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Disgraced right-wing Labour saboteur Morgan McSweeney testified to MPs of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) today. Presumably by design, it was mostly like watching paint dry. McSweeney justified himself and MPs failed to really press Keir Starmer’s ‘shadow man’. An opportunity squandered.

But an apparently emboldened McSweeney went a bit too far.

McSweeney: nothing to see with Mandelson and Labour Together

To distance himself and his sabotage and spying outfit from the scandal-riddled Blairite peer and child-rapist fan, he claimed that Peter Mandelson had not liked McSweeney’s Labour Together “at all”. Mandelson was “not a fan” of McSweeney’s project to destroy the left of the party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. That would be the same Mandelson who said he worked every day to undermine Corbyn.

Right.

But according to the unchallenged parliamentary record, as well as Mandelson’s own history, Mandelson was very much for Labour Together – and even helped McSweeney set it up:

Peter Mandelson had advised Morgan McSweeney on the establishment of that organisation, which had been responsible for breaking electoral law so that it could hide the sources of its funds from the public and from the Labour party. Labour Together then sought to intimidate and smear journalists who revealed that wrongdoing

This eagerness to distance himself and Labour Together from Mandelson isn’t new. The Canary covered it as a broad phenomenon a month ago, in March 2026. And as that coverage identified, Mandelson not only attended Labour Together events, but spoke at them. Yet Labour Together has been deleting the evidence:

Isn’t this strange… Labour Together deleted this post from X showing an LT event at 2023 Labour conference, addressed by Peter Mandelson, @jreynoldsMP and hosted by Josh Simons. This screengrab was taken two weeks ago, so only deleted since then. Would be a shame if it was… pic.twitter.com/PsgwzVF9eH

— The Fraud (@StarmertheFraud) March 25, 2026

Whyever would McSweeney and his sabotage crew caught spying on journalists and spreading totally false antisemitism smears want to distance itself from the Labour-right saboteur who couldn’t stop himself gushing about Jeffrey Epstein even after that monstrous Israeli spy was convicted for the first time of raping a child? What a conundrum – and what a pity (yet not at all surprising) that none of the MPs on the FAC thought to ask.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Defence minister Luke Pollard decided to patronise the British public on his visit to the UK’s colonial bases in Cyprus. Cyprus is part of a network of British bases being used as a node in the UK’s role in the attack on Iran.

Minister for the Arms Trade in Cyprus

The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry (pronounced: Minister for the Arms Trade) posted on X on 28 April during a visit to Cyprus:

Good to speak to our forces in the Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus today.

The Iran war is not our war but I’m very proud of the way our UK forces have protected British bases, British citizens and British allies and partners.

Good to speak to our forces in the Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus today.

The Iran war is not our war but I’m very proud of the way our UK forces have protected British bases, British citizens and British allies and partners pic.twitter.com/KnUbj3umvN

— Luke Pollard MP (@LukePollard) April 27, 2026

Pollard was echoing the official, ridiculous and widely debunked British position that the UK was only involved in ‘defensive action’.

Here is the truth of it…

Basing agreements with the US

US bombers are attacking Iran from British bases. Pollard’s claim even contradicted his boss at the Ministry of Defence (MOD), defence secretary John Healey. Healey said on 11 April:

Even in this current conflict, the basing permissions that we in the UK have agreed with the US have been invaluable to their military operations.

The key phrase here being “invaluable to their military operations”. The UK is at war with Iran, whether Luke Pollard likes it or not.

Ditto the rubbernecking public who’ve watched Iran-bound bombers leaving RAF Fairford. We corrected the Guardian’s whimsical reporting on that bleak phenomenon here.

RAF Mildenhall and Lakenheath – like Fairford, these are US bases pretending to be British – have also hosted American war machines hitting Iran.

Iran itself also rejects the UK claim it is carrying out ‘defensive’ actions. On 9 April, even the legacy press reported this:

Iran certainly doesn’t agree with the British government’s position that UK bases were only used by the US for defensive rather than offensive missions. Iran’s deputy foreign minister @SKhatibzadeh says some of the bombers which left from UK bases were on missions which led to… pic.twitter.com/paychYXf80

— Emma Murphy (@emmamurphyitv) April 9, 2026

You can read our analysis here. And here is the BBC saying the same:

UK agrees to let US use British bases to strike Iranian sites targeting Strait of Hormuz

Follow live: https://t.co/XUqp5AHwcs

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) March 20, 2026

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Moreover, a former RAF officer and a former senior British diplomat have stated that Iran would correctly view the UK as a belligerent in the US-Israel war against it.

The RAF officer told Declassified UK on 7 April:

Keir Starmer’s insistence that the UK is not involved in the war, and that US aircraft at RAF Fairford are only carrying out defensive missions, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

You can listen to former UK ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton’s analysis here:

But this is the cut-and-thrust of it.

The reality of the UK’s role in the unprovoked and illegal US/Israel attack on Iran doesn’t change based on what Luke-bloody-Pollard thinks. The obligation of an aggressor in these situations is to stop what they are doing. And if the Starmer government won’t do so, it ought to feel it at the polls at the very least.

Featured image via screengrab

By Joe Glenton

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Former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls was all over the news on 27 April. This was because he responded to the accusation that he’s a Labour politician by having a meltdown live on air.

Balls argued he can’t be a ‘Labour politician’ because he hasn’t stood as an MP in over a decade. As Greens leader Zack Polanski highlighted, however, Balls was a key Labour figure for years, and he’s married to the current foreign secretary. In other words, he’s a Labour politician by stealth who’s swapped the benches of parliament for the swivel chairs of the newsroom.

Since Balls’s public embarrassment, a clip has reemerged of him talking about Peter Mandelson becoming our ambassador to the US. It’s a clip that demonstrates his thinking is fully aligned with that of the current Labour leadership:

I’m afraid this party needs to die.

Not least for the people it’s meant to look out for. https://t.co/IIslCItQ0e

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) April 27, 2026

Oh dear, Ed Balls

In the clip above, Ed Balls says:

Peter Mandelson is the kind of person who can use that sort of British allure, his past experience, his way with people.

When Balls said this, Mandelson’s “past experience” included being forced to resign in disgrace from government on two separate occasions. His “way with people” included being friends with Jeffrey Epstein – the 21st century’s most notorious paedophile.

Balls also said:

I would think Peter is – unusually – in these times – the kind of person you’d want to be your ambassador.

When journalists and politicians were saying this, what they meant was: ‘Mandelson and Trump were good pals with the same paedophile, so they should get along like a house on fire‘.

Balls also said:

And, you know, sources close to Peter have obviously been working hard to make sure he gets the job. Let’s hope he does.

The fact that sources close to Peter were “working hard to make sure he gets the job” has now become a national scandal, as we’ve reported. Today, that saw Starmer’s ex-chief of staff Morgan McSweeney doing his best to defend the indefensible:

WATCH: Morgan McSweeney makes the understatement of the century.

I made a "serious mistake" by recommending Peter Mandelson for the US Ambassador job. pic.twitter.com/2NSVprLthS

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) April 28, 2026

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And there are still more connections to discuss too.

It’s a big club

In the clip at the top, Ed Balls is talking to podcast co-host George Osborne. Osborne was the actual chancellor when Balls was the shadow; he was also Starmer’s top pick for the ambassador position they eventually gave to Mandelson:

How on earth do you reconcile the PM constantly highlighting the immeasurable damage done to the country by austerity with that very same PM wanting to reward the man single-handedly responsible for it with a plum government job?

— Ben Kentish (@BenKentish) April 28, 2026

So Labour and the Tories are in bed together, and all of them are in bed with the media. Because let’s not forget; George Osborne also had a late-stage career in journalism. After being booted out of office, he became the editor of the London Evening Standard. He held this position despite being a sitting MP.

Unbelievable, right?

And yet this sort of thing is widely accepted in the British establishment.

Featured image via The Canary

By Willem Moore

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Christian Turner is the man who replaced the disgraced Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US. He’s proven less controversial than his predecessor, but that may be about to change:

WATCH: In leaked comments, the UK’s ambassador to the US predicted Labour MPs will oust Keir Starmer as Prime Minister after the local elections

[@FT] pic.twitter.com/X0hTw4GNt8

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) April 28, 2026

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Turner is likely going to attract even stronger criticism too, because he also said:

I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States — and that is probably Israel.

While this is obviously the case, the idea that a UK ambassador to the US would admit this is wild.

Starmergeddon – once again, thanks to a UK ambassador

The recording of Turner was made in February. As reported by the FT, Turner was still settling into his role, and was talking to a group of students.

While we agree with most of what Turner is recorded as saying, it is – shall we say – unconventional that a senior diplomat would be so forthcoming with a group of young adults.

Speaking about Starmer, Turner said:

To get to a threshold where you remove a prime minister from the Labour Party, according to Labour Party rules… is really quite hard.

80 MPs have to sign a letter in public, which is like signing your death warrant. It’s much harder than for Tories. So I think that is still quite difficult.

And Keir personally is – as you know – he’s a stubborn guy. He’s never lost a fight he’s in. And so I think Keir saying “I’m quitting” is quite a high bar.

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This last point is a moment of disagreement for us, because we still remember Starmer’s many u-turns.

Turner continued:

So probably the moment I would look to is the May elections. If Labour does very badly in the May elections, I suspect the party will move to get over that threshold and remove him. It seems to be the conventional thinking.  If they do okay, he might carry on going.

We’re pretty confident they won’t do okay at this point. We’re pretty confident that they won’t do ‘badly’, either; they’re going to do much worse than that:

Projected net changes for local elections:

Ref +1,437
Grn +926
Lib +327
Con -627
Lab -1,738

Median estimate via @Moreincommon_, April '26 pic.twitter.com/OFxPMxmoUV

— Stats for Lefties (@LeftieStats) April 21, 2026

Turner also said:

For me – that’s just me as a citizen, speculating – because I have to serve with whomever is there.

So it’s a glowing recommendation from Keir’s man in Washington then.

And the controversial comments don’t stop there.

Special relationship

As reported by the FT:

During a question-and-answer session, Turner said he disliked the phrase “special relationship” to describe Anglo-American ties, complaining that it was “quite nostalgic, it’s quite backwards-looking, and it has a lot of baggage about it”.

He added: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States — and that is probably Israel.”

The comments were made in the weeks running up to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began the current conflict in the Middle East.

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We know that the government didn’t properly vet Mandelson; we’re beginning to suspect they didn’t vet Turner either.

He’s absolutely correct in what he’s said, but there’s no way Starmer would have hired this guy if he knew the man would be spitting truths like this in the lair of the Great Satan.

To be completely fair, Turner hasn’t given up on the ‘special’ rhetoric, telling the students:

There is a deep history and affinity between us. Particularly on defence and security, we are intertwined.

And also:

The relationship will carry on, if you want, being ‘special’, but I think it’s going to have to be different.

So not ‘special’ as in ‘good’ then.

Scandalopalypse

Turner dipped his toes in other hot waters too – this time the Epstein scandal. As reported by the FT:

Turner answered questions about the Epstein scandal and the contrast in how it had played out on either side of the Atlantic.

He said it appeared to him “extraordinary” that the scandal over the convicted sex offender had “brought down a senior member of the royal family [Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor], a British ambassador to Washington, potentially the prime minister, and yet here in the US, it really hasn’t touched anybody

Again, Turner is absolutely correct.

Again, it’s wild he’s the one saying it.

These comments are so shocking because the key US politician embroiled in the Epstein scandal is president Donald Trump. If Keir Starmer knew his ambassador to the US would be asking how Teflon Don wriggled out of it again, he would have deployed James Bond to retire the guy.

And as a reminder, this was in a question and answer session with students.

Students!

Just imagine the sort of things Turner is saying at functions when he’s got a couple of piss-weak American beers in him.

Private comments from the UK ambassador

In response to the leaked comments, a spokesperson from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said:

These were private, informal comments made to a group of UK sixth-form students visiting the US in early February. They are certainly not any reflection of the UK government’s position.

This is a problem then, isn’t it, because Turner’s job is to represent the government’s position in the US.

He had one job!

The FT approached Turner for comment too, but he didn’t get back to them. Given his previous comments, we can’t wait to see what he comes back with.

Featured image via The Canary

By Willem Moore

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James Hill is a former Tory councillor from West Northants. According to him, Reform UK councillor John East has been caught maintaining a fake account to do battle in Facebook comment sections:

This needs to be investigated fully.@BBCNorthampton @ChronandEcho @NNjournalism @NadiaLincoln @NLiveRadio pic.twitter.com/ngrN6w3aj8

— James Hill (@cllrjameshill) April 27, 2026

While it’s not confirmed, Hill certainly makes an interesting case.

Mike Oxlong = Reform?

The controversial account uses the handle ‘Mike Oxlong’. For those of you who are reading this aloud, you probably just realised this name sounds a lot like ‘My Cock’s Long’. Regardless of who’s running the account, then, we can say for certain they’re some sort of mature genius.

In the video posted by Hill, Oxlong is responding to a local media post about two Reform councillors leaving the party to become independents. Oxlong’s response reads:

don’t worry, the real truth about these two will come out in time.

For now, though, while the police are investigating one of them, the party is not likely to say too much.

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So either Oxlong knows something about the local Reform group’s inner workings or he’s a fantasist.

Next, Hill shows that Oxlong has 64 friends – two of which are Reform UK councillors. Beneath Oxlong’s name is the following message:

Heart of gold, nerves of steel, knob of butter

For reference, an obsession with penises is known as ‘phallophilia‘.

The key piece of evidence presented by Hill is that Oxlong recently updated his cover picture. The uploaded image pictures three men: the first is unidentified, the second is Nigel Farage, and the third is John East. The implication, then, is that East accidentally uploaded this image to his side profile instead of his main account.

In the second video uploaded by Hill, Oxlong’s cover picture has changed to an image of a cat. This video was presumably taken after the first, because Oxlong is now friends with a third councillor.

Certified oddball behaviour

If East is operating a second account to argue with people on Facebook, he’s certainly not the first middle-aged man to do so. There are actually many weirdos behaving like that on Facebook, which is why all the younger users abandoned it years ago.

Operating side accounts would definitely be odd and unsettling behaviour for a politician. As we’ve reported, though, it would hardly be the worst thing that a Reform councillor has done:

• Reform councillor reposts that Labour MP ‘should be shot’.
• Reform councillor dramatically quits over council tax betrayal.
• What a surprise – Reform councillor attends just one meeting and sends two emails in six months.
• Reform councillor fined £40,000 for hiring ‘illegal’ workers.
• Reform councillor would like to see wage cuts to fund his pay rise.

We approached East for comment, but hadn’t heard back at the time of writing.

Featured image via The Canary

By Willem Moore

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Environment campaigners have thrown a spanner into the NatWest bank’s annual general meeting over its “climate backtracking”. The ShareAction group and others have demanded protest votes against bank chair Rick Haythornthwaite at the meeting in Edinburgh today, 28 April 2026.

Natwest AGM disrupted

Campaigners say that the board must be held accountable for the bank loosening restrictions on lending to fossil fuel companies and its decision to abandon decarbonisation targets. The call has been backed by some of the bank’s major investors, including the Anglican church, which says it will oppose board members’ reappointment.

The financial scale of support for the move is significant. A ShareAction letter to the AGM demanding a meeting with bank bosses has been signed by investors holding over a billion pounds in value. These include the church, the Greater Manchester Pension Fund and investment management companies. A separate letter signed by seventy climate experts demanding a reversal of the damaging decisions is also being presented.

NatWest has changed its rules to permit lending to oil and gas companies that hold most of its assets abroad and has abandoned its commitment to only lend to companies that are ‘credibly’ transitioning to non-fossil fuels and transparently reporting on their climate impact. The bank made this move despite noting in its own 2024 company report that the lack of transparency was a major factor affecting its own ability to make proper decisions. Its 2025 report also boasted of the bank’s “new Environmental & Social (E&S) Energy Supply Sectors Risk Acceptance Criteria”.

NatWest also dropped targets limiting lending involving harmful building materials.

In 2025, NatWest awarded its chief executive a 33% pay increase, to £6.6m a year. It has also removed caps on executive bonuses.

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By Skwawkbox

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Andrew Neil is an established figure in British media and one of the people responsible for GB News. Neil is notorious for looking and acting like a human whoopee cushion, with the latest example of that being the following:

Lesson learned: never ask @afneil for a higher tip!

“I called the owner later that night, and he was fired in the morning.”@StigAbell | @KateEMcCann pic.twitter.com/oHuuFJvQBD

— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) April 27, 2026

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A multi-millionaire bragging about getting a poorly paid waiter fired? Only in the British media!

Andrew Neil’s tip was ‘a bit light’

In the clip that was merrily published by Rupert Murdoch’s Times Radio, Neil said:

I was [reprimanded] for leaving only 15%, in cash, by the way…

The waiter came back in that New York aggressive way. I was taking some people out to dinner. I was the host. I was picking up the bill. And he said quite loudly, ‘Was there something wrong with the meal or the service, Mr Neil?’ And I said, ‘No, no, it’s fine.’

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‘Oh, because it’s just, it’s a bit light,’ he said. Yeah. A bit light. And this was in front of everybody, and it was embarrassing. And I [indecipherable] got out more dollars and gave him a bigger tip.

However, he was unlucky, because I happened to know the owner of that restaurant, and I called the owner later that night, and he was fired in the morning.

Employers in the US get away with paying poverty wages by forcing their employees to rely on tips. Although the American tipping system is hard for Britons to wrap our heads around, it is part of their culture.

Lest we forget, Andrew Neil is a right-wing British commentator, and what do the right tell us over and over? They tell us people coming to Britain must respect our culture, and that they must integrate with our customs.

Why couldn’t Neil respect the Yanks’ godawful culture and simply pay up?

Paying the price for Neil’s fragility

As many highlighted, this exchange will have a more significant impact on the waiter than the temporary embarrassment Neil experienced.

Getting some poor kid fired for making you slightly uncomfortable is quite the in character flex, you fucking talking gammon.

— Tehran Tadhg (@TadhgHickey) April 27, 2026

As Mukhtar highlighted, there were other ways Neil could have solved this problem.

This is disgusting, and the fact that he thinks getting a waiter sacked is a flex is very telling.

He should have asked his friend who owns the restaurant to raise the wage. https://t.co/OlKKqbXmyP

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) April 27, 2026

Novara’s Aaron Bastani, meanwhile, commented:

Zero class.

Turns out you can’t buy it!

Parody account, The Iain Duncan Smiths, said:

Andrew Neil ensuring he will never have a bodily-fluid-free dining experience ever again

Bloated ego

People like Andrew Neil probably do believe this sort of perceived sleight is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Although he’s worked in politics for years, he’s long been outside the impacts of political decisions, and it shows.

When we suffered through the austerity years, Neil did not suffer.

When we suffered through the cost of living crisis, Neil did not suffer.

When Neil got asked to inflate his tip, however, he ensured everyone suffered by throwing his weight around and moaning to the Murdoch press.

Featured image via Times Radio

By Willem Moore

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(Tracy Worrall)

8 min read1 hr

Through MHCLG, Labour has begun a programme, like many plans before it, to regenerate hundreds of the most deprived places in Britain. Pride in Place has high and worthy ambitions. Will it succeed where others did not? Benedict Cooper reports

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It was meant to be all about the big policy announcement. The next phase of a major programme to lift the poorest communities out of poverty, announced by the PM personally.

It just happened to be the week we learnt about Peter Mandelson’s secret dealings with Jeffrey Epstein during the financial crisis, sparking the gravest political crisis of Keir Starmer’s premiership to date. So, in the end, Pride in Place got very little time or coverage that day, and only one, nominal question at the press conference that followed.

It wasn’t the first time a major policy programme meant to tackle dire, endemic poverty has been eclipsed by a Westminster scandal or the rest of the news agenda.

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By the time the successes of the New Deal for Communities programme were being felt, the New Labour government was in a new world of problems. David Cameron’s Big Society vision fizzled out with austerity. Levelling up, announced in March 2021, was soon consumed by partygate. And Rishi Sunak’s Long-Term Plan for Towns only really got going in April 2024, three months before he was out of office.

All, in their own ways, sought transformative change for the poorest communities. All fought the more sensational stories of their days for coverage, to gain the popular traction they needed to pick up true engagement and not fade quietly into the history book of good ideas.

Is the Pride in Place Programme (PiPP) going to be different? Is it any better as a policy? Is it political, a means of staving off Reform in the places it currently thrives?

PiPP dates back to before the election of 2024, a planned major policy of a future Starmer government. It was the administration’s first secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Angela Rayner, who introduced it – conscious from the start that this wasn’t the first policy of its kind.

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Writing in The New Statesman in March 2025, Rayner led with the line that “Labour has learned from the failures of ‘levelling up’”. And she identified one of those failures. “It has to be local communities that decide the future,” Rayner wrote, “and that’s what ‘levelling up’ failed to grasp. Whitehall can’t micromanage our towns and cities.”

Up to £20m of funding per place, spread over 10 years, was set aside for an initial phase-one tranche of 75 towns. To this, a further 169 places were added in phase two, and then on 4 February, at the ill-fated press conference in Hastings, 40 more towns were announced.

A total of 284 places, receiving £5.8bn over 10 years. In the words of current MHCLG Secretary Steve Reed, a “pilot in a new way of governing” that “dwarfs anything that has come before”. Memberships of the first wave of neighbourhood boards have already been confirmed and, from this month, delivery funding will start flowing into local authorities in those areas. The plan is up and running.

Communities are not homogenised, self-organising groups. How do you set up the decision making ability?

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But is it a good one? Carola Signori is policy and research officer at the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, and also a consultant for 3ni – the national network for neighbourhood improvement. She says that Pride in Place shows promise, if it continues the local-first approach.

“The community objective is very much there. And I think this is one of the most important things in terms of the goal of this, which is to create capacity in these places, create social capital, create trust, create engagement with the communities.

“That means not just having them being consulted on things, but actually to decide what they think is most needed.”

That’s the idea behind one of the key tenets of the revamped policy. Neighbourhood boards are made up of local residents, community leaders, businesspeople, campaigners, councillors and the MP. Their job: to design unique local 10-year regeneration plans to “revitalise their neglected high streets, create new spaces for young people… to breathe new life into neglected communities”.

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Business in the Community has spent years developing programmes to enable the public and private sectors to work together to lift their towns. Its director of place, operations and strategy, Amanda Anderson, sees genuine merit in the principle, but raises questions about the delivery.

She says: “I think the intention is right but there’s a question of how they develop the policy to the boards in these areas. How are you going to get £20m into these places? Communities are not homogenised, self-organising groups. How do you set up the decision making ability for these local communities?

“We believe that we can really only solve complex long-term challenges with genuine collaboration between public and private sectors. We need to support the next generation of community leaders, and not just give more to an already overwhelmed community and voluntary sector. I hope that’s in somebody’s line of sight.”

Certainly, the government claims that it is. An MHCLG spokesperson says: “For too long, high streets across the country have been overlooked and neglected, and vital community assets have fallen into disrepair.

“We’re changing this by investing up to £5.8bn in communities across the country, giving them the freedom to invest in local priorities like buying beloved community spaces and revamping high streets.”

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One city councillor on the front line of delivering the funding, to an area badly in need of investment, sees evidence that this freedom has been built into PiPP as a priority.

Councillor Linda Smith is cabinet member for housing and communities at Oxford City Council and representative of the Blackbird Leys ward in Greater Leys, one of the most deprived areas both in the city, and nationally.

She says the inclusion of Greater Leys in phase two of the PiPP is a “welcome boost” to the area, evidenced by the level of local engagement the plan has received.

We need to support the next generation of community leaders, and not just give more to an already overwhelmed community and voluntary sector

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“There’s massive potential in this”, she says, as “£2m per year for 10 years in a small geographical area has the potential to make a huge difference”.

“We’ve seen really high levels of interest in the public engagement events we’ve held, at drop-in sessions for residents. I’ve never seen so many people at a community event in Greater Leys, including teenagers from the local youth club.

“If you look at the programme prospectus, there’s a list of things that can be spent on that goes on and on, and is so diverse. Nobody can say that Whitehall is mandating how the money can be spent.”

Perhaps not now, but that has certainly been the case historically. If PiPP is to succeed, Labour will need to keep its local champions on side.

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There are some reservations, of course. Breaking down the sums, regeneration experts will tell you that £2m per year will go much further in some places than others.

And different places need different types of funding. Some need money to invest in buildings, others need revenue for services. PiPP guidance, that 70 per cent of funding should be used for capital projects, could be storing up frictions for the future.

As Smith says: “The problem in Greater Leys is not derelict buildings. The council’s made the investment in the bricks and mortar. Where we’ll struggle is to get that revenue funding in place to really make the most of it.

“With more revenue funding, so much more could be happening there.”

And then there’s the politics. The government might not want the programme to look it, but you can’t target a policy, however obliquely, at towns where arch-rival Reform is thriving, without being called political.

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Back in February before the barrage of questions about Mandelson came in, the Prime Minister had a stern word for those “exploiting the social scars” of Britain, those “telling you that entire cities and towns, the great communities of this country are ‘wastelands’, ‘no go zones’. I reject that – completely.”

Presenting the final policy paper, in September last year, Reed declared that Pride in Place was about allowing communities to “take back control”, an “answer to those who feel silenced, ignored and forgotten”. And in a candid swipe at Reform, this is Labour’s “alternative to the forces trying to pull us apart”, he claimed.

Can one policy reverse the “geography of discontent” that think tank UK in a Changing Europe believes set the UK on the road to Brexit, or “the politics of grievance” Keir Starmer has pledged to rid from the system? Can Labour convince the silenced and forgotten towns that they, not Reform, offer a hopeful, alternative future?

Much of that is out of their hands. Events dictate history. But for now, at least, the fates of the country’s forgotten places and the government in No 10 appear to be aligned. Pride in Place needs to succeed, both for the people and places who badly need change, and the politicians promising to deliver it. 

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