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Does a ‘new golden age’ beckon for the US and Japan?
Perhaps the first thing on everyone’s minds was just how low Ishiba Shigeru, Japan’s Prime Minister (who prefers warships to golf clubs) could go on a round at the Trump International Golf Club. After all, following Trump’s victory last November, Ishiba’s South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, was seen sharpening up his golf swing in preparation for 18 holes. But what Ishiba’s speedy one-day sojourn to Washington on Friday makes clear is that no matter how transactional leaders may be, in international relations, alliances matter – particularly during a time of ‘polycrisis’.
Relations between Tokyo and Washington have not always been hurdle-free. But this bilateral alliance, enshrined in a security treaty signed by the two countries in 1951, is one which, as both Japanese and American leaders made clear during their meeting, has formed ‘the cornerstone of peace, security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond’. Its history dates to the sudden end of the second world war, after which Japan swiftly went from being one of the West’s staunchest adversaries to its most ironclad of allies.
Ishiba stressed that he did not come to ‘suck up’ to his US counterpart
Japan’s constitution, drafted by the US General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, quickly gained infamy for Article 9, which underscores how the ‘Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation’ and cannot possess offensive weapons. Debates about whether Japan will ever acquire nuclear weapons of its own have rumbled on with time. But it is no understatement to say that during the Cold War, the land of the rising sun quickly became an economic powerhouse, in no small part owing to its rapid export-orientated industrialisation and its alliance with the land of the free.
Fast forward to the present day, as the world looks to enter a second Cold War, and it is hardly a coincidence that Ishiba was the second world leader to visit Trump, after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders declared a ‘new golden age’ of bilateral relations, at a time when the US trade deficit with Japan amounts to $68 million (£55 million). Still, for a transactionally-minded president, it was no surprise that Trump refused to rule out the possible imposition of his trademark tariffs against Tokyo. Yet, economic security is only one of the many concerns that both leaders have.
Ishiba stressed that he did not come to ‘suck up’ to his US counterpart, whom he deemed to be ‘very sincere’. The fact that the two statesmen recognised the need to engage in ‘continuous cooperation’ amidst an increasingly complex regional and global security environment only highlights the reality of the challenges that lie ahead for them.
One such challenge is North Korea. The hermit kingdom has shown no intention of abandoning its ‘treasured sword’ of nuclear weapons, irrespective of whether its leader Kim Jong Un meets the ‘dotard’ (as he infamously called Trump in 2017) again. Ishiba and Trump ‘reaffirmed their resolute commitment to [North Korea’s] complete denuclearisation’.
The fact that hours after the two leaders met, North Korean state media declared that its nuclear weapons were not a ‘bargaining chip’ is a likely omen of how Pyongyang will approach these two new leaders. North Korea is a clear concern for Japan, particularly given how its missiles frequently land in waters within – or just outside of – Japan’s exclusive economic zone. What is more, with the North Korean regime rebuffing calls for dialogue made by the previous administration of Fumio Kishida, Ishiba will likely continue to seek a resolution to the ongoing ‘abduction issue’ – a reference to the North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, which has long plagued relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang.
Another challenge, of course, is the growing economic and political coercion of China. Unlike during the first Cold War, there is now great economic interdependence between the West and Beijing. China remains Japan and South Korea’s top trading partner and will now be even more eager to play the economic card to see cleavages form within Washington’s bilateral alliances with Tokyo and Seoul. Following Trump’s recent decision to impose a 10 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, Beijing retaliated by implementing tariffs of its own on crude oil, liquefied natural gas products, and agricultural machinery imported from the US.
As Japan strives to bolster its bilateral relationship with the United States and sustain momentum in improving its historically frosty relationship with South Korea, domestic politics should not become a hindrance to these foreign policy goals. This, however, is easier said than done. It is not just the presidency of Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea which continues to be mired in controversy. In Tokyo, for the first time since 2009, the ruling Liberal Democratic party has fallen short of a majority. Ishiba – who called a snap general election only one month after he took office in October 2024 – now commands a minority coalition government. Yet, the fact he has surrounded himself with experienced officials who have served in the Ministry of Defence – and has himself previously served as the country’s defence minister – may highlight his commitment towards strengthening Japan’s security cooperation.
At a time of heightened threats in East Asia, Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul must work together and consult their partners abroad. For instance, in 2022, the United Kingdom joined Italy and Japan in announcing the Global Combat Air Programme, which seeks to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet. Instead of opening talks on slavery reparations, as seems to be the priority of Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, we in Britain must not lose sight of the real and important global security challenges. If doing so involves a round of golf with the leader of the global hegemon, then so be it. It may even lead to some productive exchanges at the 19th hole, even if, in true Trumpian logic, the President will not be the one buying the first round of soft drinks.
Why does Labour loathe ordinary people?
The jaw-dropping contempt dripping from the reply suggested by Labour’s sacked health minister Andrew Gwynne to a 72-year-old lady in Manchester who had complained about her bin collections may seem shocking but is scarcely surprising. In a WhatsApp chat with Labour councillors, Gwynne proposed to respond with: ‘Dear resident, F*** your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ This is entirely symptomatic of the way that ‘the people’s party’ now regard those who elect them.
The ‘let them eat cake’ attitude by Labour’s finest towards ordinary voters first came to widespread public attention during the 2010 general election. It was then that Gordon Brown had his notorious encounter with another disgruntled northern pensioner who had dared to raise her concerns about immigration with the prime minister. Forgetting that the microphone in his lapel was still live, Brown branded the woman a ‘bigot’ – a publicly broadcast insult that may have cost him the election.
There has been a huge sea change in Labour’s relationship with the ordinary working class
Brown’s proudest boast was that Labour looked after the welfare of the elderly, the poor and the forgotten. The phrase ‘winter fuel payment’ was always on his lips, though he has been noticeably quiet about it since his current successors scrapped it last year. This has led to the suspicion that modern Labour puts the interests of illegal immigrants ahead of those of disadvantaged indigenous Britons.
The enormous gulf that has opened between Labour politicians and their natural supporters was thoroughly exposed in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, when the largely working-class people who had chosen to vote Leave were branded as ‘Gammons’ and ‘thick’ by those who disagreed with them. The Labour grandee Emily Thornberry’s tweeted sneer at a white van man’s patriotism for displaying English St George’s flags during a by-election in Rochester in 2014 forced her resignation from the shadow cabinet – a setback from which her career has never really recovered.
There has been a huge sea change in Labour’s relationship with the ordinary working class, who first brought it into being 125 years ago as the political arm of the trade union movement. Labour at the dawn of the 20th century was obviously and specifically the voice of the teeming masses in the industrial cities – particularly in the north, midlands, Wales and Scotland – who toiled for their daily bread in harsh and unforgiving conditions. Improving their lot and securing a fair deal for such folk was the purpose for which the Labour party was founded.
But there were always two strands in the Labour movement: working-class trade unionists whose primary goal was to better the state of the class from which they came; and middle-class intellectuals like the Fabian Society, with a theoretical passion for remaking society in a Marxist mould. Though the rank and file of the party – and most of its MPs – were unashamed, horny-handed sons of toil, many of its leaders – such as Hugh Dalton, Harold Laski, and Stafford Cripps – were desiccated theorists only acquainted with working-class reality at a safe distance.
But by the end of the century and the birth of New Labour, the form and composition of the party had been turned inside out. Blue-collar trade unionists had diminished to a vanishing point, and typical New Labour activists and MPs were college-educated public service employees, teachers, lawyers, and journalists with somewhat detached and superior attitudes to the white urban proletariat. The recent death of John Prescott perfectly symbolised the demise of Old Labour and the triumph of the New.
Labour’s founding fathers were, on the whole, decent and patriotic. In fact, Keir Hardie – after whom Sir Keir Starmer’s parents named their son – had distinctly Farageian views when it came to the influx of immigrants, whom he saw as threatening the jobs of British workers. It is a supreme irony that the party he founded now despises the ordinary people of this country that it is supposed to represent.
Labour is doomed under Keir Starmer
Voters simply haven’t taken to the party leader and that’s becoming impossible to ignore. Presenting the public at the next election with a figure they don’t like, rate or agree with would be madness. So at some stage a new leader will have to be installed.
There are certainly some mutterings to this effect in Tory circles, about Kemi Badenoch. But the die is not cast on that. Instead, we must look across the aisle to find the leader who has reached the point of no return.
Cold, aloof, po-faced and priggish, the PM has set about alienating vast swathes of the electorate at breakneck pace
Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive given that Keir Starmer sits at the head of an army of more than 400 Labour MPs? Yet everything about him is a disaster for their prospects of getting re-elected. Cold, aloof, po-faced and priggish, the Prime Minister has set about alienating vast swathes of the electorate at breakneck pace.
His policy agenda is a voter-repellent disaster: from crass economic mismanagement to the hijacking of school standards, prohibitively expensive energy zealotry to unilateral legislative disarmament in the face of illegal migration.
Then there is the grubby surrender of the Chagos Islands at the behest of a conclave of international lawyers seeking to act ultra vires: the most disgustingly anti-patriotic policy advanced by any British government in living memory. And shot through with a deadly symbolism about the values of the man who thinks it the right thing to do.
The polling tells the story of Starmer’s seven-month car crash more dispassionately. Not just a miserable election day vote share of 34 per cent having slumped to an average 25 per cent in his “honeymoon” debut year, but disastrous ratings on key issues too.
YouGov finds that the share of the electorate thinking Labour is the best party on the economy has fallen from 29 per cent at the end of July, to 18 per cent now. On health policy, the slide has been from 41 per cent to 26 per cent in the same period. On immigration and asylum from 26 per cent to 17 per cent. On law and order from 28 per cent to 19 per cent.
Then there is Starmer’s personal polling. He was never popular. YouGov had him on -7 per cent back in August, based on subtracting those thinking he was doing a bad job from those saying a good job. Now that score is -40.
The pollster Ipsos UK asks a key underlying question of voters every now and again: is Britain heading in the right or wrong direction? Back in August, 52 per cent said wrong. Now it is a crushing 62 per cent, compared to just 16 per cent saying right. Ipsos also finds Starmer in freefall on the question of whether he has a plan to make the country a better place. Just 27 per cent say he does, compared to 50 per cent last July.
Incumbent prime ministers almost never recover from scores like these without a remarkable series of victories and vindications (think Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1983). Where is Starmer’s Falklands or economic renaissance? Perhaps in the hostelries of Hampstead they view the Chagos surrender as a proud moment in the rise of the “Global South”. But such opinions don’t travel well to other parts of Britain.
Even in the absence of an alternative Labour figure with obviously much broader electoral appeal, I have become convinced that Starmer will not be permitted to lead his party into the next election. Why so?
Take a look at the overall pattern of public opinion. The Spectator’s poll tracker tells us Reform and Labour are locked together on 25 per cent, with the Tories averaging 22 per cent. So long as the split on the right remains unresolved and bitter, there is the prospect that Labour could win another majority on an even lower vote share than it achieved in July. Perhaps 30 per cent would be sufficient.
So Labour would not need a Blair manque with unrealistic aspirations of hitting 40 per cent – sorry Wes Streeting – just someone with a personality and kerb appeal to the various blocks which make up the core vote: public sector workers, retired public sector workers, trade unionists, Muslim voters, identity politics factions of the alphabet soup variety and Guardian-reading urban women.
Were I a betting man, I’d be putting my tenner on deputy prime minister Angela Rayner stepping into those little shoes of Starmer’s well before the next election hoves into view.
I’m sick of fare dodgers on the Tube
Go to any tube station at rush hour in London. Literally any. Then wait by the barriers and watch. Within 60 seconds it’s likely you’ll see at least half a dozen young men (it’s almost always young men) barge their way through the barriers without a care in the world. No one is shocked anymore because it happens with such depressing regularity. Paying commuters stay silent – as do the hapless high-viz clad Transport for London staff watching on. I’ve frequently seen fare-dodgers mockingly wave at TfL staff, safe in the knowledge they are powerless to stop them.
As a daily commuter on the underground, I reckon every tenth person passing through my local tube station in Oval doesn’t bother to pay. Most just shoulder-charge through the barriers. Some athletically jump over them. Others tailgate behind us mugs who still insist on paying our own way. In a city where crime is becoming ever more flagrant (I had my phone snatched out of my hand in broad daylight just before Christmas), fare-dodging on the underground is the most barefaced lawbreaking of the lot. And yet no one, least of all Sadiq Khan, seems to care.
In December 2024, a Freedom of Information request was submitted to Transport for London. It sought data since 2010 on: the number of recorded instances of individuals pushing through barriers; the number of prosecutions of such individuals; the cost to TfL of tackling fare evasion through enforcement; and the estimated loss of revenue to TfL caused by fare evasion. All pretty reasonable questions if you ask me. And yet TfL’s response was to argue that collating such data would be too expensive, and therefore it was unable to provide the relevant information.
What was completely absent from TfL’s response was any acknowledgement that the reason the cost of collating such data is so high is because fare-dodging has been allowed to spin out of control. The last official analysis of fare evasion on London’s public transport network is from 2022/23, where it was estimated to cost the taxpayer roughly £130 million a year, and account for 3.9 per cent of all journeys on the capital’s tubes, buses and trams. Those figures seem conservative, at best. But even if you take them at face value, surely they show that a serious effort to clamp down on fare-dodging would save tens of millions at the bare minimum?
The penalty charge for fare evasion is currently £100, reduced to £50 if paid within 21 days. But the size of the penalty is almost immaterial, because almost every fare-dodger knows they’ll never have to pay it. And in the remote event they do, the cost of the fine will barely make a dent in the hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds worth of free journeys they’ll have stolen over the years. The only effective deterrent is to make the barrier jumpers realise they can’t get away with it in the first place.
Here’s an idea: let’s take a leaf out of New York’s book. The ‘broken windows theory’ was famously espoused in the 90s by police commissioner Bill Bratton and mayor Rudy Giuliani. It popularised the notion that targeting minor crimes, such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking and – yes – fare evasion, would create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness. And it worked. Both petty and serious crime fell significantly in New York as a result. As such, it’s not outlandish to suggest that a zero-tolerance approach to fare-dodging would actively help the Metropolitan Police in its efforts to tackle more serious crimes.
No one is shocked anymore because it happens with such depressing regularity
Why can’t we have two police officers stationed by the barriers at every major tube station in the capital? They could keep particular watch over the ‘wide aisle’ tube gates – designed for passengers with luggage, pushchairs or in wheelchairs – which close slowly and are often targets for tailgaters. The moment they spy someone shoulder-charging through the barriers or vaulting over the ticket gates, they can pounce. Ideally the detained fare-dodger will scream, shout and make a public spectacle of themselves – providing a much-needed morale boost for the capital’s law-abiding commuters looking on.
I am fed up with fare-dodgers on the tube. It is costing London’s taxpayers millions. It creates a culture of lawlessness that now pervades the capital. But most of all it offends the most basic British sensibility of fair play. Why should I pay £3.40 to travel from Oval to London Bridge when thousands of my fellow Londoners travel for free? If Sadiq Khan wants to end his time in City Hall with even the smallest of achievements to his name then he should get serious about fare evasion. It would stop me feeling like a mug, for starters.
The spectacular implosion of the Oscars’ first trans nominee
There are some Rude Awokening moments – when the whole damn #BeKind shebang collapses in on itself – that are so perfect, so freakishly unlikely, that they might be mistaken for a fever-dream on the part of we free thinkers. Often, because of their inherent silliness, the ‘trans community’ are involved in some way.
I’m thinking, for example, of the holier-than-thou trans-ally and persecutor of gender-realist women Damien Barr who in 2020 led a campaign to have Emma Nicholson, then honorary vice-president of the Booker Prize, removed for ‘homophobic views’. He was then revealed to have tweeted, to quote the BBC, ‘derogatory terms to refer to transsexuals on social media. In one post, the author also appeared to mock a transsexual who had attempted to take their own life’. He also gave a shout-out to a ‘nice tranny charity’ and complained that there was a ‘mad tranny going through my recycling bin.’ Barr added, for good measure, a fervent plea for ‘Lady-man truckers of the world, unite!’
Then there was Munroe Bergdorf, who accused a Twitter foe of being a ‘hairy barren lesbian’ and boasted that they wanted to ‘gay bash’ a homosexual TV star. Bergdorf was dumped by L’Oréal in 2017 for writing: ‘Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more . . . Yes ALL white people.’ Bergdorf also labelled the suffragettes as ‘white supremacists’.
Schadenfreude is a popular pleasure – pretty much the Strawberry Creme in the chocolate box of life’s minor vices – but rarely is it as lingeringly relished as when the wokescreen falls down on the secular saints of our witch-hunting age.
Sometimes the biases of the professionally perfect are far, far uglier than our own; I’m thinking in particular of the allegations against ‘Male Feminist’ Neil Gaiman, who allegedly presumed that his shining cloak of ally-hood would prevent all those extremely young girls from noticing what big teeth Grandma had. (Gaiman has denied allegations of sexual misconduct, saying he has ‘never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever’.)
And now the first ‘trans’ Oscar-nominee Karla Sofía Gascón – who stars in Emilia Pérez, which has received 13 Academy Award nominations – stands revealed as being quite the social media scamp. Gascón has been an enthusiastic poster against Islam and violent criminals who are made into martyrs (we’ve all been there) and a fan of Hitler (or maybe not) in the past.
‘They have dedicated themselves to searching, to put together all the things that I had said at a time, that I had written – most of which are false,’ Gascón complained to the Hollywood Reporter through a translator. ‘And they put them all together, and so it seems that she is a very bad person, and we remove her just when we can do the most damage – right in the [Oscars] voting period.’ In this age of greedy pronouns, it’s crafty that Gascon gets to be both ‘I’ and ‘she’ in the space of a few sentences – like being both ventriloquist and dummy.
Nevertheless, the film’s distributor Netflix appears to have decided they don’t want anything more to do with either Keith Harris or Orville the Duck. It is reportedly removing Gascon from its Oscars promotional material, refusing to cover travel expenses to events (including the imminent Oscars) and giving more prominence to the film’s actual female lead Zoe Saldana. But Gascon is not giving up their moment on the red carpet gracefully; asked if they would renounce their Oscar nomination, them huffed: ‘I cannot renounce a nomination because what I have done is a job and what is being valued is my acting work… I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed any crime nor have I harmed anyone.’ They added with a quite staggering level of self-pity: ‘I believe I have been judged, I have been convicted and sacrificed and crucified and stoned without a trial and without the option to defend myself.’ Get you, Joan of Arc! Still, now you have an inkling of how numerous women feel after being driven from their livelihoods and careers because they refused to repeat the lie that men can be women.
I’d add that the creepiest thing about this whole brouhaha is that what Gascon said about Hitler (‘simply having opinions about Jews’) seems to have upset people the least. This may be because in recent years – due to resurgent Judophobia amped up since the 2023 Islamofascist pogroms in Israel – Hitler has become a bit of a ‘hall pass’ for a lot of people on the left. We saw this demonstrated way back in 2011 when the fashion crowd rallied around John Galliano like so many mother hens protecting an errant chick when he came out with a barrage of abuse aimed at a couple in a Parisian bar, including ‘your dirty Jewish face’ and ‘people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed’ – with an ‘I love Hitler’ thrown in, just in case we hadn’t got the message. Vivienne Westwood’s comment at the time was typical, ‘He couldn’t be a sweeter person’ – let’s hope she sent him one of her famous swastika T-shirts to cheer him up. He has since made a triumphant return; the FT headline put it well – ‘The Uncancelling of John Galliano.’ I bet that wouldn’t have happened if he’d said those things about Muslims.
It’s a funny old business. You can now be ‘trans’ like Gascon and think Hitler was only having ‘an opinion’ by killing six million Jews or gay like Galliano and ‘love’ Hitler. You can be ‘left-wing’ and hate Jews, just like Hitler did, and demonstrate with placards equating the swastika with the Star of David. The hilarious parody anti-woke song ‘Everyone I Hate Is Literally Hitler’ appears now to be closer to ‘Everyone On My Side Appears To Like Hitler’.
Gareth Roberts, writing here about Keir Starmer, quoted a brilliant line by Alex Dale on X: ‘No he’s not lying, but only because he genuinely sees himself and his class as being beyond the old fashioned categories of truth and lies. He does what he wants first and then makes it true afterwards.’ This has become just as applicable to the wokers. There is no truth, just what their echo chamber mates think, which then becomes the received wisdom. When one of them goes rogue, the whole house of cards tumbles down, because there’s no actual facts at the base of the belief system. Man becomes woman, Hitler simply had opinions – they’re both equally true/untrue/your truth/my truth. So take your pick – and pay for it.
The delightful melancholy of an antiques shop
Antique shops are melancholy places. The deep leather armchairs, Anglepoise lamps and bamboo bookshelves. They ask questions: who sat, worked or read using these? Banal questions, possibly, but life is generally banal, and no less poignant for that.
It’s not an unpleasant sort of melancholia. Quite the opposite. If I had to create a word to describe the feeling, I’d say it was melanphoria: ‘a state of intense excitement arising from a feeling of deep sadness’. One feels both a nostalgia for the lives of strangers and a sense of life’s possibilities. If this is abnormal, I would ask any amateur psychiatrists to write to The Spectator offices.
I am physically unable to go into any antique shop without buying something. It is rarely a grand purchase. My Ealing flat is not filled with exquisite objets d’art, and I will never be mistaken for a latter-day Bruce Chatwin. My collecting is modest. My first search is always for good-value Folio Society volumes, first-edition Simon Raven hardbacks, or prints of old tobacco advertisements (‘Give a man a Lucky, man-size flavour… man-size satisfaction… that’s Lucky Strike’ are particular favourites).
You gain a small slice of time when you buy antique furniture or a second-hand book. Not just the object, with all those unanswered questions, but also your own memories, triggered whenever you take the antique from its place on the shelf. I look at my bookcases and can remember exactly where I was when I bought almost every book. Goodbye to All That (Dulverton, Somerset), Places Where They Sing (World’s End, Chelsea). I admit I can’t remember where I was when I finished all of the books cluttering my flat; I can confidently say that The Oxford Book of Work (Putney Bridge) can rest easy for now.
One of my favourite antiques wasn’t even purchased. It was given to me by an Aberdonian antique dealer on my first visit to the French House in Soho. A naïve and not especially flush twenty-year-old, I’d been glad of his offer to buy me a drink. A bottle of shared wine later, he gave me a recently purchased escape compass, issued to parachutists prior to D-Day to help them reach friendly lines in the event that they were unable to reach their units after landing. Fortunately, I was later able to use my new compass to direct me south to a friend in Clapham, with the Northern line taking the place of Polaris.
The antique shop that remains most vivid in my mind is in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. It had no sign – indeed, it was hardly a shop at all. More a loose collection of forgotten items, left behind by various Europeans since 1979. It was full of reminders of an England that they had brought with them and that had probably vanished while they were in Africa: heavy oak tables, the colour fading in the African heat; books by Dickens and Trollope, pages wilting in the humidity; gilt frames containing English pastoral scenes, gloriously out of place. All of this was overseen with proprietorial pride by a Ndebele woman who seemed pained by the idea of anything being bought. I settled for a battered copy of Mukiwa by Peter Godwin, and the sense of ‘Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present’.
Labour minister sacked for vile WhatsApps
Congratulations to Andrew Gwynne who wins the ministerial sack race of 2025. The Labour MP for Gorton & Denton was tonight sacked as a health minister after the Mail on Sunday revealed his vile WhatsApps. After a 72-year-old local resident got in touch with Gwynne’s constituency party to complain about her bin collection, the MP wrote a suggested response: ‘Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ Charming.
The messages were exchanged in a group called ‘Trigger Me Timbers’, which Gwynne shares with more than a dozen Labour councillors, party officials and at least one other MP, all based on the outskirts of Manchester. The MoS gained access to thousands of messages from the closed group, which was set up in 2019, and discovered a barrage of abusive texts. Among them are Gwynne saying someone ‘sounds too Jewish’ and ‘too militaristic’ apparently from their name alone, and sexist comments about Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner performing a sex act. He also mocked Diane Abbott for becoming the first black MP to do PMQs at the despatch box and called a local Labour leader ‘Colin C*mface’. Hardly a good comrade eh?
Gwynne was tonight sacked as a minister immediately after the messages emerged and has now been suspended as a Labour MP. Will a by-election shortly be in the offering?
Keir Starmer’s flimsy excuse for the Chagos deal
The government has defended its controversial decision to relinquish control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius with an excuse so far-fetched it could be mistaken for a plot from a spy novel gone wrong. According to reports in the Telegraph, Starmer’s administration claims that the deal is necessary to secure the viability of the military base on Diego Garcia, citing potential disruptions in telecommunications due to ‘legal uncertainty’ over the islands’ sovereignty. The Telegraph claimed that one of the Prime Minister’s closest friends, Philippe Sands KC, who has represented Mauritius in the dispute, was the original source of these ‘national security’ claims. The UK is reportedly trying to give away the islands to Mauritius and then lease back the joint US/UK military base at a reported cost of £9 billion over 99 years.
The flimsy pretext of ITU intervention is not just a stretch – it’s a strategic misstep when it comes to political storytelling
Starmer’s official spokesperson has said that the ‘electromagnetic spectrum’ at Diego Garcia, crucial for secure communications, might not function without this deal, suggesting that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) could impose restrictions based on international legal judgments. This argument, however, raises more eyebrows than it does valid concerns.
Let’s dissect the government’s narrative. First, the ITU, while responsible for managing global radio spectrum, does not typically wade into territorial disputes. Their role is to ensure that frequency allocations are used efficiently and without interference, not to adjudicate or act on sovereignty issues unless explicitly directed by its member states or in line with international law. The suggestion that the ITU, a UN specialised agency, would challenge or disrupt military communications due to a territorial dispute over Chagos seems not just unlikely, but a stretch of the imagination. It’s like saying the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization could decide to cut off a nation’s food supply over a border dispute.
Second, the legal judgments referred to are advisory, not binding. The idea that these could lead directly to the ITU revoking or questioning frequency allocations for a strategic military base is speculative at best. The ITU’s primary concern remains ensuring the technical coordination of spectrum use, not stepping into the geopolitical fray of sovereignty claims unless explicitly mandated by its members or international law.
Now, even if we entertain this far-fetched scenario where the ITU would challenge the UK’s or the US’s use of frequencies at Diego Garcia, let’s consider the practical implications. If the ITU were to make such a move, the reaction from the Trump administration would be swift, and no doubt severe. The notion of the ITU obstructing American military communication would be met with the kind of response that only Trump could deliver – immediate defunding or withdrawing from the ITU. When it comes to national security, no bureaucratic body would dare to play chicken with an American administration, especially one as confrontational as Trump’s in the wake of his withdrawal from the WHO, which is just up the road from ITU in Geneva. The US has left the WHO, taking with it a very large part of the entire organisation’s budget.
Starmer’s excuse for pushing through the Chagos deal smacks of desperation rather than diplomacy. It appears more like an attempt to cover up what critics might see as a backroom deal, rather than a well-considered response to legal or operational necessities.
The flimsy pretext of ITU intervention is not just a stretch – it’s a strategic misstep when it comes to political storytelling. Whether this deal was about righting historical wrongs or securing future military cooperation, the rationale provided does little to justify it beyond the realm of political expediency. If Starmer’s government truly believes this, they’ve vastly overestimated the ITU’s relevance in military affairs, and at the same time underestimated Trump and the geopolitical chess game where the US holds many of the pieces.
In the grand scheme of international politics, Starmer should be wary of using such tenuous arguments to mask what might be perceived as a less than transparent deal. The realpolitik here is clear. This isn’t about electromagnetic spectrums or ITU mandates – it’s about Starmer navigating the murky waters of international diplomacy with a narrative so flimsy that it collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
Ukraine’s security depends on Europe’s courage
If anything was going to make Donald Trump come around to supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, ‘rare earth minerals’ – an issue of increasing geopolitical importance in the global competition with China – would not have made it to the top of most lists. Yet the US president has hinted this could be the key to the continuation of US investment in the nation as Russia’s war rages on. The proposal hasn’t impressed everyone – German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called the plan to make money from the war ‘selfish’ – but President Zelensky is open to the idea.
Europe cannot afford to outsource our security to the whims of voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio
That won’t come as much of a surprise, given what Trump had threatened before he became President. Even now, the American press is reporting that Trump’s administration remains split on how to end the Russian war in Ukraine, with his top team swaying between forcing the country to capitulate to Vladimir Putin and forcing Putin to back down. If Trump did proceed with the latter option, how exactly would the West ensure that any ceasefire deal actually holds up and deters Russia from returning to Ukraine?
I’ve visited many of the places that have become familiar to us since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Kramatorsk, Aviidvka, Sloviansk and Kharkiv – just some of the towns and cities that have been on the frontline of Putin’s expansionism for more than a decade.
Each of them are testament to the uncomfortable truth that the Budapest Memorandum turned out to be nothing more than a diplomatic fig leaf that let Russia brazenly seize Crimea and commence its war in Ukraine’s East. The Minsk agreements? A shattered failure that simply allowed Putin to buy time for his full-scale invasion. Any future agreement must be different, lest Ukraine will find itself the victim of another Russian invasion after Trump has left office. Ukrainians are clear: they won’t sign up to anything that doesn’t offer them proper protection.
President Zelensky will quite understandably approach any ceasefire talks with a degree of caution, but Europeans need to approach with a totally different mindset to the bystander mentality that infects so many capitals today. This time, Europe – not America – needs to be the lead guarantor of Ukraine’s security. While support from across the Atlantic will be necessary and vital, it’s time for Europe – the UK included – to take responsibility for its own backyard.
America’s patience with Europe’s somewhat loose attitude to security is growing thin. Indeed, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, one prominent German security figure, Wolfgang Ischinger, made the incredible suggestion that China could supply peacekeeping troops in Ukraine. The historian and occasional Spectator contributor, Niall Ferguson, shot down the idea with justified incredulity, telling the audience that such a suggestion would confirm all the worst things that our American counterparts already think about Europeans.
In Washington, isolationism is now the order of the day, as the populist political theory of ‘America First’ sees a President govern by caprice, starting trade wars with friend and foe alike. Europe cannot afford to outsource our security to the whims of voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, or, indeed, to a President prone to such consequential mood swings. The old certainties are over, and Europe needs to be more assertive in taking responsibility and drawing our own red lines.
The UK and the EU have shared the burden of taking in Ukrainian refugees. Our economies have, by and large, absorbed the shocks of sanctions on Russia and huge energy disruption. The entire continent’s security is intertwined with Ukraine’s. Any meaningful solution in Ukraine requires not only the consent of Ukrainians, but a new level of courage from our politicians.
It starts by acting with urgency on two things: Ukraine’s membership in Nato and in the EU. No more vague promises, an end to talk of distant aspirations, but concrete pathways with clear timelines to be achieved in order to maintain Ukraine’s sovereignty. Anything less is an open invitation for Russia to come back for more.
Britain has shown what leadership looks like. The UK led the way in training Ukrainian forces, commencing Operation Orbital in 2015 and delivering game-changing training programmes in logistics, urban warfare, reconnaissance and much more, in order to help Ukraine’s armed forces get up to Nato standards. After 2022, Boris Johnson’s administration showed considerable urgency in getting Ukraine the weapons it needed, with former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace fighting mandarin scepticism and inertia. This is the psychology that needs to be adopted in more European capitals, but it’s also one that needs to be rediscovered in London under the new Starmer administration, which has shown less urgency than it should.
As we know from history, security guarantees are worthless if they lack teeth. Future guarantees must be comprehensive, with automatic trigger mechanisms for swift military and economic assistance should Russia breach any future ceasefire agreement during Ukraine’s path to Nato accession. No more diplomatic waffling. No more ‘serious concern’. No more hollow promises of a zeitenwende that never materialises. These should be serious multilateral treaties that are ratified by national parliaments and can withstand election cycles and domestic political shifts.
Inevitably, some will argue that Ukraine in Nato and the EU will be too much of a provocation for Putin. Ukrainians are tired of listening to this counsel of despair that will only leave them forever more vulnerable. Leaving Ukraine in a strategic grey-zone has proven to be a catastrophic failure of an experiment. It cannot go on. Some will claim it’s all too risky, too complicated and too expensive. Nonsense. What’s expensive is letting Russia believe it can redraw borders by force, showing weakness and a lack of strategic foresight.
The days of being able to over-rely on the transatlantic security umbrella were consigned to history on Trump’s re-election. The anxious zeitgeist of today is our wake-up call. Either we upgrade the European security architecture now – starting with Ukraine – and on our own terms, or we allow our hands to be forced by Moscow, Beijing or Tehran further down the line. That, I assure you, will be far more costly.
The window of opportunity won’t be open forever. Peace talks, whenever they come, will test western resolve. Repeating the past mistakes of Budapest and Minsk, and offering more vague assurances, will only leave Ukraine and all of Europe vulnerable. We need treaties with real bite, a proper pathway for Ukraine in Nato, and a psychological shift in European capitals when it comes to defence and security. History will judge us harshly if we get this wrong, and it will cost us more than just pounds, pence and euros if we do. Inaction will have a far greater cost for us all.
Trump’s ICC sanctions will test an outdated institution
Once you get beyond trade and maritime borders, you will find that much of international law is, pace Clausewitz, the continuation of policy by other means. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was continuing policy by other means when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. The two stand accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes over Operation Swords of Iron, Jerusalem’s response to the Palestinian invasion of its territory and mass murder of its citizens on 7 October 2023. Israel has protested the Court’s actions, which were prompted by chief prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, as a one-sided interference in the military actions of a sovereign democracy which is not a member of the tribunal and does not recognise its jurisdiction. (The Court is relying on its jurisdiction over Palestine, which is not a sovereign state and lacks defined international borders.)
Trump evidently sees in the targeting of Israel a trial run for the ICC to target the United States
Now Israel’s stance has received the backing of the United States. In an executive order, Donald Trump has denounced ‘illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel’ and, as punishment, has frozen the US assets of key ICC personnel and their immediate families as well as restricting their ability to acquire a visa to enter the United States.
Washington, D.C. does not recognise the Court’s authority over the US or its citizens, appreciating early on that the body, set up in 2002, could one day be used by America’s enemies to judicialise the use of force in wars or counter-terror operations overseas, undermine the president’s commander-in-chief powers, and hinder American defence and national security policy. That’s why, the same year the ICC came into existence, Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. To gauge how seriously they take these matters, note the legislation’s informal title: The Hague Invasion Act, so called because, should a single US service personnel, politician or any other ‘protected person’ be seized under the Court’s direction, the president would have the authority to invade the Netherlands to free them.
All well and good, but why would Israeli leaders be ‘protected persons’ under this Act? Because it was passed in 2002, at the outset of the global war on terror, and both the Bush administration and Congress grasped that, if the ICC couldn’t get at America directly, it could go after those allies with whom America has close cooperation in military and intelligence matters. The Act therefore extends ‘protected person’ status to political and military leaders of Nato members such as the United Kingdom and named ally states including Australia, Japan – and Israel. As such, these sanctions are a shot across the bow to the ICC: come for America’s friends, and we’ll come for you.
While the executive order has caused conniptions at the UN and across Europe, with Trump accused of undermining global conflict norms, the directive reaffirms the United States’ commitment ‘to accountability and to the peaceful cultivation of international order’. However, it insists that the Court ‘respect the decisions of the United States and other countries not to subject their personnel to the ICC’s jurisdiction, consistent with their respective sovereign prerogatives’. It is an open question whether the upholding of international order and norms, including against humanitarian outrages, is well served by policing the military decisions of democracies against conventions agreed before the advent of 21st century warfare, with its asymmetric and rapidly evolving terms of conflict. Gaza embodies the problem better than most theatres, with its combatant journalists, terror infrastructure underneath UN agency buildings, politicised and partisan NGOs, and the deliberate situating of combatants at medical facilities. None of this means Israel should exercise its military power without restraint. All states should deploy force within parameters set by their own laws, ethics and customs. In the case of Israel, all three place great value on humanitarian considerations.
American and European liberals aren’t the only dissenters from this executive order. There is a segment of Trump’s coalition – let’s call them paleonationalists – who strongly dislike America’s close ties with Israel. They object to military aid to the Jewish state, even though most of it ends up back in the US economy through Israeli defence procurement, and regard any alliance as contrary to a non-interventionist foreign policy. In some, this is nothing more than consistency of principle, applying their nationalist philosophy to Israel in the same way as they do other foreign nations. In others, it is a matter of specificity rather than consistency. They are not content with America First unless it also means Israel Last. Like the paleoconservatism of old, paleonationalism harbours a certain strain that pronounces ‘Israel’ to rhyme with ‘newish’.
This strain will disapprove of Trump’s executive order as a betrayal of America First, as though anyone should be surprised that a baby boomer New York Democrat would feel an affinity towards Israel. But the terms of his order make clear that there is more than philosemitic sentimentality at work. Trump recognises that the United States is in the same position as Israel, as a country which is not party to the Rome Statute, not a member of the Court, and has never recognised its jurisdiction. He describes the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as setting ‘a dangerous precedent’ that ‘threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States’. Trump evidently sees in the targeting of Israel a trial run for the ICC to target the United States. In that sense, his directive might prove to be a far-sighted application of America First principles.
It is possible to be a liberal internationalist, concerned with the humanitarian dimension of conflict, and to welcome Donald Trump’s intervention. Some things are right even if the Orange Boogeyman does them, and this is one of them. If international humanitarian law is to survive in its current form, and that is by no means a given, it needs instruments that better reflect the nature of contemporary conflict, institutions which can apply them dispassionately, and the acquiescence of sovereign states to their jurisdiction. That might prove unachievable, but as Trump’s order shows, there are significant limits to what can be achieved under the current arrangements.
Keir Starmer is caught in a Trump trap
The mood of Keir Starmer’s foreign policy advisers was funereal as they contemplated the return of Donald Trump. The weeks since Trump’s inauguration have shown that the government doesn’t know what to do with an American president who is hostile, capricious and, let’s face it, more than a little mad, except humour him as one might humour a screaming toddler.
Labour cannot attack Farage’s Trump worship for fear of alienating Washington
Who knows? Maybe that will work. Maybe all Starmer needs to do is flatter Trump, toss in a visit to Buckingham Palace and a banquet with the King, and the rheumy Eye of Sauron will move away from Britain and on to its next target. For, as things stand, there is no diplomatic strategy beyond hoping for the best.
The journalist’s cliché about living in “unprecedented” times is accurate for once. Since the Suez crisis of 1956, no UK government has seriously contemplated how it would manage in the world without the American alliance. Even the Suez crisis – when president Eisenhower turned on the UK, France and Israel for launching a war against Egypt – doesn’t provide a real precedent.
That crisis was over in months. The French were disgusted with America’s perceived betrayal and resolved to break with the US. The British reaction was the exact opposite. The UK vowed to stick with the American alliance come what may, and never again find itself in conflict with the US.
Eisenhower welcomed Britain back. Officials in his administration didn’t abuse Harold Macmillan as Elon Musk, Trump’s close ally, has already insulted Keir Starmer. Eisenhower didn’t threaten the territory of US allies, as Trump has threatened Canada and Denmark. A hostile US appeared to be an unimaginable prospect.
Now the unimaginable is all-too conceivable. France developed an independent nuclear deterrent after Suez. But our Trident programme cannot be described as independent of US control when the maintenance, design, and testing of the UK’s submarines depend on Washington, and the nuclear missiles aboard them are leased. Our intelligence services would be poor things without US support.
Given this brute reality, all the Labour government can do therefore is grovel before a Trump administration it would otherwise condemn as “far right”.
Strangely, given their political differences, Starmer risks falling into the same trap as Nigel Farage, who seems incapable of grasping that the UK is not the US.
Reform’s high opinion ratings and the euphoria on the radical right at Trump’s victory are temporarily masking the recklessness of Farage’s foreign alliances.
Trump is an American nationalist who puts America first, not Britain. Whether Trump truly defends American interests is a question for another day. But it is clear that Farage, and much of the Tory right, are failing to defend Britain. They claim to be patriots and display nothing but scorn for the supposedly globalist liberal-left. Yet they are leaving themselves wide open to the charge that they are acting as Trump’s poodles. Farage and his allies are openly infatuated with the Trump personality cult.
‘We are beginning to see a wave that is crossing the Atlantic from the east coast of America,’ Farage cried at a rally in Essex on Saturday. Donald Trump had ‘got off to the most amazing start…even people who don’t like him say “You know what, he gets things done”.’
Large sections of the British public will soon think it shameful for a British political leader to abase himself before a foreign leader.
You might think that Labour would be helping highlight Farage’s weaknesses. Despite the threat that Reform poses to Labour MPs, however, Labour cannot attack Farage’s Trump worship for fear of alienating Washington. The need to protect what’s left of the ‘special relationship’ comes before all else.
But Labour’s difficulties do not mean that others will bite their tongues. Do not forget how Trump alienates people across the UK: from the woke left, through traditional conservatives, to everyone with enough common decency to oppose yobs, bullies, loudmouths, and grifters.
The Lib Dems, Greens, and nationalists can all be openly anti-Trump parties and seek to peel away Labour voters by exploiting the government’s weakness.
Labour’s difficulties do not mean that others will bite their tongues
Earlier this week, the Lib Dems offered a preview of future politics. Trump was toying with the idea of annexing Canada – and illustrating as he did the collapse of American politics into banana republic decadence.
“What I’d like to see – Canada become our 51st state,” he said, when asked what concessions Canada could offer to stave off US tariffs.
Canada is a member of the Commonwealth and Charles III is its king. Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, asked Starmer: Why weren’t we supporting our ally when it was under attack from the loutish leader of a hostile foreign power?
“Trump’s tariffs on our Commonwealth partner are a shocking way to treat a country that stood alongside both the US and the UK during the Second World War,” Davey said as he appealed to a patriotism Nigel Farage seems unable to comprehend.
Davey wanted Starmer to organise a joint Commonwealth response. Starmer would do nothing of the sort, of course, for fear of the consequences. But Davey’s intervention showed how dangerous being seen as an American poodle could soon become in British politics.
MAGA is motivated by a deep distrust of America’s allies rather than of America’s enemies. In Trump’s mind we have ripped America off and taken its friendship for granted. In these circumstances, nothing can be ruled out.
Davey made an excellent point when he continued: “The British government can’t just sit back and hope Trump won’t hit us with tariffs directly. He’s proven time and again how unpredictable he is.”
If Trump were to come for us, it’s possible to see the British following the French example and developing a patriotism based on opposition to America – and leaving Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer in the dust.
Kemi Badenoch has a secret weapon in the fight against Nigel Farage
Things are currently looking choppy for Kemi Badenoch. Polls last weekend were bad enough, seven of them showing Reform leading the Conservatives by a point. But now it seems this gap may have widened dramatically. A poll on Thursday showed Reform pushing the Tories in to third place, with Farage’s party on 25 per cent and the Conservatives trailing on 22 per cent.
It’s when Kemi speaks from her own experience that a gap between the Conservatives and Reform seems to open up
‘The message that’s coming from this is very, very clear,’ Farage has crowed. ‘Not only do we have momentum but if you want to beat Labour, if you want to get them out at the next general election, don’t waste your vote with the Conservatives.’
Kemi herself has decided, publicly at least, to play it cool, recently shrugging off Reform’s growing popularity: ‘What we’re seeing with those numbers, a lot of people still don’t know who I am. They’ve known Nigel Farage for twenty years.’ As for Farage’s stated ideas on tackling immigration, she’s dismissed these (perhaps accurately) as ‘just wishes…His diagnosis of things is not wrong, but he has never tried to fix things so he doesn’t understand the system.’
When pushed on the possibility of merging with Reform, she says it’s absurd to consider dealing with a group of people ‘who have said what they wanted to do is destroy the Conservatives… They’re not interested in solving problems. It’s all about taking us down.’
Do Reform have a good chance of achieving this? And are pundits correct to see the writing on the wall for Kemi and her party? Right now, it certainly looks like it. But given that four years is an eternity in politics, let us, just for the sake of it, imagine a different outcome.
It’s 2029, and after a full term of Trump2 in the White House, with all its attendant sturm und drang, the UK is wearying of more florid styles of right-wing leadership. Kemi, a little late to the shindig, has nonetheless made a fair entrance and is finally having an impact on the public. Reform, by pitching themselves as a populist (and popular) movement well to the right of the Conservatives, have freed up swathes of those who once proudly declared they’d ‘never kiss a Tory’ to vote for a party that now seems emollient by comparison.
Yet what would they actually be voting for? Badenoch has said this week that under a Conservative government migrants on work visas but claiming benefits will be banned from settling indefinitely in the UK. But other policy announcements have been deliberately slow in coming.
Instead, we need to look at what she herself has said. We know she describes herself as ‘an economic liberal who believes in a small, fiscally prudent state,’ and that she values ‘family… freedom… equality under the law… citizenship, real citizenship, not just to have a passport.’ Yet these are blandishments which surely no free-market Conservative or Faragist would dispute. What does Badenoch, in her own words, actually believe?
She has promised to be radical, and to ‘rewire, reboot and reprogramme’ the state. She intends to shift workers away from a swelling bureaucracy and into more ‘productive areas’ – bad news, in other words, for the civil service and much of the public sector. ‘We keep creating more bureaucracy, more regulation, and yet the public services are not improving.’ Government, whether under the Conservatives or Labour, is ‘doing too much, and it’s doing it badly… People want the government to fix everything. They want the government to solve everything. And if you ever sound hesitant, you are made out to be a cruel, unfeeling person.’
She also recognises the need for slow, methodical analysis before plans get made: ‘If you get the diagnosis wrong, the treatment won’t work.’ But if Reform continues to trounce the Conservatives in the polls, with Badenoch herself seen as the main obstacle to any merger, will she get the chance to carry out either?
We know she believes in free speech, much of it for practical purposes: ‘We need to go back to a point where people can see what is real and what is not real and that requires a lot more free speech and a lot more proper conversations.’
She also recognises that British tolerance can be its own undoing: ‘How do we stop people from taking advantage of the freedoms we have, to use them to try and destroy us?’ On immigration, her view is that the country needs ‘high-skilled immigration’ and to ‘get rid of the low-skilled immigration… Our country is our home; it is not a hotel….If people arriving don’t want to integrate into British culture, they shouldn’t be here.’ She clearly feels multiculturalism is, as it stands, an abject flop: ‘We are getting people having separate and insular communities… We have to make sure we have a dominant culture in our country…’
‘Numbers matter,’ she’s conceded, but ‘culture matters even more;’ it’s vital that ‘people who come to the country are compatible with those beliefs’ or ‘at the very least, do not damage’ them. You sense at times that Badenoch wants to alter the entire mood-music of Britain, to change the way it sees itself and where it draws the line. Many will wish her luck here, but the test will be her policies for bringing such things about, lest they too turn into ‘just wishes.’ There is still, some would say, not enough clear blue water here between her party and Farage’s.
Badenoch’s kind of specificity is something neither Labour nor Reform are currently offering
Yet it’s when Kemi speaks from her own experience that a gap between the Conservatives and Reform seems to open up, and you get a more thoughtful picture of race and immigration. When it comes to the first, Badenoch, largely as a result of her own experience, loathes blanket categories and likes to be exact. As she has pointed out, ‘I grew up in a very multicultural country. But everyone looked the same.’
She deplores the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ she found at Phoenix College, South London, where she did her A-levels, and where she says she was gently deterred from attempting to become a doctor: ‘They couldn’t tell the difference – and this is where judging by skin colour is a terrible thing – between someone who had perhaps grown up in a very disadvantaged family and had serious challenges, and someone from a stable family who had loads of opportunities.’
She dislikes the left-wing thinking which says (in her own words again) ‘‘You’re a black woman, you should be going to the black woman’s room and doing black women’s groups’ and which dismisses those who choose not to as ‘coconuts’ or in her particular case as the ‘black face of white supremacy.’ This attitude she’s condemned as ‘destroying the identities of hundreds of millions of people, who have different ethnicities – they’re all black – different cultures, different languages, and just throwing all of that away to create this really bland stereotype.’
The same goes, she says, for Islam and Islamic countries,’ of which ‘there are so many different groups’, adding at another moment that the failure to distinguish between ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamism’ is hurting ‘many Muslims.’
She’s been criticised for applying this thinking to Pakistani grooming gangs, but has defended it robustly: ‘They did come from a particular place where they were mostly peasant farmers, they were insular, even from the rest of Pakistan, they’re not like the people in Lahore… a lot of innocent people who happen to share characteristics are being blamed, so let’s be specific.” Nor is this attitude confined to race. She is just as wary of generalisations about big business, or those who dismiss landlords as mere ‘exploiters’ of their tenants. Her instinctive dislike of viewing any so-called group en bloc seems to apply across the board.
Let us leave aside, for a moment, the elephant in the room: that a split and fractious right-wing vote at the next election will be a gift to Keir Starmer and his party, however disillusioned the electorate may be. The fact is, Badenoch’s kind of specificity is something neither Labour nor Reform are currently offering. Nuance doesn’t always play well with voters – particularly in an age of spin and soundbites. But it may be what the world is crying out for in 2029, after four years of Donald Trump in office and the ongoing circus – sometimes engaging, sometimes exhausting – of Farage and his ambitions. When Kemi Badenoch comes to outlining the clear differences between her Conservatives – ‘under new management’ – and the Reform Party, here would not be a bad place to start.
Labour dodges scrutiny on efficiency savings
Well, well, well. Rachel Reeves has spent much of her seven months in power banging on about budget blackholes and spending cuts, vowing to use the Treasury’s ongoing spending review to find more ways to cut costs. The Chancellor has asked government departments to find 5 per cent ‘efficiency savings’ to help set their budgets over the next few years. But when it comes to the specifics, the Labour lot have been rather, um, light on the detail.
Conservative MPs John Glen and Mike Wood submitted written questions to the government, quizzing Sir Keir Starmer’s army about exactly what non-essential spending cuts had been made by departments, with Wood requesting a breakdown of the estimated savings made from cancelled comms campaigns. Yet despite all the Chancellor’s big talk about balancing the books, Labour has refused to publish efficiency savings details. How very curious.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones told Glen that 39 comms campaigns had been cancelled, while 46 continue with reduced budgets and another 46 aiming to reduce their spending costs by 25 per cent. But when Woods requested information about individual costs, the Cabinet Office clammed up. ‘The combined savings from these measures total £85 million in 2024-25 and up to £96 million in 2025-26,’ Labour’s Georgia Gould responded, adding: ‘There are currently no plans to publish this list in detail.’ So much for transparency, eh? It certainly raises questions about the credibility of all these savings claims in the first place…
Russia’s quest to woo Africa is paying off
The West may like to convince itself that it is, in the words of one American diplomat, ‘strangling the Russian foreign ministry’, but it ought to look south for a rather different perspective. On Tuesday, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was in expansive mood as he announced the formation of a brand-new Department of Partnership with Africa.
Recognising that for years Moscow had neglected Africa, Lavrov blamed in part the bankruptcy of the late USSR and Russia in the 1990s, when embassies had to be shut down and sold off. I remember one polyglot diplomat who, while serving in Nigeria, had taken to spending his mornings giving English, French and Russian classes to make ends meet because his salary was so often in arrears. However, he also blamed the ‘strategic mistake’ of focusing too much on relations with the West and unrealistic expectations of cooperation. In this, he has a point. In the 1990s, for sure, Boris Yeltsin’s government was desperate to join what seemed like the camp of the Cold War victors.
Moscow is not offering aid, but it has guns, oil and a tempting anti-Western narrative
Yet even as Vladimir Putin charted an increasingly assertive and confrontational policy towards the West, for years Moscow still saw little reason to concern itself with Africa. Even when it held its first Russia-Africa Summit in 2019, there was no real strategy there, but rather a desperate search for potential political and business opportunities and a desire to troll the West. From this, though, something that begins to look like a strategy has emerged, built on three pillars.
Most notorious are the mercenaries. Despite the pyrotechnic end of its rebellious founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner corps still survives in Mali and the Central African Republic. Most of its forces, though, have been rolled into the new Africa Corps, under tighter government control. Unlike Wagner, the Africa Corps is less focused on actual fighting and more on conventional security assistance missions, training local troops and providing security in countries such as Libya, Niger and Burkina Faso. Despite some setbacks, they have enough customers who value their services, and although losing the opportunity to stage supply flights through the Hmeimym airbase in Syria would pose logistical problems for them, they are not going anywhere.
There is also an understated but significant soft power angle. Under the umbrella of the African Initiative, which describes itself as a ‘Russian news agency about events on the African continent’, Moscow is building a growing network of propaganda sites, local affiliates and conventional outreach opportunities. It may not be that many Africans necessarily see Russia as a promised land – though there are many doctors, engineers and soldiers who at some point have been trained there – but instead there is a surprising receptivity to a pernicious narrative that frames Russia’s aggression in Ukraine as an anti-colonial war: that Ukraine is simply the proxy of a hegemonic West trying to force Moscow into line. It is nonsense, but appealing nonsense in countries whose experience of colonialism was at the hands of the British, French, Belgians, Italians or Germans.
Indeed, the global sanctions regime has given this a new spin, as African countries are now being expected to turn their backs on Russian business for fear of primarily US secondary sanctions. One West African diplomat angrily described this as ‘financial imperialism’ – and it is difficult to disagree. After all, the third pillar of Moscow’s campaign is economic, especially the supply of discounted Russian oil. In the first year of the war alone, sales to Africa leapt fourteen-fold, and despite all efforts to clamp down on the ‘shadow fleet’ tankers and the financial loopholes that allow this trade to continue, the market finds a way.
In many ways, one has to acknowledge that Russia is simply the beneficiary of the retreat from Africa of the West, especially France. Moscow is not offering aid, but it has guns, oil and a tempting anti-Western narrative – and all this is bearing fruit. Last year, Russian embassies were opened in Burkina Faso and Equatorial Guinea, and new missions in Niger and Sierra Leone are expected to start working in 2025, with ambitious plans also in South Sudan, Gambia, Liberia, the Union of Comoros and Togo. The director of the new partnership department, Tatyana Dovgalenko, clearly has been given unprecedented resources and political priority.
But why? ‘We are convinced that Africa is our natural ally,’ claims Lavrov, but to what end? In part, it is to build political support: an impoverished African nation, after all, has the same single vote in the UN General Assembly as the US or Britain. The wider campaign is also to ensure that Moscow continues to have customers for its oil today and maybe its weapons again tomorrow, creating connections that the West will have trouble prising apart without being willing to provide more aid and fewer patronising homilies. It is also world-class trolling, especially in Paris, where news of Russian advances in Africa seem to be taken as seriously as battlefield successes in Ukraine.
Yet as much as anything else, it is also performative, reinforcing the idea that a resurgent Russia is a global power again, even if on the cheap. When not castigating the West for its myriad sins, Lavrov’s role now seems to be to provide what seeming successes he can for the Kremlin and its propaganda machine. At present, Africa is proving fruitful ground.
Why Beckham’s wait for a knighthood goes on
The newspapers’ front page photograph of David and Victoria Beckham entering Buckingham Palace’s State Dining Room was a publicity triumph for England’s global icon. Beaming with pride, Posh – wearing one of her own designs – and Beckham in a specially tailored white tie and tails – had worked hard to secure the invitation last December to King Charles’s dinner in honour of the ruler of Qatar.
Alex Ferguson had spotted Beckham’s weaknesses
As the photographs revealed the King’s surprise guests, it was reported that the monarch was certain to propose a knighthood for Beckham. The tabloids’ headlines “Make it ‘Sir Becks” relaunched the bandwagon. Surely, no one could deny that Goldenballs, England’s glorious footballer, dedicated ambassador for charities and loyal monarchist, deserved that honour?
Actually, they could – and they did in 2011, when Beckham’s nomination for a knighthood was outrightly rejected by the honours committee. Despite the certainty of his sponsor Sebastian Coe, being an iconic brand and passionate Englishman did not qualify Beckham for a knighthood. ‘You’ve done everything that’s been asked of you,’ Coe had told Beckham after helping to secure the Olympics for London. To underline his exceptional qualifications, Beckham had visited British troops in Afghanistan, supported charities and signed football shirts for young cancer sufferers.
For the honours’ committee, however, Beckham’s dedication to charity was less important than the veto signalled by the Inland Revenue, HMRC.
The public would subsequently discover that Beckham had joined a supposedly legal tax avoidance scheme organised by Ingenious Films. The average saving for each of the 697 members of the scheme in the first year had been about £200,000. In HMRC’s opinion, Ingenious’s investors were involved in ‘aggressive tax avoidance’ which was in retrospect outlawed. Beckham’s partnership in Ingenious Media’s tax structures classified him as a tax dodger.
But unknown to the public, Beckham’s use of the Ingenious tax avoidance scheme was, as the honours’ committee discovered, just the tip of the iceberg.
To research Beckham’s finances for my book The House of Beckham, I employed a hugely experienced forensic accountant. During nearly 300 hours work, he combed through the last 21 years of Beckham’s bewilderingly complicated corporate structure for all his operations.
In his 48-year-career, the accountant reported, he had never examined any accounts as brazenly dedicated to confuse HMRC, albeit legally. Beckham’s football and branding income was channelled through a succession of ever-changing companies. Every year’s accounts revealed inter-company trading of loans, cash, share issues and payments. Those internal transactions left threads that were difficult even for specialists to follow, not least because the various companies’ financial years ended at different dates.
Beckham’s tax advisers completed a series of complicated manoeuvres to restructure his business, casting another legal smokescreen over his finances. Not least when he played football in Spain, America, Italy and France and became a non-dom, not liable to pay British taxes on foreign earnings.
Over the years, his companies incurred fines for late submission of the statutory returns and were even threatened by the regulator at Companies House with being struck off or closed down unless required paperwork was filed. Nearly every year his accountants corrected the previous year’s accounts.
As England’s captain, Beckham was uncommunicative, isolated and ungenerous
Naturally, before publishing the book, I put all those discoveries and conclusions to Beckham’s representatives. None of them were rejected, though a representative for Beckham said that Beckham had paid all the required taxes in the relevant jurisdictions and that his tax practices were lawful. The spokesman added the complexity in the accounts were all standard accounting practice, and the adjustments needed were due to late invoices.
Beckham’s controversial tax affairs were certainly sufficient to bar him from a knighthood. But surely that was outweighed by being a football genius and England’s outstanding captain who scored many phenomenal goals not least against Greece in 2001?
Scoring outstanding goals has never justified a knighthood. Since 1949, only a handful of English players have received the honour, including Bobby Charlton, Bobby Robson and Stanley Matthews. Compared to those giants, Beckham’s football record was not as outstanding as many believe.
In 2001, Beckham was a stunningly handsome, magical player, adored across the world. But Manchester United’s manager, Alex Ferguson had spotted his weaknesses. Focused on selling his brand and enjoying his hectic social life, his football skills were declining. Ferguson was looking for a buyer.
There were many potential suitors. His value to England’s Football Association and subsequently Real Madrid and LA Galaxy was his magnetic appeal to fans.
Not only did he fill stadiums in expectation of a brilliant goal, but he sold thousands of shirts. Made for a pittance, they sold for up to £80 each. The profits for the clubs of Beckham’s numbered shirt were huge. But, they discovered, his performance on the pitch, was patchy at best, and often abysmal.
As England’s captain, Beckham was uncommunicative, isolated and ungenerous. Over six years, Beckham led England to humiliating defeats. In September 2005, playing Northern Ireland, who ranked 116 in the world, England were defeated 1-0, for the first time since 1972. Before the match, Beckham reportedly booked a manicure. During the match, his desultory shots all missed the target, and, as captain, he failed to rally the team.
Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail wrote for the majority after the 2006 World Cup: ‘The most disgracefully unprepared team in England’s World Cup history was captained by a narcissist so obsessed with himself that when the inevitable humiliation came he cried for himself, not his country.’
The statistics exposed Beckham’s shortcomings. He scored only 17 goals for England in 115 internationals, despite taking most of the free kicks and penalties. In his career, he scored 144 goals which included 65 from direct free kicks. His midfielder contemporary Frank Lampard would score during his career 29 goals for England and 274 club goals – and rarely took the free kicks.
But Beckham, who turns 50 in May, did score an English record for the most number of yellow cards: no fewer than 149, and eight red cards. That delinquency mirrored the same crude anger he expressed in his private communication when he was refused a knighthood. The honours committee, Beckham emailed to his publicity chief in 2013, were ‘unappreciative’ and ‘a bunch of cunts’. The public and private Beckham are different characters. Nothing has changed to reconsider a knighthood now.
Starmer will need a miracle to boost his ‘AI growth zones’
The government has unveiled its new ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’ – a ten-syllable, fifty-point proposal to grow the UK’s AI industry. Among the only memorable points of the fifty unveiled last month was the creation of ‘AI growth zones’, clusters of AI expertise dotted around the country. The only growth zone named in the plan was Culham, a sleepy village in Oxfordshire. I went to pay it a visit.
Culham and its nearby sister village Harwell were among the top sites in the world for scientific research in the mid-20th century and were run by what’s now called the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which conducts nuclear experiments. Rumour has it, the area was of such strategic significance the government redirected production at the steelworks responsible for repairing bomb-damaged Westminster to support the boffins in Oxfordshire.
The government has had to pin its hopes for AI growth on planning decisions made half a century ago
The old visitors’ book I was shown at Culham is testament to this. In it I found the signature from one W. Churchill, dated 1954. Overleaf, Eisenhower scribbles his name down, then Khrushchev, then Queen Elizabeth, and on it went: a veritable who’s who of world powers. It was at this site in the late 1970s, not long after the first commercial Concorde flight took off from Heathrow, that construction began on a project called ‘Joint European Torus’ or JET, a major scientific experiment to explore the use of nuclear fusion to generate energy.
Such were the immense power demands of JET, that the project had its own connection to the National Grid installed, and a 400Kv substation was built on the site – enough to power a small city. At the time, coal was the primary source of energy for electricity and the UK was mining more than 100 million tonnes of it a year. But the project was justified in the name of scientific endeavour, with the hope that Britain would one day build its own nuclear fusion power plants.
JET was decommissioned just over a year ago, freeing up the grid connection for alternative uses – including building the power-hungry data centres that will fuel Culham’s AI growth zone. Today it takes as much as a decade for a private data centre company to get access to a grid connection – a huge source of frustration.
Shockingly then, the government has had to pin its hopes for AI growth on planning decisions made half a century ago, an era when Britain got things done. Keir Starmer’s new mantra of ‘slashing red tape to get Britain building’ is easily justified, therefore, and his commitment this week to putting the UK ‘back in the global race for nuclear energy’ is welcome. A majority the size of Labour’s, unlikely to last long, is a rare opportunity to do big bold things that not everybody likes.
But after a raft of tax rises and Downing Street messaging that ‘things are much worse than we thought’ sent business confidence plummeting, Starmer’s new boosterism is suffering a credibility problem. The big projects the government supports, mostly over a decade from completion, can do little in the short term to reassure. Up against a freewheeling Donald Trump who promises to cut taxes and tear up ten regulations for every new one introduced, much more will be needed to convince investors to park their money in UK plc.
A clear example of the challenge lies back at Culham, which was also once home to a second jet. This jet was a prototype rocket propulsion system designed by Reaction Engines – once dubbed the successor to Concorde. Reaction received £60 million in government funding in 2016 and was later boosted by more from the private sector. Last year the firm needed extra cash to get the prototype over the line – but no private investors came forward, and the government shrugged. In November it collapsed.
Concorde-style innovation in supersonic travel lives on – but not in Britain. Last week an American firm called Boom Technology made its first supersonic test flight – the first for a passenger jet in two decades since the UK grounded Concorde – with hopes for a commercial service in under a decade.
The company’s founder, Blake Scholl, celebrated by posting an image of a jet adorned with a US flag. He captioned it ‘Make America Boom again’. Let’s hope its first commercial flight lands at Heathrow – runway number three.
Steve Coogan should stick to comedy
How amusing to hear Steve Coogan and Emily Maitlis pontificate about the dreaded ‘establishment’ on Maitlis’s News Agents podcast recently. During a discussion about Coogan’s role as Brian Walden in Brian and Maggie – Channel 4’s two-part drama about Walden’s final, sensational interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1989 – the comedian admits that although he identifies with Thatcher’s lower-middle-class background, he had concerns that the script might make her seem too sympathetic. Heaven forbid. Coogan considers the drama to be as much about class as a lament for long-form interviews, suggesting that intelligent outsiders such as Walden, Thatcher and indeed Coogan himself will always struggle to break through the cut-glass ceiling.
The reason I found this so entertaining is because you’d be hard pressed to find two more establishment figures than Coogan and Maitlis, and yet here they were intimating that they are the true outsiders, having to fend off a powerful cabal of upper-class twits. I’ve heard this argument before from leftist friends who remain convinced that the huddled masses are still being lorded over by members of the Lords. I sometimes wonder whether any of them has actually met a modern-day aristo. The ones I know wield about as much power and influence as the mangy labradors they keep chained up outside their stately homes. Most seem to be in a perpetual state of financial crisis. Yes, they’ve inherited castellated millstones, but step beyond the porticoed entrance of your average country seat and the unsanitary conditions soon become apparent. And yet the newly moneyed elite continue to gaslight us into believing that a bunch of ruddy-faced shire-buffoons are in charge rather than the likes of Coogan and Maitlis.
During the interview, Coogan’s contempt for easily led populist voters soon became apparent, despite his plea that we should prioritise the most disenfranchised in society. Whether the poor deserve government help presumably depends on their political leanings – the rest can bugger off back to Clacton.
As Coogan moved on to the tyranny of the right-wing press and how the sexes need to have a ‘conversation’ in order to rid the world of ‘right-wing misogynists’ (a one-way conversation, presumably), I began to wonder why he couldn’t just stick with what he’s good at. Isn’t it enough to have played Alan Partridge, surely one of the funniest comic creations of all time? Why is he wasting time on political posturing? It’s not what he’s being paid for. He’s a comedian.
Unlike his seamless transformation into Partridge, whenever Coogan steps into more serious roles I immediately become aware of the joins. I just didn’t believe his turn as Walden: it felt like a ‘performance’, all technical tell with very little show. Even the Brummie accent veered all over the place, only occasionally landing in Walden’s native West Bromwich. Harriet Walter, who plays Mrs T, felt much more invested – but by overdoing the flashing evil-stare shtick the character at times lapsed into cartoon cliché. Far from being a heartless tyrant, the real Maggie comes across in the 1989 interview as touchingly vulnerable when confronted by the unrelenting Walden. Sadly Walter, a proud socialist, couldn’t quite bring herself to portray the less metallic side of the Iron Lady. But in the end it was Coogan’s performance that let the project down.
It may be galling for him to admit that his talent rests on a single character, but there comes a time when every man must know his limitations
When an actor becomes typecast it can spell the end of their career so it’s hardly surprising they want to play against type. It’s a sad irony that talented thesps such as the late Harry H. Corbett of Steptoe and Son can vanish into obscurity simply because of the brilliance of a single role. Corbett showed great promise and could have gone on to play even more interesting characters – but his alter ego Harold, the frustrated rag and bone man, came to define and eventually bury him.
Jon Hamm, who portrayed the dapper Don Draper in Mad Men, complained that after the success of the show he received ‘about 40 scripts that were all set in the Sixties, or had me playing advertising guys’. Hamm has been largely absent from our screens ever since, which is a shame because I would like to have seen his full range.
Coogan is a different kind of performer. His limited range is actually his greatest strength. As he approaches his autumn years it may be galling for him to admit that his talent rests on a single character, but there comes a time when every man must know his limitations. Rarely has a comic creation been so beloved by so many for so long (Partridge has been making us wince for more than 30 years), and I for one am looking forward to Alan’s next project entitled ‘How Are You?’ in which the head of Peartree Productions assesses the mental health of the nation. Sometimes more of the same with an added twist is all that’s required.
The call that shames the pro-Palestine movement
Some of us switch off when we hear a ‘loony left’ story. We might cock an eyebrow at the latest tale of progressive idiocy but that’s about it. They’re at it again, we think, and move on. But there are reports this morning of some truly perverse behaviour among the activist classes and we cannot afford to laugh it off or look the other way. It’s far too serious for that.
It’s the revelation that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for the right to protest against Israel on the very day Israelis were being butchered in their hundreds by the neo-fascists of Hamas. On 7 October 2023, Hamas’s pogrom still unfolding, PSC notified the Metropolitan Police of its intention to march against Israel on the streets of London the following Saturday: 14 October.
In response to a Freedom of Information request from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Met has confirmed that a representative of PSC phoned up on ‘Saturday 7 October at approximately 12.50pm’ to inform the Met of ‘the intention to protest’. A headline in today’s Jerusalem Post puts it starkly: ‘Anti-Israel activists planned London protest while 7 October massacre raged.’
Think about what this means. As Israelis were being knifed, shot, raped and kidnapped, London’s left was planning a march against Israel. As the youthful revellers of the Nova music festival reeled from the rape and slaughter of hundreds of their friends, the safe, secure luvvies of London’s activist set were giddily plotting an Israel-bashing demo. As Israeli toddlers and grannies were being dragged from their homes and violently spirited into enemy territory, the virtuous of London were organising a protest – not against that vile and criminal behaviour but against the nation that was its victim.
They couldn’t wait until the bodies were cold? They couldn’t wait until the rape victims who survived their sick ordeal were safe in hospital? They couldn’t wait until the house fires started by Hamas’s anti-Semitic bandits had been put out? The coldness, the inhumanity, is startling. The world watched in horror as a neo-fascist militia wreaked sadistic destruction upon the Jewish state, and yet here were the right-on of London’s leafy suburbs essentially saying: ‘Screw that state.’
Let’s be clear about how morally degenerate this is. To my mind, it’s as sick as if people had organised protests against France as the butchery at the Bataclan in 2015 was still unfolding. Or if activists had responded to the Easter massacres in Sri Lanka in 2019, in which hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Islamist fanatics, by writing ‘F**k Sri Lanka’ on a placard and hitting the streets.
The PSC has responded to the storm over its hasty plotting by pointing out that Israel had already responded to Hamas’s attack by this time on 7 October. It is ‘citing Israel’s retaliation to the terror attack’, says the Telegraph. A PSC spokesman told the Telegraph:
‘[By that morning] it was already clear that the Israeli attacks on Gaza would be of an indiscriminate violence we had not witnessed before, and that 2.3 million people in Gaza – more than 50 per cent of them children – were at severe risk. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that PSC would call for a protest that would seek an immediate ceasefire and call for the root causes of Israeli occupation and apartheid to be addressed. Those who seek to demonise the organisers of and participants in protests for justice for Palestinians do so to deflect attention from the crimes against humanity that Israel has committed. We shall not be deflected by their apologism for genocide.’
Of course Israel retaliated. Its men, women and children were being murdered by an invading militia. What did they want Israel to do – turn the other cheek? Someone needs to tell the PSC it’s not the 1930s anymore. Armed men can no longer kill Jews with impunity.
It is profoundly unsettling that people in the PSC saw Israelis being chased, shot, burnt out of their homes and beheaded and thought to themselves: ‘Let’s protest against Israel.’ Such a response to the most barbarous pogrom of the modern era falls entirely outside of the bounds of normal moral and political behaviour. To organise an anti-Israel demo even as Israelis were being slain was to rub the salt of Israelophobia into the wound of Hamas’s pogrom.
It was not anti-war activism – it was gloating over Israel’s suffering. The sadism of Hamas’s attack found its echo in the moral detachment of western leftists. What the revelations about the PSC really show is how unhinged anti-Israel activism has become. Today’s fashionable loathing for Israel belongs less to the realm of anti-imperialism than to the realm of bigotry. Our activist classes have dehumanised Israel and its inhabitants to such an insane degree that even the mass murder of Israelis by invading Islamists leaves them unmoved.
There are people in Britain who, when their grandkids ask them what they did following the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, will have to say: ‘I organised a protest against the Jews’ homeland.’ The left might think this was a normal response to 7 October – I guarantee you future generations will disagree.
Can a second Kursk offensive give Ukraine bargaining power?
In theory, the Kursk salient is one of the most militarily insignificant fronts of Putin’s war on Ukraine. However, war is ultimately all about politics, and the presence of Ukrainian troops on Russian soil is sufficiently problematic for President Vladimir Putin that Kyiv has decided to deploy more troops in a bid to reverse the slow recapture of the occupied territory.
Having originally seized some 400 square miles in its lightning attack in August 2024, by last month, steady Russian pressure had shrunk Ukraine’s grasp on territory to some 180 square miles. Although Ukraine still held the town of Sudzha – about the only significant settlement in this area – the front line had crept perilously close.
Putin admitted in a meeting with regional governors that the situation there is ‘very difficult’
Nonetheless, in line with commander in chief General Olexander Syrsky’s declaration in January that his forces ‘need to prepare not only for defence, but also for offense’, the Ukrainians have in recent weeks reportedly managed to push Russian troops back six miles from Sudzha. According to Moscow, this entailed the deployment of two fresh mechanised battalions. The Russian concern is that it may jeopardise their positions in the village of Guyevo, which sits across the main supply lines to Sudzha to the north.
On Thursday, to mark the six-month anniversary of the Kursk attack, Volodymyr Zelensky said that ‘we have brought the war home to Russia. That is where they must feel what war truly means. And they do’. He added that the ‘Kursk operation clearly explains the meaning of the principle of “peace through strength”‘.
This is true to a degree. While the Russian media is full of tales of local victories in Kursk, Putin himself admitted in a meeting with regional governors that the situation there is ‘very difficult’. The acting governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Khinshtein, a hack from the ruling United Russia party appointed in December, had a face-to-face meeting with Putin on Wednesday in which he lobbied hard for more federal funding to address the problems of the more than 150,000 refugees displaced by the invasion.
All told, the Russians are thought to have deployed between 50,000-70,000 troops to Kursk, including the 11,000 North Koreans. These latter have been rotated out of the fighting, although contrary to claims that they had been withdrawn home because of their high casualties, it seems more likely that they are simply recuperating and also revising their tactics in light of their first actual combat experience, before returning to the fray. The Russians have also had to deploy more National Guard security troops to rear-area security operations, as Ukrainian special forces infiltrate deep behind their lines.
But while it essentially ate up all the reserves Moscow had at its disposal, including many elite units, Ukraine’s Kursk operation failed to meaningfully force the Russians to transfer substantial numbers of battle-hardened troops away from the Donbas front. While this has been a slow, bloody process, taking losses that exceed the Kremlin’s capacity to recruit new soldiers, if anything, the tempo of Russian advances increased.
Since the start of the year, that pace has slowed marginally – in December they took more than 150 square miles, and just 125 square miles in January – but several of Moscow’s current objectives such as Kurakhove have fallen, Chasiv Yar is being contested, and they have forced a bridgehead across the Oskil River. As this offensive slows, it may be culminating, in the jargon – running out of steam – or it may be that they are simply digesting their latest gains.
None of this is to suggest that the Kursk salient is meaningless. It is, rather, to emphasise its political significance. Back in August, it was a powerful fillip to a demoralised Ukrainian population – and also a useful counter to a growing Western narrative that suggested Kyiv had, as one British soldier observed, ‘nothing left in the tank’. If and when there are negotiations, so long as Kyiv holds some Russian territory, freezing the current front line will be a little less appealing to Putin (even though it is likely his immediate political objective).
There are serious pressures on Ukraine’s ability to continue to feed this meatgrinder of a war as well as the profound uncertainties about the US position – will it try and impose a ceasefire or not? As such, it is all the more important that Kyiv be able to present itself, if not as a winner (although simple resistance to its larger neighbour can be counted as something of a win) then at least not as that worst of all things in Donald Trump’s lexicon: a loser.
Can Ukraine stop the bombings at its draft offices?
On 1 February, a young man walked into a military enlistment office in Rivne with a bomb in his backpack. Moments later, it detonated, killing him instantly and injuring eight Ukrainian service members. He was just 21, recruited online by Russian intelligence operatives who offered quick cash for sneaking the bomb inside. This attack was not an isolated incident – it was the beginning of a wave of deadly bombings targeting draft offices across the country.
Two more attacks followed this week. In Kamianets-Podilskyi, in the Khmelnytskyi region, a man walked into a recruitment centre, bag in hand, claiming he had personal items to hand over. The bomb went off before he could drop off the bag, killing him and severely injuring two doctors, a soldier and a member of staff. In Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, another bomb blast injured a serviceman. Three suspects were soon detained: all the bombers were recruited by Russian-run Telegram channels designed to sabotage Ukraine’s conscription efforts.
More than 80 per cent of Ukrainians use the Russian-made app to follow breaking news, but its hidden side offers far more. Ukrainians can earn $100 for exposing the home addresses and photos of enlistment officers, $2,000 for setting their vehicles on fire and $5,000 for burning down a draft office. The reward for the assassination of a draft officer (usually a war veteran) is ‘negotiable’. The recruits – mainly young, unemployed men opposing conscription – start small, spreading posters in their home regions with QR codes linking to these Telegram channels, before going on to blow up soldiers’ cars, plant explosives at enlistment offices and even carry out targeted killings.
Ukraine’s security service is working overtime to capture the collaborators. According to Serhiy Andrushchenko, first deputy head of the agency, nearly 500 people were detained last year for burning private cars of military personnel (some 300 were torched across the country), damaging railways and planting explosives at draft offices. Andrushchenko says Russians now tend to remotely detonate the bomb while the collaborator is still on-site – to avoid paying for their services. ‘Russian intelligence treats these people as expendable material,’ he said. ‘The FSB doesn’t care what happens to them once the job is done.’
As a countermeasure, Ukraine has launched an official Telegram chatbot, ‘Expose the FSB Agent’, where citizens can report suspicious messages or channels. Since December, it has received nearly 2,300 reports of Russian attempts to recruit saboteurs.
The security risks of Telegram have long been debated in Ukraine. Spy chief Kyrylo Budanov has repeatedly warned that the app poses a serious national security threat, saying that Russian intelligence services can access users’ personal data, including deleted messages. Last September, Kyiv restricted Telegram’s use on government-issued devices, banning it for state officials, military personnel and critical infrastructure workers. However, the decision doesn’t extend to personal smartphones.
A full nationwide ban has yet to be discussed. Despite its risks, Telegram remains Ukraine’s most widely used news source. Would banning it be unpopular? Almost certainly. But at a time when the country is struggling to mobilise troops and when critical infantry shortages are allowing Russian forces to push forward, it shouldn’t even be a question. As Ukraine’s army chief warned this week, national defence is impossible without public support and respect for the military. Hunting down traitors one by one is an uphill battle. Shutting down the Russian network is far easier.