I’ve never bothered learning what a petard is, but it’s sweet as sucralose to watch a government minister get hoist by his own.  Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s Health Minister, has just resigned over some iffy Whatapp postings. The Sunday Telegraph reports that these were “anti-Semitic posts”, and Keir Starmer has, of course, expressed “deep concern.” Among the iffiest of his private messages, though, was a proposed response to a 72-year-old resident who had inquired about bin collections after the local election. The resident wrote politely, assuming that even as a non-Labour voter, she had a right to basic public services. Gwynne’s suggestion for a reply? “Dear resident, f— your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.”

Not satisfied with fantasising about the death of someone who hadn’t voted for him, he also reportedly wrote that he had “positive visions” of a local constituent being mown down by a heavy goods lorry. “We couldn’t be that lucky!” he added. Now, Labour is pretending to be shocked. Everyone is pretending this isn’t hilariously predictable.

But let’s be honest. What’s really happened here? A minister in a government that has only been in power for a few months, but is already the most authoritarian on record, has been purged for the same “wrongthink” as people are still rotting in prison for having entertained last summer.

Normally, I’d say that resigning over a few WhatsApp messages is ridiculous. Maybe Gwynne was tipsy; maybe he was joking. The idea that anyone should have to quit his job over something said in a closed chat group is insane. But there are other considerations to take into account. This is a government that treats questioning mass immigration as a borderline hate crime, a government that throws English women in prison for angry tweets while handing out suspended sentences to foreign criminals.

This is Starmer’s Britain, where the wrong opinion—even in private—can get you fired, fined, arrested, or locked away. So, excuse me if I don’t shed a tear for Andrew Gwynne. I guarantee Gwynne himself has supported the very censorship machine that’s now crushed him.

And now? He’s been thrown under the bus for playing by the very rules his party created. Starmer’s Government operates on a simple set of rules:

1. If you are an ordinary citizen, you get arrested for “hate speech” while actual criminals walk free.
2. If you are a senior Labour minister caught saying something problematic, you resign in disgrace but are quietly rehabilitated later.
3. If you are in the second eleven and expendable, well… you’re out.

Had Gwynne been high-profile enough, he would have been sent on a “learning journey” and allowed to crawl back after a period of enforced reflection. But he wasn’t. He was a second elevener. A useful idiot. Expendable.

So now he’s gone. But I hope this won’t be the end of the matter. I hope all his private messages get scrutinised. I hope the pigs decide some of them are criminal, and start dragging him through the courts. I hope he realises, too late for him, what sort of country he has helped bring into existence.