If Keir Starmer didn’t already understand Harold Macmillan’s warning about ‘events, dear boy, events’, he got a lesson on Saturday. At 4.49 p.m. on Truth Social, Donald Trump ate humble pie about the -sacrifice of British troops in Afghanistan, having previously claimed Nato forces avoided the front line. ‘We enjoyed it for a few minutes,’ a close aide recalled.

Eleven minutes, to be precise. At 5 p.m. on the dot, Andy Burnham announced that he wished to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. So began the latest psychodrama at the top of the party. This was an open challenge to Starmer’s authority and a test both of his remaining political power and his willingness to use it.

It is the pithiest explanation the government has yet provided of what it is doing

The conversation was brief. It was decided that Starmer’s allies on Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) would reject Burnham’s request. An ally said: ‘A man says he wants to launch a leadership challenge, but can’t when he’s not an MP, then says he wants to become an MP and the current Prime Minister has the ability to stop that. What do you think is going to happen?’

Burnham did little to lobby even his allies on the NEC to vote for him and lost the vote 8-1. Colleagues think this is a strange strategy. ‘He’s been elected to serve four years and he wants to call the biggest by-election ever in Britain and divert huge amounts of party resources to it. It wasn’t hard to find people, whether they like Keir or not, within the party machinery who think that’s not a very good idea.’

With........

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