahahaha.

The bond markets, those notoriously obedient institutions, just waiting for a Labour MP to tell them to stop mucking about and behave. Somewhere in the City, a bond trader heard this, cancelled his Bloomberg terminal subscription and said, “Fair enough, a Labour MP has spoken. Pack it up, lads. Democratic socialism has priced the gilt curve.”

To all those campaign managers out there, if there is a campaign, and I am not saying there is, do not let anyone offering this argument within fifty feet of it. Not near the manifesto. Not near the launch. Not near the biscuits. Certainly not near a microphone. Put them in charge of something harmless, like the commemorative tote bags, and even then check the exchange rate.

And if a Treasury spad is reading this, I know there are not as many as there once were, please send everyone Paul Mason’s article on bond markets. Or, at the very least, a YouTube explainer called Why Money Sometimes Leaves The Country When Politicians Frighten It.

It’s only Wednesday and I’m exhausted. The beast is still being fed. And somewhere, deep inside the lobby psyche, 1990 is still playing. Thatcher walking out. Cameras flashing. Reporters’ hearts kicking against their ribs. Lager being spilled in Hull. The first hit. The original rush.

They have been chasing it ever since.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favour of tackling structural misogyny. But I have a hunch that the message sent from Wakefield, Birmingham, the South Wales Valleys, North Wales, Grimsby, Kirklees, Sandwell, Wigan, Sheffield, Sunderland, Barnsley, Gateshead, South Tyneside, Hartlepool, Halton and much of Scotland was not: “Please accelerate plans to tackle structural misogyny.”

The voters Labour is losing are not crying out for another cross departmental co-ordination of something. They are asking whether anybody in power understands the cost of living, fraying public services, anti social behaviour, insecure work, immigration pressures and the sense that their towns have stopped moving forward.

Politics is partly about priorities and partly about signals. Too often Labour still signals upwards into professional metropolitan culture rather than outwards into the country it exists to represent.

That does not mean abandoning progressive values. It means speaking the language of everyday life again.

I think the recent elections show that the Reform party has crossed an important psychological threshold. Voters now see Reform as a potential party of government. Almost as importantly, Reform itself has started to behave as though it believes that too. Nigel Farage is no longer merely treated as a protest politician. Millions of voters can now imagine him entering Downing Street, though I suspect they want to know about the five million too.

I may be wrong, but I do not think the same is true on the progressive side of politics. I do not think most voters see the Greens as a potential governing party, though some plainly do. And after a bruising few months, I suspect even many Green voters do not seriously imagine Zac Polanski walking into Number 10 as Prime Minister.

That asymmetry matters. The old two party system is broken, perhaps gone. Britain is increasingly organised around two broad blocs, one progressive and one right wing. Reform’s danger is that it can consolidate the right, hollow out the Conservatives and still raid Labour’s edges. That is why it can win in Labour areas: Labour leaks voters in several directions, while much of the anti Labour vote gathers behind Farage.

So the blocs remain real, but they are not sealed containers. The party that best consolidates its own bloc while raiding the soft edge of the other one has the advantage. Right now, that party is Reform.

That is also why the next election is still there to be won by Labour. But Labour will not win it by pretending the old politics still exists.

Before Labour MPs plunge themselves into a battle for the leadership of the party, they should take a breath and acknowledge the structural problems that any Labour Prime Minister would have to confront. Changing leader will not magic away low growth, the cost of Brexit, higher defence spending, rising welfare costs, broken public services, the politics of migration, the cost of net zero or the tax choices now closing in on the government.

That is why Labour also has to level with the country about the arithmetic.

The manifesto tax pledge increasingly looks unsustainable. Labour inherited broken public services, soaring welfare costs, stagnant growth, demands for rearmament and a commitment to major capital investment, all while ruling out increases in the main rates of income tax.

In retrospect, that was politically understandable but economically close to impossible.

Once you rule out the main rates of income tax, the pressure does not vanish. It moves. It turns up in higher employer National Insurance contributions, punishing business rates and net zero costs loaded onto bills rather than dealt with transparently through taxation.

These are distortionary taxes because they change economic behaviour in damaging ways. Employer National Insurance discourages hiring. Business rates punish physical investment and productive high streets. Net zero levies hidden in energy bills raise industrial and household energy costs without an open fiscal debate about the trade offs involved.

A more transparent approach to taxation could also ease some of the cost pressures flowing through the economy, particularly in energy intensive industries and consumer prices. At the very least, it would allow the country to debate inflationary trade offs straight rather than hiding them in bills and payroll costs.

That is bad economics and bad politics.

So what should Labour do?

First, it should stop treating Europe as an embarrassment.

Brexit still drags on growth. Estimates of the long term cost now run to around £100 billion a year in lost output. You do not have to relitigate the referendum to recognise economic reality.

A closer relationship with Europe is part of a serious growth strategy. Labour should pursue practical alignment where it serves British jobs, investment and security: trade, standards, energy, science, mobility, defence and youth opportunity. If closer alignment makes Britain more prosperous, Labour should say so.

Second, Labour should be straight about tax and growth.

There is a serious pro growth argument for reducing business rates and other business taxes. High streets, factories, warehouses and small firms are the visible economy of many towns. Tax them in ways that discourage investment and places will feel poorer.

But if Labour cuts business taxes, it must say how they will be paid for. If the answer is higher income tax or National Insurance, say so. That is better than hiding hard choices in employer costs, property taxes and household bills.

The same straightness is needed on net zero. If government is investing in the energy transition, why hide so much of the cost in energy bills? Direct taxation would make the trade offs visible. Energy subsidies and transition costs would sit alongside health, defence, education, welfare and transport. This is not an argument against net zero but it is an argument for paying for it plainly.

A sensible wealth tax may also have a place, if carefully designed and not used as a performative raid on aspiration. But the larger point is truthfulness. Modern states cost money. Ageing populations, insecure borders, rearmament, broken infrastructure and rising welfare bills will not be wished away.

Third, Labour has to build credibility on migration, citizenship and belonging.

Given the scale and geography of Reform’s victory, it is striking how little plain discussion there has been about migration in the election aftermath. Voters can see that the post Brexit immigration system has not delivered what many Leave campaigners promised. Labour should not talk about that luridly but it should talk about it clearly. Small boats exist because of Brexit. We should say it more often.

The work on earned citizenship and managed migration is important and overdue. It speaks to people who feel the state lost control and the old rules stopped making sense.

Labour also has to speak plainly about the post Brexit migration wave. Some call it the Boris wave. It could just as easily be called the Farage wave, because Brexit campaigners promised to end free movement from Europe and replace it with a global points based system. That is broadly what happened. EU migration fell sharply. Non EU migration rose sharply. Net migration then reached a record peak in the year to March 2023.

Most temporary migrants have no recourse to public funds. But many people on work and family routes can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain after five years. Once granted ILR, they may become eligible for public funds if they meet the usual rules. Labour needs a policy that is firm, fair and intelligible before Farage turns the whole issue into a fiscal panic.

This means holding the progressive bloc together while sounding credible on crime, immigration, welfare, borders, streets and public spending. It means speaking to voters who want fairness and better public services, while also speaking to those who think the state has lost control.

That is not easy. But it is the job.

Liam Byrne has argued for some time that Reform voters are reachable. I think he is right. Most are not extremists. They are often pessimistic, anxious, economically insecure and unconvinced that anybody in authority has a plan for the country. Sneering at them is morally lazy and politically disastrous.

Voters do not have to like a Prime Minister. They have to believe the Prime Minister understands the scale of the country’s problems and is prepared to make hard choices. That is the test now.

Before Labour MPs plunge themselves into a leadership battle, they should ask whether any alternative Prime Minister would face different structural problems. They would not. The tax choices would remain. Brexit would remain. Defence spending would remain. Welfare reform would remain. Migration would remain. Net zero costs would remain. Business rates would remain. The need for growth would remain.

The question is not simply whether Labour changes leader. The question is whether Labour has the courage to tell the country the truth.

I still think this is heading towards a Stop Farage election. But Labour cannot assume anti Farage sentiment will carry it over the line. It will not. The lesson of Thursday is also that you can no longer just say ‘Stop Farage by voting Labour’.

The public mood is anxious, fragmented and impatient. People want competence, seriousness and candour. The election is still there to be won. But only if Labour understands the new blocs, faces the fragmentation inside them and remembers that the country is listening with its nerves, not just its intellect.

The Times says:

“A group of disgruntled backbenchers first elected in 2024 are canvassing support for a challenge to the prime minister after Labour’s expected drubbing in local elections on Thursday. They intend to send an open letter to Starmer — whose allies insist he will fend off any coup — in which they will blame him for the party’s losses and request he sets out a timetable for his resignation in the wake of expected losses to Reform UK and the Green Party. The Times understands that several cabinet ministers are aware of the plot, which is reminiscent of the round-robin missive that set in train Blair’s departure 20 years ago this September. It comes amid what one minister described as “real anger in the PLP [parliamentary Labour Party]” at Starmer’s leadership. Blair was forced to concede that he would serve no more than another year as prime minister a day after seven frontbenchers, including Gordon Brown’s lieutenant Tom Watson, quit in an ultimately successful attempt to oust him. The group wrote to Blair and said the “uncertainty over when you intend to leave office” was “damaging the government and the party”. He had set a deadline for his resignation within 24 hours of its publication.”

If any of these anonymous MPs want my advice, I am available for wise counsel. I would tell them not to be as reckless as we were in 2006. Experience is what you get just after you needed it most.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Labour’s current woes, the answer is not two dozen backbench MPs writing a public letter calling on the Prime Minister to resign.

Firstly, it will not work. A letter that starts as an anonymous threat will end as a public loyalty test. It will turn political anxiety into a Westminster psychodrama and it will do so in front of the voters.

Secondly, it would damage the whole Parliamentary Labour Party. Voters will see a party talking to itself while the country is shouting at it.

Thirdly, it would give Labour’s opponents the easiest attack line in politics: they are not focused on you, they are focused on themselves. Reform would dine out on it. The Greens would dine out on it. The Conservatives, who have recently behaved like a leadership contest with a party attached, would dine out on it. Even the Liberal Democrats would find a way to get a morsel out of it.

Fourthly, it would not answer the real question. If Labour has lost support to Reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, the solution cannot simply be a different name on the door. The party has to listen harder, think deeper and recover its political purpose.

So, with the greatest respect to any colleague tempted by this course: that was then and this is now. Do not do it. Really, do not. If I had my time again, I would not have signed the letter in 2006. There. I’ve said it.

But is it really nearly twenty years since a myth was made?

The myth is that I drafted the letter to Tony Blair calling on him to go, then somehow gathered Labour MPs in a secret curry house in Wolverhampton to plan the end of a premiership over poppadoms.

I have never quite worked out where the curry house coup story really took hold. It is true that I had a curry with Sion Simon, with whom I regularly had curry. That was not unusual. In the West Midlands in those days, having curry with Sion Simon was less a conspiracy and more a dietary pattern. It was practically on repeat prescription.

It is not true that we discussed a coup. In fact, if I recall correctly, and I admit I am on slightly unsteady ground here because I had drunk quite a lot of lager, we spent most of the evening talking about community radio in Sandwell.

That, I appreciate, sounds suspicious. Why would Sion Simon be interested in community radio in Sandwell? He wasn’t. But he was a patient listener.

Somewhere along the way, several lobby journalists decided that “listener-funded community breakfast show” was almost certainly a codeword for something more sinister.

When the story broke, it was as if Westminster had discovered the Profumo affair, but with naan bread. Within twenty-four hours, every curry house within a three-mile radius of West Bromwich seemed to be receiving calls from journalists asking whether I had recently been in their restaurant. At least 90 per cent of them answered yes. To be fair, this was not implausible. Back then, I really did like curry.

Eventually, the secret location was revealed as a Westminster exclusive. It was Bilash in Wolverhampton. The meeting had apparently been so secret that Sion and I had signed the visitors’ book.

This is where the myth becomes truly magnificent. Guy Fawkes had a barrel of gunpowder. We had a lamb vindaloo. His plan was to blow up Parliament. Ours, apparently, was to leave a paper trail, order five extra pints of lager and bring down a Prime Minister before the bill arrived.

Over time, the story acquired all the necessary ingredients of a Westminster legend. There was a letter. There was a curry. There was a visitors’ book. There was a dramatic phrase, “the curry house coup”.

It did not matter that I was not the author of the letter. I had become the maître d’ of the coup. It did not matter that no band of conspirators had gathered in a candlelit back room, whispering “Tony must go” between mouthfuls of pilau rice. The story was too good to check. In politics, a myth with a decent headline can outrun a fact wearing running spikes.

So perhaps today’s Times article gives me a useful opportunity. Not only to warn a new generation of Labour MPs against repeating the mistakes of 2006, but also to rebut the old myths before they are reheated for the twentieth anniversary.

I did sign the letter. I did resign. I do not pretend any of it was a model of calm political diplomacy. But I did not organise a secret curry house coup. I was not standing at the door of Bilash with a clipboard, a seating plan and an anarchist’s manifesto.

Nearly twenty years on, the curry house coup has outlasted most of the political events of that year. It certainly changed the course of my life. And any MP thinking about signing a letter this weekend should understand that it will stay with you for years, and generally not in a good way.

Thinking about it, maybe Sion and I should go back to Bilash for a commemorative curry.

This time, though, I am not signing the visitors’ book.

But it would be a mistake to stop there. The polls and projections suggest something larger is happening. This is not simply a judgement on Starmer, or even on Labour. It is beginning to look like a judgement on the two-party system, and on the Whitehall way of governing that has sustained it.

The figures are stark enough. Recent polling has Reform in the mid-twenties, Labour and the Conservatives in the high teens, the Greens in the mid-teens and the Liberal Democrats still very much in the field. Psephologists have pointed to heavy losses for both main parties. Some projections have Labour losing nearly 2,000 council seats, the Conservatives also going backwards, and Reform, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats making the gains.

If it happens, it will represent a fissure in our two-party system.

The sad truth is that many people will not be voting on Thursday for the party they think will run local services best. They will be voting against. Against Labour. Against the Conservatives. Against Westminster. Against a system that feels remote, slow and incapable of doing the things it promises.

Local elections have always carried national messages. That is not new. What feels different this time is the extent to which the local has been crowded out altogether. Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have helped turn the campaign into a vote about race, migration, Israel, Iran and a whole range of questions which have little to do with who collects the bins most efficiently, fixes the roads or keeps the libraries open.

That does not mean those issues are unimportant. It does mean that the poor councillor defending a record on social care, housing, libraries or potholes may find himself judged on matters over which he has no control at all. Local democracy is often unfair. This year it may be positively brutal.

I can remember two years of terrible results for Labour during the Gordon Brown years. They were a blow. They chipped away at his authority. They added to the sense of a government losing altitude. But they did not stop the daily flow of crises being dealt with in Number 10. The phones still rang. The papers still came in. The decisions still had to be made. Government carried on.

What feels different now is the shape of the punishment. In the Brown years, the system still made a kind of sense. Labour lost. The Conservatives gained. The pendulum moved. The shock was painful, but the mechanism was familiar.

This time, the vote is scattering. Reform gains here. Greens there. Liberal Democrats somewhere else. Independents in places where local anger has found its own candidate. The two-party system is not simply under pressure. It is nose down, hurtling towards the runway, while everyone in the cockpit insists the instruments are being reviewed.

In Wales, the polling tells the same story in a sharper form. YouGov’s MRP has Reform and Plaid Cymru effectively neck and neck, with Labour a distant third. Other polls point in the same direction.

The striking point is not simply Labour’s weakness. It is the wider displacement of the old parties. Labour and the Tories are losing their place in the system. The Conservatives, already weak in much of Wales, risk becoming almost peripheral, while the main contest shifts towards Plaid and Reform.

That is the pattern across Britain. The governing party is being punished, but the official opposition is not the automatic beneficiary. In Wales, as in England, the protest is scattering. Reform takes one kind of discontent. Plaid takes another. Labour falls back. The Conservatives struggle to remain relevant.

That is why Thursday should not be read only as an anti-Starmer election. It is also an anti-Tory election, and a warning about the failure of the old alternation: Labour in, Conservatives out; Conservatives in, Labour out. Voters are not simply changing government. They are changing the terms of two-party politics.

That raises a harder question than whether Starmer has had a bad week. It asks whether the old bargain still holds. Britain’s governing model rests on the idea that a party wins power, commands the Commons, controls Whitehall, sets the direction for local authorities and delivers change. But voters increasingly look at housing, the NHS, social care, migration, energy bills, transport, planning and policing, and conclude that the machine does not work as advertised.

Whitehall still thinks in departments, consultations, reviews and efficiencies. The public thinks in broken appointments, rising bills, unanswered calls and things that never seem to get fixed. The gap between those two worlds is now a political fact.

Kemi Badenoch’s position is not easy either. I may be the only person who thought she was actually doing well as leader. She had begun to sound sharper and more settled. Then she disastrously called it wrong on the Iran conflict and overplayed her hand by calling Keir Starmer a liar. There are moments when an opposition leader must wound the Prime Minister, but the danger is that in doing so, they look less prime ministerial. I cannot help thinking Kemi is too addicted to social media moments rather than long-term strategic clarity.

Ed Davey, whom I like very much, appears to have been forced into chasing the daily media cycle, from Trump to Mandelson and whatever else happens to be passing across the screen. One assumes his team worry that the one-man media machine of Zack Polanski will steal the oxygen. They may be right. But it is not always wise to chase a populist, particularly for liberals.

And what of the potential winners, Polanski and Farage? Their success would tell us as much about the weakness of the old parties as about the strength of the new ones. Both have understood that attention now moves faster than organisation. The danger is that attention is not the same as trust, and noise is not the same as government.

Polanski is certainly a media sensation. No one can deny that. But short-term sensation is not the same as long-term strength. He has allowed his party to be drawn into the hands of people whose political style will be familiar to anyone who watched the autocratic grip placed on Labour under Corbyn. That may work well on TikTok, but he has already turned himself into the riskiest choice for PM in a generation.

And then there is Nigel Farage. He will claim victory on Thursday whatever the numbers say. It is hard to lose from a standing start, especially when you have spent years explaining that every setback proves the establishment is terrified of you. Whether this projects him towards office is another question. A reported £5 million personal gift from Christopher Harborne, now under scrutiny by the Electoral Commission and the parliamentary standards commissioner, ought to matter in the arguments ahead. These are unusual times, though. Perhaps in the new politics, £5 million is just a rounding error. Who knows, in the present climate?

Meanwhile, the people who deserve most sympathy are barely in the national story at all. There are some very fine civic leaders facing serious challenges this week. They will not all deserve the verdict they receive. Many will have worked hard, served decently and tried to hold together public services under impossible pressure.

They are in my thoughts. I have always believed local parties are nothing without their councillors. They are the lifeblood. They are the glue. They keep the organisation alive when the national leadership is popular, and they keep it breathing when it is not.

As commentators say this is going to be the worst night in human history for an incumbent government, one thing can safely be said: Labour has at least got its expectations management right!

Somewhere in Tory and Labour HQ, clever young men with lanyards are drafting lines saying they always knew the asteroid was coming and are pleased it has landed broadly within the expected blast radius.

But the more serious point is not the size of the defeat. It is the meaning of the fragmentation. Voters are no longer merely changing sides. They are losing faith in not just the main parties, but the whole system.

That is a much more dangerous thing.