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Man arrested after fires at Starmer’s home
A 21-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life after a fire at Sir Keir Starmer’s family home in Tufnell Park in London.
The London Fire Brigade and the police had attended the property shortly after 1.30 a.m. on Monday. While the door to the four-bedroom home owned by the Prime Minister was damaged, no one was hurt.
Later in the evening it emerged that counterterrorism officers were also investigating a blaze at a second property linked to Starmer as well as a vehicle fire. The vehicle fire occurred just before 3 a.m. last Thursday. It was on the same street as Starmer’s home.
In a statement, the Met police said:
‘On Monday 12 May at 01:35hrs, police were alerted by the London Fire Brigade to reports of a fire at a residential address in north London. Officers attended the scene. Damage was caused to the property’s entrance, nobody was hurt. The fire is being investigated and cordons remain in place while enquiries continue.’
The force later added:
‘The investigation team are also considering two other incidents – a vehicle fire in NW5 on 8 May and a fire at the entrance of a property in N7 on 11 May – and are investigating whether they may be linked to the fire in NW5 on 12 May.’
Why has the BBC’s gay dating show got a trans contestant?
‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,’ says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren’t what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is, in fact, a woman. Yes, what was basically Love Island without women in its first series is now, in series two, like Love Island.
Can’t the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own?
‘I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It’s aged me, but in a good way,’ says Lars, who says they/them ‘felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman’s body.’ What on earth that means, and how she could possibly know, is anybody’s guess.
Can’t the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own? Unfortunately, it seems that for our TV class, I Kissed A Boy isn’t progressive enough, so it needed a woman in it.
To me, this looks like coercion disguised as ‘good manners’ – don’t kick up a fuss; just go along with it. What does it matter? Don’t be horrible. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you were a nasty person…
But gay men shouldn’t have to put up with it. It’s not fair that one of the other contestants might be placed in the awkward position of matching with someone who was born female, let alone doing so in full public view.
There is also the reasonable suspicion that this is merely a softening up exercise for a second series of lesbian sister show I Kissed A Girl, which will inevitably have a bloke in it.
In our supremely enlightened age, it seems that gay people can be whatever they want to be. Even straight girls can be gay boys. Is I Kissed A Boy‘s ‘inclusive’ cast a sign of progress? I’m not convinced. The idea that British TV is prejudiced and nasty, or ever was, is very silly. TV has always been stuffed with liberals and progressives, behind and often in front of the cameras.
Yes, back in the 1970s there were stereotypes, not least in comedy. But mostly these were born of a particular moment that has lingered long in our collective cultural consciousness. Those comedy characters who popped up in shows in the early-to-mid 1970s were of a specific era, caught between old standards and new sexual freedoms. Even by the late 1970s, these depictions were creaky and passé.
True, there were no lesbian or gay regular characters in soaps, or any such heroes in other drama before the 90s. But I’ve watched a lot of old TV – I still do – and I’m very frequently surprised by guest characters and storylines. Upstairs, Downstairs managed to pack in several such stories in its run from 1971 to ’75.
Crime drama, particularly from ITV, has gays galore. The XYY Man is an incredibly scuzzy series about a cat burglar – it’s basically The Wire made by Granada in 1976 – that features bruiser Leslie Schofield as a gay ‘glamour’ photographer in Soho, along with Corrie’s Alec Gilroy (Roy Barraclough) as a marvellously eccentric rat catcher.
The Gentle Touch features episodes about a gay teen runaway who commits murder in a moment of panic, and a study of assisted suicide that just happens to be about a lesbian couple. Minder has a very ordinary gay couple in 1980. You’ll find these stories even further back and in the unlikeliest places: there’s an episode of thriller It’s Dark Outside from 1964 featuring Jerome Willis as a tough nut gay gangster.
Even comedy has its moments; there is a gay couple, totally accepted, in the pub in Til Death Us Do Part. Some very anodyne jokes about the gay friends of the central trio in an episode of Man About The House mean that the characters get cut almost completely from the version you can stream on ITVX. How advanced!
And there is, besides, almost never any active malice in comedic depictions of gay men on old TV. This is hardly surprising: why would there have been, given the rich tradition of gay men in showbusiness?
Half a century later, I Kissed A Boy – for all its ‘progressive’ credentials – is a very different scenario. The men selected for the exercise are all painfully similar; the contestants do the usual reality TV contestant thing of pretending to be stupider than they are. But, what’s worse, is the inclusion of Lars.
There has been so much political blather about the practice of gay conversion therapy. But it is no exaggeration to say that I Kissed A Boy looks like actual conversion practice in reality. Gay contestants on the show might find themselves in a position where they feel pressured to disown their sexuality, courtesy of our wonderful state broadcaster. It is grotesque, and seems more homophobic than anything ever seen before on British TV.
What exactly is the point of Starmer’s EU defence pact?
Sir Keir Starmer’s cherished agreement on defence with the European Union seems to have been high on the diplomatic agenda for a very long time without ever quite reaching its top. The Labour party’s manifesto for last year’s general election promised an ‘ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen cooperation on the threats we face’. We have heard the word ‘reset’ in terms of our relationship with the EU so often that it has lost most of whatever meaning it once had.
Next week, however, the UK will host a summit for the Prime Minister to engage with EU leaders and, at last, approve this long-anticipated and discussed defence deal. The Times has gleaned some of the major elements of the agreement: it will be ‘unique and ambitious’ – it would be odd if negotiators on either side had dismissed it as ‘ten-a-penny’ or ‘low-hanging fruit’; it will make it easier to move military assets and personnel across the continent; and it will make some provision for the UK to participate in the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence industry fund and EU military missions.
The one explicit argument in the pact’s favour will not even be automatic
The agreement is reportedly heavy on sententious rhetoric, with the UK and the EU facing a ‘decisive moment’ and the ‘greatest threat in a generation’. Yet it is still not entirely possible to discern what Starmer wants from the deal in principle, as I warned in February this year. The Prime Minister still hasn’t offered a plausible justification for pursuing defence policy and procurement through the EU’s limited and weak institutions rather than the tried-and-tested structures of Nato. My concern is that he sees it as a way of atoning for Brexit, of expiating the sins of the British electorate, instead of acting in the hard-faced national interest.
One major motivating factor for an agreement of some kind is that the EU’s new €150 million (£126 million) SAFE loan scheme for defence spending makes clear that those participating in common procurement must be either EU or EFTA members, an acceding, candidate or potential candidate country, Ukraine or ‘third countries with whom the Union has entered a Security and Defence Partnership’.
Given that the UK is home to the world’s seventh-largest defence manufacturer, BAE Systems, the inclusion of this proviso was a not-very-coded message to Britain: if you want to be a player in this booming sector, you will need to sign a security agreement. However, it seems that any rights of access the United Kingdom might expect will not be automatic under the new agreement, but ‘subject to a separate negotiation and conditions, including a financial contribution from the UK’.
It has also been reported that the EU is ‘open to the UK taking part in the EU’s common security and defence policy’. This slightly offhand acceptance is at odds with the tone of the debate only a few months ago, when support for EU military missions was seen as a duty the UK might have to pay for a wider deal. Now it is being graciously, if partially, bestowed as a reward.
The danger is that the UK is sucked into supporting military deployments that it did not approve, for foreign policy priorities which we may not share. The whole idea could merely strike another blow at a weakened Nato.
The European Union’s joint command and control institutions are much smaller and less tested than those of the alliance. The EU’s timid approach to clear and identified threats was demonstrated by the refusal of various member states to participate in Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led security mission against Houthi militants in the Red Sea. The Prime Minister should shape the UK’s defence policy around our strategic interests and the means of delivering them, not as a token of good faith to an organisation we left five years ago.
What is the UK gaining from the impending agreement if the reports of its contents are accurate? Our defence industry will be ‘allowed’ to meet EU procurement needs under SAFE but only if a participation fee is paid, and the EU is ‘open to’ allowing the UK armed forces to bolster its own military capability. In addition, there will be various working groups and discussion forums which merely enshrine the kind of conversations which could be happening anyway.
This agreement is intended to be the centrepiece of the summit. It will have come at a cost, many anticipate, of continued EU access to UK fisheries and acceptance of a youth mobility scheme. There may also be increased ability for British suppliers to sell food and agricultural products in the EU without customs checks. The pact will pull the UK into the EU’s Common Defence and Security Policy, but we will have no influence over decision-making. And we will duplicate many of the functions and institutions of Nato, or rather provide worse ways of replicating them. The one explicit argument in the pact’s favour – allowing our defence sector access to SAFE – will not even be automatic.
No doubt the Prime Minister will tell us this is a good deal for Britain. It feels more like a desperate plea for better relations with an ex-partner – and ten months of diplomatic energy which would have been much better spent elsewhere. Still, 27 EU member states will regard it as quite a coup.
What the kids get right about the assisted dying bill
The brothers Grimm knew that it sometimes takes a child to call out what grown-ups think but dare not say. Whether it is that the emperor wears no clothes or that our parliamentarians show little compassion, you can count on children to speak the truth.
Does it take a 17-year-old to point out that we shouldn’t be focusing on assisted dying but on assisted living?
Take the latest report from the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza. Asked about the Assisted Suicide Bill, which reaches report stage this week, the teenage respondents’ approach is thoughtful and compassionate. In stark contrast to the shallow and weaselly debate that supporters of the Bill have engaged in, here are 15- and 16-year-olds who address the ethical dilemma head-on, pointing out that the legislation risks making ‘some lives more valuable than others’. They ask, ‘is life with a disability not worth living?’ All share an understanding of the potential for coercion and discrimination inherent in the Bill in its current formulation: ‘What if’, asks one 16-year-old girl, ‘it ends up removing people from society that people don’t want in society?’
Some of the respondents are disabled themselves, while others have family members who are approaching their end of life. They have first-hand experience of the care system and understand how its failures are driving many vulnerable individuals, including young people, to be tempted to end it all.
‘Mercy killing’ sounds less barbaric than being at the mercy of a system that allows for squalid ‘care’ homes staffed by over-worked, under-paid, and all too often jaded ‘carers’. Does it take a 17-year-old to point out that we shouldn’t be focusing on assisted dying but on assisted living? That we shouldn’t concentrate on how to reduce the number of vulnerable citizens in need of health and social care but rather fix our NHS and social care systems?
Baroness Casey has warned the government bluntly that her commission will be deliberating for years about improving social care: by then, how many youngsters will have felt compelled, if not coerced, to opt for assisted dying if this Bill is passed?
On one issue the report’s contributors remain silent, however: it is the young who risk being subject to particular pressure to end their own lives. Social media already pumps out content that encourages young people to commit suicide. There are images and videos that share tips on how to kill yourself and online challenges to participate in games that can result in suicide.
When the Samaritans conducted a survey among young people regarding the impact that seeing content depicting suicide and/or self-harm was having on their lives, 77 per cent admitted to self-harming in the same or similar ways as the videos they had watched. As Sophie Winkleman, campaigner for a social media ban for under 16s, warns:
There is a domino ignition effect with suicide content and material. Most teens go through troubled and anxious phases. The prospect of a ‘way out’ of a bullying spell, a patch of social angst, even a panic about exams – would be an alluring one to all but the most robust of adolescents.
As it stands, the assisted dying Bill would allow young people from 18 onwards to seek assistance in suicide. Given the sinister promotional material they already access – even involuntarily – the Bill will compound the pressure on teenagers struggling with any mental or physical health issues.
The least we can do, de Souza says, is to give children and young people a voice in the ongoing debate:
The quality of their reflections on the implications of this Bill have been more impressive than I have heard in the parliamentary debate so far… We must listen and reflect on what our young people think to ensure that policy and laws don’t overlook the perspective of those they will ultimately impact. If we don’t include them, we risk being entirely out of step with the wishes of the next generation.
Jess Asato MP, a vocal opponent of the Bill, has been urging MPs to read the contribution of these young people to the debate on assisted dying ahead of its report stage next week. She is right – they should.
Ukrainians are giving up hope
I am a 37-year-old Ukrainian woman, and have recently returned from Odesa, where I was born and grew up, and to which I’ve just had my ninth visit since the war began. I generally go back for two or three weeks each time, to see my parents who still live there. On these trips back home, I try to support my family, to do some nice things with them like going out to a restaurant or cafe, and to bring them, perhaps, a little joy.
Joy is something it’s getting harder and harder in Ukraine to feel
But joy is something it’s getting harder and harder in Ukraine to feel. Whatever you’re doing, even if there’s laughter, there’s always something black and heavy at the back of your mind. On each visit, the people of my country have amazed me. They’re still trying to hold onto the life they once had. They go to the seaside and drink coffee there; they buy flowers for those they love; they put on make-up and often make themselves look attractive. But civilians there realise, in Odesa now as elsewhere, that the good time they’re having might be interrupted any moment by air alarms and missile attacks.
In this new phase of nightly bombing, what you see in people is a kind of exhaustion, both emotional and physical. Practically everyone finds it harder to relax and get to sleep. You’re told by certain Telegram channels that drones and missiles are on their way from Russia but not, until the last moments, which city they’re heading for. As a result, there’s constant anxiety. It doesn’t leave you for a moment and it’s getting increasingly difficult for people to hold themselves together.
On my last two days with my family, Russia bombed the city. It happened close to our home and was unnerving, to say the least. You could hear the new Russian Gerbera drones flying above and our mobile anti-missile systems trying to eliminate them. I thought about the young missile defence soldiers driving around Odesa, shooting down the Russian drones, risking their lives to save ours. The gratitude I felt towards them – like those on the front line – was indescribable.
But my parents (like all the people in Ukraine) have to go through this all the time. Now that I know personally what it’s like, I’m even more worried about them – not only for their lives but for their nervous systems. I keep praying my parents are strong enough to go through all this and enjoy their normal peaceful life when the war is over. That said, you can still, sometimes, hear people’s defiance: ‘Russia won’t achieve anything with their bombings. They can see nothing is working out for them. They expected to take Ukraine in three days. They miscalculated.’
You also see the soldiers coming back from the war. There are young people who look very old because of what they’ve been through, and when you see into their eyes you feel, with sadness, the absolute irreversibility of it all. Cemeteries in my country are now a sea of Ukrainian flags – one for each soldier who has died. It’s more powerful, and pitiful, than any statistic could be.
Amidst the grief and hopelessness, there are also sudden waves of optimism the war will finish soon. It’s a rollercoaster ride, these changing visions of the future, but one that’s sometimes preferable to any certainty about where the country’s heading. In such a state, people get superstitious and have presentiments. One friend is convinced that this August (she doesn’t know why) will mark a crucial moment, that something will change and the war come to an end. ‘From her lips to God’s ears,’ as we say in Ukraine. But such predictions, as I see it, are a sign things are getting increasingly desperate.
Faith in Donald Trump – whom we once hoped would help us – is now gone. According to a survey of Ukrainians from the New Europe Centre, ‘As of mid-April 2025, only 7.4 per cent of respondents said they fully or mostly trust the American leader, compared to 89 per cent who do not trust him.’
I can confirm, from my own conversations, the truth of this. As time passes, there’s less and less belief in the White House. A lot of people are disappointed and consider Trump just a loudmouth and a show-off. We also feel outrage about his gaslighting of president Zelensky and our people, as he tries to make out it’s Ukraine that doesn’t want the war to end, and which is refusing the generous offers of kind Uncle Putin, who so earnestly longs for peace.
Trump’s whole attitude toward this war, as if it were just some business deal, is infuriating too. He says he cares about people dying (‘I love Ukraine’), but then wilfully ignores Putin’s vile atrocities. As I said to a friend at the beginning of the war, ‘If a woman fights off a rapist instead of lying back and taking it, is she guilty of aggression?’ Now I ask myself whether people have a natural tendency to end up blaming the victim. Is this how the human psyche works?
The pain Ukrainians have to endure every day makes it impossible to be tolerant
My own world used to be split, morally, into Russians and Ukrainians but isn’t any more. Now it divides into Putin supporters (i.e. those who support his brand of fascism, wherever they are from) and people against his terrorist regime. I pray one day that Russians in the latter group – I know they exist – are able to change things in their country and to cure those poisoned by Putin’s lies. That is the best one can hope for.
But a lot of Ukrainians feel differently, and I understand why. The pain they have to endure every day makes it impossible to be tolerant. I don’t know how much time will pass after the war ends, and what needs to be done to ease the hostility between our nations. Otherwise, it might stay with us forever.
Because the very fact that the occupied territories will remain under Russia’s control — as well as White House endorsement of what is being ‘offered’ to us (rather than the terms we ourselves are proposing) — seems to nullify every last one of Russia’s crimes. The two countries, this narrative seems to tell us, were initially fighting on equal terms, both having started the war, and now are looking for a compromise to end it.
But black has become white here, white become black – nothing could be further from the truth. As Ukrainians, we sometimes feel at the moment – helped along by Trump and Putin – completely misrepresented before the world, and misunderstood. Ukraine, it should not need repeating, did not start this war. For three years, Russia bombed us with impunity, justifying its crimes with various absurd excuses, twisting everything as if it were provoked by us. Unsurprisingly, we Ukrainians long not just for peace – for people to stop dying – but for Russia to be held publicly accountable for what it has done. This, the proposed peace agreement completely fails to do. Russia – which so richly deserves punishment – has got away with murder.
As I write my final words, I’m checking the news. Earlier today, Russia struck the city of Sumy with ballistic missiles — three people were killed. Just an hour ago, the Kremlin launched 13 strikes on the city of Zaporizhzhia. At this very moment, people remain trapped under the rubble. All we can do is hope that the rescuers will manage to get them out alive. And that sometime soon, though it seems less and less likely, Russia’s war on Ukraine will finally come to a lasting and satisfactory end.
Trent Alexander-Arnold and the wrath of Anfield
Trent Alexander-Arnold is a gifted footballer. Twice he has helped Liverpool become champions of England. He was also an important member of the team that became champions of Europe, and he has played 33 times at right back for England. Alexander-Arnold is still only 26. His race is nowhere near run. He has, one may safely say, power to add.
And how did Liverpool supporters receive him when he came on as a second-half substitute against Arsenal over the weekend? Touched by the sun, thousands hooted their disapproval. The ‘Anfield faithful’, to borrow one of those sentimental phrases that come so easily to lazy scribes, let the player know that he could, in fact, walk alone. Charmers all.
Alexander-Arnold’s offence is to leave Liverpool, a great club, for a greater one: Real Madrid. He’s a local lad, and many Liverpudlians regard his transfer as an act of treachery. He’s leaving Anfield on a ‘free’, too, so the club can’t trouser a fee. This is mutiny, Mr Christian.
It is possible to argue the player has made a mistake. Liverpool are in rude health, finishing top in the first season of Arne Slot’s stewardship after several not-quite years under Jürgen ‘Klippety’ Klopp. Real Madrid, meanwhile, have endured a frustrating season, beaten in the Spanish title race by a resurgent Barcelona and walloped in Europe by Arsenal.
From a footballing point of view, therefore, Alexander-Arnold could have stayed his hand. The thing is, Real Madrid tend not to knock twice. This is the club of clubs, which has won the European Cup/Champions League 15 times. It is the domain of Alfredo Di Stéfano, Ferenc Puskás and Zinedine Zidane. It is where footballers go to find out how good they are.
Michael Owen, who left Anfield for Madrid at the height of his powers, didn’t last a season – the victim of club politics. Steve McManaman was twice a champion of Europe wearing the famous white shirt of royal Spain. Yet neither man was given the Liver bird in the manner of Alexander-Arnold. Liverpool fans turned against Owen when he joined Manchester United, it is true. The narcissism of small differences, in Dr Freud’s book.
It is not uncommon for outstanding servants to leave Anfield. Kevin Keegan left for Hamburg in the summer of 1977, days after leading Liverpool to their first European Cup triumph. Keegan tends to get overlooked these days, but it is impossible to ignore his mighty contribution to the club’s story. Seven years later, Graeme Souness packed his bags for Sampdoria in Genoa after playing a starring role in another European Cup victory.
The ‘Anfield faithful’, to borrow one of those sentimental phrases that come so easily to lazy scribes, let the player know that he could, in fact, walk alone
But Alexander-Arnold is from Liverpool, and so there is a sense of betrayal. He’s ‘one of us’ in the eyes of that vocal ‘Scouse not English’ portion of the Anfield crowd. You know, the folk who make a point of booing the national anthem to show how daring they are. And they wonder why others don’t take them at their own estimation.
It’s important to distinguish Scousers from Liverpudlians because they are not all birds of the same feather. Ken Dodd, Simon Rattle and Paul McCartney are bona fide Liverpudlians. To identify Scousers, well, as Ko-Ko sang in The Mikado, ‘I’ll leave it up to you’. There are quite a few candidates.
J.B. Priestley, who visited the city on his celebrated English Journey in the autumn of 1933, was shocked by the vulgarity of the Liverpool Irish. Would Ireland, he asked, want them back – or even recognise them as being ‘Irish’?
Liverpool fans are not alone. Football, uniquely among team sports, exalts a tribalism which non-tribalists find puzzling – indeed, offensive. Journalists and broadcasters who should know better then fan the flames of this mental disturbance by using absurd and frequently quasi-religious imagery to describe the fans’ ‘passion’ and ‘devotion’. Yet we’re talking about a game, one among many.
Liverpool are worthy champions. The players represent a great club in a city that has so much more to offer than a few thousand of its more blinkered citizens are prepared to give. ‘Manchester man, Liverpool gentleman’, they used to brag when their port faced the right way. It might be a good idea for some of those hooters to live up to that honour.
Why are women expected to love chocolate?
‘What? You don’t like chocolate?’ The British Airways attendant almost shouted at me in incomprehension as she was passing out little packets of chocolate digestives. I had had the temerity to ask (in economy, of course) whether there might be any other biscuits on offer. To which she had responded with a concerned enquiry about allergies. No, I said, I am not allergic. I just don’t like chocolate.
I can’t say I was surprised by the attendant’s reaction. Any suggestion that you might not share the current appetite – nay, fetish – for chocolate and you are treated as though you’re inexplicably withdrawing yourself from the cultural mainstream. This applies particularly to women. In the event that a man declines chocolate, this tends to pass without comment. So be it. A woman who declines chocolate, on the other hand, risks finding herself treated as somehow deviant. And if a conversation among women turns to chocolate, well, the best course by far is to keep quiet.
A conversation about chocolate will not be of whether, but what – preferences in taste, texture and brands, perhaps prices and outlets. Interject that, actually, you don’t really like the stuff, and a full interrogation follows, reflecting a near-universal disbelief. You are allowed to dislike almost anything else in the sweet line-up: liquorice, Turkish delight, marshmallows, etc., but not chocolate.
In one way this is strange, as there are health reasons why some people might sensibly decline chocolate. Along with cheese and some red wine, chocolate can be a trigger for migraines. This is not my particular problem. I am mostly unfussy about food, I just happen not to like it. But the migraine connection should be a reason for mass caterers, such as airlines, to avoid a take-it-or-leave-it chocolate.
Whatever the medical and gender aspects, an exaggerated enthusiasm for chocolate has somehow become an unquestioned part of modern mores, and the more exotic and ‘pure’ the variety, the more desirable it will be. Air miles are seemingly no object. You can find people stoically eschewing avocados, citing the fruit’s inordinate thirst for scarce water, who will happily seek out chocolate made from beans grown in, say, Dominica or Uganda. The extent of chocolate choice in many supermarkets is now as wide as for coffee, and attracts some of the same snobbery – sorry, connoisseurship.
I had rather hoped that the recent Dubai chocolate affair might have spelled the beginning of the end of this country’s chocolate fetish – a phenomenon mostly not found elsewhere. You may remember how Waitrose featured in the news just a few weeks ago for reportedly limiting the amount of so-called Dubai chocolate that any one customer could buy. It turned out that TikTok influencers (but of course) had successfully promoted the delights of a chocolate bar containing pistachio and filo, causing a run on the bars. The shortage was exacerbated by poor pistachio harvests in various parts of the world.
You are allowed to dislike almost anything else in the sweet line-up: liquorice, Turkish delight, marshmallows, etc., but not chocolate
Regrettably, the effect was not to quell the demand for exotic chocolate, but to spawn a host of imitations, demonstrating that the Dubai chocolate craze was but one fleeting aspect of a much bigger and longer-term trend. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to almost any mid- to upper-range supermarket and note all the shelf space currently occupied by chocolate. While traditional boxes of chocolates are, if not quite in a minority, then conspicuously in retreat, that is old chocolate. New chocolate, in the form of ever darker, higher-concentrate bars from ever farther producer countries, marches on. Even in the run-up to Easter, I registered more space at a large M&S dedicated to chocolate bars than displaying seasonal eggs, rabbits and chicks.
I can understand why many mid-20th century parents might have had a bit of a thing about chocolate – remember blue-wrapped Cadbury’s Dairy Milk or Fruit and Nut, or red-wrapped Nestlé bars. After all, they had lived through wartime sugar-rationing; chocolate was both a novelty and a treat. And maybe something of that mentality has been passed down to the third and fourth generations, along with the presumption that everyone likes – sorry, loves – chocolate. I hope it won’t take another war for us to lose this chocolate addiction.
In the meantime, I was pleased to find that on two recent BA flights, the offerings were a blueberry bar and shortbread respectively, though the chocolate digestives will surely be back soon.
What my walking boots taught me about death
It’s unlikely you’ll find a sorrier-looking pair of hiking boots than mine. As a result of my Camino addiction, the backs of my boots are literally crumbling, while the fronts have split open like a French baguette. They look like prime candidates for the hiking boot version of assisted dying – to put them out of their misery. But on my last pilgrimage, and in recognition of my complacency, I began treating my boots like royalty. I applied leather grease at the end of each day, packing them with newspaper to draw out the moisture. In short, I put those boots before all else.
They are lasting far longer than I thought possible. These boots got me thinking about my recent experiences of palliative care: three cases in as many months at the start of the year. One involving a relative, one a close family friend, and the last a Texan cowboy I came to know in Austin.
I was with my bed-ridden relative – who had lost more than half her body weight, having not eaten anything for six weeks – and her husband. There I witnessed the highest form of love – what the Greeks and C.S. Lewis described as agape, superior to all else. Watching palliative care left me contemplating the strange contradiction in these dreadful situations: when someone endures an early death, there is a mysterious alchemy within the relationships of those involved.
Because of the efforts of my relative’s husband and a helping friend – a palliative care nurse – my relative looked herself. Her hair was done, her nails manicured; she had always been a colourful dresser – so I recognised her for who she still was, despite the ravages of illness.
They had set up her bed in the sitting room, so she was surrounded by the Christmas tree and decorations as she watched Strictly Come Dancing. She was so clearly in a loving home – what the writer Rod Dreher calls ‘a haven in a heartless world’ – and all I can say is what a difference that made to everyone involved.
During that final visit, as her husband fussed over her, continually asking what she needed, if he could do anything more, I had to turn my head away – so intimate and intense was the relationship between them. I suspect it was all the more striking for the contrast it made with what we usually see in our world of smartphones and hard-set faces.
Similarly, through the daughter of an old family friend, I heard how ‘beautiful’ his last two weeks were. My friend, her sister and mother tended to the fading warrior – as a young British Army officer he served in Oman during the 1970s – through all the hardship and heartbreak. But it’s the beauty that stayed with her.
You can get another pair of hiking boots easily enough – but our friends and loved ones are unique
The partner of my Texan cowboy friend described how, after months of fighting and chemotherapy, she just ‘knew’ one night that the end was near. She read out a special ‘blessing’ she had been saving. Then, after setting aside the book, she held that cowboy as his life drifted away – and, her intuition correct, he ‘took his last breaths a few moments later’ in her embrace.
How do you sum all that up? I can’t even begin to convey it. Perhaps it’s something like the camaraderie I witnessed in the army in Iraq and Afghanistan – and which is one of the reasons so many veterans struggle after leaving the army. It sounds unbelievable given we’re discussing war, but the civilian realm can be so brutally cold and heartless by comparison.
Pope Francis – who gave a potent demonstration of not giving up on life – spoke admirably about the importance of recognising human dignity, and how our high-tech, disposable, modern societies trample on the sanctity of life. He spoke of the ‘distorted view of the person’ that ‘fosters an individualistic and aggressive throw-away culture, which transforms the human being into a consumer good’. He regularly warns how this attitude targets the youngest – the unborn – and the oldest. I wonder if those who campaign for ‘assisted dying’ have seriously considered this.
Death is the most difficult thing any of us has to deal with. It’s easy to think you’d do the right thing if you’ve never been tested. But I pray I would never let my loved ones be put down by the state, no matter how inconvenient others might find them. Primarily because of – I hope – love.
We already have ‘assisted dying’: it’s what I saw and had described to me. Palliative care is assisted (caring for the) dying. What Esther Rantzen, her fellow campaigners, and media such as the Guardian are pushing is ‘assisted suicide’ – the second horn of the dystopian pincer movement, with abortion already in place to end life at its beginning.
You can get another pair of hiking boots easily enough – but our friends and loved ones are unique. We only have them this one time. They will be taken away from us, just as we will be taken from those who survive us. Keep applying that leather grease to your loved ones, no matter what.
How Zelensky is calling Putin’s bluff
As the war between Russia and Ukraine continues on the battlefield, global leaders are waging their own campaigns through diplomacy, pressure and strategic manoeuvring.
Just days ago, leaders from the UK, Germany, France and Poland arrived in Kyiv to urge Vladimir Putin to accept a 30-day, unconditional ceasefire. The message was clear: if Moscow refuses, Western allies will increase sanctions and ramp up military aid to Ukraine.
Buoyed by this unified show of support, Volodymyr Zelensky called the ceasefire ‘the first step in truly ending any war’.
But by morning, the Kremlin had issued a statement that ignored the ceasefire entirely. Instead, Putin proposed resuming direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on 14 May – without preconditions. This move directly challenged the EU’s demand that a ceasefire come before any negotiations.
‘We propose to the Kyiv authorities to resume the talks that they broke off in 2022, and, I emphasise, without any preconditions,’ Putin said.
The proposal sounded like a demand to raise a white flag, considering the Kremlin’s previous terms: that Ukraine recognise Crimea as Russian territory, pledge neutrality and disarm. Zelensky rejected those terms then, saying that ‘Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be negotiated.’
Over the three years since then, Ukraine’s position has worsened: hundreds of thousands are dead, millions displaced, and much of the country’s economy, industry and infrastructure is in ruins.
Reviving the Istanbul talks would underscore the stark contrast between Ukraine’s position then and now – a contrast Putin probably meant to highlight when he declared: ‘The situation has fundamentally changed since 2022,’ signalling Russia’s growing leverage as Ukraine weakens.
Zelensky’s unexpected agreement to attend the 14 May meeting in Istanbul in person stirred speculation. Some interpreted it as a step towards peace; others feared that it signalled capitulation. But for those familiar with Zelensky’s style of diplomacy, the move echoed a familiar pattern: seizing the initiative through face-to-face engagement, even under intense pressure.
Consider the December 2019 Paris summit, when Zelensky met Putin for the first time. Despite earlier accepting the Minsk agreements, Zelensky reversed course in person – insisting on a full Russian withdrawal from Donbas before any political resolution. The demand blindsided Putin, who accused Zelensky of reneging on prior commitments, sinking the talks.
A similar breakdown occurred in Istanbul in 2022. An agreement, reportedly finalised by Zelensky’s representatives, was abruptly scrapped when Ukraine withdrew from the talks. In a televised address, Zelensky said: ‘We cannot trust Russia’s promises.’ US and European diplomats were stunned but did not press to resume negotiations – anticipating a Ukrainian counter-offensive that never materialised.
The war dragged on, and a frustrated Putin did all he could to ensure Ukraine would not regain the upper hand.
For a more recent example, look to January 2025, when Zelensky travelled to Washington to meet Donald Trump regarding a proposed deal on rare earth metals. The discussion quickly escalated into a heated argument, derailing an agreement Zelensky viewed as unfavourable to Ukraine. The episode underscored his preference for high-stakes, personal diplomacy – even when it means walking away at the last minute.
These repeated patterns suggest a likely outcome in Istanbul: Zelensky will use the talks not to reach peace, but to position Russia as the intransigent party. It may be the only viable tactic he has left, given the cards on the table.
Surrounded by shifting alliances and inconsistent support, Zelensky is forced to walk a razor’s edge – expected to negotiate without conceding, to fight without endangering elections, and to rally allies who may not be fully committed. Russia exploits Ukraine’s battlefield exhaustion, while some western leaders use peace talk optics to serve domestic audiences, leaving Zelensky with few genuine choices.
Zelensky will use the talks not to reach peace, but to position Russia as the intransigent party
Yet time and again, Zelensky has managed to steer Ukraine through seemingly hopeless scenarios. From holding Kyiv in the early days of invasion to navigating energy crises, diplomatic breakdowns and political isolation, he has shown a knack for manoeuvring under pressure – and for turning weakness into defiance. Istanbul may be one more chapter in that story.
As for today, Zelensky cannot refuse to negotiate – doing so would invite accusations that he is prolonging the war to delay Ukraine’s presidential election and hold on to power. But he also cannot sign any deal that would resemble surrender.
So both Kyiv and Moscow are likely to walk away from Istanbul with empty hands – and renewed licence to continue the war. Each side will blame the other for the breakdown, and both will appeal to Trump as a potential mediator. Which side will Trump take? His recent statements leave little doubt.
Instead of courting favour from the White House or openly flirting with the Kremlin, Zelensky is now aiming to secure unified European support – though showing himself to be an unbending, victory-confident vanguard.
One step in that direction has already been taken. While Putin only proposed resuming talks in Istanbul – making no mention of personal attendance – Zelensky declared he would be there in person, waiting for the Kremlin leader to show up. It was less an invitation than a challenge – and unlikely to please Putin.
This is only the first of many obstacles on the so-called road to peace. The path ahead for Zelensky and Putin is not just too narrow for both leaders – it is leading them in opposite directions.
Can Britain end its dependence on foreign workers?
Migration, migration, migration. Sir Keir Starmer didn’t express it like that in his Downing Street press conference, but he might as well have done. ‘Significantly’ reducing immigration, which is what he pledged in front of the cameras, can now be added to ‘smashing the gangs’ as clear priorities on which Labour will be judged over the next four years.
The Prime Minister was at pains to say that the focus on cutting immigration was not about ‘politics’, in other words, some kind of knee-jerk political response to events (local election losses) or the popularity of other parties (Reform). But the framing of the policies, the high-profile presentation of them and the drip feed of announcements over the past week signals the government’s desire to grab the narrative from its political rivals. ‘Taking back control’ of our borders is a Labour argument, said Starmer, in a naked attempt to wrest the slogan away from Brexiteers.
Current levels of immigration are unsustainable, socially and economically
Despite its political tint, however, Starmer’s approach has indisputable logic behind it. Current levels of immigration are unsustainable, socially and economically. The main driver has been an influx of foreign workers over two decades (417,000 arrived from non-EU countries in the year to June 2024). So, for there to be any sizeable impact on the numbers, work visa restrictions must be tightened and British employers weaned off their dependence on overseas labour. That, at least, is the theory.
Doing it is another matter. Under Starmer’s plan, employers who recruit heavily from abroad, such as those in engineering and IT, will in future be required to train more people based in the UK and ‘engage’ those who aren’t currently working. Between 2011 and 2022, overall investment in training, per new recruit, dropped by 26 per cent and from 2015 to 2023 apprenticeships for under-19s plunged by 41 per cent.
The pressure on employers to comply with the new regime will be partly financial, as revealed in the small-print of the Home Office white paper setting out the proposals. It says there’ll be a 32 per cent hike in the Immigration Skills Charge, a fee employers pay if hiring overseas workers. For medium and large firms, already clobbered by employer national insurance and minimum wage rises, that’s a hefty increase, going from £1,000 per foreign employee per year to £1,320. Will companies turn to domestic workers instead? Or will they simply put the brakes on recruitment? That’s the danger if the plans don’t include incentives and support to train home-grown workers.
In some sectors, such as adult social care, the government has already faced calls to provide extra funding if its plans are to have any chance of success. The Prime Minister announced care visas would no longer be available, after a record 105,000 were issued in 2023, but the risk is that vacancies will shoot up because UK workers continue to be put off by poor pay and conditions. A promised ‘Fair Work Agreement’ for the care sector is still some way off.
In other areas, there will have to be a fundamental shift towards courses that provide vocational training and skills, and away from some subjects whose content provides no clear pathway to a job. Professor Brian Bell, chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, illustrated the point in an interview on the BBC as he discussed why there was a shortage of welders in Britain. The construction sector wanted to train more of them, he said, but further education colleges weren’t able to provide the (costly) equipment and facilities required for such specialised training, opting for courses for international students instead.
Welders are one of the roles on an official list of ‘shortage’ occupations, for which employers can recruit from abroad at 80 per cent of the minimum salary usually required for a work visa. It’s an extraordinary list, a shocking reminder that something has gone seriously wrong with Britain’s capacity to train its own workforce. Along with other construction roles, such as bricklayers, roofers, tilers and carpenters, are archaeologists, dancers, choreographers, orchestral musicians, arts officers, graphic designers, lab technicians, fishery workers and biological scientists – as well as carers.
The government has a possible solution, also hidden in the white paper. It’s considering imposing a levy, understood to be around 6 per cent, on the tuition income universities receive from international students. It would go towards the system of ‘higher education and skills’ – and could pay for apprenticeships and the work-based training courses so badly needed in those shortage occupations – if the Home Office can win over its colleagues in the Department for Education. They will be anxious about the impact on a sector which receives around 25 per cent of its funding from foreign students; last week, Universities UK issued a timely warning that four in ten institutions would be in deficit by the summer.
The challenge for Starmer is to get that list of shortage occupations down, without harming higher education, bashing business and impeding economic growth. If, by the time of the next election, there’s no need for such a long and permanent list of roles that depend on foreign workers it will be a sign his ambitious plans are working. Government modelling suggests all the proposed changes, including tweaks to a scheme allowing overseas graduates to work, tougher English language requirements and a doubling of the period for settlement to ten years, will reduce the number of visas by almost 100,000 per year. That would certainly be a ‘significant’ reduction – but it will require drive, persistence and imagination to get there.
Hamas is using Edan Alexander to win favour with Trump
The last surviving American hostage held by Hamas in Gaza is set to be released as early as today, coinciding with the arrival tomorrow of President Trump in the Middle East. The timing could not be more significant. Previous attempts to negotiate the release of Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier from an elite army unit, failed despite high-level talks in Qatar. However, Hamas – not a terror organisation known for its nuanced approach to diplomacy – clearly realised that with Trump in the region, their ‘gesture of good will’ might pay additional dividends.
Alexander was serving on the border with Gaza on 7 October 2023 when Hamas gunmen arrived in force, killed 1,200 Israelis and other nationals and seized 251 hostages. The young soldier was one of 59 hostages left to be released, only 24 of whom are thought to be still alive. Four other American hostages are believed to be dead. Alexander, born in Tel Aviv but raised in New Jersey, will have been held in Gaza for 583 days if he is released today.
The release of Edan Alexander is a clever chess move by Hamas
Trump, who is due to land in Saudia Arabia tomorrow as part of a Middle East trip that will include visits to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – but not Israel, described the imminent freedom for Alexander as ‘monumental’ and said it was ‘a step taken in good faith’. The decision by Hamas to release the American hostage without preconditions – in other words, no consecutive release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel – has underlined how the dynamics of the Gaza war have been changing.
On the one hand, Hamas wants the war to end without being comprehensively defeated. They want to survive, to continue playing a leadership role in Gaza and to achieve that, they need all Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops to withdraw from the territory. The holding of hostages has been key to this strategy.
Israel, on the other, under Benjamin Netanyahu, has now made it clear that the total defeat of Hamas and the occupation of the whole of the Gaza Strip is the priority, even more important than the release of the remaining hostages. Thousands of reservists have been mobilised to flood Gaza with troops.
The Trump administration has backed Israel to eliminate Hamas but the President has other objectives and needs the war to end and the hostages released to achieve it. His arrival in Saudi Arabia is a reminder that Trump’s long-term vision is to persuade Riyadh to agree to formal diplomatic relations with Israel as part of an expanded framework of peace and stability in the region. Saudi Arabia has shown willingness to consider this strategy but not until the war in Gaza comes to an end.
The release of Edan Alexander is, therefore, a clever chess move by Hamas to gain favour with Trump as he lands in the region. They want him to put pressure on Netanyahu to call off his plan, approved by his security cabinet, to launch a new all-enveloping offensive to seize the whole of the Gaza Strip.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s ubiquitous special envoy, slipped away from the Trump delegation to Saudi Arabia in order to fly direct to Israel to speak to Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister has so far treated Alexander’s freedom as a bonus and a sign of desperation by Hamas rather than as an incentive to suspend or cancel his new offensive in Gaza.
Netanyahu, of course, is under all sorts of pressure, political and diplomatic. Trump is getting almost as frustrated with the Israeli prime minister as he is with President Putin and the Russian leader’s ambivalent response to Washington’s demands for an end to the war in Ukraine.
Domestically, Netanyahu is being accused of deliberately expanding and prolonging the war in Gaza in order to safeguard his own position. He still faces corruption charges which he has described as ‘an ocean of absurdity’. Alexander’s release has also intensified the demands of the hostage families, a potent political force in Israel, to focus far more effort on securing the return of the other hostages, dead and alive.
One of the principal players on the American side in recent negotiations with Hamas was Adam Boehler, Trump’s special envoy for hostage response. The other key members of the Trump administration involved were Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and temporary national security adviser.
Most of the talks between the US and Hamas have been carried out indirectly, with Qatar acting as mediator. But earlier this year, Boehler held direct talks with Hamas in Doha, Qatar to try and secure Alexander’s freedom, as well as the bodies of the four dead Americans. But those talks faltered, partly because of Israeli objections.
The last time there were hostage releases was in January and February during the two-month ceasefire. 38 hostages were freed in exchange for 1,500 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The ceasefire ended in March after a breakdown in talks to agree the next phases in a longer-term settlement, which should have led to the release of the remaining 24 surviving hostages and 35 dead captives, held by both Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.
How America betrayed Edan Alexander
When a US citizen, just 19, was taken captive by a fascist militia, what did America’s progressives do? They cosplayed as his captors. They wrapped their faces in the keffiyeh in gleeful mimicry of the militants who seized their compatriot. They cheered the jailers of their fellow citizen. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, some cried, ‘martyrs’ meaning the radical Islamists who had dragged their teenage countryman into a hellish lair and kept him there for 583 days.
Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity harder
The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, is cause for celebration. He was born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey. He was just 19 when he was seized during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. He’d been patrolling the Israel-Gaza border as part of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit. According to freed hostages, he was held in the grimmest of conditions, deep in one of Hamas’s dank tunnels. He had two birthdays there, meaning he emerges today, blinking in the sunlight, as a 21-year-old man.
Yet even as we share in the joy of the Alexander family, we must never forget how others in the US betrayed this young American. Some even became unpaid propagandists for his captors. Last week, the radical brats of Columbia University, including scores of they/thems and a daughter of Hollywood stars, occupied the campus library to damn Israel yet again. It was a sea of keffiyehs. As their fellow American, the same age as them, languished underground, these rich kids were essentially paying sartorial tribute to the army of bigots holding him captive.
You couldn’t have asked for a better, uglier snapshot of the West’s moral crisis: entitled ‘progressives’ gussied up as Palestinian militants as one of their own suffered under the ruthless boot of those militants. For 18 months, America’s self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ didn’t so much as mention the words ‘Edan Alexander’, except perhaps to slam him as a soldier of the ‘settler-colonial Zionist entity’ who deserved everything he got. They saved their warm words not for Edan but for his persecutors.
Students at George Washington University hailed Hamas’s ‘martyrs’. Campus chants grow ever ‘darker’, the Washington Post reported. Many keffiyeh-adorned hotheads now ‘openly endorse Hamas and its leaders’, it said. At Columbia, students cheered the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – the name Hamas gave to its 7 October pogrom – and cried ‘Revolution until victory!’. They were celebrating the carnival of violence during which Alexander was kidnapped. They cried out, not for the release of their compatriot, but for the victory of the army of anti-Semites that seized him.
We cannot overlook the unusualness of this, not to mention the horror of it. Young Edan will have a lot of readjusting to do following 583 days of captivity. And, tragically, one of the things he’ll have to adjust to is that so many American youths sided with the brutes who robbed him of his freedom. That American radicals expressed more sympathy for Hamas than for its victims, even the American ones, is surely one of the greatest betrayals of decency of our time.
Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity that bit harder. Unwittingly, sure, but still. Their constant cry that the IDF is the wickedest army, the sickest gang of killers since the Nazis, will certainly have done nothing to shake Hamas’s conviction that it had the right to persecute the likes of Alexander. To Hamas, he was an evil settler deserving of humiliation – and that sick belief will likely have been emboldened by the noisy Israelophobia coming from the West.
Where was America’s media? Why did its worthy broadsheets not report more often on Alexander’s predicament? Why did they not make a cause célèbre of this young American and his unjust captivity at the hands of racist terrorists? ‘Who is Edan Alexander?’, asks the New York Times today. I know that’s just a style of headline for explainer pieces. But in this case it feels like an apt question. I bet there really are some liberal types out there who’ll hear about Edan Alexander today and think to themselves: ‘That name rings a bell…who is he again?’
Of course, not everyone turned a blind eye. Jewish communities in the US and elsewhere held vigils for Edan. Crowds have gathered today in Tenafly, New Jersey, where he grew up, to await news of his liberation. This is the America some of us love: the America that detests anti-Semitism and terrorism and cares deeply for the life and liberty of all Americans.
That’s what Edan Alexander’s tragic captivity has revealed: that there now exist Two Americas. One lost to the lunacy of Israelophobia and identity politics, the other clinging for dear life to the values of the American republic and of Western civilisation itself. Today’s a good day for the latter.
My encounter with the PKK’s Abdullah Ocalan
The Kurdish militia group, the PKK, had decided to disband and lay down its arms, after decades of launching attacks against Turkey and bombing civilian areas.
The move came after the PKK’s ageing jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, called in February for the group to end its campaign. From his prison cell, Ocalan sent a message to his followers: ‘I am making a call for the laying down of arms… The PKK must dissolve itself.’
Ocalan wondered if Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams might be able to help? ‘I know he is a friend of ours,’ he said.
The Marxist-inspired PKK, which has long been branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey as well as the UK, the US and other western countries, responded to his call today, announcing that it had ‘carried the Kurdish issue to a level where it can be solved by democratic politics.’
The announcement will boost the prestige of Turkey’s President Erdogan, who can now boast that he achieved what his predecessors failed to do – the end of the PKK’s violent ‘armed struggle’.
For me, the announcement has brought back memories of my own encounter with the group’s leader in a Rome ‘safe house’ more than a quarter century ago.
I was one of the last journalists to interview Ocalan before he was captured by Turkish special forces in Kenya back in February 1999. Since then he has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul.
For many years Ocalan, revered by his followers, had resided in Damascus from where he masterminded a bloody campaign for a Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. He was something of a Scarlet Pimpernel figure, always remaining beyond the reach of Turkish forces who wanted dearly to kill or capture him.
But, under pressure from Turkey, the Assad regime in October 1998 gave him a one-way air ticket out of Syria. After a brief sojourn in Russia, he landed in Rome where, in January 1999, he agreed through intermediaries to give me an interview. I met him in a house in a Rome suburb, where he was closely guarded by jumpy Italian security agents toting sub-machine guns.
The man I found was charming, courteous and not without a sense of humour, although I was also conscious that Turkey’s most wanted fugitive was accused of waging a brutal 14-year campaign that had resulted in 30,000 deaths.
At the time, Ocalan denied claims the PKK was on the run. ‘If those claims were true, they [Turkish forces] would not have pursued me so much. They would not have more than 300,000 soldiers in military operations, they would not have gone to occupy northern Iraq.’ But he admitted that Turkish military helicopters were a major threat to the PKK and said that they were responsible for 90 per cent of the casualties among his forces.
We sat on opposite sides of a sofa in a small sitting room dominated by a huge TV set, and he seemed eager to present himself as a moderate – strongly denying the widespread claim that the PKK was funded largely from the drugs trade. He also urged the West to intervene to get a peace deal.
While Ocalan insisted he was not worried about his future, he admitted that no country seemed willing to take him in. ‘I am like a ball of fire, and everybody is wishing not to have this fireball,’ he said with a grin.
Despite his easy charm, I felt that he was, indeed, nervous about what lay ahead.
He asked me if Ireland could give him refuge. After all, Ireland was not a member of Nato. He wondered if Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams might be able to help? ‘I know he is a friend of ours,’ he said.
As I departed, he shook my hand and said: ‘We hope to meet in better days’. He chose a chocolate from a bowl on the table and popped it into his mouth.
There were not to be better days for Ocalan. Just days after our interview, he was off on his mysterious travels again. After landing in Nairobi, he was grabbed by jubilant Turkish security agents. Trussed up like a chicken and his eyes bound with tape, he was hustled onto a private jet bound for Turkey. Put on trial, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Now, the bloody campaign that he once masterminded has finally come to an end. Maybe the 76-year-old captive held at Imrali prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara is hoping that peace will now at least be part of his legacy.
Police probe fire at Prime Minister’s home
To north London, where the Metropolitan Police are investigating a fire that broke out at Sir Keir Starmer’s personal home early this morning. Shortly after 1.30 a.m., the force attended the property alongside the London Fire Brigade after receiving a report of the fire. While the door to the four-bedroom home owned by the Prime Minister was damaged, no one was injured.
In a statement, the Met police noted:
On Monday 12 May at 01:35hrs, police were alerted by the London Fire Brigade to reports of a fire at a residential address in north London. Officers attended the scene. Damage was caused to the property’s entrance, nobody was hurt. The fire is being investigated and cordons remain in place while enquiries continue.
The London Fire Brigade added:
Firefighters were called to a small fire outside a property in Kentish Town this morning. The brigade was called at 1.11am and the fire was under control by 1.33am. Two fire engines from Kentish Town fire station attended the scene.
It’s not the first time the police have been called to the property. Last year three people involved in a pro-Palestine protest outside Starmer’s home were found guilty of public order offences – as well as breaching court bail. The trio propped up a banner outside the house emblazoned with the words ‘Starmer stop the killing’, alongside red handprints – which the PM’s wife Victoria admitted to the Westminster court made her feel ‘a bit sick’ throughout the demo.
The Prime Minister’s house has been regularly rented out since Starmer’s move to Downing Street and yet it has been repeatedly targeted by protestors in recent months. The street remains sealed off as the police continue their enquiries.
Three key flaws in Starmer’s immigration crackdown
Sir Keir Starmer wants you to believe he’s serious about bringing immigration down. Faced with the political threat of Reform and growing anger over record levels of both illegal and legal migration, Labour has finally begun to talk the talk. But ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’, the white paper in which the government details its borders crackdown, is flawed.
The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper
For all the tough-sounding language about control and fairness, the document is shot through with proposals that quietly liberalise the system and could incentivise more illegal immigration. Here are three of the most consequential changes, each of them likely to make it harder, not easier, to bring migration down.
1. A new bereaved parent route
The white paper introduces a new immigration route for bereaved parents, specifically, those who have lost a child while living in the UK without settled status. The government’s argument is that, following the death of their child, parents should not be forced to leave the country while grieving. On the face of it, the policy sounds humane. But immigration rules are not just about individual compassion: they also set expectations for the system as a whole.
Allowing a person to stay in Britain after their child has died risks undermining a structured, rules-based system and instead moves towards one where discretion and circumstance play a larger role. It subtly reinforces the idea that settlement can be conferred on emotional or compassionate grounds.
More to the point, it sets a precedent. Today, it’s bereaved parents. Tomorrow, it may be carers, or siblings, or those facing other forms of hardship. Once the principle is conceded – that tragic personal circumstances trump other criteria – it becomes harder to draw the line. As with so much immigration policy over the years, what starts as an exception often becomes the rule.
2. A new route for those who ‘discover’ they aren’t settled
The second change is aimed at a group the Home Office describes as ‘children who have been in the UK for some time’ and ‘discover they do not have status’, who will be supported to ‘settle’. In other words: young people, often brought into the country illegally as children, who upon turning 18 realise they have no lawful status. The white paper out today proposes support to ‘regularise their status and settle’.
Again, this will be dressed up as fairness. After all, can you really blame someone for their parents’ decisions? But policies don’t exist in a vacuum. If the state starts offering amnesty-by-stealth to people in this category, it risks sending a signal: bring your children to Britain, and once they’re here long enough, the system may eventually let them stay.
There’s a reason the phrase ‘pull factor’ appears so often in border discussions. This proposal would be one.
3. Lowering financial thresholds for young adults
The paper also proposes to ‘consider measures to reduce the financial barriers to young adults, who have lived here through their childhood, from accessing British nationality.’ That sounds like Whitehallese for: ‘we’re going to make it cheaper to regularise your immigration status.’
But those barriers exist for a reason. They’re part of what distinguishes the legal immigration system from one of automatic entitlement. Lowering the cost of applications will almost certainly increase the number of people applying. It undermines the idea that migrants should earn their place. It’s another policy dressed in the garb of compassion that ultimately chips away at deterrence.
Put these three policies together, and a pattern emerges. Starmer talks about restoring control. The headlines make his proposals seem radical, as if the Labour government is finally getting tough on migration. But hidden away in the small print we find the sugar pills which Starmer has inserted to make the policy shift more palatable to his party, and perhaps to his own conscience as a former human rights lawyer.
These aren’t the kind of changes that will make front pages. They’ll be sold as minor adjustments or compassionate tweaks. But, taken as a whole, they shift the foundations of the immigration system back toward leniency, exceptions, and eventual amnesties.
The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper.
What’s the truth about immigration and economic growth?
If the consequences of Labour’s heavy losses in the local elections were not already clear, they became so in this morning’s press conference to relaunch the government’s migration policy.
Reversing years of generally friendly attitudes towards migration, dating back to Tony Blair’s day – when the UK opened its doors to migrant workers from Eastern Europe seven years ahead of most EU countries – Keir Starmer has unashamedly tried to reposition Labour as an anti-immigration party. He lambasted the Conservatives for saying they would reduce migration before trebling it, and repeatedly used the Leave campaign’s slogan ‘take back control’.
This followed policy announcements by Starmer and by the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, which promise to make it more difficult for asylum seekers to challenge decisions to reject their applications and to make it harder for care homes to recruit care workers from abroad.
Whether any of this will impress Red Wall voters drawn to Reform is one thing, but the PM’s announcements were noticeable for one thing in particular: his rejection of the idea that migration is good for economic growth. This, said Starmer, is no more than a ‘theory’.
Groups such as Migration UK have been arguing as much for years, asserting that high rates of migration can have a negative effect on growth because the easy availability of cheap labour disincentivises employers from investing in labour-saving technology, depressing productivity. But it is novel to hear a senior Labour politician making this point.
While there are advocates of migration such as Jonathan Portes of King’s College London who point to statistics showing migrants have higher earnings than the native population (skewed somewhat by a few billionaires), the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) is fairly neutral on the matter, stating the obvious: that it rather depends on what the migrants are doing.
One thing is for sure, however. Without high net migration over the past couple of years, the UK would have fallen into a recession. High migration hasn’t helped boost GDP per capita, which has fallen back, but it has – just about – helped keep raw GDP growth in the black. That is something for which Rachel Reeves, in particular, may feel grateful.
Moreover, is the government sure about blocking care homes from accessing migrant labour? The NHS is under enough pressure from ‘bed-blockers’ as it is; it won’t go down well if operations have to be cancelled because hospitals are full of patients who cannot be discharged because the care home they would go to can’t find enough staff.
There has to be a suspicion that the government is lashing out at legal migration because of its impotence when dealing with illegal migration. If you can’t stop the boats because you are not prepared to take on the human rights lawyers, then trying to make life a pain for people coming to Britain to work is at least one way of trying to reduce net migration. Unfortunately, it is also a way to ensure that migration becomes even more negative for economic growth, because it increases the proportion of migrants who are unproductive – who are banned from working as they await the outcome of asylum applications and numerous appeals.
As for impressing voters, it is surely illegal migration which upsets them most – in particular the criminals, terrorists and chancers who at the moment are abusing the asylum system by using the European Convention on Human Rights, as interpreted by clever lawyers, to save them from deportation. If you want to stop your voters from drifting off to Reform UK, this is surely where you have to start.
Will Starmer, however, have the determination to take on human rights lawyers, given that he has a background in that profession and has repeatedly said he is committed to the ECHR? If he is not, he can forget about winning back Reform voters; his migration policy will be doomed.
The state’s Southport narrative is crumbling
What really caused the countrywide unrest after the Southport massacre last summer? Last week, a report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS), shed a much-needed light on this vital question.
This was the second part of HMICFRS’s inspection of the police response to the public disorder that followed Axel Rudakubana’s attack on a dance class in Southport on 29 July, which killed three little girls. The first part looked at police preparedness; tranche two focuses on police use of intelligence as the disorder unfolded, its subsequent crime investigations, and the role of social media.
The bulk of the media coverage has so far focused on the latter, with headlines about the police response to ‘social media risks’ and ‘countering fake news’. Such concerns reflect the official explanation for the disorder, preached with fire and brimstone by Sir Keir Starmer from his No. 10 pulpit during the unrest.
Three days into the disorder on 1 August, the Prime Minister told the country that the unrest we were seeing was the work of ‘gang[s] of thugs’ who had travelled to ‘a community that is not their own’ to smash it up; ‘far-right thugs’ would become his mantra. He also said the violence was ‘clearly whipped up online’, prompting a fierce crackdown on online speech. Even Department for Education guidance from late August followed this narrative. In a post suggesting how to how to talk to schoolchildren about what had happened, the department wrote that, ‘rioting coordinated by right-wing extremists was initiated by the spread of misinformation about the perpetrator of the Southport attack resulting in violent, racist and Islamophobic attacks on our communities by extremists’.
Yet this police inspectorate report has brought that narrative spectacularly crashing down. The HMICFRS finds ‘no conclusive or compelling evidence that the 2024 disorder was deliberately premeditated and co-ordinated by any specific group or network’.
Moreover, ‘most people who took part in the disorder lived locally’. Far from being hardened EDL skinheads, few had been convicted of disorder before, and their ages ranged from 11 to 81. ‘The murders of three young girls in Southport triggered these events’, it notes. But, far from being down to far-right organising, ‘they turned into widespread and often serious disorder because of many other complex factors’.
Should those factors not have been obvious? Hadn’t we been hearing for years that those towns and cities that saw riots – among them Middlesborough, Blackpool, Hull and Rotherham, all of which have endured the horrors of rape gangs – were downtrodden, ‘left behind’ parts of Britain? But in the political hysteria of those febrile days, this shallow reservoir of sympathy evaporated in an instant. No sympathetic sociological explanations for the riots were offered, as they had been in 2011. For the prime minister, who had kneeled after violence at BLM riots, it was ‘not protest’ and ‘not legitimate’.
In starkly laying out these deeper reasons for the unrest, the HMICFRS report provides a welcome corrective to how the events of last summer have generally been presented. Still, it arguably places too much emphasis on social media. The police should be ‘better prepared and resourced to monitor, analyse, use and respond to online content’, it says, which it says was a risk to public safety.
But why were rumours about the real identity of the attacker swirling online in the first place? Initially, after all, we had only been allowed to know that the suspect was ‘a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff’, and Merseyside Police had insisted absurdly early on that there was ‘no evidence’ that this horrifying mass stabbing constituted terrorism.
Instead of incessantly monitoring everything happening online, perhaps the authorities would be better to just be straight with the public from the outset. The report even quotes Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s terrorism adviser, who for his part lays the blame pretty squarely on the lack of information disclosed by the authorities: ‘In the digital era, if the police do not take the lead in providing clear, accurate and sober details about an attack like Southport, others will. Social media is a source of news for many people and near-silence in the face of horrific events of major public interest is no longer an option.’
A recent Home Affairs Committee report on the disorder, though it has been widely panned for insisting there was no two-tier policing involved and though it fails to cite Hall, draws a similar conclusion. ‘The extent to which dis- and misinformation were a specific driver of disorder is not clear’, it says, with much of the unrest coming down to ‘opportunistic participation driven by social deprivation, rather than social media’. It also criticises the lack of information disclosed to the public by the authorities about the suspect, which ‘created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow, further undermining public confidence.’
Who or what caused the unrest last summer is not an academic question. The state roared into action off the back of this political narrative. Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that much of this narrative was false – yet people have gone to prison because of it. Lucy Connolly, who is appealing her 31 month sentence this week, is the most prominent example, but there are many others who have been treated very harshly for very little. Grandfather Peter Lynch held a sign and shouted ‘racist and provocative’ remarks at a protest at a Rotherham asylum hotel which later turned violent. He was sentenced to two years and eight months for violent disorder, and in October he was found hanging in his cell.
It may suit Keir Starmer and his allies to maintain that the Southport response was a fascist uprising, but in reality many of those who went to prison were ordinary people with real grievances whose lives have been destroyed. The more we learn about what happened last summer, the crueller and crueller this seems to be.
Starmer will struggle to deport foreign criminals
The government is rattled on immigration. Forget its liberal metropolitan supporters: just-about-managing voters from Whitehaven to Waltham Cross are deadly serious about the need to curb the numbers coming here. After a last-minute get-tough announcement by Yvette Cooper failed to stop massive Reform gains earlier this month, Keir Starmer has now gone on the attack with a migration White Paper.
If Labour is to convince potential Tory and Reform electors that it is serious about immigration, vague words are not enough
Apart from making it more difficult for migrants to obtain full residency rights, and tightening English language and education requirements, this proposes changing the law to stop foreign criminals and illegal migrants winning the right to stay on human rights grounds. Currently the strong presumption in favour of deportation is subject to a showing of exceptional circumstances, or in the case of those imprisoned for four or more years ‘very compelling’ ones. Unfortunately, in practice what is seen as exceptional seems to have been expanding alarmingly. The White Paper promises to tip the balance in favour of deportation by strengthening the presumption in favour of removal and narrowing the exceptions to it.
Will this work? It’s a bit unclear until we see the precise change in wording proposed, which we haven’t yet. However, the omens are not good.
First, immigration law already stresses hard the exceptionality of any decision to block deportation. Indeed, it’s difficult to think how it could be stressed much harder. The problem lies not so much in the law’s dry words, but in their interpretation by tribunals up and down the country. Exceptionality – and its relative, the requirement of ‘very compelling’ circumstances – are, after all, a matter not of precision but of evaluation. Immigration judges, whether because they have passed through universities staffed by predominantly liberal law teachers or because there is a close correlation between expertise in immigration and human rights law and a liberal outlook, will tend for better or worse to apply them generously. However the words are strengthened, one fears that when the chips are down a well-constructed submission of possible trauma resulting from expulsion will likely lead to individual cases going much the same way.
Secondly, however, there is the ever-looming background of the European Convention of Human Rights. The tendency towards generous interpretations of what amount to exceptional or compelling reasons not to deport criminals are also informed by human rights arguments: notably, the ECHR’s protection for privacy and family life in Article 8, or occasionally its prohibition of inhumane treatment in Article 3.
This point, which the White Paper skates over, creates two big stumbling blocks for the government. One is that the interpretation of the ECHR does not lie in the UK government’s gift: it is a matter for the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and a UK statute cannot alter it. The other is that any UK legislation has if possible to be interpreted in accordance with the ECHR as interpreted in Strasbourg. The result is that even if the legislation were strengthened, any effect would be limited: any new standards would have to remain at least partly open-ended, and there is a clear danger that in applying them courts would continue to follow what they saw as the tendency of human rights law.
It’s hard not to conclude that something has to give: we can have a strict rule on removal of foreign criminals, or we can have strict compliance with the ECHR, but we can’t have both. To their credit the Conservatives and Reform have noted this: the Tories have made it clear that if necessary they are prepared to face the prospect of leaving the ECHR, and Reform have simply said they will leave.
Unfortunately, Labour has not grasped this. Asked this morning about the potential conflict between human rights and effective immigration control and whether he might have to choose between them, Keir Starmer obstinately insisted that he could continue to support both at the same time. True, he probably had little choice: even if White Van Man cares infinitely more about immigration than human rights, Labour’s parliamentary and intellectual machine is wedded to the present ECHR regime.
This bodes ill for Labour. The problem is that Keir’s answer was patently vague and uninformative. He did not explain how he thought he could back tighter rules on deportations while at the same time preserving the existing human rights landscape: and his further arguments that only by being members of the ECHR could the UK get agreements with other countries for the return of foreign migrants rings hollow.
Starmer may not like it, but if Labour is to convince potential Tory and Reform electors that it is serious about immigration, vague words are not enough: it will have to say explicitly that if push comes to shove the ECHR is expendable. The longer he continues to try to ride two horses simultaneously, that of concerned human rights activist and that of immigration hawk, the heavier and more uncomfortable his fall will be.
Congratulations to Graham King, the asylum billionaire
It’s always heartwarming to hear of a person who starts from humble origins and, through sheer entrepreneurial vim, makes something spectacular of himself, isn’t it? Such as story appears to be that of Graham King, founder and boss of Clearspring Ready Homes. It was reported yesterday that Mr King has this year crossed that all-important threshold from multi-, multi- millionaire to billionaire from his company’s contracts with the government to house asylum-seekers. He is known as the ‘Asylum King’ – and we can think of him, maybe, as a monarch among the wretched of the earth.
Mr King’s fortune is reported to have jumped by 35 per cent in the last year alone. Here is a man who parlayed the family caravan park in Essex into a vast property empire – and whose contracts to house asylum seekers (he spotted a gap in the market in the late 1990s and, as they say, pivoted) have gone up sevenfold in value. The taxpayer is now paying well north of £4 million a day to house asylum seekers.
Having liberated many of those millions from the dead hand of the state and released them into the vigorous, sappy, animal-spirits-infused world of the private sector, Mr King is (according to his Tripadvisor account, apparently) determined to live his best life. He flies private jets, competes as a racing driver, and is to be found whooshing around the Caribbean with his much younger consort, a Latvian entrepreneuse named Lolita Lace. He is seldom pictured without a smile on his face. Good for him.
From the other end of the contract, though – seeing as it is you and I who are on the other end of the contract – we might wonder why it should be possible for someone to become an actual billionaire by housing asylum seekers. A billion is an awful lot of money. Isn’t government supposed to be a bit more thrifty than that, what with the cost of living crisis and such?
Can it really be the best value for money to award these vast companies ten-year exclusive contracts? Clearspring, Serco and Mears Group seem to have carved the UK up into something like feudal fiefdoms. And Mr King’s companies have what seems to be a patchy record. Inspectors denounced two of their sites as ‘decrepit’, ‘impoverished’ and ‘run-down’ in 2021, and in 2023 70 refugees slept on the street in protest at the conditions in their Clearspring-run hotel (it’s quite the achievement to provide stateless destitutes with accommodation so poor they prefer to be voluntarily homeless). The Home Office, who was sued as a result of the 2021 inspection, noted at the time that Clearspring and the other contractors had made ‘improvements to the site and continue to do so.’ This will, I suppose, appease those in a state of permanent outrage at the luxury accommodation in which asylum seekers are imagined to be housed, but perhaps not those who mind about how much public money is being spent on that housing.
In 2023-24 an audit said delicately that Home Office procurement systems would benefit from improving ‘invoicing controls… to reduce the risk of overpayment.’ The fact that the value of Clearspring’s contracts have gone from £1 billion to £7.3 billion suggests that the Home Office hasn’t yet got the tight grip on the public finances that we might hope.
The more asylum seekers who need accommodation, the more money King makes
One explanation for the rise – and it’s a respectable one – might be that too many asylum seekers are arriving on these shores. The more asylum seekers who need accommodation – and we are legally bound to provide it – the more money Mr King makes. Every small boat that lurches onto a beach in the South of England makes a tinkling noise in Mr King’s bank account.
But another answer is that it’s not just the volume of asylum seekers arriving that’s the problem. It’s that those that do arrive take an extraordinarily long time to process. We now have around 100,000 asylum seekers in hotels or other accommodation at taxpayer’s expense. Flying them to Rwanda, attractive though it may have seemed as a headline, wasn’t exactly a cost-efficient solution either.
Opinions may vary on whether it’s an obscenity that our moral and legal duties to destitute refugees can end up allowing businessmen to siphon countless millions from the public purse. There exist hard hearts – and they seem to be getting the upper hand in our politics – that resent spending any money housing asylum seekers at all. But just as a matter of accountancy alone, I think it bears looking at. Mr King’s bank-balance – he owns about 99 per cent of the shares in Clearspring – dramatises the scale of the refugee crisis in a new and exciting way.
Far be it from me to rain on his parade – I should love to be able one day to see him and Lolita Lace heading into space with Jeff Bezos or similar – but is there not a case to be made that rather than spending millions of pounds a day on hotels for asylum seekers, there might be a saving to be made by spending money on boring old non-billionaire civil servants and boring old non-billionaire lawyers to clear the backlog a bit faster?
Scottish Labour leader turns on assisted dying bill
To Holyrood, where parliamentarians will tomorrow vote on Scotland’s assisted dying bill. Scottish Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur has put forward legislation that would allow those deemed terminally ill north of the border to take their own lives – as Kim Leadbeater’s bill for England and Wales makes its way through Westminster. But support for the Scottish legislation is waning north of the border, and now Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has announced he will not back the bill. How very interesting…
Sarwar will vote against the assisted dying bill tomorrow after stating he does not believe the proposed legislation include ‘sufficient safeguards to provide the reassurance and protection that would one needed in such a sensitive area’. Instead, the Labour MSP – who has written about his intentions in the Daily Record – insists access to palliative care resources should be improved. ‘Our hospice and care sectors do remarkable work, and I commend them for it — but there is still more government can do to ensure people have the support they need, including the ability to die at home if they wish,’ Sarwar wrote. He went on:
Too often I have heard by people say they wouldn’t want to be a burden on their families. That sentiment worries me, and I don’t want anyone to feel pressured – even subtly – to end their life because of it. Lastly, I have been struck by the words of disability campaigners like my friend Pam Duncan-Glancy MSP who says for too many ‘we haven’t yet delivered the right to live, never mind the right to die’.
The Scottish Labour leader follows SNP First Minister John Swinney and his predecessor Humza Yousaf in declaring his intention to vote against the bill tomorrow. The SNP leader – whose wife has multiple sclerosis – told reporters that he ‘agonised’ over his decision but that he is ‘a man of faith and I can’t separate myself from that’. Meanwhile Yousaf said he was not convinced there would be ‘strongh enough safeguards’ to protect vulnerable people, adding the bill would ‘open a door that cannot be closed’.
The decision by Sir Keir Starmer’s Scottish counterpart comes after weekend reports that Downing Street is cooling on Leadbeater’s euthanasia bill, while the Prime Minister will skip this Friday’s vote on the legislation. Will politicians north and south of the border opt to pull the plug on the UK’s assisted dying legislation? Stay tuned…