Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak fined over partygate

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are both to receive fixed penalty notices for attending lockdown parties, it has just emerged.

The police fines for breaking Covid laws, which these two men created, throw everything around the Prime Minister and the Chancellor into the air. Previously, many Tory MPs had said this would be a resigning matter for a serving PM to be found to have broken the law.

A No. 10 spokesperson confirmed the fines, saying: ‘The Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have today received notification that the Metropolitan police intend to issue them with fixed penalty notices.’

The Prime Minister’s wife Carrie Johnson has also been fined. A spokesperson for Mrs Johnson said: ‘In the interests of transparency, Mrs Johnson can confirm she has been notified that she will receive a Fixed Penalty Notice. She has not yet received any further details about the nature of the FPN.’

The Prime Minister has now not only been found by police to have broken the law, but he also misled parliament about the matter, saying he had been assured that there was no party. Now we know the police have concluded that on at least one occasion there was a party and that Johnson attended it.

What will Tory MPs do now? Parliament is in recess at the moment, which makes it harder for them to organise an immediate response. But what it does mean is that MPs will face the reaction of their constituents. Remember that it was the fury within constituency parties and among local voters that tipped many Conservatives into calling for Johnson to resign when the row reached its height. 

There is also a question about what the opposition does. Sir Keir Starmer has already said that ‘Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have broken the law and repeatedly lied to the British public. They must both resign.’ But does he now call for a vote of no confidence in the Commons? Or does he wait for the Conservative party to hold its own vote?

If Tory MPs don’t pick up a reaction from their constituents before returning to parliament, then they will surely get a clearer message in the local elections next month. The timing of these fines couldn’t be worse for those polls. But it is highly unlikely that the local elections are the only polls this will affect. Political parties often mistakenly price in things that voters are still angry about. While Westminster had largely moved on from the Lib Dem U-turn on tuition fees, the 2015 election showed voters had not. This is of a far greater magnitude than a weasely policy change. 

Boris Johnson is the first Prime Minister in history to have been found to have broken the law. It is impossible that voters will have forgotten this come the next election. And his most likely successor – Rishi Sunak – is in exactly the same leaking boat.

Listen to Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls on the latest episode of Coffee House Shots:

What next for Imran Khan, Pakistan’s ousted leader?

On Sunday, Imran Khan became the first prime minister in Pakistan’s history to be ousted by a no-confidence vote. Followers of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party naturally took to the streets; much of their anger has been directed at the generals who engineered their leader’s downfall.

It was a clash with the all-powerful military that, like so many of his predecessors, finally ended Khan’s prime ministership. The former cricketer had attempted to oust one of the country’s all-powerful spy chiefs, a move that finally ended the uneasy relationship between the PM and the military. Attempting to save his own politician skin, Khan tried to block a no-confidence vote by dissolving the assembly last week but this was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. Now his supporters, mainly the conservative, urban middle-classes, are outraged. It seems unlikely that they will be able to change the outcome of the military machinations. Opposition leader Shahbaz Sharif is to take his place, a more pliant figure in the eyes of the generals and a member of the PML-N, which has ruled Pakistan alongside the PPP for half of the country’s history, with the other half spent under military rule.

Few in the West will be unhappy to see Khan go: his rages against American imperialism and cosying up to Islamism made him an unstable regional actor. In power, he proved uncompromising and ineffective. His promises to end corruption in 90 days and create 10 million jobs both failed to materialise. And the number of opposition figures and journalists filling Pakistan’s prisons only increased. Yet the method by which he was ousted speaks to a deeper problem in Pakistani politics.

Khan began his political career as a voice against the military’s abuses before eventually striking a deal with the devil to rise to power on the generals’ shoulders. In his three-and-a-half-year rule, Khan oversaw a multitude of fiscal crises that alienated the country’s working class. He pandered to the radical Islamists and supported the Taliban in Kabul. And he was catastrophic for Pakistan’s world standing: humiliating the country in brawls with France, was devout in his subservience to China and dangerous in his flirtations with Russia.

The latter, coupled with Khan’s populist, anti-West rhetoric eventually threatened the military’s interests and he was swiftly removed. But it has allowed Khan to fan claims of a ‘US-led conspiracy’ to oust him, further emboldening supporters’ views that he is taking on the world for the betterment of Pakistan.

Having categorically proven himself unfit to run the country, Khan can use his failures to help rid Pakistan of its perpetual ailment: the military’s unchallenged hegemony. Next year the country will hold a general election. If Khan continues his vociferous and uncompromising attacks on the military, perhaps in some perverse way that election may be saved from the meddling that had defined previous contests.

Khan’s supporters are now in the streets chanting that the army chiefs are ‘mercenaries’ – reminiscent of Khan’s position before taking office that they are up for sale, especially to the US. He is focusing his attacks too on the PML-N and the PPP over their dynastic rule and corruption, a return of sorts to what he was saying before coming to power in 2018. Perhaps he can return to that same crusade with added vigour, taking on the army’s unparalleled corruption and their opportunistic reshuffling of political alliances to suit their own ends.

With no political empire left to shield, Khan can go all out and take on the epicentre of Pakistan’s skewed power structure that he has dutifully protected for much of his time as Prime Minister. On the cricket pitch, Khan was one of the great heroes of Pakistan. His political life saw him become a villain, but he may yet regain something of that former heroism.

For that, however, he would need to do the one thing that he would find harder than his unlikely Cricket World Cup win. Khan would need to admit his mistakes.

Is Putin using chemical weapons in Ukraine?

In 1942, as Hitler’s forces swept through the Soviet Union, the Red Army went underground. Outside the city of Kerch in Crimea, 10,000 Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian soldiers dug into the caves of a limestone quarry, ready to defend their position to the last man. Intent on flushing them out, the Nazis bombed them from the skies, flooded the complex and, according to testimony from survivors, pumped noxious gas into the tunnels.

That siege, 80 years ago, would have been the last time that chemical weapons were used in combat in Europe. Until, perhaps, yesterday. Just over 100 miles north of Kerch, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, locals have reportedly complained of lung and ear problems after a drone dropped its payload overhead. ‘Russian occupation forces used a poisonous substance of unknown origin against Ukrainian military and civilians in Mariupol, which was dropped from an enemy UAV,’ the notorious nationalist Azov regiment said in a statement on Monday. ‘The victims have respiratory failure and vestibulo-atactic syndrome.’

Mariupol, once home to nearly half a million people, has been turned into a smoking wreck in recent weeks. One of the largest settlements in the Donbass that had still been under the control of Kyiv’s forces since the start of the conflict in 2014, it was targeted first by Russian air strikes and quickly surrounded by tanks, troops and artillery. With its hardened defenders refusing to surrender, Moscow appears to have given the order to pound the city into submission, razing buildings, killing civilians and creating some of the most harrowing scenes of the invasion so far.

Because it is cut off from the rest of the country and facing heavy bombardment, the allegations that chemical weapons may have been deployed are nearly impossible to verify, with no independent journalists working in the area. Unsurprisingly though, the potential escalation has caused immediate alarm, with Anton Gerashchenko, an Interior Ministry official, writing that Russia had begun ‘openly crossing all boundaries of humanity and openly declaring it.’ Washington has called the reports ‘deeply concerning,’ while the UK has pledged to help establish their circumstances.

While Europe may not have seen this kind of warfare since the days of Adolf Hitler, for those studying Russian president Vladimir Putin’s playbook, the scenes might feel grimly familiar. In 2018, after his forces were sent to Syria to prop up the government of Bashar al-Assad, hospitals in the city of Aleppo saw a deluge of men, women and children struggling to breathe. Widespread reports that barrels of chlorine gas had been dumped over residential areas sparked an international outcry, with Moscow blaming rebel forces for the attacks and vowing to begin a massive bombing campaign that would oust them.

Despite the convenient pretext, investigations by the United Nations determined that Assad’s government had itself been behind a number of chemical weapons attacks, including those using chlorine gas and the nerve agent sarin. Russia, however, rejected the accusations as political, and consistently vetoed efforts to hold anyone responsible despite claims they were orchestrating a coverup.

Many, therefore, believe that Putin and his top brass are willing to tolerate unconventional warfare when waged by their allies, and will be asking whether Moscow would be prepared to sign off on such an attack in Ukraine. The country is a signatory to the 1997 Convention on Chemical Weapons and insists it has destroyed its stockpiles of mustard gas, sarin and other toxic agents, while accusing the US of dragging its feet on its own commitments.

For years though, there has been speculation that the Kremlin has maintained a secretive programme to keep hold of and develop some of the deadliest substances known to man. Those fears gained traction in 2020, when opposition figurehead Alexey Navalny was mysteriously taken ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk, screaming and writhing in pain in a video captured by a fellow passenger. After eventually being transferred to Berlin for treatment, his German doctors reported finding traces of the nerve agent Novichok in his test samples. The Soviet-made poison, understood to be in the possession of only Russia and Iran, is also said to have been used in the poisoning of former double agent Sergey Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury two years prior.

In many cases, though, chemical weapons don’t have to be high-tech compounds made only by a select number of laboratories – chlorine gas, for example, is relatively easy to get hold of if militaries can risk the ire of the world by using it. According to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby, US intelligence also has concerns ‘about Russia’s potential to use a variety of riot control agents, including tear gas mixed with chemical agents, in Ukraine.’

The reason that the use of this kind of warfare is an international taboo is because it indiscriminately maims civilians who have little chance to escape. While choking on the fluid filling your lungs after a chemical attack is a horrendous way to die, so too is asphyxiating on smoke in a burning building, starving to death in a besieged city or bleeding to death in the street. Given Moscow has demonstrated a clear willingness to target civilians during the war so far, using conventional weapons with devastating effect, some will likely question whether the use of unconventional ones would be a genuine escalation.

But it would. The red line for the use of chemical weapons is a firm one in the mind of most world leaders and US president Joe Biden has already pledged that Nato would ‘respond’ if Russia were to do so. With tensions at an all-time high between East and West, the Kremlin may think it has little to lose by further outraging those who are already outraged, but there is still much more that can be done to support Kyiv and punish Moscow, economically and militarily.

For example, Germany, which has resisted calls for energy embargoes because of its dependency on Russian gas, would find it far harder to resist such sanctions on grounds of self interest, given its own history of using chemical weapons in the second world war and during the Holocaust. Just a stone’s throw from Mariupol, the caves at Kerch stand as a reminder of the terror chemical weapons sow, and of how Russians were once on the receiving end of them.

Why are councils blocking homes for Ukrainian refugees?

Over the course of three days in September 1939, 1.5 million evacuees were sent to rural locations across Britain considered to be safe from the impending war. In a staggering logistical feat facilitated by thousands of volunteer helpers – from teachers to railway staff – children were swiftly relocated, with gas masks around their necks, suitcases in hand. Stately homes were given over for use as nursery schools. Local authorities attempted to provide a full-time education by finding alternative buildings – pubs, chapels and church crypts.

Contrast what was achieved over eight decades ago, where only a few wealthy families had phones and the web was the stuff of science fiction, with the news this weekend that officious councils are blocking UK homes for Ukrainian refugees because they have plug sockets that are too low, garden ponds, or the wrong type of plaster on their ceilings. Consider how, a few weeks ago, one sponsor application was unsuccessful because the property didn’t have central heating. How Justices of the Peace are undergoing DBS checks, their existing clearance deemed inadequate.

Meanwhile, the Home Office is processing parents and children separately, preventing them from travelling to their UK hosts’ homes. And, while hundreds of thousands of people in Britain have offered to host refugees under Homes for Ukraine, a rule preventing people applying to it once they are in Britain means they cannot benefit from these offers.

The government introduced the Homes scheme after coming under fire from all sides for its begrudging response to the crisis. Three million people were made refugees by Putin’s invasion in just three weeks, and while other European countries went to great lengths to help, the UK was accused of resorting to bureaucratic trickery and foot-dragging to evade responsibility. The approach was badly out of kilter with the public mood: millions of pounds were donated to projects in Ukraine, collection points were being inundated. The scheme was supposed to end the shambles and restore the credibility of a nation that spent more than any other helping Syrian refugees.

Instead, we have an application form that stands at over 50 pages. A dedicated phone line has been described as a ‘waste of time’. Sponsors have complained documents have ‘disappeared from online applications’.

The Ukrainian refugee crisis has brought out British nit-picking bureaucracy and craven caution at its worst. Remember when the University of East Anglia banned mortarboard tossing, or one council banned kites on the beach? Just last week, residents of St Blaise in Cornwall were told daffodils would no longer be planted after a training course informed council officials that the flower can be toxic to humans if ingested.

But it speaks more to the incentive structures intrinsic in our society. Sure, councils aren’t yet draining every private swimming pool or pond in the land. But the UK now has a pernicious mix of US litigiousness combined with the regulatory culture of the EU. Council officials don’t want to get sued, they don’t want to get blamed, but they do want to expand their funding and their status.

This is not a call for recklessness, but rather a softer attitude to risk which may, conversely, save lives. By 7 April, just 40,900 visas had been issued for Ukrainians. A fraction of that number have made it to Britain through the scheme, while 12,000 have come through the family reunification pathway. In other parts of Europe refugees are travelling freely, arranging visas upon arrival. Large train stations on the continent are full of locals holding placards offering rooms and transportation.

Our approach has an appalling cost. Over the past week our attention has been diverted away from defensive weaponry and towards the human anguish wrought by this conflict. Boris Johnson became the first western leader to use the word ‘genocide’ after dozens of civilians were found dead in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. Last week, one newspaper told the harrowing tale of a grandmother who, after hiding in a neighbour’s cellar with her grandchildren, emerged to find a newly-dug pit in her garden. When she asked, a nearby Russian soldier told her: ‘This is a graveyard for you.’

None of this is to downplay the efforts of the Ministry of Defence, and the alacrity with which the UK has provided training, reinforced Ukraine’s defensive capabilities or imposed sanctions. There is a reason why Zelensky has this week urged leaders in the West to follow our example. But the government ought to be straining every sinew to get the Ukrainian people out of danger as quickly as possible. At the very least, the standards that would normally apply to renting a property ought to be loosened in the interest of accelerating their exit from a war zone. But it appears the opposite is happening.

While the experience of evacuees during the second world war was far from unequivocally positive once they reached their destinations, they at least were able to escape high-risk areas. We should not let bureaucracy deny the people of Ukraine the same opportunity.

Will Hunter Biden finally bring down his father?

It was meant to be a kumbaya moment for the Democrats. Barack Obama, the still revered 44th President, would make his first formal visit to Joe Biden’s White House – and sprinkle some of his leadership magic over a struggling administration. Barack and Joe, the old duo, were to mark the 12th anniversary of what is thought to be their greatest legislative achievement: the passing of the Affordable Care Act.

Unfortunately, last week’s event ended up reminding most Americans that the current President may be better off in an Expensive Care Home. The videos from the day were painful to watch: Biden bumbled around helplessly as his former boss worked the room. Obama looked still so charismatic, charming, confident. Biden was the opposite.

Biden’s supporters in the media were quick to point out that mean Republican operatives had edited to clips to make Biden look more lost than he was. Maybe so. But the camera can’t lie that much. Watching the two men together, it was impossible not to feel sorry for Biden, clearly still the junior partner in their relationship: less loved, less able to exude charisma. It was also agonisingly evident that many Democrats would so much rather ‘no-drama Obama’ were still in charge. 

The Democratic party knows deep down that the Joe can’t go on. With inflation rampant and a cost-of-living crisis underway, Biden’s job approval ratings are now around 40 per cent. A staggering 71 per cent of Americans think their country is on the ‘wrong track’.

Biden is leading his party towards a humiliating defeat in the mid-term elections in November. The Democrats seem increasingly certain to lose the House of Representatives and the Senate. Biden could, in theory, do what Obama did in his first term: turn mid-term defeat into re-election triumph two years later. But, as last week proved, Biden is no Obama. He’s a 79-year-old disaster.

In his recent trip to Europe to address the Ukraine crisis, Biden’s succession of gaffes culminated in his accidental call for regime change in Moscow. ‘For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,’ he said. Was he, at some unconscious level, really talking about himself?

Many Democrats now think he must go – though few dare to say as much out loud. But they are stuck. How can they carry out their own ‘regime change’ without trashing their integrity as a party? The original plan, never publicised but acknowledged by Washington insiders and occasionally (albeit accidentally) by Biden himself, was that the 46th President would be a ‘placeholder’; Biden would gracefully make way for Kamala Harris, his Vice President, by 2024.

But, as everybody now knows, Harris is even less popular than the current President and similarly gaffe-prone. Polls suggest that, in a likely presidential election matchup against Donald Trump, she would perform far worse than Biden. A more immediate issue is that it’s not clear that Biden, a scrappy character who grows more stubborn as his faculties diminish, now shows no signs that he intends to stand down as a failure before 2024. He may need to be shoved.

Having spent four years trying to impeach Donald Trump, the Democrats therefore find themselves in the awkward position of having to remove their own dear leader.

There’s talk of invoking the 25th amendment, a clause in the constitution that could enable Vice President Harris to oust her boss on the grounds that he is not physically or mentally able to do the job. But that would mean admitting that the Trumpist attack machine was right all along when it claimed that Biden was never fit to lead the free world. It would also mean further empowering Kamala, which nobody apart from Kamala thinks is a good idea.

Another break-glass-in-case-of-disastrous-presidency option may present itself, however, in the sorry form of Hunter Biden, Joe’s errant son. Hunter, a recovering drug addict, has always been the horror PR bomb waiting to blow up his father’s career.

His infamous laptop, which was discovered in the run-up to the presidential election of 2020, contains easily enough salacious material to trash the Biden family name forever. The videos of Hunter smoking crack – despite his father’s prominent role as an enforcer of America’s ‘war on drugs’ in the 1990s – and having orgies with prostitutes are hellish manna from tabloid heaven. But those aren’t bad enough to bring down Joe, Hunter’s loving and long-suffering father.

The more explosive element could be Hunter’s emails, which show him using his father’s influence as the then Vice President as leverage in his extremely suspicious business dealings. They also show that Joe’s brother Jim was intimately involved in the various attempts to make lots of money using the Biden family name. The documents suggest not only that Biden was aware of his son’s activities, but that he may have been involved in them, too

The most notorious email is about a $10 million deal with a Chinese company, in which an associate of the Bidens suggest how the equity from the arrangement might be distributed in percentages, including 20 for ‘H’ (almost certainly Hunter), 10 for ‘Jim’ (Jim Biden) and ’10 held by H for the big guy.’

Is the ‘big guy’ Joe Biden? Biden has always insisted he had nothing to do with Hunter’s private work. But the question won’t go away. Until recently, these grubby details were mostly brushed aside as right-wing scuttlebutt or toxic fake news.

In the run-up to the election, various intelligence officials and the larger pro-Democratic news organisations dismissed the laptop evidence as a classic Russian disinformation operation. In an extraordinary demonstration of their power to control the flow of information, Twitter and Facebook censored and suppressed links to the story from their platforms.

But nobody ever proved it wasn’t true. Now, intriguingly, as President Biden flounders, the New York Times and the Washington Post, two loyally pro-Democratic papers, have begun publishing extensive reports on a federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax affairs and his lobbying efforts.

Both newspapers have now confirmed that the notorious laptop emails are real. What’s strange is that other credible reporters had validated the emails more than a year ago, but the Democratic establishment largely ignored them because they tended to work for pro-Republican media groups and were therefore deemed untrustworthy.

As the Hunter Biden investigation develops, however, and worthy liberal newspapers suddenly take the allegations against the Biden family seriously, ruthless figures at the top of the Democratic party might see an opportunity to push their problematic president towards his much-needed retirement.

Any detailed look at the Bidens’ family history shows them to be a less glamorous version of the Kennedys: an Irish-American Catholic clan determined to get ahead but often hurt by terrible tragedy. Biden lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. His son Beau, an aspiring politician, died of brain cancer. Like the Kennedys, too, a whiff of corruption has always dogged the Bidens’ otherwise heroic and very American family story.

‘The big difference is that the Kennedys made their money before going into politics,’ says Ben Schreckinger, author of The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s 50-year-rise to power. ‘The Bidens made their money after, and that has raised some thorny issues.’ The question is whether that thorniness will now be used to get a failing President out of the way in time for 2024.

Defra director: I’m with Extinction Rebellion

Westminster’s favourite millionaire environmentalists are it again. It seems that one or other of the Goldsmith brothers can’t go three months without sticking their foot in it. Today it’s the turn of Ben, the less prominent but no less gaffe-prone millionaire, who is one of the non-executive directors in Defra – the environment department in which his brother Zac currently serves as minister.

Undeterred by last night’s shenanigans by Crispin Blunt, Ben Goldsmith decided to today make himself the main character of Tory twitter by offering his views on the oil blockades currently being imposed by eco-activists. Responding to Labour’s call to impose an injunction on the disruptors, Goldsmith declared:

Not a good look from @UKLabour. The protestors are right to be doing whatever it takes to wake people up. The fossil fuel industry is grubby and dangerous. We need to unhook ourselves from our dependence asap. I’m with @ExtinctionR.

With wearisome predictability, after an outcry the tweet was then subsequently deleted. Tory MPs in the Defra Whatsapp group are now kicking off, with Damian Green suggesting Goldsmith should resign and Simon Jupp describing his views as ‘codswallop.’ Others have left the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) chat: the pressure group was founded by Goldsmith and recently boasted having half the Conservative parliamentary party as members in its caucus. Backbencher Chris Loder has declared that ‘one of us will not be a member of this organisation at the end of today.’

This is of course, not the first time that one of the Goldsmiths have become embroiled in Twitter shenanigans. Just last month Ben Goldsmith was casting aspersions on Dorset Police, after an eagle was found poisoned in the local area. Eco-activists on Twitter demanded action but an autopsy and police investigation revealed the bird most likely died from poison consumed by rodents it had then subsequently eaten. 

Goldsmith’s response was to suggest that no investigation had taken place – even though officers released a statement confirming that ‘a detailed examination and tests have been carried out.’ Zac meanwhile has used the same platform to act as something of a rapid rebuttal unit for the Johnsons during their time in No. 10.

Twitter is one thing, the real world of course is quite another. In recent months, Zac Goldsmith has found himself embroiled in both the disastrous Operation Ark scandal and claims about his tax status. Ben Goldsmith has meanwhile admitted breaking his own department’s rules over the release of deer from his land – something which Zac’s boss George Eustice subsequently conceded in a Daily Mail interview. 

Ben Goldsmith is now desperately trying to save his Defra post, messaging the CEN chat to say: 

I’ve always previously stood publicly opposed to the methods employed by ER, but frustration got the better of me on this occasion. I know I’m not alone in feeling a rising sense of panic as the reported science grows ever grimmer. Action is far too slow, even if we in the UK are leading the way globally.

Will that be enough?

It’s time to clamp down on militant protesters

The right to protest against the policies of the government of the day, the system in general or even just to ‘stick it to the man’, as 1960s radicals used to put it, is fundamental to a free society.

But when the freedom to protest is deliberately used by activists to take away the freedom of others to go about their normal lives then we reach an ethical crunch point. One man’s freedom has then become, as it were, another’s suppression and the law must adjudicate between the competing claims.

So it is with the campaign tactics of various climate alarmist groups that have sprung up such as Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and most recently Just Stop Oil. By trespassing on parts of the oil supply infrastructure in the past week, the latter group has succeeded in interrupting deliveries to petrol stations, leaving many people unable to fill their cars and thereby wrecking countless Easter holiday plans and the working lives of millions of people.

This is no accidental side-effect of the protest, but the central point of it. For example, Mitchel, Rosa and Ben, an infuriatingly plumy-voiced trio who have managed to shut the pipes at the Grays terminal in south Essex, explained their rationale in a video. Mitch celebrates causing ’25 hours of increased disruption to the oil infrastructure of the country’, while Ben adds: 

If you are someone who is feeling this disruption and wants to know how it can stop, it stops when Boris Johnson or his government makes a meaningful statement that they are going to stop all new consents and licences for new fossil fuels.

This goes far beyond the right to protest; it is in fact a bid at political imposition via ‘direct action’, causing unbearable costs to a society that has not democratically chosen this path. And they’re not just stopping people from buying fuel, but also stopping them driving anywhere even if they do manage to fill up.

On Sunday activists caused traffic chaos, again quite deliberately, by blocking key junctions in our big cities, just as they have done over recent months by blocking motorways such as the M25 in morning rush hour. This again is not an activity that can legitimately be covered by the idea of personal freedom to protest because it involves stealing the freedom of so many others to go about their lives.

It should not take more than an instant for the legal system to decide that the freedom of people to go about their normal business must obviously trump the freedom of political activists to carry out militant protest. And yet this is not where we are as a society. Attempts to remove, arrest and prosecute these saboteurs have so far been slow and half-hearted.

As the Metropolitan Police put it in a tweet on Sunday: ‘Officers have been on scene and speaking with those protesting on Lambeth Bridge, encouraging them to leave. The demonstration is causing serious disruption by blocking the bridge.’ The Met may call it ‘encouraging’, but many of us will see it as begging – begging law-breakers to pack it in and disperse but lacking the courage to do anything decisive to resolve the situation.

This is a disastrous turn of events and will surely lead to many more instances where those whose freedom is being infringed feel they have no option but to take matters into their own hands, with an ensuing risk of injury to one party or the other. Take the case of school-run mum Sherrilyn Speid, who used her Range Rover to nudge an Insulate Britain protestor along the highway as she tried to get her son to school on time and herself to work.

Ms Speid was given an interim driving ban after admitting a charge of dangerous driving, but it is hard not to sympathise with her complaint against the protesters that: ‘What they are doing is wrong. They’re not peaceful, they’re obstructive and they’re rude.’

It is yet to be seen whether the Police and Crime Bill will have much of an impact. But the ethical case for new limitations – including the proposed test of whether action will be ‘seriously disruptive’ – is now very strong. As Home Secretary Priti Patel has pointed out, there has been a ‘significant change in protest tactics… with protesters exploiting gaps in the law which have led to disproportionate amounts of disruption’. Though the House of Lords is predictably cutting up rough about the measures, all those who really care about living in a free society should hope for them to reach the statute book as soon as possible.

Welcome to globalised paradise

‘I remember when this was a dusty old coastal road with stunning views across the length of Seven Mile Beach’ recalls my charming cab driver as we cruise along one of Grand Cayman’s many spotless highways. That was back in the 80s before mass tourism and the financial sector barricaded the island’s most bankable asset behind a ribbon of luxury hotels and apartment blocks. Back in the early 60s Grand Cayman, the largest of a three-island archipelago, was little more than a sparsely populated, mosquito-infested swamp surrounded by some of the loveliest beaches in the Caribbean.

Pronounced CayMan by locals, this British Overseas Territory continues to be a land of extremes. While the summer heat is off the scale so too are the income disparities. The lives of local migrant workers remain in stark contrast to the financiers and wealthy tourists who flock here for a piece of the good life.

A proportion of the swanky new beach hotels such as the Ritz Carlton and Kimpton are the responsibility of one of the island’s most enigmatic figures. The reclusive foam container billionaire Ken Dart owns much of the island’s infrastructure, including some of the many highways that connect the more remote parts of the island. Few of the locals I spoke to had ever caught sight of the mysterious Dart although they were all aware that he came to Cayman seeking refuge and has since embraced an extraordinarily lavish island lifestyle. With his vast property portfolio, rambling Seven Mile Beach hotel residence and Dart Enterprises business, this middle-aged magnet holds much of the islands’ future in his hands.

In 2007 he commissioned a glitzy $800 million, 700,000 sq ft residential, retail and office development called Camana Bay just north of the capital with its own mini manmade tropical island and assortment of upscale restaurants. His latest venture is a proposed $1.5 billion ‘iconic skyscraper’ that would rival the Eiffel Tower and the Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

Despite Grand Cayman’s reputation as an offshore tax haven it’s actually remarkably difficult to open a bank account here, not that this has dampened prospectors’ enthusiasm for what is now a major tourist hotspot. Of course, the benefits of not having to pay income or corporate tax remains a major draw for businesses and individuals with money to burn but there is far more to the Caymans than profitable business opportunities.

Look beyond the disparities and the Caymans have plenty to offer the discerning tourist. There are the famously white sands of Seven Mile Beach of course (it’s actually just over five miles but who’s counting) while restaurants are plentiful and varied with some world beating seafood joints.

While the Seven Mile Beach hotels house some excellent restaurants – Taikun at the Ritz Carlton has great sushi while the Coccoloba beach bar at Kimpton Seafire serves a mean fish taco – it’s worth seeking out some of the quirkier local gems. George Town’s Lobster Pot with its panoramic waterfront terrace has been offering up freshly caught crustaceans to enthusiastic locals since the mid 60s with dishes such as the legendary ‘Cayman Trio’ consisting of lobster tail, garlic prawns and mahi mahi. Sunsets are particularly dreamy from this vantage point, especially when accompanied by one of the barman’s signature pina coladas.

Over at the colourful Calypso Grill overlooking Morgan’s Harbour at West Bay with its warm breezes and raucous native parrots, authentic Caribbean dishes include grilled ginger tuna and lobster and shrimp champagne. Fresh fish arrive daily from the nearby dock.

If lounging on Seven Mile Beach isn’t really your thing (all beaches on Cayman are publicly owned) travel a few miles up the coast to the charming capital George Town with its homely atmosphere and colourful Caymanian architecture.

Those seeking adventure should take one of the organised catamaran trips from Camana Bay out to Stingray City, a sandbank in the middle of the warm turquoise sea where inquisitive rays gather to feed and be ogled at by enchanted tourists. Stargazers should hire a kayak at Rum Point and marvel at the pristine night sky. Trail your hand along the surface of the sea and watch bioluminescent creatures light up the water. Grand Cayman also a thriving art scene with several galleries showing a wide range of home-grown talent.

While all three islands have retained much of their tropical appeal those seeking the full Robinson Crusoe experience should head to Little Cayman where the pace of life is slower. The island is barely ten miles long and sparsely populated so there are plenty of empty white sand beaches to live out your castaway fantasies. Electricity only arrived on the island in 1992 so there is still a sense of untrammelled wildness about the place. At Pirates Point you’ll stay in comfortable huts right on the beach and enjoy communal meals with fellow island hoppers. Keep an eye out for flocks of giant native boobies and the odd plodding iguana.

The island remains a must for underwater enthusiasts. Divers travel from all over the world to marvel at Bloody Bay Wall, a sheer 1000 ft coral cliff less than a hundred metres from shore. Unlike so much of the world’s bleached out coral, this particular stretch of volcanic artistry remains in rude health but for how much longer is the question on everyone’s lips. There are rumours that Mr Dart has his developer’s eye on one or two of the beaches here so let’s hope his arrows fall short of the mark.

The finest pasta in London

Why was it that when lockdown haunted our doors we all rushed out to buy pasta? Dry wheat in a bag in a funny shape. Cheap, yes, and ridiculously easy to cook. And, if the supermarket cheddar didn’t run out, very good with cheese. But still, pasta. Shouldn’t we have thought of something more inventive?

Yet a spate of restaurants popping up round London with new enthusiasm now that we’re out and about again suggests that the Italian carb is enjoying a gourmet renaissance.

Stevie Parle, founder of the fresh pasta restaurant Pastaio, speaks of pasta-making as an ‘obsession’. The satisfaction of ‘extruding pasta through bronze dies’ and ‘slow cooking delicious ragu’ that he refers to when we speak sounds practically religious.

You only have to watch the eternally watchable Stanley Tucci’s recent foray for the BBC to Rome to appreciate the fervour the Italians feel about the stuff.

Pasta’s recent UK popularity Parle puts down to value for money. ‘The amount of protein in pasta dishes is generally less so we can still use the top ingredients I’ve used throughout my career at really high end restaurants, but can deliver for a much lower price,’ he says.

The etymology of the name pasta certainly suggests humble beginnings. It allegedly came from a Latinisation of the Greek word παστά meaning ‘barley porridge’.

Cheap, delicious and often covered with cheese, has pasta become the new pizza I wonder? Parle thinks pasta is too precious: ‘The thing about pizza is that it is somehow delicious even when it’s pretty terrible quality. Yesterday’s pizza has helped nurse many a hangover, whilst great pasta somehow loses its appeal in minutes’.

What London has come to offer in the past five or so years is a plethora of pasta restaurants with tight menus of small sharing plates. No longer are we talking hefty bowls of spag bol washed down with Chianti in straw covered bottles.

Pasta’s gastronomic revolution in the UK can be pinned, most likely, to the moment Jordan Frieda and Tim Siadatan, who met while working at River Cafe, opened up Padella on Borough Market’s London Bridge edge in 2016.

At Padella, their second restaurant, Frieda and Siadatan created a master design. Taglerini and ravioli are piled onto dishes just larger than a side plate costing between £8 and £10. Ingredients are simple but high quality. Customers are left to have their Lady & the Tramp moments, make a mess of the tables, slurp down cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper for the uninitiated, a much-loved dish in Rome) and leave.

Queues when it opened were frustratingly long. Another Padella is due to open in Shoreditch this year.

Since then, you’ll find Lina Stores, Bancone and La Nonna have all followed a similar path. Ragus vary and recent opening La Nonna now outsmarts Lina Stores for quality (this reviewer thinks). I wanted to bathe in La Nonna’s four mushroom tagliatelle smothered in cream and truffle paste, the most expensive plate on its menu at £13.

But there is also the higher end too. Fun, poppy Luca in Farringdon and nose-to-tail supremos Manteca in Shoreditch both elevate pasta to a decadent pre-main course.

Johnny Smith, Luca’s co-founder, believes that eating even the simplest pasta dish is “a transcendental moment when everything is in balance”. Not that Luca’s pastas are simple: the reinterpretation of carbonara into agnolotti parcels covered in puffed quinoa to give an odd but satisfying crunch is a careful study in flavour, texture and satisfaction and wildly outperforms the main courses.

The fun part is trying to eat your way through the different shapes. Italy Magazine claims there are around 350 different types: almost one for every day of the year.

Crispin Blunt’s extraordinary intervention

Crispin Blunt has had quite the 24 hours. The Tory MP yesterday made an extraordinary intervention in the case of Imran Ahmad Khan, the Wakefield backbencher found guilty of the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy. Blunt decided to release a highly unusual and hyberbolic statement which lambasted the conviction as a ‘dreadful miscarriage of justice’ incited by ‘lazy tropes about LGBT+ people’ based in ‘Victorian era prejudice.’ He even claimed that Khan’s guilty verdict ‘is nothing short of an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ muslims around the world’, writing:

I am utterly appalled and distraught at the dreadful miscarriage of justice that has befallen my friend and colleague Imran Ahmad Khan, MP for Wakefield since December 2019. His conviction today is nothing short of an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ muslims around the world. I sat through some of the trial. The conduct of this case relied on lazy tropes about LGBT+ people that we might have thought we had put behind us decades ago. As a former justice minister I was prepared to testify about the truly extraordinary sequence of events that has resulted in Imran being put through this nightmare start to his Parliamentary career. I hope for the return of Imran Ahmad Khan to the public service that has exemplified his life to date. Any other outcome will be a stain on our reputation for justice, and an appalling own goal by Britain as we try to take a lead in reversing the Victorian era prejudice that still disfigures too much of the global statute book.

The court which convicted Khan found he had plied a 15-year-old with gin and tonic before dragging him upstairs to watch pornography and groping him in a bunk bed. The victim’s parents reportedly both broke down in tears when giving evidence as they told how their son was left ‘inconsolable’ and ‘shaking’ after the incident at a house in Staffordshire. As ITV reporter Harry Horton notes, Blunt only attended the defence and summing up of the trial; he was not present to see any of the prosecution witnesses. 

Crispin Blunt has today removed the statement from his website and issued a grovelling apology. He now writes:

I have decided to retract my statement defending Imran Ahmad Khan. I am sorry that my defence of him has been a cause of significant upset and concern not least to victims of sexual offences. It was not my intention to do this. To be clear I do not condone any form of abuse and I strongly believe in the independence and integrity of the justice system.

He has also offered his resignation as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ Global Rights. It comes after Stewart McDonald, Chris Bryant and Joanna Cherry all quit the panel in protest. There’s now a grassroots revolt building in Reigate against Blunt, with speculation that the party whip could be withdrawn.

Could Imran Ahmad Khan’s trial cost the Tories not one, but two MPs?

Why is Durham trying to ‘decolonise’ maths?

Is maths racist? That’s the question apparently troubling the department of mathematical sciences at Durham University at the moment. As the Telegraph reports, the department has put out a new guide on ‘decolonisation’, urging maths academics to ensure their teaching is ‘more inclusive’ and not dominated by a Eurocentric view on the world.

Of course, exploring the overlooked contribution of non-western thinkers to mathematics would be no bad thing. But this guide goes a fair bit further down the ‘decolonisation’ rabbit hole. It urges academics to introduce more non-white thinkers into their classes, thus presenting their race as more important than their merit or impact. And it urges academics to ‘discuss how maths can be used to aid attempts to secure equality’ – that is, to turn what should be an objective, academic subject into a form of activism.

One idea the guide floats is using non-western analogies when describing mathematical concepts: ‘To give an example from statistics, two common examples of Simpson’s paradox involve survivors of the Titanic, and enrolment in an American University, both examples from the western world. But there is also an example one can cite which is based on the representation of the under-representation of Maori in New Zealand jury pools.’

It would be tempting to read this as the work of one administrator high on virtue or something stronger. But when it comes to wokeness seeping into mathematics, Durham isn’t an isolated case. Last year, in California, a state-education panel considered various reforms aimed at rooting out ‘white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom’. Woke educationalists even argued that ‘upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers’ was part of a nefarious, covert system of racial domination via long division and algebra.

‘Decolonisation’ has been a hot topic on British campuses since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. It amounts to ridding various subjects of their alleged ‘Eurocentrism’ and championing alternative, non-western thinkers and ‘forms of knowledge’. Once a fringe academic tendency, ‘decolonisation’ activists now have the ear of our most esteemed institutions of learning. In June 2020, Oxford University announced plans to ‘decolonise’ its maths and science degrees.

Many top universities have tried to have their cake and eat it here – to indulge the ‘decolonisers’ while not becoming complete relativists. ‘The maths curriculum our students learn remains the same’, said a Durham spokesman in response to the Telegraph story. ‘But we also encourage students to be more aware of the global and diverse origins of the subject, and the range of cultural settings that have shaped it. Two plus two will always equal four.’

But the Durham guide still urges staff to essentially racialise maths, to treat race as a key consideration when compiling course materials and teaching students. This politicised approach to mathematics not only undermines what should be an objective discipline, it also patronises ethnic-minority students. They are presumed to be incapable of appreciating this subject unless it is presented to them with a more ‘diverse’ face.

Elsewhere, as we saw in California last year, the attempts to introduce racial politics into maths is bred of a more clear-cut contempt for ethnic-minority people. Luckily, the state-education panel rejected the genuinely racist notion that expecting black children to get the right answer was itself racist. But across the US ‘gifted and talented’ programmes for high-flyers in various subjects are now on the way out, over claims that black children can’t possibly benefit from them.

These attempts to rid maths of its alleged white supremacy make two things crystal clear. First, that identity politics in education is no longer confined to the arts and humanities – even maths and the hard sciences aren’t safe from such relativism. Second, for all their talk of ‘decolonisation’, it is woke activists who think of ethnic minorities as lesser beings, incapable of mastering ‘western’ subjects unless those subjects are completely rewired beforehand.

Is maths racist? Of course not. But the woke assault on maths most definitely is.

If Sunak goes the Treasury needs a real low-tax Tory

It could be Kwasi Kwarteng, the business minister. Or Nadhim Zahawi, the education minister, and before that the minister who helped make the vaccine roll-out such a success. Or perhaps Sajid Javid will even get his old job back.

With an investigation opening into his financial affairs, and with questions over his judgment growing by the day, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak is increasingly damaged goods. It won’t be long before there is speculation about who will get the second most important job in British politics. But hold on. It doesn’t matter so much who moves into No. 11. What is important is that the next Chancellor clears out Sunak’s policies – and tries some conservative economics instead.

Sunak could hardly have had a more catastrophic week than the one he has just endured. At precisely the moment when taxes are going up and the cost of living crisis is starting to bite, it emerged that his fabulously wealthy wife Akshata Murthy may have saved millions in tax by claiming non-dom status, and that he himself held a US green card. He can argue all he likes that it is unfair to drag his partner into politics but when you have pushed taxes up to the highest level in 70 years to pay for your wild spending, it was hardly a wise decision. From the Prime Minister in waiting, Sunak is starting to look damaged beyond repair.

Sure, it is fun to speculate about his successor. Kwarteng and Zahawi are the most obviously qualified candidates. Liz Truss would be formidable, and it is about time a woman was appointed to the role (she would surely make mincemeat of Labour’s overrated Rachel Reeves). And yet the name of his successor is not as important as the policies. In reality, for all his ability, Sunak has been a disappointing Chancellor. He has pushed up taxes, put them on the wrong targets, spent money too wildly, and shown zero interest in genuine reform. It has been Gordon Brown on steroids. For all the talk of being a low-tax, fiscally responsible conservative in principle, there has been absolutely no evidence of it in practice.

In reality, what the UK needs right now is a return to Conservative economics. Such as? Government spending needs to be brought firmly back under control, and a working-from-home public sector reminded that it serves the public, not the other way around. Taxes need to be reduced, not just in 3071, or whenever Sunak’s income tax cut comes in, but right now.

Businesses need some help, not constant punishment with higher corporate taxes, and steeper National Insurance levies. And the government should be encouraging more people back into the labour market, so that we can earn rather than just borrow our way out of a cost of living crisis. It is the policies that matter more than the personalities. If Sunak is forced out of his office over the next few weeks, his successor needs to sweep out his legacy. And they need to relaunch the government’s economic strategy – so that it actually has a chance of promoting growth.

Exclusive: disgraced MP to quit

Independent MP Imran Ahmad Khan has today decided to stand down from the Commons – three days after being found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. Elected in December 2019 for the ‘Red Wall’ seat of Wakefield, the backbencher had the Conservative whip removed in June 2021 after he was charged for the offence.  The outgoing MP has now released a statement in which he says:

Owing to long delays in the legal process, my constituents have already been without visible parliamentary representation for a year. Even in the best case scenario, anticipated legal proceedings could last many more months. I have therefore regrettably come to the conclusion that it is intolerable for constituents to go years without an MP who can amplify their voices in parliament. Representing them has been the honour of my life and they deserve better than this. Consequently I am resigning as MP for Wakefield and withdrawing from political life.

He originally intended to stay on and fight his case in parliament but after a significant backlash to Crispin Blunt’s statement of support on Monday, he chose to stand down. Ahmad Khan’s seat was one of the most surprising Tory gains at the 2019 election, having been solidly Labour since 1931. Based on current trends, Keir Starmer’s party us expected to re-capture the seat, which Ahmad Khan won by just 3,358 votes on a turnout of 64 per cent.

The defeated Labour candidate last time was former frontbencher Mary Creagh, who marched up to Jeremy Corbyn in parliament after her loss to blame him for her defeat. Already she is being again mentioned as a possible candidate, were a contest to be held. Other suggestions being circulated include former Chancellor Ed Balls, out of the Commons since 2015. And you thought Strictly was a surprise…

Given the number of jumpy Red Wall Tories currently fearing for their seats, the results of the forthcoming contest in Wakefield will be eagerly studied in Westminster by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The Scottish Greens are in cloud cuckoo land on trans rights

A minister in the Scottish government has likened people who share my opinions to racists or anti-Semites. Apparently my views on how best to support and include transgender people in society place me on the same footing as those who condemn and exclude others based on their race.

This latest outrage comes from Lorna Slater, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens – Nicola Sturgeon’s junior partners in government. While complaining that the BBC should not give ‘anti-trans’ people a platform, Slater has claimed that:

‘We wouldn’t put balance on the question of racism or anti-Semitism, but we allow this fictional notion of balance when it comes to anti-trans [views]. The whole thing is disgusting.’

I imagine it matters little to Slater that I am transgender, nor that my arguments are reasoned and rooted in reality. Nor even that I seek a solution that protects the right of transgender people to prosper and contribute in the UK. What matters is my beliefs or – rather – my lack of belief in a quasi-religious ideology that elevates feelings over facts.

It would be interesting to know how Slater defines ‘anti-trans’, because it is yet another weakly-defined term that characterises this debate. This senior member of the Scottish Greens sounds less like a junior partner than an infant. When she pointed out that the Greens were standing some trans candidates in local elections, she said that she’s ‘genuinely afraid for their safety.’

This really needs unpicking. Does she really think that trans candidates are in specific danger when running for the council? I don’t. The UK is a tolerant and accepting society. I haven’t perceived any anti-trans panic and, unlike Slater, my experience is first hand. Maybe she is worried that the voters on the doorstep might disagree with the policies her candidates are trying to promote. That is normal in politics. It is also normal for aspiring politicians to present coherent arguments to support their assertions, but how can they do that when their claims are based on wishful thinking?

Not everyone thinks that ‘Transwomen are women’ and – indeed – some of us think that it is nonsense. The difference is that we can present an argument to support our position. We believe women are biological females while transwomen are biological males; female is not male; therefore, transwomen are not women.

While that dose of common sense might be suppressed in social media bubbles or even in branch meetings of the Scottish Greens by comparisons with racism or anti-Semitism, transgender candidates will need better when venturing out into the real world. No wonder Slater is worried about them. But the problem is not out there, the problem is squarely in Slater’s own thinking. She went on to say:

‘These gentle, hardworking women are being portrayed as if they’re inherently dangerous. It couldn’t be further from the truth.’

It is telling that transmen are again erased from the narrative, but that is beside the point. As a trans person involved in politics, I do not need to be infantilised and nor do other trans people. We certainly must not be excused from normal safeguarding procedures. As has been explained many times, transwomen are male and we need to be subjected to the same checks as every other male. Otherwise the trans community risks becoming a magnet to men who want to avoid those checks.

None of this seems to bother the Scottish Greens, however. In their cloud cuckoo land, anyone can be the sex they want to be, and anyone who disagrees is a horrid person and certainly not worthy of being heard.

If that isn’t enough then unsubstantiated assertions can be thrown around with abandon. Slater went on to repeat the claim that that ‘there’s money in this from certain right-wing American groups that’s been flooding into organisations in the UK.’ She provided no supporting evidence, of course.

The truth is that there are three vulnerable groups impacted by this debate. It’s not just about trans people – women have found themselves having to defend sex-based rights they thought were secure. Meanwhile some children who have been told that they can be the sex they want to be have have believed this, with profound consequences on their development. That is why we must keep the spotlight on the trans debate.

And if Slater said anything of any note, it was to point the light to what she called, ‘the fictional notion of balance.’ She cited climate deniers as not worthy of a platform. I’d suggest biology deniers like Slater are another.

Could we be heading for a second Covid recession?

The political story for the moment is the cost of living crisis. But by the end of the year could we be talking about a recession instead? We shouldn’t read too much into one year’s economic growth figures, especially given how often they are revised upwards or downwards. But February’s figures, published this morning, have caught many people unawares. They show that the economy just about ratcheted upwards in February, growing by 0.1 per cent. That’s compared with healthy growth of 0.8 per cent in January, as the country emerged from the Omicron scare.

Notably, in two areas the economy contracted: construction fell by 0.1 per cent and production by 0.6 per cent. It was only the services sector, where growth was 0.2 per cent, which kept the economy’s head above water, and much of that was down to a rebound in foreign holidays. While the economy as a whole is now 1.5 per cent larger than it was pre-pandemic, production is still 1.9 per cent smaller, with the automotive sector in particular dragging down the figures.

What should worry everyone is that February’s GDP figures come before the full impact of household energy price rises. We won’t know the impact of that for a couple of months, when we get GDP figures for April. It is hard to imagine that the production or construction sectors of the economy will have picked up by then – both are struggling with rising input prices. But it is all too easy to see how the services sector might have gone into reverse by then too, with consumers drawing in their horns and cutting back on discretionary spending in order to pay their essential bills.

Government bailouts earned us an early exit from the Covid recession. Although extremely deep, the plunge in the economy then only just about qualified as a recession – there were only two quarters of negative growth. But the price of governments buying an early exit from the Covid recession is that we may be heading for an inflation-sparked recession two years later. What we are experiencing now feels like unfinished business from two years ago, as we discover the full, inevitable effects of closing down large parts of the economy for weeks on end in 2020.

The word ‘recession’ has receded from everyday political language over the past year as the economy appeared to stage a strong recovery. But don’t be surprised if it starts to be used with increasing frequency in coming weeks. Here is an alternative vision of Britain in autumn 2022: the country enters its second recession in two years. All talk of interest rate rises ceases as debate turns instead to when the Bank of England is going to make an emergency rate cut. The – quite possibly new – Chancellor brings forward plans for a penny cut to the basic rate of income tax in an effort to stimulate demand, while unemployment surges in manufacturing areas.

I always remember the day I drove into my local town in mid-afternoon in May 2008 and asked myself: where is all the traffic? Have we entered a recession? It turned out that that is exactly when the 2008/09 recession began. It will pay to keep an eye on the traffic in coming months.

CCHQ’s unfortunate Jimmy Savile link

Oh dear. Just last week, on the day that Boris Johnson raised National Insurance, it was pointed out to the bright young things at Tory high command that they might want to remove from their website his, er, manifesto pledge to not hike the tax. It’s still proudly displayed there online as part of six manifesto commitments, adorned by Johnson’s own prominent signature. 

More pressing still might be the replacement of their current slogan: ‘You started it, now be part of it,’ urging internet browsers to sign up and join the Conservative party. For, as Times columnist Matt Chorley noted in one of his recent shows, the words have an unfortunate echo with the theme tune to the BBC show Jim’ll Fix It presented, of course, by reviled paedophile Jimmy Savile:

Your letter was only the start of it. One letter and now you’re a part of it. Now you’ve done it, Jim has fixed for it you.

Given the recent Netflix series about the disgraced BBC star, perhaps it’s not the kind of brand recognition CCHQ ought to be aiming for? Especially in light of Boris Johnson’s own comments about Savile…

Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine’s energy sector

We are seven weeks into the war and the level of destruction in Ukraine is mounting. Every single day we learn more about Russia’s scorched earth tactics and about the atrocities its forces have committed in the areas they once occupied.

But with another Russian surge in Ukraine’s east looming, one trend is not sufficiently understood in the West. Over the past weeks, Russian air and missile strikes have deliberately targeted and destroyed key components of Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure, especially in the energy sector, in a bid to make the country collapse.

In late March the Pentagon estimated that Russia had fired over 1,200 precision guided missiles into Ukraine. The cost of direct damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure in the month since Russia invaded the country has reached $63 billion, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. Ninety-two factories (including food warehouses), 378 educational institutions, 138 healthcare institutions and 12 airports have been damaged, destroyed or seized.

But it may well be the energy sector where Russian missiles will do the most long-term harm. Modern cities and villages cannot survive without a proper supply of electricity, gas and fuel that is needed not only for households and businesses, but also for water supply, sewage systems and heating. Since 24 February the Russians have damaged and destroyed numerous assets of the Ukrainian energy sector. They are systematically targeting and destroying Ukrainian critical infrastructure in order to make villages, towns, cities and eventually entire regions uninhabitable for Ukrainians, forcing people to leave their homes.

Since the beginning of the invasion, seven power plants and parts of the electricity grid have been damaged, and one destroyed. Russia has also targeted gas pipelines. Parts of the Soyuz transmission line carrying westbound gas to Europe were seized in the Kharkiv region by Russian forces in March. Forty-four gas distribution stations are now not operating in Ukraine due to the damage to middle and low-pressure gas pipelines at a regional, city and village level, leaving around 300,000 households across the country without gas.

Key targets have included heat and power plants in the cities of Chernihiv, Sumy and Okhtyrka (in the Sumy region). Russians also targeted and damaged over 50 components of electricity grids in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions and damaged the grids of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), Europe’s largest NPP, which provides 25 per cent of Ukraine’s electricity. In a press briefing this month, the CEO of Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK Group said that despite his company’s efforts, approximately 1.5 million households remain cut off from electricity.

On 3 April, Russian missiles hit and completely destroyed Ukraine’s largest oil refinery in Kremenchuk, in the Poltava region. On the same day, missiles also destroyed a critical oil processing plant in the harbour of Odesa. With the Ukrainian Black Sea blockaded and critical oil storage and processing infrastructure destroyed, the only way to import oil and fuel into Ukraine is now via train and trucks from the EU.

Russia is well aware of that and experts worry that it will soon target the Ukrainian railway system to disrupt fuel supplies. As of now, fuel is already rationed and as evacuations from the eastern regions are underway, civilians and possibly the army will face fuel shortages in the near future.

Even before the beginning of the renewed Russian aggression, the situation was especially acute in the country’s eastern regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk – especially in the besieged city of Mariupol.

In Luhansk 132,000 users across more than 35 settlements have been cut off from gas. And as of 5 April, almost 96,000 people in 30 settlements across the Luhansk region are without electricity. Last week the governor of Luhansk wrote on Telegram that every hospital in the Luhansk region was either damaged or destroyed.

In April, fighting in the Kharkiv region damaged energy infrastructure, leaving more than 60,000 residents cut off from their water supply and another 40,000 residents without electricity. Around 20,000 people are still trapped and completely cut off from electricity, gas and water in the besieged city of Izium, in the Kharkiv region.

We have to understand that despite Russia trying to militarily capture large parts of Ukraine’s eastern region, it is highly likely to continue striking energy infrastructure across the country. The sad reality is that Ukraine lacks the ability to protect its critical infrastructure against air and missile attacks. Without more advanced medium and long-range anti-air systems, Russian rockets will continue to damage and destroy peaceful cities and infrastructure. Only some of this infrastructure can be quickly restored once the fighting stops.

Whether Ukraine can effectively deploy defence systems like the S-300 from Slovakia, which recently arrived in Ukraine, will decide whether Putin can realise his goal of punishing and destroying large parts of the country. If the Russians continue to disrupt Ukraine’s energy infrastructure unabated, the number of displaced people (which currently stands at over seven million) will quickly grow. People do want to stay in the country but the Russian plan to make large areas of Ukraine unliveable will force them out. The EU believes that up to eight million refugees will seek shelter in the European Union. Given the Russian ability and desire to wreak havoc on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, millions more may be forced to leave very soon as well.

Stopping the next Hunter Biden laptop cover-up

Hunter Biden reportedly paid over $1 million in back taxes for income he never claimed, but which was found in his emails — the ones from his laptop that had been dismissed by the mainstream media as Russian disinformation.

The FBI is conducting an ongoing investigation into Hunter’s business activities based on the contents of the laptop. It was only the Bureau’s use of the laptop as evidence that finally forced the New York Times this month to admit that what it said last year was false.

See, as the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files indicated a potential pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the 2020 presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails ‘have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’. The signers said their national security experience made them ‘deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.’

The letter played off prejudices from 2016 that the Russians manipulated an American election. In fact, most of the letter’s signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the mainstream media, the meme quickly morphed into ‘the laptop is fake, ignore it’. Twitter and Facebook quickly banned all mentions of the laptop, and the story disappeared in the mainstream media. Until now.

During my 24-year State Department career, I was exposed to foreign disinformation, and as a journalist today, I read the Hunter Biden emails. There is no way experienced intelligence officers could have mistaken the contents of the Biden laptop for fake, produced material.

The most glaring reason is that most of the important emails could be verified by simply contacting the recipient and asking him if the message was real. Disinfo at this level of sophistication would never be so simple to disprove.

In addition, the laptop contents were about 80 per cent garbage and maybe 20 per cent useful (dirty) information, a huge waste of time if you are trying to move your adversary to act in a certain way. Such an overbearing amount of non-actionable material also risks burying the good stuff, and if this is disinfo you want your adversary to find the good stuff. It is also expensive to produce information that has no take attached to it, and fake info of any kind is at risk of discovery, blowing the whole operation. Lastly, nothing on the laptop was a smoking gun. You need the disinfo to lead fairly directly to some sort of actionable conclusion, a smoking gun, or your cleverness will be wasted.

Compare the alleged Russian disinfo of the Biden laptop to the Christopher Steele ‘Russiagate’ dossier. To begin, Steele put classified markings on his document. That signals amateur work to the pros but causes the media to salivate.

Steele never names his sources, to prevent verification by the media (a major tell). Steele also finds a way to push the important info up front, in his case a summary. If Biden’s laptop was disinfo, the makers could have included an Index, or Note to Self where ‘Hunter’ called out the good stuff. Or maybe even a fake email doing the same. Steele’s dossier is also concise, at 35 typed pages. Hunter’s laptop is a pack rat’s nightmare of jumbled stuff: thousands of pages, receipts, info on cam girls and the like.

But the real giveaway is who was out there peddling the information. Ideally you want the stuff to come from the most reliable source you can find to give it credibility. Steele, as a professional intelligence officer, used multiple, overlapping sources. Those pushing the dossier eventually included selected patsy journalists, the State Department, John McCain and even the Department of Justice (FBI and DOJ officials).

For the Biden laptop, it is understood the whole messy thing was shopped all across the mainstream media by Rudy Giuliani, about the most mistrusted man available for the purpose. The source must be reputable for the gag to work, and there is no way a full-spectrum Russian disinformation operation would use Rudy. That alone should have ended the discussion among those 50 letter-signing intelligence officials.

Lastly, everything on the laptop was verifiable in an hour or two by an organisation like the NSA. They could have had an intern verify the emails, bank statements, wire transfers, etc. using about half the capabilities Edward Snowden revealed they have. James Clapper and John Brennan knew this, and knew equally well that the media, if they picked up the story at all, would not ask any such questions, and the NSA, et al, would never weigh in. It would be our little secret.

So we’ll call that letter claiming the Biden emails were potential Russian disinfo a lie, a fabrication, made-up, fake stuff designed to influence an election. That’s disinformation by any definition, and evidence the only disinformation op in 2020 was run against the American voters by their own intelligence community working with the media and on behalf of the Democrats.

Almost half of Americans now believe Trump would have won a second term if the media had fully reported on the laptop’s revelations. The scam worked. You know some of its hallmarks now, so keep a sharp eye out in 2024.

France is set for serious social unrest

So it’s Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen once again, and for many millions of French that is a deeply depressing prospect. There were violent protests in the Brittany city of Rennes shortly after the result of the first round of voting was announced, as an estimated 500 people vented their anger against ‘fascism’ and ‘capitalism’.

Around the same time I received a call from my sister-in-law in the south of France. She was in despair, this working-class socialist, at once more being forced to choose between Macron and Le Pen.

But it’s her ilk who will decide the outcome of the second round on 24 April. Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 21.9 per cent of the vote – approximately 7.6 million ballots – of whom the majority were 18 to 34 year-olds. He polled best among this demographic, while Le Pen topped the count among the 35 to 64 age range (she was second to Mélenchon among those aged 25 to 34). The only age group dominated by Macron was the over 65s, where he was by some margin the most popular candidate.

This is dangerously unhealthily.

Those whose working lives are over, those on – in general – comfortable pensions with no mortgage are content with the incumbent. This is also the demographic who most approved of Macron’s draconian Covid measures, the passport, the masks, the shutting down of society. This is the generation of ‘Soixante-huitards’, Baby Boomers to Brits. Half a century ago they were radicals and revolutionaries but in their dotage they are rather smitten with their ‘president of the rich’.

A good many senior citizens did not vote for Macron, of course, but they tended to be working-class men and women, highlighting the ominous faultline that has appeared in France in the last five years. ‘Two social and cultural blocks face each other,’ explains the pollster Jérôme Fourquet in Monday’s Le Figaro. ‘Macron, whose appeal is much stronger the more we climb the social ladder, as well as among the retired who come from the centre right… and Marine Le Pen, whose principal supporters are concentrated among those on more modest salaries, those still working and who are in difficulty in contrast to the affluent strata of society and the retired.’

According to Fourquet, it is obsolete to think of the divide in France in terms of left against right; rather it is between the haves and the have nots.

The yellow vest movement embodies this new cleavage, uniting men and women who a decade ago would have described themselves as socialists or right-wingers but who now go by the collective ‘The Forgotten’. A similar heterogeneity was in evidence last summer when tens of thousands of people took to the streets across France to protest against the Covid passport.

I attended several demos from both protest movements and not once did I hear demonstrators chanting their support of Le Pen or Mélenchon. There was only one name on their lips, and that was spat out with a cold hatred: ‘Macron, Démission!’ [resign] they hollered over and over as they trod the streets.

He declined their advice and he is favourite to win a second term, although a poll on Monday morning (the polls were impressively accurate in the first round) predicts that it is going to be very tight between him and Le Pen.

But whoever wins on Sunday week they will have to preside over a country that is fractured, fed up and spoiling for a fight.

Last year a group of retired senior military officers published an open letter in France warning of an impending civil war. They were right to air their anxiety although they were wrong in pinpointing Islamic extremists as the enemy within. They are too few in number to spark any serious social unrest; the conflict brewing in France is between the anywheres and the somewheres, the globalists and what Macron mocked as the ‘resistant Gauls’. It is the well-off against the downtrodden Proles.

France has been here before, and it never ends well.

Nicola Sturgeon’s adolescent troubles

After the Derek Mackay scandal, you’d have thought the SNP would want to distance itself from 16 year-olds. Far from it, it seems, for the bairns of tomorrow are central to Nicola Sturgeon’s ambitions today. Support for independence is flagging. The public sector services are creaking. Calls for an investigation into the ferries fiasco are growing. So, if you are First Minister, how do you regain the initiative?  

The answer, apparently, is to let kids become MSPs too. For this weekend, the SNP unveiled their latest constitutional wheeze: reducing the minimum age of election candidacy from 18 at present to just 16 for Scottish parliament and local council elections. 

The move would bring it into line with the voting age for those elections, despite people still having to be 18 or over to vote in a general election. The plans would allow those under 18 to become MSPs at the next Scottish parliament election in 2026 and councillors at the local election due to be held the following year. 

Leaving aside the question of whether devolved authorities ought to have the right to grant such constitutional change, the proposal seems to be yet another example of the SNP project trying to accumulate political capital for an eventual independence vote rather than expending it on meaningful policy initiatives.

It would also mean people who are too young to learn to drive, get married without parental consent or drink alcohol would be able to help run the country. A teenage MSP would walk out of the voting lobby into Holyrood, to be denied service at the bar, before being required to take a taxi or public transport home to their constituency. Ironically, there’s a chance they’d be older than both some members of both the UK and Scottish ‘youth’ parliaments, the latter of which caters up to 25-year-olds. 

They’d also be exposed to the vitriol and venom of the whole toxic Scottish independence debate, with all its trolling, death threats, hatchet jobs and online abuse. Can 16 and 17 year-olds cope with that? Nicola Sturgeon didn’t seem to think so as recently as, er, three years ago, when she fought to introduce her controversial ‘named person scheme’. 

Under this proposal, a named person would safeguard the welfare of every child in the country. Presumably the SNP vision of Scotland is to see ministerial-approved minders escorting elected adolescents through the chamber, holding their hand as they opine on the fate of a country.

Still, given the behaviour of some of its incumbents, it wouldn’t be the first time the SNP have elected children.