The parable of Justin Welby

When Channel 4’s Cathy Newman summed up the Church of England’s John Smyth scandal as showing that ‘the church had neither process nor kindness’, Justin Welby agreed. It was hard for the Archbishop of Canterbury not to. Welby’s downfall was in no small part due to his neglect of the right process, one which puts victims and survivors first. As Welby – who resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury this week – said: ‘You can have kindness without process and nothing happens’.

The Makin review into the church’s handling of the abuse allegations against Smyth shows what happens when things aren’t done by the book. It reveals details of meetings in Lambeth Palace in 2017 between a small unrepresentative group of victims and palace officers, despite ‘police advising against any meetings’. What victims wanted was the Archbishop. Instead, unable to have him, behind the scenes they got a traditional Anglican fudge that blurred the boundaries further.

This corridor approach to decision making, while making a public show of consultation, has been a feature of Welby’s time in office. Little wonder the Archbishop has found an unlikely supporter in Alastair Campbell – architect of Tony Blair’s ‘sofa government’. Now, Welby has gone – but the CofE has been left in an unholy mess. 

The allegations against Smyth aren’t the only instance where there are questions over the church’s willingness to do things by the letter. Proper process has not been followed in so many of the ‘big projects’ that have needed dealing with during Welby’s archiepiscopacy. 

In 2020, when prime minister Boris Johnson closed churches at the outbreak of the covid pandemic, priests expected to be allowed to continue to enter for private prayer and eucharist. Instead, the Archbishops wrote to clergy saying they ‘must now be closed’, even for them. When clergy complained, they were told the letter was merely guidance. Welby declared that, in the CofE ‘the one way to get anyone to do the opposite of what you want is to give them an order’.

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Then there have been the problems we have seen in the General Synod, the national assembly of the CofE. Blessing services for same-sex couples should ideally have come to Synod as new liturgy, except that would require a two-thirds majority which isn’t there. So instead, after exhausting, divisive, and very painful Synod debates, the bishops finally commended them – in a manner which suggests they were always allowed legally anyway.

Self-preservation is a powerful thing. It can ride roughshod over process. Just look at Paula Vennells. Welby presumably did, when he is said to have been supportive of the former Post Office boss’s bid to become Bishop of London. But then, Welby has been clear on camera that he doesn’t ‘give a hang about the institution’ he has led. If it receives a fatal blow, he said ‘God will raise up another institution’. Nothing stays the same forever, of course. Processes can, and should, be updated. But this feels like an Archbishop who has shown a casual lack of concern about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

When Welby was appointed Archbishop in 2012, there were high hopes among Anglicans. This was a man who – while relatively unknown – was going to know how to do process well, especially in a large institution. The former Bishop of Durham had served as chairman of an NHS Trust, and had a role at a large city investment firm. Welby had also worked in the oil industry for a number of years and been appointed onto the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. ‘Can companies sin?’ had been the title of his dissertation. His corporate background and plain-speaking were surely his strengths. This was no theologically-focused academic, nor overly-fluffy pastor; this was someone who could get the church in shape for the 21st century. Or so it was thought.

If Archbishop George Carey had created much of the bureaucracy in the church, and Archbishop Rowan Williams had prayed it would go away, Archbishop Welby could reform the archaic processes and structures of the national church. Yet the flickers of what would lead to his downfall could be seen in the early days. One former boss noted his combination of ‘relaxed approach and an absolute iron will’. The devil, it turned out, was going to be in the actual details of what was done – and what was not done. 

It is what was not done that has been catapulted into the public consciousness in recent weeks. Elements of the Makin review and some statements published subsequently call to mind Charles Osgood’s responsibility poem; ‘Nobody did What Anybody could have’. 

Of course, the reality is far more complex. Welby says he regrets not asking for evidence of what was happening. ‘I didn’t chase it up. I didn’t follow it up. That is my fault. But I was wrong. I should have said, what’s the evidence?,’ he said this week. Oh, for a clearer process for all concerned. One hopes that one is now in place.

Prior to Makin, other bishops had been hammered by Welby over their apparent lack of adherence to safeguarding processes. In 2019, he suspended a bewildered Bishop of Lincoln following an ‘error of judgement’ concerning an abuse disclosure. After 20 months of inquiry, which the bishop described as an ordeal, he was allowed back as the concerns had been dealt with. 

While Welby’s relaxed approach, but iron will, elevated him to the position of Archbishop, he never had time to learn how to work with the bureaucracy of the church. His time in charge was a missed opportunity to formally reform process in the church. Bad process hurts everyone; we need both rules and kindness. Now, Welby should follow the process for leaving in a timely way, as the Church of England looks for its next leader. It might do well to choose a priest prepared to carry the cross that is Canterbury who will put people first – even when that means playing by the rules.

Without America, Britain’s economy will stall

The comments by Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s economic adviser, should not really be controversial. ‘I’ve always said that Britain has to decide,’ he said from Florida, where he is preparing the new administration’s economic policy. ‘Do you want to go towards the European socialist model or do you want to go towards the US free market? Lately it seems like they [Britain] are shifting more in a European model and so if that’s the case I think we’d be less interested in a free trade deal.’

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He is right. Britain absolutely does have to decide whether it wants to be closer to the US economic model or to carry on down the route of becoming just another brand of European social democracy. And never has the decision stared us so firmly in the face. The Trump administration is pretty clearly offering the UK a free trade deal at the same time the President Elect is threatening a general tariff of 10 to 20 per cent on most imports to the US – and much higher on those from China. Britain has been drifting ever since Brexit, but clearly, we are heading for crunch time.

Sadly, there is little doubt as to which choice our government is likely to make. The horror of doing any kind of deal with Trump will itself set Labour against the US. Moreover, Starmer has already put himself on a path of trying to cuddle up to the EU – though why he thinks he will get a better deal now than Boris Johnson was able to extract is hard to say. On top of that, just look at what Starmer’s government is doing in domestic policy: more employment law, heavier taxes on business, more regulation in most areas. Having made the brave decision to push itself out of Europe’s low orbit, Britain is slowly being sucked back.

But the situation is stark: that is a route to national impoverishment. At the time of the 2008–09 financial crisis, the richer, larger countries of western Europe were poorer than the US, but not dramatically so. They had enjoyed a spurt of growth. It was possible to look at the European model and say: well, even if we are on a slightly lower trajectory of growth, that is a reasonable trade-off against better public services. In 2008, according to World Bank figures, and calculated on a dollar basis, UK GDP per capita was 97.5 per cent of that of the US; in France it was 93.7 per cent, and Germany 93.9 per cent.

It is no longer possible to ignore the gap between US and European economic growth. By 2023, the UK’s GDP per capita was just 59.8 per cent of that of the US; in France, it was 54.4 per cent, and Germany 64.6 per cent. True, some of that difference is down to currency movements: the dollar was weak in 2008 and strong in 2023. If you measure the same economies on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, which corrects for living costs in different countries, UK GDP per capita in 2023 was still 72.1 per cent of what it was in the US; in France, it was 74.8 per cent, and Germany 84.8 per cent.

But however you want to look at it, it is inescapable that Europe – both the UK and EU – are slipping further and further behind. Since the pandemic, the gap has grown wider: since Q4 of 2019, the US economy has grown 11.4 per cent, France 4.1 per cent, the UK 3.0 per cent, and Germany 0.2 per cent. Whoever has been in power in the US, that country has been growing its economy consistently more strongly than Europe.

Shouldn’t that be the most important, indeed overriding, piece of evidence when it comes to answering Moore’s question: do we want to be more like the US or the EU? Unfortunately, I fear it will not even be considered. There are too many people in the government and indeed in positions of power outside it – like Andrew Bailey – who seem to think that the EU, with its high-regulation, high-welfare model, is the fount from which all wealth flows. Their delusion is condemning Britain to mediocrity.

Is it time to ban boxing?

This year, as almost every year, there have been calls for a complete ban on boxing. Two fighters, Ardi Ndembo and Sherif Lawal, have died as a result of the sport since April, with more than twenty meeting the same end in the last decade alone. Steve Bunce, BBC’s ‘voice of boxing’, seemed in a recent interview to encapsulate the central dilemma: ‘I’ve been in waiting rooms, I’ve been there when doctors have told loved ones that their son, husband and father has died. Nobody in their right mind is going to defend that.’

But as Bunce pointed out, the sport – often a million miles from the grotesque mismatch we witnessed between Tyson and Jake Paul earlier this morning – can also redeem apparently hopeless lives; those straightforwardly against it may ‘have no understanding what it’s like to grow up, in the case of Jimmy Murray, in a tenement on the outskirts of Glasgow. Fighters want to fight and they want what boxing can give them.’

Meanwhile, we’ve lately been subjected to the obscene Olympic spectacle of what looked very much like men – strong ones at that – beating up women in the ring for sport. Many will feel that an outright ban on fights between equally matched same-sex opponents has been eclipsed for now as a topic – even if it’s unlikely to go away.

Many of these issues were brought into focus by the recent 50th anniversary of the ‘Rumble in Jungle’, the mythical fight between heavyweight champion George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali which took place in Kinshasa, Zaire in October 1974. To mark the event, When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s unmissable nineties documentary about the match, has just been reissued on Blu-ray.

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As Gast’s film makes clear, few at the time thought the pairing of Ali and Foreman a safe or sensible move. Former champion Ali, 32 years old – a Muslim convert who’d received a three-year ban from boxing for refusing to fight in Vietnam, and was probably the most famous man in the world – seemed outclassed and even to be risking his life. He’d lost to Joe Frazier in 1971 and, in another match with Ken Norton, had his jaw broken. Yet Foreman – unbeaten in forty matches, seven years younger and with a terrifying punching power – had ruthlessly dispatched both Frazier and Norton in a couple of rounds.

Sports commentator Howard Cosell was far from alone in his fears about the coming fight: ‘The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali…. Maybe he can pull off a miracle. But against George Foreman? So young, so strong, so fearless.’

Ali was bullish in his response to the world: ‘I’m going to make you eat everything you say against me, all of my critics. I’ll prove to the world that I’m still the fastest, the prettiest, the… classiest, the most scientific, the greatest fighter of all time….’ With Cosell, a notorious toupée-wearer, Ali got personal: ‘Cosell, you’re a phoney and that thing on your head comes from the tail of a pony!’   

It was Zaire’s President Mobutu who financed the match. A bloodthirsty Congolese tyrant who’d executed numerous opponents (even dismembering one of them alive), Mobutu stumped up a staggering $5 million (£4 million) apiece for the fighters, hoping it would bring glory and new investment to his failing state of a country.

The fight, staged by first-time promoter Don King – who’d just been released from jail for manslaughter – was billed not just as a sporting event but the return of two African American boxers to their cultural roots (with James Brown and BB King coming along for the ride as well). As King is overheard saying in Gast’s film: ‘We left Africa in shackles and fetters and chains, you know? And we’re coming back in an aura of splendour and scintillating glory.’ Certainly Ali, with his openness, showmanship and motormouthed wit quickly charmed the Zairian people, who followed him around in a great, adoring mob.

Meanwhile title-holder Foreman – a shy, brooding introvert – struck the wrong note in Zaire from the start. Having snubbed Mobutu’s offer of quarters at a presidential palace outside the capital, he holed up in a city-centre apartment, visibly pining for home. Kinshasa was a place Foreman seemed to loathe – with its poverty and crime almost the definition of a ‘third world’ city – and the feeling appeared to be mutual.

Ali, naturally, was the beneficiary. As he trained, he was increasingly surrounded by Zairians yelling the phrase: ‘Ali bo-ma-ye! Ali bo-ma-ye!’ On discovering, to his delight, that it was a universal exhortation to pulverise Foreman – ‘Ali, kill him! Ali, kill him!’ – he began, with a broad smile, to conduct their shouts and lead the chanting himself. Though writer Norman Mailer (who later wrote his book The Fight about the Ali-Foreman match) believed Ali was secretly afraid throughout the pre-fight period – no one did bravado better: ‘If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait till I whip Foreman’s behind!’ Or, in words that turned out to be prophetic: ‘I’m the matador and he’s the bull.’

The match – delayed by an excruciating month thanks to an injury Foreman suffered while sparring – finally took place on 30 October. Rumours swirled round before the day: Foreman believed someone was poisoning him, others said Ali had got one of the local witch doctors – feticheurs – to put a curse on his opponent. Immediately prior to the fight, emotions in the Ali camp seemed funereal, with a feeling, as writer George Plimpton put it, that their man was going ‘out to the gallows’. Only Ali himself seemed unfazed: ‘Scared? A little thing like this! Do I look scared?… I fear Allah and thunderstorms and bad plane rides. But this is like another day in the gym.’

From the opening bell – at 4 a.m. – the fight was ferocious. The boxers seemed to lock horns, flailing and swinging madly at one another. As one official commentator put it: ‘There is real violence in that ring. There’s hatred… This is like a street fight, not a boxing match.’ It seemed that Ali, like Frazier and Norton before him, might succumb to an early KO by Foreman, a fighter who liked to keep things swift and brutal. Mailer said that in a break between rounds:

Ali had a look on his face that I’ll never forget. It was the only time I ever saw fear in Ali’s eyes. It seemed as if Ali were staring deep within – ‘Alright, this is the moment… This is the hour. Do you have the guts?’

Finally, the fighter ‘nodded to himself’ in response, and – ‘as if he was looking into the eyes of his maker’ – turned to the adoring crowd and began to shout: “Ali bo-ma-ye! Ali bo-ma-ye!” 100,000 people yelled back at him and ‘this huge reverberation of the crowd,’ Mailer remembered, ‘came back into the ring. Ali picked it up.’ The fight went on. 

Yet it still looked like the other boxer was winning. Ali was mostly on the ropes, taking huge punishment from Foreman, who was battering away savagely at his arms and torso (Ali, according to journalist Ken Jones, urinated blood for days after the fight from kidney damage). ‘Get off the ropes,’ his trainers yelled at him, but Ali refused: ‘Don’t talk. I know what I’m doing.’

As Foreman continued to hurl punches at him, round after round, Ali began to taunt him back: ‘C’mon, champ, you can do better than that… Show me something, George… Punch, sucker! That’s a sissy punch!’ By about round five, with Ali absorbing more and more crashing blows, Foreman, unused to a fight of this length, looked as though he was flagging. In round eight, his eyes battered and swollen, he seemed exhausted.

It was at this point that Ali roused himself: ‘Now it’s my turn,’ he muttered to his opponent. Driving the champion into the centre of the ring, he seemed to toy with him before, with seconds left till the end of the round, delivering a deadly right-left-right combination, at which the poleaxed Foreman – undefeated in 40 matches – simply spun and hurtled to the canvas. The referee counted to nine before the bell went, but it was all over. The challenger’s strategy of letting Foreman punch himself out – his ‘rope-a-dope’ manoeuvre – had worked. Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion of the world once again.

As a jubilant crowd of Zairians swarmed into the ring, Ali spoke directly to the camera: ‘Everybody stop talking now! Attention! I told you, all of my critics, I told you all that I was the greatest of all time… Never again say that I’m going to be defeated… If you want to know any damn thing about boxing, don’t go to no boxing experts in the whole of the States… Come to Muhammad Ali – I am the man.’

The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ may have been a glorification of violence. But it was also a tale of bravery, wisdom, endurance, humility and faith – one which seemed to happen on an epic plane and which, fifty years later, still has the transcendent power to inspire. Is it worth a century’s fatalities, or the sight of Ali shaking with Parkinson’s – possibly exacerbated or even directly caused by boxing – in his later years?

There are no glib, easy answers, though perhaps Muhammad Ali’s own words are relevant to the debate. ‘Without fear, there is no bravery,’ the champion once remarked, adding, at another moment: ‘Boxing is a risk and life is a gamble. And I gotta take both.’

If Peter Mandelson can’t handle Trump, no one can

If Peter Mandelson is confirmed as our next ambassador to Washington there will be an outcry among swathes of both the right and the left of British politics. There always is when Mandelson lands a plum position. On the left, the resentment began over his transfer of allegiance from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair more than 30 years ago. But it really gained momentum after Blair parachuted him in to be Northern Ireland secretary in place of Mo Mowlam in the autumn of 1999.

Grassroots Labour mythology sprung up around the idea that Mowlam was being punished by Blair for being too popular and that Mandelson had been manoeuvring for her job. He had been sacked from the cabinet late in 1998 over his taking of a secret loan from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson.

The more prosaic truth was that Mowlam’s relationship with Unionist politicians had deteriorated to the point that it had become an impediment to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Most of the heavy lifting needed to get the deal signed in the first place had been done by Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell anyway.

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Mandelson made a good pantomime villain, but in the event was rather successful during his brief tenure in the job. The Stormont Assembly, the power-sharing Northern Ireland executive and police service reform all sprang into life before Blair sacked him again, this time over the Hinduja passport affair. Later, an inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing and a no-doubt sheepish Blair supported him bowing out of the Commons to become a European Commissioner late in 2004. There were groans aplenty at this, as well as much mockery from those who recalled Mandelson declaring upon his re-election in Hartlepool at the 2001 general election that he was ‘a fighter, not a quitter’.

On the right it is his Europhilia that lies at the root of much of the hostility towards him, something heightened by his support for a second referendum to overturn Brexit. Yet Mandelson also made a success of his European Commission trade portfolio in the noughties, impressing none other than Nigel Farage with his mastery of the brief. Indeed, Farage has become an unlikely cheerleader for Mandelson’s latest job search, recalling his impressive grasp of policy detail during his Brussels years and conceding his possession of ‘a good brain’.

As well as being frontrunner in the ambassadorial stakes, Mandelson is also in the race to become the next Chancellor of Oxford University. With a characteristic degree of modesty, he has pronounced himself capable of doing both jobs at the same time.

His main rivals for the Washington role are said to be Baroness Ashton, a fellow Labour peer and former EU foreign affairs supremo, and David Miliband, the New York-based fellow Blairite whose pitch for the Labour leadership was famously thwarted by his younger brother Ed. Miliband major also has a good brain, no doubt, but seems to regard the demonstration of that as the prime objective of most functions he attends. Mandelson’s advantage is an awareness of the need to draw concessions from the person sitting on the other side of the desk.

It is largely for this reason that I find myself hoping that he gets the job. I cannot imagine a long-time Hillary Clinton fan from central casting such as Miliband endearing himself to the incoming Donald Trump administration. Mandelson, by contrast, will surely understand the key aim of a UK ambassador to the US, once inelegantly set out by the aforementioned Powell as being ‘to get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.

The grim experience of our former man in Washington Kim Darroch during the first Trump administration – he resigned shortly after getting caught being rude about Trump and then the president being rude about him right back – should remind us that handling the incoming POTUS will not be straightforward.

Selling Britain as America’s most important ally while Britain is led by a Labour government that is anathema to Trump in almost every regard will require a masterclass in diplomacy as well as a Machiavellian mind. If anyone can pull it off, Peter Mandelson can.

Russia’s mephedrone problem is spiralling out of control

Russians are, stereotypically, known as heavy vodka drinkers – a fact that is often celebrated, despite all the bodily perils it entails. What’s rather less talked about is that Russia suffers one of the worst HIV epidemics outside Africa. This is thanks, in no small part, to heroin users sharing needles. But the latest challenge to public health, aside from the meatgrinder in Ukraine, is the synthetic stimulants craze behind which lie an underworld of cyber drug cartels.

The annual death toll from illicit drugs has more than doubled since 2019 to over 10,000 a year, a gruesome trend that’s likely to continue as the stress of the war eats away at Russian society and traumatised soldiers return from the battlefield.

It’s tricky to tell, for obvious reasons, precisely how much of Russia’s drug traffic flows through the dark web. But anecdotally, nearly everything has shifted from street corner sales to the internet, as documented in a new report by the Global Initiative for which I was a researcher.

Cocaine, which has to be smuggled from South America, is out-of-reach of most everyday Russians. Instead, Russian druggies have opted to make their own: mephedrone, a white crystalline powder originally developed as a pesticide by Israeli chemists, feels like a dirtier version of ecstasy crossed with the moreish cravings of cocaine that can lead to days-long “marathon” sessions with no sleep. 

Make-you-own-mephedrone kits are cheaply and readily available from the dark web and DIY chemists sell their gear online and over messaging services.

‘These days, everything is produced here apart from cocaine, because it’s obviously impossible to have a coca leaf plantation in Russia,’ says Artem (not his real name), who used to manage a ‘shop’ selling drugs over Telegram. ‘But that’s the only thing that comes from abroad. Everything else is made by local chemists who sell on these very same platforms.’

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Russia’s drug problem is nothing new. Cocaine was popular among high society, artistic and bohemian circles in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including a young Mikhail Bulgakov (of The Master and Margarita). It wasn’t uncommon for actors to take drugs before walking onstage. It didn’t reach epidemic proportions, nor was it considered particularly dangerous to society at large. The few laws in place were comically lax: if someone overdosed on a pharmacists’ cocaine, the druggist responsible merely had to repent in church. But by the early 1920s, coked-up street orphans had become a visible menace, and many doctors, surgeons and soldiers had picked up a morphine addiction while serving in the Civil War. The Bolsheviks sought to stamp out narcotic inebriation as a symptom of capitalist decadence.

While the USSR was leftist in a fiscal sense, it was also deeply socially conservative. Free thinking was discouraged. Yet a small cohort of Soviet hippies continued to exist. Inspired by rock n’ roll and eastern philosophy, they sought to free their minds by smoking grass, brewing opium tea and huffing on cleaning fluid.

‘An important moment in psychedelic history came when the Leningrad kids brought Sopals, which was a washing chemical produced in Riga,’ recalled Vladimir Wiedemann, a veteran hippy from Estonia. ‘There’s this sweet smell…You start breathing it in and you feel out of it. It sends you flying on an adventure to other worlds. I’d say it’s even cooler than LSD. That’s what we called it: Soviet LSD. There was a kind of mysticism around it; we used to hold group seances.’

During the 1980s invasion of Afghanistan, bored Red Army conscripts bartered their fuel, weapons and ammo – often the same bullets that would be fired back at them – for opium and hashish. Returning soldiers brought the habit back with them. When communism collapsed in the chaotic years of the 1990s, life expectancies plummeted as people lost their jobs and basic social institutions crumbled, leaving a vacuum filled by heroin. 

Yekaterinburg’s Roma village was at the heart of the heroin economy; smack was sold there more-or-less openly. In 1999, hundreds of heavies clad in black leather jackets parked inside the settlement and stood in intimidating silence. Affiliated to a local mafia gang and led by an ex-convict who later became the mayor, the vigilantes called themselves City Without Drugs. These men kidnapped addicts and chained them to their beds as they underwent withdrawal. It’s uncertain that their dubious methods worked. 

Being a connoisseur of politically-incorrect pick-me-ups became particularly risky in Russia, where law enforcement left the druggie community thoroughly paranoid: you never knew if that friend passing you a roll-up was trying to incriminate you to get himself off-the-hook from the cops. But most young Russians were cyber-savvy. Several message boards appeared in the untamed prairies of the internet during the late 1990s and early 00s. These were not only places to share information and stoned thoughts, but became increasingly professionalised trading platforms for “shops” selling every mind-bending chemical under the sun. In the two decades since, they’ve become more akin to traditional narco-mafias, aggressively expanding and monopolising their territory and even dispatching tracksuit-clad enforcers to dispense street justice to untrustworthy associates. As the Global Initiative notes, online Russian drug syndicates have now found footholds beyond the old Soviet empire as far abroad as Sri Lanka.

Cop is dying

In the near three-decade history of the annual round of UN climate conferences, the Baku Cop29 stands out. There have been disastrous Cops before. For those with long memories, there was Cop6 in the Hague after George W. Bush narrowly won the 2000 presidential election, which was disrupted by protestors and the outgoing American climate negotiator had a cake thrown at him. Then there is the Copenhagen Cop15, when the Global South, led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, sunk a binding climate treaty that would have required them to cap their emissions. But never before has there been the indifference and mass absenteeism that marks the Baku Cop.

The choice of Azerbaijan to host the talks was always going to be challenging. Being an oil producer did not disqualify Dubai from skilfully running last year’s Cop. But the brutal ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh last year and President Ilham Aliyev’s long-standing denial of the Armenian genocide proved too much even for a UN climate conference where white-washing and hypocrisy are the order of the day. Ironically, it was the Paris Cop21 in 2015 – widely seen as the crowning achievement of the UN climate talks – that drained the drama from all subsequent Cops.

Under the Paris climate agreement, the process moved from countries sitting around the conference table negotiating emissions targets to countries submitting their own targets – or deciding not to have any targets at all – in the form of five-yearly Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs). Unsurprisingly, the Paris agreement failed to bring about a peaking of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2015, global emissions of carbon dioxide were 35.4 billion tonnes. In 2023, they had risen to 37.79 billion tonnes – an increase of 6.75 per cent – with little sign, despite the UK and EU delivering massive emissions reductions, that global emissions are close to peaking.

The outcome of the Paris agreement’s system of NDCs is that Cops have become talking shops devoted primarily to two issues: standardising the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, a yawnathon if ever there was one, and money – how much of it the West should give the Global South. In an FT article last week, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, cited UN estimates that the energy transition required to meet net zero needs up to $11.7 trillion a year, equivalent to 10 percent of world output. Our economic survival depends on unlocking trillions of dollars of green capital, Lagarde argues. This is a nursery-school level of thinking about finance. The world’s second most powerful central banker appears to think there are trillions of dollars of unused capital lying around in someone’s cellar. What Lagarde really means, but lacks the honesty to say, is that net zero requires diverting a vast amount of capital from being deployed in productive investments where they earn a higher return than on so-called green ones.

But telling the truth about the price tag of net zero is tantamount to killing it. The one world leader who has grasped the dire economic consequences of net zero is Donald Trump, whose election is already accelerating the Cops’ slide into irrelevance. Having withdrawn the United States from the Paris agreement in his first term, Trump is promising to do so again in his second. This provoked a bizarre response from ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods. Speaking in Baku, Woods complained that pulling out would ‘leave a void with respect to what the Trump administration could bring to this process.’ This echoes the view of Woods’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who, before being fired as Trump’s first secretary of state, argued that staying in would enable the Trump administration to renegotiate the terms of the Paris agreement.

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This shows how little Tillerson understood. The only renegotiation that would have relieved the US of the legal commitment to submit an NDC with ever more stringent emissions targets every five years would mean gutting the agreement. Renegotiation wasn’t going to happen. The whole point of the US exiting the Paris agreement is to leave a void, so that the US is not obligated to submit another NDC or hand over more American taxpayers’ money to the Global South. Trump’s views are evidently shared by Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who ordered his country’s climate negotiators to leave the Cop.

These developments left Keir Starmer looking an increasingly forlorn figure at Baku, where he presented Britain’s NDC for 2035, which would see an 81 per cent cut in emissions. ‘Our goal of 1.5C… Is aligned with our goals for growth,’ the Prime Minister declared. In just 11 words, the Prime Minister shows himself doubly deluded. The following day, Oslo-based climate researcher Glen Peters said that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is ‘so small that it almost makes no sense anymore.’

On net zero being good for growth, Starmer should have a quiet word with Ed Miliband, as his net zero minister knows the truth. When Miliband was doing the same job under Gordon Brown, on 9 March 2009, he signed an impact assessment on the Climate Change Act’s 80 per cent target. ‘I am satisfied that, given the available evidence, it represents a reasonable view of the likely costs, benefits and impact of the leading options,’ Miliband certified on the first page of an impact assessment. In a paragraph near the top of the document, it reads: ‘Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere. The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak.’ The prime minister should heed that warning and withdraw the UK’s NDC before net zero does even more damage to the dangerously fragile British economy.

Amy Lamé embarrasses herself – again

After eight years of poorly serving the capital, there was relief from London taxpayers last month when Amy Lamé announced she was standing down as Sadiq Khan’s ‘Night Czar’. On her watch, dozens of clubs, pubs and bars closed down, all the while she continued to enjoy inflation-busting pay rises. It was Mr S who broke the news last year that Khan had handed her a 40 per cent wage increase, with her final salary being eventually more than £132,000 a year. So much for performance relayed pay eh?

Lamé is no longer claiming a taxpayer salary – but she still continues to embarrass herself. This afternoon it was announced that the popular London nightclub Heaven has been closed on public safety grounds. Why, you ask? Because, shockingly, a woman was allegedly raped in the vicinity of the venue by a member of security staff earlier this month. The Met says that a staff member has been arrested, charged with rape and is on remand in prison. The force successfully applied to Westminster Council to suspend the licence of the venue until a full hearing can take place.

So, what did Lamé choose to do? She took to Instagram to declare the following:

Today Westminster Council, supported by the Met Police, has taken the controversial decision to close Heaven, the UK’s longest running and historically important LGBTQ+ nightclub. Our community is being held to double standards, targeted by institutional homophobia and is the victim of legally questionable interpretation of licensing regulations. Let the battle commence #SaveHeaven

Of all the licensing matters for Lamé to care about, this is the hill she chooses to die on? Neil Garratt, the Leader of the City Hall Tories hit back strongly:

Absolutely disgusting response from our disgraced ex-Night Czar, Lame Amy. Trying to make herself to be the victim, when there is a very clear victim who deserves everyone’s utmost sympathy. What an appalling response to a human tragedy.

Presumably she’s jealous she didn’t get to be the person responsible for another nightclub closure in London.

One phone call won’t make Putin listen to Scholz

This afternoon, for the first time in nearly two years, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz picked up the phone to speak with Russian president Vladimir Putin. The two leaders reportedly spoke for approximately an hour, with Scholz calling on Putin to end the ‘Russian war of aggression in Ukraine’ and withdraw his troops from the country. Scholz also made another demand of Putin, that ‘Russia must show a willingness to negotiate with Ukraine – with the aim of achieving a just and lasting peace’.

During the call, Scholz reportedly condemned Russia’s continued striking of civilian targets in Ukraine and raised the subject of the 50,000 or so North Korean soldiers believed to have been shipped to the Ukrainian front to help prop up the Russian army’s advance. Scholz is said to have warned Putin that keeping North Korean troops in the fight would lead to an escalation of the conflict. Ending the call, the pair apparently agreed to ‘stay in touch’.

Today’s phone call between the pair is not a surprise: German government sources let it be known at the end of September that Scholz wanted to speak to Putin again for the first time since December 2022. Unlike Donald Trump’s reported call with the Russian president last week, Scholz had apparently forewarned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky of his plans – and appears to be planning to debrief him about the call.

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Alongside his statement on Twitter/X announcing that the conversation had taken place this afternoon, Scholz included a softly-lit photo of himself seemingly preparing for the call, sat at his desk, flanked by advisers, staring intently at papers. In doing so, the Chancellor will have been trying to present an air of statesmanship and stability – particularly important following the messy collapse of his government coalition last week and the calling of a snap election in the new year. Trump’s looming presidency and the instability it is expected to bring for Europe on a number of issues, including support for Ukraine, makes the need for a show of strong leadership all the more important. 

That Scholz has got his wish to speak to Putin now will be viewed as a diplomatic coup inside the Chancellery – all the more so as the Chancelor gets ready to fight a brutal election campaign in which the issue of ending the war in Ukraine is expected to play a large part. But getting Putin on the phone is one thing; getting him to pay even the slightest bit of attention to Scholz’s message is quite another.

Issuing its own statement following the call, the Kremlin was at pains to point out the initiative for it had come from Berlin. In their words, a ‘detailed and frank exchange of views’ on Ukraine was held between the two leaders, as was a discussion, intriguingly, on the situation in the Middle East. The statement highlighted Putin’s complaint to Scholz that the nadir to which Russo-German relations had fallen to was ‘a consequence of the unfriendly course of the German authorities’. 

If the Kremlin readout is anything to go by, much of what Putin had to say to Scholz was things he has already said before. The war in Ukraine, the Russian president said, was ‘a direct result of Nato’s long-standing aggressive policy aimed at creating an anti-Russian bridgehead on Ukrainian territory’. The rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine had, apparently, been ‘trampled’. 

Putin once again claimed that he has ‘never refused and remains open to resuming negotiations’ on the war – something he has stated repeatedly and yet failed to so far follow up with any kind of substantive action. He also reinforced the recognition of Russia’s ‘new territorial realities’ – for which read conquered land – as a precondition for any negotiations, something Germany or any of Ukraine’s allies seem unlikely to do in the near future.

Putin may currently have the upper hand in his war, but even he is aware that his invasion is not indefinitely sustainable. The Ukrainian army claims that Russian losses have risen to an average of 2,000 per day in Moscow’s attempts to recapture land in their Kursk region (partially occupied by Kyiv’s troops since August) and make advances on Ukrainian soil. With the clock ticking down to Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, Putin is trying to snatch as much land as he can before the President-elect potentially attempts to lock in any type of peace deal. 

No peace deal in Ukraine will be possible without bringing Putin to the negotiating table. But the Russian president’s phone call with Scholz seems unlikely to pave the way for any substantial breakthrough in the conflict – as much as Scholz would like it to.

SNP health secretary embroiled in expenses debacle

To Scotland, where the Nats are once again under scrutiny over expenses claims. It now transpires that not only had SNP health secretary Neil Gray been using ministerial cars to take him to sports matches, he took relatives in the vehicle with him too. The last time Mr S checked, acting ‘in line with government duties’ did not involve bringing family along on the job…

Gray came under fire after the Sunday Mail revealed the Aberdeen FC fan had been chauffeured to a number of his team’s games between November 2023 and May 2024. After pressure on Gray ramped up, the cabinet minister opted on Thursday to make a statement on his use of the public purse in Holyrood. Lamenting the optics of the situation, the separatist admitted to parliamentarians:

It is a matter of regret to me. By attending four Aberdeen games that I have given the impression of acting more as a fan and less as a minister…but when it comes to domestic football I should have ensured I went to see teams other than Aberdeen.

You can say that again. Continuing his confessional, the health secretary added that he had taken ‘a family member or a guest’ to five of the six matches he was chauffeured to – quickly insisting the indiscretion hadn’t cost the taxpayer any additional money. That doesn’t quite right the wrong, however. Now the Scottish Tories have called for a ministerial code investigation, with deputy party leader Rachael Hamilton fuming: ‘Neil Gray wasn’t even the sports minister when he went to some of these games. These excuses are an embarrassment.’ Ouch.

It’s not the first time Gray’s professional judgement has come into question – after the Nat was caught attempting to buy Oasis tickets during a conference event on, er, Alzheimer’s disease. And, more than that, this is now the second time in a matter of months that an SNP health secretary has been quizzed over football-related fiascos. Gray’s predecessor Michael Matheson forced to resign from government over an £11,000 iPad scandal, which saw the former government minister accused of lying to the press on the matter before being handed a suspension and wage cut over the issue.

Given the Nats have always been fast to blast Labour over questionable expenses claims, this latest development shrouds the embattled party in yet more embarrassment. With just 18 months to go until the next Holyrood election, the flailing SNP could certainly do without stories like these…

Democrats don’t need their own Joe Rogan

One of the new cliches of American politics is that progressives need their own Joe Rogan. The comedian turned podcaster has an audience that is four-fifths male and 51 per cent aged 18-34, and it has not escaped the Democrats’ notice that, while women aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, men in the same age group went narrowly for Donald Trump. This tracks with pre-election research which showed a majority of Rogan listeners, regardless of sex or age, planned to vote Republican while only a quarter intended to back the Democrats. Rogan himself endorsed Trump, crediting Elon Musk for making ‘the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear’. Since Rogan is America’s most popular podcaster, with 14.5 million followers on Spotify, surely it makes sense that Democrats would want their own Pied Piper to the himbos and gymbros of Gen-Z.

Well, his name was Joe Rogan. Rogan is a supporter of abortion rights, socialised healthcare, gay and lesbian rights, and drug legalisation, a critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, and endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primaries. But he is also a believer in freedom of expression, which has led him to interview the likes of Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, a disbeliever in gender identity ideology, and he discouraged young people from taking the Covid shot while talking up his self-prescribed use of anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. These heresies caused progressive activists in politics, journalism, academia and civil society to mount a campaign to get Rogan fired by Spotify. Oddly enough, Rogan didn’t take well to this attempt to destroy him professionally and financially and while it’s difficult to prove that this nudged him Trumpwards, it’s hardly a leap to guess that it probably helped.

In some ways, progressive handwringing over Rogan is just a 2020s re-run of liberal handwringing over talk radio in the 1990s. Until the 1994 ‘Republican revolution’, which ended four decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, liberals dismissed talk radio as a forum for obnoxious shock jocks, low-information listeners and bored truckers. Then Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million weekly listeners were identified as the culprits behind the Democrats’ congressional defeat, and talk radio became a liberal bogeyman, a production line of ‘angry white men’. There were even attempts to blame its ‘rhetoric’ for the Oklahoma City bombing. When liberals couldn’t beat conservative-dominated AM radio, they tried to mimic it and many a Democrat was hailed in newspaper puff pieces as the next ‘Limbaugh of the left’, among them Al Franken, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo and Bill Press. But none could compete with Limbaugh, and even liberal talk’s breakout star, Rachel Maddow, only did so by switching to television.

The problem was one identified by Marshall McLuhan three decades earlier. As a medium, AM radio was ill-suited to a liberal message shaped by elite preoccupations with minority rights, political correctness, social justice, and scepticism towards American global leadership. Liberals were trying to use a format for Archie Bunker to sell the politics of Maude Findlay. They had misunderstood Limbaugh’s talent, which was not for converting his overwhelmingly white, male audience into conservatives but for drawing out the innate conservatism of this audience. Today’s progressives misunderstand Rogan in much the same way: he’s not making young men anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness – young men are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness.

Another flaw in the ‘progressive Joe Rogan’ proposal is that part of Rogan’s appeal – his authenticity – is that he’s not a political tribalist whose beliefs change with every shift in party strategy or ideological doctrine. Limbaugh often jabbed the Republican establishment from the right, but he was mostly a reliable party man, especially come election time. Rogan is a goofy Gen-X stoner dude with a degree from the University of Wikipedia and a policy interest in telling anyone who’ll listen how awesome it is tripping balls on DMT. Good luck trying to create a DNC version of that. Instead of astroturfing a progressive masculine culture, Democrats should ask themselves what has gone so wrong on the left that such a thing is required.

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They should also ask themselves whether the fusion of politics and media is still beneficial to the American centre-left. In previous election cycles, having a sizeable segment of the news media unable or unwilling to distinguish between journalism and political activism might have served a purpose. (As Mitt Romney once quipped of the news media: ‘My job is to lay out a positive vision for the future of the country, and their job is to make sure no one else finds out about it.’) But the more progressive the Democrat party and the media have become, the further they have pushed each other from the American mainstream, whether on the economy, crime, immigration, identity politics or foreign policy. The media-political complex has become a purity spiral within a purity spiral. Progressive media radicalises an already hyper-progressive audience, with lurid tales of impending fascism. This makes it harder for progressive politicians to pursue moderation, because moderation in the struggle against fascism is tantamount to appeasement. As a result, progressive politics becomes so immoderate that it loses a presidential election to an eminently beatable opponent. Progressive media then polices the response to this defeat so that progressivism cannot be blamed and pragmatic reform cannot be pursued. Losing purely becomes a virtue and winning through compromise a vice.

The right savours those compilation videos of progressives weeping on cable news or shrieking in their cars because Trump won, but behind the schadenfreude lies a symptom of major political and psychological dysfunction. The progressive purity spiral has not only made it more difficult for Democrats to win elections, it has made it harder for them to process defeat. People hyperventilating to camera about the end of democracy are collateral damage of a style of news that treats catastrophising as a content strategy. Even after the Democrats’ defeat, MSNBC hosted a Yale psychiatry fellow who told viewers it was ‘completely fine’ to distance themselves from relatives who voted the wrong way. Helping Donald Trump win a second term is regrettable, but the damage done to Americans’ mental health is unforgivable.

The Democrats don’t need their own Joe Rogan. They need a different message and a different medium. The current message is driving voters into the arms of Donald Trump while the current medium is driving Democrats themselves into cascades of despair.

How corrupt are Britain’s prisons?

Two recently-released prisoners have lifted the lid on corruption and sexual harassment in Britain’s prisons. Beatrice Auty, who was imprisoned for money laundering, said that she was harassed by a male prison officer at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey. A former officer, Lee Davis, who spent two years in prison for corruption, also told the BBC of a culture where staff routinely use their knowledge of security measures to smuggle contraband inside.

The company that runs HMP Bronzefield, said that, while it cannot comment on individual cases, ‘where complaints are received about any employee, we undertake all appropriate investigations and take necessary actions as needed’. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice’s response to the report suggests that this could be a case of a few bad apples.

‘The overwhelming majority of Prison Service staff are hardworking and honest,’ the MoJ said in a statement, ‘we’re catching more of the small minority who break the rules. This includes by bolstering our Counter Corruption Unit and strengthening our vetting process.’ Is this true?

Most prison officers and staff aren’t corrupt. The problem is that it doesn’t take many officers who don’t follow the rules to undermine the entire prison system.

The supply of contraband which threatens to overwhelm prisons in Britain relies upon either complicity or incompetence. Whatever the cause, it’s a lucrative trade. Davis explained that he was paid £400 to £500 per ‘package’ of cannabis, steroids and phones. This was in 2010. Prices have risen since. When I was an inmate at HMP Wandsworth in 2020, I knew of an officer who would charge £1,000 for a delivery of tobacco or drugs. Even in our most secure prisons, this happens. I spoke with a former prisoner, ‘Mike’, who was jailed at Belmarsh, the prison which holds some of the most dangerous terrorists. He was able to corrupt an officer who repeatedly smuggled in iPhones.

This really shouldn’t be possible. Prisons ought to be secure. Most people probably imagine them to be something like an airport, with everyone – and everything – being scanned on its way in. In reality, security is often lax. Davis told the BBC that he was only ‘searched twice in three years’. This would be laughable, were it not so serious. 

John Podmore, a former governor of Brixton and Belmarsh, who was head of the national Corruption Prevention Unit for the prison service, believes that the drugs trade in prisons could be worth around £1 billion per year. He arrives at this estimate because prison inspections regularly report that drugs are easy to obtain, that, in some cases, over half of prisoners are testing positive for drugs, and that drugs inside jails sell for approximately three times their ‘street price’. On this basis, a typical drug-using prisoner may be spending £80 or more per day, with perhaps 40,000 regular users in the prison system. John says this is a ‘hidden tax on their families’. He’s right. Earlier this year, I spoke with the mother of a prisoner at HMP Wandsworth. She explained that dealers came to her home address, demanding money for drug debts incurred by her son inside. Drugs are a scourge in prisons. They kill and harm. Often inmates are released more addicted then when they arrived, and these addictions drive further crime and create more victims.

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It simply isn’t good enough then for the MoJ to assure us that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of officers are fine. There are many good, decent and honest officers in the prison system. But enough aren’t that it’s a problem. I often hear whispers from serving prison staff about corruption at higher levels. They fear that senior staff are protected by the system.

Internal whistleblowing mechanisms are often not up to the task. Louise, a former prison officer who did not want to disclose her real name, told me that she suffered appalling sexual harassment from a male officer who had been appointed as her mentor. When Louise reported what was happening, she was ostracised by colleagues. The man was then moved twice to other prisons where he was accused of sexual harassment.

This culture of organisations hiding, minimising, and failing to report matters to the police brings to mind the Church of England’s latest scandal. The only cure for wrongdoing is truth, as the MoJ appears to recognise. In recent years, they’ve established a Professional Standards and Behaviour group and a Tackling Unacceptable Behaviour Unit. Both aim to make it easier for staff to report colleagues who are breaking the rules. Let’s hope that more brave serving staff are willing to come forward and leak the evidence necessary to root out corruption and misconduct from our prisons. Otherwise, our jails will remain pits of despair, addiction and abuse.

Spain won’t forgive and forget over Valencia’s deadly floods

The head of the Valencia regional government has just attempted an impossible task – justifying his administration’s conduct before, during and after the flash floods that killed over 220 people in the Spanish region last month. 

Since the catastrophe on 29 October, relentless, richly deserved criticism has been heaped on Carlos Mazón’s right-wing Partido Popular administration, which last year scrapped a special response force for natural disasters. On the day of the floods, instead of monitoring the situation, Mazón enjoyed a leisurely restaurant lunch lasting until six in the evening and then took over an hour to reach the emergency command centre. The flood warning, when it finally came, was too late: the alert pinged on one woman’s mobile phone while she was hauling herself up the side of a building, the torrent roaring just below her.  

And then the recovery effort, at least in its early days, was a mismanaged chaos. Besides the long delays in updating the numbers of dead and missing, for days the under-resourced relief was slow to arrive and coordination was conspicuous by its absence. With volunteers outnumbering soldiers, ‘Only the people can save the people’ soon became a popular slogan. 

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Meanwhile Mazón and his ministers have been caught out in numerous self-serving half-truths and contradictory declarations. The technology to send alerts to people’s mobile phones, for example, has long been in place but Salomé Pradas, Mazón’s interior minister, declared that she was not told until the evening of the day of the disaster that such a thing was possible. She later retracted that statement. When some impertinent journalists caught up with her as she entered a building and asked why she’d lied, she simply turned and gave them a long, contemptuous ‘How dare you?’ stare. 

So it was no surprise last Saturday when an estimated 130,000 people took to the streets in Valencia, some calling for Mazón to resign while others demanded that he be prosecuted and sent to prison. Waving placards – one read ‘Our hands are stained with mud, yours with blood’, another ‘Not everyone is here; we’re missing all the people that drowned’ – they daubed the walls of government buildings and clashed with riot police. 

Today, when he appeared before the regional assembly to explain his government’s actions, Mazón’s two and a half hour-long speech was cold and scripted, sounding at times almost as if he was rehearsing his legal defence. He barely mentioned the dead and the bereaved, preferring to cite large quantities of detailed facts and figures that proved, he suggested, that ‘the system’ had been unable to cope with the unprecedented magnitude of the disaster. But lessons had been learned, he assured everyone: he was restructuring his government and was now ready to lead the region towards a better future. 

His resignation would at least have allowed his party to claim that some political responsibility had been shouldered. However, no one really expected him to step down: that would almost certainly trigger elections in which his party would suffer a heavy defeat. But on the other hand, how can Mazón carry on? He’s heckled if he shows his face on the street and has, of course, no chance of re-election. 

The incompetence and dishonesty that Mazón and his ministers have displayed is nothing new in the Partido Popular. It was a Partido Popular government for example that blamed Basque terrorists for the Madrid bombings in 2004, despite the forensic evidence pointing to Al Qaeda. And over recent years it’s been hard to keep track of all the Partido Popular politicians accused of fraud, embezzlement and money-laundering.       

But things are no better in the socialist camp. It seems unlikely that the fragile minority left-wing coalition currently governing Spain will escape all blame for this catastrophe. And it too is mired in corruption scandals, one involving the prime minister’s wife. Meanwhile, the only important measure it has managed to get through parliament is the hugely unpopular amnesty for hundreds of Catalan separatists facing criminal charges. The radical left Podemos party is currently making its four votes, which the government needs if its budget is to be approved, conditional on the severance of ‘commercial and diplomatic relations with the genocidal state of Israel’. 

It’s not clear then how much longer Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez can cling to power. When the general election does come, the right-wing alliance of the Partido Popular and Vox is likely to secure an absolute majority. If the Partido Popular then proves, yet again, to be more interested in the spoils of office than in working hard for the public good, then the more principled Vox, ideologically much closer to President-elect Trump and enjoying good relations with his team, will have plenty of scope to implement its policies. 

Two more bets for Cheltenham’s November meeting

Cheltenham’s three-day November meeting, starting today, will take place on much faster ground that normal and so anticipate plenty of non-runners if, as expected, there is very little rain over the weekend. This is usually a meeting at which soft-ground horses have their preferred conditions but that’s definitely not the case this time.

The big race tomorrow is the Paddy Power Gold Cup (2.20 p.m.), a handicap chase over two miles four furlongs that has attracted a field of 15 runners. I had expected to put up Ga Law who I backed at tasty prices to win this very race two years ago.

However, his odds have contracted all week and a current top price of 13-2 seems short for such a competitive race even though he is guaranteed to love this quick surface. Ginny’s Destiny, trained by Paul Nicholls, is a worthy favourite and is likely to be rated far higher than his current mark of 155 by the end of the season if he is as talented as connections think he is. However, his price seems short enough too at 3-1 or less.

You won’t often find me tipping a runner from 6 lbs out of the handicap but, as always, if a horse is overpriced I am keen to back it. STRAW FAN JACK hails from the yard of Sheila Lewis in Brecon, Powys. Lewis was running her own nail salon until relatively recently but that doesn’t mean she can’t train racehorses – far from it.

She has certainly done Straw Fan Jack proud, training him to run plenty of big races including being third in the TrustATrader Plate at the Cheltenham Festival in March at odds of 28-1. Admittedly that was off a mark of 133, fully  8lbs lower that the mark he will run off tomorrow.

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However, this nine-year-old grey gelding goes well fresh, he loves good ground and this race will have been the aim for most of the summer. I am hoping that, at the very least, Straw Fan Jack can run into a place. Take the 33-1 each way with Paddy Power and Sky Bet paying five places, rather than the 40-1 available with one less place.

I deliberately held off writing this column so that I could see the declarations for Cheltenham’s Sunday card, which closed this morning at 10 a.m. Sunday’s big race is the Unibet Greatwood Hurdle (3.30 p.m.) which has attracted a field of 16 runners.

I have already put up Go Dante for the race ante post but my fear is that the ground is now far too quick for this horse to do himself justice.  Soft or even heavy ground are probably what he needs to win a high-class handicap of this nature.

So I am going to go in again, this time knowing the likely ground conditions, and put up an outsider in  the form of Nicky Richards’s runner FLORIDA DREAMS. This six-year-old gelding has been the apple of his trainer’s eye for a couple of years now.

He has won half of his eight races under rules without reaching top rank and a mark of 127 gives him a chance of landing this £56,000-plus prize for the winning connections. It’s true he only just scraped home by a short head in a modest handicap hurdle at Hexham last month but that will have been very much a prep race for tomorrow’s contest.

Florida Dreams was 33-1 earlier in the week but that price did not last long. However, he is still available at 25-1 with bet365, paying five places, and so back him each way at those odds. Teddy Blue, from the Harry Derham yard, is another outsider that might well outrun his odds but you can’t back them all.

I had intended to put up a couple more tips but the two horses in question are confirmed mudlarks so I will be patient and keep their names under my hat for another day – a much wetter day – some time in the future.

Pending:

1 point each way Straw Fan Jack at 33-1 in the Paddy Power Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Go Dante at 9-1 in the Greatwood Hurdle, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.

1 point each way Florida dreams at 25-1 in the Greatwood Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Ahoy Senor at 6-1 in the Betfair Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 3 places.

Last weekend – 5.2 points

1 point each way All The Glory at 8-1 in the Mares’ Handicap Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Frero Banbou at 14-1 in the Grand Sefton, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places. Unplaced – 2 points.

1 point each way Percussion at 12-1 in the Grand Sefton, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Forward Plan at 9-1 in the Badger Beer Handicap Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 4 places. 4^th + 0.8 points.

2024-5 jump season running total: – 11.2 points.

2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.

2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

Is Starmer really proud of this rubber dinghy crackdown?

Hold the front page. The government may have finally smashed part of a people-smuggling gang, or as word-mangling Keir Starmer put it in a piece to camera, a ‘people-smaggling gun’.

The details are as follows: a 44-year-old Turkish national was arrested at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in an operation involving the UK National Crime Agency and its partner bodies in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Good news that a man suspected of being a significant supplier of small boat equipment has been arrested.

I want to thank @NCA_UK and their Dutch and Belgian counterparts for their work on this investigation.

Our approach to smashing criminal gangs is already having an impact. pic.twitter.com/54OkF7mIJY

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) November 14, 2024

He now faces extradition to Belgium to face charges of being involved in human smuggling via the transit of boats and engines from Turkey to a storage unit in Germany and then on to northern France.

According to Starmer, the arrest shows the government’s focus on breaking the supply of boats is now ‘bearing fruit’.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper added that: ‘This major investigation shows how important it is for our crime fighting agencies to be working hand in glove with our international partners to get results.’

That the arrest of a single suspect has brought forth statements from both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary perhaps indicates a certain sense of desperation to demonstrate some progress on this issue.

And no wonder. Because the overall story of Labour’s approach to ending the illicit cross-Channel traffic has been one of predictable and lamentable failure.

Starmer’s immediate scrapping, on taking office, of the nascent Rwanda deterrent plan has been followed by a big upsurge in illegal arrivals into the UK via the Channel. Between January 1 and July 4, under Rishi Sunak’s premiership, 13,574 people entered Britain in this fashion, at an average of 73 per day. But since Starmer took office, almost 20,000 have arrived at an average of 145 per day.

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It has also just emerged that at least in some cases the migrants are being provided with healthcare as well as plush hotel accommodation and ultimately permanent social housing.

Yet still ministers refuse to acknowledge that the migrants themselves are usually enthusiastic participants in a criminal enterprise designed to help them gatecrash illegally into Britain and tap into its extensive taxpayer-funded welfare state. 

Indeed, there is a strong case for saying that the migrants – typically young men paying £3,000 each for a place in one of the boats they help carry down to the waterfront in France – stand to gain at least as much financially over the long-term as do those arranging their dinghy berths.

Still Starmer and Cooper ask us to have faith that they can shut down the route by starving northern France of rubber dinghies, while running a free water taxi service into Dover for any that reach the mid-point of the Channel.

There is as much chance of that working as there is of the arrests of individual drug dealers ending the London cocaine trade.  

Of course those making millions out of facilitating illegal immigration must be arrested, charged and then jailed upon conviction. It is important that they face at least some risk of an adverse outcome.

And yet there will always be someone new keen to step into the shoes of those apprehended so long as migrants with cash in their pockets are willing to pay big money. By failing ensure any deterrent exists in the minds of the migrants themselves, other than the still very small risk of drowning in the Channel, ministers are guaranteeing this problem is only going to get worse.

After seeing what failing to stop the boats did to the careers of his Tory predecessors, it must surely soon dawn on Starmer what failing to smash the gangs will do to his own.

Roman Polanski and the scandal of the Dreyfus Affair

A few days ago, in the suburban surroundings of the Phoenix cinema in Finchley, north London, a major film by a great director that positively hums with contemporary relevance received its first, and by the looks of it, only showing in the English-speaking world.

The Jewish Film Festival finally found the courage that art house cinemas, the BBC, Channel 4, and all the streaming services lacked and put on An Officer and a Spy for one night only. And now it has gone again. Even Amazon Prime does not have it, and it is meant to have everything.

The suppression of the film version of Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 to 1906 is the most glaring act of censorship in recent cinema history. 

Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the Anglosphere. The French version, entitled J’accuse, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was nominated for a record 12 César awards, the French film industry’s equivalent of Oscars, and won Best Adaptation of a Book for Robert Harris, Best Costume Design, and Best Director. 

And there lies the rub, because the director in question was Roman Polanski, one of the greatest directors of our time, but who also, in 1978, fled Hollywood after pleading guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer.) 

At first glance, the censors seem to have a rational case. Polanski is a fugitive and a sex offender. Samantha Geimer has forgiven him and they have reached a settlement, but strictly speaking, her views are irrelevant and do not expunge the offence.

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Many would reply with the old argument that you must separate the life from the work, and that anyone looking for scenes of moral uplift in the private lives of artists is doomed to disappointment. 

But the old arguments don’t apply in our neurotic age.

The banning of An Officer and a Spy has no rational explanation. The censorship is a random and arbitrary act, conducted in secret and driven by the real and imaginary fears of media bureaucrats. 

At the screening in Finchley, the journalist Tanya Gold introduced the film and said that we live in “a time of censorship and idiocy and the two are not unconnected”. 

Indeed they are not, as the history of this film proves. John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, has championed it in the US, but found that “film distributors were terrified of being denounced and picketed. Commercially it’s very viable because it’s a great film. It is an extraordinary thing that it has been banned: an illicit and hideous victory for the woke.”

Even right-wing Jewish organisations were frightened to touch it. “You can take Mein Kampf out of public libraries in the US,” MacArthur continued, “but you can’t watch a movie about the Dreyfus affair.”

The absurdities do not end there. Polanski has been cancelled – but not entirely. His 1974 thriller Chinatown is one of the best film noirs ever made. It’s still shown, and as late as May, BBC radio dedicated a 45-minute programme to discussing “one of modern Hollywood’s greatest and most controversial movies”.

Spoiler alert but the plot of Chinatown ends with a revelation of child abuse. Compare it with An Officer and a Spy, which tells the story of Georges Picquart, who is superbly played by Jean Dujardin. He is appointed head of the French army’s secret service. Gradually he starts to suspect that the army falsely convicted a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason. 

Polanski captures the claustrophobia and the growing sense of menace as Picquart’s superiors insist that he cover up the scandal. Picquart refuses, and they turn on him. And when the affair breaks with Emile Zola’s thunderous J’accuse denunciation of a miscarriage of justice, a condemnation that is remembered to this day, reactionary France responds with a paroxysm of anti-Jewish hatred. 

That Dreyfus is clearly innocent does not matter to the army, the mobs on the street or the right-wing press. He is a Jew and the attempt to clear his name is a Jewish conspiracy.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, heard the chant of “death to the Jews” at anti-Dreyfus rallies. French Jewry was the most assimilated and emancipated Jewish community in Europe, he reasoned, but still Jews were not safe. Only a new Jewish state could save them from racist Europe.

If you want to know a part of the reason why Israeli troops are fighting in Gaza and Lebanon today, you should watch this film. Except you can’t watch it. You can watch Chinatown even though Polanski abused a child and its theme is child abuse. But you cannot watch An Officer and a Spy, whose theme is the dangers of secrecy and censorship, because arts and media bureaucrats have secretly suppressed it.

I have saved the greatest absurdity for last. As far as I can see not one feminist group or organisation for the survivors of child abuse in the UK, US, Canada or Australia has called for An Officer and a Spy to be banned. As with so much modern suppression, distributors, channel controllers and film festival organisers have engaged in pre-emptive censorship. 

They do not think that Harris’ and Polanski’s film should be banned themselves, but they are frightened that activists will denounce them if they do not ban it. And, they reason, those activists will in turn be frightened by the thought of other activists denouncing them if they do not denounce, and so on until the nth degree.

Dave Rich, the great authority on modern antisemitism, has noted how Jews are being written out of modern culture. He points to Lee, Kate Winslet’s portrayal of the life of the war photographer Lee Miller. She witnessed the Holocaust, but there is only, he says, one “explicit mention of Jews in a film that climaxes with the liberation of Buchenwald”.

None of this pathetic sanitising of history is on display in an Officer and a Spy. Polanski confronts racism and conspiracy theory with a directness liberals used to admire. When the generals question Colonel Picquart, for example, they accuse him of “being paid by a Jewish syndicate” to clear Dreyfus.

Maybe in these post-Gaza days, liberal audiences do not want to know about anti-Jewish hatred. Or maybe arts organisations are turning into the authoritarians they once despised.

“We are not policemen,” a festival organiser said to me. “The courts and the justice system should punish people, not the arts. People should be free to watch what they want.”

Except in the English-speaking world, we are not free. We are policed by frightened bureaucrats. The scandal of the Dreyfus Affair is not over yet.

Failed ex-FM claims Musk ‘scours’ his messages

Hapless Humza Yousaf certainly picks his battles – and this week the former first minister has taken aim at Elon Musk. On a Tortoise media podcast, Yousaf rather pompously claimed that the tech billionaire was part of a campaign to ‘besmirch’ his reputation and insisted he was ‘certain’ the Twitter CEO had access to his private messages on the social media app. Er, right. Talk about delusions of grandeur, eh?

When quizzed on whether he believed the Twitter owner had private message access, Yousaf was adamant to listeners:

I’m certain he absolutely does and I’m certain he scours the private messages of those that he sees as a threat. In fact, I’m certain he has a whole team of people who are now looking at any information they can gather on me and try to use it to besmirch my reputation, and he’ll use any nefarious tactics in order to do that.

Crikey. Hapless Humza didn’t stop there either, adding ominously:

Let me be clear that Elon Musk could have trillions, let alone billions, and he wouldn’t be able to shut me up.

Much to everyone else’s dismay, Mr S would add…

Yousaf’s latest intervention follows a Twitter spat between the duo during the summer riots – in which the Nat slammed Musk as a ‘race baiter’ and ‘one of the most dangerous men on the planet’. The Tesla chief was quick to hit back – blasting Scotland’s former leader as a ‘scumbag’ before claiming that Yousaf is ‘obviously super racist against white people’. Shots fired!

Musk went on to note: ‘Legal discovery will show that however big a racist he’s been in public communications, he is vastly worse in private communications.’ The tech billionaire has reportedly denied ever accessing personal messages on Twitter – but that hasn’t stopped his remark from getting under Yousaf’s skin. Steerpike suspects that the newly-appointed leader of the US Department of Government Efficiency may have more important matters to consider than the contents of Yousaf’s messages however…

Is air pollution really the killer we think it is?

Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old who died in February 2013 after suffering an asthma attack, is the first person in the UK to have air pollution cited on their death certificate. Two weeks ago, Ella’s mother finally settled her legal action against the government, which said it was ‘truly sorry’ for Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s loss and that it was committed to delivering an ‘ambitious clean air strategy’. Ella’s death has become a cause celebre among anti-car and anti-pollution activists. There is no doubt that Ella’s death was a terrible tragedy. But to blame air pollution alone – as some campaigners have done – for what happened risks ignoring the complexities of this case.

Living just 25 metres from the South Circular Road, in Lewisham, south London, Ella’s short life was blighted by exhaust fumes from road traffic. It is this pollution that is now cited as the culprit of her death. It has long been known that filthy air is bad for you, but the inquest ruling seemed to confirm the worst: that pollution kills. It stated that ‘there is no safe level for particulate matter’. With declarations like this, it seems that nowhere is safe from the miasma of urban life.

But focusing on pollution alone cannot adequately explain what happened to Ella. She was a child with a severe, hypersecretory asthmatic condition, causing episodes of respiratory and cardiac arrest. Ella’s illness meant that she required frequent emergency hospital admissions. Her asthmatic attacks had already caused seizures resulting in 28 hospital admissions over three years. In 2009, she was placed in a medically-induced coma for three days when she was six years old. Her short life was difficult. Yet in much of the reporting of Ella’s death, these tragic details get lost.

So what did cause Ella’s death? The original death certificate stated that Ella’s death had been caused by asthma. Yet the deputy coroner, Phillip Barlow, who re-opened an investigation six years later which concluded in 2020, added that pollution in the form of air quality was a ‘material contribution to Ella’s death’.

Barlow’s report – which documented that ‘failure to reduce the level of nitrogen dioxide to within the limits set by EU and domestic law which possibly contributed’ to Ella’s demise – has been seized upon by campaigners. But during Ella’s childhood – between 2005 and 2013 – emissions of nitrogen oxides in the UK actually fell by 36 per cent and particulate matter reduced by more than 20 per cent.

Ella’s case represented a shift from assuming that a death might be caused by asthma, to a suggestion that asthma itself was triggered by a prior issue that was external to the child’s condition. Barlow’s report was published at the height of the Covid pandemic, when medical briefings regularly documented patients ‘dying with Covid’ as opposed to ‘dying from Covid’, for example. This debate shifted the dial in the discussion of death. It was no longer sufficient to say that someone had ‘died from complications arising from asthma’; instead it became ‘dying with asthma from a polluted environment’.

In fact, asthma is a condition that is hard to define. The NHS currently states that ‘the exact cause of asthma is unknown. Genetics, pollution and modern hygiene standards have been suggested as causes, but there's not currently enough evidence to know if any of these do cause asthma'.

Whether car drivers can be blamed is up for discussion. Clearly pollution-free air might help those like Ella. But eliminating vehicles entirely – even if that were possible – would not mean that asthma no longer existed. The one group with the highest incidence of asthma and other breathing difficulties is cross-country skiers. These are fit, healthy people who spend their time in the cleanest of air. Clearly cold, dry air has a significant impact on asthma too. Indeed, there are other factors that often dare not speak their name, like the quality of healthcare. The Royal College of Physicians has written that ‘46 per cent of the children who died from asthma had received an inadequate standard of asthma care'.

The yo-yo effect in childhood asthma fatalities also suggests that pollution alone cannot be blamed. In 2019, the Office for National Statistics’s mortality statistics showed that – somewhat arbitrarily – the number of childhood asthma fatalities in 2009 was half that of the previous year. Admittedly, this could possibly demonstrate a link with traffic levels in that congestion on Britain's main roads and motorways fell by 12 per cent due to the 2008-9 recession. As the cost of fuel skyrocketed, fewer journeys were made. But the reduction in drivers on the road at that time is nowhere near representative of the percentage decline in deaths. Similarly, by 2013 (the year of Ella’s death) asthma fatality rates had returned to 2008 levels (30 per year), then declining by a third again in the following four years. These significant shifts are not explained – convincingly – by driving habits or even air quality mandates.

It seems likely that pollution played a part in Ella’s tragic death. But her severe asthmatic respiratory problems – admittedly exacerbated by her surroundings – must also have contributed. This doesn’t merely mean that car pollution is to blame; hay fever is also known to exacerbate symptoms for asthma sufferers. The 2014 National Review of Asthma Deaths for the UK says that 15 per cent of that year’s asthma deaths were exacerbated, in some way, by hay fever.

There is, it seems, an increasing tendency to examine forensically the minutiae of a case in order to find a way to apportion liability. But perhaps sometimes there are cases where blame is not always helpful. We find it difficult to accept the reality of accidents. We are desperate to avoid the existence of tragedy. We increasingly find it difficult to cope with bad things happening and seem to need the catharsis of culpability. 

As it happens, in the past 30 years, we are living longer. In 1995, the average life expectancy in the UK was 76 years; today it is 81. These improvements in the UK’s ageing demographic have been caused by better medical care at both ends of life. Better elderly care has been supplemented by better survival rates for infants. In other words, the reduction in child mortality has boosted the mathematical average lifespan.

Mortality rates for under-fives in the UK have also improved greatly, from 142 deaths per 1,000 a century ago, to 20 deaths 50 years ago, to just four deaths per 1,000 today. That is still a figure of around 14,000 five-year-olds dying this year (Ella Kissi-Debrah died when she was nine years old), but the improvements in child mortality are similarly impressive for later years. It is a rare event for a child to die in this country. A 2009 research paper on asthma deaths in the British Journal of Medical Practice (the year that Ella first showed signs of respiratory ill-health) states that ‘the standardised childhood death rate in the UK is 2.5 per 1000. An average-sized [medical] practice with 10,000 patients including 1,500 children will have a child death about every two years'.

These statistics will bring no comfort to Ella’s family. But we must remember that the death of a nine-year-old is rare – and blaming air pollution alone for what happened means ignoring the truth about the circumstances that led to her tragic death.

Non-crime hate incidents are out of control

It’s police overreach season again on free speech and non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. On Remembrance Day morning, we had Essex police’s surreal doorstepping of journalist Allison Pearson, demanding an interview about a long-forgotten Tweet by her they refused to identify. Pearson has said the police told her it was a NCHI, though the force says it regards the issue as a criminal matter concerning material ‘likely or intended to cause racial hatred’ under the Public Order Act 1986.

Regardless of the specific form of overreach, now a FOI request from the Times has unearthed episodes where police recorded NCHIs against a nine-year-old schoolchild who called someone a ‘retard’ and against two secondary school girls who accused another pupil of smelling ‘like fish’.

Neither should have happened. Last year the previous government promulgated a code of practice that forbids recording an NCHI against someone’s name, unless there is a real risk of significant harm or future crime and evidence of intentional hostility towards people with a given characteristic. It also mandates a careful regard for the right of free speech. The idea that either of these incidents qualified under these criteria is laughable.

Free speech is gradually being strangled by events like this. Moreover, in the short term there’s not much that we can do. Codes of practice are all very well, but in the absence of someone bringing judicial review proceedings, breach of them carries few consequences. And this government, to its discredit, has made it fairly clear that even if there may have been technical overreach it is not enormously concerned. Questioned about the Allison Pearson incident, Keir Starmer paid lip service to free speech and promised a review, but pointedly backed the police’s practice of recording NCHIs as a crime prevention measure. We also know that his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is instinctively impatient with free speech concerns in such matters. Indeed last August she reportedly suggested that the present rules on NCHIs were if anything too protective of speech and restrictive of what could appear in police records, and probably needed relaxing.

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But if we take a long view things may be different. Outside an increasingly beleaguered liberal and academic elite, police involvement in journalists’ tweets and playground tittle-tattle, fuels despair and exasperation for most people. This can be harnessed. Given a UK electorate that values liberty, competence and effectiveness more than you might think, conservatives now have a useful base to attack a government already historically inept and unpopular. Here’s a policy that they can adopt if they want to regain the moral and libertarian high ground.

First, they need to press for the NCHI guidelines to be enshrined in law. At present the rules preventing NCHIs from being reported are quite simply unenforceable. Every instinct of the senior police establishment, which has a vested interest in promoting identity politics and placating interest groups, is to ignore them. Conservatives need to make it clear that this must stop.

Secondly, they need to go on to the offensive on the free speech front. There may be a way to do this, too. The reason why you need to be frightened about a visit from the police about something you said on social media, or on the radio, weeks or months ago is this. In theory you can decline to talk or to go voluntarily to be grilled at the local nick by the police. But your choice is a specious one. The standard practice, which is at present entirely lawful, is for the police to warn you that if you do not cooperate you will later be arrested, your home searched and your computers, phones and papers taken away, probably for months, as evidence. For most people, especially home workers and even more journalists or writers, this makes the police offer one you can’t refuse.

This needs to be stopped. Suppose we changed the law and said that arrest for any speech crime, such as grossly offensive communications or matter likely to cause racial hatred or distress, required a warrant from a magistrate unless taking place at the actual time of the alleged offence. This would be easily defensible as a protection for free speech, leaving the police free to deal with inflammatory speeches at demonstrations and the like, but allowing people faced with complaints about what they had said in the past, if they wished, to stand by their views and resist pressure to give in.

The right of a person accused of speaking out of turn to say to the state, or the police, ‘Prosecute me if you dare; I’ll see you in court’ is an immensely valuable one. Properly put together as a protection for the small man’s right to speak his mind within the law, and to insist that the state prove its case if it wishes to sanction him, this could be an electoral winner, not to mention difficult to oppose convincingly. Kemi, Nigel and others: are you listening? What’s to lose?

Listen to more on Coffee House Shots:

Chagos latest: Mauritian ex-PM banned from leaving country

The circumstances of David Lammy’s Chagos deal get murkier and murkier. This week, the incumbent Mauritian government went to the polls – and got roundly thrashed. Pravind Jugnauth’s MSM party won just two of the 62 seats in parliament, with the Labour party taking the other 60. Now, five days after losing office, the Mauritian press is reporting allegations that Jugnauth is banned from leaving the country. It is the latest extraordinary claim in an alleged wire-tapping scandal that could derail the UK-Mauritian agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands.

It follows the revelations of Sherry Singh, the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, which highlighted Jugnauth’s alleged involvement in the acquisition and installation of illegal listening devices. During her testimony, Sherry Singh specified that the order for the listening equipment had been validated by Jugnauth when he was PM. As Zinfos974 notes ‘This case could have major repercussions on the Mauritian political class, with revelations that have apparently already had repercussions on the balance of power on the Sister Island.’ 

The Independent last month reported fears that that British High Commission’s phones had been hacked during the Chagos Islands talks.  The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) confirmed that the Mauritian police were investigating after audio of apparent discussions between Charlotte Pierre, the British High Commissioner, and other political figures were featured on a Mauritian Facebook page.

The conversion is believed to have taken place in the autumn of 2022, meaning it is likely to have occurred towards the start of the negotiations over the Indian Ocean islands. Sub-optimal to say the least. Jugnauth has previously denied his administration were behind the phone-tapping allegations: and that the apparently leaked recordings are ‘fabricated conspiracies and falsehoods.’

Iain Duncan Smith, that doughty defender of British interests, has already asked the Foreign Office to make a statement on  ‘the adequacy of the security provisions within Mauritius’ telecommunications system.’ But, sadly, if, unsurprisingly, Anneliese Dodds declined to do so, blandly insisting that ‘this is the subject of an ongoing police investigation in Mauritius, and we are unable to provide further comment.’

Let’s hope the investigation concludes sharpish eh?

Labour’s cynical House of Lords reform

This week, the House of Commons is focusing its attention on proposed reforms to the House of Lords. MPs backed plans to get rid of the remaining 92 hereditary peers on Tuesday, while a second bill which will increase the number of female bishops in the Lords had its second reading on Thursday. The contrasting nature of the two bills highlights the rather problematic way Labour is pursuing constitutional reform.

The Labour party’s 2024 manifesto made a number of promises on House of Lords reform. It pledged to remove hereditary peers, instate a mandatory retirement age, and included a commitment to introduce ‘an alternative second chamber which is more representative of the regions and nations’.

In spite of this, Sir Keir Starmer’s first Kings Speech only put forward two legislative measures. A bill removing the last of the hereditary peers, and a second bill relating to the bishops who sit in the Lords. I have previously commented on the former measure, which I consider rushed and unwise.

The second bill has already passed through the House of Lords. It contains only one substantive clause and is designed to extend the life of an existing act to ensure that whenever a vacancy arises among the 21 bishops who sit in the House of Lords who do not hold one of the ‘great sees’ (Canterbury, York, London, Durham and Winchester), the position will continue to be filled by a female diocesan bishop – if one is available. 

The bill continues a temporary practice introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to enable more female bishops to sit in the House of Lords. Assuming it is passed, the new bill will continue the practice until May 2030. 

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Since the passage of the original legislation in 2015, the House of Commons Library records that six female bishops have entered the House of Lords more quickly than otherwise would have been the case. When the bill was proposed, the Cabinet Office issued a press release noting that it was at the request of the Church of England. The Rt Reverend Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester, has contended that:

‘Bishops in the House of Lords seek to speak to the hopes and needs of all people across the communities they serve. By better reflecting those communities we can carry out that service more effectively.’

This is all well and good, and an argument can be made in favour of addressing gender inequality, particularly since women make up only 29 per cent of the House of Lords. However, the more pressing matter is how – when it has expedited legislation to remove hereditary peers from the Lords – can the government justify the retention of Church of England bishops?

Baroness Smith of Basildon, the Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, has argued that the ‘Lords Spiritual play a key role in the House of Lords’. However, recent headlines, following the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggest the Church of England should be getting its own house in order, rather than seeking to influence government policy and legislation in the Lords.

The John Smyth scandal threatens to engulf the CofE with suggestions that other senior figures may have known about and either ignored, or even covered up, allegations of abuse. These issues are toxic and victims of abuse are calling for further resignations.

Into this boiling cauldron, Sir Gavin Williamson has thrown in the quite reasonable question: why is Labour seeking to remove hereditary peers, but not the bishops, from the House of Lords? On Tuesday, he tabled an amendment to the hereditary peers bill, seeking to remove the bishops as well. His proposal was defeated. But it forced reformers into a number of convoluted contortions.

Williamson noted that only other country which has unelected clerics in its legislature is Iran. He argued that the bishops ‘do not come from every component part of the United Kingdom’ – but rather are restricted to those who hold office in England and that only 2 per cent of the British population attend an Anglican service on Sundays. He suggested that the bishops ‘have an absolute right to influence the course of public debate, but from the pulpit, not in Parliament.’ 

In response, Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Sarah Olney said that while her party supported Williamson’s ambition in ‘the long term’, the current bill was ‘not the correct vehicle for it’.  Cabinet Office Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds argued that the bill had ‘a clear and simple purpose’ and ‘a single focus’ and sought to avoid the question of what to do about the bishops entirely. Labour MPs were left to argue that the amendment might open up a debate about the role of the established church and that it should not be ‘tacked on’ to the bill.

For the jaded cynics amongst us the passage of these two rather contradictory bills appears to be designed to give the Labour party a smaller, more compliant House of Lords. Over 40 of the hereditary peers are Conservative, while only four are Labour peers. Perhaps the government thinks the bishops will be more likely to support its positions in the Lords. 

Given the size of Labour’s majority, it seems that both bills will pass without too much controversy. However, unless Labour comes forward with further moves to reform the Lords – for example by restricting the Prime Minister’s powers of patronage and allowing the House of Lords Appointments Commission to veto unsuitable candidates – it’s hard not to conclude that the nature and timing of this constitutional reform is almost entirely self-interested.