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Ridiculously enjoyable: Doom – The Dark Ages reviewed
Grade: A
In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether.
The original Doom (1993) really was the genesis of a genre: dark, intense, relentless, addictive. The latest iteration of the game – which plunks our space marine and his demon hordes in a medieval world rather than a space station – stays true to its vibe, while using all the processing grunt available in next-gen consoles to tune that vibe up. You’re still chasing a blue keycard to open that door, still strafing frantically to avoid incoming fireballs, still grunting and panting as the screen throbs red at low health, still mowing down uglies in their hecatombs. The big innovation: Doomguy now has a shield. You can shield-charge distant enemies, throw it like Captain America, bounce incoming projectiles back to source – and, yes, if you must, use it to block attacks. But it doesn’t make the game defensive. When you’re on the verge of dying, baddies drop more health boosts, so the way to stay alive is… to attack more aggressively. And melee-strikes reward more ammo, so you’re further incentivised to get up close and personal. There are so many demons. Even on easy mode (‘Hurt Me Plenty’) it’s frenetic; and the gameplay is rich without being overcomplicated. It’s just ridiculously enjoyable. Welcome back, Doomguy.
Provocative, verbose and humourless: Mrs Warren’s Profession reviewed
George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw’s characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world of high finance straight out of university? Hard to say. But for Shaw it seems feasible, so we accept it.
However, Vivie’s life is about to be thrown into disarray. Enter Mrs Warren, her redoubtable mother, played by Imelda Staunton. Kitty Warren speaks and thinks exactly like her daughter but she affects a more luxurious personal style. Her ash-blonde hair is piled high on her head and she’s magnificently robed in a costly ball gown accented with necklaces and other pieces of finery. She looks like the tsarina being led to her execution by the Bolsheviks. But her accent carries inflections of a rough past.
We learn that Kitty rose from the gutter to become a wealthy businesswoman and the details of her past are slowly revealed during Act One. She began as a barmaid at Waterloo Station where she earned four shillings (£20 today) a week. Then she was spotted by a female relative who worked as a courtesan and recruited Kitty to the business. Kitty prospered and opened a chain of private hotels in Ostend, Vienna, and other cities across Europe. Meanwhile her daughter was privately educated in England but she knew nothing of her mother’s career. When Vivie learns the truth she reacts with forgiveness. Good for her. Then another bombshell lands. Kitty’s international business is still in operation and Vivie receives a monthly dividend from the profits. Horrified, she demands a reckoning.
The production, directed by Dominic Cooke, is dominated by Shaw’s verbose and stupefyingly clever prose. The script is not overburdened with jokes. ‘Women have to pretend to feel a good deal that they don’t feel,’ says Kitty, which raises a modest laugh. Staunton turns in a decent performance during the first half. In Act Two she’s let down by Shaw’s habit of creating characters from opinions and attitudes rather than emotions and instincts. Kitty makes a monumental speech asserting her maternal ‘rights’ to Vivie’s love but she sounds like an expert witness at a custody hearing. The story ends abruptly without a proper resolution. The big selling-point of the show is the casting of Staunton opposite her biological daughter, Bessie Carter, as Vivie. Perhaps the plan was to add layers of emotional depth to the story but the experiment doesn’t work because the Vivie-Kitty relationship is based on distance and alienation, not on love and propinquity.
Chloe Lamford’s elegant designs would probably have impressed Shaw. The first act is set in a luxuriant circular garden, like a putting green, arranged with elegant seats and gorgeous flower beds bursting into bloom. Everything is sensuous, vibrant and life-affirming. Act Two overturns this colour palette and takes us into Vivie’s cheerless office in Chancery Lane. She perches at a plain desk in a circular space without any drapery or carpets. The bleak walls are painted a uniform flat grey – the colour of rainless winter skies. The contrast between goodness and greed couldn’t be starker.
Outpatient is a monologue with a weirdly contrived premise. Olive is a freelance journalist who receives a commission to interview terminally ill patients. On a routine visit to the GP she learns that her liver has an abnormality that may be fatal. Then again, it may not.
Olive turns to Google for advice, despite her doctor’s warnings to the contrary, and she learns that her death is almost certainly imminent. Instead of making her feel depressed, she finds the news electrifying and she starts to live her life at 100 miles an hour. She goes on a shoplifting spree and ‘bodyslams’ her way through the ticket barriers on the Tube. At home she breaks the bad news to her girlfriend and they agree to cancel their wedding. Olive befriends a terminally ill patient who needs a lover to sweeten her final days. Olive obliges. This gloomy material is staged with brilliant wit and humour by Harriet Madeley. She has a film star’s knack of turning a little detail into a massively successful joke.
The show feels like a 60-minute pitch for a movie that could become a cult hit. As for the ending, it’s as contrived as the opening. Somehow Madeley gets away with it.
In praise of Michael O’Leary
NatWest has returned to full private-sector ownership 17 years after the £46 billion bailout that took it into state hands – and five years after the name swap which reduced the once globally trumpeted Royal Bank of Scotland to a humble north-of-the-border branch network, while promoting its English subsidiary NatWest to become the parent brand. RBS shareholders who were almost wiped out but hung on to what are now NatWest certificates have seen their shares triple in value since 2023, finally surpassing the bailout price.
HM Treasury took a £10.5 billion loss on the whole rescue exercise, which required a decade-long series of placements and buybacks to filter the taxpayers’ 84 per cent holding back into the market as the bank’s performance gradually recovered. But few would argue it was badly managed or wrong in the first place.
Fred Goodwin’s RBS, crippled by his hubristic bid for the Dutch group ABN Amro on top of a balance-sheet full of toxic debt, fully deserved to fail. But its customers did not deserve to lose their deposits and livelihoods, and when chancellor Alistair Darling received a call from Goodwin’s chairman Sir Tom McKillop on 7 October 2008 telling him RBS would fail the next day, Darling had to set aside any consideration of moral hazard and step in: chaos would have ensued if he hadn’t.
The workaday NatWest – which never had a coherent strategy for the era of globalised banking that died with that phone call – has survived, despite a continuing tide of branch closures, as a relatively trusted high-street brand. I’m pleased to see chairman Rick Haythornthwaite talking about a ‘simpler, safer’ bank with a ‘UK-focused business model’.
But readers of this column over many years know that financiers with short memories are doomed to repeat their predecessors’ mistakes. So I hope NatWest’s top team, none of whom was anywhere near the top in 2008, will ignore the Financial Times’s advice that this belated return to Go on the Monopoly board of banking fate allows them ‘to adopt more aggressive strategies’ and ‘spend surplus cash more imaginatively’. Don’t even think about it.
Because he’s worth it
Radio 4’s newsreader adopted a special tone for Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary’s €100 million bonus: ‘I may not know what a share option is,’ her voice seemed to signal, ‘but this sounds like the sort of boardroom greed that should never sully my script.’ Or perhaps she was just secretly wishing the BBC offered such golden incentives. Either way, the opportunity was missed to add words of congratulation – because this is a rare example of a corporate bonanza that’s fully deserved.
Controversially agreed by shareholders in 2019 and now triggered by a strong run in Ryanair’s share price, O’Leary’s option package salutes a chief who has set an example to the rest of Europe for cartel-busting market disruption, operational efficiency and resilience in the face of economic swings, all combined with a wicked sense of humour. Passengers whinge at the charmless service, but 200 million chose Ryanair last year.
In post for three decades but still only 64, O’Leary won’t collect his treasure until 2028, when it could be worth less if the shares don’t hold up and he’ll part with a big chunk of it in tax. He’s never taken a romantic view of his mission (‘An aeroplane is nothing more than a bus with wings’) but let’s hope the award doesn’t make him rich enough to want to retire to his racehorses and cattle. The aviation industry really wouldn’t be the same without him.
Down the drain
KKR, the scary US private equity giant mentioned here recently as a potential investor in GP surgeries, has abandoned plans to take a stake in another vital piece of our infrastructure, namely Thames Water. This long-troubled utility is sinking under £20 billion of debt as its chairman, Sir Adrian Montague, witters on about ‘a sustainable recapitalisation… in the best interests of all stakeholders’, by which he means a painful haircut for bondholders and other creditors. Meanwhile, his managers continue to collect huge fines for sewage spills and it’s a wonder water still flows from the taps of 16 million customers in London and the south-east – that being the essential simple function of a privatised business brought low by financial machinations designed to outflank an ill-designed regulatory regime.
We should always be wary of interventions that enlarge the economic footprint of the state (see my comments last week on Labour’s Great British Railways) but in Thames’s case a ‘special administration’ regime of temporary nationalisation is surely now inevitable – and the sooner the better, so we can all stop talking about it.
Dine at home
One in three hospitality businesses is losing money, according to a new survey – three times as many as were doing so before the Chancellor loaded them with an additional £3.4 billion of employers’ NIC costs. ‘This is an industry that employs 3.5 million people and sits at the heart of every community,’ says Rooney Anand, whose RedCat venture owns 100 pubs, ‘but government just isn’t listening.’
The micro-reality of the sector’s crisis is made vivid by an owner who tells me his pub used to make £100,000 annual profit and now loses the same, so he’s converting it into flats. As it happens, we’re talking over dinner at another friend’s home, cooked by a local restaurant équipe for cash on their night off. Each guest contributed and several brought wine from their cellars – ending with an ambrosial drop of Château d’Yquem 1996. Satisfaction all round and a value formula I heartily recommend. But perish the thought that I’m encouraging what we might politely call the informal economy: it’s Rachel Reeves herself who’s doing that.
Letters: Pride has taken a nasty turn
Lionel is right
Sir: Gareth Roberts’s piece (‘End of the rainbow’, 31 May) gave me pause to reflect. It’s not that Pride has become irrelevant; after all, same-gender relationships are still criminalised in 64 countries – and in eight of those the death penalty is applicable. Rather, since the pandemic, it seems to have taken a rather nasty and unpleasant turn, with those dissenting from whatever ludicrous party line happens to be in vogue routinely heckled and vilified.
Placards emblazoned with slogans such as ‘If you see a Terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] then smash them in the face’ are often to be spotted on Pride marches. Those producing such placards seem to forget that it was the first- and second-wave feminists (as well as early LGBT activists) who’ve brought us to the relatively benign state of affairs we now enjoy – in this country at least.
As Lionel Shriver pointed out elsewhere in the issue (‘The war on normal’), it’s curious, if not downright laughable, how these and other such revolutions manage to eat themselves in the end.
Bernard Jennings
London SE11
Lionel is wrong
Sir: Lionel Shriver does precisely what she accuses gay people of doing. She reduces relationships to mere sex and then equates sex with only reproduction (or lack of it). Does she not know that both ‘heteronormative’ and homosexual people have sex for pleasure? Most sexual activity in the world is for this hedonistic purpose, not reproduction. She also repeats the fallacy that homosexual couples cannot reproduce. I can assure her they can, if not with each other, and play their part in advancing human evolution.
More than this, they value relationships, from which they derive companionship, affection, fulfilment and yes, intimacy, just as much as their heteronormative counterparts. Why Ms Shriver thinks gay people are any different in this respect is a mystery.
Neil Robinson
Carlisle, Cumbria
Hold your horses
Sir: Nick Timothy makes many valid points, (‘Backing the wrong horse’, 31 May), but in my opinion uses the wrong example of the lucrative Queen Anne Stakes at Ascot to reinforce his point about the low prize money in British horse racing compared with Dubai or Hong Kong. Instead, I believe attention should be drawn to the more typical racecourses, where prize money verges on the pathetic when set against the cost of owning and training a horse. I was at Redcar on Bank Holiday Monday and the first race had five horses entered that each cost between £30,000 and £36,000, with the winning owners receiving £3,414. In the main race – the Zetland Gold Cup, with all its wonderful history – the winning owner, trainer and jockey got £20,000 less in 2025 than in 2003. These examples are no reflection on the friendly Redcar, because it’s a similar story in most other UK courses. As underlined in Mr Timothy’s article, any regulations that make this already worrying situation worse must therefore be resisted.
Michael Dixon
Sunderland, Tyne and Wear
State of the art
Sir: Richard Morris laments the inaccessibility of much of the country’s public art (‘Hanging offence’, 31 May). Some years ago, the Public Catalogue Foundation embarked on a gallant initiative to record all the oil paintings held by public collections and published a series of excellent catalogues, county by county. This has subsequently morphed into the online Art UK, whose website shows more than 600,000 works held by galleries, universities and institutions as diverse as the National Trust and the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol. Indeed, a perusal of Ipswich Borough Council’s collection will reveal the Beckers and Squirrells Mr Morris admires. This excellent charity has extended its feat to sculpture and watercolours. Everyone should look up what’s in their area: they may be in for a pleasant surprise.
Sarah Drury
Devizes, Wiltshire
SAS distress call
Sir: Richard Williams, in his defence of the SAS (‘May the force be with us’, 24 May), says that ‘our Special Forces are globally respected’. This may be so, but the ways in which some ex-members conduct themselves dishonours these ‘valiant soldiers’. The flood of sensational books, films and TV series by former SAS soldiers damages the regiment’s reputation for reticence and anonymity. SAS soldiers should disappear seamlessly into civilian life once their military days are over. Disciplinary matters should also be handled without degrading investigations being carried out in public. Discretion is as important as valour.
Michael Cullup
Norwich
To a tea
Sir: I agree with Charles Moore (Notes, 31 May) that asking for Indian tea often elicits blank looks these days. To avoid being landed with the ubiquitous, and not very enticing, English Breakfast tea, for many years now I have always just specified Darjeeling, which seems to have better ‘brand recognition’, as the marketeers would say.
David Engel
West Hoathly, West Sussex
The joy of tpyso
Sir: Christopher Howse on typos (Notes on, 24 May) reminded me of a rather wonderful example in the Cornish & Devon Post some years ago. In the small ads section I noticed: ‘Wooden animal hutch for sale – would suit guinea pigs or small rabbi.’
Anthony Black
Launceston, Cornwall
Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk
What history doesn’t tell us
Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The trouble with history is that it is topiary. History is what’s left after the unwanted foliage has been clipped and cleared away. The topiary birds, pigs and pyramids are just yew bushes minus the clippings, these forms having emerged from the topiarist’s shears. Your yew-based pig is a product of selective disposal, even down to its curly tail.
Likewise with a historian’s shears. The raw material may be facts (in the words of the 19th-century German historiographer Leopold von Ranke, ‘what actually happened’) but the history book’s account, the shape and meaning we give to an era, relies as much on the happenings we choose to discard as on those we decide to notice. In like manner, Ancient Greek astronomers conjured up fantastical constellations by topiarising the stars.
Such thoughts teased me as we walked around the Centre d’histoire de la Résistance in Lyon last week. I do recommend a visit both to this chilling museum dedicated to the Free French resistance during the Vichy years, and to Lyon itself.
If your only brush with the city is (as mine had been) a complex motorway bypass to avoid it, then Lyon will come as a revelation. Situated on and to each side of the peninsula formed by the confluence of two great navigable rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, Lyon surpasses Paris (in my view) in its ambience, squares, promenades, boulevards and architecture from every era since the city was established by the Romans as one of their hubs of empire.
The climate is mild and the atmosphere warm: classy restaurants and cool bars spill out on to tree-lined pavements. In an age when something in Paris has gone rancid, Lyon remains full of flavour. On a train trip to Spain we had decided to break our journey there for a night and explore.
Museum-bashing is not my habit, but the courage of this hotbed of the French Resistance and the horror of the deportation of Lyon’s Jewish population lends the museum sharp focus. Impossible to sum up in a few paragraphs, but the huge collection of images, explanations, re-created rooms and even recorded sounds transport the visitor back into a terrifying time. Through sepia-tinted photographs and the accounts of Jews dragged off to an awful fate, something of the malign spirit of the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, hangs in the air.
Sharp focus, as I say. But something troubled me. Something was missing. How had all this felt to that overwhelming majority of citizens who were not clandestine freedom fighters, Nazis or Vichy administrators, and who were not Jews? What access have we to their daily thoughts, hopes, fears and prayers? How much did they know, or want to know, or care, about what was arguably a terrorist campaign (though one we admire) by the Resistance? Whose side – if any – were they actually on?
The meaning we give to an era relies as much on what we choose to discard as what we decide to notice
Or is this not even a useful question, when the routine of hundreds of thousands of citizens may have been so far from what we are pleased to call the ‘news’ of the day? Perhaps for them such news was a distant thing: the daily grind and the impacts upon their own everyday interests being what was close-up, real, central; and the ‘history’ they were living through only peripheral.
These were questions that, not weeks before, had been prompted in my mind when I asked a splendidly competent Ukrainian lady managing a café in an English village how she assessed the situation in her country. I’d thought to get her views on the various impasses between Zelensky, Trump and Putin, the insolence of Vance, and her feelings on the shape of any possible peace deal. But all these were far from her thoughts. Instead she told me of her hopes that some of her family might be able to come here, and her uncertainties about the current arrangements for Ukrainian refugees already in Britain. War and politics were just the wallpaper to her life.
Yet in that very shrug, wider insights may be seen. Popular sentiment, even popular apathy, the question of what the populace will bear, may by a million small channels filter upwards, finally influencing the shape of big ‘historic’ decisions.
What access, then, will the future have to the present’s minor vexations and fixations, the present’s ignorance, the present’s unconcern? Any pollster’s biggest problem is the issue of ‘salience’: not ‘What do they think?’ but ‘How important is it to them?’ Of course AI may offer future historians access to a billion emails – but there’s much we don’t put into emails. Or a billion WhatsApps – but when do we mean it and when are we just going through the motions?
So much that matters is not discoverable through the measurement of frequency or assurances of sincerity. There’s a magnificent church on every corner in Lyon, and the city’s cathedral is a monumental masterpiece, but did those who designed, financed or built these boasts in stained glass and stone really believe the scriptural assurances to which they gave architectural expression? Or did they just like building cathedrals?
Through the lens of history we’re afforded glimpses of great events as we might view the painting of some majestic galleon, her sails puffed tight in a stiff breeze. We can see there was a wind. But we cannot see, cannot feel, cannot test the wind. From history we see when there was movement or inertia. But we cannot feel for ourselves what drove change or paralysis. How often have we nodded intelligently to scholarly accounts of the reasons for the first world war but, asked later to explain, grasped hopelessly for anything one could get a grip on? There were winds we cannot see.
Von Ranke was closer to the mark when he wrote (of the past) that most people and governments are not blind or ignorant, but ‘some impulse within them’ propels them forward: ‘Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.’ They were blown there, yet we cannot see the wind.
Why I burnt the Quran
My name is Hamit Coskun and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence. My ‘crime’? Burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Moments later, I was attacked in full view of the street by a man. I was hospitalised. Then I was arrested.
Some may say that book-burning is a poor substitute for reasoned debate. I would counter that it was a symbolic, non-violent form of expression intended to draw attention to the ongoing move from the secularism of my country of birth to a regime which embraces hardline Islam.
As I told Westminster Magistrates’ Court, what I did constituted political protest and the law, as I understood it, was on my side. CPS guidance makes clear that legitimate protest can be offensive and on occasion must be, if it is to be effective. In that spirit, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects not just polite speech but speech that offends, shocks or disturbs. Political expression, above all, is meant to enjoy the strongest protection.
Alas, the judge ruled otherwise. And the reasoning deployed to convict me raises troubling questions, not only about the scope of public order law but about whether Britain is witnessing the quiet return of blasphemy laws.
Although the man who assaulted me is being prosecuted separately, the Crown says his action helped to prove my guilt. It argued that because I was attacked, my behaviour must not have been peaceful. Under this logic, ‘disorderly’ no longer depends on conduct, but on how offended or aggressive someone else chooses to be in response.
Neither was this the only inversion of logic the prosecution relied on. It insisted this was not a political protest. Yes, I had told police I was protesting against President Erdogan’s government, which has made Turkey a base for radical Islamists while trying to create a sharia regime. Yes, I had written on social media beforehand that I would burn a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate. Yes, I said in interview that I was criticising a political ideology, not Muslims as a group. But all of this, the Crown claimed, was a ‘convenient shield’, something I had fabricated to conceal my hostility towards Muslims.
The judge in the case accepted that argument, concluding that my actions were ‘motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion’.
If every protest against Islam is redefined as hatred of believers then space for lawful criticism collapses
This lies at the heart of the matter, and is key to the danger of the precedent set. If every protest against Islam is presumed to be a protest against Muslims, if criticism of doctrine is redefined as hatred of believers, then space for lawful criticism of that religion – or any religion – collapses. My case turned on that blurring of categories.
Why did the judge reject my stated motive of criticising political Islam, rather than all Muslims? Because he accepted the prosecution’s argument that I hadn’t shouted ‘Erdogan’ often enough while the first of two assailants launched an attack outside the consulate. At what point, exactly, would the Crown Prosecution Service have preferred me to launch into an explanation of the slow erosion of Kemalist secularism in the republic founded by Ataturk, in the language of my assailants, which I could not speak? While the second was chasing me? Spitting at me? Or while he was kicking me as I lay on the ground?
So let me do now what I evidently failed to do at the time. Let me set out what brought me to that pavement. Let me explain what I would have said to my attacker, if I’d had more time and a little less adrenaline.
There was a period when Turkey was secular. Imperfectly, yes, but enough to allow people like my parents to live with some dignity. My mother, whose grandmother was killed during the 1915 deportations from the eastern provinces, was Armenian. My father was Kurdish. Neither was religious and I was raised to think freely and to question authority. For a while, that was possible.
In those years, especially during the 1980s, power was still contested. The military cast a long shadow over public life, but civilian governments held office, parties competed in elections and Kemalist secularism, though often used repressively, remained the organising principle of the state. Islam was present, of course – it always is in Turkey – but it remained largely in the background. For secular families like mine, it was still possible to believe in the republic’s founding ideals.
As a young man, I joined the People’s Labour party (PLP), a legal, left-wing party committed to democratic reform. In 1993, I was arrested for being a member and tortured while in detention. More than a thousand others were swept up in the same wave of repression. My brother, who was also politically active, was murdered in 1997. When I was eventually released from prison in 2002, I continued to speak out, though it felt like only a dwindling few still had the courage to do so. I left the PLP, disillusioned by its refusal to confront political Islam. The murder of the atheist writer Turan Dursun and the assassination by car-bomb of the secular journalist Ugur Mumcu had already convinced me that the space for dissent in Turkey was shrinking fast.
By the mid-1990s, the Welfare party had risen to power on an overtly Islamist platform, and its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, briefly served as prime minister. His protégé, a young charismatic mayor of Istanbul named Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was already laying the foundations for something far more enduring. The army forced Erbakan from office in 1997, but the movement didn’t disappear. It regrouped under a new name – younger, slicker, more pragmatic. Even before the electoral triumph of Erdogan’s AKP in 2002, the old secular order was under strain from a rising religious conservatism rooted in the provinces and rural heartlands.
The country I had grown up in was disappearing. Erdogan’s rise to power brought with it a new political theology. Islamist groups were tolerated, even encouraged. The education system was transformed: science and evolution pushed aside, religious dogma promoted, children funnelled into Quran schools and religious orders. I saw reports of senior figures from Hamas visiting Turkey, welcomed, protected, housed in government buildings. Police officers no longer served the law but the faith. I was detained again and a plainclothes officer told me that if I returned to prison, I would not come out alive. There was something about the way he put a gun to my head as he spoke that made me believe him.
After that, the decision made itself. In 2022, I claimed asylum in Britain. Why here? Because I believed it was a country where an atheist refugee could speak without fear. That belief brought me to the gates of the Turkish consulate on 13 February.
Had I known that challenging the Islamist propaganda which destroyed the country I grew up in could lead to prosecution, I might have thought twice about coming. But I am here now. And I will not remain silent.
The Free Speech Union funded my defence and stands ready to provide any assistance needed to get this judgment overturned. Because this is no longer just about me. It is about whether Britain still believes that no religion is beyond criticism, especially when it shapes public life and political power. That was the principle I was imprisoned for defending in Turkey and it was the principle I was defending outside the Turkish consulate. I have no intention of abandoning that fight.
How often do volcanoes erupt?
Under control
UK air space is to be reorganised – the first wholesale change since the 1950s – to improve flight times and reduce delays. It was Britain that pioneered air traffic control with the world’s first control tower – a timber shed on a platform 15ft above the ground – at Croydon Aerodrome in 1920. The tower was given responsibility for all aircraft airborne, with which it had basic radio connections. From 1928, control centres in Norfolk and Kent allowed radio signals to be ‘triangulated’ for the first time, allowing the position of an aircraft to be determined even if the pilot was lost.
Battle ready
The government seemed to downgrade its target to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence to an ‘aspiration’. Who spends the most, and least, on defence as a percentage of GDP in 2023 (or latest figures)?
MOST
Ukraine 36.7
Eritrea 20.9
Libya 15.5
Lebanon 8.9
Algeria 8.2
Saudi Arabia 7.1
LEAST
Haiti 0.1
Ireland 0.2
Zimbabwe 0.2
Papua New Guinea 0.3
Ghana 0.4
Guatemala 0.4
World Bank
Hot stuff
Tourists were nearly caught in an eruption of Mount Etna on Sicily. How often do volcanoes erupt?
– There are 47 volcanoes worldwide considered to be in a state of eruption.
– 54 have so far erupted this year.
– 65 erupted over the course of 2024.
– 333 volcanoes are recorded as having erupted since 1960, many multiple times.
– 528 have erupted since 1800.
– The average number which have erupted a year since 2010 is 80.
Global Volcanism Program, Smithsonian Institute
Force fields
How much land does the MoD own?
– On 1 April this year, it owned 230,800 hectares of land and foreshore, 0.9% of the total surface area of Britain.
– It held rights over a further 110,600 hectares, 0.5% of the UK land area.
– The land is broken down as: training (76%); R&D (10.5%); airfields (4.4%); barracks/camps (3.8%); and storage/supply depots (2%).
No, I’m not a British spy
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday. He and the other 12 new communicants looked angelic in their white robes. They all had impressive wooden crosses hanging from their necks and the five girls had wreaths of tiny flowers in their jet-black hair. Once Don Mauro had finished dispensing the Body of Christ, the bells peeled as if a wedding had taken place. There followed a pleasant open-air lunch by the sea and I wondered: ‘Is it better to live in Italy or Britain?’
Certainly, society is less fractured here. The weather is more helpful to both body and soul and the food is effortlessly superior, despite all the delusional British bragging about the amazing results of fancy fusion.
Italy, yes, is a great place to live – but it’s an awful place to work. Employers avoid proper contracts at all costs as that would mean shelling out on ‘extras’ such as tax and national insurance and paying a living wage. Last summer, the Venezuelan woman in charge of the restaurant by the beach where our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, was a waitress failed to cough up the pittance she’d agreed to pay. But Magdalena and her mother, Carla, were too timid to cause a scene.
‘Basta!’ I bellowed manfully. ‘Your mentality is why the Mafia exists.’ Risking not just the wrath of Carla but a heart attack, I stormed off to confront the Venezuelan myself with Magdalena in tow. I told the woman that the wages she owed my daughter were anyway those of a slave and that her sister, a lawyer, would be interested. In addition, I told her that I was a member of His Majesty’s Press, as she could see from the word ‘PRESS’ on the inside of my Land Rover Defender’s windscreen. She disappeared and after five minutes came back and contemptuously threw down some bank notes she’d crumpled into a ball.
‘Papa,’ said Magdalena once we were back in the Defender. ‘You were brilliant!’ For once, I felt like a proper father. But such tales are small beer compared to some of the things I have had to go through workwise.
Italy’s notoriously slow, incompetent and unjust judicial system has effectively made it impossible for me to work legally in Italy, thanks to someone I shall refer to as Aldo X. The other day, yet another surreal legal document arrived from Signor X who in 2018 somehow managed in my absence to get a court judgment against me for €50,000, which I am for some unfathomable reason unable to challenge even though I do not owe him this money. Every time I earn something in Italy, if he gets to find out, he seizes it.
In this latest legal action to get ‘his’ money, Signor X is trying with no evidence to prove that our house which is owned by my wife is in fact half mine. To help him in his mission, he has decided I am not really a member of His Majesty’s Press but in fact of His Majesty’s Secret Service.
Italy is a great place to live – but an awful place to work. Employers do all they can to avoid proper contracts
In his view, this is relevant as he is insinuating the judges are biased in my favour because I am a British spy. So he is demanding that those judges call me to swear on oath, in the affirmative or negative, about a series of statements such as: ‘I swear and in swearing confirm that I am an external resource of MI6, and I was sent to Italy to write about Benito Mussolini.’ I also have to accept or reject on oath that I was sent to Italy to deny the truth that Britain caused the rise and fall of fascism and assassinated Mussolini on Lake Como in 1945 – and whether MI6 pays me ‘£2,500/3,000 a month via transversal means’.
None of this seems relevant to the trial, let alone to reality, but that doesn’t seem to worry the judges who just let it all grind on. In the latest case, Signor X lost the original trial and this is the appeal which may end this year but then again may not. Even if it does, he can appeal again.
The cancerous saga began in 2005 when Signor X, a lawyer, offered to defend me in criminal and civil libel trials I faced after I called someone a traitor to the West. Signor X said he’d do it for free because he ‘admired’ my journalism. I was quite famous in Italy at the time because with Boris I’d interviewed Silvio Berlusconi for this magazine – with results that caused headlines for a couple of weeks and the media tycoon’s government to wobble for 15 minutes.
Stupidly, I agreed to allow Signor X to defend me, though I replaced him after the first criminal and civil trials (which I lost) as he seemed more interested in plugging his conspiracy theories than defending me.
Just in case, I kept a 2006 fax in which, at my request, he had confirmed: ‘Between us there will be an agreement “quota lite”… if the outcome in the case were to be negative, it will mean that I will have worked gratis.’ But I never got the chance to use the fax because I didn’t find out about the 2018 case at which he got judgment against me for fees I did not owe until it was over. Incredibly, under Italian law I had no grounds for appeal. All I can do is try to fend off his relentless legal assaults on my life.
Meanwhile, the three hens we have just got for our children have laid their first eggs. They only cost €5 each and I’ve ordered four more. We will have to keep them safe though, not just from Signor X but also from the wolves that we sometimes hear howling at night near the Martello tower.
Hell is a speed awareness course
The builder boyfriend sat nervously in front of my laptop as I logged him in to do his speed awareness course.
I sat him at the kitchen table, I clicked the link the speed course people sent him and then, as we waited for them to admit him, I began my pep talk: ‘Do not say anything political. Do not joke. Joking is the worst thing you could possibly do.’ I had already decided this was going to end badly.
How could the builder boyfriend button his lip long enough to get through a three-hour online speed awareness course – the result of a trip to the UK to do a roofing job – without being reported to the police for coming out with something you are not allowed to say any more?
How could he manage to have some po-faced, overpaid functionary lecture him about the non-crime he had committed – driving at 32mph – without eventually bursting with the anger of the righteous working man and telling the merciless technocrats who still manage to rule us, even though we have moved to West Cork, what he thinks of them?
He would be speaking for millions if he did give them a piece of his mind. But the whole object of this course being to avoid points and higher insurance, I urged him to remain focused on affecting compliance, no matter how preposterous things got.
The poor chap looked wretched, sitting in front of a conference-calling software program he doesn’t understand with a screwed up half-packet of cough sweets, a cup of instant coffee, an old pen hardly working and a scrap of paper he’d pulled out of his work jeans pocket to write on. How dare they take his dignity in this way.
I placed an A3 notepad down and said he should use that, for I know, having done the same course a few weeks before, because I also visited the UK recently and made the mistake of doing 40 on a dual carriageway, that they make you hold up your notes to show you are fully participating. I didn’t think holding up an old receipt for a chainsaw blade with a doodle of an idea for a barn conversion on it would help, necessarily.
‘Answer the questions. Be polite. And remember, do not tell any jokes.’
‘No, all right, I know,’ he said, and then, staring at the screen like it was alchemy: ‘What is happening? What does that mean?’ And he pointed to a logo telling him he was going to be admitted soon. ‘You’re in the waiting room,’ I explained. ‘Ridiculous,’ he said.
We sat there for a bit, he sipped his coffee, the dogs came and went, wagging their tales, trying to get his attention, and then he lost patience.
‘I know that road is a 30. I was doing 30. I was crawling along so slow as I went up that hill I didn’t think I was going to get up it. They put a camera at the top of the hill. The dirty rotten…’ Lots of swearing.
‘…32 miles an hour…That’s not speeding. There were people running past me carrying spears going faster than me.’
Now, that is an example of the sort of joke that I was trying to avoid him blurting out live on screen. He merely meant to illustrate that he was going so slowly that Stone Age man was overtaking him. But it could be misconstrued.
I had a feeling the leader of a speed course would misconstrue it. And the very next moment, the course leader popped up and a lady with a very foreign name announced herself in a very thick accent.
She was more than a bit hard to understand. The BB handled it beautifully, for he has impeccable manners. He introduced himself and said how relieved he was that he had logged in correctly. But the lady was not having it. As I collected up the dogs to leave, ducking (or so I thought) beneath the screen, she shouted: ‘NO, NO, NO! You have people in the room! You not allowed to have people in the room!’
The builder b said: ‘My wife is just getting the dogs out of the way.’
‘NO!’ the woman yelled. ‘You have someone in the room for registration so that invalidate registration! You have dogs? You not allowed dogs!’ And she continued shouting a rapid-fire volley of what would be termed ‘abuse’ if it was coming the other way, from him to her.
The BB sounded as though he wanted to cry. ‘I didn’t think we had started yet…’ ‘Listen to me!’ she yelled. ‘This is registration and you invali-DATE! YOU INVALIDATE!’
‘But I can’t work computers,’ he pleaded. ‘My wife had to sit with me until the thing connected because I didn’t understand how to do it…’ ‘NO NO NO!’ she shouted.
I ran away and cowered outside the kitchen. A few minutes later he came out ashen-faced and said he was going to shut himself in another room with a lock on the door in case I came into the kitchen by mistake over the next three hours.
He said the lady had put him back in the waiting room and would re-admit him in ten minutes. He had to click the link again to re-join. This time he would have to cope on his own, because if she saw or heard me, that would be curtains.
I sat miserably on the stairs next to the room he was in, thinking: ‘This is all wrong. I’m not even sure three points for 32 in a 30 on a badly signed road would hold up in court. He’s being treated like the worst kind of criminal. This is an Orwellian form of re-education, a brainwashing…’
He must have worked out how to click the link for he did not come out for three hours. I went about my day and came back into the kitchen after doing the horses to find him making himself a cup of tea.
He looked shattered. ‘How was it?’ I said. ‘You didn’t make any jokes did you?’ ‘Jokes?’ he said, his hair standing on end, his face red with annoyance. ‘The whole thing was a joke. At one point she told us that in order to not be distracted by her grandchildren in the back of the car she gave them tablets.’
‘You mean she sedates them?’ ‘You would think. But then she said…,’ and he did the rapid yelling voice: ‘I do not want you to think I drug my grandchildren. I am talking about the iPads!’
‘That is quite funny,’ I said, changing my opinion of her slightly.
‘She wasn’t joking. When we all laughed she told us not to laugh because giving children tablets was no laughing matter. If we laughed we would be thrown off the course.’
‘Well, as long as you didn’t do the joke about the spears.’
The racing victory I’ve enjoyed the most
Allegedly the most effective rain dance in the world is that performed by Native American Hopi Indians. The biennial 16-day rite conducted by the Snake and Antelope fraternities involves participants jiving around a column of rock in feathered dress carrying snakes in their hands and mouths.
As our dry spring moves into what could be an even drier summer, the local shops in Newmarket, Lambourn and Middleham might be wise to stock up on feathers and plastic reptiles. Fortunately, before Sandown’s key evening meeting last Thursday there had been just enough precipitation to take the sting out of the ground and embolden trainer Ed Walker to run his talented Almaqam, an entry in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, in the feature event, the Group 3 Brigadier Gerard Stakes. Walker confessed: ‘I’ve never hidden what I thought about this horse but ground is the absolute key. You can tee yourself up for a big fall. We skipped a couple of Group 1s the previous weekend to come here and get the job done, get him back to winning ways. I was worried when I saw the soft-ground horses coming out. I thought “What do they know that I don’t?” It made me nervous.’
The four-year-old showed his quality in fending off the Godolphin-owned and John and Thady Gosden-trained Ombudsman who was previously unbeaten in four races. Although he could race at Ascot should it suddenly turn soft, Almaqam’s targets are likely to remain in the autumn. Says Walker: ‘I won’t be lured into the big races if they are on quick ground.’
The Upper Lambourn trainer has certainly got his team in good order. The previous Saturday his sprinter Mgheera had won the Temple Stakes at Haydock and two days after Almaqam’s success he scored a cross-card treble with Scenic winning the Brontë Cup Fillies’ Stakes at York, while at Haydock Balmoral Lady took the Listed Achilles Stakes and Ten Bob Tony scored by a head in the Group 3 John of Gaunt Stakes.
Walker’s assistant Matty Hicks greeted Ten Bob Tony’s victory by saying of the horse: ‘He’s very tough. Gelding him has probably made him a bit more of a man’. Racing really does have its own language. You know what he means, but practically poor Ten Bob Tony is two cojones less of a man.
‘He’s very tough. Gelding him has probably made him a bit more of a man’
The Gosden team looked slightly short of their normal firepower last season but this year they too are flying. There was consolation for Ombudsman’s defeat when Trawlerman set himself up for an Ascot Gold Cup without the sadly retired Kyprios by beating the reliable yardstick Coltrane by five lengths in the Henry II Stakes at Sandown.
Noting that the seven-year-old wasn’t having much of a blow after his effort, Thady told us: ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve every time and he’s part of the furniture now. He’s a cracking old boy.’ Some see the application of a hood as a critical comment on a horse but Thady explained: ‘He’s so generous he always wants to give you almost too much and the hood settles him down.’
Yorkshire trainer David O’Meara probably owes the Gosdens one. He acknowledges that the elegant grey Estrange – owned by the top quality Cheveley Park Stud – is potentially the best horse he has ever had in a yard whose fortunes were built steadily on handicap success. On ITV at the weekend Cheveley’s supremo Chris Richardson revealed that the filly had started life in the Gosdens yard but been immature and struggled to get her act together. John Gosden suggested that Estrange be moved to a smaller yard in an environment more relaxed than Newmarket.
Dropped in at the back in Haydock’s Nifty 50 Lester Piggott Fillies’ Stakes by jockey Danny Tudhope, she cruised throughout and came with a smooth run to go four lengths clear in an eye-catching victory. Her odds for the Arc were swiftly slashed to a still interesting 16-1. Racing language again: at the last count David O’Meara’s ‘small yard’ contained some 130 horses.
The victory I most enjoyed at Sandown on Thursday was that of the 25-1 Anthelia in the Listed National Stakes. Rod Millman has what you genuinely can call a small yard in Cullompton, Devon but he knows the time of the racing day. Remember his Sergeant Cecil who won ten of his 53 races including a 2005 triple in the Northumberland Plate, the Ebor and the Cesarewitch and came second in 14 more? There have been quick ones too, like Lord Kintyre who won the Weatherbys Super Sprint at Newbury in 1997.
Taking on the colts for the first time Anthelia had to battle up the rail to remain unbeaten after three races and will surely get six furlongs when asked. Millman went to the yearling sales with £50,000. He liked her but thought she wasn’t worth that. Hanging around he picked her up for just £6,000. As he told us with a grin: ‘She’s worth a lot more than that now.’
Bridge | 7 June 2025
‘There are only three kinds of Bridge players; those who can count and those who can’t.’ And there are only two types of reader: those who find this funny and those who, like me, don’t.
It’s not so much that it’s hard to count to 13 – it isn’t really – it’s just that there are so many things to keep track of; trumps, side suits, points and shapes. And of course, the main one which is easy to forget – counting your tricks and those of your opponents.
West started with Ace and another Diamond. South ruffed and played a top Heart, West winning and persisting with a Diamond. With an unexpected second trump loser, it appeared to Declarer as if she had to get a Club away on the Spades. She took a couple of trumps and Ace, King of Clubs to get some info about the hand, then played a small Spade to the Ace, one back to the Queen and a third Spade – then time stopped. Eventually she finessed the ♠️10 and went two off when East won and cashed a Club.
‘I don’t know,’ said North to her partner, showing that she was no great countess herself. ‘With East being void in Hearts, he’s more likely to have three Spades, isn’t he?’
So what has declarer missed?
She should have looked down and counted her tricks. When West follows to the third Spade, the contract is guaranteed if you put up the King. Either East follows with the Jack and you can throw your Club away, or he shows out, in which case you just ruff a Spade in hand for your tenth trick.
She had counted everything except her own tricks.
Why corporate wokery refuses to die
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways.
Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of the state compared with pre-pandemic, what few people realise is the extent to which the private sector has been incubating its own Blob for years.
To illustrate how Blob PLC can achieve its ends and – crucially – why people have gone along with it, we must follow its successful campaign to make British business bow to the diversity gods, and how it started at the very top – with the boards.
The trouble began with Lord Davies, affectionately known in his banking career as ‘Merv the Swerve’ after the Welsh rugby no. 8 of the same name, ennobled by Gordon Brown and made a minister for business. In 2011, Vince Cable, business secretary in the coalition, published a report from Lord Davies called Women on Boards. It asserted: ‘Research has shown that strong stock market growth among European companies is most likely to occur where there is a higher proportion of women in senior management teams.’
The basis of this claim was a 2007 report by an American organisation called Catalyst, set up to ‘expand opportunities for women and business’. Not an entirely disinterested party, then. These reports, amplified later by two McKinsey studies, became the go-to texts which formed the foundation myth of Blob PLC’s diversity dogmatism.
As Alex Edmans and Ross Clark have written in this magazine, drawing on research by John Hand and Jeremiah Green in the US S&P 500 index, there is actually no evidence of a link between more diversity in a company and better stock performance.
Another of Lord Davies’s similarly baseless insights at the time was that the global financial crisis might not have happened if women had been in charge, due to their supposed lower appetite for risk. On these two commandments hang all the diversity laws and their prophets.
Naturally, boards should recruit from as wide and deep a pool as possible to increase the likelihood of finding the best people for the job. But the hypothesis that women (or indeed people of colour) bring better performance remains unproven.
Well, the wheels cranked into motion anyway. It was also widely believed at the time that the push for diversity was fashionably European. In 2005, Norway had introduced a 40 per cent quota for women on its listed boards. Twenty years later, it extended this to any private companies which employ more than 30 people.
In Britain, Lord Davies set a 25 per cent ‘target’ for women on boards, which later became 33 per cent and then 40 per cent, irrespective of the actual number of women working in corporate life at the appropriate level. The new Listings Rules issued by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2022 enshrined this, but they also dictated that at least one of the top four jobs of CEO, CFO, chairman and senior independent director (SID) must be held by a woman. The result was a stampede as boards rushed to appoint a female NED as their mandated SID to get around this awkward rule unless and until they felt able to put them in one of the top three jobs.
The hypothesis that women (or indeed people of colour) bring better performance remains unproven
Initially, soothing words were deployed to reassure the doubters among FTSE 100 chairmen, who would bear the initial brunt of the changes. A campaign group called the 30% Club was formed to win over the sceptics. If that didn’t work, they were pressured into compliance.
Before the target was set in 2011, Cable had threatened quotas, so targets and goals were initially greeted with relief. Veterans of nudge theory will recognise the technique, but the idea of legal quotas never went away. Just two years ago the FCA drew up plans to require all the firms they regulate to have targets for age, ethnicity, sex or gender, disability, religion and sexual orientation. Their own costing estimated this would set businesses back £561 million. After a backlash, these plans were halted in March.
Even without legal quotas, it was always a fiction that companies did not have to comply with the targets. Yes, in theory they could choose to explain why they were not doing what everyone else appeared to be doing. But, predictably, companies that didn’t comply were named and shamed. The rolling Davies review was replaced in 2015 by the Hampton-Alexander review, still supported by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to ‘monitor progress’.
CEOs took an active role in persuading their boards to appoint more women, especially when it meant the heat would come off their own faltering attempts to diversify the workforce and senior management teams.
Even by the end of the 2010s, the corporate world had still failed to grasp that the male/female imbalance on boards was a problem not of lack of demand but of appropriate supply: women are more likely to leave corporate life early to have a family, and if they return at all, they come back too late to scale the heights.
The truth is that positive discrimination and all-female shortlists suited some women at a certain age and stage who were in no mood to be as patient as their predecessors. They took the leg up and went along with the fib that their presence would raise all boats. After all, the men had had their way for too long. There was a scramble to secure the best women on to the most prestigious boards, which meant that a small number of the best qualified women were in impossibly high demand (the so-called ‘golden skirts’).
It suited activists, equally, to believe that this was real progress. Some asserted that all this rapid change was still by merit alone. The more honest appeals to the case for diversifying the talent pool were lost in the rush to get results. Qualified men were overlooked and under-qualified women were fast-tracked well before they were ready.
Ever since 2011, these changes have coincided with the growing influence of proxy advisers, such as ISS and Glass Lewis, which had been early adopters of diversity dogma. Their role meant that passive tracker funds (that automatically invest in large stocks and do not employ their own governance teams to advise on such matters) were able to shift the tiresome burden of diversity issues from their shoulders. They automatically required the companies they invested in to adopt diversity dogma. These companies feared for their reputations as ‘good citizens’ and so our pension providers powered this diversity drive.
These trends were abetted internally by the growth of HR functions, which champion anything of this kind, and externally by their advocates in the consulting and headhunting firms, on the principle that all change is good for the order book.
The gender diversity drive was swiftly followed by full-fat DEI, for which gender had been the bridgehead. The E was for equity (initially equality, but this was magically upgraded almost overnight) and inclusion (who could be so cruel as to be against that?).
The same strategy has recently been put into action in regard to race. Sir John Parker, a well-liked panjandrum of corporate life, was asked in 2015 to lead what duly became known as the Parker Review. Result? Every FTSE 100 board was now to have at least one director from an ethnic minority by the target date (2021 for the FTSE 100, 2024 for the FTSE 250).
He used a rather watered-down justification: ‘Many of us in business would attest that our experience on boards that embrace gender and ethnic diversity benefit in their decision-making by leveraging off the array of skills, experiences and diverse views within such a team.’ This is far less dramatic a claim than had been deployed to get gender diversity off the ground. Perhaps this
is a sign of its shakiness, but it could also be a reflection of the fact that the ethnic diversity push was necessarily more modest since it involved 14 per cent of the population instead of 50 per cent. Even for the magic thinking of DEI, it would be impossible to make a strictly commercial case for the addition of one non-white director in every company.
But the push has meant that three of the four tasks about a company’s nomination committee work mandated by the Financial Reporting Council are to do with diversity.
Worryingly, today’s DEI zealots still make no mention of the need to assess and promote cognitive diversity, which in any rational world would seem to be the most important thing if you are seeking better decision-making. On the contrary, the next targets of Blob PLC – if its takeover of the public sector is any guide – will be to collect socioeconomic diversity data (what type of school you went to, your highest-earning parent’s job when you were 14) and then use it as a sifting mechanism in recruitment, removing candidates from ‘privileged’ backgrounds on the basis that this too will strengthen company performance.
If the effects of diversity targets were bad between 2010 and 2024, we can expect them to become even worse now, since Labour ministers will be fully on board with officials on such matters. There are differences between the public and private sector Blobs, but the main ideological point at which they intersect is their self-flagellating desire to ‘correct’ capitalism and atone for society’s sins.
This impulse to tell business what it is to do is chipping away at legitimate commercial autonomy and the meritocratic integrity which most people still assume (and shareholders certainly would hope) the business world stands for.
At a time when growth is needed, this is dangerous displacement activity. The private sector must see the Blob for what it is and be prepared for what comes next. The fact that this article is written under a pseudonym is evidence of the scale of the problem.
Kemi’s one chance at recovery? Trussonomics
You may have noticed that for some while the BBC News people have stopped referring to Reform UK as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’. That’s not because Nigel Farage has tacked to the left a little on such policies as nationalisation; one characteristic of the left is that if they consider you ‘far right’, they will not commend anything you say, even if they fervently agree with it. You will never gain their favour, even if you join Greta Thunberg on her stupid and narcissistic boat expedition to Gaza and then pronounce your solidarity with all trans folk. This is one of the mistakes often made by people who are right of centre and have said or done something that has aroused the fury of the left-wing mob. Apologising will not make things better for you; it will simply be used to convict.
Nor is it that the BBC reporters and producers no longer think that Reform is far right or hard right – they still do and they still hate the party. It’s just that it is very difficult to use those descriptions when a third of the public is seemingly intent on voting for them. The left accepts that ‘hard right’ and ‘far right’ are not meant as descriptions per se; they are deployed solely as insults. But while it might be possible to fling those insults at a party which has perhaps 15 per cent electoral support, it is very difficult to do so when the figure is more than double that.
The political blogger Mark Pack writes that Reform UK are above 30 per cent in six of the major opinion polls, with BMG giving the highest score of 32 per cent. In every poll the lead is more than 5 per cent (over Labour) and 9 per cent would probably be the median margin. You may recall that Labour won the last election with 33.7 per cent of the vote and gained 412 seats while so doing. It is not inconceivable that Reform could overtake that percentage within the next month or two – in fact, based on the current evidence, it is highly likely that they will.
I had reckoned they would find 25 per cent a difficult hurdle to pass, but that has been easily surmounted. As I’ve mentioned before, every new vote for Reform is almost exponential in that it generates more and more new votes further down the line. My guess is that the recent vaulting in the polls for Nige and the gang is a consequence of people seeing that they could actually win, and win big, in those remarkable local council elections. But it is perhaps also true that the old notion of the ‘shy Reform voter’ – i.e. those people who do not tell pollsters that they intend to vote for the party because they do not want to be thought of badly by the spavined middle-class idiots on the BBC – has winnowed away to a considerable degree. Nothing, at the moment, can stop Reform, while there’s every reason to suppose both Labour and the Tories will continue to lose support, given that both parties are gasping for breath, swimming in Farage’s broad wake.
And broad it is. Even the Scots are now getting in on the act – even the Roman Catholic Scots in Hamilton. It has suddenly occurred to them that they needn’t be forced to choose between two parties that don’t remotely represent their interests. There is an alternative. It is too soon to say that Scottish voters are showing definite signs of wishing to cease being the most dim-witted and compliant caucus in Europe, but there
is at least a little hope.
We may look back on the council elections as being the most significant in a century
I spoke to Kemi Badenoch at the weekend for my Times Radio show. Her basic line was that members of her own party should show a little patience because there are four years to go before another general election and Reform UK is simply a ‘protest’ party with no serious plans to do anything at all, apart from a spot of high-profile DOGEing and a purging of the DEI grifters. She was insistent on describing Nigel Farage as ‘Jeremy Corbyn in a Union Jack T-shirt’ – not understanding, I fear, that this apparition is a rather agreeable prospect to the Red-Wall electors now voting for him en masse.
Kemi’s problem is that her own political beliefs lead her to chase those right-wing blue-collar votes which are piling up in the Reform corner. So, at the same time as failing in that enterprise (the Tories have just one seat on Durham county council), she’s at grave risk of estranging the affluent Tory voters in the south who will have been distressed to hear her calling the party further to the right than Reform. Off they will troop – already have trooped, in many cases – to the clownish Lib Dems.
My suspicion is that the only thing that might pull the Tories around a little is a dose of Trussism: present yourself as a tax-cutting party which rewards endeavour and people who do the right thing. Farage would find it hard to adopt that line when his party is currently promising northerners that there will still be a giant state tit on which to suckle for eternity. This is all a bit of a shame because I think I trust Ms Badenoch’s instincts on immigration and wokery rather more than I trust Mr Farage’s.
For Labour? It too has been pursuing Farage and thus a) failing to beat them in the Red Wall and b) estranging the affluent lefties down south. Things can change, of course – and a solid improvement in the economy may lead to a Labour revival. But for now the die seems to be cast and we may look back on the council elections as being the most significant in a century.
The EU can’t resist empire-building
A wearisome aspect of modern political polarisation is feeling forced to take sides. Until recently, I felt I could contemplate last Sunday’s Polish presidential election with friendly neutrality. Both sides, after all, strongly resist Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In my one visit of any length to Poland, I was most kindly looked after by my publisher, all of whose friends supported the Civic Platform and mostly came out of Solidarity and related anti-communist dissident movements of the 1980s. On the other hand, I liked the way the Law and Justice party (in office at that time) opposed the extension of EU power and appeared to stick up for peasants and lower-paid workers against the Brussels satrap, Donald Tusk, who is now the Polish prime minister. As the election approached, however, I noticed the BBC constantly pushing the cause of Rafal Trzaskowski, ‘liberal mayor’ of Warsaw, and I started to lean towards the ‘hard-right historian’, Karol Nawrocki, the Law and Justice man. I was finally tipped in his favour by a biased BBC report about the terrible wickedness of abortion restrictions in Poland and how a Trzaskowski victory would put all that right. Against BBC hopes and predictions (it often confuses the two), Nawrocki won. With a bit of luck, the resulting cohabitation between a leftish government and a rightish president might prove Poland’s democratic maturity. Perhaps its voters, irritated by Tusk’s dominant media and political establishment, resist the ever-greater sublimation of Polish sovereignty which eliminates the national veto and extends EU ‘competences’. It is tragic that Brussels thinks the best way to resist the Russian empire is to extend its own.
On the subject of abortion, I partly share people’s irritation that J.D. Vance sees fit to intervene over our ban of protests outside abortion clinics. It is not his business, any more than it was ours to protest about the death of George Floyd. But the current state of the British abortion law is oppressive. The primary reason people oppose abortion – that it kills a defenceless child – is hardly ever discussed in public here. The question is expressed solely as a matter of women’s bodily autonomy. As we learn more about the development of the foetus, our deliberate blindness on this issue will look as bad to future generations as does our blindness to the wrongs of slavery 300 years ago.
As I write, we in the House of Lords are playing ping-pong. Almost everyone except the government supports Lady Kidron’s amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill to protect the copyright of the creative classes, of whom, as an author, I suppose I am a member. It is designed to stop Big Tech stealing our intellectual property, or, at least, to state when they have stolen it. We ping our amendment down to the Commons and the Labour-controlled Commons pongs it back. By the time you read this, we may well have decided to desist, in deference to the right of the elected House to prevail, or – much less likely – the government will have conceded something. The thieves Big Tech employs against us are Large Language Models (LLMs), who sound like voluptuous young Mediterranean girls learning English in university towns, but are actually voracious machine learners, processing and generating language. There is an interesting intellectual conundrum here. On the one hand, language is the common property of mankind, developed by free human intercourse, and so to mine it is not to steal it. On the other, Big Tech can make vast sums out of what we creatives make, without paying us. We are what Labour’s famous Clause 4 called ‘the workers… by brain’, and we demand what it calls ‘the full fruits of [our] industry’. Piquant that the Lords are standing up for us and a Labour government (perhaps in alliance with the Trump tech bros) is trying to do us down.
As with all property, though, it is easy to dispute boundaries. I remember being told years ago that the distinguished modern composer Robin Holloway had been accused of infringement of copyright by the estate of T.S. Eliot in something he had set to music. What lawyers call ‘the words complained of’ were just ‘Wallala weialala’, which come from ‘The Waste Land’ (I think they represent the rhythmic cries of Thames boatmen). This challenge was particularly comical because few poems rely more on literary quotation than does ‘The Waste Land’. Thank God there was no intellectual property law in the 17th century. Imagine the lawyers’ letter: ‘We act for the estate of the late Mr William Shakespeare and draw your attention to your unauthorised use of the words “Never, never, never, never, never.” This line appears in his play King Lear. Copyright is hereby asserted.’
A correspondent tells me that new rules have quietly come in about posting parcels to Northern Ireland. What he calls ‘a shadow customs declaration’ is filled in by the post office and recorded on its computer, though not docketed on the packet. Recently, he tried to post a gallon of beer from his local brewery to a friend in Co. Antrim, but this was banned on the grounds that it is illegal to send alcohol to the province. No such rules apply, of course, to internal communications in any other part of the United Kingdom. Thus is what Theresa May used to call ‘our precious Union’ subtly eroded.
A tall, slim man arrived at the reception, greeted us warmly and strode forward to make an excellent speech in support of the New Schools Network, the body which did so much to create 700 free schools in Britain. As he explained in his speech, its achievement is now threatened by Bridget Phillipson’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Who was he? I recognised his face but, just for a split second, I thought he might be someone who looked very like David Cameron rather than David Cameron himself. Why this momentary double-take? Later, I learnt the answer: Mounjaro.
It didn’t take Starmer long to morph into Brezhnev
It has taken Sir Keir Starmer just under 11 months to enter his Brezhnev era. Portly, autocratic and reliant on past glories, the Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by reading a list that would make Borat proud of the infrastructural benevolences to make benefit glorious region of Red Wall. In Sir Keir’s world, there is no decay or decline: the economy is booming, pensioners and children are well cared for and the streets are safe.
Notable by her absence was the Deputy Prime Minister: those windows of Downing Street won’t measure themselves
The praesidium – sorry, Front Bench – lapped this up. Or those who turned up did. Absent was the Chancellor who had been sent to gawp like an aquarium dweller in front of a group of factory workers who – like most people of taxpaying age – visibly despised her. One man kept plunging his head into his hands every time she spoke as the existential dread took over. This was the Muppet Show meets Rodin.
Meanwhile, back in the Commons, our spam-hued Brezhnev was flanked by the Sage of Tottenham, David Lammy, and Lucy ‘Dog Whistle’ Powell. Hardly the brightest and best and that’s from a cabinet who are, shall we say, unlikely to be troubling MENSA any time soon.
The Prime Minister has a late Soviet attitude to answering questions too. Rather than talk about the child benefit cap as he was asked, he launched into a lengthy diatribe about Ukraine. When pushed on the economic forecast, he talked about the Chagos. There are trained corvids who, using a rock and twig-based communication system, can answer questions more clearly than Sir Keir.
On the Chagos debacle, which he brought up by the way – presumably as serial killers like to reference their previous crimes in their mocking letters to the authorities – he yelled that it was “absolutely clear that legal uncertainty would have threatened our strategic capability.” What is the PM’s benchmark for clarity one wonders? As clear as a Beijing smog? As clear as Lord Mandelson’s conscience?
By this point Mrs Badenoch was getting seriously frustrated; she gesticulated wildly, as if trying to play charades with Helen Keller. In fact, she was more like the wolf, huffing and puffing all she could but still confronted with a smug little piggy happy in his house of bricks.
The backbenches fared no better at eliciting answers. The new Reform MP for Runcorn, Sarah Pochin, asked about the burqa and received an answer about Liz Truss. Some of them, in fairness, didn’t even try.
Every Wednesday an invertebrate desperate for the dear Leader’s dispensations asks a humiliating non-question about how wonderful everything is. Alex Barros-Curtis of Cardiff West was this week’s nominated dignity-vacuum. He gave a lengthy address about the PM’s efforts on steel. Fleshy Brezhnev smiled and said he was “doing very well”.
Yet as always with the USSR – especially in its later stages of decline – the story was more about what was not seen and not heard. Or rather who. Every other evasion (sorry, answer) offered by Starmer contained a direct dig at someone who remained silent throughout the session, the MP for Clacton. Equally notable by her absence was the Deputy Prime Minister: those windows of Downing Street won’t measure themselves.
Cleverly splits from Kemi on climate
Tree-hugging isn’t just for the Greens, it seems – as former Tory leadership contender James Cleverly will insist this evening. At a London event tonight, the ex-Foreign Secretary will make the case that Conservatives should care about the climate and urge his colleagues to reject ‘both the luddite Left and the luddite Right’ on green policy. ‘Conservative environmentalism doesn’t mean a choice between growth and sustainability,’ Cleverly will tell the Conservative Environment Network tonight in a dig at both the Labour government and Reform UK.
The former Cabinet Secretary will speak this evening at the annual Sam Baker Memorial Lecture – where he will award Tory MP Andrew Griffith for championing the marine environment of Chagos. Cleverly will tell his audience that the country must ‘push further, faster and smarter’ on green tech, before going on:
The idea that we must choose between a strong economy and protecting our environment is outdated. The future I believe in is one where these two aims go hand in hand, driving innovation and opportunity.
We are caught between two tribes of Neo-Luddites: The negative Right, claiming that the way things are now is just fine, [that] concerns about emissions, habitat loss, and falling yields are scaremongering. Their motto: all change, even for the better, is a bad idea. And the negative Left, suspicious of technology. Believing things were better before the car, the internal combustion engine, before the steam engine, before the wheel. The ‘let’s not move forward’ tribe is in a bidding war with the ‘let’s move backwards’ tribe. They’re both wrong.
Shots fired! Mr S can’t imagine Reform’s Richard Tice, with his ‘net stupid zero’ mantra, will be all too impressed…
It’s not quite on message, however, given Cleverly’s party leader Kemi Badenoch insisted in a departure from Conservative green policy in March that ‘net zero by 2050 is impossible’, adding: ‘Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it can’t be achieved without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us.’ While the CEN blasted Badenoch’s remarks at the time – with the think tank slamming her move to ditch the 2050 target as a ‘mistake’ – Cleverly’s speech won’t mention his party leader by name.
After the Tory backbencher enjoyed a warm reception from members at the Tory party conference during the Conservative leadership race last year, his latest intervention has sparked speculation he could be angling for another crack at the whip. Especially after he told GB News in April about running once more: ‘I just say, never say never again.’ How very curious…
Winter fuel payments will be reinstated this year, Reeves insists
Labour’s winter fuel payment cut has proven one of the most controversial policies brought in by the party since it got into government last summer – and today Chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised the payment will be reinstated to some pensioners by this winter. Speaking from Manchester this morning, the Chancellor said that ‘more people will get winter fuel payments this winter’ and hinted that changes to the current £11,500 threshold would be set out in her spending review next Wednesday.
This doesn’t mean that the universal payment will be making a return, however. Reeves said today that a ‘means test’ would be introduced by the end of the year while pensions minister Torsten Bell has ruled out returning the benefit to all pensioners. The Chancellor added that ‘difficult decisions’ had forced her to introduce the cut last year to ‘restore sound public finances’ – but insisted this morning that the government is now on ‘firmer footing’. There are concerns, however, that the creation of a new means test in time for the winter would be too complex for the government’s computer systems, with ministers also thought to be considering the reintroduction of a universal payment and taking back the money when well-off pensioners complete their tax returns.
Today’s development comes two weeks after Sir Keir Starmer’s mid-PMQs announcement of a partial reversal to the cut. While recent YouGov polling shows that a minority of Britons believe the benefit should be universally restored, the move to make the payment available to a greater number of people is much more popular. It was one of the most frequently discussed issues on the doors in Runcorn and Helsby – the constituency Labour lost to Reform UK in May – and has dogged Scottish Labour campaigners leafleting in Hamilton ahead of this week’s Holyrood by-election.
But whether Labour’s U-turn will bring voters back on side is far from clear. Although More in Common polling has suggested almost two-thirds of Brits say they would view the government more favourably if it restored the benefit, many in the party are of the opinion irreversible damage has already been done. People will remember the initial insult better than the rowback, and in its stubbornness to retain the cut the government has squandered a sizable amount of political capital. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP and Reform UK have all garnered support by campaigning for a return of the universal benefit while the Conservatives have called for the government to widen the eligibility criteria. And while news of Labour’s climbdown will provide relief to some campaigners, it is still unclear just how many pensioners will benefit.
Badenoch’s ‘chaos’ attack on Starmer will be less effective than she hopes
Fists flew at Prime Minister’s Questions. The party leaders sprang from their corners and bashed each other repeatedly in the face. It was fun to watch. Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir Starmer of performing so many U-turns that ‘his head must be spinning.’ Two weeks ago, he panicked and cancelled his decision to withdraw the winter fuel allowance. ‘The Chancellor is rushing her plans,’ she said, ‘because she’s just realised when winter is.’
Kemi sprang her trap. She leapt to her feet, glittering with triumph
Sir Keir shrugged this off. ‘I’m glad to see she’s catching up on what happened two weeks ago.’
Kemi delivered a booby-trapped question disguised as a query about the two-child benefit cap:
‘We believe people on benefits should have to make the same choices as everyone else,’ she said. And she added, pointedly. ‘What does the prime minister believe?’
Glancing at his notes, Sir Keir said, ‘I believe profoundly in driving down child poverty.’
Kemi sprang her trap. She leapt to her feet, glittering with triumph: ‘I asked what he believes – and he had to look in his folder to find the answer.’
She repeated this charge and accused Sir Keir of using Morgan McSweeney, his spin doctor, to give him moral guidance. But Sir Keir exploited Kemi’s reference to his notes and turned it to his advantage.
‘I’m going to look in my folder,’ he said. ‘And I’ll read it out.’ He quoted a statement made by Kemi about Britain using Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia. These words had been praised by one of Vladimir Putin’s spokesmen. Kemi affected outrage:
‘I asked him about the two-child benefit cap and he’s talking about the Kremlin.’
Sir Lindsay Hoyle rose from the Speaker’s chair and took Kemi’s side against Sir Keir. He issued a veiled rebuke to the Prime Minister.
‘Let’s listen to the answers,’ he said, addressing the chamber, ‘even if you don’t think you’re getting one.’
A clear breach of impartiality. Nevertheless, a forgivable sin. An elderly Chair is apt to wobble.
Kemi brought her performance to a climax by reeling off a list of Sir Keir’s most recent blunders. Stalling the economy. Releasing more criminals. Losing control of our borders. ‘But he still managed to find £30 billion to give away the Chagos Islands.’
She summed it up as chaos and confusion.
‘Chaos, chaos, chaos,’ she said, using a motif with a venerable history in parliament. Mrs Thatcher said ‘no, no, no’ to Brussels. Tony Blair denounced John Major as, ‘weak, weak, weak.’ Kemi’s cry of ‘chaos, chaos, chaos,’ – which we heard twice today – is intended to echo these rhetorical barrages. But its impact is less powerful. Why? ‘Chaos’ has two syllables. One is punchier.
Kemi had a pretty good day. For Reform it was an afternoon to forget. Their newest MP, Sarah Pochin, called on Sir Keir to ‘ban the burqa.’ An illiberal policy. The country doesn’t need a dress-code devised by parliament and policed by goons. Imagine a bunch of half-witted cops enforcing a burqa ban at Taser-point.
Sir Keir ignored the question and made a gag about Liz Truss. That’s his automatic response whenever Reform are mentioned. His attack was aided by Tory backbencher, Lincoln Jopp, who referred to Nigel Farage’s desire to lavish more child benefit on fecund parents who have more kids than they can feed.
Jopp suggested that ‘the leader of Reform might be [a socialist] too.’
Sir Keir gladly expanded on this theme and attacked Reform for pledging ‘£80 billion of unfunded commitments.’ And he added, for good measure, ‘they’re Liz Truss 2.0.’
There we have it. Sir Keir’s re-election campaign in two soundbites.
When will the BBC admit it has an Israel problem?
When the White House uses a press briefing to lambast a foreign broadcaster by name, something seismic has shifted. That’s exactly what happened today when Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, publicly accused the BBC of treating ‘the word of Hamas as total truth’ and challenged the White House’s description of the broadcaster rushing out anti-Israel claims only to later bury the corrections.
Holding up printouts of BBC headlines that morphed from ’26 dead after Israeli tanks open fire’ to ’31 killed in Israeli gunfire,’ then ‘Red Cross says at least 21 killed’, before publishing another piece admitting ‘claim graphic video is linked to aid distribution site in Gaza is incorrect’, she put the world’s most recognisable public broadcaster on notice: ‘We’re going to look into reports before we confirm them,’ she said, ‘and I suggest that journalists who actually care about truth do the same.’
When it comes to Jews and Israel, the BBC’s failures have become not just frequent but predictable
This was a blistering callout of a problem that has been festering for decades. For many who cover Israel, and for Jewish communities across the world, it was not only justified. It was long overdue.
For years, the BBC has seemed to betray its royal charter commitments to accuracy and impartiality when it comes to Israel. And British citizens are forced to pay for it: every household with a television who watches or records live TV is legally obliged to fund the corporation through the licence fee. That makes this not just a media failure, but a democratic scandal. Thank goodness for the Trump White House calling it out.
Time and again, the BBC seemingly rushes to publish Hamas’s version of events, only to be contradicted later by evidence. After the Al-Ahli hospital blast in October 2023, the veteran BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen declared Israel had ‘flattened’ the hospital: Hamas’s narrative broadcast globally. Within hours of the false reports, including by the BBC, synagogues were torched in Berlin and Tunis. By the time the IDF, the US, and British intelligence had proven the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket which, in fact, only struck the parking lot, the damage was done. Bowen later admitted the hospital had not been flattened as he claimed, but obstinately declared he had no regrets.
That episode was no outlier. It seems to be a pattern. A BBC anchor falsely claimed Israel was ‘targeting medical teams as well as Arab speakers’ in the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza – a grotesque inversion of the truth, which was that the IDF had brought Arabic-speakers and medics with them to minimise harm when they had to operate to target Hamas, which was using the hospital for cover.
Elsewhere, they wrongly translated the Arabic word Yahud (‘Jew’) as ‘Israeli’ in a documentary, sanitising open anti-Semitism. Their Gaza special, How to Survive a Warzone, featured a child narrator who turned out to be the son of a Hamas official – it was later revealed the production company paid his family, too.
In another sequence, a child portrayed as a volunteer paramedic was shown in what claimed to be a single day’s events, yet his shoes changed four times, and his hair visibly varied in length between scenes. This crude montage stitched together footage from multiple days to fabricate a seamless, emotionally manipulative narrative, misleading viewers into believing they were witnessing a real-time account. Despite this grotesque ethical collapse, the BBC only pulled the programme after intense public pressure.
Did they learn? Of course not. They aired a Louis Theroux documentary on Israeli settlers that abandoned even the pretence of balance, painting cartoon villains and flattening real lives into ideological clichés. Ari Abramowitz, one of the participants, told me he felt the BBC twisted his words and worldview, omitting the parts of his personality that didn’t fit the ‘fanatic’ mould. He described the film as ‘twisted propaganda created with the explicit agenda of portraying the settler movement as caricatures’.
The BBC’s Arabic service is worse still. Journalists there ‘liked’ and shared posts celebrating the 7 October massacre. One guest described the massacre as a ‘heroic military miracle’. One BBC employee referred to Jews as ‘Zionist apartheid parasites’ and said the Holocaust was a hoax. Only when it was revealed publicly did they get rid of her. BBC Arabic made more than 80 corrections in the first five months of the war – averaging one every other day, including calling Hamas ‘the resistance’ and describing Israeli civilians as combatants. This is not occasional bias. It is systemic rot.
Even French President Emmanuel Macron was misrepresented. The BBC clipped and headlined an interview as if Macron had accused Israel of ‘killing babies’. He hadn’t. French officials were forced to clarify his words and call out the distortion.
The BBC has repeatedly broadcast misleading or false claims during the war, often echoing Hamas’s narrative without scrutiny. It ran the headline ‘Half of Gaza’s population is starving, warns UN’ – yet the actual UN report spoke of ’emergency levels of hunger’, not starvation. In November, it claimed Gaza had become a ‘polio epidemic zone’ due to Israeli actions, omitting the fact that the virus had been detected months earlier and that vaccination rates had already declined under Hamas. It also cited fatality figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry – controlled by Hamas – without caveats, only later adding qualifiers under pressure. And when it put out a story suggesting a nine-year-old boy with cerebral palsy had become severely disabled due to Israeli actions during the war, the BBC omitted that he had a lifelong neurological condition: a serious distortion it only corrected after the article was quietly pulled and rewritten.
This pattern of distortion is nothing new. Years ago, I appeared on the BBC to provide live analysis of a precision strike that had eliminated a senior terrorist. Unbeknownst to me, as I spoke, the BBC aired b-roll footage purporting to show wounded Palestinian civilians – including one man dramatically carried away as if unable to walk. Moments later, the same man appeared in a separate shot casually strolling about and scratching his groin. It was theatre disguised as journalism, broadcast unchallenged beneath my commentary.
The BBC cannot plead ignorance any longer
During the Covid pandemic they invited me on BBC World to discuss Israel’s world-leading vaccination rollout, only to twist the story into a criticism, wrongly insisting that Israel was obliged to vaccinate Palestinians under the Oslo Accords. When I corrected this on air, pointing out that the Accords in fact assigned healthcare to the Palestinian Authority – which had rejected Israeli vaccines and failed to equitably distribute those it did receive – the anchor insisted on moving on. Only after a formal complaint from a viewer did they quietly admit their error on a little-seen corner of their website.
Each of these falsehoods was corrected only after public outrage or political pressure forced the BBC’s hand. Never proactively. And by now, nobody is surprised. When it comes to Jews and Israel, the BBC’s failures have become not just frequent but predictable. We expect the sloppiness. We anticipate the bias. We know they will lead with allegations sourced from Hamas-run authorities or its affiliates and only days later, under duress, walk it back.
What once might have shocked is now routine. A pattern so ingrained it has become farce. The BBC’s coverage of Israel is no longer just flawed – it’s a punchline. A wheezing, bloated, publicly funded relic that still sees itself as the gold standard of journalism, even as it parrots propaganda. It still won’t even call Hamas a terrorist organisation.
A long line of critics – from former BBC heads like Danny Cohen to MPs, Jewish groups, foreign governments, whistleblowers and journalists – have warned of this decay. But the corporation remains stuck in its own ideological bunker: defensive, deluded and disdainful of accountability.
The BBC cannot plead ignorance any longer. It has been called out – now, even by the White House. Its reputation lies in ruins. The only question left is whether it will continue gaslighting the public or finally find the humility to change.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Spectator’s world edition.
Lord Hermer and the political prosecution of Lucy Connolly
Was the prosecution of Lucy Connolly in the public interest? That is the question now being asked of the embattled Attorney General, Richard Hermer, following my story in the Sunday Telegraph that Hermer approved the charge of stirring up racial hatred against the mother and childminder last summer, over a hastily deleted tweet on the night of the Southport attack. ‘Lord Hermer of Chagos’ has faced further questions over his political judgement and yet more calls for him to be sacked.
In their blinkered appeals to sentencing guidelines and legal procedures, these lawyers seem utterly deaf to the central political and moral question of whether someone should be liable to go to prison for seven years for a single tweet
With significant public outrage about Connolly’s case, Hermer will doubtless not be pleased that this connection has been made. Since Lucy lost her appeal against her 31-month sentence last month, meaning she will remain in prison until August, a fundraiser for her and family has nearly met its £150,000 goal such is the public sympathy with her plight.
Even still, parts of the legal profession have been attempting to justify her imprisonment. On the day Connolly’s sentence was upheld, I appeared on GB News opposite legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg. I was shocked when he denied that Lucy had been made an example of, stonily defending Connolly’s treatment on the grounds that ‘this is an offence for which the maximum sentence is seven years in prison’, as laid down by parliament.
Later that week on BBC Question Time, one audience member asked how it could be right that in the midst of a prison overcrowding crisis, Lucy Connolly will spend longer in prison than some of the members of a Telford grooming gang, four of whom received sentences of just 30 months in 2013 for convictions including child prostitution and having sex with a minor. On the panel, barrister Hashi Mohamed condescended that the comparison was a ‘misconception’ since the sentence had been handed down according to the guidelines – utterly missing the point about the outrageous double standard.
Last week Lord Sumption, the author and former Supreme Court judge, also threw his weight behind the prosecution, rubbishing claims that Connolly is a ‘political prisoner’ and declaring her rash tweet a ‘serious offence’, since it was seen many times on social media.
The criminal law is not hermetically sealed off from the real world and from what normal people think, nor should it be. In their blinkered appeals to sentencing guidelines and legal procedures, these lawyers seem utterly deaf to the central political and moral question of whether someone should be liable to go to prison for seven years for a single tweet. Under the Public Order Act 1986, any prosecution for stirring up racial hatred must be signed off by the Attorney General, both as a safeguard for free speech and to ensure such prosecutions are in the public interest. The charge was brought, and the sentencing guidelines were then applied – but should it have been?
It is rare for the Attorney General to refuse to give consent because, by the time it reaches their office, the Crown Prosecution Service will have itself determined that a successful prosecution is likely, it is understood. But Hermer had the constitutional power to decide differently. Suella Braverman, Conservative Attorney General between 2020 and 2022, said at the weekend that were Connolly’s case to have crossed her desk, she would not have given consent to prosecute. ‘The charges brought against [Connolly] were not in the public interest’, she said, and she questioned whether the ‘the costs and resources required to prosecute Lucy for her message were proportionate’ given the current pressures on prisons.
Connolly’s case is not the only draconian prosecution for stirring up racial hatred agreed by the AG last summer. Take former Royal Marine Jamie Michael, who in a Facebook video during the Southport unrest called for his local community to peacefully organise to prevent illegal migrants being settled in the Welsh Valleys. (Some of his language was ‘clumsy’, he later admitted, having described some illegal immigrants as ‘scumbags’ and ‘psychopaths’.) After he was reported to police by the office of a Labour Senedd member, Mr Michael was charged with intending to stir up racial hatred – which Hermer must have agreed to. Like Connolly, he was treated like a serious violent offender and remanded in custody, where he spent 17 days before finally securing bail.
In February, he went to trial, defended by the Free Speech Union, and when the jury retired to consider his case it took them just 17 minutes to find him not guilty. Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union, told me: ‘Jamie Michael should never have been arrested for his Facebook post, let alone charged with an offence that could mean seven years in jail. It beggars belief that the Attorney General signed off on his prosecution. By unanimously acquitting in 17 minutes the jury was sending a message to Lord Hermer: stop wasting everyone’s time with these vexatious, politically motivated prosecutions.’
The only other defendant charged with stirring up racial hatred during the Southport unrest to appear before a jury, former prison officer Mark Heath, was also acquitted. The jury accepted his argument that he was simply expressing his ‘strong views’ in his series of anti-immigration social media posts and was not attempting to stir up violence – even if Hermer apparently disagreed by approving the prosecution. Lucy Connolly likewise stood a strong chance of being acquitted by a jury and was advised to plead not guilty by the Free Speech Union. But, denied bail and facing months in prison waiting for a trial, the mother and childminder pleaded guilty, believing it would be the quickest way to be reunited with her 12-year-old daughter.
In total, the AG’s office consented to 17 prosecutions of stirring up racial hatred in connection to the Southport disorder. To be clear, not all of these prosecutions seem so obviously misconceived. Tyler Kay, for instance, wrote posts inciting action against specific immigration solicitors in Northampton as well as asylum hotels while riots were ongoing, which would seem to meet the definition of direct and explicit incitement. (Even still, many will find his 38-month sentence disproportionate given that people received less for actual rioting.)
But what has always troubled observers of the Southport crackdown is the sense that the government, following Sir Keir Starmer’s political narrative about what was causing the riots, decided to indiscriminately throw the book at people over online speech. Hermer himself boasted after individuals were jailed that this served as ‘a stark warning that you cannot hide behind your keyboard’. Nitpicking lawyers and Labour cheerleaders might insist there was nothing political to this whatsoever – that it was just the ‘independent’ justice system functioning as it normally would. But it now seems – if it wasn’t clear already – that explicit political decisions were indeed involved.
One can also criticise the CPS for bringing the case against Connolly, and the fact that she was cruelly held on remand. But it’s crucial to remember that all this could have been nipped in the bud at the say-so of the Attorney General. Lucy Connolly is in prison today because Richard Hermer decided that it was in the public interest for her to be prosecuted in the first place. This prosecution was undoubtedly political.