FlyTheNest

Bev Craig, the soft-left leader of Manchester City Council, has emerged as the front-runner to beat Burnham as the Labour candidate.

According to party sources, Craig is popular in the city for her efforts on economic regeneration and work on local government co-operation. “She may also benefit from the anyone-but-Andy movement,” a party source added.

There was one winner out of the attention on Burnham – Streeting. “No 10 can point their guns at someone else for a change,” an MP ally of the Health Secretary said.

Yet, even as Labour tears itself apart over whether Burnham should or shouldn’t stand, Labour insiders acknowledged the stakes are higher than just one by-election.

A Labour source said the dilemma of whether to act and when was both existential for Burnham and Starmer.

The ( Starmer) fury was sparked by Trump’s claim that Nato troops “stayed a little off the front lines”. This is incorrect in the case of Britain, but what splenetic British politicians and generals fail to admit – and probably do not know – is that if the British Army was not behind the lines and away from the fighting, it was not for lack of trying.

Of course, there were no First World War type front lines in these guerrilla wars. In Iraq, the British joined the US-led invasion to preserve their status as America’s most loyal military ally. They then chose to base their forces just outside Basra, a city of one million people in southern Iraq, because it was Shia Muslim, anti-Saddam and a place they did not think they would see much military action.

Basra was safer than Baghdad and Anbar, the vast Sunni province to the west, but it was still a dangerous place and the British had far too few troops to control the city. Eventually, the British had to pull back away from Basra after a humiliating agreement with the local Shia militias. The debacle is all copiously documented in the monumental Chilcott report into the Iraq war.

Eager to get out of Iraq without offending the Americans, the British forces moved to Helmand Province in Afghanistan in 2006. Then-defence secretary John Reid famously said that he would be “perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot”. A British intelligence report had predicted gloomily that there was no Taliban insurrection in Helmand at the time, but there soon would be if the British Army turned up. Helmand was chosen because the Canadians had got Kandahar. Once again, the main British motive was to prove that they were America’s greatest ally.

refitman wrote: Sun Jan 25, 2026 11:41 am How is the BBC trying to both sides the shooting???