A darkened room in central London. Curtains drawn to keep the lawbreakers out. A few dozen brave journalists who have dared to walk the streets. Mugshots of convicted criminals along with the sentences received line the walls on video screens. Though weirdly, none of James McMurdock. Perhaps Reform has yet to update its own database of undesirables. Young James is taking a break from the party whip while the Public Sector Fraud Authority investigates Covid loans to his companies. That’s the trouble with London today. Trust no one.
Just after 11am, a siren goes off and Nigel Farage, the Conservative-turned-Reform councillor Laila Cunningham and Tory-turned-Reform MP Sarah Pochin settle down behind a table. To their right is a lectern with the slogan “Britain is lawless”. Miraculously, none of them have had their phones nicked or been stabbed on the journey into London. A city where crims operate with impunity. Dante’s seventh circle of hell. A place where only the lucky get out alive.
First up is Laila, a woman who freely admits she expects to get robbed every time she leaves her front door. She’s almost sorry when she makes it back home in one piece. Laila has something she wants to get off her chest: she doesn’t actually like anyone. Her country has been betrayed.
One day, she might ask who was responsible. The answer might be closer to home than she imagines. Nige has done as much to shape the UK in the past 10 years as anyone. If you want to know why we’re broke, you can start with Brexit. But for now, Laila is beyond thinking. She’s just a heartbeat away from taking out an AK-47 and mowing down a nearby gang.
Next comes Sarah P, AKA Nurse Ratched. The unthinking person’s idea of a thinking person. She, too, is in despair. London is a ruined city. The only people out in daylight hours are shoplifters and drug dealers, most of them foreigners. Sarah is almost in tears as she goes on to say that most Afghan migrants are potential sex offenders. How she yearns for the days when you could rely on all rapists to be white.
But that’s two-tier justice for you. Spare a thought for poor Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to prison just for inciting people to burn refugees alive inside their hotel. Where was the harm in that? It was obviously only a joke. And Sarah is still laughing her head off at it. Worryingly, Farage appears to be lining her up to be his home secretary. She’s one of the few Reform MPs he hasn’t yet fallen out with.
For the details, such as they are, we have to wait for Nige. He, too, is living out his own fantasies of a London that is one large no-go area. Crime is out of control, he says. Don’t believe the statistics that show violent crime is going down. Just turn the graphs the other way up and use your own data.
Stop and search everyone. Especially foreigners. Zero tolerance for anything. Apart from James McMurdock. Three strikes and it’s life imprisonment. Send our worst prisoners to El Salvador – with any luck they might get tortured there. Send foreigners back to foreign lands. Build Nightingale prisons and throw away the keys. Recruit 30,000 new police officers. Abandon all diversity and equality targets. If you want a proper copper you need to get a white, heterosexual man to do the job. Only then will you feel safe.
This is Nige’s fantasy world. A country on its knees, reduced to lawlessness by the woke and the Blob. A land only he can save by locking every crim up. No offence would go unpunished. To prove his point, he passes around a sheet of paper with some bogus figures explaining how he would pay for everything. Shrink the state, cut net zero and HS2 and you can do what you like, he says.
He’s asked about El Salvador. Is he serious? Oh, no. Not that El Salvador. He can’t think why he said it. He’s all heart really. Nige and reality have a small intersection area.
Starmer appeared before the House of Commons’ liaison committee on Monday. Photograph: House of Commons/PA
Elsewhere in Westminster, the government is winding down before the summer recess. For Keir Starmer, this means one of his thrice-yearly appearances before the liaison committee. A chance for the select committee chairs to ask the prime minister a few – reasonably – polite questions about his performance so far. It’s noticeable that the Labour members of the committee are a great deal tougher than they were last time round.
Meg Hillier gets things going by asking what he thinks the country will look like in three years’ time. It will be amazing, Keir replies. Everything hunky-dory. No one should take his brilliance for granted. The Tories have broken everything. He is the saviour who will mend things. In the public seating area, the first eyelids begin to droop. Starmer has the unique gift of being able to put any crowd to sleep. It’s got him out of bigger holes than this.
The session drifts on as Keir talks technobabble – “no silver bullet”, “delivery targets” – while the committee tries to reintroduce him to the real world. If he is really committed to ending poverty, why doesn’t he consider getting rid of the two-child benefit cap? And even the diluted reforms to the welfare bills are going to increase poverty. Debbie Abrahams insists these aren’t Labour values and that she feels ashamed. Liam Byrne wonders why Starmer is so reluctant to make changes to capital gains tax? Then he could afford to give tax breaks to the less well-off.
Keir mumbles something about not setting the budget months ahead and the forecasts constantly changing and we all go back to sleep. Hillier ends by asking what has been his highlight of his first year in office. “Easy,” says Starmer: walking into Downing Street for the first time. Which rather suggests it has all been downhill from there.
