Politics

Writing in the Observer this week about the use of dark money in right-wing thinktanks and the explosion of domestic and foreign propaganda on the web, I said there was an obvious need to protect British democracy. The Electoral Commission should be given police powers. Political parties should have the same duty as banks to check they are not laundering dirty money. Thinktanks and lobbyists should be required under pain of criminal punishment to declare who is funding them. As should social media companies running political adverts. But come now, I concluded, ‘Do you expect a government led by Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson to open up a system that

The promotion of Simon Case to the head of the civil service – aged 41 – will create an interesting new power dynamic in Boris Johnson’s top team. Dominic Cummings, Downing Street’s resident grenade-thrower, is now working with someone more adept at defusing bombs. Case, a Barbour-wearing career civil servant, was poached from Kensington Palace, where he was Prince William’s right-hand man, by cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill. In his role as Number 10’s permanent secretary, Case oversaw anything Covid-related that crossed the Prime Minister’s desk. He is being hailed as the man to rescue the government’s erratic handling of the coronavirus crisis. His experience with the dysfunctional royal household will stand him

As one battles on, a reluctant volunteer in the culture war which the left is fighting on every front with enviable efficiency, it is frustrating that the millions who hate what is happening are not being properly led. On the whole, government responses are reactive rather than proactive, and late at that.  Boris Johnson said the right things about BLM supporters’ defacing of the statue of Churchill, but almost a week after the event. In the row about ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the last night of the Proms, Sir Keir Starmer actually got in before Boris, backing the traditional last night, in a soft-focus way, as being ‘a staple of the