Behind closed doors some Labour figures are unsettled by the perception that Lord Alli has effectively privatised the Labour frontbench. Along with hundreds of thousands in donations his properties have been used extensively by the Labour leadership for numerous roles, as Guido revealed…

The “he doesn’t have any agenda because he’s already a peer” spin, which claims he doesn’t  intervene politically apart from ‘being Labour’, took a hit on Friday when Guido revealed Alli argued against the removal of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Almost zero information exists in the public domain about Alli’s role in the Middle East, which includes his multiple meetings with Assad…

Guido can reveal that Alli was also dispatched to Iraq by No 10 to meddle in the January 2005 elections. Blair’s Downing Street pledged clandestine support to Iyad Allawi, the former member of Saddam’s security services who had earlier been chosen as interim Prime Minister by the coalition forces…

After the Labour lord was installed in Allawi’s office there was a huge increase in advertising spending on his campaign. Allawi dominated the Iraqi media landscape from that point on, leading Al Jazeera to brand him an “American puppet.” Jack Fairweather, author of ‘A War of Choice: the British in Iraq’ wrote that Alli and former Labour Party General Secretary Margaret McDonagh, his partner for the mission, suggested the “classic New Labour ploys” of polling data analysis and “working with focus groups to coordinate campaign messaging“, which were received with zero enthusiasm by Allawi’s campaign team.

By the end the Allawi campaign was a foreseeable failure, gaining a mere 13.8% of the vote. The winner was Ibrahim Al-Jaafari – the candidate of the Shiite religious establishment. Predictably Labour’s intervention to support Allawi damaged UK relations with new PM Al-Jaafari, against UK interests…

What was Alli, a TV executive best known for producing ‘The Big Breakfast’, doing intervening in foreign elections on Labour’s behalf? Why has his role been kept out of the public eye? Who paid for it? Why did Alli go on to have multiple meetings with Assad in Syria? There is much more to discover…

Sir Tony Blair has sounded the alarm: Sir Keir Starmer will have no choice but to slap the public with a tax hike of £53 billion, according to a report from the Tony Blair Institute today. Labour’s tax-and-spend tendencies are laid bare, with forecasts predicting taxes must rise by 1.9% of GDP by the end of the Parliament just to keep debt in check. Meanwhile, Starmer has appointed two Blair-era cabinet ministers into his government. This latest move only makes Blair’s involvement more evident…

Tony himself doesn’t think Keir’s growth agenda will cut it against future challenges. Even speeding up house-building, reforming infrastructure planning, and cosying up to the EU won’t spare taxpayers from the inevitable raid. Blair letting the cat out of the bag…

Tony Blair has come out today to clear the air on sex. Despite Labour politicians getting themselves into a muddle over the matter, the former Prime Minister insisted the definition of what a woman is was not difficult to answer, saying: “a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis”. A definitive line…

It’s odd that the so-called ‘heir to Blair’, Keir Starmer, hasn’t taken on the same strong standpoint on the issue. In 2023, Sir Flip Flop said 99.9% of women “haven’t got a penis”. In March, Starmer still couldn’t actually provide a clear answer to the question of what a woman was, rolling out the empty line to The Sun, “we’ve been very clear… for the overwhelming majority of women, it’s a biological issue”. Blair without the flair of decisiveness…

Yvette Cooper gets the award for most Blairite speech at Labour conference so far. Apart from bringing back “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, she focused on tackling shoplifting, bringing in tougher sentencing for assaults, and starting up “Youth Futures Hubs” to fix knife crime. The message: “We did it before, we can do it again“. Things can only go back to how they were before…

Liverpool is the home of Beatles tribute bands, and Keir is determined to be his own tribute act. If the “Let’s Get Britain’s Future Back” slogan reminds you of the “Britain Forward Not Back” slogan of Blair from 2005, that’s not accidental. The Blairites always believed that to win over the British electorate a party had to “own the future”. That’s what they will try to demonstrate next week…

Next week there will be no revolutionary banners with hammer and sickles, no PLO flags being waved in the hall and the militant socialists will be marginalised outside in the cold. Will this Labour Party love Peter Mandelson? Guido is curious to see if those shiny suits will be back…

Some bold, punchy calls for the need to change the Geneva convention here, particularly to stop the abuse of economic migration:

“The Geneva convention was intended to protect individual people from persecution. A significant number of people who claim asylum are doing so for broadly economic reasons. So I think it is right we look at the framework, as indeed other European countries are doing.”

And another:

“Britain, like all European countries, had inherited the post-war, post-Holocaust system and sentiment on asylum … [that is] completely unrealistic […] The presumption: “that someone who claimed asylum was persecuted and should be taken in”] was plainly false; most asylum claims were not genuine. Disproving them, however, was almost impossible. The combination of the courts, with their liberal instinct; the European Convention on Human Rights, with its absolutist attitude to the prospect of returning someone to an unsafe community; and the UN Convention [Relating to the Status] of Refugees, with its context firmly that of 1930s Germany, mean that, in practice, once someone got into Britain and claimed asylum, it was the Devil’s own job to return them.”

Feisty. No doubt the likes of James O’Brien and Nish Kumar will be absolutely incensed, although wait until they hear who said them… New Labour’s immigration minister Phil Woolas in 2009, and Tony Blair himself in his autobiography. Jack Straw made the same arguments in 2000.* Suella’s speech was practically anodyne by comparison…

*Hat-tip: John Rentoul for reminding Guido of New Labour’s attitude.