Hoyle and grandees declare war on booze

First it was drugs, then it was the press. Now Lindsay Hoyle and the grandees on the House of Commons Commission have turned their guns on the demon drink in a bid to restore parliament’s reputation. They are seeking to end the age-old tradition of ‘Thirsty Thursdays’ in the Palace of Westminster, whereby staff enjoy the freedom of the place while their bosses return to their constituencies for weekend meetings with voters.

For now changes have been announced today to restrict the access to Strangers’ Bar by the Thames: the favoured watering hole of thirsty MPs who fancy a quick snifter between votes. From tomorrow, the bar will close at 8 p.m on a Thursday before a non-sitting Friday; on the day before a sitting Friday it will now shut at 10 p.m. No non-pass holders will be admitted to the bar on any day, unless they are the guests of MPs, who can bring in up to three guests.

Steerpike’s inbox has been filled with rage and consternation from distressed staffers and journalists, horrified at the end of an era which saw them spending up to £10,000 a week in the estate’s bars. Many of them were enjoying the hospitality of the terrace just last night at a drinks reception for the parliamentary press gallery. Who knew that would be the last hurrah? A House of Commons spokesman told Mr S that:

Due to a large volume of non-passholders using the Strangers Bar in recent months, with resulting pressures on parliamentary staff running the venue, the Administration Committee and the House of Commons Commission have agreed a small number of changes to access rules to ensure a comfortable experience for all staff and users of the venue.

Where will the best stories come from now?

Starmer certainly put more welly into it at PMQs

Last week, Sir Keir was monstered by his critics after a feeble performance at PMQs saw him he fail to trouble a wounded Boris. Even his closest allies were in despair. ‘Put some more welly into it,’ advised his deputy Angela Rayner.

Today we saw Sir Keir transformed and unleashed. He was flinging wellies in all directions. The search for his inner populist began with a reference to a film released 45 years ago.

‘The prime minister thinks he can perform Jedi mind-tricks on the country …. The force isn’t with him any more … He’s Jabba the Hut.’

He called Boris ‘the ostrich’ and said he was busy massaging the figures to pretend that our flat-lining economy is surging ahead on magical rocket boosters. In fact, we’re growing slower than anyone in the G20, bar Russia.

Boris’s Jesuitical explanation was that Britain had roared out of Covid so fast that our initial growth-spurt had temporarily eclipsed our rivals, but they were now catching up and taking over. His solution to soaring prices is to fling cash at every household in the land. Because extra money always curbs inflation …

Next, Sir Keir tried a Love Island analogy.

‘Contestants that give the public the ick get booted out.’

Did that hit home? Boris isn’t at risk of being ‘booted out’ by the public so the analogy rang false. As did the implication that the high-minded Sir Keir – whose mother was a nurse, remember – likes to watch a speed-dating show full of bronzed hunks and oiled bimbos.

Boris threw in an Egyptological reference about Sir Keir’s ‘Sphinx-like silence’ on the RMT strikes. Sir Keir threw it back and claimed that Boris was avid for the strikes to start. ‘He wants the country to grind to a halt so he can feed off the division.’

Unwittingly Sir Keir revealed his love of industrial action. It’s desirable because it stokes class strife which can be useful. That’s how he thinks.

The showboating continued as he whipped the house into a frenzy with an improvised game of Q and A. He read out a list of insults directed at Boris by Tory backbenchers. All anonymous of course.

‘He can’t win back trust … he’s dragging everyone down…His authority is destroyed.’ Sir Keir broke off and asked the Tories behind those slurs to identify themselves.

‘Come on. Hands up, hands up … You’re very quiet now.’

This was dire – like watching a wannabe DJ at a care-home jubilee party. Around him the shadow cabinet stared glumly at their shoes. Sir Keir is no cheeky-chappie comedian. He moved to his big finale which was a compendious list of Boris’s sins.

‘He’s totally deluded. Totally failing the economy. Failing to tackle inflation. Failing to back business …’

On he droned, like a philology professor reading the Shipping Forecaster in Esperanto. Even the Speaker got fed up.

‘I think we need to get to the end of the question,’ he said. Which made the Tories giggle.

So who profits from this awkward fiasco? Angela Rayner’s message to Sir Keir was intended for a wider audience, of course: Labour needs a leader who can put more welly into their speeches.

Who could she mean?

Coventry council’s Russian misadventure

More than three months on, the ramifications from Putin’s invasion are still being felt across the globe. Sanctions, protests, boycotts – couldn’t happen to a nicer despot. One minor consequence in England though has been the demise of Coventry council’s twin city relationship with Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad. The Labour-run authority temporarily cut ties with the city in March, announcing a pause in twinning links ‘with a heavy heart… until such a time that they can resume.’

Now, a Freedom of Information request has discovered that the council spent more than £12,000 in the past five years on the ultimately doomed relationship. Funds were spent on four separate events, including a £3,478 visit to the city in February 2018 to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad at which Putin told the assembled audience ‘We have no right to let them down, to demonstrate cowardice or indecisiveness. In our actions, we must rise to the level of the achievements of our fathers and grandfathers.’ How’d that one work out?

Elliot Keck of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said to Mr S that: ‘Taxpayers expect councils to fund frontline services, not expensive jollies to foreign countries.’ Another trip in November 2019 cost Coventry council £2,863 for attendance at ‘International People’s Diplomacy Forum on the 75th Anniversary of the Twinning Link’ while more than £2,000 was spent in 2018 to attend the ’29th General Assembly of the International Association of Peace Messenger Cities.’

Fat lot of good all that talk did the Russians, eh.

The European court has seriously overstepped over Rwanda

Last night’s abrupt order from the European Court of Human Rights that led to the grounding of the first Rwanda deportation flight delighted progressives everywhere. They will of course say – rather in the fashion of twentieth-century home secretaries calmly refusing to reprieve a condemned murderer – that the law is merely taking its course, and that we should be proud that the rule of law has been upheld.

This sounds comforting. It is also wrong-headed. The Rwanda debacle in fact raises very serious questions about the legitimacy of the Strasbourg judges and their interference with national administrations.

To remind you of the background, concerted lawfare in the English courts failed to block the flight. However, the Strasbourg court’s intervention (or rather, one of its judges who happened to be on duty that night) led to the operation being halted. This wasn’t because it infringed the human rights of the deportees: we don’t know, and won’t for some time, whether it did or not. Instead the judge used a slightly concerning power in the procedural rules of the Strasbourg court which allow it to issue governments with interim orders, ‘just in case’. The UK government complied, though an appeal seems likely.

That a series of events like this should be possible should worry us a lot.

First, while it’s often necessary for national judges to issue peremptory orders holding the ring while the lawyers sort out what the parties’ rights actually are, it is by no means clear that any such power should be given to human rights judges. No doubt their judgments deserve great respect when they are carrying out their proper function of weighing state action as a matter of principle against some perceived higher norm. But once they stray outside this field and start essentially supervising the day-to-say administration of justice, which is essentially what Strasbourg did yesterday, they deserve a good deal less. Put bluntly, that is not, or at least should not be, their job.

Secondly, the European Court of Human Rights retains what respect it has at a national level precisely because it never claims to be a final court of appeal. Disappointed litigants frequently have to be told that they do not have the right to ask Strasbourg to reverse a decision they do not like, but that instead its function is far more limited: it is merely an impartial international body which may on occasion be asked to arbitrate if a citizen alleges that a state has infringed important moral rights.

Unfortunately, this defence does not work for interim orders like the one we saw from the court in this case. In practice, if not in law, the Strasbourg court last night played the part of an appeal court calmly reversing the decision of a national judge with whom it disagreed. An Iraqi asylum seeker, having asked the English courts up to the Supreme Court for an order stopping his flight and been refused, then demanded what was essentially the same thing from Strasbourg and got it. If you see this as a blatant case of the Strasbourg court interfering directly with the legal process in this country, you are right.

All this, however, leaves us with the big question. What should Priti – who is understandably livid, and as soon as the decision was announced made it clear that preparations for the next flight were continuing as normal – do now? For the moment at least, she has wisely ruled out the idea of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention entirely, even though it can do so with six months’ notice and decisions like this may well cause more voters to see such a solution as eventually inevitable.

Any solution is likely to be untidy. However Priti’s best option could well be to brave it out, and announce that the UK government not only plans to proceed with the next flight to Kigali, but also on that occasion to ignore any order not to do so emanating from any court outside the UK.

This sounds drastic. But politically it is attractive, particularly were Priti to add that the UK would abide by any later final judgment the Strasbourg court chose to give on the issue of whether human rights had indeed been broken. Not only would this way of proceeding nicely chime with British public opinion, much of which sees the immigration system – with some reason – as being systematically abused, and wants something done about it. It would also put the court, and the Council of Europe which overseas the Convention, in a difficult position.

True, disobeying a peremptory order from Strasbourg is a technical breach of the Human Rights Convention. But on the other side, a statement from Strasbourg that it intended to continue making interim orders and expecting unquestioning obedience to them would also sound impossibly self-important and bossy. In addition, there is a further embarrassment for Strasbourg and the human rights establishment. As long ago as 2011 the Council of Europe, which oversees the Court, itself admitted in one of its periodical declarations on the working of the Convention (the so-called İzmir Declaration) that the use of interim orders as a kind of transnational last-ditch immigration appeal was not in the spirit of the Convention. It might well feel that, faced with the Rwanda difficulty in 2022, discretion was the better part of valour. Particularly, of course, if it knew that its standing with the British public was already on a knife-edge. Strasbourg may be overbearing: but politically at least, it is very far from stupid.

Update: An earlier version of this piece suggested the European Court of Human Rights ‘immediately ordered the operation stopped’. We are happy to clarify that while the court’s decision ultimately led to the operation being halted, the court only considered a single case before it, rather than the entire operation. We would also like to clarify that while there has been some suggestion the UK government will appeal, it has not yet said so publicly.

What Emma Thompson needs to understand about celebrity nudity

Another day, another diva disrobes. If it’s not Madonna (63) being ‘outraged’ after being banned from Instagram Live (after continually breaking the app’s rules with her nude posts) for ‘digital depictions of her vagina’ it’s Emma Thompson (also 63) getting her kit off for her new film, in which she plays a widow who hires a sex worker. And like a bleak backbeat, we have the sad spectre of Britney Spears, a young woman used as an ATM machine by her immediate family and as fantasy fodder by strangers since she was old enough to wear a school uniform ironically. Her social media since her recent emancipation shows her to be understandably confused about what she is valued for and she has shared a string of naked pics with her 41 million Instagram followers.

From the time Adam swerved Lilith for Eve, women have been sorted neatly into two types by various patriarchies: the Good and the Bad, the Virgin and the Whore. But I tend to think that we’re more accurately – and less judgementally – divided into the Tough and the Tender.

Jennifer Lopez often posts shots of herself wearing very little. But when she does it, it never seems like a cry for help or a plea for attention – simply a straightforward celebration of a body which has assisted its owner to command a vast fortune as a singer, dancer and actress over three decades. Lopez posed naked as recently as two years ago, wearing nothing but her engagement ring on the cover of her single ‘In The Morning’ and sharing the sight with her 133 million Instagram followers. ‘Surprise!’ she wrote. ‘Here’s the official cover art for #InTheMorning. Single drops Friday.’ It was a masterpiece of understatement. I fancy that Lopez strips for the same reason that Ursula Andress gave when asked why she took her clothes off for Playboy back in the day: ‘Because I’m beautiful’. And for the money, of course – but not needing the money, being already successful, adds to the take-it-or-leave-it air of insouciance such women display.

You’ll know a Tough Broad like Lopez when you see one. (Not to be confused with the – shudder – Strong Woman, a phrase I’ve grown to loathe over the years, as every weak ninny of the female sex has rushed to adopt it as their own. Unless you can pull a truck along with your teeth, please don’t call yourself a Strong Woman.) Tough Broads disrobe, drink and drug as they see fit; when they’ve had enough, they move on and embrace moderation.

But if women are Tender Babes, such antics may damage them. Stripping off, especially, looks more like a side-effect of self-harm rather than self-esteem. Marilyn Monroe was, of course the tenderest babe of them all – when her nude photos came to light in Playboy, having posed for them for a 1952 calendar, and she was asked why she had done it, she replied ‘Hunger’. It’s not extreme to say that the commodification which eventually killed her started here, lending an even creepier necrophiliac feel to Hugh Hefner’s statement in 2012 on the 50th anniversary of her death, when his dirty mag chose to rake over the poor creature’s ashes for profit: ‘She was most in control when she was in the nude. What would be a position of vulnerability for others was a position of power for her.’ Her sad life and early death would suggest otherwise.

What about those who don’t need the money and do it anyway – those privately-educated, over-privileged smuggies who strip off in the name of ‘fat activism’? Their poster girl is Lena Dunham, with her bovine eyes and her regrettable urge to get her baps out whatever the weather. No doubt this type of woke woman considers such antics ‘empowering’ but – like Slut Walks and pole-dancing, also rebranded as modern feminism – stripping off and then complaining about being objectified is about as logical as a flasher complaining that people are looking at him funny.

So, on the whole, the best way to undress in public is to do an Andress and simply say ‘Because I’m beautiful.’ Try not to get pretentious about it; whereas Madonna once disrobed out of sheer high spirits, her recent peep-shows have an air of derangement about them. Be a Kate Moss, not a Lottie Moss; if you decide to flaunt your youthful beauty, do it for a Calvin Klein billboard rather than the geek chorus of OnlyFans.

In the past, getting naked in public for pay was largely confined to the desperate and the decadent; now it can seem that everybody’s doing it. But whether young women chose to see this route to public attention as a blessing or a curse, it might be wise for them to consider first whether they are tough or tender. Because it is these differing personality traits which will decide whether exposing themselves may be the springboard to stardom – or sorrow.

PMQs: Starmer is haunted by the ghost of Corbynism

Keir Starmer has of late come under pressure from his shadow cabinet to, in their words, stop ‘boring everyone to death’. In response, the Labour leader has told his colleagues that really ‘what’s boring is being in opposition’. However, the comments appear to have got under his skin. At today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Starmer was notably more confrontational – attacking Boris Johnson on several counts.

After the Labour leader failed to capitalise on Johnson’s internal party woes last week, following the Prime Minister’s no-confidence vote from his own MPs, Starmer attempted to remedy things. He used the session to call Johnson an ‘ostrich prime minister’ with his head in the sand. Starmer went on the offensive, pointing out low growth in the economy and criticism Johnson has received from his own MPs.

The Prime Minister attempted to return fire by pressing Starmer for a position on the planned rail strikes – and bringing up his government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. The fact that Johnson brought this up of his own accord – the day after the failed first flight – shows how the government believes it can win political capital from those trying to thwart the policy.

The attack lines ought to have been uncomfortable for Johnson. But Starmer offered him ways out. Where the Labour leader struggled most was when he started quoting what Tory MPs had said about Johnson. One of these was a hostile document passed around Tory MPs that called Johnson ‘the Conservative Corbyn’. He said this was not meant as a compliment.

However, given Starmer served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, helped campaign to get him elected and also talked up Corbyn in his leadership campaign, the attack line backfired. Johnson was able to brush off the criticism by simply pointing out that Starmer’s connections to Corbyn were far stronger than his. The session showed that for all the current criticism of Starmer, stepping out of his comfort zone comes with risks of its own.

Is the western boycott of Russian oil backfiring?

Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against the Russian invasion has surprised almost everyone outside the country, none more so, presumably, than Vladimir Putin. As for the West’s efforts to harm Russia through sanctions on its fossil fuel exports, that is a very different matter. Sanctions have not been entirely useless. According to a report by the think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), they have led to Russia losing over €200 million (£173 million) a day relative to what it was earning at the start of the year: €880 million (£692 million) per day in May compared to €1.1 billion (£951 million) per day in January and February. But, thanks to much higher oil and gas prices caused in part by the invasion of Ukraine itself, Russia is still earning more revenue than it did last year.

In the first 100 days following the invasion on 24 February, the CREA says Russia earned €93 billion (£80 billion) from its oil exports. Of that, €57 billion (£49 billion) was earned from exports to Europe. For all of Europe’s efforts to wean itself off Russian oil and gas, much of the gap left by the reduction in European fuel exports is being plugged by other countries. China has overtaken Germany as Russia’s biggest fossil fuel customer, taking €12.6 billion (£10.9 billion) worth since the invasion. According to the CREA’s report, others who have upped their imports of Russian oil include India – 18 per cent of whose crude oil imports now come from Russia, compared with one per cent before the invasion – and, somewhat surprisingly, UAE and Saudi Arabia. 

Much as we might wish that the rest of the world would boycott Russia as we are trying, and failing, to do, the West has no power to prevent it exporting its oil and gas eastwards and southwards. Moreover, it is hard even to protest against other countries taking Russian oil and gas when we are still the country’s largest customer. Russia also continues to export large quantities of coal to Europe. The Netherlands is Russia’s second largest customer after Japan. The only countries which have stopped virtually all energy imports from Russia are the US (100 per cent) and Sweden (99 per cent).

That, at least, is the situation with direct imports. But here is the really depressing bit: some of the oil being exported to India seems to be finding its way back to either Europe or North America. India’s large oil-refining industry, much of the product from which is exported, is increasingly using Russian crude oil. The largest oil refinery at Jamnagar took 27 per cent of its crude oil from Russia in May. According to the report, over half of the refined oil produced there is exported. Of this, 20 per cent in May was bound for the Suez canal – suggesting that it was destined either for Europe or North America (although some could be heading for North Africa). What’s more, European and US tankers are helping to export a lot of Russian oil. In April and May, according to the CREA, 67 per cent of Russian crude oil exports were transported by US and European-owned ships.

It might be the right thing to try to boycott Russian oil and gas exports, and this has resulted in some success. But at some point we will have to start asking: is the pain being inflicted on European industries and consumers through higher energy prices really worth it? Particularly when the rest of the world, far from following Europe’s example, is actually increasing its consumption of Russian fossil fuels?

The bravery of Carole Cadwalladr

Carole Cadwalladr’s victory over Arron Banks is a triumph for free speech that has come at a cost no free society should bear. For the courts to rule on a passing remark she made in a 2019 TED talk and a tweet about the Leave.EU tycoon, who gave the pro-Brexit campaign the largest donation in British political history, has cost Banks somewhere between £750,000 and £1 million. Cadwalladr’s costs must be about the same, and it is very unlikely that the court will order that she and her supporters be reimbursed all their money. So we are talking about between £1.5 and £2 million for a single case.

For three years, as a friend and colleague of Cadwalladr’s, I’ve seen how lawyers have dominated her life. Discussion of Russian influence on British politics was chilled, not only by Banks’s action but by the Kremlin’s pet energy company Rosneft and several Russian billionaires suing Catherine Belton and the publishers of Putin’s People; a post-Soviet mining conglomerate’s action against Tom Burgis and the publishers of his study of kleptocracy; and the general fear the lawyers incubate that if you take on the super-rich you risk losing everything.

We are meant to have the rule of law in England and Wales. But it is a law the overwhelming majority of English and Welsh people cannot begin to afford. In 2011, Kenneth Clarke, the then justice secretary, announced: 

‘The UK should be lawyer and adviser to the world’.

The courts should become a luxury product, like prime property in Mayfair or Beluga caviar, sold in the global marketplace, and with prices to match, rather than an affordable means of delivering justice to the people of this country. You have to be very rich or very brave not to back away.

Carole Cadwalladr was brave. Banks sued her personally. She had said as an aside in a TED talk entitled ‘Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy’ that: ‘I am not even going to get into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian Government,’ and repeated much the same in a follow-up tweet.

Rather than sue the owners of the immensely successful TED franchise, Banks, who has always strongly denied the allegations against him and has indicated he will likely appeal against the judgement this week, went for her. Most of us would have backed down and offered a grovelling apology in the face of the stupendous financial penalty if we fought and lost such a case. Thanks to her inner-strength and the generosity of her social media followers, Cadwalladr decided to fight.

Decisions by the courts then made it as hard as possible for her to win. Like an occultist searching for hidden meanings, Mr Justice Saini ruled in 2019 that Cadwalladr had not simply claimed that Banks had told lies about his covert relationship with the Russian government. Using the near magical power an English legal education gives learned judges, he decided that what her statements had actually meant was that Banks was telling lies about ‘a secret relationship he had with the Russian government in relation to acceptance of foreign funding of electoral campaigns in breach of the law’.

Cadwalladr could not defend the judge’s interpretation of what she had said and apologised to Banks for that reading of her remarks. Banks could have left it there but, somewhat stupidly as events were to turn out, chose not to.

I have seen some right-wingers on social media saying that she got off on the weird technicality of a ‘public interest defence’ in relation to that TED talk. There is nothing weird or easy about it. In her judgement this week, Mrs Justice Steyn said Cadwalladr had to prove that she was talking about a matter of public interest, which she clearly was, and that she had reasonably believed that publishing the words sued over by Banks was in the public interest.

The judge then went through all the evidence. It was uncontested that Putin was trying to influence elections in the West. Theresa May, hardly a woke leftist, had warned when she was prime minister that the Kremlin was:

‘Deploying its state-run media organisations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.’

Leaked emails from Banks led Cadwalladr to consider that ‘there had been a series of invitations from and to (the Russian) Ambassador Yakovenko, many of which were accepted’ (and that Banks ‘had been offered preferential shares in an investment scheme to consolidate several Russian goldmines and the privatisation of a state-owned Russian diamond company,’ which he declined.)

Let us just pause for a moment and imagine what the reaction of Conservatives would have been to the revelation that Jeremy Corbyn had several meetings with the Russian ambassador. Do you think they would have gone for the journalist who broke the story as Banks’s claque in the right-wing press did? Do you think they would have accepted claims from Corbyn’s defenders that it was a non-story pumped up to damage the left?

One of the judge’s conclusions was that Cadwalladr had reasonable grounds for believing that statements made by Banks regarding his relationship with the Russian government were inaccurate. Admittedly, there was a change in circumstances in April 2020, after the Electoral Commission confirmed it accepted the National Crime Agency’s conclusions that it had found no evidence that Banks had broken the law – meaning that Cadwalladr could no longer rely on the public interest defence. But by then the TED talk was in the past, and the judge found that from that point on Banks had failed to prove that he had suffered serious harm because of Cadwalladr’s comments in the TED talk.

Some of Cadwalladr’s online critics are saying that this verdict will reinforce the belief of centrist fanatics that Brexit was caused by a Russian hybrid warfare operation. Such people exist, I concede. But although I see them on Twitter I rarely see them in the flesh. (Speaking of Twitter, I noticed that Banks once tweeted that ‘Ukraine is to Russia as the Isle of Wight is to the UK. It’s Russian’. That was in 2017. Five years on, it’s a line the people of Ukraine are dying in their tens of thousands to refute.)

Rather than focus on such a fringe, supporters of Boris Johnson would do better to ask why Russia was so keen on Brexit. The answer is all too obvious: because it would weaken the UK. If you want evidence for the mess it has caused, just look around you.

How the Treasury maintains its power

Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to zero. At most, you might hear the sound of a distant flute playing a courante by Lully. As Sir Howard Davies puts it in this insider’s view, which manages to be both authoritative and quite cheeky:

The Treasury does not cultivate a warm and cuddly working environment. You may well not know if your immediate boss has a spouse or partner, and would certainly never meet them if they exist. Social events are at a premium.

Yet this notoriously ascetic culture is not in the least hierarchical. Junior principals are free to slap down the arguments of the permanent secretary (Treasury officials seconded to city banks are startled by the silence of underlings in meetings there). The Treasury takes its officials from the forcing houses of Winchester and Manchester Grammar School, and in no time these intensely able recruits are making serious policy. As well as being so unexpectedly youthful, this Praetorian Guard of Whitehall is also thin on the ground. In the 1980s, I remember once asking for the names of the team supervising the nationalised industries (then a huge chunk of the British economy) and was amazed when I was directed to a single harassed under-secretary.

The Chancellors is a sequel to Davies’s earlier book The Chancellors’ Tales (2006), which included lectures given at the LSE by the five living ex-chancellors who ran the British economy between 1974 and 1997. Now he takes the story forward, drawing on his interviews with the four who were in charge for most of the period between 1997 and 2019, this time telling the story himself. When I say this is an insider’s view, that’s an understatement. Davies keeps popping up in his own narrative, at first in the Foreign Office, then in the Treasury, then as controller of the Audit Commission, then as director general of the CBI, on to the Bank of England as deputy governor, from there to chair the new Financial Services Authority, and out of Whitehall again to run the LSE. He is everywhere, the Zelig of the public finances. So he constantly has to be marking his own homework; but such is the marvellous moral austerity of a good Treasury man, you always feel he is recording the failures on his watch as candidly as the successes.

On overall performance during the period, Davies gives the UK economy reasonably high marks, well up with the leading developed nations. Only in the years after the EU referendum has the UK fallen behind. We can leave it to the Brexotics and the Remoaners to argue whether this is a temporary ‘kerfuffle’, to use Boris Johnson’s preferred term for making light of serious things, or a permanent loss of trade.

But the statistics should not mislead us into thinking that it has been a smooth patch in the Treasury’s history. During these two decades, it has been threatened with break-up at least twice; lost one of its most important functions to the Bank of England; sharply reversed macro-economic policy at least twice; was instrumental in saving one referendum and no less instrumental in losing another; failed to foresee one global financial crisis and retrieved stability only at the eleventh hour.

Davies reminds us how Gordon Brown deserted Prudence, who had been his constant companion throughout Labour’s first term, for a dramatic spending splurge which transformed Britain’s schools and hospitals and hugely reduced working poverty, bringing a real gain of 17 per cent in the incomes of the poorest as against only 1 per cent for the top earners. But then, as the invaluable Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, this had been pretty much the same story under Margaret Thatcher: continence with Geoffrey Howe, expansiveness with Nigel Lawson.

You can go further back and see a similar pattern under Edward Heath, from Iain Macleod’s short-lived tenure to the Barber Boom; and twice under Harold Macmillan – Peter Thorneycroft and Selwyn Lloyd both being forced out to make way for the more compliant Derick Heathcoat-Amory and Reggie Maudling. The need to win the next election always takes priority. If Johnson survives, Rishi Sunak may suffer the same fate as his fellow Wykehamist Geoffrey Howe. Wykehamists make great chancellors (Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell), but are not quite vulgar enough to make it to the very top, the sole exception being Henry Addington, who was no great shakes.

The term ‘mandarin’ suggests a highminded indifference to low politics. In the case of the Scottish referendum, nothing could be further from the truth. The Treasury permanent secretary, Nick MacPherson, argued passionately for the Union, insisting that a truly independent Scotland would be shattered by its first bank crash. One senior official described the publication of his damning verdict as ‘the most extreme politicisation in the Treasury’s history’. The cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, tried to veto the publication, but George Osborne supported MacPherson. Alistair Darling, who led the Better Together campaign, concluded that ‘it was the economics what won it’.

I like the sound of the forthright MacPherson. He described NHS Test and Trace, estimated to cost £37 billion, as ‘the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time’. High praise indeed, as Davies remarks. But the failure to supervise the banks must have cost many billions more.

It will be a long time before Ed Balls lives down his boast when minister for the City in 2006 that ‘today our system of light-touch and risk-based regulation is regularly cited as one of our chief attractions’. Davies also describes a war game that same year, in which the assembled regulators considered the case of a northern building society heavily dependent on wholesale funding of its mortgage book – which was to be precisely Northern Rock’s trouble two years later. Unfortunately, the regulators could not agree what they should do in such a case, and so do did nothing.

The story of the Treasury and the EU is even more contentious, and surprising. When Davies joined the Treasury in 1976, just after being the only man in the Paris embassy to have voted ‘No’ in the first referendum, he was surprised to find Great George Street a home from home. The department had always been suspicious of foreign entanglements, regarding itself as a cut above, a feeling intensified after the ERM debacle of 1992. Brown and Balls masterminded a devious and brutal campaign to keep Britain out of the euro. (Ironically, Davies himself, by then at the CBI, had cast off his youthful enthusiasm for glorious isolation and was now all in favour of going in.) They kept Tony Blair out of the loop, in what Balls later admitted was ‘one of the more heavy-handed and uncollegiate things that I was ever involved in’.

How and why the Treasury then became convinced Europeans en masse remains something of a mystery, even to Davies. But by the time of the 2016 referendum, the Treasury had become Public Enemy No. 1 of the Vote Leave campaign. It was the Treasury which had declared that ‘the UK would be permanently poorer if it left the EU’, and Osborne who led ‘Project Fear’ (the phrase was actually coined, not by Johnson, but by Alex Salmond in the Scottish referendum). The irony was that the Treasury’s original long-term forecast that the impact of leaving would reduce GDP by about 4 per cent still looks reasonably accurate. It was Osborne’s second paper, a month later, which forecast ‘an immediate and profound shock to our economy’ and prompted him to promise an emergency budget if Britain left, in order to tackle ‘the £30 billion black hole’ in the nation’s finances. This doomsday scenario was wildly wrong, as Osborne himself now admits, resting as it did on the implausible assumption that the Bank of England would take no action to steady the ship.

The howler seriously damaged the Treasury’s reputation. Brexiteers like Iain Duncan Smith wanted the Treasury broken up. So did Ed Miliband for a while. He commissioned a review from Lord Kerslake, the former head of the Home Civil Service, who described the Treasury as ‘arrogant, overbearing and negative’. Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, described the department as ‘devalued currency’. When Dominic Cummings burst on the scene, he attempted a coup by persuading Johnson to insist that Sajid Javid sack his own advisers and accept No. 10’s nominees, but was foiled by Javid’s refusal to be humiliated. After 20 years of turmoil, Davies reflects at the end of his unfailingly lively tour, ‘the Treasury was as powerful as it was at the start’. Attempts to create a rival centre of economic policy-making had all failed, and the spending departments continued to do as they were told, meekly accepting their annual settlements.

And a good thing too. Effective control of the purse strings is the first thing we expect from government. I disagree with Davies only where he deplores the skeleton staff of the department. I fear that if the numbers were much increased, sooner or later they would start thinking of more ways of spending our money – as they are already doing in the vastly inflated No. 10. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.

Putin’s Davos flops after sanctions

Oh dear. It seems that starting an unprovoked war is not the best way to inspire foreign investment in your country. For 25 years, the Kremlin has touted the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) as Russia’s equivalent of the World Economic Forum, using the summit to try to attract the forces of capital.

But after a string of sanctions, it seems that no one from the West now wants to be seen at ‘Putin’s Davos’ this week (quelle surprise). No names of American and European companies or their CEOs are on the published schedule for SPIEF, which begins today and ends Saturday. To save face, the Russians are instead presenting the forum as a chance to attract investment from developing markets in Asia and the Middle East; countries that haven’t joined the international condemnation of the Ukrainian invasion.

This means that, as Reuters puts it, ‘Having once welcomed then- German chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-IMF chief Christine Lagarde, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, Citi’s Vikram Pandit and ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson’ instead Moscow will be giving ‘top billing this week to the presidents of allied states Kazakhstan and Armenia.’ Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is also set to address the meeting via video link. What a roll call.

Humiliatingly, the Taliban are also now honoured guests, since their restoration to power in Kabul last year. It’s quite a change from the early noughties, when Putin’s ally Sergey Ivanov was demanding more sanctions on the Islamic fundamentalists and declaring that ‘there is no question of opening talks with the Taliban.’ Still, desperate times and all that, eh Vlad?

Keir Starmer has got the Zzzz…Factor

Is it a fatal handicap for a politician to be dull? Since he became Labour leader two years ago, there has been a growing feeling that Sir Keir Starmer not only lacks the magical ‘X Factor’ that makes for political success, but is in proud possession of its polar opposite – what might be called the ‘Zzz.. Factor’: that he is, in a word, boring.

This week, Labour’s fears about the soporific nature of their chief finally surfaced with a report in which unnamed Shadow Cabinet members accused Starmer of ‘boring everyone to death’. Earlier, in a coded rebuke of her boss, his deputy Angela Rayner begged him to put more ‘welly’ in his political style. Finally, the pollsters J.L. Partners found that half the respondents in a survey thought Sir Keir was ‘boring, bland and dull’ – while the other half were merely indifferent to him.

Clearly nettled by the charges, an angry Starmer rounded on his critics at a shadow cabinet meeting and told them to stop briefing the media about how tedious he is. ‘What’s boring is being in opposition,’ he said.

It is obvious, though, that there is some substance to the charges. Asked by the LBC presenter Nick Ferrari to name one exciting thing that he did in his life, the millionaire lawyer offered taking his children to football matches (without, however, mentioning that he gets freebie tickets worth thousands to do so).

Encouraged by Ferrari to cite another exciting event in his life, Sir Keir finally came up with an occasion when he was offered a spare room in a well-wisher’s house – only to find the bed already occupied by someone else. He added that he did not discover whether the occupant was male or female, which, since he has trouble defining a woman, is perhaps understandable.

Sir Keir need not despair. The episode of the occupied bed at least sounds slightly more exciting than former prime minister Theresa May’s most edgy experience of running through corn fields. And the fact that May reached the dizzy heights of Downing Street despite her dullness proves that being terminally boring need not be a fatal bar to ultimate political success.

One of Sir Keir’s most distinguished predecessors as Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was widely written off as an insignificant nullity – including by his Tory opponent Winston Churchill who famously (and possibly apocryphally) is said to have described him as ‘a modest little man with much to be modest about’. Churchill is also reputed to have coined the witticism that ‘an empty car drew up in Downing Street and Mr Attlee got out’.

If Churchill did hold such disparaging views of his Labour rival, he had good cause to revise and regret them after Attlee efficiently conducted the home front’s business as the great man’s deputy while Churchill was off winning World War Two. And after the war, Attlee led Labour to a landslide election victory over Churchill’s Tories, presiding over one of the century’s great reforming governments and surviving twenty years as Labour’s longest serving leader. As the modest little man himself put it in a witty Limerick:

‘Few thought he was even a starter,

Many thought that they were smarter,

But he ended PM, CH, and OM,

An Earl and a Knight of the Garter’.

Much more dangerous to Starmer’s political prospects than the fact that he is, as political guru Sir Lynton Crosby said of his former boss, the election winning former Australian PM John Howard ‘as dull as batshit’, is the fact that he appears to lack basic political skills. To succeed in their trade, politicians need what the Germans call ‘fingerspitzengefuhl’ – fingertip feelings: a sensitivity to ever changing popular moods, coupled with rat-like cunning and a certain ruthlessness.

Sadly for Labour, Starmer has demonstrated none of these qualities. Surprisingly for such a fan of the beautiful game, time and again he has fumbled the ball and failed to boot it into a goalmouth that is wide open. He was the architect of Labour’s disastrous Brexit policy which helped lose them the 2019 election. His ham-fisted attempt to demote his deputy Angela Rayner ended with him being forced to promote her instead. And his calls for Boris Johnson to resign over ‘partygate’ backfired when he was accused of breaking Covid rules himself – a charge that is still under police investigation.

The evidence is mounting that the Labour’s leader’s fatal flaw is not just that he is a boring dullard – but that he is also a hopeless politician.

Met police refuse to release beergate details

Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s goin’ on ‘ere, then? Boris Johnson might have shrugged off partygate but Sir Keir Starmer is not so lucky. The investigation by Durham police into whether the Labour leader and his deputy broke lockdown restrictions in April 2021 is still ongoing, with no end date yet announced. Sir Keir has pledged to quit if he is fined; that curry could yet become the most expensive takeaway of his life…

One intriguing detail about the fateful night in question was the presence of a protection team from the Metropolitan police. The Sun reported that Met bodyguards accompanied the Labour leader on the Durham trip, as part of his efforts during the Hartlepool by-election campaign. The paper published a photograph of a police Range Rover Discovery parked outside the Miners’ Hall where the event was held. The officers would, presumably, have witnessed what went on and whether any rules were indeed broken.

Sadly though, it seems that our boys in blue are less than enthusiastic to share details about Sir Keir Starmer’s police escort. A Freedom of Information request about the cost, numbers and subsistence arrangements for the officers involved in Starmer’s visit has been met by a flat rejection from the Met on the grounds of ‘law enforcement’, ‘health and safety,’ ‘personal information’ and, er, ‘national security.’ The force even refused to confirm whether Sir Keir does receive a police protection team – even though pictures of their vehicle have already been published online.

According to the Met, confirming it ‘could undermine the safeguarding of national security allowing those with terrorist intent to gain an operational advantage over UK policing’. It continues that it would only confirm that ‘police protection is provided to the Queen, her heir and the Prime Minster’ and adds, intriguingly, that protection is only provided ‘after careful evaluation of the threat and risks posed to those individuals by operational experts in this field of policing.’ What kind of threats has Sir Keir been facing, for him to require an escort?

Labour will just be hoping that an escort is the only kind of contact with the police he’ll have in future…

Progressives, don’t cheer Rwanda’s setbacks

The last-minute halting of the first flight to Rwanda is humiliating for Boris Johnson’s government. An urgent interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights prompted a domino effect of domestic court orders that ended with the plane returning to base without passengers.

The ECtHR’s order came down to three factors. First, that evidence from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and others suggested asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda ‘will not have access to fair and efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status’. Second, that the High Court had found ‘serious triable issues’ in the government’s decision to treat Rwanda as a safe third country on the grounds that it was ‘irrational or based on insufficient enquiry’. Third, the lack of ‘any legally enforceable mechanism for the applicant’s return to the United Kingdom in the event of a successful merits challenge’ in the UK courts. Since Rwanda is not a state party to the convention, the ‘risk of treatment contrary to the applicant’s convention rights’ meant the Iraqi national who brought the case could not be removed until the domestic courts had ruled on the merits.

The interim measure and subsequent UK court orders are being celebrated by opponents of the government’s Rwanda plan. It is hardly a surprising outcome. I and others predicted it when the policy was announced. Whatever the merits or the morals of the plan, I am not sure the events of last night are a cause for celebration. Of course, they have kept these applicants in the UK a little longer and those responsible have delivered a setback to a policy measure they regard as cruel, callous and contrary to the UK’s international and humanitarian obligations. The politics of the first deportation flight, a Boeing 767 chartered at a cost of £500,000, departing with an empty passenger manifest is humiliating for the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister. They look weak, outmanoeuvred and not in control of the situation.

Yet it is these very considerations that should give progressives, liberals and others pause. For one, a deportation ordered by the Home Secretary and not blocked by UK judges has been interdicted by a court in Strasbourg, and not just any court: the big, bad, criminal-coddling, border-opening one with ‘European’ and ‘Human Rights’ in its name. Yes, the Council of Europe, of which the court is a creature, was first proposed by Churchill. Yes, the convention it upholds was drafted by a British Tory, David Maxwell Fyfe. The fact remains that the court has become contentious in Britain, so much so that merely invoking its name is the political and legal equivalent of saying ‘candyman’ five times into a mirror.

Many among the general public consider it a foreign institution imposing the preferences of foreign judges on the UK. It is telling that even the BBC, in its write-up of last night, felt the need to clarify that the ECtHR was ‘part of the Council of Europe, which still counts the UK as a member, rather than the European Union’. Ministers have got their bogeyman and even if a UK court eventually deems the Rwanda policy unlawful, Strasbourg and its convention will be shoved into the firing line along with the concept of domestic judicial review.

Ministers also couldn’t have asked for a better case study for their deportation regime. The applicant in K.N. v. the United Kingdom is an Iraqi national who, according to the court, ‘left Iraq in April 2022, travelled to Turkey and then across Europe before crossing the English Channel by boat’. Now, the Refugee Convention, to which the UK is a state party, doesn’t require refugees to claim asylum in the first safe country. It does, however, forbid signatories from penalising refugees for ‘illegal entry or presence’ where they have come ‘directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened’ (Article 31) or refouling them to a territory where they would be at risk on the basis of their ‘race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ (Article 33).

Again, though, there is international law and then there is national public opinion. Britain heeds the former more scrupulously than its domestic critics would admit and gives the latter shorter shrift than many of the enlightened European countries those domestic critics long for it to emulate. No matter. The result is the same: ministers will be able to point to a failed asylum seeker who, though fearing for his life, crossed the entire continent of Europe without finding a safe country until he reached the UK. That a medical doctor at the Immigration Removal Centre filed a report ‘indicating that the applicant might have been a victim of torture’ is not immaterial – but neither will it shape public opinion in the way asylum progressives might hope. The perception that Britain is falling victim to asylum shopping is something progressives prefer to wave away but it is a central component of public hostility towards the current refugee regime.

We aren’t really talking about law here but about politics – Tory politics. Winning a fifth election in a row was already going to be a huge ask, even before Boris Johnson became damaged goods. Doing so after admitting defeat to the lawfare industry, particularly on the question of border integrity, would be an almost impossible gradient to scale. If the Rwanda policy is ultimately frustrated, it would be politically lethal for the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and their party. While current talk of withdrawing from the ECHR seems rash, a defeat for the government in Strasbourg would likely shift Conservative backbenches, grassroots and voter opinion on the convention to the right.

Progressives should not welcome such a development as toxifying the Tory brand for the same reason they should not rub Conservative noses in last night’s embarrassment. The idea of ECHR withdrawal entering into the mainstream of British politics would put Labour on the wrong side of the very voters it needs to win back. It could represent another Brexit-style cleave in the political landscape. The public wants effective asylum policies and is not well disposed to judges – in Strasbourg or in London – overturning measures to secure the border. It’s not enough for progressives to oppose the Rwanda plan, they need to propose their own plan, one that is compassionate and humane but that a sceptical public can have confidence in.

The eurozone crisis is back

Stock markets are crashing. Bond yields are soaring. And the cryptos are evaporating. There is so much going on in the financial markets right now it would be hard to miss the most significant event. The eurozone crisis, which almost broke apart the single currency back in 2011 and 2012, is back. And this time around, there is no very obvious way of fixing it.

With inflation soaring across the world, the era of plentiful printed money coming to an end and interest rates starting to rise, every kind of financial market is in turmoil. Investors are adjusting to a new set of circumstances, and doing so very quickly. So far, only a few traders who spend their days glued to Bloomberg terminals have paid very much attention. But, within the chaos, yields on peripheral sovereign debt, the trigger for the single currency’s meltdown a decade ago, are rising steeply again.

At the start of this year, the yield on a ten year Italian bond was just 1.25 per cent. Now it stands at 4.04 per cent and is going up every day. Just last week it was only at 3.3 per cent, a dramatic increase by the standards of the bond market. The yield has already climbed to its highest level in years and is accelerating towards the 6.7 per cent it reached at the height of the last crisis when there were widespread fears Italy would default. Likewise, the yield on a ten year Greek debt has doubled over the past few weeks, punching through 4.4 per cent, and getting dangerously close to the levels that came close to forcing the country out of the currency zone.

The trouble is, rising interest rates make all that debt a lot more expensive to service. And these, let’s remember, are some of the most heavily indebted countries in the world, and they owe a lot more than the last time around. Italy’s debt to GDP ratio has risen to an alarming 148 per cent of GDP, and Greece’s to 186 per cent.

It is exactly the same challenge as a decade ago, except this time on roller skates. And, perhaps most worrying of all, the European Central Bank (ECB) has no real way of fixing it. At the height of the last crisis, its then president Mario Draghi, who now happens to be Prime Minister of Italy, pushed all the treaties to one side and started printing money. That meant he could buy all the bonds the peripheral countries issued and bring the markets to heel. But this time? It is not so simple. The ECB can’t print money without stoking inflation. But if it doesn’t print extra euros, it may have to admit that Italy and Greece, and perhaps France as well, come to think of it, are bust. In reality, the euro remains as dysfunctional a monetary system as ever – and inflation, a first for the currency, is about to test it to the limit.

Gareth Southgate doesn’t know what he’s doing

‘The Hungar Shames’ screamed the Sun after England suffered a mortifying 0-4 defeat to the not so mighty Magyars last night. The game was England’s worst home defeat since 1928. England now face the humiliating prospect of relegation from Tier B of the Nations League where they may join the likes of Armenia, Montenegro, and Albania. The shambolic, shapeless, performance against determined but limited opposition (Hungary are ranked 40 in the world) came on the back of three consecutive dismal outings (one goal in six hours of play, and that a penalty). England’s second favourite status for the World Cup in Qatar now seems ludicrously optimistic.

Ordinarily there would be serious questions raised about the manager’s position after such a debacle. But, despite fans chants of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’, not here. Gareth Southgate is immovable, thanks to his freshly inked contract extension which will keep him in the job until 2024 (at £5 million a year). This was reward for the accumulated credit of a World Cup semi-final, Euros final and straightforward qualification for Qatar; along with, probably, his nice manners and impeccable progressive credentials (supporting his players taking the knee, for example).

But does Gareth Southgate know what he is doing? And is he worth £5 million a year? On the surface reaching the semis of a World Cup and final of the Euros are unquestionable achievements for a nation used to hitting a quarter final brick wall in major tournaments. But below the surfaces are awkward realities like the exceptionally favourable pathway at Russia 2018 opened up by a rather dubious defeat to Belgium in the first round; and the huge advantage of playing mainly at home in the Euros; and some large slices of luck en route to that final. What few question is that Southgate made a mess of the World Cup semi and the Euros final, with an inflexible game plan in both and a controversial, some would say inexplicable, selection of penalty takers in the latter.

All this highlights just how difficult it is to truly evaluate Southgate’s, or arguably, any manager’s true value and contribution. All the man in charge can really do is try to create a good atmosphere in the squad (probably a Southgate strength), pick the team, and then hope for the best. During the actual games, he can prowl around the ‘technical area’ looking pensive and concerned (Southgate), or leap around in frustration at perceived injustices (Graham Taylor). He can make substitutions that sometimes, perhaps fortuitously, appear to work, but usually make no difference; and he can bark instructions through cupped hands that, even if heard, probably confuse as much as help.

Common sense dictates that nothing much can be achieved without a decent team. Just as Lewis Hamilton won’t win an F1 race in a Williams, so Jurgen Klopp is unlikely to have much joy at Norwich. The key metric by which any manager should be judged then is how successful they are in relation to the quality of the squad available to them, and the opposition faced. By such a calculation Southgate plummets, with what most would regard as a wealth of talent at his disposal and yet a record against major sides, and recently not so major sides, that is little better than his predecessors.

Making accurate assessments of top tier international team managers like Southgate has been further complicated by Fifa and Uefa’s constant tinkering with tournament structures. In the days of 16 team World Cups and eight team Euros, qualification was a genuine achievement. But with the bloated formats of today (32 and 24) is that still the case? Hardly. In 2026, where almost one in three European teams will make it to the first 48 team tournament, it should be a mere formality for England to qualify. Expect Harry Kane to reach his 100^th England goal with home and away hat-tricks against San Marino.

There was a time when football had a similarly realistic view of what the manager or coach could achieve to that which persists in rugby (can you name the coaches of the four home nations; I can’t) and cricket, where the coach (Brendon McCullum) is a long way behind the on-field captain in profile and importance. That began to change with the appointment of England’s first full time manager Walter Winterbottom in 1946.

Winterbottom’s talented England teams consistently qualified for major tournaments, where they usually disappointed. He was at the helm during some of England’s worst humiliations, including the worst of them all – the 1-0 loss to the USA in the 1950 World Cup. His teams were thrashed, home and away, by Hungary, admittedly a vastly superior Hungary, in 1953. Brian Glanville, probably the last writer on football who was around at the time, noted that ‘for all his interests in tactics, his strategies were often flawed’.

Winterbottom was by all accounts, like Southgate, a nice man, with the professorial air of the schoolteacher he once was. Unlike his occasionally abrasive successor Alf Ramsey, he caused the FA no trouble at all. He kept the job for 16 years. And won nothing. Is Southgate doomed to repeat his winless run?

The Rwanda policy is about sending a message

Is the UK on course to leave the European Convention on Human Rights? This is what some Tory MPs are pushing for after judges in Strasbourg blocked, at the last minute, the first deportation flight scheduled to take asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.

After unsuccessful bids in the UK courts, a judgement from the ECtHR halting the deportation of one passenger triggered a series of new legal challenges back in London. This led to the government removing all the passengers from the plane. In response to the judgment, Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was ‘disappointed’ but undeterred – insisting work for the next flight was already underway. 

Ahead of the decision, Johnson had already suggested that withdrawing from the ECHR was an option: ‘Will it be necessary to change some laws to help us as we go along? It may very well be and all these options are under constant review.’ Though notably the minister on this morning’s media round, Guy Opperman, takes a different view – saying it’s not government policy and ‘nor is it something I would be advocating’. 

Is the fact ministers can’t currently carry out their immigration plan a problem for this government? On paper, it doesn’t sound good. In reality, it’s more complicated. Ministers are more than happy to have a fight – just look how they responded to reports that Prince Charles called the policy ‘appalling’, leaning into the argument rather than ignoring it. It follows that a European court blocking the plan only further plays into the narrative of the establishment working to stop No. 10 from doing something it believes is popular with voters. Part of the point of the policy is simply to send a message to voters that the Tories are willing to be tougher than others when it comes to immigration. It also puts Keir Starmer in a tight spot – does he have an alternative plan to offer?

Yet there are still limits to this strategy. While No. 10 aides have described the policy as an ideal wedge issue, it still needs to eventually have an impact on deterring people from crossing the Channel. Otherwise, the Tories risk looking in the long term as though they don’t actually have a grip on a key voter concern.

What’s the alternative to the Rwanda plan?

Last night, a Boeing 767 that was supposed to fly 130 asylum seekers to Rwanda returned to Spain without a single passenger on board. Throughout the day, the number of people planned for that flight had been whittled down by multiple legal challenges. Then, minutes before take-off, the European Court of Human Rights made an injunction stopping an Iraqi man known as KN from being taken to Central Africa because, it said, he faced ‘a real risk of irreversible harm’.

The question some are asking is why the Home Secretary didn’t wait. There is supposed to be a broader challenge at the High Court next month which would, perhaps, have dealt with Strasbourg’s concerns – namely, that there was no legal mechanism for asylum seekers to return to the UK. Although that seems to be a feature rather than a bug: even if you are found to be a legitimate asylum seeker, the UK has said Rwanda is a safe place for you to settle. In other words, you still don’t get to come back to Britain. A mechanism for some legitimate refugees to return to the UK may be the only way to get this policy passed Strasbourg. But perhaps ministers want their flagship policy to get bogged down by legal challenges. When it comes to the Protocol, there’s certainly a view among some Europeans that Boris Johnson is dusting off the Vote Leave playbook, picking fights in order to get his message across. It works in a campaign, but it’s an odd strategy for governing.

The central question after last night is what to make of the Rwanda policy. It certainly divides opinion. Again, there are those who think that dividing opinion is part of its appeal. But Rwanda is as much a product of exasperation. The number of people illegally crossing the Channel is growing rapidly every year. And some of those people are dying. A couple of years ago I spoke to a family member of one of 39 people who suffocated in the back of a refrigerated lorry while attempting to get into Britain. When we spoke, they didn’t know for sure whether their sister was one of the bodies. But they suspected. It’s a horror I still find hard to imagine, slowly realising you’re unable to breathe in a fetid, sweaty box.

So although I felt a little sceptical, in fact, a little uneasy, about the Rwanda policy, I accepted something had to happen. The government’s response to its Rwanda critics is: what would you do? I’ve yet to hear a convincing answer to that question. The number of dinghy crossings is growing every year. Many of those people, too, find themselves suffocating under the waves of the English Channel. The UK tried paying the French to better police their own borders, but it seems not to have made much of a difference. Instead, the only option is to dissuade people from making those journeys in the first place. Why bother risking life to get to the UK if you’re going to be flown 4,000 miles away?

Back in 2015, David Cameron promised to take people directly from refugee camps. He wanted to discourage asylum seekers from illegally journeying into Britain, instead assessing them in or near the country that they were fleeing. It never happened, but it seemed sensible enough. Combine the two together – a tough Rwanda-style plan to deal with illegal entry and a generous offer to take legitimate refugees in situ – and we’d have something close to a fair and effective policy. The problem of course is scale. According to the UN, there are 26 million refugees across the globe. Even once we’ve weeded out the many millions more economic migrants, the UK would be unable to handle more than a fraction of that number. We are always going to have to restrict access to legitimate asylum seekers in some way. That is the most difficult problem of all.

Why Starmer shouldn’t relaunch

Yesterday’s Times carried a report that will only add to Sir Keir Starmer’s troubles. It quoted several members of the shadow ministerial team suggesting that Starmer is dull and unimpressive.That will only sharpen the perception, held by quite a few Westminster people, that the Labour leader isn’t doing as well as he should be, given the government’s weaknesses and failings.

‘Keir Starmer is not dragging his party down but he’s not transforming its fortunes either’. That was the conclusion of a New Statesman analysis a few weeks ago, and probably a fair one. The problem for Starmer is the fact that Labour needs that transformation. One of the most overlooked facts of political life is just how badly Labour did in 2019. That very poor performance means it would take something truly impressive and borderline historic for Labour to win a majority next time around.

Roughly speaking, it would take the sort of ten-point swing that Tony Blair got in 1997 to give Starmer’s Labour even the smallest of Commons majorities. And Keir Starmer is not Tony Blair. Hence the range of likely outcomes of the next election run from a modest Tory majority (perhaps under a new leader) to a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party and struggling to govern.

That is my summary of the conventional wisdom at Westminster regarding Starmer and his prospects. The coming Wakefield by-election is unlikely to change that story if it follows expectations and produces a Labour win: that gain has been, in the irritating cliché of the political village, ‘priced in’, regarded as the least that the opposition should currently be achieving. A (truly surprising) Tory win in Wakefield would turbocharge the ‘Starmer isn’t working’ narrative.

Narratives about leaders and their performance can be powerful, and can also defy the facts. Boris Johnson’s story is the best example of that. Even today, you can find Conservatives (and others) who talk of the PM as a politician with a broad and unusual appeal, able to reach a coalition of voters others cannot. That used to be true, in the middle of the last decade. But Brexit made Johnson divisive and subsequent events have made him unpopular: he entered No. 10 with negative approval ratings and – now that his vaccine bounce has faded – he’s even less popular now.

The story that Starmer is underperforming could easily become a problem for him regardless of the electoral facts. Politics is often a confidence game, and keeping the morale of your own side up is important. If your MPs start to doubt that you can lead them to victory, trouble will soon follow. So Starmer inevitably faces questions about what he’s going to do to improve his standing and prospects. His own deputy, Angela Rayner, has helpfully joined that conversation by suggesting that her lawyer boss is too lawyerly in his manner. ‘Put some more welly into it’, she advises. 

Because Westminster narratives follow well-established patterns, the current chatter about Starmer must soon be followed by talk of a relaunch or reset, some sort of big moment where an ‘embattled’ leader says or does something to show that actually s/he isn’t a duffer and will in fact deliver glorious victory. In 20-odd years of wandering around Westminster, I’ve seen relaunches come and go. Almost every party leader has resorted to a Big Speech relaunch at one point, and some have done lots of them: the Johnson premiership has been relaunched at least half a dozen times in three years.

Here’s what I’ve learned about relaunches, a lesson Keir Starmer might ponder as he hears advice telling him he needs to do one: they don’t work.

One reason they don’t work is that they actually just ratify the narrative. By relaunching yourself, you confirm that you’ve been sinking, which only undermines the very confidence you need your follower to have in you. In early 2003, Iain Duncan Smith made yet another attempt to rescue his leadership of the Conservative party with a conference speech declaring that ‘the quiet man is here to stay and he’s turning up the volume’. A month later he was gone. Relaunches don’t correct weakness. They advertise it.

They also do nothing for voters, whose perceptions of politicians are almost never positively changed by a single moment, speech or media round. In fact, public impressions are extremely hard to change, at least in a positive way. Once voters have formed an impression of you, it will likely stick.

I’m happy to be corrected on this by readers with better memories, but in the last two decades, I can think of only two politicians who have actually achieved a significant improvement in their standing, and Starmer is unlikely to want to copy them. The first is Jeremy Corbyn, whose numbers rose significantly in 2017. Partly that was because the Corbyn which voters saw in the 2017 election campaign didn’t match the one they’d been presented in a lot of pre-election coverage. Partly it was because he was up against a dismal opponent in Theresa May. Yet May is the other politician who changed her image. Having been a charmless and austere home secretary, she enjoyed a now-forgotten honeymoon as PM, during which voters and the electorate briefly enjoyed the reassuring solidity she offered after a time of turmoil.

Of course, neither of those stories ended well for the politicians concerned. But I still think these are the examples Starmer should learn from. Instead of a Big Speech with a new slogan or – even worse – confessional interviews where he reveals his true self and his burning passions, he should just keep on going. Instead of trying to change perceptions of his character – staid, boring – have faith in voters to see those things as a virtue. Keir Starmer isn’t a man who ‘puts welly’ into speeches. If he tried he might well sound like IDS turning up the volume.

These are difficult, turbulent times for many voters. Their country is led by a prime minister who is unpopular even with his colleagues and widely regarded as unreliable. The best thing for a leader of the opposition to offer is surely solidity, not style. Would it be a risk for Keir Starmer to ignore the chatter from his colleagues and the Westminster narrative that he’s underperforming? Yes. But sometimes when you’re uncertain of what to do, it’s worth remembering Hippocrates’s advice: first, do no harm. Relaunches do no good – and sometimes cause harm.

It’s time for Westminster to take on the SNP

There will not be a legally binding referendum on Scottish independence next year. It’s important to bear this in mind when chewing over Nicola Sturgeon’s latest pronouncement. The SNP leader held a press conference on Tuesday morning to publish a paper on independence in advance of a plebiscite Sturgeon says will be held in 2023.

She claims a mandate for such a vote from the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, in which the SNP and Greens ran on pro-referendum manifestos and won a majority of seats between them. This is the same Sturgeon who, asked during that campaign what a voter who backed her for First Minister but didn’t want another referendum should do, replied: ‘They should vote for me on Thursday, safe in the knowledge that getting us through this crisis is my priority.’ More to the point, the Union is reserved to Westminster, not devolved to Holyrood. It is a logical and constitutional absurdity to claim that a mandate can be obtained at an election to one parliament for the exercise of powers held by another parliament.

Westminster has not sanctioned a referendum but the SNP maintains it would be lawful, though the details are fuzzy. Glasgow University law professor Adam Tomkins has previously flagged up the Supreme Court’s robust interpretation of Section 28(7) of the Scotland Act, which says the UK Parliament retains ‘the power… to make laws for Scotland’. The legal scholar argued that any Holyrood Bill on independence ‘would surely be struck down’.

Is there a way to hold a referendum without a Section 30 Order (the legislative go-ahead from Westminster) and not fall foul of 28(7)? My layman’s brain pipes up: sure, Holyrood could just legislate for a non-binding referendum and, if the Leave side wins, wield it as a moral cudgel against Westminster. Assuming ministers took fright and rushed to make concessions — because of course they would — this little stunt could net the separatists an official referendum or another Union-enervating devolution of powers. Either way, the campaign to abolish the United Kingdom would score a major victory.

Why does it have to be this way? Labour promised that devolution would mean ‘the Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’. Why is the SNP allowed to use the institutions of devolution — UK institutions — to advance its anti-British crusade? Why is the UK government willing to risk a shock adverse outcome at the Supreme Court or the embarrassment of being outmanoeuvred with a non-binding plebiscite? Why does Britain allow its future to constantly hang in the balance in a way that no other sovereign country would?

Well, for one, the Prime Minister prefers to avoid Scotland, in the apparent belief that benign neglect is a substitute for leadership — or is, in fact, benign. More generally, ministers are paralysed by the devocrat creed that says Westminster must always bend over backwards to avoid upsetting Holyrood. This has proved disastrous for Scotland. The SNP is guaranteed victory in every election because it enjoys the dutiful support of the 40 per cent or so who make up the pro-independence core vote and believe freedom is just around the corner. Elections in Scotland are not judgements on how the Scottish or UK governments are performing but polls of competing constitutional identities.

Safe from scrutiny, the Scottish government has presided over dismal outcomes in health, education, the economy, transport, public procurement, rural affairs and in its handling of the pandemic. A parliament set up to make decision-making more responsive to people in Scotland has enabled one of the most insulated, opaque and under-scrutinised governments in western Europe. Devolution has brought Scotland bad government, lamentable outcomes and no hope of change until the constitutional question is resolved. Poor children will continue to lag behind, the quality of Scottish education will decline further, all the SNP’s ‘legally binding’ NHS targets will go unmet. The never-ending uncertainty about Scotland’s constitutional future will deter investors and further entrench the new political sectarianism of nationalism versus Unionism.

There is a way to bring this to an end. Unfortunately, it would require some backbone, a quality not in abundance in Downing Street. The SNP’s iron grip on Scottish politics depends on the transaction: vote SNP, get independence. If that transaction was shown to be fraudulent or unfounded, the SNP would struggle to trade on its brand as the party of Yes. And with that brand tarnished, you could expect the party’s various internecine battlelines — left vs right, trans rights activists vs feminists, climate gradualists vs fundamentalists — to sharpen and divide the organisation from top to bottom.

How could Westminster encourage this? By reforming devolution to strengthen the Union and prevent its institutions being misused to pursue the break-up of the UK. There are various ways to go about this. My proposal is for a new Act of Union that reasserts the UK as a unitary state in which the Crown-in-Westminster is sovereign; revokes the permanence of the Scottish Parliament and reserves certain devolved powers (elections, referendums, local government) to Westminster; and prohibits the use of Scottish parliamentary or governmental resources in relation to independence or other reserved matters.

Alternatively, Professor Tomkins has made his own suggestions, such as clarifying the circumstances under which a referendum may be held and creating a legal duty for public bodies to work in the interests of the Union. Jack Straw previously advocated going even further and legislating to make the Union permanent, as is the case in the United States, Spain, Australia and India, to name a few. On the other, less ambitious end of the scale, parliament could simply amend the Scotland Act to state: ‘The power to conduct referendums or similar devices on constitutional or other reserved matters is reserved to the UK Parliament.’

But wouldn’t the SNP call it a power grab? They call everything the UK government does a power grab. Where has falling over themselves to avoid the impression of a power grab gotten ministers so far?

But wouldn’t there be protests? Civil disobedience? Of course there would. Destroying the Union is what these people live for. Making that more difficult would hardly go down well with them.

But wouldn’t it make the UK government hugely unpopular in Scotland? Have you consulted an opinion poll lately? It is because the Prime Minister is so unpopular in Scotland that he could afford to do this.

The real obstacle to devolution reform is not the inevitable backlash but the willingness of UK ministers to ride it out. To set a course, stiffen their spines and refuse to U-turn. In the end, it is a question of belief. The Nationalists believe in their country and will do almost anything to redeem its independence. Do UK government ministers believe enough in their country to make the reforms necessary for its future?

How I prepare for the Edinburgh Fringe

I am going to the Edinburgh Festival this August. That declaration could be said in a number of ways. Celebratory (unlikely). Showing off (possibly). Self-promotion (in there somewhere). However, I’ve been in comedy a while and have reached what my wife recently called ‘solid middle-age’, so announcing I’m going to the Fringe is more of an incantation: a chant designed to steel myself for a taxing endeavour.

Not that there will be much tax owing afterwards, I’m not likely to make much money. No-one in Edinburgh does as well out of the Fringe as some bloke called ‘Josh’ who rents you his airing cupboard for six grand.

I’m assured this year should be special, as the festival hasn’t happened (properly) since 2019. The ‘vibe’ is going to be incredible. However, ‘vibe’ could also mean ‘lots of competition’. Having extricated myself from happy family life for three weeks I need to sell some bloody tickets. I’m all for ‘the biggest Fringe ever’ but not if I end up earning less than my barely pubescant flyering team.

Furthermore, given my experience of post-Covid travel, what state of mind will this army of returning fringe-goers be in by the time they arrive in the city? (having spent £400 for a flight from Luton which eventually took off in Biarritz). What kind of appetite for comedy can I expect from someone who spent the sum of their monthly mortgage on a single night in an Ibis which still has those air-fix toilets? The ubiquitous jacket potato will cost so much that those kindly American tourists will reverse the usual trend and start mugging locals.

Given all this negativity, why am I even going up? It’s mainly because my show, ‘I Blame the Parents’, is the best tour I’ve ever done. This isn’t arrogance, I’m just saying it’s the best show I’ve ever done. In the same way Hugh Laurie’s jazz album was definitely his best album containing jazz.

The start of my Tour in 2021 was electric, though it’s possible the early adulation was underpinned by the enthusiasm of a recent jail-break; people had just been allowed out of their houses and gave big returns for someone able to point out humorous things about vaccines: ‘Yes Geoff, Astra Zeneca is like a British value range – a bit s**t but gets the job done.’

The pandemic and lockdowns gave comics something we thrive on: shared experience. Beyond going to school and diarrhoea, there are few things we all go through, but Covid was a universal reference point. You didn’t even have to say, ‘Have you ever noticed?’ because you knew dam well everybody had. The pandemic was the only thing to notice. Either that or admit that you and your wife had run out of anecdotes.

It’s a delicate thing to work out when routines are going past their sell-by date. You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but the potential comedic stench of said bath water may ultimately be so foul that one or two discarded babies could be seen as reasonable collateral. Covid was a gift, producing some of the best material I’ve written and it wouldn’t be right for me to hope for just one more worrying variant to keep the subject live until the end of the Fringe. Would it?

Any show which started out a year ago will have also seen cultural and political changes moving at a faster pace than usual. When I started the Tour last September I had a routine about why Labour were so meh and why they’d never get ahead in the polls (in my defence, Labour still are meh, but the Tories seem intent on giving the opposition their own version of a windfall).

Even though Rishi’s approval numbers have since tanked like political Bitcoin, I still think the Tories should make him leader, if only to pettily take the high-ground in the diversity stakes.

By August, the Conservatives might be on their third confidence vote and the flights to Rwanda may have taken as many 12 people. I just thank god for the enduring nature of Prince Andrew’s unpopularity.

Even a subject like cancel culture has morphed. It was heartening to see Channel 4 stand by Jimmy Carr’s right to tell jokes (what with him being a comedian) and Netflix have started wondering whether a staff member ‘literally shaking with rage’ would constitute Dave Chapelle’s most objective critic. So the dial has moved a little bit, but if you’re arguing cancel culture doesn’t exist because globally famous gods of comedy have evaded it, you might be setting the threshold a little high.

So I’ve accepted I am going to the Edinburgh Fringe and the very least I can do is have some new things to say.

Maybe you’re going to the festival too. If that’s the case I have some sober advice. When it comes to accommodation, book early and don’t rule out student accommodation. It may be basic, but if you can endure a shared bathroom and the lingering smell of skunk you might have just enough money left to afford one of those coveted jacket potatoes or, even better, a ticket to my show.

Geoff Norcott is performing at the Edinburgh Festival 12-28^thAugust at the Underbelly with his show ‘I Blame The Parents’