“I left Keir Starmer’s Britain,” began one of our most intriguing headlines this week, “…and here’s why I’m now moving back.” Having abandoned her expat life in Sydney, Katie Strick promises that her reasons to be cheerful about the UK are not just the heatstroke talking, brought on by a spring heatwave. “Two months into our return, I have yet to have a phone stolen or witness knife crime in my local park. A traffic warden even said hello to me this morning. Grouse all you like about Britain – I’m sure I’ll be joining you next time my train is cancelled, or my phone is stolen – but Nigel Farage isn’t prime minister yet,” she wrote.
Ah yes, Reform’s disappearing leader. According to Sonia Sodha, the man most likely to win the next election remains a long way from office – and could well be in for a cruel summer. Trailing in the latest polls for the Makerfield by-election, and mired in controversy about a £5m “personal donation” from an expat crypto billionaire, the Clacton MP – who Sodha says has “sometimes appeared coated in Teflon”, but who has long “relied on his Marmite status to escape proper accountability” – could yet find himself suspended from the Commons and subject to a recall petition that finds him ejected from his seat. Choc ices all round!
John Rentoul has yet more bad news for Farage’s Reformers. Makerfield is shaping up to be an “algorithm election”, with an even harder-right rival party, Restore Britain, up to third place in local opinion polls, thanks in part to online support from Elon Musk: “If Restore ‘splits the right’, it could take enough votes from Farage’s candidate to hand the seat to Labour.” A cheeky win for Andy Burnham would surely boost morale within Labour’s rank-and-file (if not Downing Street), at a time when key indicators on the governmental dashboard – fastest growth in the G7, net migration down, NHS waiting lists shrinking… – suggest that things really are getting better.
Kay Burley, a former Wigan resident who has reported from Makerfield, wrote for The Independent how “Farage’s ‘pint and a fag’ approach plays well in a constituency that, until relatively recently, was staunch Labour. But will that be enough? Burnham is no normal Labour candidate. If anyone can keep the seat red, then he can.” To misquote the famous newspaper headline from the 1953 coronation: “All this… and an encyclical from a former prime minister, too!”
Tony Blair chose this week to make his first major intervention since Labour returned to power – and it was arguably his most consequential toe-dip since he left Downing Street almost two decades ago. Talking about himself in the third person, he wrote how “the politics of the future may be better understood by those presently outside politics”, before declaring that a “fundamental reset” is needed.
Fortunately, Blair has all the solutions. Rentoul summed up his 5,700-word essay in one neat sentence: “He disagreed tactfully with Gordon Brown, less tactfully with Ed Miliband, and contemptuously with Jeremy Corbyn; and he tried to help Keir Starmer, offering increasingly pointed policy advice on net zero, digital ID and foreign affairs, before going full blast against a Labour Party preparing to dump the prime minister and replace him with something worse.”
So, in Blair’s opinion, change – the very slogan on which this government won its loveless landslide – isn’t always as good as a rest. Until next week.
