KING OF THE NORTH TO LOSE HIS THRONE?

In the great British tradition of political theatre, where ambition is dressed up as public service and the electorate plays the role of a sceptical audience armed with rotten tomatoes, one can only admire the latest plot twist involving Andy Burnham, the self-styled King of the North, and Sir Keir Starmer, the man who makes a cardboard cut-out look like a bundle of raw charisma. Burnham, having long ruled Manchester like a benevolent satrap with a slightly better haircut, has decided the time is ripe to descend from his mayoral throne and contest the Makerfield by-election. The local Labour majority sits at a slender 5,000 or so—thin enough to make a bookmaker nervous—and recent council results saw Reform UK gobbling up seats like a man who has discovered the all-you-can-eat buffet after years of rationing. One is tempted to ask: has Starmer, that master of the quiet knife, engineered a subtle trap for his ambitious colleague? Or is this simply politics as usual, where the gods of electoral arithmetic laugh last and loudest?

Sir Roger Scruton, had he still been with us to sharpen his pen on this particular folly, might have observed that British politics has always been at its most entertaining when it resembles a provincial repertory company performing Macbeth with a budget shortfall. Burnham arrives not as a humble servant of the people but as a figure of almost messianic self-regard, the sort who has spent years cultivating the image of the plain-speaking northerner while presiding over a city that, to the less charitable eye, occasionally suggests a municipal experiment in how many problems one can accumulate while issuing press releases about levelling up. His popularity in Greater Manchester is real enough—local boy made good, photogenic in a hi-vis jacket, capable of delivering a soundbite with the weary gravitas of a man who has seen too many trams delayed. Yet Makerfield is not Manchester. It is the sort of constituency where the phrase "left behind" was practically invented, a place where the abstract promises of Westminster meet the concrete realities of post-industrial life, and where voters have begun, in alarming numbers, to flirt with alternatives that do not involve another lecture on net zero or diversity workshops.

The numbers, as the post in question dryly notes, are not encouraging for the aspiring Prime Minister-in-waiting. A majority of 5,000 in these febrile times is less a cushion than a trampoline—liable to launch the candidate skyward at the first gust of anti-incumbent sentiment. Reform's local successes speak to a deeper rot in the Labour coalition: the old working-class base, long taken for granted, has started to notice that the party of Attlee and Bevan now concerns itself more with pronoun etiquette and international climate summits than with wages, borders, or the price of a pint. One pictures the canvassers trudging through the streets, clipboards in hand, encountering not the deferential voters of yore but citizens who have watched their towns stagnate while the metropolitan commentariat clucks about "populism" as if it were a mysterious virus rather than the entirely predictable immune response of a body politic fed up with being ignored.

Here the sardonic mind turns to Starmer himself, that paragon of cautious competence who somehow contrives to make competence look like a mildly embarrassing condition. Could he have deliberately set Burnham up for a fall? The suggestion has the delicious tang of palace intrigue, the kind that keeps political journalists in overtime and the rest of us in popcorn. Starmer's leadership has been defined by a certain ruthless tidiness—clearing out the Corbynites, triangulating with the centre, and maintaining the expression of a man perpetually disappointed by the shortcomings of reality. Burnham, with his northern power base and telegenic profile, represents a rival centre of gravity. What better way to neutralise a potential leadership challenger than to encourage him into a contest where victory is possible but defeat plausible, preferably splashed across the front pages as a humiliating verdict on "Starmer's Britain"? If Burnham wins, Starmer can claim credit for the masterstroke; if he loses, well, one troublesome prince has been bloodied in the provinces. It is the sort of calculation that would have earned a wry chuckle from the more Machiavellian minds of the Blair era, though one doubts Starmer possesses quite that level of feline cunning. He may simply be relieved that someone else is willing to take the risk while he clings to Number 10 like a limpet on a particularly unyielding rock.

Of course, one must not overstate the conspiracy. British politics runs as much on incompetence and accident as on grand design. Burnham may yet prevail, buoyed by residual loyalty, tactical voting, or the sheer inertia that still propels the Labour machine in its traditional heartlands. The bookies, those cold-eyed realists, seem to fancy his chances. Yet the very fact that a figure of Burnham's stature must fight on such contested ground tells its own story: the Red Wall, once thought rebuilt, is showing fresh cracks. Reform channels a discontent that the main parties dismiss at their peril—part economic anxiety, part cultural revolt, part sheer exasperation with a governing class that lectures more than it listens. In Makerfield, the voters will not be choosing between nuanced policy platforms so much as delivering a verdict on whether Westminster still speaks their language.

One is left reflecting, in the best Scrutonian tradition, on the absurdity of it all. Here is modern Britain: a former mayor eyeing the premiership via a by-election in a marginal seat, while the actual Prime Minister navigates scandals and slumps with the air of a man wondering why the script keeps deviating from the focus-grouped version. The electorate, meanwhile, watches with the jaundiced eye of theatregoers who have seen too many revivals. Whoever triumphs in Makerfield, the larger drama continues—the slow, often comic unravelling of certainties that once seemed as solid as the mills and mines that built these towns. Politics, as ever, provides the entertainment. The joke, as usual, is on all of us.

HANTA LA VISTA, BABY

One can only admire the stamina of our international health bureaucracy. Like a ageing actor who has played Hamlet once too often, the World Health Organization has returned to the stage with a new production, this time featuring not a melancholy Dane but a rodent-borne virus that has had the temerity to appear on a cruise ship. The MV Hondius, a vessel whose very name sounds like a suppressed sneeze, has become the unlikely theatre for this drama. Some nine cases, three deaths, passengers from twenty-plus countries, contact tracing, quarantines, and the faint but unmistakable whiff of another opportunity for the great and the good to demonstrate their indispensability. 

Dr David Bell, a man with the weary air of someone who has seen this particular farce before, points out the obvious with the sort of bluntness that used to be mistaken for common sense. Hantavirus, in its various guises, infects somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people a year across the globe. Most of it comes from rodents doing what rodents do best: leaving little gifts in corners where humans would rather not look. The fatality rate can be grim in certain strains, but the disease has been plodding along for decades without requiring the mobilisation of the planetary nervous system. Yet here we are, with the WHO fanning the embers of a cluster into something resembling a conflagration. One is reminded of that line from the old master: the louder the protestations of urgency, the stronger the suspicion that something else is being sold. 

The strain in question is the Andes variety, which possesses the rare and thrilling ability to pass, on occasion, from one human to another—usually after the sort of prolonged close contact that cruise ships, with their shared buffets and confined corridors, regrettably facilitate. This is not nothing. Three people have died, and one does not mock tragedy. But nor does one pretend that a handful of cases on a floating retirement home constitutes the opening act of the next great extinction event. The CDC itself, not normally accused of reckless insouciance, rates the public risk as low. The passengers are being dispersed under appropriate precautions, and the rest of us are invited to return to our lives without immediately donning hazmat suits to collect the post.

Yet the machinery grinds on. Notifications, alerts, disembarkations in Tenerife, the inevitable talk of treaties and preparedness. One pictures the conference rooms in Geneva, the earnest slides, the polite applause for yet another framework that will require funding, coordination, and—most importantly—more of the same people who brought us the previous performance now taking a victory lap for their vigilance. Bill Gates, that tireless philanthropist whose fortune seems to expand in direct proportion to global health anxiety, has interests in this area, as does the broader ecosystem of vaccine development. Malaria continues its patient work of killing some 2,000 people daily; tuberculosis around 4,000. These lack the glamour of a cruise ship outbreak. They are simply there, year after year, like reliable character actors who never quite make the poster.

The satire writes itself. In 2020 we were treated to the spectacle of the world locking itself down with a unanimity that would have impressed the more ambitious emperors of old. Models predicted mountains of corpses; television screens filled with graphs climbing like Jacob’s ladders; experts appeared hourly to remind us that we were all in this together, preferably six feet apart. The public, to its eventual regret, largely complied. Economies were torched, education disrupted, mental health collateralised, and a great many liberties accepted as temporary inconveniences. We were told it was science. It was often modelling, politics, and fear dressed up in a white coat.

This time, however, the audience has read the script. The replies to Toby Young’s post and the broader murmur online carry the unmistakable tone of people who have seen the sequel and recognise the same director. “We’re not buying it,” as one succinctly put it. The trust that was squandered so profligately during the coronavirus years has not been magically replenished. People remember the shifting goalposts, the suppressed debates, the economic devastation handed out with the breezy assurance that experts knew best. They remember, too, how certain interests—pharmaceutical, technological, administrative—profited handsomely while small businesses and the young bore the brunt. A cynicism has set in, and cynicism, for all its sourness, can sometimes function as a healthy immune response. There is something almost touching about the WHO’s persistence. Like a missionary in a land grown sceptical of miracles, it continues to preach the gospel of coordinated global action against the latest zoonotic interloper. Hantavirus on a cruise ship! Quick, dust off the pandemic agreement, convene the working groups, prepare the communications strategy. One almost expects Tedros himself to appear on deck in a hazmat suit, striking a solemn pose for the cameras. The optics are irresistible: decisive leadership in the face of a novel-ish threat. Never mind that the novelty is mostly in the setting, not the pathogen.

The language of emergency is seductive because it flatters the emergency-mongers. It turns bureaucrats into heroes, modellers into prophets, and the rest of us into grateful extras. Yet reality has a stubborn habit of intruding. Most hantavirus remains a rural, rodent-afflicted affair. The Andes strain’s person-to-person transmission is real but limited, requiring the sort of intimacy that does not scale easily to continents. The cruise ship cluster is a genuine if contained misfortune—precisely the sort of incident public health systems should handle with quiet competence rather than orchestral fanfares. The public, one senses, has grown tired of being cast as the perpetual victim in these morality plays. They have mortgages, jobs, children to raise, and a healthy suspicion that the next round of restrictions, digital IDs, or “benefit-sharing” mechanisms for pathogens will serve everyone except them. The lesson of 2020 was not that viruses do not exist or that precautions are always foolish. It was that fear is a potent political solvent, and those who wield it rarely surrender the tool voluntarily.

So here we are again: a handful of cases on a ship, three tragic deaths, and the machinery of panic revving its engine with familiar enthusiasm. The difference this time is the audience. They have seen the show. They know the plot twists. And they are, in increasing numbers, refusing to applaud on cue. In the long run, that may be the healthiest development of all. A public that has recovered its scepticism is harder to lead by the nose, even when the nose is pointed firmly toward Geneva. The rodents will keep doing what they do. The question is whether we will let the human ones do the same.

STARMER HEADS TO THE GALLOWS

One does so hate to say one told you so, particularly when the spectacle unfolding is less a political miscalculation than a slow-motion auto-da-fé conducted with all the self-awareness of a man walking into a plate-glass window while admiring his own reflection. Yet here we are, scarcely a week after the 2026 local elections, watching the Prime Minister of this once-sturdy realm cling to office with the tenacity of a limpet on a particularly barnacled rock, as the returns come in like so many shovelfuls of earth onto the coffin of New Labour’s dismal sequel. 

Labour, that great tribune of the people (or at least of the sort of people who summer in Tuscany and lecture the rest about pronouns), has shed nearly 1,500 council seats. Reform UK, that ragtag assortment of populists whom Sir Keir once dismissed with the curled lip of a man encountering an uninvited tradesman at the back door, has gained almost as many, seizing councils and scattering the red rosettes like confetti at a particularly disastrous wedding. Councils long held in the iron grip of Labour—places where the party machine once operated with the quiet efficiency of a vending machine dispensing favours—have fallen. The working-class heartlands, those stubborn redoubts of common sense that Starmer’s Islington sophisticates had written off as regrettable atavisms, have spoken. And what they have said, in the blunt vernacular of the ballot box, is something rather closer to “enough” than to “more of the same, please, and do pass the net-zero subsidies.” 

Ah, Sir Keir. One must almost admire the man’s capacity for delusion, were it not so comprehensively disastrous for the country he presumes to lead. Here is a former Director of Public Prosecutions who cannot prosecute a competent policy to save his life; a lawyer whose most notable talent was looking grave in a courtroom, now reduced to delivering post-election speeches that read like the suicide note of a particularly self-pitying accountant. “The results are tough,” he intoned, with the emotional range of a speak-your-weight machine, before promptly reminding us, in that trademark nasal monotone, precisely why he must go. No mea culpa worthy of the name. No recognition that the voters—those tiresome proles with their inconvenient concerns about borders, taxes, winter fuel bills, and the general sense that their country is being administered by people who despise them—might have a point. Just the usual guff about “delivering change” from a man who has delivered little except higher taxes, colder homes, and the distinct impression that the working class were only ever useful as electoral props. 

There is something profoundly undignified about a Labour Prime Minister—once the party of the working man—positioning himself as the bouncer for a failing social experiment. The working classes, after all, bear the brunt of this experiment: the depressed wages, the strained housing, the eroded trust, the grooming scandals that fell heaviest on the poorest White girls. Starmer’s predecessors at least had the decency to look awkward about it. He has elevated awkwardness into doctrine. Cowardice has rarely been so thoroughly institutionalised.

This is the same Sir Keir Starmer who posed as the redeemer of Red Wall Britain, only to treat its inhabitants as embarrassing relatives best kept from the dinner table when the Davos set came calling. A man of such towering principle that he once promised fidelity to the working man before discovering the joys of EU regulatory alignment and green levies that hit the poorest hardest. His face—perpetually arranged in an expression of mild constipation, as if perpetually on the verge of explaining yet another U-turn—has become the very image of a politics drained of vitality, conviction, or basic competence. He speaks of “hope and optimism” while presiding over a government that has made the cost of living feel like a personal rebuke from the Chancellor. He lectures about fairness while slashing support for pensioners and hiking taxes on the very people who built this country. One pictures him in No. 10, tie ever so slightly askew, rehearsing his lines about “tough decisions” with all the sincerity of a man reading the small print on his own political obituary.

The local elections have not merely wounded this administration; they have eviscerated it. Reform’s surge is not some mysterious populist spasm but the entirely predictable roar of a native working class that has watched its concerns—mass immigration, cultural erosion, economic neglect—dismissed as bigotry for too long. The Greens nibbled from the other flank, the Lib Dems picked up the suburban protest vote, and the Conservatives, for all their own sins, at least looked vaguely alive compared to the corpse-like inertia opposite. Labour lost control of dozens of councils. Historic strongholds crumbled. And through it all, Starmer has demonstrated the political instincts of a man trying to extinguish a house fire with a watering can full of petrol. 

This is not governance; it is the administrative equivalent of hiding under the bed with a torch and a copy of the Guardian, hoping the nasty men with opinions will go away. Starmer’s posture is that of the classic lily-livered authoritarian: the man who trembles at the prospect of robust debate yet finds within himself a sudden, steely resolve when it comes to keeping out the wrong sort of visitor. The borders, we are told, must be defended—against articulate critics, that is. Against the daily flotilla of small boats carrying unvetted young men from safe countries, the drawbridge remains invitingly lowered. One almost admires the consistency, if only it were applied in the same direction. 

One can only pray—yes, pray, for in these dark times even the sardonic observer must occasionally acknowledge the need for divine intervention—that this bloodbath proves the final nail. A general election, perhaps sooner rather than later, to rid Britain of what is, without any show of doubt, the worst government and the worst Prime Minister in the entire history of these islands. Worse than the winter of discontent, worse than Black Wednesday, worse even than the various Blairite and Brownite experiments in hubris. Starmer has achieved the rare feat of uniting the nation in visceral contempt: a man so out of touch he might as well govern from a balloon drifting gently over the Channel, waving benignly at the problems below.

When the reckoning comes—and come it must—the scenes will be worth savouring. The working-class native people of these islands, long patronised, lectured, and betrayed, will rejoice in a manner not seen since VE Day. Flags, pints, old songs, the unashamed assertion that this country belongs first and foremost to those who built it, fought for it, and paid for it. No more sermons from the sanctimonious prosecutor who forgot how to read a room. No more Islington pieties masquerading as governance. Just relief, raw and cathartic, at the departure of a political class that treated them as an inconvenience rather than the beating heart of the nation.

Starmer will, of course, linger for a while yet, like a bad smell in the curtains, insisting his resolve is undimmed. One pictures him in private, perhaps, rehearsing the speech in front of a mirror: “We will not tolerate…” A noble sentiment, if only it applied to the actual disorder rather than the complaint about it. Britain has always been a country robust enough to handle foreigners with strong opinions—Voltaire, Marx, Einstein, Solzhenitsyn. That it now quivers at the prospect of a few populist speakers says less about the speakers than about the spiritual frailty of those in charge. The mood of the nation is shifting; the old managerial consensus is cracking. Starmer’s response is to bar the exits and police the conversation. It will not work. History’s joke is usually on the censorious: the more frantically they police the gates, the more obvious it becomes that the citadel has already been breached—from within, by those too weak to defend it.

But the game is up. The locals have delivered their verdict. The pyre is lit, the noose adjusted, and history—ever the driest of wits—prepares to deliver the punchline. Britain deserves better. It always has. And if the coming days finally deliver the coup de grâce, one suspects the laughter, however sardonic, will be tinged with something like hope.