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Will Wormald actually help Starmer change the civil service?
Downing Street has announced that the 14th secretary to the cabinet and head of the civil service will be Sir Chris Wormald. He will succeed Simon Case when the latter stands down after four years on 16 December. Wormald, 56, has been permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care for eight and a half years, before which he was the top official at the Department for Education for four years – a true Whitehall veteran.
There is no doubt that Wormald is experienced. He is likeable and highly rated, though his department has hardly stood out for excellence over the past decade and he sometimes struggled under questioning at the Covid-19 inquiry. But Keir Starmer has spoken of the need for ‘the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform’. Is Wormald the man to help him deliver that?
Starmer mouths radical words but has done little
Case’s departure had been inevitable since before the government came to power in July. He was a surprise choice for cabinet secretary by Boris Johnson in 2020, only 41 years old and never having run a major department of state. Johnson had brought him into a chaotic Downing Street to lead the response to the pandemic, after having disposed of Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary he had inherited from Theresa May, several months into his premiership.
That sense of being a courtier to the prime minister would be fatal, as flecks of scandal from Johnson’s declining administration accumulated on Case. Initially appointed to lead the inquiry into ‘partygate’, he had to recuse himself because he had attended some of the gatherings. When he took leave of absence through illness in October 2023, many suspected he would not return to his post. Case reappeared a few months later, now using a stick, but the clock was ticking on his career.
With Keir Starmer’s arrival as prime minister it was a given that Case would retire in the near future, partly because he was irreparably tarnished and partly because the new prime minister was eager to make a fresh appointment. But Starmer’s determination to do things differently gave rise to sometimes outlandish speculation that the new head of the civil service would be an unconventional appointment, perhaps a figure from outside Whitehall to jolt the bureaucracy into change.
The favourite for a long time was Sir Olly Robbins, who had enjoyed a glittering career and was appointed by Theresa May as the first permanent secretary to the Department for Exiting the EU in 2016. He was then May’s chief adviser on Europe and the UK’s lead negotiator for Brexit. Robbins became such a bogeyman for Brexiteers that he left Whitehall when May stepped down and disappeared into investment banking with Goldman Sachs. Starmer was said to be keen to bring the departed mandarin back.
The idea of an outside candidate led to a smörgåsbord of names gaining traction in the media: former Whitehall regulars Dame Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, and Dame Sharon White, until recently chairman of the John Lewis Partnership; Tom Riordan, long-time chief executive of Leeds City Council; Baroness Shafik, an Egyptian-born economist who had run the Department for International Development, spent six years as vice chancellor of the LSE and then had survived 13 months as president of Columbia University in New York before resigning.
When the shortlist of four candidates emerged last month, the radicalism had gone. Robbins, nominally an outsider, was competing against three serving permanent secretaries: Dame Antonia Romeo (Justice), Tamara Finkelstein (Defra) and Sir Chris Wormald. In appointing the last, Starmer has chosen perhaps the safest, least radical option.
Wormald joined the civil service in 1991 following a degree in history from St John’s College, Oxford. After 15 years at Education, he moved to the Department for Communities and Local Government, then in 2009 became head of the powerful Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. A year later he also took on the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, coordinating policy work for Nick Clegg. Early in 2012 he returned to the Department for Education as permanent secretary.
After five months in office, Labour has introduced much less organisational change than expected. The ‘mission boards’ are damp squibs: despite his promise, Starmer is not chairing them, they have no executive or financial powers and are hard to distinguish from ordinary cabinet committees. Sue Gray, who arrived as Downing Street chief of staff with supposed wide-ranging plans for Whitehall, was forced out after three months. The only change to the machinery of government has been moving responsibility for EU relations from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office.
When Harold Wilson became prime minister in 1964, he created five new government departments and commissioned a national plan for the economy. Starmer mouths radical words but has done little. Now he has a new chief civil servant and official adviser, he has little time to waste if he is to succeed in ‘chang[ing] the way government serves this country’. The jury is still very much out.
Labour risks death by consultation
After 14 years in opposition, you might have expected Labour to come into government bursting with plans for Britain. Yet the first four months of the Starmer supremacy have seen ministers commission a glut of various reviews, consultations and task forces about what they should actually do in office. Helpfully, Sky News has compiled a running tally of these. Their current figure is 61 in less than 150 days: a rate of one every two-and-a-half days. The obvious risk is ‘paralysis by analysis’.
Under Yvette Cooper, the Home Office has commissioned seven reviews on police and fire fighter pensions, knife sales, ninja swords, police prosecutions, family visas and counter-extremism. Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing has launched eight: on reforming right to buy and its past discounts, local government pensions, social housing rent policy, relations between Whitehall and municipal authorities, new towns, the national planning policy framework and on urban brownfield sites.
Inertia is an active choice, that often carries costs
Good government means taking decisions, even when they are hard decisions. The result on 4 July was hardly a surprise: by then Labour had led in the polls for nearly three years and were nailed on win the election since the mini-budget disaster of October 2022. As one aide points out, the party had already taken numerous studies in opposition. The shadow Defra team did a rural review while the Justice and Home Affairs team did ones on charging and sentencing respectively. Labour also has a National Policy Forum to undertake lengthy and detailed policy work too.
Inertia is an active choice, that often carries costs. Take the Department of Work and Pensions, which has launched four reviews, including one on ‘health-related inactivity’. Plans for overhauling the welfare system are now set to be published in the spring, according to Liz Kendall. But Budget forecasts show that the bill for sickness benefits is ballooning at a rate of £266 million a month, with an extra 85,000 people forecast to be signing on. This means that by April, when the plans are ready, welfare spending will be £1.3 billion higher – almost the same amount that Rachel Reeves hopes to save by scrapping winter fuel payments, with the resultant political pains that it brings.
It begs the question as to how much work done in opposition has actually been useful for office. ‘If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know’, one adviser memorably told the BBC before Labour conference. Much of Starmer’s speech a week later consisted of boasting about the various task forces his ministers had established, rather than enacting decisions taken in opposition in the first 100 days. It remains to be seen, for instance, how radically different the conclusions of the ongoing Strategic Defence Review will differ from the Integrated Review Refresh 2023. Similarly, to curb the ballooning welfare budget quicker, Liz Kendall could have simply adopted much of the work done by Mel Stride in the Sunak government.
Of course, many of the problems Labour is facing are ones which their Conservative predecessors deflected and delayed for years. One aide grumbles that the Tories ‘got about three Mail splashes on consultations on whether to ban the plastic spork’. To do better than that – and deliver the change which Starmer promised – Labour will need to kick the habit of ‘consultation-itis’, no matter how tempting it may seem.
Why Joe Biden was right to pardon Hunter
President Joe Biden’s unexpected pardon of his son, Hunter, on federal gun charges may appear as the ultimate example of lawfare hypocrisy, but it’s really the best outcome for everyone – including Donald Trump. Despite indications that such a pardon was unlikely, Biden – who infamously declared on X in May that “no one is above the law” – now believes that Hunter was “unfairly prosecuted.”
Jail time would have kept the Biden family in the spotlight long past their expiration date
“I believe in the justice system,” Biden said on Sunday while announcing an end to his son’s legal drama, “but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
No matter the reason, ending the spectre of jail time made the most sense – despite the extra-strong splash of nepotism. The younger Biden was actually facing two sentencing hearings – the first on 12 December for gun charges followed by another on 16 December for federal tax evasion charges. Hunter, the first ever child of a sitting president to be criminally convicted, faced up to 17 years behind bars.
It’s easy to understand the outrage around the Hunter pardon. Beyond the president’s insistence that his son would not receive special treatment, the Biden White House has used the nation’s court system to enact a similarly personal “lawfare” campaign against Donald Trump. Despite the announcement last week by Special Counsel Jack Smith that he was dropping two key cases against Trump, the prospect of charges against the once and future president haven’t gone away.
Despite the legal battles still awaiting Trump, the conclusion of the Hunter Biden judicial drama is in the best interests of everyone. For Hunter, it ends the threat of jail time, but most crucially, for America it means an end to Hunter Biden. This is a man who, despite every privilege available, has burdened his family — and nation — with a list of sex- and drug- and weapons-related sagas that have damaged and diminished both the Biden clan as well as the presidency.
America needs to move on from Hunter’s sex tapes and baby-mamas – his hacked laptops and tawdry rehab stints and apparent obsession with his own endowment. Jail time would not have allowed for this; just the opposite, in fact. Along with the double sentencing appearances later this month, his actual confinement would have fanned the flames of tabloid fodder with unprecedented vigour.
Hunter would have immediately become the highest-profile prisoner in US history, his saga consuming critical air – and air time – at the exact moment America should be spared any additional fallout from a disappointing Biden presidency. Jail time would have kept the Biden family in the spotlight long past their expiration date, a reminder of both the circus-like atmosphere that defined the Hunter saga, along with the equally chaotic final months of the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump has pledged to return to the White House in order to clean house. And Biden in the big house would have proven a distraction that would have only benefited the Bidens and their progressive enablers and surrogates. The inevitable images of his prison entry, the unending family visits, the constant speculation – a la Martha Stewart and Jeffrey Epstein – about his prison conditions the stuff of legend across a pliant and sympathetic mainstream media.
Having spent his life battling the demons of both his mother’s tragic death and contending with such a famous family, Hunter Biden has always elicited a level of compassion far beyond he deserved. Spending years in prison would have merely supercharged Biden’s nepo-sympathy on a grand and very public level. His father’s pardon provides what Biden — and the nation — needs most right now, for Hunter to fade into the historical footnote he barely warrants.
With more than a month to go before inauguration day, Hunter Biden should be well on his way to footnote status by the time Trump returns to the Oval Office. This is both a blessing and challenge for Trump. Armed with the Biden pardon, Trump can continue to press for an end to his remaining legal cases, demanding a playing field levelled and equal to the future former first son.
But Hunter’s sudden status-shift also means less focus on Trump’s predecessor – and even more eyeballs on Trump. Long saddled with his own litany of unseemly charges and allegations, Trump can now make the claim that pre-existing transgressions – like with Hunter – no longer matter. He can enter the White House with a future-first agenda, demanding to be unburdened by the past – just like the democrats he so spectacularly defeated.
Can Starmer force the NHS to change?
‘Hear me when I say this – no more money without reform.’ That was the Prime Minister’s message to the NHS only in September, when he promised the biggest reform of the health service since its founding.
But that’s not quite how it has panned out. Labour’s first Budget, which raised an additional £40 billion in tax, also announced an additional £22 billion for day-to-day spending within the NHS. Having allocated more than half of the tax rises to the health service, the promise from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves was that improvements would be forthcoming. It’s not obvious, however, that the NHS agrees.
There is never a circumstance where enough resources have been allocated for the NHS to exist in any state but a crisis
The front page of today’s Times is a briefing – or warning – from NHS officials to the Labour party. Starmer is expected to announce in his ‘plan for change’ on Thursday that the NHS will finally meet its target of carrying out 92 per cent of operations within 18 weeks. This is not a new target, but an outstanding one which has not been met for nearly a decade. Yet the response from the NHS, tasked with finally having to meet this target by the end of this Parliament, is not an enthusiastic one. Instead, NHS England is suggesting that meeting the target for routine procedures could turn A&E services into ‘war zones’, while also jeopardising the service’s ability to improve access to mental health treatment.
It’s hardly surprising that this is the NHS’s immediate response. Even when more money has been offered up to the service with clear deliverables attached, the NHS has still gone on to downgrade what can be achieved (including the multi-billion pound top-up to address the post-Covid waiting lists). There is never a circumstance where enough – or more than enough – resources have been allocated for the NHS to exist in any state but a crisis.
The growing problem for the health service, however, is that the numbers tell a different story. NHS spending is at its highest level on record (minus pandemic spending), now sitting comfortably in the top third healthcare budgets across the OECD. And while staff and money has increased dramatically since the pandemic, productivity within the NHS is still well below 2019 levels.
It is increasingly clear that the NHS is doing less with a lot more resources at its disposal: and that was true even before this £22 billion cash injection. But while the optics are a growing problem for the health service, coming up with a plan for reform remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing this new government (details of which we are expecting to hear in spring next year from the Health Secretary Wes Streeting).
The early pay-out has made the process much harder. Having made £22 billion the baseline payment, with no strings attached, what is the NHS going to demand to reach its outstanding targets, or to make serious changes to the way the service runs? What will the price tag be for extended hours, which is part of the government’s reform agenda – and what happens when there are first attempts to bring pay in line with the new league tables recently announced by Streeting?
It’s notable that the Prime Minister’s reset speech this week is going to announce an NHS ambition that is already on the books, albeit not being met. This might be an early indicator that the government is already scaling back its ambition for reform – not because of public appetite, but because of the hurdles that exist with the system. Waiting over four months for routine treatment – especially if a patient is experiencing pain – is not exactly how many would define world-class access to care.
But even this will be very difficult. Having done exactly the opposite of what was pledged – handing over billions without plans for reform – the scale of the challenge has become immensely greater.
Why the West must back Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
I had a nasty shock when I switched on my TV on Sunday. It was clearly a propaganda film with hijabed women standing amidst the rubble of their former homes extolling Hezbollah’s victory over the invading forces of Israel. Except it wasn’t a propaganda film; it was a BBC news report from Lebanon highlighting the plight of the de-housed Hezbollah-supporting Lebanese.
Of course, there was no report on the 60,000 Israelis who are still too frightened to return to their homes in northern Israel. They have good reason. Over the weekend, Hezbollah troops broke the ceasefire agreement and fired rockets into northern Israel. However, the anti-Israel bias of the BBC and western liberal media is a well understood fact of life. They support the perceived underdogs, Hamas and Hezbollah. This is a moral perversion of the facts of course. Israel, not Hamas and Hezbollah, is the real underdog in its war against Iran’s powerful Mullahs and their regional allies.
Morality and geopolitics do not work; realpolitik is the only logical partner for geopolitics
When it comes to picking sides in the Middle East based on moral values, things have become trickier in recent days. With a sudden flare up of jihadism in Syria, the west is going to have an even harder job in deciding who are the ‘moral good guys’.
Last week, an Al Qaeda splinter group called Hay’at Tahrir al-sham (HTS – or ‘Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’), based in Syria’s northeastern Idlib province on the border with Turkey, launched an attack on Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and quickly took control. HTS and its jihadist allies, allegedly funded by Turkey, are now moving southwards. The main M5 highway between Aleppo and Damascus has been cut off. HTS are battling both Syrian forces and their Iranian-based militia allies.
Although HTS’s primary objective is the ‘liberation’ of the Levant, higher aims have been alluded to. Their leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has previously stated that ‘we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival’. HTS reportedly host international terrorists. Their sudden aggressive emergence not only threatens Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad but also Iran: Syria is an Iranian ally. It is part of the ring of Iranian allies that encircles Israel. Crucially, Syria’s M5 highway is a supply route for Iran’s Hezbolah allies in southern Lebanon.
So, what side should the west take? Should we support the HTS jihadis against the monstrous dictatorship of President Assad? Or should we support President Assad against the monstrous jihadis? It comes back to the tricky issue of ‘morality’ in geopolitics.
I am reminded of my experiences in Syria during the neo-con presidency of George W. Bush. On a visit to Damascus to meet the Syrian finance minister, I also had meetings with the British Ambassador. It became clear that they were both lobbying for Syria to be taken under the western umbrella. Bashar al-Assad, it transpired, was keen to jettison his historic Russian and Iranian allies. This surprising revelation was confirmed in our discussion with Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, at the vast Mount Mezzeh presidential compound, a hideous totalitarian bunker, that overlooks Damascus.
That the Assads were pro-western was no surprise. Asma had grown up in Acton, west London. Her father, a Syrian émigré, was a cardiologist at the Cromwell hospital. She studied at King’s and then Harvard before joining US investment bank, JP Morgan. In London she met Bashar, an ophthalmologist who was doing postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital. The happy couple only moved to Damascus when the heir apparent, Bassel al-Assad, died in a high-powered Mercedes Benz while driving on the way to a skiing holiday in Switzerland.
In the event, the Syrian attempt to become a western ally, a move apparently supported by the US ambassador in Damascus, failed. The leitmotif for President Bush’s foreign policy had become the need to combat the ‘Axis of Evil’, a phrase coined by his neo-con speech writer David Frum. Originally defined as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the ‘Axis of Evil’, expanded to include their allies such as Syria. Bringing the Assads in from the cold was a non-starter. An opportunity to turn an Iranian ally was lost.
The west’s relations with Syria became frostier still after 9/11 and later still, the Arab Spring. Foolishly, backed by president Barack Obama, the disastrous dethroning of the Middle East’s dictators became apparent when President Mubarak was toppled in Egypt only to be replaced by the radical Islamic government of the Muslin Brotherhood in 2011. Meanwhile, in Syria a civil war led by the ‘pro-democracy’ Free Syrian Army was launched to depose Assad. It led to a brutal crackdown by the president that killed as many as 500,000 people.
As misguided as Obama, prime minister David Cameron also took a moral stance against President Assad and warned ‘I want a very clear message to go to President Assad that nothing is off the table’. Tired of the G8’s dithering on Syria, at Doha in June 2013 Cameron launched an attempt to orchestrate a coup against Assad. It was a plan that rested on the fantasy that the Free Syrian Army was competent and a ‘white horse’ of democracy.
This was quite clearly an illusion. As illustrated in authoritarian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia in the aftermath of the Pacific War, democracy comes about because of free market economic development, the nurturing of property rights and the gradual development of democratic institutions as well as cultural norms, such as free speech. Imposition of democracy on relatively poor countries, particularly ones with an Islamic culture predisposed to authoritarianism for socio-religious reasons, has never worked.
There were two forms of government available to the Middle East at the time of the Arab Spring: Jihadi dictatorship or secular military dictatorship. It is the same geopolitical choice that faces the west today. Take your pick. The geopolitical choice is not without complexity, but ultimately the choose is obvious. Syria may be an opponent of our ally Israel, but an Al Qaeda jihadi group is even more dangerous to the interests of not only Israel but the west in general.
So, let’s have the military dictatorship of the Assads any day. They may be repellently brutal, but they do not support international terrorism and global Jihad in the manner of Al Qaeda, Isis, Hezbollah and Hamas; indeed, the Assads are as fiercely opposed to these groups as we are. Morality and geopolitics do not work; realpolitik is the only logical partner for geopolitics.
The problem for politicians in the west, led by nose by the simplistic moral compasses of their media is that, other than the beacon of democracy that is Israel, there are no ‘moral good guys’ in the Middle East. We simply need to take the side of what works best in our interest.
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Sir Chris Wormald is the new cabinet secretary
Keir Starmer has today resolved one of his longstanding headaches: who to appoint to lead the civil service. The man chosen to replace Simon Case as cabinet secretary is Sir Chris Wormald. The 56-year-old has served as permanent secretary of the Department of Health since 2016, leading colleagues throughout the ups and downs of the pandemic. Prior to that, he was permanent secretary at the Department of Education (DfE) from 2012 to 2016. Government is very much in Wormald’s blood: his father Peter served as under secretary in the DHSS from 1978 to 1981.
The task that faces the new cabinet secretary is considerable
With 33 years of continuous service in Whitehall, it is clear that the Prime Minister is opting for a ‘greybeard’ over a wildcard. High-profile names floated for the post of cabinet secretary included Antonia Romeo and Olly Robbins but Sir Chris is an appointment in line with the traditional ‘Sir Humphrey’ mould. As the longest-serving perm sec, he has featured among the riders and riders for Whitehall’s top job for more than a year. Deeply committed to the civil service ideal, his appointment will likely be regarded by the mandarin class as a return to normalcy after the unhappy experiment of the Simon Case era. Others are less impressed: Dominic Cummings, who worked with Wormald at DFE and then No. 10, has already launched a lengthy broadside on his record during Covid.
Announcing the appointment, Sir Keir declared that his fellow knight will be be pivotal in working to ‘change the way government serves this country’. He said: ‘From breaking down silos across government to harnessing the incredible potential of technology and innovation, it will require nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform.’ Starmer added that there was ‘no-one better placed’ to push through his flagship ‘Plan for Change’ than Sir Chris, ahead of his big ‘reset’ speech on Thursday.
The task that faces the new Cabinet Secretary when he begins work on 16 December is considerable. He will need to rebuild morale in a civil service battered by constant scandals and struggling to shake off the legacy of Covid. Fulfilling Starmer’s goals of ‘mission-led’ government will be a considerable challenge and some may question whether Wormald, as a Whitehall lifer, is best placed to achieve this. Supporters though will point to his work on the Coalition’s school reforms as proof that even a lifelong insider can deliver the radical change which Britain needs.
Why did the state let Kneecap win?
There was something predictable in the government’s agreement last week to accept defeat in the Belfast High Court. The overtly republican Irish band Kneecap had brought a judicial review over the withdrawal of an offer of a £14,500 state grant to support artists overseas, alleging unlawful political discrimination. The government lawyers caved at the door of the court.
It is going a bit far to expect government to directly fund something so contrary to its own interests and values
Put simply, there were many advantages for the government in acting as it did. The sum at stake was chickenfeed, and blame for the whole affair could be conveniently placed on Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary in the previous government who had vetoed the grant in the first place. Moreover, the government’s stance will also have placated those among its own left wing MPs who have discreet Irish nationalist sympathies, and no doubt pleased a fair number of potential youthful supporters too. (Kneecap are a popular and successful band and, according to the young people I know, very good musicians.)
How should conservatives view the decision? There is a view that they should swallow it. True, Kneecap are Republicans through and through and never lose an opportunity to attack the British state. They drive around in a British Army-style Land Rover covered in suggestive graffiti, and their very name recalls – one suspects deliberately – a brutal practice used by the IRA to torture and maim its victims. But free speech and the freedom to hold political views should cut both ways. If you don’t like, say, the Arts Council disfavouring rightist artists, then you must accept groups like Kneecap should be similarly treated despite their rebarbative political views.
And yet… there is a very respectable argument that Kemi’s original decision was right. Kneecap’s arguments based on free speech and political discrimination are actually remarkably problematic.
First, there was no direct attack on the right of Kneecap or its members to speak their mind. They were merely being denied a small discretionary grant under a system known as the Music Export Growth Scheme operated by the government through the British Phonographic Industry (the organisation that arranges the BRIT awards). Kemi’s view was that Kneecap were free to say what they liked, however unattractive, but could not necessarily expect British taxpayer largesse to be extended to them. To that extent, one might think Kneecap’s claim to have been hard done by relatively weak.
Secondly, there was more to this affair than a simple refusal of an otherwise neutral grant on the basis of the recipient’s politics. It was a fair inference, as Kemi rightly noted, that any money provided was likely to be used to promote a world view that was virulently anti-British. This matters.
While you can expect government to be neutral where matters are otherwise equal – we would rightly query a refusal of an award to a theatre troupe for no better reason than that the leader was personally a communist – it is going a bit far to expect government to directly fund something so contrary to its own interests or values. Imagine the money had been asked for to promote something like Islamist misogyny, or pro-Iranian propaganda against Israel’s existence. Would the complaints have been the same? One doubts it.
Moreover, here there is room for suspicion that the money had been applied for at least partly with a view to political devilment, by a band that did not really need it. Indeed, Kneecap announced after the Belfast proceedings that it would be giving the payment to a couple of local charities. For a group that has promoted Irish republicanism, there would certainly be a strong attraction in the idea of cocking a snook at London and later claiming the British government had to pay for propaganda levelled against itself. This feature may not have affected the legal position, but if right it surely says a good deal about the deservingness of the claim.
For that matter, the legalities themselves may give rise to concern. We do not know whether the government was advised that it would have lost had had the matter not been settled. If they were, then this is itself worrying. Things are coming to a pretty pass when a government cannot set up a scheme to help its musicians make their way in a crowded international market-place without also binding itself to subsidise those who wish to use their art for the purposes of biting the hand that feeds them. If this is indeed so, then whatever this administration may think about the virtues of judicial review, the opposition might do well to say it will look carefully at the extent to which lawfare can upset the understandable decisions of elected politicians.
The Oxford Union has disgraced itself
The chamber of the Oxford Union, that once-proud institution, has been breached by the forces of bigotry, hatred, and mob rule.
Invited to speak against an anti-Israel motion, I attended with three colleagues, each bringing unique expertise and experience to the room. But what unfolded on Thursday night was not a debate at all. It was an assault on the very principles the Union once claimed to uphold, presided over by organisers who behaved more like a mafia than custodians of an august society dedicated to free speech.
This was an extremist mob dressed up like a wolf in black tie
The motion for debate was itself a grotesque provocation: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” Apartheid and genocide are not just loaded terms; they are distortions when applied to Israel, as I planned to explain in my speech. That the Union had decided to frame this debate around them was bad enough. It had caused some to decline their invitation to speak at all. But the problems were much deeper rooted even than students seeking attention through sensationalist wording.
This wasn’t an evening for intellectual rigour or balanced argument. From the very beginning, it was clear the organisation of this event was deeply and worryingly dishonest, aggressive and one-sided. Speakers infamous for their unhinged views were invited to confront us; we were left in the dark about who had been invited on our side. Deception and dishonesty characterised the entire run-up to the debate.
When the day finally arrived, the atmosphere in the chamber was hideous, sinister, and suffused with tension. Jews who might have attended were clearly too afraid to show up: many had written to me privately to tell me of their fears. In a packed chamber, I identified four Jewish students who sat huddled together across from me, but soon realised there were unlikely to be many more present. When I acknowledged them with a thumbs-up, they returned the gesture with a heart symbol: a fleeting moment of solidarity in what was otherwise an unrelentingly hostile environment.
The tone was set long before the debate began. The president of the Union, Ebrahim Osman Mowafy, an Egyptian Arab, seemed to me to be openly biased from the outset. His behaviour throughout the evening was not that of a neutral chair but of an orchestrator, stacking the odds against the opposition and fostering an environment of unchecked hostility. In the end, perhaps his most disgraceful speaker against Israel withdrew, seemingly intimidated by the strength of the team we had managed to assemble despite the Union’s best attempts to stop us. Having been told a student would take his place, we found out only on the night that Osman Mowafy himself would forgo the traditional impartiality of the chair’s role and speak against us himself.
At the pre-debate dinner we were completely ignored by the president: the vibe felt decidedly more like Mean Girls than Brideshead Revisited. Meanwhile, after cancelling the traditional pre-debate group photo altogether, Mowafy posed alone for private snaps in the chamber with the anti-Israel team, beaming like a Cheshire cat in white tie. As we entered the chamber itself, I reached out to shake hands with the opposing speakers. All but one refused the gesture.
From the moment the debate began, the crowd displayed its unbridled hatred towards us. Aware that tickets had been tightly controlled ‘for security reasons,’ we soon felt it has been to decrease our security. As I rose to speak, the mob of a crowd pointedly giggled and coughed to show their animosity. Their interruptions grew louder and more vicious as I progressed, culminating in a young woman standing and screaming obscenities in my face like a banshee: “Liar! F*** you, the genocidal motherf***er!” It took an intervention from me to finally prompt the president to have her removed. Even then, it seemed that he did so begrudgingly, as if I had overstepped the mark by expecting basic order.
This was not an audience interested in debate or even in hearing arguments. It was a baying mob, openly hostile and emboldened by the president’s refusal to enforce the most basic rules of decorum. They interrupted every pro-Israel speaker with jeers, coughs, and outright abuse. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a senior Hamas founder and leader who defected to Israel’s side and saved countless lives, was met with jeering derision and cried of “traitor” and “prostitute” (in Arabic), as he recounted his extraordinary story of moral courage and bravery. In a genius move, after explaining his choice to report information of forthcoming suicide bombing attacks over ten years to the Israelis he asked the audience to indicate by a show of hands how many of them would have reported prior knowledge of the October 7th massacres. The vast majority of the room remained still. Here was an Oxford Union audience which would have buried its head in the sand over the barbaric Palestinian terrorism of that dark day, without trying to prevent it at all.
Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli Arab who has dedicated his life to dismantling the apartheid lie, faced similar treatment. The international law commentator Natasha Hausdorf was hectored to finish her speech far quicker than her proposition counterpart.
Meanwhile, the proposition speakers trafficked in unforgivable and dangerous rhetoric. Miko Peled, a relentless anti-Israel activist, described the atrocities of 7 October as acts of “heroism.” I presume that includes the slaughter and kidnap of babies.
This felt like a marker, the moment when the Oxford Union truly fell
Novelist Susan Abulhawa demonised Jews as foreign colonisers, claiming their true homeland lay in Europe. Her later post on X branded me and Natasha “white colonisers”.
Mohammed El-Kurd, in the mode of a moody teenager, peddled unverified claims of Israeli atrocities to cheers from the crowd, and then flounced out as soon as he had finished his speech. All the while, the president sat unmoved, in my view, permitting this orgy of hate to continue unimpeded, as members of the audience cursed us in Arabic and disrupted the proceedings. This was an extremist mob dressed up like a wolf in black tie.
By the time the motion passed – 278 in favour to 59 against – it was clear that the entire event had been a sham. This was not a debate; it was a show trial, it seems to me, orchestrated by a deeply biased president and cheered on by a mob that had no interest in facts or truth.
This felt like a marker, the moment when the Oxford Union truly fell. Not just as a debating society, but as a symbol of intellectual freedom. The room that night was not filled with future leaders engaging in the battle of ideas; it was a mob baying for blood, intolerant of nuance, and utterly resistant to the values the Union claims to uphold.
The Union has long been a proving ground for ambition, a training ground for those destined to lead. But if this is the intellectual and moral climate shaping the leaders of tomorrow, then the implications are chilling – not just for the Union, but for society at large.
As we swept out of that chamber of horrors after midnight, we escaped down a side alley marked ahead of time for us by our security team, past a gay nightclub with youngsters spilling out in skimpy vests and crop tops. Did these carefree, liberal partygoers know of the horrors just the other side of the wall, of the decline of a once respected institution of intellectual debate into a chaotic, morally compromised shadow of its former self?
As our driver sped us out of Oxford, my colleagues and I compared notes about what we had just experienced: it was no less than the fall of the Oxford Union.
How does the NHS tackle eight million missed appointments?
One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals.
Every day, there are more than 300,000 outpatient appointments at hospitals, from MRI and breast scans to plaster casts and blood tests. And every day, 20,000 patients don’t turn up.
On the surface the data looks like a success story for the NHS, with the percentage of appointments that patients miss gently falling over the last decade.
Unfortunately, like most of our health service, the figures are running to stand still and not even achieving that. Although the percentage missed has fallen, the number of appointments overall has ballooned by 20 per cent. What was fewer than 7 million missed appointments in 2010 has grown to more than 8 million in the last year.
The cost is ballooning too. Hospital appointments are far more expensive than GP visits: the NHS says the cost is £160 per missed slot. That number has been used since 2016 so it’s likely to be even higher now. Even using the £160 figure puts the total annual cost of missed appointments at a staggering £1.25 billion.
Within these national figures is a wide divergence between trusts. In the most recent data, both the Bedfordshire and Doncaster trusts had missed appointment rates of around 10 per cent. By contrast, the Cambridge and York trusts had rates under 4 per cent. Every trust faces unique challenges, but the differences are stark and suggest that some have found better ways to manage the problem than others.
There’s also considerable variation in attendance by age. Around 10 per cent of working-age adults fail to turn up, as do children, likely because their parents – also working-age adults – are responsible for taking them. Attendance improves significantly over the age of 50, which may be down to more settled lives and fewer commitments – or them just taking their health more seriously. Younger people may be more affected by transient addresses or a lack of engagement with the traditional NHS letter.
To be fair to the NHS, it’s a problem they’re well aware of. One major cause of patients failing to attend appointments is simple forgetfulness. Over the years, various text reminders and prompts have been used – you’ve probably seen a few, and these have shown real success in improving attendance rates. Gently guilting people with reminders about the cost of missed appointments has also proven effective.
But there’s a bigger issue: NHS bureaucracy. Surveys show that up to half of people who have missed their appointments blame problems with appointment letters – either they never turned up or arrived after the appointed day. Others needed to change their appointment – it clashed with a holiday, wedding, or even a haircut – but struggled to get through to someone to change it.
Although the NHS is famously slow at adopting technology – it is still phasing out fax machines, after all – this seems like it could be an easy win. Banks have been sending letters via a secure portal for a couple of decades, tracking whether we’ve opened them, and saving a fortune in postage. Why can’t hospitals? Similarly, we’re all used to booking restaurant tables or concert tickets online. Why should scheduling an MRI be any different?
The variation between trusts shows that some are already embracing these solutions, but the NHS needs to go further. Tackling missed appointments is about more than just reminders – it’s about transforming the patient experience. A more modern system, where communication is seamless and rescheduling is easy, would do more than save money. It would mean patients got the tests and treatment they need on time, as well as freeing up time for many more, and – just maybe – allow the NHS to start to make a dent in those waiting lists.
Tony Blair is wrong to love nuclear energy
Towards the end of his time in office, Tony Blair came over all nuclear. A new generation of atomic energy plants, he told a CBI conference in 2006, would provide Britain with clean, carbon-free energy as well as boost national energy security. He didn’t last long enough in Downing Street to see it through, but this week he is banging the drum for nuclear energy again. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has published a polemic, A New Nuclear Age, which dismisses fears over safety and cost to propose that Britain once more plunges headlong into new nuclear plants.
‘Public perception of the risk of nuclear power is not commensurate with the actual risk,’ it asserts. ‘The world is now paying a price for letting lingering concerns about safety and ideological opposition deter governments from harnessing a key solution to powering economies in a clean way.’ Had the industry not been killed off by irrational fears and carried on expanding at the rate it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, it goes on to claim, the world could have saved 28.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide since 1991 – 3.1 per cent of the total emitted in that period and equivalent to 903 coal-fired power stations.
How great it would be to love nuclear power. It is true that nuclear provides a reliable source of low-carbon energy that wind and solar cannot. It is hard to imagine the world getting anywhere close to net zero emissions without a hefty input from nuclear power.
Yet there is something rash about the Tony Blair Institute’s case for a massive expansion of the industry. True, nuclear energy generally has a very safe record – though to claim that the world has only seen ‘two major accidents (those at Chernobyl and Fukushima)’, as the TBI claims, does rather ignore Three Mile Island in 1979 and Windscale in 1957, both of which were critical public emergencies.
Blair misses the point about nuclear power and safety. It isn’t that nuclear accidents have ever killed large numbers of people. The predictions at the time that Chernobyl would go on to kill tens of thousands of people were magnitudes out: the UN’s official death toll – all deaths attributed to the accident to date, including effects of radiation decades later – stands at just 50. The problem with nuclear is more the economic cost of a serious accident. After Chernobyl, an exclusion zone with a 30 km radius was imposed – still mostly uninhabited today. After Fukushima, a 20 km radius exclusion zone was imposed, putting 600 square km out of bounds – since reduced to 370 km. It required 165,000 people to be evacuated.
If we are going to have a new nuclear age, the safety aspects will very much still have to be addressed
Project those zones around Hinkley nuclear power station and a Fukushima-level accident would require the evacuation of Bridgwater, Taunton and much of Exmoor. For a Chernobyl-scale accident you can add on the centre of Cardiff. There would be no more Glastonbury, either. Maybe traffic might still be allowed to transit along the M5, so long as motorists didn’t linger; otherwise the South West would lose its main road connection. Such would be the economic devastation that even a once-in-a-century event on this scale becomes intolerable.
Nuclear power stations have improved a lot over the decades – and western designs were never as dangerous as Soviet ones. Even so, Japan still suffered a devastating accident. Moreover, with safety improvements have come extra layers of cost. The strike price (long-term guaranteed price) offered to the developers of Hinkley C – £92.50/MWh at 2012 prices, rising with inflation – was twice the market price for electricity at the time.
If we are going to have a new nuclear age, the safety aspects will very much still have to be addressed. Small nuclear reactors (SMRs) of around one-tenth the output of Hinkley could have a big role to play here, as the consequences of a serious accident would be much reduced. But the idea that SMRs could bring down the cost of nuclear energy looks a long way from being realised. Tony Blair is of a type: a non-scientist whose messianic belief in whatever science or technology he has discovered tends to run ahead of the reality. With Japan and also now Germany turning their backs on nuclear power, and a lack of enthusiasm from many other countries, a new nuclear age looks a long way away.
Joe Biden was always going to pardon Hunter
Joe Biden’s whole presidency has been built on untruths. We were led to believe, for instance, that since 2021 the Commander-in-Chief has been fit and well enough to serve, when everybody could see that he was not.
So the latest proof-of-dishonesty over the pardoning of Hunter Biden comes as no great surprise. Of course, Joe was going to grant clemency to his errant and only living son. He just pretended he wouldn’t all year for electoral reasons.
The maudlin love of the father used to dress up the presidential deceit
‘I believe in the justice system,’ said the president in a statement. ‘But as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.’
‘I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,’ Biden said in his statement.
There it is. The maudlin love of the father used to dress up the presidential deceit. Joe and Jill repeatedly made out that, in contrast to Donald Trump, their respect for the justice system meant they wouldn’t use his presidential power to pardon Hunter. But now they have nothing to lose.
The ‘raw politics’ Biden is referring to is not just the Republican efforts to prosecute Hunter; rather Joe’s own politicking led him to stand aside as the wheels of justice ground against his son. It’s worth remembering that Hunter was initially let off with a judicial slap on the wrist. Then, as the Democratic-led lawfare campaign against Donald Trump started to backfire politically, the Department of Justice suddenly did charge Hunter over three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018.
The surprising part about the pardon is its timing. Why did Biden announce the news this weekend, rather than waiting for January to let his loved-one off-the-hook, as is customary for presidents vacating the White House? ‘Once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,’ says Biden. But nobody quite believes that.
Did Joe think that Americans would be in a forgiving mood on Thanksgiving? Or is his health in such precipitous decline that he felt necessary to pardon his son now before it’s too late?
Is the Biden presidency, in fact, likely to end before inauguration day on January 20, 2025? In that case, might Kamala Harris become the first female US President after all, albeit only for a few days? That may sound outlandish. Never put anything past the Democrats, though.
It’s also interesting that Trump has not directly attacked his rival for his ‘full and unconditional’ pardon of his son. On his Truth Social platform last night, the Donald posted:
‘Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!’
That suggests Trump may use his executive power to grant clemency to the many Americans who have been pursued by Biden’s Department of Justice over the disorder on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
But it also looks as if Trump, having had a fairly amicable-looking meeting with Biden in the White House after his election victory last month, is willing to let the murky Hunter story fade away.
Is this the end for the luxury believers?
I’m not the biggest Donald Trump fan, so I surprised myself by being pleased when he won the American election so conclusively. There was a serious reason for this. Though I’m thoroughly for abortion and against sex pests, it’s no good the Democrats pretending to be the party of women’s rights when they’re in favour of allowing cheating males into female sport and perverted men into female prisons. This isn’t feminism at all, but what I’ve dubbed ‘Frankenfeminism’ which ends up making life both less fun and less safe for women – and that’s a rotten combo.
But there was also a frivolous reason why I felt pleased, and that was because it gave me a warm glow of pleasure to imagine the faces of all the super-smug celebrities who were convinced that by the grace of their glorious endorsements beaming down on Kamala, America would flock to vote for her. The reactions, when they came in, far succeeded my wildest expectations. I’ve always thought Alec Baldwin was crazy, but his statement that Hollywood (the denizens of which Ricky Gervais once nicely summed up with ‘You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything – you know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.’) could play a role in informing the masses was a new level of cuckoo. And I’ve always thought Sharon Stone was smart, but her cracking case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (Americans are ‘ignorant’ ‘arrogant’ and ‘uneducated’) might indicate that her much-touted IQ of 154 has perhaps taken a bit of a hit over the years.
When I was young I used to like film stars more when I found out they were left wing. People who don’t know me will sneer ‘That’s because you got old and right wing!’ but nothing could be further from the truth. As a teenager, I was a keen Zionist who believed in the death penalty, nationalisation of all utilities and the abolition of private education; I was for equality of opportunity for all races and both sexes, for free speech and against blasphemy laws. Fifty years on, I’ve stayed true to all of these beliefs; it’s hardly my fault that the left has done a complete 180 and become a rag-bag of weirdos having the screaming ab-dabs on repeat. No, I think the reason I’ve changed my attitude to left-wing celebrities is that left-wing celebrities have changed.
In the golden age of Hollywood, from the 30s to the 50s, film stars were of blue-collar stock; when they were left-wing, like Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Ava Gardner, their politics were still populist. They generally felt ashamed of their lack of education and guilty that their good looks had won them glittering lifestyles, and so they were disinclined to preach to the masses. When they endorsed candidates, they did it in a humble manner – think of Frank Sinatra fawning over JFK.
These days film stars tend to come from the upper-middle classes – like most successful British actors. Add to this a massive helping of nepotism (actors would once have been horrified by their children following them into the profession; now they do everything to encourage it) and this changes the social make-up of the show-business establishment completely. If you stood up as a liberal against the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, you could be ruined. Now the Hollywood establishment is liberal, being left wing is just another way of conforming and currying favour.
To be fair, right-wing film stars aren’t the most fresh and appetising selection. Famous fans who celebrated with Trump at Mar-a-Lago included Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Dennis Quaid. But though the liberals are the more attractive, they can be lacking in what we might politely call inner beauty. I’ll forever treasure the report of Demi Moore saying to Tina Brown at the party to launch Talk magazine, as the crowds peered across the velvet ropes into the VIP enclosure, ‘Can you imagine how you and I look to those people over there?’ We all know when we’re being looked down on; it’s wired into our survival mechanism, like food that’s bad for you often being blue. And this may explain why, when entertainers espouse a political cause – as they did with everything from Hillary Clinton to Remain – mere ‘civilians’ (to use Elizabeth Hurley’s word) turn against them.
Some of the disdain on the part of the paying public may be down to the increasing desire of stars to be seen as suffering grafters when we are fully aware that their lives are extremely soft and well-remunerated. Gwyneth Paltrow has not only famously claimed that being a film star is tougher than doing a ‘regular’ job but also that reading nasty things about herself and her friends was ‘almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanising thing’. Film stars in the past never complained. There’s heartbreaking footage of Marilyn Monroe during her marriage to Arthur Miller (an alleged Communist and confirmed rotter) leaving hospital after a late miscarriage of a much-wanted baby; how she smiles and waves, like she’s been surprised by paps leaving the hairdresser. Then think of Kristen Stewart saying that having her photo taken – in a public place, not even being spied on – was like being ‘raped’. People struggling to make a living are bound to feel nothing but contempt for such cry-babies.
It’s a phenomenon we might call being ‘Show-blind’. If you have a camera pointed at you for a lot of the time, mainly while you either fabricate or exaggerate your emotions, you may well come to believe that your feelings are more important than other people’s. (It’s not just film stars; we can see it in domestic divas from Lineker to Vorderman.) When less-photographed people – ‘civilians’ – then don’t behave ‘correctly’, you may become very cross indeed. There were many disappointed Dems to chose from when it came to morning-after misery, but among my favourites were Rosie O’Donnell (‘on the verge of pills’), Rachel Zegler (‘May Trump voters never know peace’), Christina Applegate (‘My child is sobbing’) and Cardi B (linked states with liability to suffer from hurricanes with voting Republican.) But my levity at this smorgasbord of show-blind sorrow was soon tempered by the dreadful revelation that the ghastly cry-bully Ellen Degeneres has done what so many of her fellow fools threatened to do – and moved over here.
It will be fun to see what happens when the dust settles. In a piece in The Spectator last week, William Cash wrote:
‘Variety splashed with the headline ‘Hollywood on Edge After Trump’s Devastating Victory’. One actor was quoted bemoaning the ‘unimaginable cruelty that’s going to be unleashed on women, immigrants and the LGBTQ community’. Another said they had called LA pharmacies to ‘hoard birth control pills’. Yet this fractious relationship is about to see a surprising plot twist. After years of virtue-signalling films – including a feminist Terminator and a female Muslim Marvel hero – Hollywood CEOs are quietly welcoming Trump: The Sequel. A shift away from liberal preaching has been under way for a while, and it has less to do with Trump and more to do with economics. The reason is that Hollywood has bankrupted itself. In May, famed investor Warren Buffet revealed that he had sold all his Paramount stock, losing as much as $1.5 billion. Walt Disney and Warner Bros have also been hit. Trump and Hollywood are both dysfunctional and needy, and so are perfectly suited to one another. The town may even thrive under the new president.’
But I’m most interested in the absolute discrediting of celebrity endorsements this time around – and most curious to see what happens at the next US election. In 2028, will celebrities who offer their endorsements to the next Democratic candidate be told politely but firmly where to stick them?
The Democratic campaign – and the way that the rich and famous swanked around during it – was so condescending, it made ordinary Americans feel that a man as rich as Trump understood them better. For me it was summed up best by having J-Lo pretend-cry over what a crime against regular people a Trump victory would be, when we’ve all seen the photo of her spitting her used gum into a regular person’s hand; do the Dems want to risk being promoted by people like that ever again?
Politics is often called ‘showbiz for ugly people’ – but the ugliness of showbiz people came to the fore in this election, and will not be quickly forgiven or forgotten by the ‘civilians.’
Is Keir Starmer turning into Rishi Sunak?
Keir Starmer is only 150 days into his premiership and his team are already planning a reset. Officially, no one in Downing Street is using the R word when it comes to the speech the Prime Minister is due to give on Thursday. But the plan to use the event to signal a new phase for the government – as part of his ‘plan for change’ – points to how Starmer and his team are trying to turn the page on a torrid start to his premiership.
The Prime Minister is expected to set himself a series of new ambitious targets in a bid to show he is listening to the concerns of ordinary voters. These include cutting NHS waiting lists, reducing crime, improving living standards and boosting early years education. While they are talked up as a development of the five missions Starmer announced in opposition, they are intended to be more precise and tangible to people’s everyday lives.
For example, rather than talking about fastest growth in the G7, Starmer will set out targets to improve living standards. This refocusing is being read to reflect fears that Labour will not secure the fastest growth in the G7 – even if Labour say the target remains. But there is also another factor at play. Government aides have looked at the return of Donald Trump in the States and the way the Democrats lost. Joe Biden could point to a chart showing the American economy was growing, but this wasn’t felt by many voters. This at least part explains the change in language for Labour now.
So, will the shake-up work? Aides in Downing Street believe the whole operation is functioning better since the departure of Sue Gray as chief of staff – but they also know there is a long way to go. Just today, there is more news suggesting consumer and business confidence is down following the Budget, with high street retailers suffering their worst slump in sales since Covid. Then there’s the resignation of Louise Haigh last week over a spent fraud conviction, with questions asked about what Starmer knew and when. Generally speaking, ministers and aides are still getting used to the pressure of government compared with opposition.
It follows that Starmer’s attempt to bring attention back to policy priorities is logical. However, there is a chance that the government machine then focuses on arbitrary targets at the cost of other issues. He also needs to only look back to July this year to see the other risk. These new targets sound a little like Rishi Sunak’s five priorities – even if some of the topics are different, such as clean power in the place of stopping the boats. When Sunak entered Downing Street he set himself a series of targets he said were challenging but that he would achieve to restore trust in politics. It turned out to be much harder than many thought.
Sunak met his target on inflation but fell short on cutting waiting lists and stopping the boats. The five priorities were regularly cited as a way to criticise Sunak for government failure. A strategy that was meant to win back voter trust ended up showing how difficult delivery is inside government. The good news for Starmer is that he has time on his side as he does not need to call an election for several years – but it’s still a plan that comes with risks.
Joe Biden pardons his son Hunter
There are less than 50 days until Donald Trump takes back the White House – so the Democrats are now doing some last-minute future-proofing. In a bombshell announcement overnight, President Biden revealed he has signed a pardon to a victim of a ‘miscarriage of justice’ whose case has been ‘infected’ by ‘raw politics.’ Who is this hapless victim you ask? Why, none other than the President’s own son Hunter Biden. And they call the Trumps nepotistic…
The U-turn comes just weeks after the White House denied that the President would make such a drastic move in the final months of his lame duck presidency. Biden, himself, said as recently as June that he would ‘not pardon’ his son, who was facing sentencing in two criminal cases on federal gun charges and federal tax evasion charges. His spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre even told reporters in July that ‘It’s still a no, it will be a no, it is a no and I don’t have anything else to add. Will he pardon his son? No.’
Yet now Biden Sr. has intervened, declaring that people are ‘almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form’ and that ‘It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.’ In a lengthy 350-word statement, the President raged against ‘several of my political opponents in Congress’ who he claimed made the charges a public spectacle ‘to attack me and oppose my election.’ He added that the plea deal Hunter agreed to with the Department of Justice was a ‘fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases’ but that deal fell through at the last minute under political pressure. Biden ends his letter by insisting:
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough… I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.
So much for ‘no one is above the law‘ eh Joe?
Parliament has fallen
Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its Second Reading in the Commons on Friday, which means that it is considerably more likely than not to end up on the statute book. Normally, when momentous legislation is before the House, the media is full of glowing tributes to the quality of the speeches, and we hear many warm words about MPs rising to the occasion and so forth.
If you read Hansard from even 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 60, the sophistication and rigour of parliamentary argument is quite remarkable
It may be my imagination, but there seems to have been rather less of that this time round. Even the most generous of Westminster observers would have struggled to find much to admire in the speeches given in favour of assisted suicide. Leadbeater simply read out most of her proposition speech, in a flat and monotonous tone, with no verve or style. As a Twitter friend noted, Erskine May – the authoritative guide to every aspect of parliamentary procedure, first published 180 years ago and now in its 25th edition – states that ‘in principle, a Member is not permitted to read a speech’ on the reasonable grounds that ‘debate is more than a series of set speeches prepared beforehand without reference to each other.’ The rule seems to be honoured more in the breach than the observance nowadays. No doubt MPs see precedent and tradition as part of the stuffy old ways that are now being rightly swept aside by tidy-minded modernising reformers.
That disdain for what has gone before arises at least in part from a huge lack of seriousness in our legislators. This has been on full display in the run-up to the vote. Leadbeater and her co-sponsors struggled consistently to give a full and accurate account of what her bill actually contained. They have made misleading claims about how it compares to other assisted suicide laws around the world. They have even taken umbrage at the very idea that there should be a robust and full debate about the proposal. Earlier this month, Leadbeater said that she found it ‘disappointing’ and ‘upsetting’ that members of the cabinet had vocally opposed the bill, which leads inevitably to the thought that MPs who don’t appreciate the cut-and-thrust of principled disagreement might be in the wrong line of work. A few weeks ago, in a Newsnight interview, Christine Jardine waffled and prevaricated in response to questioning about how the provisions of the bill would enable the detection of coercion.
In the Second Reading debate, Stourbridge MP Cat Eccles interrupted Danny Kruger’s excellent speech opposing the bill to complain about his use of the word ‘suicide’, suggesting that it was ‘offensive’. She was quite rightly ignored by the Speaker, but the attempt to police language in such a schoolmarmish manner demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the culture – and indeed the purpose – of the House of Commons.
Then of course there was the Prime Minister’s bizarre assertion at the start of October that the government was making time and space for an assisted suicide debate because he had ‘made a promise to Esther Rantzen before the election’. Whatever he meant by this, to give the impression that the legislative agenda for a government is being set by the wishes of a single celebrity is plain odd. Almost ten million people voted for the Labour party in July – how many of them get personal attention from the PM?
We might note other examples of the lack of thought and weight that legislators have attached to this whole proceeding. Jess Phillips was one of many MPs who dragged out the old chestnut about bodily autonomy, seemingly without having considered any of the nuances or tensions of that position, and admitting at the same time that she wasn’t sure the NHS was able to manage assist suicide in a safe way. Rupert Lowe of Reform based his own vote in favour not on a careful consideration of the issues, but on a straw poll of his constituents in Great Yarmouth. About 1,200 people responded, out of an electorate of 70,000, rather less than 2 per cent.
The Commons as a body failed to give this enormously significant moral and legal change enough time for debate. Second Reading is generally considered to be the main opportunity for debate over the essential principles of a bill, so is generally the only stage at which the Commons can entirely reject legislation. And yet only five hours were available, which meant that members’ speeches were limited to five minutes. It is extremely difficult to set out a sustained, clear and coherent argument about a subject like assisted suicide in five minutes. And only a small minority of members were able to contribute at all. There were dozens of MPs who wished to speak but were not able to do so. By way of comparison, it has been estimated that something like 700 hours of parliamentary time were devoted to discussion of Labour’s ban on foxhunting 20 years ago.
It is all a far cry from some of the great Commons debates of old, which would often continue long into the night. If you read Hansard from even 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 60, the sophistication and rigour of parliamentary argument is quite remarkable, all the more so when you remember that MPs were speaking ex tempore, or with just a few notes. MPs routinely make long, detailed arguments over multiple paragraphs, with long and complex sentences. Biblical and literary allusions are common. There is much more real debate going on, i.e. members are responding to opponents’ arguments with their own rebuttals and refutations, rather than simply re-asserting their own points.
It’s easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles. But it’s hard to deny that the standard of parliamentary discourse has fallen noticeably in recent decades. This is not a mere academic or antiquarian concern. Huge and perhaps irreversible changes to legal principles that have underpinned our civilisation for centuries deserve more and better consideration from our elected representatives.
The National’s latest journalistic triumph
Oh dear. It seems that Scotland’s self-identifying ‘newspaper’ is at it again. On Saturday, the great and the good of Edinburgh gathered to say farewell to Alex Salmond at St Giles’ Cathedral. Among those who assembled at the memorial service was First Minister John Swinney who – unlike his predecessors Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf – at least had the decency to turn up. But his presence there caused something of a stir – as the National was only too quick to point out.
‘The service of Alex Salmond has just started,’ reported reporter Laura Pollock, breathlessly. ‘A dramatic start as John Swinney took his seat, shouts of “traitor” and “shame on you” could be heard from Alba members inside the cathedral.’ Quite the claim, given that Pollock was stood some 35 metres away from St Giles Cathedral’ in the press pool. As attendee Roddy Dunlop pointed out:
There is no doubt that the FM was heckled (outside, by a few people on the pavement) as he left the service. But I heard no shouts within the cathedral, from Alba members or from anyone else… Suggesting that there was is hugely damaging, and detracts from what was, throughout, to my mind, eyes and ears, hugely respectful.
Cue a grovelling apology from Pollock who had to admit ‘An error from false information going around the press pool within the cathedral. We had all mistaken inside for outside and I should’ve verified before posting.’ But that did not stop fellow hack James Cook – the BBC’s Scotland editor – from going full studs up on Pollock by tweeting:
I was with the press pool in the cathedral. I talked to the journalists next to me about texts from colleagues outside re jeering. It is not true to say ‘we had ALL mistaken inside for outside’. At no point did I hear any jeering inside nor did I hear anyone suggest there was any.
Ouch. Taxi for the National eh?
Why Gail’s triumphs
The bakery chain Gail’s, which opened its first branch in Hampstead less than 20 years ago, is reportedly touted for sale by Goldman Sachs with a half billion pound price tag. There are 152 outlets in the UK, all of them in relatively prosperous areas, and it has ambitious plans for expansion. But Gail’s is described as ‘divisive’; its popularity with ‘well-off, middle-class customers in the London suburbs’ being its chief offence against the Zeitgeist.
These days, I mentally calibrate almost all my discretionary spending by trying to think: if I didn’t buy this, how many Gail’s cinnamon buns could I buy with the money instead?
Here is one of those stories that gets what you might call sociological cut-through. For years, the Telegraphnews pages have treated the John Lewis Christmas advert and the Marks & Spencer share price not as business stories but as matters of vital national importance, and so it is with Gail’s. The presence of a Gail’s, data experts have determined, has a strong positive correlation with both house prices and the presence of people who vote Lib Dem. Make of that what you will. I take huge encouragement from this, personally, in an age when the latte-sipping metropolitan liberal elite is blamed for everything that goes wrong, and at the same time described as out of touch and irrelevant. If Gail’s is booming at quite the rate that its valuation suggests, there may be life in us latte-sipping elites yet.
But I’m not here to talk about cultural politics. I’m here to talk about croissants. The reason Gail’s is worth having, and deserves enthusiasm rather than anti-bourgeois sneering, is that – an old-fashioned virtue in a for-profit company, I know – the product is good. Have you tasted a cinnamon bun from Gail’s? Or one of their sublime cheese straws? Or any one of their very expensive sourdough loaves? These are, at least for a high-street chain, best in class by a country mile. As Marie Kondo would say, they spark joy. I would unhesitatingly submit that the world is a better place, and thousands of people’s lives slightly but perceptibly improved every day, for their existence. And they are products that require skill, and decent ingredients, to make.
The same argument applies, I think, to Le Creuset – which was bouncing around the news pages not long ago when a half-price sale in Andover caused the whole of Hampshire’s road transport system to grind to a halt as us latte-sipping plonkers raced to acquire a matching set of orange pans on the cheap. Yes, those casserole dishes are stupidly expensive, no question. There’s a reason that I’ve acquired only two (one new, one second-hand) in my half century on the planet. But the product is good. They are both useful and beautiful and almost indestructible – and good value if you amortise their cost over a lifetime and consider the pleasure they give. (The same isn’t quite true of that other middle-class totem, the Aga; they spark joy inasmuch as they warm your kitchen and your wet socks most pleasingly, but they’re not much use when it comes to actual cooking.)
Is Gail’s overpriced? Maybe it is. I know that when I treat myself, cliché that I am, to a flat white and a cinnamon bun from Gail’s on the way back from a meeting in Muswell Hill, I’m dropping nearly eight quid. The near-equivalent in Greggs (for which I’m also an enthusiast) would be less than half that. In Costa, Starbucks or Caffè Nero the price would be there or thereabouts and the product wretchedly disappointing. But bakeries, even expensive ones, are not in the category of things which are affordable only to the senior managers of hedge-funds or, be it remembered, compulsory to buy from. In a bakery, you can spend a couple of quid extra to upgrade from the mundane to the excellent – as you cannot do in a car showroom, a clothes shop, an estate agent or a full-dress restaurant. That seems to me a bargain. Luxury in the sub-£10 bracket is the dream: it’s luxury that’s available to nearly everyone. Those who respect the price-finding powers of the invisible hand will say that Gail’s pastries cost what they cost because there are enough people, like me, willing to buy them at that price.
Also, you pays your money and you takes your choice. After all, what corporate wallies like to call ‘the retail space’ is full of insane mark-ups and pitifully bad products whose pricing reflects a branding premium rather than a premium in quality – and these are not all middle-class indulgences. The cardboardy popcorn in my local Vue starts at about £6, which must be a mark-up in the thousands of per cent. If you want to buy branded running shoes, or the latest official replica football tops from the team you support, you’re spending a fortune on entirely average tat. Think of the pleasure and satisfaction that money could give you were you to spread it out over a few weeks of visits to Gail’s. These days, I mentally calibrate almost all my discretionary spending by trying to think: if I didn’t buy this, how many Gail’s cinnamon buns could I buy with the money instead? That’s why my jeans have holes in them and my charity-shop jumpers are spackled with cinnamon sugar.
I feel confident, then, in saying that the items Gail’s sells are well priced. Is the business itself worth the £500 million – aka 15 years of adjusted profits – that Goldman Sachs thinks it’s worth? Not being an investment expert or a microeconomist, I couldn’t with any authority say. Trends in global commodity prices, energy tariffs, wage legislation, immigration policy and any number of other factors will be involved. The market, again, will do its work. But whatever it’s worth, it’s worth because of point a, which is that the product is good and that people – not just middle-class plonkers but anyone who’s prepared to spend a bit more on a day-to-day treat – can’t get enough of it. Long live Gail’s.
Is Marine Le Pen ready to bring down Macron?
There is a deadline today in France. It was set by Marine Le Pen last week for Michel Barnier. Show me you’re serious about respecting me and my party, she told the prime minister, or I will bring down your government.
The ultimatum, ostensibly at least, concerns Barnier’s budget for 2025, and the ‘red lines’ that Le Pen demands must not be crossed if she’s to desist from supporting the left’s vote of no confidence.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the French elite never ceases to amaze
There have already been concessions of Barnier’s part, notably his withdrawal last week of a tax on electricity and a promise to reduce state medical aid. Le Pen wants a drastic reduction in this aid, an essential cause for the left, but which her party says is a major pull for migrants.
In fact, Le Pen has been pushed into this confrontation with Barnier by the majority of her 11 million voters, and also a growing number of her 125 MPs. They are worried that the party is being sucked into the centrists’ vortex having strayed to close in their pursuit of ‘respectability’.
A few months ago Le Pen and her MPs were ‘fascists’ and a threat to democracy, the method used by the left and the centre to scare the undecided from casting their vote for the National Rally in July’s legislative election.
Now these same centrists are demanding that Le Pen do the decent thing, for the good of the Republic, and continue to support the government, come what may. To do otherwise would be disloyal and run the risk of seeing a far-left government in power, one controlled by Jean-Luc Melenchon. The mainstream media are also piling in, accusing Le Pen of ‘blackmail’ and ‘irresponsibility’ in her threat to topple the government.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the French elite never ceases to amaze. One minister was quoted as saying if Le Pen did join the left in a vote of no confidence ‘it’s going to be very, very complicated for her afterwards and she’ll have to bear the responsibility for what happens.’
Le Pen’s responsibility is to her voters, not to an elite that are desperate to cling onto power at all costs. And the polls show that two-thirds of Le Pen voters want this government to fall.
As for the fear-mongering about the financial chaos that would follow a vote of no confidence, most Le Pen voters look around and ask: ‘Can things get any worse? Nearly every sector, from agriculture to manufacturing to retail, is in crisis and an avalanche of redundancies are forecast for next year. Furthermore, the extraordinary mismanagement of the country’s economy under Macron has shocked the financial world. ‘The governability of France is being called into question more than I have ever seen in my lifetime,’ Moritz Kraemer, ex-head of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor’s, told the Telegraph last week.
Meanwhile the drug cartels still ply their trade with immunity and judges hand out derisory sentences, like the €600 fine to the man who threatened to ‘burn alive’ a headteacher who had asked a pupil to remove her headscarf.
Ultimately, the ambition of Le Pen and her voters is to get rid of Emmanuel Macron, the man who described them as ‘slackers’, ‘resistant Gauls’ and sneered that there is no such thing as French culture. More and more politicians and commentators have declared in recent days that the only way out of the imbroglio is the president’s resignation.
It is Macron who bears responsibility for the disintegration of France. The day after he called his snap election he was heard boasting to a senior member of the country’s business community: ‘I’ve been preparing this for weeks, and I’m delighted. I’ve thrown my hand grenade at them. Now we’ll see how they get on.’
With remarks like that, who can argue with professor Jean-François Bayart, one of France’s leading political scientists, who described Macron last year as ‘an immature, narcissistic, arrogant child, deaf to others, and somewhat incompetent.’
Macron’s ‘hand grenade’ blew the country apart, and the 11 million men and women who voted for Le Pen’s party see no reason why they should help in the healing process.
As for Le Pen, it is a strategic mistake to believe she will win over the metropolitan bourgeoisie by acting ‘responsibly’ for the sake of the Republic. This demographic will never vote for her party; not of out ideological opposition but because hers is the party of the working-class. Instead, she should focus on appealing to the one third of the electorate who didn’t vote in the legislative election, many of whom have been alienated by the consensual politics this century.
As the historian Philippe Fabry said in the summer, the demonisation of the National Rally ‘is no longer ideological, it’s sociological: for the nobility of the Republic, it’s a question of refusing to allow the people to enter their place of life and power.’
A recent study disclosed that those most opposed to the National Rally are those who been through higher education and live in a city. The author of the report said that in contrast, people voted for Le Pen’s party because of a ‘broader rejection of all the intellectual classes, of the “elites”, and it goes far beyond the political class. It concerns the people who actually live in metropolitan France…it’s a cultural rejection.’
Metropolitan France is in general progressive whereas the provinces are far more traditional.
Having recently moved from Paris to rural Burgundy, I can testify to this: I might as well be living in another country such are the cultural differences.
The disaffection of the people in the provinces of France mirrors that of Americans in the Rust Belt, and that is why Le Pen made a mistake in not celebrating Donald Trump’s recent victory more enthusiastically.
Her voters, like Trump’s, believe that the only way to make the country great again is to drain the swamp.
Are you ready for agentic AI?
It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University, when volunteers were persuaded to electrocute, with increasing and horrible severity, innocent ‘learners’ (actually actors). The experiment revealed that most of us would administer a lethal shock of electricity to an innocent human being, if only told to do so by a man in a white coat with a clipboard.
That battling lawyerly AI may go headfirst into a protracted squabble with your council, turning an £85 speeding ticket into a £3,000 legal bill
And if that sounds sinister, maybe that’s fitting, because the word agentic has been co-opted into the lexicon of artificial intelligence to describe a new form of AI that many will find ominous. Agentic is like ChatGPT4 or Gemini but it also has agency. It can act autonomously. It only needs the vaguest command or a list of intentions, and it will go off and complete relevant tasks, maybe online, maybe somewhere else – making independent decisions on the way. Agentic AI enables the bot to fully interact online as a human would. When tasked to sort a cheap holiday in Barcelona, these AIs won’t simply offer you a list of budget places near the Sagrada Familia; they will actually book a nice Airbnb. Ask agentic AI to ‘find a present for my husband’, and it won’t muse volubly on the various merits of aftershave versus cufflinks; it will take all its knowledge of your family and purchase a perfectly lovely fountain pen.
Such is the profitable potential for agentic AI to simplify our lives that multiple companies, many of them founded six minutes ago, are jumping on the train. From Aether to Bounti to Rabbit, they all promise to take away the hassle of human decision-making and hand it to the machines. Let the bots sort out that birthday party, from the catering to the venue; let the machine fight that parking ticket and gather all the tedious evidence. What’s not to love?
Well, one unlovable thing might be the tendency of AI to hallucinate – the polite term for those occasions when AI makes stuff up or deliberately gets things wrong, rather than do or say nothing. A hallucinating agentic AI may end up buying your husband a fountain rather than a fountain pen. That battling lawyerly AI may go headfirst into a protracted squabble with your council, turning an £85 speeding ticket into a £3,000 legal bill. Not so good.
Indeed, we already have an example of how agentic AI can roil the world in the form of Goatseus Maximus. What follows may feel like it is written in drunken Klingon, but here is the gist of this tale – as much as anyone understands it. Goatseus Maximus is a memecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency underpinned only by internet subculture in-jokes. The idea for this particular memecoin was invented by two AI model talking and joking with each other. The joke was released to the world by one of them, incarnated as an account on Twitter, and a human follower actually created the cryptocurrency. The agentic AI was lent $50,000 by an American software engineer and decided to buy up a load of these coins. It’s now the first AI millionaire that we know of. As I write, this ‘joke’ cryptocurrency has a market value of three-quarters of a billion dollars.
Alternatively, if you’re utterly confused by all this, rest assured you’re not alone – and that is one of the most unsettling aspects of cutting-edge AI, including agentic AI. These bots may get so clever, and autonomous, they will go off and do incredible, successful things, and we won’t understand why or how. And of course, they may also do profoundly destructive things. One place where agentic AI will be obviously powerful – and dangerous – is on the battlefield, because there its power and danger will be expressly required. Already in the Ukraine war we are witnessing the birth not just of AI-powered drones, guns, and vehicles, but the glimmering advent of agentic AI weaponry.
And this makes total sense: an armed AI drone-copter hovering over a Russian tank will gather data faster than any human observer, and if it definitely wants to take out that tank, it needs the capability to decide for itself when to shoot in the next three nanoseconds. Every moment lost by referring to human overseers will be a crucial advantage squandered, so the human element will logically be sacrificed to gain the military benefits.
The same logic goes up the military chain. Consider a general commanding armies in the field. The skill of generalling is knowing, through decades of training and experience, what troops are where, the strength of the enemy in different domains, how supply lines are functioning, and estimating what will happen if division A is moved to forest B. Most of it is applied maths combined with data collection and strategic forethought (Napoleon was brilliant at maths).
However, an AI general will clearly be superior (just as AIs are now much better than humans at those war games on a board – chess and Go). An AI general will be able to draw on near-infinite amounts of data, it will instantly grasp that there are 34,829 physically fit troops that can be moved in 4.7 hours to train station X; it will outclass human generals by orders of magnitude. Therefore, every state, every army, every military, will demand these AI warlords. And for these robot generals to succeed, we will have to make them agentic, so they can devise and execute tactics at mega-speed and thereby triumph.
But what if we task them to win a war, and they decide that to do that they must sacrifice half the citizens at home? Alternatively, what if the agentic AIs end war for good, at least for humans, as it becomes a theoretical battle between thinking machines? It could be wonderful, or it could be hellish, and the uneasy fact is we have no real idea which of these will happen – it is beyond the event horizon. One thing, however, is for sure: we’d better get used to that strange new word: agentic.
Goodbye, Earl’s Court
Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there was fun to be had eavesdropping on conversations littered with ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’.
There are some troubling details: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood and the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed
Older generations will remember earlier waves of immigrants. There were the Polish soldiers who were resettled there after the second world war and set up shops, cafes and clubs. There were also new arrivals from Commonwealth nations, including V.S. Naipaul. His semi-autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival describes a discomfiting stay in a down at heel Earl’s Court guest house in 1950, surrounded by ‘drifters from many countries of Europe and North Africa’.
Others might remember visiting the Ideal Home Exhibition, which astonished postwar Britain by showing off the first fitted kitchens, vacuum cleaners and teasmades, or the annual Motor Show, which ran from 1903 to 2008. The Art Deco exhibition centre built in 1937 also became a landmark of the British music scene – during the 1970s you could have caught the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie or Queen performing.
Things were going rather well for this busy, affordable and slightly seedy part of west London until the start of the 21st century. The exhibition centre, sinking amid a sea of competition from more modern venues, was bulldozed in 2014. Its former owner, Capital & Counties Properties (Capco), tried and failed to bring forward a redevelopment plan. The exhibition centre site – more than 40 acres of prime development land in the heart of London – has lain empty ever since.
‘When we had the exhibition centre it provided employment, and it was also an identifiable building which was known the world over,’ says councillor Linda Wade, chair of the Save Earl’s Court campaign which fought against Capco’s redevelopment plan. ‘It gave the area a sense of identity. The high street was vibrant. Then we had the closure and the demise of businesses and hotels. We had dust and dirt. Then the empty years. The Earl’s Court Road is in decline, primarily because of the closure of the exhibition centre.’
This year a new £10 billion redevelopment plan was put forward by the Earl’s Court Development Company (ECDC), the site’s new owner and a joint venture between a Dutch pension fund, a British developer and Transport for London, which owns some of the land involved. The scale of the plot makes it the biggest single site left to redevelop in such close proximity to central London.
The ECDC proposes 4,000 new homes, around a third of which will be affordable and aimed at local people, in high-rise buildings of varying stature. There will be student digs and homes for the elderly, three cultural venues, a park on a deck over the West London Line, around 100 new shops, bars and restaurants, and almost three million square feet of workspace.
ECDC certainly seems to mean business. A spokeswoman says that, subject to planning permission, work would start in 2026, with the first residents moving in from 2030. It claims the development will restore Earl’s Court to its position on the world stage: a clean, green provider of new homes, jobs and wealth. ‘After years of being empty, the proposed development will reinstate Earl’s Court on London’s cultural map… bringing homes, jobs, entertainment and leisure to a place which was once a core part of London’s economic and cultural scene,’ the spokeswoman says.
But there are problems with this vision. First, of course, is the question of who will buy the two-thirds of homes on the site which don’t fall into the ‘affordable’ category. Given local land values, coupled with the premium charged for new builds, the answer is very simple: only the wealthy. The exhibition centre’s former car park to the south of Lillie Road has already been redeveloped into a residential complex called Lillie Square. One-bedroom flats are on sale for £695,000, and two-bedroom homes from £1.775 million.
‘We recognise the challenges faced by high house prices in London and are also looking at the opportunity for innovative forms of housing models which can address the “squeezed middle” in places such as Earl’s Court,’ says the ECDC spokeswoman.
In recent weeks Wade has been poring over the 600-plus documents, reports and drawings submitted by the ECDC in support of its plan. The sheer volume of paperwork strikes her as undemocratic. Who has time to parse that much information and come up with a credible response within a strict time limit?
Already there are many details that trouble her: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood, architecture she considers ‘indifferent’, the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed, and impact on already overcrowded local Tube and train stations.
She is unhappy the council won’t be able to put any of its tenants into the privately operated housing for older people, despite a huge need for senior-friendly homes locally. Given the impact the loss of the exhibition centre has had on Earl’s Court Road, with its empty shops and fast-food stores, she would particularly like to see better links to the development site which is sequestered on an island between railway lines. ‘I can see no real, active, positive engagement to make sure the Earl’s Court Road actually benefits,’ she says.
Certainly, visually, there is nothing about the ECDC’s plans which seems unique or special. With a blank canvas to play with one could have hoped for more than a public piazza featuring a large stepped seating area just like King’s Cross’s Granary Square. And the way the new buildings are clustered closely together mirrors the way new apartment buildings have built in a ripple around Battersea Power Station.
The ECDC says it has put together a cultural strategy for its three new venues which will reflect Earl’s Court’s storied history, and points out that some 4,000 new homes will go a long way toward meeting the government’s housing delivery targets in west London. ‘Our commitment is to deliver beautiful, well-designed and sustainable buildings of the highest quality,’ says the spokeswoman.
But Wade is unconvinced. ‘The question is, should urban planning be defined by developers or by local need?’ she says. ‘That is my concern with all of these targets. It is advantageous for developers but not necessarily for local people.’