ANDREW PIERCE: Do Labour know what a child is?

Question: When is a child not a child in the eyes of the Labor Party?

Answer: When Sir Keir Starmer thinks there might be votes.

Labour’s manifesto promised to give voting rights to 16 and 17-year-olds, supposedly to ‘increase young people’s participation in our vibrant democracy’.

‘This will align UK-wide elections with those of Scotland and Wales and herald the biggest change in UK democracy for a generation’.

However, it seems that the party that cannot define ‘woman’ has a similar problem in deciding whether young people are responsible adults. In response to a recent parliamentary question, Home Secretary Sarah Jones admitted last month: ‘This Government has no plans to lower the legal age limit for purchasing alcohol in England and Wales from 18. ‘This is consistent with the protection objective of the Licensing Act 2003’ kids from harm.”

Ah-ha! So 16 and 17 year olds like that After all, they are not ‘young people’ but children. Until Labor tried to buy their votes.

n Is nothing sacred anymore? Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said Sir Keir Starmer was so desperate to abandon Brexit that he was ‘now trying to change the name of British marmalade to align with the EU’. When Labor negotiates, Britain loses big time.

Dame Sarah Mullally, the newly appointed first female Archbishop of Canterbury, loved playing football as a child in Surrey.

But in any case, he was playing with the local boys’ shins rather than the ball. This is a practice that will serve him well in the monasteries of the Church of England.

Dame Sarah Mullally, the newly appointed first female Archbishop of Canterbury

A majority of Britons think Morgan McSweeney faked phone hacking to hide messages between her and Peter Mandelson, a poll has shown. Former Oxford University lecturer Sir Vernon Bogdanor is more generous: ‘There were students who explained this. [that] a wind blew [their] Article about Thames. ‘I always believed in them.’

Burly Communications Workers Union boss Dave Ward and his rowdy pal Martin Walsh arrived at the business select committee last month carrying nice little bags. Union leaders of the 1970s never harbored anything but hatred.

Former Tory minister Lord Redwood says Labor thinks we’re all April Fools’ jokes. ‘Of course we don’t ban our own oil and gas, so we import it… We give Chagos along with the dowry… Are we paying the French police to watch the gangs make money?’

HMS Dragon set out to defend Cyprus last month. But when it finally arrived, one of its iconic red emblems was missing. I was told that there was such a panic to get her ready in six days that the workers did not have time to bring the dragon back to starboard. As US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth quipped last week, that’s the ‘big bad Royal Navy’ for you.

Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that a new musical, The Iron Lady Sings, was coming to London. After seeing Evita a year before he became Prime Minister, he told speechwriter Ronnie Millar: ‘If the Peronists can do this… then we should provide some pretty good material for an opera called ‘Margaret’.’ Forty years later he was proven right. Again.

Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that a new musical, The Iron Lady Sings, was coming to London.

Armed Met police officers tasked with protecting Sadiq Khan mistakenly left a bag of weapons outside his home last week.

His predecessor as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was one of the country’s best-known politicians. Yet he insisted on traveling around the capital on his bike or on public transport without any security.

Khan clearly thinks more of himself. Former London Labor MP Baroness Hoey wrote about X: ‘There is absolutely no need for such a thing an expensive security team. Rather signs of grandeur More than necessity!’