12 February 2025

Whiplash on the Labour benches

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rebel Labour MPs fear a draconian clampdown on dissent after a particularly heavy threat from the chief whip, Alan Campbell. Left-wingers mutter darkly that few may survive a purge after the enforcer sent a menacing letter to Jon Trickett, sole Labour voter against the winter fuel allowance cut. The missive warned that any future dissent could result in disciplinary action. Leninist brawler John McDonnell, still whipless after a revolt against the two-child benefit cap, fired a request back to Campbell on behalf of the Socialist Campaign Group seeking a meeting and clarification of what lefties regard as a fatal tightening of Parliamentary Labour Party rules. One snarled that he and comrades were unlikely to finish the parliament as Labour MPs if an oppressive regime was imposed. Keir Starmer styling his government as “disruptors” and “insurgents” appears to exclude disrupting and insurgent MPs.

Bad news for Starmer should he ever wish to buy Greenland from Copenhagen to gift the Arctic territory to covetous Donald Trump. A Danish diplomat claimed Britain had first dibs under a 1917 treaty. My snout whispers that head scratching and a search of drawers in King Charles Street unearthed nothing, so a blindsided Foreign Office dispatched a sleuth to the National Archives in Kew to retrieve dusty documents. No purchase option on Greenland exists, David Lammy was informed. It seems that Greenland can never be used as a modern form of Danegeld to buy peace with raider Trump.

Currently living rent free in both Labour and Tory heads, Nigel Farage most trashes his former Conservative Party home. An inside source murmured that the Reform chancer himself placed a tale that his allies and those of Kemi Badenoch’s wannabe replacement Robert Jenrick met at Mayfair’s In and Out private members’ club to discuss uniting the right. Reform-leaning Jenrick getting the blame was a bonus point. Badenoch subsequently declared a Tory-Reform pact was “for the birds”. Division-sower Farrago was a pig in muck.

Starmer’s facial contortions see him mockedas an unfunny Stan Laurel by cynical Labour MPs. Several across the party’s waterfront have now predicted in my hearing that the PM will be gone before the election. Still more a drip than a trickle, but it’s started. Angela Rayner, graduate of the school of hard knocks, is their choice to blow the froth off privately educated city slicker Nigel Farage’s beery appeal to the working class.

At the TUC, Unite union bigwig Steve Turner bemoaned the labour movement’s inability to counter Reform slogans. “The problem on the left,” he declared, “is we always want to write a book when we need a punchy pamphlet.” I trust he was fully minuted.