NOW I’d like to tell you about the man who taught his dog to fly-tip, but that will have to wait for a few paragraphs. Let’s address the Gorton and Denton byelection first.

The Manchester constituency has a new Green MP in the personable-seeming shape of Hannah Spencer. That description, by the way, is not intended to be snide or slighting. It’s just that we don’t yet know much about Hannah, aside from her being a local plumber with a good line in social empathy. She fought a highly visible campaign, winning by a healthy margin.

Her victory gave Sir Keir Starmer even less to smile about than usual. And he wasn’t exactly grinning from ear to ear to start with (it’s not his way).

Does all this indicate the end of the world – the end of Starmer – the end of the old politics? It can mean whatever the shouty-mouthed beholder wishes it to mean, including the shouty-mouthed beholder quietly typing these words.

That’s the thing about byelection upsets. The result can be used to reinforce whatever it was you believed beforehand.

Something I’d ask is how much of the Green win was down to tactical voting, with potential Labour supporters switching to see off Reform UK. I’d certainly vote like that if necessary. And voters who do so may not necessarily repeat that at a general election.

Most of the mainstream comment has been about Starmer being doomed (again). Much less time has been spent wondering how Reform UK were beaten by the Greens. Instead the microphone was again handed to Nigel Farage, who was vile cockiness personified during a campaign he clearly thought he could win. Once that didn’t happen, he shouted about cheating and said the Greens had “emboldened the radical left”.

At least his candidate Matt Goodwin, former academic turned GB News host, accepted defeat with quiet good grace. Oh, hang on a second. He didn’t. Instead he sulked and said: “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain…”

To save Britain from what – being a mostly moderate and decent country, and a pleasant place to live?

In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Jake Wallis Simons was in a similar funk: “The Greens’ extremist victory pushes Britain one step closer to the abyss.”

And there was me thinking the abyss was where Nigel Farage wants to take us, right next to the one his pal Trump is creating in the US. An abyss, Mr Trump, in case you are wondering, is a bit like a bunker on a golf course. Only it’s much deeper and goes down for ever.

The biggest hole anyone has ever seen, as you might say, while boasting that you know more about big deep holes that anybody else.

Oh, and that moral abyss you are creating is deeper still and there isn’t a light switch at the bottom.

What about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch? I’d almost forgotten about Kemi. How did she respond to her party suffering its worst ever result and losing its deposit? She posted online that Starmer had no choice but to resign. Shortly afterwards she tripped and fell down the irony abyss.

As for Starmer, he must feel that life is a bit abyss-shaped. He is denigrated by almost all the media and hated by leftwing MPs in his party who speak against him at every opportunity and encourage union leaders to do the same.

Do they all want Nigel Farage as prime minister instead? Almost certainly not. But if that happens they’ll be sure to blame Starmer. Thankfully, the Greens winning in Gorton and Denton does show that Reform UK being certain winners, a scenario endlessly pushed by the BBC, is far from inevitable.

 

NOW on to that dog. A small story on the foreign pages of the Guardian concerned a man in Catania, Sicily, who is reported to have trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish.

The small dog carries a bag of rubbish in its mouth, before “dropping it neatly at the roadside”, thus evading cameras installed to combat fly-tipping.

What a clever misled dog. This quirky story struck a chord. A lane near us runs between neatly clipped hedges, with fields to either side, and a village at the end.

If that sounds rural, the rush of traffic can be heard from the ring road nearby.

Rubbish is always being fly-tipped down there. Not by dogs but by lazy inconsiderate people. The other day someone had dumped what appeared to be a baby’s wooden cot and mattress.

As I often point out absurd Telegraph headlines, let’s end with the Allister Heath Headline Generator, as created by The New World magazine. Heath has been responsible for some real culture war clangers, and now you can generate your own. I just made this one…

 Why fly-tipping dog is the most toxic ideology ever inflicted on the British people

Allister Heath

The Telegraph