Another peer, another paedophile
Unelected doesn't mean harmless.
‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.
And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.
I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.
Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.
This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.
Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.
If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.
That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, …
Unelected doesn't mean harmless.
‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.
And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.
I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.
Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.
This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.
Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.
If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.
That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, …
Another peer, another paedophile
Unelected doesn't mean harmless.
‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.
And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.
I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.
Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.
This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.
Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.
If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.
That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, …
