Come friendly bombs and fall on Iran

It is heartening to see the lefties out marching in defence of mullahs and their enlightened rule of Iran. The Stop the War Coalition has been organising protests the length and breadth of the country, demanding ‘Hands off Iran’. It is harder for the marchers to identify specifically with their cause than it is when they’re marching about Palestine: Iranians don’t wear keffiyehs. Perhaps they should take on their marches an intricately woven carpet or some uranium-235. Or maybe design some sort of badge that can be cheaply manufactured and somehow symbolises the country – I would suggest the image of a crane with a homosexual dangling at the end of it.

Out there in the moronosphere, opposition to everything the West does grows by the week: it is Peak Corbyn – all countries which we loathe are to be defended, all countries which we like to be vilified, but especially Israel. Always Israel. The only countries which come even close to Israel in levels of fascist mendacity are the USA and of course the UK. Meanwhile, whereas once the marchers contented themselves with demanding an end to military action, now they are identifying with the regimes under attack and making treasonous raids upon our own military infrastructure. All the time telling us that the biggest threat to peace in the UK is something called ‘the far right’.

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I have no objection at all to dropping lots of bombs on Iran. As has been said before, it is a foul authoritarian country that has continually sponsored terrorism against democratic governments, and its aspiration to construct some sort of primitive nuclear bomb must be forestalled. Even now I can hear the riposte from the cretinati: ‘We’ve got nuclear weapons, why shouldn’t they have them?’ A point of view so devoid of rationality that it is pointless even to engage.

So, I reckon, keep the bombs a-coming until we are certain that their dreams of Armageddon are put back by 30 years or so and their scientists and centrifuges buried deep beneath billions of tons of rubble. Taking out Iran’s nukes is a precise, practical and attainable aspiration on the part of the West and Israel, just as taking back the Falklands was a precise, practical and attainable aspiration. And just as carpet-bombing Vietnam in order to persuade them of the benefits of capitalism as opposed to communism was none of those things – much like the Iraq War, once we had discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction lying around and we had been lied to by our governments.

That is one reason I wouldn’t support an attempt at ‘regime change’ in Iran. It would be an undertaking of enormous expense in terms of lives and money and, more importantly, it would not work. It could provoke the Iranians to hunker down with their current administration and if regime change were to occur, it would almost certainly be for the worse. In short, Iran would be left in the hands of a group of people whose animosity towards Israel and the West would be greater. Those cranes for hanging homosexuals would probably increase in number.

I had hoped that the liberal evangelistic approach to foreign policy might have been extinguished entirely as a consequence of its hideous failures in the past quarter of a century, but it is still with us. The notion that an entire people can be bombed into becoming agreeable Jeffersonian Democrats still lingers. It is given succour by western TV interviews with nice, well-educated, middle-class people in Tehran – career women who hate the niqab, university professors who wish for freedom of speech, clamorous students who want freedom and western consumer durables. The problem is that these people represent about 3 per cent of Iran’s population, just as those freedom-loving liberals in Kabul or Baghdad represented a similar fraction of their own country’s population.

The overwhelming majority in every case beg to differ. These are the people who exist scarcely above subsistence level, have huge families and little education and will cleave to whoever shouts the name of Allah with the most bloodied vigour. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was indeed a mass uprising, partly provoked by our own highly dubious meddling in the affairs of that country. The vast majority of Iranians do not want to be western, considering us debauched and godless (and they are not entirely wrong about that). Regime change would be for the worse, just as it was in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cambodia. I thought we understood that now.

If Iraq didn’t clear the sinuses of the congealed phlegm of liberal evangelism, then those Arab Springs should certainly have done so. One by one, the BBC cameras and fawning correspondents traipsed from Tripoli to Cairo via Tunis over to Sanaa and back to Rabat and, most dangerously, Riyadh. They want freedom! And democracy!

What they got instead was usually the Muslim Brotherhood. In not one country where regime change actually took place did it turn out to be for the better, unless your conception of ‘better’ means a more authoritarian and fundamentalist administration. Luckily they got nowhere near regime change in Saudi Arabia, or we would have lost a valuable ally and be faced with a comparatively rich country in the grip of the mentalist Wahabis and Salafists who yearn for our destruction with the same misplaced zeal that they yearn for virgin totty. The correspondents who believed that from those various protests in each country would spring forth an amenable politician, a sort of Menzies Campbell with a tea towel on his head, were sadly mistaken.

It seems to be a vault of imagination too far for many in the West that we live in an imperfect world and that not everybody in it believes in the same things we do. But that’s the only truth worth knowing. De-nuke the mullahs and then let them get on with it until, one day, their population has had enough.

Wonks team up to ‘Fix Britain’

It is a year ago next week that Labour won the general election. ‘The adults are back in the room!’ proclaimed Treasury minister Darren Jones, shortly after the result. Yet, 12 months on, it seems governing is proving somewhat more difficult than many first thought. Luckily, a group of wonks, hacks and thinkers are on hand to offer the Labour lot a useful dollop of advice…

For tonight sees the launch of a new cross-party group of figures concerned about the state of the country. The ‘Fix Britain’ campaign is the brainchild of Munira Mirza, onetime head of Boris Johnson’s No. 10 Policy Unit. She and a group of likeminded politicos are aiming to overhaul Whitehall practices with accountable methods similar to those deployed in the governments of Denmark and Singapore. Detailed policy options will be drawn up with other staff drafting legislation and designing implementation plans. Watch out Whitehall…

The non-partisan initiative boasts various bigwigs on its board. Among them are Labour peer Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour, and The Spectator’s own Douglas Murray. Other members include biotech entrepreneur Annalisa Jenkins, journalist Liam Halligan, pollster James Johnson and Jon Benjamin, the UK’s former man in Mexico City. Fix Britain intends to act as a conduit for serving officials to provide insights, with several current civil servants already believed to be involved.

Talk about not a moment too soon, eh…

Rachel Reeves looks increasingly petrified

Sir Keir Starmer was in the Hague. I know, I know, you’d have thought they would have done Blair first. Sorry to get your hopes up, but the Prime Minister was in fact there for the Nato summit. He was doubtless bringing to bear all the soft power which the government had bought by paying to give away the Chagos. Ha ha. You heard it here first, Keir Starmer: geopolitical anti-Viagra.

Anyway, all this meant that the deputy PM was in the hot seat again. The first question that Big Ange faced wasn’t a question at all but the by now standard self-respect-immolation by a backbench Labour MP, the ceaselessly embarrassing Mike Tapp. He went on a rant about the Tory record on crime with all the dignity of a loose suitcase crashing down an escalator at Luton airport. Sir Lindsay Hoyle cut him short and told Ange she didn’t really need to answer on account of it not actually being a question. For how long will Labour backbenchers be happy to commit these acts of craven embarrassment every week? They don’t seem to get much in return. 

We then came to Mel Stride. Possibly due to her own insecurities, the Leader of the Opposition is still committed to the random rotation model of deputation. Presumably hapless shadow cabinet members have to assemble in her office and draw straws. This week the loser – sorry winner – was the shadow chancellor. I have to confess I did not have particularly high hopes for the man who claimed he had ‘Melmentum’ at the Tory leadership contest last year. But he started with two decent jokes suggesting that he and the deputy PM had more in common than people might think; they both, he said, disagreed viscerally with the Chancellor. He added that a number of people behind her wanted the arrangement whereby she replaced the PM to be permanent. Even Ange permitted herself a hopeful smile at the latter.

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Sir Mel pushed his opponent on whether there would be a vote in the House next Tuesday on benefit cuts. Ange assured him there would, although the shadow chancellor pointed out that we’d heard that one before. Indeed; the government is less in the business of U-turns and is now engaged in a sort of perma-doughnut, like joy-riding teenagers attempting to destroy a neighbour’s lawn. 

The main thrust of Ange’s answers was: ‘Yeah but no but the Tories’. They had stood idly by, which was something she could never do. This was the Good Samaritan meets Vicky Pollard. Whether it was tax rises or the welfare bill, she listed how the Tories had done the same thing – but somehow worse – to the economy. Next to her sat the Chancellor, looking like a petrified marsupial. At one point she managed a grit of the teeth and a shake of the head but the general impression remained. She was a Lego opossum, a wombat with rigor mortis.

After Sir Mel’s slightly blustery but ultimately futile attempt to get an answer from the Deputy Prime Minister it was the turn of others. But the Ginger Sphinx of Ashton-under-Lyne was not budging. Daisy Cooper of the Lib Dems got a riddle of an answer on the carer allowance and multiple MPs found ways to convert questions on topics as diverse as homelessness, nursery places and council funding structures into point-scoring against the Tories. At least someone’s living somewhere rent-free. That said, I dread to think what the other tenants inside Big Ange’s head are like.

Sureena Brackenridge, an exceptionally shouty woman who is mystifyingly the MP for Wolverhampton North-East gave a high-decibel rant about free school meals, which once again seemed to be saying how wonderful the government was. It was Brian Blessed meets Jasper Carrott meets that woman who reads the news out in North Korea.

There were still a few moments of fun to be had. At one point Hilary Benn’s phone went off, revealing that his ringtone is the repeated chime of a suburban doorbell – think Hyacinth Bucket. Sadly unequal to the challenge of turning it off, The Honourable Hilary sprinted out of the chamber, dinging as he went. Andrew Snowden gave a pretty damning litany of the specific failings of the Government front bench. Would she encourage the PM himself to be shown the door in the upcoming reshuffle? Unsurprisingly, Ange enjoyed this question. Given his spirited delivery ‘perhaps next week he can have a go?’ Ange continued: ‘The leader of the opposition said she was going to get better week on week- she already has in the last two weeks!’ Even the Tories laughed at this. The faintly unsettling gangland lock-in vibe was back.

There was a final moment of camp flirtation with Ange’s previous sparring partner, Sir Oliver ‘Olive’ Dowden. ‘I am so pleased to be asking her a question again’ he gushed. ‘I hope he’s got his factor 50 on out there, he knows how tough it can be for us gingers’ she purred. I was put in mind of Mr Humphries asking Mrs Slocombe about the state of her pussy on Are You Being Served?. Talking of 70s throwbacks, the final question was from Jeremy Corbyn, who now sits so far into the corner of the opposition backbenches that he might as well yell his queries from a barge in the Thames. 

Next week, global crises all being equal, we will be back to the Nasal Knight. I suspect most of the House of Commons – his own side especially – will be hoping that his Hague detention could last just one week longer.

Starmer stands by his welfare bill

Keir Starmer is in the Netherlands to attend the Nato summit – but that is not the subject which is gripping everyone back home. This afternoon, the Prime Minister held a press conference to confirm that the UK will shortly be expanding its nuclear deterrent by buying a squadron of American-made fighter jets. It is the most significant change in Britain’s nuclear posture since the end of the Cold War. Yet the attendant hacks chose to focus on a rather different conflict.

The welfare bill dominated today’s PMQs in Starmer’s absence and is clearly the obsession of MPs here in Westminster. With 120 Labour rebels now publicly confirmed, would the PM now be pulling the bill? Absolutely not, suggested Starmer. ‘We were elected in to change the system that is broken, and that is what we’ll do, and that’s why we’ll press ahead with the reforms,’ he said. Unlike his No. 10 spokesman, he declined to use the word ‘moral’ to describe his changes. No change here, guv.

Instead Starmer preferred to call welfare reform a ‘progressive’ and ‘Labour’ argument. His most striking line was when he was asked about why he had failed to read the mood of his own MPs. The PM insisted that the party is ‘pretty united’ and ‘absolutely on the [same] page’ on the need for reform… ‘Is it tough going? Are there plenty of people and noises off? Yes, of course, there always are, there always have been, there always will be. But the important thing is to focus on the change that we want to bring about’.

‘Noises off’ is not exactly how many would categorise a full-scale revolt which boasts multiple select committee chairs and spans the breadth of the parliamentary party. Indeed, even Starmer’s claim that the party is on the same ‘page’ on the basic need for reform does not stack up. To take just one example, Debbie Abrahams, who chairs the Commons panel on work and pensions, declared yesterday that she did not agree with any of Starmer’s proposed cuts to the benefits bill.

Starmer’s defiant stance can either be read as a confident assertion of strength – or a stubborn refusal to admit his error. Judging by the mood among his MPs, the latter conclusion seems more likely. As one 2024 loyalist, who has not signed the rebels’ letter, says: ‘Government is going to have to cave.’ The fact that first Rayner at PMQs and then Starmer at his press conference committed themselves to Tuesday’s vote means any potential U-turn will now be all the more embarrassing.

Exacerbating the Labour tensions is the fall-out from last week’s vote on assisted dying, with Kim Leadbeater’s bill narrowly passing its third reading in the Commons by 23 votes. As Henry Zeffman of the BBC notes, some of the rebel ringleaders on welfare were very active on both sides of that debate. Voting ‘no’ on assisted dying appears to be a very good predictor of the rebels, with a Labour ‘nay’ voter being almost twice as likely to have signed as a Labour ‘aye’.

That suggests that this rebellion would not have happened without assisted dying laying the ground for it. Starmer’s tacit support for Leadbeater’s bill has driven a wedge in his party and given some MPs a taste for organising and rebellion. In time, it could prove to be one of his great missteps: a needless rod that he made for his own back which shapes the course of the rest of this parliament.

Zohran Mamdani and the Hipster Intifada

I see Generation Intifada has a new hero. Those rich white kids who never leave the house without their keffiyeh and who love to annoy their parents by saying ‘Globalise the intifada!’ are falling at the feet of this political idol. At last, they cry, a man who ‘gets it’ and who might even prise open the eyes of the dim and uneducated to the terrible injustices of our cruel world.

It’s Zohran Mamdani. Of course it is. The meteoric rise of this 33-year-old ‘democratic socialist’, who last night became the Dems’ candidate for New York City mayor, has induced rapture among the digital left. He’s being hailed as the youthful, smiley saviour of a left battered and bruised by the populist turn. Some are calling his win a ‘revolution’, but others are using a different word. This is nothing short of an ‘intifada’, they say.

Yes, not content with culturally appropriating Palestinian headwear, now the faux-virtuous brats of the Ivy League co-opt Palestinian terminology. ‘Intifada: globalised’, they’re tweeting in response to Mamdani’s win. Mohammed el-Kurd, the Palestinian poet beloved of the overeducated of the West, got them even hotter under the collar with his response to Mamdani’s win. ‘Consider the intifada globalised’, he posted.

It seems insensitive – to put it mildly – to so gleefully bandy about a word that hits Jews where it hurts. It was under the banner of ‘intifada’ that Hamas detonated so many suicide bombs in Israel and launched its fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. Why use a word that you know will trigger in Israelis and Jews the most hellish memories of persecution and death? And in New York of all places, the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel.

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Here’s the awful thing: it’s partly down to Mamdani himself that the crowing of this gross word has become all the rage among some of his supporters. He infamously refused to condemn the slogan ‘Globalise the intifada’. Asked about this menacing cry that took off among the West’s keffiyeh classes in the wake of Hamas’s pogrom, he said it’s just a call for equality. The people who use it are expressing their ‘desperate desire’ for ‘Palestinian human rights’, he said.

Really, Zohran? You’re chilled about the widespread use of a word which, right now, in this moment, primarily refers to the killing of Israelis by an army of anti-Semites called Hamas? To some of us, it was suspect indeed that the activist classes of New York and London noisily sang the praises of ‘intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ that involved the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis. It felt like a cruel taunting of Jews masquerading as a cry of solidarity.

Everywhere you went you’d hear the unsettling wail. It fell from the mouths of every keffiyeh-covered student radical. It was scrawled on placards in London. What did these people want, exactly?

The two most recent ‘intifadas’ entailed untold horrors for Jews. During the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005, hundreds of Israeli civilians were massacred. They were blown up on buses, burnt alive in nightclubs and mercilessly slain in pizza restaurants. In the Al-Aqsa Flood ‘intifada’ – or the 7 October pogrom, as decent people call it – Jews were raped, kidnapped and murdered in their hundreds. Globalise that?

To cry ‘Globalise the intifada!’ after 7 October was akin to crying ‘Globalise the lynchings!’ following a particularly gruesome murder spree by the KKK in the American South. It was cluelessly insensitive at best, intentionally threatening at worst. Indeed, anti-Semitic violence has sky-rocketed in tandem with this deathly slogan. Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot dead in Washington DC, Jews set on fire in Colorado, synagogues desecrated in the US and Europe – there’s your globalised intifada, folks.

One marvels, yet again, at the hypocrisy of the left. These are the kind of people who think it’s ‘hate speech’ if someone says you can’t have a penis and be a lesbian. They’ll blub about ‘erasure’ if you misgender their mate. And yet they think it’s fine to yell ‘Globalise the intifada’ after an ‘intifada’ that was positively Nazi-esque in its ferocity and bigotry. One rule for me, another for Jews.

For all his socialist strutting, much of Mamdani’s support comes from New York’s wealthy voters. He performs well among white, university-educated liberals, and less so among the black working class. If his rise is an ‘intifada’, it’s a Hipster Intifada: an uprising by the privileged with their luxury beliefs and mandatory keffiyehs. That so many on that rarefied plane seem cavalier about the word ‘intifada’ is worrying. That the potential next mayor of a city to which Jews contribute so much thinks it’s okay to holler ‘Globalise the intifada!’ is even more so. Pray for New York.

Angela Rayner had a bad PMQs

With Keir Starmer at Nato, the hospital pass of this week’s PMQs was handed instead to Angela Rayner. The welfare row is tearing apart the Labour party, with more than 120 MPs now committed to voting against the changes to disability benefit next Tuesday. In such circumstances, the obvious choice to fill in for Kemi Badenoch was the shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride – the man who had previously held the work and pensions brief from 2022 to 2024.

Given Labour’s woes, today was always going to be a difficult day for Rayner. Sir Mel certainly made it so, opening with a decent crack about her recent leaked memo to Rachel Reeves. Welcoming Rayner to her place, Stride declared, ‘we share many things – not least that we both viscerally disagree with the Chancellor’s tax policy.’ He followed it up with six crisp questions on welfare and tax, pivoting neatly halfway through to asking whether, if the government could not get its savings through next Tuesday, Rayner could rule out Reeves coming back for more tax rises.

Naturally Rayner could not give that assurance. Sporting a pair of glasses at PMQs for the first time, she gave a somewhat halting, fumbling performance that seemed rather muted compared to her usual vim and vigour. After confirming the only meaningful domestic story of the day – that next Tuesday’s welfare vote will still go ahead – the deputy PM spent most of her answers talking about the record of the ‘last Conservative government’. The lacklustre Labour faces behind her suggests they fear they are now living through a rerun of the Tory years.

Rayner’s remarks about the Welfare Bill were neither disloyal nor effusive; scripted but not wavering. Her own personal feelings about the Bill might differ to those of the official No. 10 ‘line’ – but she did well not to betray them in the course of the half-an-hour session. She did perk up later in the session and managed even to get a good joke in. ‘The Leader of the Opposition said she was going to get better week-on-week’, Rayner said. ‘She already has in the last two weeks by not turning up.’

Yet, that aside, there was precious little for the government benches to cheer. That was perhaps why the Tories, for arguably the first time this year, sounded notably more boisterous and cheered than their Labour opponents opposite. Towards the end, Calvin Bailey tried to get into his most pompous Tufton Bufton role by criticising comments made by Reform’s Richard Tice about the base commander of RAF Brize Norton. However crass the comments may have been, they were hardly – as Angela Rayner said in her reply – ‘even worse’ than the £30 million of estimated damage inflicted by Palestine Action.

That exchange summed up Labour’s day: flailing around and missing the point. Both Keir Starmer’s afternoon press conference and the ever-growing band of rebels means that today’s session will not live long in the memory. But it was a good day at the office for Sir Mel, at a time when some Tories are growing increasingly uneasy about their party’s future.

Join Sarah Vine, Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson and Hugo Swire as they discuss what it’s like Living with a Politician. Book tickets here

Mark Rutte is right to suck up to ‘daddy’ Donald Trump

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, has two jobs. The first is to lead the 32-member alliance at a time of unprecedented threat and challenges. His other equally significant task is to keep America, and in particular President Donald Trump, on side.

Rutte is in effect tasked with doing and saying whatever it takes to keep Trump sweet. Why so? For the simple and obvious reason that, without the US leader’s support, Nato is in even bigger trouble than ever. That is why the criticism of Rutte in some quarters for lavishing praise on Trump is misguided.

‘Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do,’ Rutte wrote in a text message to Trump. Is this sycophantic? Perhaps but so what? What else would his critics have Rutte do? Would it be better for Nato if its leader chose to pick a fight with Trump?

Rutte went on to congratulate the president for getting all Nato allies to agree to spend more on defence. ‘Europe is going to pay in a BIG way as they should, and it will be your win,’ Rutte’s message read. Trump, being Trump, gleefully shared a screenshot of the congratulatory text message while making his way to the Nato summit in the Hague.

The Nato chief heaped further praise on America’s role in his opening remarks to world leaders when talks got underway today. ‘For too long, one ally, the United States carried too much of the burden of that commitment, that changes today,’ he said. Asked about Trump’s profane language on the Israel-Iran conflict, Rutte said: ‘Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.’ Yes, it’s cringeworthy. But this is Rutte simply doing his job in keeping on the right side of Trump and ensuring the talks are a success.

Keeping the show on the road is no easy task. At one point there was speculation that the president might give the gathering a miss altogether. Nato isn’t much to Trump’s liking. At the 2018 summit during his first term, Trump hinted that the US might even leave the alliance. On Air Force One, en-route to the Hague, Trump was asked whether the US would abide by Nato’s article 5 guarantee that says that if one member of the alliance is attacked, it is considered as an attack on all, and other allies should take the actions deemed necessary to assist the country attacked. ‘Depends on your definition,’ Trump said. ‘There’s numerous definitions of article 5, you know that, right? But I’m committed to being their friends.’ It’s not exactly a cast-iron guarantee for the future.

That is why every effort has been made to ensure the Nato gathering is tailored to Trump’s wishes. It is a cut-down event. A single two-and-a-half- hour meeting is being held to sign off a brief communique confirming the new 5 per cent of GDP defence spending deal. Every step has been taken to ensure it fits Trump’s notoriously short attention span and impatience when it comes to talks with other leaders. Yet somewhat bizarrely, Rutte has even been getting flak for making the summit shorter to suit Trump. What’s he supposed to do? Stick to the usual timetable and find the president decides he has had enough and leaves early? That’s exactly what Trump did during the recent G7 leaders’ talks. What purpose does the Nato gathering serve if the main man, who ultimately controls the purse strings and the military might that keeps the alliance going, decamps early?

Rutte knows from bitter experience that striking the right tone is key when it comes to managing relations with the ever-unpredictable American leader. Everyone knows Trump loves – indeed expects, even demands – flattery. In fact, Rutte’s ability to sweet talk Trump is one of the reasons why he got the job of Nato chief. He demonstrated his diplomatic nous in deciding to visit Trump in Mar-a-Lago in November last year, when he was still president-elect. The former Dutch prime minister has even been nicknamed the ‘Trump whisperer’ because he is one of the few leaders capable of ticking along nicely with the president.

Those carping at Rutte now for ‘sucking up’ to Trump need to put a sock in it. There are much bigger issues at stake when it comes to Nato and the future security of Europe.

Starmer may regret bringing forward Trump’s state visit

One of the most notable features of Keir Starmer’s otherwise undistinguished premiership is the bromance that he seems to have formed with King Charles. Both men seem to have a shared sense of moral values and a reticence of character that appears to have served them well in what, up until now, has been a harmonious working relationship. However, the first serious cracks in their partnership might be about to appear, and they come courtesy of none other than Donald Trump.

It was announced earlier this year that the President would be hosted in Britain on a state visit, as he had been in 2019. The major reason for this unprecedented boon being offered was to obtain preferential treatment when it came to trade deals and tariffs, and it appears that playing on both Trump’s Anglophilia and sincere love of the royal family has been successful.

However, a difficulty has now ensued. It has been reported – not least by Trump, who has gleefully called it a ‘fest’ – that the state visit will be taking place relatively soon, in September. This is against the wishes of the King, who would have preferred that if such a visitation needed to take place at all, it would have been a relatively quiet and informal occasion, rather than the full bells-and-whistles pageantry that such a state visit demands.

There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that Charles, who recently conducted a successful trip to Canada, is said to be appalled by Trump’s musings that the country – which still honours the King as its sovereign – should be turned into America’s 51st state. In the pointed and decidedly political address that he made when he opened Ottawa’s parliament last month, Charles declared that the country should stay ‘strong and free’. He said

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Today, Canada faces another critical moment. Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination, and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the government is determined to protect.

This has been echoed in typically wishy-washy fashion by Starmer, who said last week that ‘Canada is an independent, sovereign nation, and quite right too’. Yet there are murmurings from Buckingham Palace that hosting Trump goes against this rhetoric and that a state visit should have been delayed in order to allow the President to tone down some of his more inflammatory remarks. This has not happened, and the formal document that allows for the state visit to take place, the ‘manu regia’, was delivered to the White House last week after being signed by the King.

The King had supposedly wished to meet Trump informally first, with the sop that this encounter would allow the two to plan the most successful state visit together. In his invitation to Trump in February, he supposedly wrote, ‘that is why I would find it helpful for us to be able to discuss, together, a range of options’.

These desires, however, appear to have been steamrollered so that Trump can visit the country once again in a few months and so that Starmer can have his photo opportunities, playing the international statesman once more.

If this comes at the expense of what has been, up until now, a warm and fruitful partnership with the King, then he should reflect on the wisdom – or otherwise – of jeopardising a very different kind of special relationship. As the likes of Blair, Johnson and Truss all learnt, an aggrieved monarch is not a happy one, and the consequences can be regrettable indeed.

Join Sarah Vine, Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson and Hugo Swire as they discuss what it’s like Living with a Politician. Book tickets here

Former Scottish Tory MP jumps ship to Reform

Oh dear. It’s not been a good year for the Scottish Conservatives, who have seen multiple councillors defect to Reform UK ahead of next year’s Scottish parliament elections. Now, in a further blow to the Tories, it transpires a former Conservative MP has jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party. Talk about a sinking ship, eh?

Ross Thomson – who had formerly backed Kemi Badenoch for the party leadership – less than a year after claiming his old group was the only party able to overcome the ‘threat’ of Farage. The eighth Conservative member in the region to turn his back on the blues, Thomson revealed his new colours after appearing in a party promotional video with Reform’s new chairman David Bull at the weekend. Explaining his change of heart, Thomson told the Press & Journal:

I did so because only Reform have the courage and answers to the issues facing Scotland and the United Kingdom and Reform are best placed to beat the SNP and sort a Holyrood system that’s in desperate need of Reform. Nigel Farage leads with conviction, courage, and above all, he listens. He is the only national leader who understands the serious challenges facing the north-east of Scotland – and what it will take to make our region thrive again.

Thomson stood down as an MP for Aberdeen South in 2019 and has since stayed away from frontline politics. But within the last 12 months, the former parliamentarian has been spotted campaigning for the Conservatives on the doors and threw his weight behind Badenoch at last year’s Tory leadership contest. Thomson was also a backer of Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay during last year’s leadership race north of the border – writing on social media that Findlay ’embodies authentic conservative values and prinicples’.

The ex-Tory MP’s move follows the jump made by a number of other Conservative councillors to Farage’s crowd in the last few months – and the party even managed to persuade a Labour councillor to join their ranks. While Reform UK didn’t win the recent Hamilton by-election, the party’s candidate Ross Lambie came third place with 26 per cent of the vote and Farage’s lot have continued to poll well. While some polls suggest Reform could pick up as many as 15 MSPs from a standing start, others have suggested the start-up is on track to become the official opposition party of Scotland next year. Watch this space…

Jenrick: Lib Dems aren’t welcome in the Tory party

Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick has insisted that the Conservatives must not beat around the bush about what they stand for – even if it means pushing more liberal members out. The shadow justice secretary made his comments to Popular Conservatism director Mark Littlewood. Jenrick told Littlewood:

I’ve always said that a political party can be a broad church, but it’s got to have a common creed. It’s got to have some kind of religion at the heart of it, and the Tory Party hasn’t had that in recent years. It has had two diverse opinions which has meant that you’ve left the public completely confused. What does this thing actually stand for? And there’s been far too many times I’ve been on the doorstep and people have said: ‘I don’t know the difference between you and the Lib Dems and the Labour Party enough.’

The Tory party has got to be very clear what it stands for, and with the greatest respect, that means that there might be some people who conclude this isn’t the right party for them. And I mean no disrespect to those individuals, just the party’s got to believe in something. It’s got to be clear what it stands for. So the public aren’t left confused.

It may be the first time someone as senior as Jenrick has effectively told Lib Dems using the Conservative banner out of convenience to, er, go away…

Watch the clip here:

France wants to know the true cost of immigration

The right-wing UDR group in the French parliament, led by Eric Ciotti, has called for a parliamentary commission to calculate the true cost of immigration. Ciotti is demanding a line-by-line accounting of France’s spending on healthcare, housing, education, and emergency aid for migrants, alongside their economic contributions. The French left recoiled instantly and predictably. To move the debate on, the Socialists tabled a no-confidence motion against the Bayrou government, ostensibly over pension reform, but widely seen as a bid to deflect Ciotti’s challenge. In Paris, few are fooled: immigration is the real flashpoint.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left firebrand and founder of LFI, thundered that Bayrou must resist ‘the creeping Trumpism of public life.’ Mélenchon is deliberately missing the point. All the right is asking for at this point is a procedural commission. It would be sober and long overdue. But for the French left, the idea that immigration might be scrutinised like any other line of public spending is intolerable. Much easier to cry racism, scream Trump, and table a motion of no confidence to distract and shut the whole thing down. When something looks threatening, change the subject.

Ciotti’s proposal may be politically explosive, but it is also needed. France’s public finances are in crisis. The deficit stands at €154 billion, and the Bayrou government is scrambling to find €20 billion in immediate cuts just to satisfy Brussels. Voters are being told they must expect austerity. The question of what immigration costs, and what it brings in, is now being posed more forcefully than ever. France’s annual bill for state-funded healthcare for migrants is now over €1.2 billion. Emergency accommodation for asylum seekers and illegal migrants costs around €1 billion a year. Add to that the costs of education, unemployment, integration schemes, housing aid, child support, and criminal justice. The numbers aren’t exactly hidden, but they’re never being added up in one place. And that, of course, is the point.

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For decades, France’s political class has tiptoed around immigration, treating it as a moral question, rather than a policy one. For the left, asking how much it costs the country is considered out of line. The mere act of quantifying the impact and cost of immigration they claim invites racism. There is no other area of public spending subject to such hysteria. No one accuses the state of fascism for calculating how much the pension system costs. No one calls the budget ministry xenophobic for measuring how many billions go to education. But when it comes to immigration, the numbers are always framed as dangerous, not because they’re made up, but because they might be true.

The panic now gripping the left is not really about the commission itself. It’s about what might follow. Because if the numbers are bad, the consensus begins to unravel. For years, think tanks have insisted that immigration is a net positive, citing GDP growth and demographic renewal. But these arguments are increasingly threadbare. France has among the lowest immigrant employment rates in Europe, and those in work are often concentrated in low-productivity sectors. Immigrants contribute little in taxes and draw heavily on expensive social services. A recent study by the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie argued that immigration is a long-term fiscal burden, not a benefit at all. They conclude that immigrants leave the workforce earlier than previously assumed, and with much higher dependency needs.

Ciotti’s proposal is dangerous to the establishment. It threatens to turn immigration into a budgetary issue, at a time that the focus will more than ever be on the budget. It will become increasingly difficult for the left to virtue signal. In the upcoming budget debate, the right-wing bloc and the Républicains plan to treat immigration as a line item. Something with a cost, a trade-off.

Marine Le Pen has repeatedly framed immigration as a ‘financial black hole’ for the French state, singling out programmes like free healthcare for undocumented migrants as an unjustifiable burden on the taxpayer. Jordan Bardella has also repeatedly called for an audit of public spending on immigration and integration. For the time being they’ve stopped short of endorsing Ciotti’s commission, but the RN has long championed the idea that immigration is not just a cultural or security issue but has a cost in fiscal terms.

The left senses this shift and is now desperately trying to contain it. Hence the vote of no confidence. It’s unlikely that the motion will pass at this point, it’s unclear for the time being whether the Républicains will support it. But it will allow the left to take back control of the conversation. To frame Ciotti and his allies as demagogues, and Bayrou as weak for tolerating their rhetoric. In effect, the motion of no confidence is a warning shot to the centre.

Bayrou, meanwhile, is trying to keep his government afloat. He’s weakened by the coming budget shortfall. Austerity is looming. Unions are calling for strikes. Bayrou can’t afford to alienate the right, which he depends on for votes. But neither can he be seen to indulge their demands, lest he lose control of his own centre-left flank. So he’s hesitating. And while he hesitates, the right advances with growing popular support.

The question now is whether anyone in government is honest enough to admit the true cost of immigration. Ciotti has placed that question squarely on the table. The left wants to kick the table over. The coming weeks will reveal whether the Bayrou government has the nerve to let the immigration debate happen, or whether it bows once again to the forces of strategic amnesia. The numbers, meanwhile, won’t go away.

Why is the Michelin Guide launching in Saudi Arabia?

Having only a short time ago been synonymous with the terrors of its Wahabiist regime, the temptations and pleasures of Saudi Arabia now seem to know no bounds. Whether it’s Emily Maitlis crooning over the feel of her all-covering abaya as she slips into the Jeddah market, Boris and Carrie Johnson posting pics of their brood in sun-kissed repose on one of the Kingdom’s newly opened (but still booze-free) Red Sea resorts, the fanfare and billions swirling around the desert city of AlUla or any number of ‘art practitioners’ flying in for a calendar packed with Biennales, art fairs and exhibitions, you’d think this truly was the freest, easiest, and most stimulating cultural cornucopia on earth.

And it most certainly does not stop there. The next stop on the western breathlessness train is food. The Michelin guide, founded in 1900, has just announced that its reviewers are setting to work on rating the best the Kingdom has to offer.

To read the press release you’d be forgiven for thinking that every last edible morsel in Saudi Arabia is suffused not only with Michelin-starred quality but also shot through with gold-medal, never-before-seen warmth and friendliness. It’s a weird message: on one hand, Michelin is meant to be impartial and severe, conjuring images of dowdy podgy reviewers who care only for excellence. On the other, Michelin seems to be the latest western outfit to be drunk on generous lashings of Saudi PR. Its ‘destination partner’ is the Saudi Arabia Culinary Arts Commission, one of dozens of state-funded bodies tasked with throwing money at its global seduction campaign.

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It’s working. ‘The warmth and generosity of the Saudi people further enhance the travel experience, making every visitor feel welcome and valued,’ gushes the release. ‘From the heartwarming traditional Saudi restaurants keen to preserve and showcase recipes that have been handed down through the generations, to the always-packed restaurants, and jaw-dropping malls such as VIA Riyadh that feature renowned global brands.’

If the sound of eating in a mall is of limited appeal, especially for would-be Michelin-starred diners, then do not worry. ‘Unforgettable experiences aplenty; be it kabsa in a Najd setting or Mubahar rice with the locals, fabulous mini cheese and honey glazed sambosas galore or a mouthwatering masabeeb, the generosity, pride, and hospitality remain firmly in the memory. Additionally, our inspectors observed an impressive culinary diversity, where American cuisine mingles with Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Thai. Whether it’s exceptional Saudi dishes or global favourites, Saudi Arabia offers something for every international traveller eager to explore the captivating sights while savouring the diverse culinary offerings.’

Wow. What a place! Paradise on earth. But where is the critical voice of Michelin in this excitable blather? Perhaps, like all the other excitable western cultural outfits suddenly ‘discovering’ Saudi Arabia, it is suspending its critical faculties. I do not know what role the deep pockets of the Kingdom may play in any such suspension, but what I do know is that it has begun to sound awfully familiar.

Perhaps it’s just a mixture of good-old Arabism with a thrill of the new. I remember hearing that Abu Dhabi was paradise about 20 years ago: an expat’s dream. I went to visit a friend who had moved there for work, while briefly considering taking a job at the National, its western-style newspaper. Bottomless brunch! A hive of activity! But I found the vast apartments my friends lived in poorly built and soulless in the extreme, and the bottomless brunches, in the dining rooms of corporate American hotel chains, truly grim. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more depressing hangover than the one that crept upon me post-brunch as payback for all the Prosecco I had drunk to try to find that germ of fun.

Dubai, of course, is the biggest hype-machine in the Gulf. A few years ago, I decided to go and check it out, and see if perhaps I had dismissed it out of sheer snobbery. Maybe it would be delicious, fun, convenient, and buzzy like the world seemed to be saying. It was none of those things. It felt culturally third-rate, clapped out, held together with poor-quality materials that were ugly or bling or both; bisected by relentless overpasses and motorways, throttled with traffic, and full of expensive resorts whose raved-about restaurants served stuff London left behind in the 1990s.

Saudi Arabia may be different; its recent past is far more brutal than that of the Emirates, but it also has a longer, deeper culture beyond the frightful (and thankfully mellowing) tradition of Wahabiist Islam. I doubt the malls will be a nice place to eat, and as Saudi rides the wave of sudden admittance into the western travel and cultural canon, attention-grabbing restaurants and trend-drunk dishes will no doubt be numerous. But there will also be some interesting, delicious food that channels older skills and traditions. I just hope the Michelin guide has the time to find these amid all the dazzle.

Israel has weakened Iran – but not destroyed it

With the ceasefire between Iran and Israel so far holding, a preliminary assessment of the 12-day campaign is now possible. Jerusalem and its US ally achieved a considerable amount. Iran’s deficiencies on a tactical level were laid bare. Structural flaws in Tehran’s strategy of war by proxy have been made apparent. Both the nuclear and ballistic missile programmes have been significantly damaged. The hands of the doomsday clock, which were getting close to midnight, have been vigorously pulled back.  

Unlike the actual digital clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, however, which was destroyed by Israeli ordnance during the campaign, the Iranian strategy for the destruction of Israel has not been comprehensively defeated. Nor does the regime appear to be currently in danger for its existence. This was not a Waterloo moment. Iran has suffered a series of telling blows which significantly weaken it, without fundamentally changing the strategic picture.  

With regard to the nuclear programme, the joint US and Israeli action against nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow, Tabriz, Arak and Isfahan caused considerable damage. Precisely how much cannot yet be conclusively ascertained. A leaked defense intelligence agency report has suggested that the nuclear programme has probably been set back by only a few months. Iran’s supply of around 400 kilograms of enriched uranium remains intact. This means that Iran is likely to recommence efforts toward reassembling its capacities for uranium enrichment.  

The killing of a number of the most senior nuclear scientists, again, will complicate and set back Iranian efforts to get the programme back on track. At the same time, the Iranian-based knowledge which produced these scientists has obviously not been destroyed.

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Israel’s successful targeting and removal of top figures in Iran’s scientific and military establishment was one of the most notable elements of the events of the last days. Jerusalem revealed what had long been suspected: that its intelligence organisations have thoroughly penetrated Iran’s centres of government and that it possesses an organisation on Iranian soil.

This structure, apparently staffed largely by Iranians themselves under Israeli direction, can be activated at will and can then strike with telling effect before disappearing back into the shadows. The assembling of this body is a significant achievement for Israel and will be giving Iranian officials pause. It can and undoubtedly will be used again when Israel deems it appropriate. Israel has shown in recent days that this structure is able to engage in sabotage using drones and explosives, as well as the targeting of specific regime figures.  

Another notable detail of recent events was the failure of Iran’s proxy strategy. Over the last forty years, Teheran has invested heavily in the building of and/or sponsoring of a number of Islamist political-military organisations across the region. The Qods Force, the external operations wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was responsible for the management of this project, in accordance with the vision of its long-time leader, the late Major-General Qassem Soleimani. According to this strategy, Iran-supported organisations would become the most powerful element in their local arena, and would then be available both to advance Iranian power projection and to assist Iran when needed.

This strategy had appeared to pay dividends in recent years. On the eve of the current war, in October 2023, the Lebanese Hezbollah organisation, Iran’s prototype proxy, was the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. The Shia militias of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation Units) dominated Iraq. The Ansar Allah (Houthis) controlled the Yemeni capital and a stretch of the coast. Hamas, Iran’s Palestinian clients, controlled Gaza and were the best organised and most popular force among the Palestinians. And Bashar Assad, Tehran’s sole state ally, had been saved by the IRGC’s methods and appeared victorious in his country’s long civil war.

Israel had long feared that the proxies, and specifically Hezbollah, would strike the Jewish state with a missile barrage in the event that Jerusalem took action against the Iranian nuclear program. In the event, however, Soleimani’s vision, like other ideological constructs before it, had evidently failed to factor in a crucial element: namely, the preference given by the various proxies to their own local interests over their supposed obligations to the Iran-led alliance.  

Hamas’s independent decision to launch its war from Gaza on 7 October reflected its own independent decision-making. The half-hearted and partial response of the various proxies reflected theirs. This piecemeal response also enabled Israel to focus on the various components of the Iran-led bloc, and then on Iran itself, without ever facing a concerted effort from the alliance. The result: none of the proxies were able or willing to come to Tehran’s aid when Israel turned its attention to their patron. Iran’s proxies were the pistol that failed to go off in the third act.  

Iran succeeded, nevertheless, in penetrating Israel’s air defences on a number of telling occasions. The Israeli death toll, 28 civilians killed, is considerable. A well-organised Home Front Command, which issued clear instructions and a well-prepared infrastructure of shelters, undoubtedly prevented a much higher death toll. But the damage to property and infrastructure was extensive and leaves many questions to be answered.

The US decision to rapidly force through a ceasefire and President Trump’s subsequent public berating of Israel point to significant differences between Jerusalem and Washington. While for Israel, the Iranian threat is central and existential, the US president appears to operate from instinct rather than strategy, now backing an ally with unprecedented determination, now rapidly bringing the campaign to an inconclusive halt.  

Ultimately, the events of the last 12 days must be seen as an episode in a long and ongoing conflict, rather than a final or decisive moment. Israel and the United States have broken the taboo and dispelled the sense of dread that surrounded the notion of military action against the Iranian nuclear program. Iran has been revealed as far weaker than its propaganda would suggest. Nevertheless, the regime is not broken. Its ambitions remain intact. It will now set about trying to revive its capacities.  

The question now remaining is whether Israel will, in line with its practice in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, be able to commence periodic but ongoing operations against Iran in order to disrupt and frustrate Iranian attempts to rebuild the nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Until such time as the Iranian people can organise to rid themselves of a regime which a large majority of them clearly reject, this will be the key imperative. 

Is the Bank of England turning on Rachel Reeves?

Rachel Reeves does not have many supporters left. The bond markets don’t think much of the Chancellor. Business groups have rubbished her policies, and so have many of the UK’s largest companies. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are furious about both the chaos over the winter fuel allowance and the cuts to the welfare budget. Now, it looks as if the Bank of England may have turned on her as well, if comments from the Bank’s governor are anything to go on.

We might expect Andrew Bailey to avoid any direct criticism of the Chancellor. After all, she is his boss. What’s more, a public split between the UK’s two most important financial officials would be deeply damaging, especially given the vast amounts of money the UK has to borrow on the global markets every year. Even so, speaking to the House of Lords economic affair committee yesterday, he sounded a lot more critical than usual.

The obsession with the ‘fiscal rules’, Bailey argued, risked turning into a distraction, with too much emphasis on a single number, and not enough attention paid to the country’s longer-term fiscal challenges. Even more seriously, he argued that the steep rise in National Insurance was starting to destroy jobs. ‘We are starting to see a softening of the labour market, and that is the message I get when I go around the country talking to firms,’ he said.

These are hardly minor points. The ‘fiscal rules’ are a centrepiece of Reeves’s plans, designed to create a framework of stability that will encourage investment and boost growth. And the NI rise was meant to stabilise the public finances, as well as raise the extra money needed for investment in public services and new industries. If they are the wrong policies, then Reeves’s entire economic strategy starts to fall apart.

In reality, it is not hard to work out what is going on here. Just about everybody, except possibly Reeves herself, can see that the British economy is heading into big trouble. Reeves’s first Budget killed off growth, spending is spiralling out of control, and borrowing is soaring.

In the autumn, the Chancellor will be forced into another big round of tax increases, and that will plunge the economy into a full-blown recession. There may well be a gilts crisis as well if the markets lose faith in the Labour government’s ability to balance the books. The Bank is quite rightly trying to avoid the blame for that – and the only way it can do that is by putting as much distance between the governor and the Chancellor as possible.

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Britain is racing towards a fresh cost-of-living crisis

The poorest Brits now owe £6.6 billion in unpaid council tax – a record high and up some 85 per cent since before the pandemic. That’s according to data released this morning by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which suggests Britain is plunging back into a cost-of-living crisis. What’s more, a report also out today by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) finds that between 2022 and 2024, some 400,000 more households slipped into arrears, taking the total number of people in debt to their local council to 1.8 million.

The CSJ’s report also finds that 97 per cent of those in arrears have at least one ‘personal vulnerability’ compared to 47 per cent in the whole population. Those in arrears are three times more likely to have health problems and twice as likely to be grieving or to have recently lost their job. 

Of course there are some people who are simply dodging paying their council tax and Matthew Greenwood, author of the CSJ’s report, says they should face ‘the full force of the law’. But he goes on to say:

Our report shows that the vast majority of those in arrears are not refusing to pay – they’re simply unable to, often due to poor health, job loss or other negative life shocks. Under the current rules, missing just one payment can make someone liable for the entire year’s bill within weeks, triggering bailiff action and, in some cases, threat of imprisonment. It’s an outdated, punitive system that fails to distinguish between those who won’t pay and those who genuinely can’t.’ 

The CSJ would like to see that punitive system change with more help provided for those struggling to pay their bills.

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The news, the CSJ says, flies in the face of the government’s commitment not to increase taxes on working people. But separate research from the Institute of Fiscal Studies finds that council tax is likely to rise at its fastest pace for two decades.

Core spending in local government rose by 3.5 per cent above inflation annually over the last two years and the spending review has it going up by 2.6 per cent a year on average for the next three years. That’s a better settlement than many central government departments were granted by the Chancellor, but rather than increased funding from the Treasury, the vast majority of this cash increase will come from a higher council tax take. The message to councils from Rachel Reeves seems to be that they should make use of the maximum allowed bill increase of 5 per cent a year.

With the squeezed and derided rich now choosing to leave the country rather than pay ever more tax, the burden for our ballooning state is increasingly going to have to fall on lower- and middle-income earners. The government has now pledged another £30 billion on defence, the winter fuel U-turn has proved ministers do not have the gumption to take on pensioners and now with a large-scale rebellion over Liz Kendall’s very modest welfare reforms – that only shave £5 billion off a sickness benefits bill that will rise to around £100 billion whatever happens in the Commons – it seems that our politicians are only prepared to take public spending in one direction.

As Paul Johnson of the IFS noted yesterday: if spending only goes up, so too must tax. What we see in today’s council tax data is a stark reminder that contrary to polling of the public – who think the rich should just pay for everything – this burden is going to have to fall on poorer and average shoulders. While Britain’s overall tax burden is now at a post-war high, individual tax levels remain lower than in many countries with comparable public spending. That gap will surely have to close if the state continues to grow.

Yet no political party seems willing to make a serious case for a smaller, leaner state – not even the Tories, who won’t support even modest welfare cuts because they’d rather see Keir Starmer lose a vote. The result? A system where even record-high taxation can’t keep pace with rising demands. If politicians continue to dodge the argument for restraint, voters will soon realise that it’s not just the welfare state that’s unsustainable, it’s their own household budgets too.

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Nigel Farage and George Galloway share a common problem

A more gracious person would refrain from saying, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not a gracious person. So, as George Galloway announces his backing for another Scottish independence referendum, allow me to say – nay, crow – I told you so. 

Galloway, leader of the Workers party, says he and his party ‘support the right of the Scots to self-determination’ and that ‘the time for another referendum is close’. He adds: ‘Speaking personally, I can no longer support the British state as presently constituted.’

If you’re familiar with politics north of the border, you might be wondering if this is the same George Galloway who travelled Scotland in 2014 on his Just Say Naw tour, urging an anti-independence vote in that year’s referendum. It is indeed the man who said: ‘It sickens me that the country of my birth is threatened by such obsolescent dogma. Flags and borders do not matter a jot.’

It is also the man who was the face (though not the leader) of All for Unity, which rocked up on the scene ahead of the 2021 Holyrood elections and declared itself the anti-independence alliance that would unite the pro-Union parties. This was news to the pro-Union parties and they responded with the political equivalent of ‘new fone, who dis?’ All for Unity more than earned the disregard it received. It was essentially a Twitter account doing a bad impersonation of a political party, but what it lacked in electoral strategy it made up for in digital noisemaking. 

Its social media outriders took a particular dislike to me, which is shocking because I’m lovely. All I’d done was repeatedly point out in The Spectator that they were a hopeless shower of political halfwits. Some people can be very sensitive. 

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I didn’t just argue that All for Unity risked splitting the anti-independence vote, I pointed out that it wasn’t all that anti-independence. For one, its tactical voting guide endorsed a Labour MSP who had called on Boris Johnson to hand powers over referendums to Holyrood. 

For another, its lead candidate on the South of Scotland list was George Galloway. Just a few years earlier, he had said it would be a ‘democratic monstrosity’ if Westminster refused Holyrood another referendum. A few years before that, he had explained why he wasn’t joining the official No campaign in the Scottish referendum: ‘because it’s a Unionist campaign, because it flies the Union Jack. I hate the Union Jack.’ Galloway hasn’t stopped being a Unionist; he never was one. 

Galloway has gone from opposing independence in 2014, to asserting Scotland’s right to indyref2 in 2017, to campaigning against indyref2 in 2021, to reverting to support for indyref2 in 2025. He’s pivoted more times than Mikhail Baryshnikov. 

And here’s where I get to gloat. Total vindication: unlocked. 

This is one of the paradoxes of populism. Voters will often say, ‘At least you know where you stand with him’, when the him in question routinely adopts stances and ditches them again without any intervening search of the soul. ‘Every politician does that,’ you might protest. ‘My point exactly,’ I would reply. Populists claim politicians are all the same, then set about proving it. 

This unreliability is a hallmark not only of leftist populism but of its right-wing counterpart. Reform is an obvious example. Is Nigel Farage’s party left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, interventionist or market-driven? Is it pro- or anti-economic migration, for or against multiculturalism, all-in or sceptical on devolution? The answer is that it holds all of these positions, switching out one for another as expediency (or the leader’s whims) demands. 

Populism is very useful if you aim to disrupt the status quo but its lack of ideological or intellectual moorings leaves it vulnerable to mainstream capture. When voters become anxious about political turmoil, they can turn to the reassuring and the familiar, and populists have no option but to follow them. If disruption is all you aim for, populism is all you require, but if you want to replace the established order with a new one, you also need a philosophy that is held sincerely, fiercely and with constancy. 

Reform has no such philosophy and is too fragile a coalition of conflicting interests and incoherent instincts to acquire one between now and the next election. As such, the party can only be reactive, loudly opposing everything Labour does and reminding the Tories of everything they failed to do. Farage need only point to the parlous state of Britain to dramatise the ill effects of Labour and Tory governance. That might be enough to win a general election but it is not a strategy for implementing the kind of transformation (political, cultural, institutional) that national revival demands. Reform gives voters an opportunity to chuck a spanner in the gears but offers no prospect of new machinery. 

Nigel Farage, like George Galloway, is a populist and populism is all you’ll ever get from him. Trust me: I told you so before.

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Starmer’s national security strategy fools no one

Sometimes it feels as if the government’s approach to defence and security could be summed up by the venerable punchline of the Irish farmer, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’. Despite having had more than four years as Leader of the Opposition to prepare, Sir Keir Starmer never quite seems able to seize the initiative as Prime Minister, often being left puce and blinking.

Yesterday saw the publication of the UK’s national security strategy (NSS) 2025, Security for the British people in a dangerous world. It had been announced in February and promised before this week’s Nato summit (in fact, it was released on the summit’s first day). The Prime Minister argued it would pull together a number of extant reviews: the Strategic Defence Review, the AUKUS review, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the China audit, the FCDO’s three internal reviews and the strategy for countering state threats, among others.

It was obvious at the time that this sequencing was nonsensical. The UK’s first national security strategy, Security in an interdependent world, was a product of Gordon Brown’s government, issued in 2008, and it was genuinely innovative. It was meant to conceptualise ‘national security’ in a new and broad way, taking in not just traditional elements like military operations, diplomacy, intelligence and counter-terrorism, but ‘threats to individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and interests of the state’.

Brown billed it as ‘a single, overarching strategy bringing together the objectives and plans of all departments, agencies and forces involved in protecting our national security’ From it flowed a number of discrete tasks and policies. The approach was not complicated: determine the big picture, then decide how to support it in practical terms.

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Starmer’s national security strategy has done almost the opposite (though that ascribes to it too much coherence). We have seen the Strategic Defence Review setting out the future shape and tasks of the armed forces, three internal FCDO reviews have reported to the Foreign Secretary (but not released) and as much of the China audit as we will see is in the National Security Strategy.

Meanwhile the Defence Industrial Strategy is a work in progress, and the AUKUS review risks being made irrelevant by the Trump administration’s own re-examination. So it is neither top-down, nor bottom-up, but rather lacking any direction at all. I wouldn’t have started from here.

One important element of the NSS is an announcement on expenditure. The Nato summit is expected to agree a spending target of 5 per cent of GDP, made up of 3.5 per cent on core defence capabilities and 1.5 per cent on ‘resilience and security’. The NSS contains an ‘historic commitment to spend 5 per cent of GDP on national security’, which is encouraging, but the detail is teeming with devils.

First, the date by which the UK is expected to meet this level of spending is 2035. That is at least two general elections away; Vladimir Putin will turn 83 and Donald Trump will be 89, if either is spared. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy’s Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines will be coming out of service. It is a long time away, and it remains a target without any practical steps to reach it.

The NSS also widens the scope of ‘national security’ further than ever before. Including energy policy may seem defensible, but attaching the label to ‘green growth’, ‘inequality’ or ‘stripping out red tape’ starts to stretch credibility. The interdepartmental nature of the ‘national security’ umbrella is vital – but the danger is that if everything is ‘national security’, then nothing is.

This matters because if the government simply moves spending from one column on its mother of all spreadsheets to another, it does not acquire a new capability. Equally, there is no deterrent effect on Russia or China, or ‘Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm’ – as Elizabeth I once so neatly put it. If the Prime Minister designates Border Security Command as a ‘national security’ asset, that is £150 million he had already earmarked, not new investment.

The 2008 national security strategy was a serious and systematic attempt, supervised and delivered by Robert Hannigan and Patrick Turner, to design an overarching framework for the defence of the UK and its interests, then develop policies to support that framework. Its 2025 successor does not –by its nature and timing cannot – achieve that same goal.

The national security strategy is not all bad; it comes in large part from the pen of the formidable Professor John Bew, who spent five years in Downing Street as foreign policy adviser to four successive prime ministers. But he has been asked to change the tyres on a moving car, creating a strategy around half a dozen other reviews in various stages of progress. There must be very serious concerns now that it is little more than a centripetal instrument for pulling in enough government expenditure nominally to meet our Nato obligations. Our allies are unlikely to be fooled, and our enemies will certainly not be.

Join Sarah Vine, Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson and Hugo Swire as they discuss what it’s like Living with a Politician. Book tickets here

Why Coronation Street shows the future of TV is doomed

In what looks like an act of remarkable stinginess, bosses at ITV have reportedly cancelled the traditional freebie summer party for the cast and crew of Coronation Street. The show is still one of the network’s top-rated programmes, and the beleaguered staff are said to be ‘furious’, according to the report in the Sun. I don’t blame them.

This is trivia, yes, but I think it’s a telling moment along the pathway of television’s slow demise. The medium is contracting. Just a few months ago, ITV announced that it was reducing the number of episodes of both Coronation Street and Emmerdale to a mere five half-hour slots each per week. Cast contracts have also been redrawn to bring down the number of episodes an actor is guaranteed per year. The soaps are slowly shrinking.

I worked on both these shows – getting on for thirty years ago now – at the time when the opposite was very much the case. Back then, we would often have to stick characters superfluously into scenes just to fulfil the actors’ contract guarantees. You may wonder why Rita, say, would hover with a couple of lines in the Rovers every now and then – ‘A gin and lime, Betty, after the day I’ve been having’. And I was in the room as the decrees came down from high level at ITV that the number of episodes was going up to five a week. Now I have the sensation of watching the tide go out again.

However, even in those glory days, there was often a feeling that for the biggest shows on the box, which were bringing in millions of pounds in advertising revenue, things could be surprisingly threadbare on ground level. Because production had always been achieved at the chip shop level, it was considered that a level of cheapness and haste was acceptable. Ask for any kind of complicated or specially designed prop and you were inviting trouble. There was never enough time, and so retakes – and even rehearsal in the traditional sense – were impossible. Huge amounts were spent on extraneous things – big-budget trailers and direct-to-video spin-offs – that didn’t seem to increase the ratings at all. Meanwhile, staff on the actual show were having to rush scenes at the end of the day for fear of a few minutes of overtime.

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I remember looking at the rather battered third-hand car driven by the then-producer of Emmerdale and thinking, ‘I highly doubt that the person behind the second biggest show in the States is getting about in a vehicle like that’.

The increase in episodes turned the soaps from occasional treats to everyday, routine background material. Their ubiquity, perversely, made them easier to ignore; keeping up with them as they started running double episodes on top of the regular instalments required a major lifestyle alteration from viewers. Standards, inevitably, slipped. The last time I tuned in regularly, I kept noticing mismatches in continuity and a depressing uniformity of tone, with every scene played and shot in much the same way as every other one. There’s no time to do anything else.

The contraction of these shows is a sign of something wider and more significant. British TV as a whole is contracting. Revenues in ITV plummeted by 8 per cent in nine months in 2024. In March, the BBC – the begging bowl held out as per – whined that ‘without intervention, it will be difficult to maintain the current ambition and volume of UK content’. It revealed that its ‘content spend’ – what a gruesome term – for the coming 12 months will drop by £150 million.

The thinking is that the British broadcasters cannot compete on an equal footing with the high production values of the international (for which, read American) streamers. But the streamers are in trouble too, with rising subscription fees and the introduction of interruptions from adverts into their programmes. It may well be that TV streaming is itself a bubble, though a surprisingly long-lived one.

What will this contraction leave us with? What will we do without television? At what point does it stop being recognisably television? Has that, in fact, already happened?

Maybe AI will inspire new methods and new ideas? I doubt it. Old brands are already everywhere in the media – who would ever have thought that three of the big shows of 2025 would be Bergerac, Blankety Blank and All Creatures Great And Small? What next – gritty, multi-ethnic reimaginings of Rentaghost or Don’t Wait Up?

AI will surely smash straight into the TV industry’s reliance on the familiar and the very old. You’re frustrated that there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers? Enter a prompt and get 100 more.

But a bespoke portfolio of AI content is conceivable. I long for a TV drama that tells its story in chronological order, and I’m beginning to think that’s only going to happen if I ask a computer to provide me with one.

I find myself strangely optimistic about this brave new world – not for the programme makers, but for viewers. The disconnect between these two groups has got ever wider and more extreme and has hastened the inevitable demise of TV. AI will, surely, be a better judge of what people actually want to watch than some spotty Herbert with a 2:1 in Diversity Studies. Roll out the robots!

No, I’m not going to bloody Glasto

‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded jolly, of hedgies glamping in a five-grand-a-night yurt and the sort of inherited wealth that means you crash in a mate’s eight-bedroom Old Rectory within the free ticket zone, rather than camping cheek-by-unwashed-jowl with the masses.

No, I am not going to Glastonbury. The last time I went – and I can tell you the exact year, because I found the programme while going through some boxes in the attic – was 2004. I think it was the first year the Great Wall went up to stop people scaling the fence and, getting there late on the Wednesday, we had to pitch our tents hard against it – which was like camping in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, though less convivial.

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That was the year I swore I’d never go again: the crowds were insane (150,000) and just moving between stages took at least two hours. The five days were an exhausting feat of endurance with the odd highlight (James Brown on the Pyramid stage, Orbital headlining the Other Stage on the Sunday night) but it was such a crush to move around the site, you were doing well if you managed to see even a couple of bands a day.

Glastonbury also has the worst sanitation of any festival I’ve ever been to, either as a punter or when I was working for the news teams of Radio 1 and, later, 6 Music. (See Julian Temple-Morris’s 2006 documentary for a taster.) It was only bearable back in 2004 because my cousin’s band were playing the New Bands stage and I had a backstage pass so could use their loos. (Shamefully, I didn’t even watch their set as they clashed with P.J. Harvey.) Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I’ve never had one – or met anyone who has.

This year a whopping 210,000 tickets have been sold. A built-up area of over 200,000 is classed as a city by the Office for National Statistics. From today, Worthy Farm in Somerset will have a temporary population somewhere between that of Reading and Wolverhampton.

Even before you look at the line-up, which is lacklustre (my only must-see would be Neil Young, but I have tickets for his Hyde Park concert next month; these days I only go to gigs where I can sleep in my own bed), just the logistics of getting around the site are about as appealing as the SAS selection march over the Brecon Beacons. You can, of course, smoke weed and take shrooms to mitigate the privation – only one of your mates will invariably do a Syd Barrett and require looking after for the rest of the weekend. And depending on the weather, there will be sunburn or trench-foot – or both – to contend with.

You should also forget any Alexa Chung-style outfits you had planned; England in June can be extraordinarily cold and unsettled (remember, D-Day had to be postponed). I vaguely recall watching Paul McCartney while I was wrapped in a damp blanket from the Oxfam stall that smelt of the old person who’d died in it.

Of course, moaning that Glastonbury isn’t what it used to be is all part of the ageing process – I get that. ‘What do you mean, you need money, darling?’ asked my mother when I wanted her to sub me for my ticket sometime in the late 1990s. ‘I didn’t pay anything when I went.’ She went to the first Glastonbury (then the Pilton Pop Festival, but that moniker was swiftly dropped, presumably being less marketable to Trustafarian twats). They watched Marc Bolan and drank free milk from the dairy. This year a pint of festival cider will cost you around £7, which isn’t outrageous – but remember to make it last because the queues for both bars and bogs will be apocalyptic. And good luck finding your friends ever again if you need to head off on your own during the 1975’s set for a pee.

Even if you can get close enough to the stage – rather than watching on the giant screens – your vision will be obscured by the serried ranks of Palestine flags. One of the most wilful misconceptions about Glastonbury is that it’s a lovely crowd of chilled old hippies. Try sticking your head under a standpipe meant for drinking water because you just can’t go another day without washing your hair and hear the queue of knit-your-own-Guardian readers erupt with language that would make a paratrooper blush.

There’s vast cognitive dissonance between the festival giving millions to charities like Greenpeace and the grotesque amounts of rubbish and single-use plastic (mostly in the form of abandoned tents, wellies and ponchos) left behind. This year there’s added spice – in addition to the usual ‘festival flu’ and STDs – with warning of a measles outbreak from the UK Health Security Agency, due to all the unvaccinated Gen Z-ers, born in the wake of the MMR scare. There have also been thousands of cases of Covid reported by people who went to Download earlier this month.

But there’s no need to spank nearly £400 on a Glastonbury ticket (you can’t, in any case – they sold out in 35 minutes). To recreate the experience at home, just do the following: stop washing and use baby wipes instead. Retch every time you open the bathroom door and give yourself a UTI by going for as long as you can without peeing. Throw your phone in a bush. Eat a burrata and butternut squash flatbread wrap and then bin £20. Fail to find your bed and have a couple of hours of fitful sleep outside while playing industrial techno through a tinny speaker. Oh – and, crucially, watch it all on TV. That’s really what all those Glasto-goers will be doing anyway.

The chat show is dead

I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive on a diet of eggshells and cold Rustlers burgers. In my nightmare, I am abducted by a gang of Mad Max-inspired bandits who take me to the Asda Superstore in Clapham Junction and torture me for information. My constitution is strong. I refuse to tell them where I’ve hidden my scarce supply of mango-flavoured vapes.

One of the bandits produces a laptop and says, grinning, ‘This will get him talking.’ They pin my eyes open and place the screen before me. After some buffering, the title of the video appears. It’s a YouTube compilation of ‘best moments’ from The Late Late Show with James Corden. ‘Please, God, no!’ I scream, thrashing around in my chair. I tell the bandits where my vapes are before Corden can finish his opening monologue. The pain is unbearable. But instead of releasing me, the bandits make me watch Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Adele for 20 hours on repeat before putting a bullet in the back of my head – which, in this context, is a sweet release.

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Watching a modern-day chat show is a bit like getting a back tattoo in Ayia Napa: fun when you’re drunk. A major problem are the hosts. To be fair to Corden, which I don’t want to be, it would also be a nightmare if the bandits forced me to watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Jonathan Ross Show, and just about anything that falls under the knackered umbrella of ‘chat shows’. All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television. Gone are the days of Dick Cavett and his intelligent, if meandering conversational style. Lost is the ‘preposterously mellifluous’ voice of William F. Buckley. Absent are the charismatic captains of late-night television: Johnny Carson and, to a lesser extent, Michael Parkinson. These hosts weren’t always kind or warm – William F. Buckley once threatened to ‘sock’ Gore Vidal in the mouth – but they were real. And they were entertaining. The same can’t be said for the pusillanimous hosts of today. The only exceptions are Graham Norton and David Letterman, though neither of these is particularly contemporary. And perhaps Jonathan Ross was OK a few decades ago.

Now the new school of late-night chat show hosts reigns supreme. There’s Jimmy Fallon with his talent for laughing at anything, even when that thing is about as funny as a wet weekend in Bognor Regis. A guest only needs to cough for Fallon to repeatedly smash his face against the desk in a manic fit of laughter. The insincerity of it makes my toes curl. Though I urge all of you to watch his recent interview with the Costco Guys; it’s the only time I’ve seen Fallon on the verge of a nervous breakdown – perhaps his assistant forgot to give him a dose of nitrous oxide before he went on.

And then we have Jimmy Kimmel. The only time there is light behind Kimmel’s eyes is when he’s hosting Matt Damon. But the studio will never fire him. Why? Because he can’t do anything else. Stephen Colbert is more like a school chaplain than a suave media personality. Ellen had her moment in the sun, but there’s only so long that you can round up audiences from the bus stop before your shortcomings as a host are laid bare. All of the hosts are much of a muchness, as are their shows.

But the hosts aren’t entirely to blame. The guests are part of the problem too. They’re just not interesting anymore; their overlords – talent agents, managers and publicists – won’t allow them to be. In 1971, Salvador Dalí sauntered onto The Dick Cavett Show and launched his pet anteater at Lillian Gish’s lap. That would never happen today. The best we can hope for is a little jig from Tom Hiddleston on Graham Norton. The guests are carbon copies of each other. All American chat show line-ups are formulaic: an actor from a new Netflix series, an actor from a new Apple TV series, Robert De Niro being a curmudgeon, Ryan Gosling et al., and a musical guest you’ve never heard of. UK chat show line-ups are the exact same with the addition of Greg Davies.

On the rare occasion that they do have an interesting guest, the host doesn’t know what to do with them. Fallon recently had author Edward St Aubyn on his show. Just two minutes and 30 seconds into the interview, Fallon turned Aubyn’s novel over in his hands, read the endorsements and mumbled, ‘These are some great blurbs for you on the back here.’ Thanks, Jimmy! I wonder how his team of writers came up with that line of thought-provoking dialogue. My favourite part of the show was when Fallon stood up and read an excerpt of Aubyn’s novel in the voice of Mick Jagger – though it was more Stella Street than the Rolling Stone himself.

The chat show is dead. It died when The Alec Baldwin Show premiered in March 2018. But perhaps it was always doomed to fail. Chat shows reflect our time. In that sense, the hosts, guests and producers are not to blame; we are. We, the public, created this rubbish because we can’t get enough of it. The bloated cadaver of the late-night chat show is also indicative of our changing understanding of celebrity. Forty years ago, you could watch Michael Parkinson interview Cher one week and Margaret Thatcher the next; Orson Welles on Wednesday and Jacob Bronowski on Saturday. All of them were celebrities – i.e. people of great import. Now, we clap and squeal when JoJo Siwa appears to talk about her relationship with Love Island alumnus Chris Hughes. These are the celebrities of the 21st century, and the chat show knows it.

I’m not sure if the chat show will ever escape this quagmire of lazy television. It might be too late. Let’s hope the demand for engaging late-night TV returns. In the meantime, I’ll be content watching reruns of After Dark on YouTube. Oliver Reed making a drunken fool of himself beats Jimmy Fallon playing ‘egg Russian roulette’ with Ryan Reynolds any day of the week.