Police Scotland slammed over leaked Isla Bryson memo

The end of Nicola Sturgeon’s premiership was mired in controversy over her plans for trans rights, her botched gender reform bill and the rather disturbing revelation that trans rapist Isla Bryson had been housed in a women’s prison. And now it has emerged that Police Scotland even considered logging Bryson as female on the sex offenders’ register. Good heavens…

Bryson, who was jailed for raping two women while known as a man, changed gender while waiting to stand trial. In a rather shocking move, the rapist was subsequently sent to Scotland’s female-only Cornton Vale prison by the Scottish Prison Service while awaiting sentencing. The blunder came to light at the same time as Sturgeon was attempting to pass legislation to make it easier to allow people to legally change gender – and, after immense backlash, Bryson was moved to a male facility.

While Police Scotland insisted last week that rapists won’t be allowed to self-ID as women – with Chief Constable Jo Farrell remarking ‘you can only commit that crime as a man’ – a leaked document seen by Sky News suggests that hasn’t always been the force’s attitude. An internal 2023 memo, ‘Sex and Gender’, considered how Bryson could be dealt with after leaving prison. The file described how Bryson could be registered as ‘female’ in the sex offenders’ list and the crime database, noting:

When this individual comes back into contact with Police Scotland it would likely be a public protection matter in the management of sex offenders. In this instance they may be recorded as a female with the name Isla Bryson however the trans history would be appropriate to be retained on relevant policing systems.

Crikey. Farrell has been adamant the force has always believed that only men can commit the crime – insisting this ‘isn’t a different position’ from any expressed previously – but the new leak raises rather serious questions about it all. For its part, Police Scotland stated: ‘The chief constable addressed the matter of gender self-identification at the Scottish Police Authority board in September 2024, during which Police Scotland committed to a broader review.’ But that hasn’t exactly placated everyone. Deputy leader of the Scottish Tories, Rachael Hamilton, slammed the force over the ‘jaw-dropping revelation’, fuming: ‘Police bosses and SNP ministers must urgently come clean as to why this insulting, out-of-touch policy was ever adopted, and reassure the public that it has been ditched for good.’ Quite.

Tugendhat clashes with Cleverly over Chagos Islands

With less than a week to go until MPs vote in the Tory leadership race, a row has blown up over an unlikely cause. A quarrel in a far away country is causing a rupture between the two men whom most colleagues think could be next to go out: Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly. Both are fishing in the same waters for votes on the centre and left of the party. Of the two, Cleverly was perceived as having given the better speech yesterday at Tory conference. But the government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius could revive old fears about Cleverly’s judgement.

Following the announcement this morning, the Shadow Home Secretary rushed to condemn the news. He declared that it showed ‘weak, weak, weak’ government, adding ‘Labour lied to get into office. Said they’d be whiter than white, said they wouldn’t put up taxes, said they’d stand up to the EU, said that they be patriotic. All lies!’ Yet, as others were quick to point out, it was in November 2022 that negotiations over the future of the islands first began between the Foreign Office and their Mauritian counterparts. The Foreign Secretary at the time? James Cleverly.

He told MPs on 3 November 2022 that:

Following the meeting between the then Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), and Prime Minister Jugnauth at the UN General Assembly, the UK and Mauritius have decided to begin negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)/Chagos archipelago… The UK and Mauritius have agreed to engage in constructive negotiations, with a view to arriving at an agreement by early next year.

Admittedly, Cleverly did not sign off the talks in his fifteen months at the Foreign Office – unlike David Lammy who has done so after three. But Tom Tugendhat has not been slow to point out that Cleverly did nothing to stop talks progressing. Shortly after the government’s announcement today, he called it a ‘shameful retreat’ but added that ‘it was disgraceful that these negotiations started under our watch.’ He went further on the World At One, telling the BBC:

I objected to these negotiations happening when they began in November ’22. I objected on many occasions. This is another area where I’m afraid we see legalism replacing leadership and we saw this legalism in the Foreign Office in November ’22 when the Foreign Office was pushing for this and nobody stopped it until finally, we got leadership under Lord Cameron.

The conclusion is obvious: Tugendhat thinks Cleverly was either unwilling or unable to stand up to civil servants over the future of the islands. It is a charge which resonates with the private concerns of some Tory MPs who fear that Cleverly did not challenge advice from officials in successive government briefs. Supporters of the Braintree MP argue that this is unfair. They point to his success in cutting migration at the Home Office and suggest that his willingness to champion, rather than denigrate, civil servants helped mend relations after the unhappy tenure of Suella Braverman.

But it was perhaps notable that on Sunday, when asked by Trevor Phillips whether Israel had ‘crossed any red lines this week’, Cleverly refused to be drawn, arguing he could not answer without being in possession of the full facts. ‘Because we are in opposition,’ he said, ‘I am no longer able to access the detailed reporting that I did when I was Foreign Secretary and when I was Home Secretary’. For some, such an answer will speak to Cleverly’s honesty and self-awareness; for others, it will suggest an overreliance on the civil service machine.

It will be up to Tory MPs to draw their own conclusions about the merits of the four candidates. But given that Cleverly is keen to present himself as a safe pair of hands, supporters of Tom Tugendhat will note how eagerly he rushed to attack Labour on the Chagos Islands – despite his own record here. Rival MPs have already started sharing screenshots from Hansard of Cleverly’s statement from November 2022.

With both men polling 21 votes each last month, every misstep will be scrutinised by the handful of MPs deciding which of Cleverly or Tugendhat would be best placed to face the members.

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Why is the police probe into Nicola Sturgeon taking so long?

As Scots look ahead to the 2026 Holyrood election, support for the Scottish National Party continues to plummet. One scandal that the Nats won’t want looming over them when Scotland heads to the polls is Operation Branchform: the long-running police probe into the SNP’s funds and finances. Mr S can confirm that the investigation into the party – and its former first minister Nicola Sturgeon – is still ongoing, despite Scotland’s Crown Office receiving the latest Police Scotland report a two months ago. Talk about dragging it out.

Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, was charged with embezzlement of party funds this year, after an investigation was launched in 2021 into a ‘missing’ sum of £600,000 fundraised by for a second independence referendum campaign. Murrell was arrested alongside the party treasurer and the SNP’s former Dear Leader last year, after a police raid of both SNP HQ and the Glasgow home Sturgeon shared with Murrell – with officers lifting pots and pans, women’s razors and, er, a wheelbarrow from the former first minister’s house.

Developments became stranger when a luxury motorhome worth £110,000 was picked up by police – with the party leadership claiming it was bought for campaign purposes. Yet when Mr S quizzed the party’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn about it all, he revealed he had no idea about the campervan until ‘it was on the front of a newspaper.’ And the party’s treasurer Colin Beattie – also arrested last year in connection with the probe – denied knowledge of the purchase too. How very curious…

Police Scotland told Steerpike that it is still waiting to receive advice from the Crown Office on the matter: ‘On 9 August 2024, we presented the findings of the investigation so far to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and we await their direction on what further action should be taken.’ They’re taking their time.

When Mr S spoke to the Crown Office today, a spokesperson noted that Sturgeon remains under police investigation, stating:

A standard prosecution report has been received by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service from Police Scotland in relation to a 59-year-old man and incidents said to have occurred between 2016 and 2023. Connected investigations of two other individuals, a man aged 72 and a 53-year-old woman, remain ongoing.

Professional prosecutors from COPFS and independent counsel will review this report. They will make decisions on the next steps without involving the Lord Advocate or Solicitor General. All Scotland’s prosecutors operate independently of political influence… Decisions on how to proceed are taken by prosecutors acting independently, and are based upon available evidence, legal principles, and the merits of each case. They are not influenced by political events.

But the very matter of the case rumbling on in the background is rather damaging the party’s prospects. As polling guru Sir John Curtice noted, Operation Branchform and the arrest of Sturgeon contributed to a rather large drop in SNP support. Sean Clerkin, the man who reported the party over the ‘missing’ money, has demanded that the probe ends soon – and before the 2026 election – to ensure any potential criminal trials don’t influence the Scottish parliament poll. In a nod to similar calls, the Crown Office added:

Before deciding what action to take, if any, in the public interest, prosecutors will consider if there is enough evidence. There must be evidence from at least two separate sources to establish that a crime was committed and that the person under investigation was the perpetrator. 

Some party figures are thinking along rather similar lines to Clerkin, with them keen to see a swift end to the police probe and the removal of the dark and distracting cloud hovering over the party before 2026. The Nats are currently predicted to lose around 20 seats in the next Holyrood poll – and the election countdown is on. Tick tock.

You can’t deal rationally with the rail unions

The idea that the government had somehow managed to draw a line under the rail strikes by offering drivers and other staff a fat pay rise with no conditions attached even managed to fool the former Tory rail minister Huw Merriman, who declared in August: ‘I can understand why the new government have decided to cut a deal to end the uncertainty and move on with goodwill.’

Goodwill? That didn’t even last a day as Aslef celebrated the award of a pay rise for drivers by announcing a further round of strikes on LNER, this time over rostering. Those were cancelled after the government expressed outrage, but that hasn’t stopped Mick Lynch’s Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union coming back for more. Any minister who thought that train drivers might just be happy with salaries of almost £60,000 a year has been cruelly deceived: the RMT’s Tube drivers voted on Tuesday to reject the offer. Londoners now face Tube strikes throughout the autumn – so much for a fresh start under a new government.

At the same time, Unison is balloting local government workers and staff at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), represented by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), who have voted to strike over demands that they return to the office for just two days a week – a threat which they first made under the previous government. The idea that we now have a ‘grown-up’ government with a mature and less combative relationship with trade unions has been blown out of the water. The more militant unions will keep on pushing for higher wages until they are earning in excess of the craven MPs who are bowing before them. In fact, with overtime, some Tube drivers are already achieving this.

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You can deal rationally with some unions, but not with the likes of the RMT and Aslef. They have just proven that by treating the government with contempt. They were awarded everything they said they wanted – pay rises with no agreement to accept more productive working arrangements in return – and yet all it has done is to embolden them to come back for more. Worse, they have more power now than they did in the last months of Rishi Sunak’s government, as they are no longer bound by legislation to provide minimum service levels on strike days.

There will be a big opportunity here for the Conservatives, if they are prepared to seize it. All Tory leadership candidates in recent weeks have dropped in a word about Margaret Thatcher – Robert Jenrick, we learn, has even given his daughter the middle name ‘Thatcher’.

But if they really want to emulate her, they should reflect on what she would now be doing, were she Prime Minister. She would be stockpiling old buses in preparation for a final showdown with the Tube drivers. When they refused a pay offer, she wouldn’t just sit on her hands like the last Tory government did. She would already be making secret plans to automate the Tube and do away with Tube drivers altogether. There are more than 60 metro systems around the world that run without them. When the plan to automate jobs was announced, the unions would almost inevitably call an indefinite strike – at which point the mothballed buses would be brought out to maintain a Tube replacement service until the work to automate the Tube was complete. Then, when the work was done, we would have a more reliable, cheaper and strike-proof Underground.

Boris Johnson did once or twice threaten to automate the Tube, but in office he failed to do so. By the time the current government is finished, we will be back in 1979, with a public that is absolutely sick of the antics of the unions and is eager to vote for a party which promises to take them on. Whoever wins the Conservative party leadership needs to be ready to seize the opportunity.

Britain’s half-hearted support for Israel helps no one

When Iran launched almost 200 ballistic missiles at targets across Israel on Tuesday, there were fears that it would ignite a wider regional conflict. That a wider war has not (yet) erupted is partly due to the fact that most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel and what the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) spokesman called ‘a defensive coalition led by the United States’. The United Kingdom was part of that coalition. But what role did the UK really play on Tuesday night? And how does that support square with the Labour government’s hostility towards Israel?

Defence Secretary, John Healey, reiterated that ‘the UK stands fully behind Israel’s right to defend its country and its people against threats’ when he confirmed that British forces ‘played their part’ in defending Israel this week. This isn’t the first time Britain has backed Israel in this way. When Iran last attacked Israel in April, the Royal Air Force deployed Typhoon FGR4 fighters from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, alongside tanker aircraft, to help intercept their drones and missiles. A great deal has changed since April, however.

The general election saw the arrival of a new triumvirate to determine British foreign and security policy: the cautious and legalistic Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, a new foreign secretary in the headstrong, moralising David Lammy, and John Healey, a meticulous, pragmatic Yorkshireman at the head of the Ministry of Defence. While the UK may pledge its support for Israel’s right to self-defence, two significant decisions have been taken which have changed the bilateral relationship.

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The first step was to overturn the previous government’s objection to the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A Downing Street spokesman stepped smartly away from the controversy by saying that ‘our position on this process matter is that it is for the courts and prosecutor to decide’.

Then, in September, the Foreign Secretary told parliament that the government was suspending around 30 licences for the export of military equipment to Israel because ‘there exists a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law’. These licences included components for F-16 fighter aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, naval systems and targeting equipment.

These decisions have damaged the UK’s relationship with Israel, with Netanyahu describing the suspension of arms export licences as ‘shameful’. It is against this backdrop that we have to view the government’s pledges of support this week. Suspending exports and stepping back from the ICC warrant procedure sit uneasily with committing British armed forces to the physical defence of Israel: the UK’s policy on Israel suddenly looks contradictory and confused.

Britain’s military contribution will have reassured many decision-makers in Jerusalem. Healey revealed after the event that, while UK assets had been ready to take action, they ‘didn’t need to do so’.

But the Defence Secretary is putting a positive gloss even on that: unlike in April, when Iran launched a combination of drones, rockets and missiles, Tuesday’s attack relied predominantly on ballistic missiles and may have included the hypersonic, highly manoeuvrable Fattah system. The Typhoon FGR4 jets used by the RAF are air superiority fighters which can also be used for air-to-ground precision strikes. They can intercept slower unmanned aerial vehicles, as happened in April’s operation, but they are not equipped to track or engage ballistic missiles.

The Royal Navy also contributed to this week’s deployment in the shape of HMS Duncan, a Type 45 air defence destroyer which has been in the region since May. She is equipped with the Sea Viper anti-air missile system which can engage and intercept a large number of airborne threats and has been used to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea. However, it is reported that HMS Duncan did not fire any Sea Viper missiles on Tuesday.

There is debate over the full capability of HMS Duncan. The Ministry of Defence has asserted that she can intercept ballistic missiles, but the former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace suggested this would be difficult pending a £300 million upgrade to the Sea Viper system which he authorised in 2022. He said yesterday that the UK ‘should with immediate effect seek to accelerate the already planned upgrade of their missile systems in light of what we are seeing in the Middle East’.

Britain’s support for Israel this week was largely cosmetic. Sending military assets which cannot directly engage the immediate threat from Iran is symbolic of the government’s muddled attitude towards Israel. It is supportive of our ally, but not unconditionally, and will wring its hands when the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon become controversial. This agonised semi-solidarity may be an attempt to split the difference between bitterly polarised arguments, but it is not what serious grown-up statecraft looks like.

Britain could regret handing over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius

The United Kingdom will shortly be ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Under the terms of a new treaty, there will be a 99-year-lease for Diego Garcia, the tropical atoll used by the US government as a military base. It follows two years of negotiation over the strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean. Both sides have vowed to finalise the treaty as quickly as possible.

The announcement today follows Keir Starmer’s call with his Mauritian counterpart Pravind Jugnauth. A Downing Street spokesman said that: ‘The Prime Minister reiterated the importance of reaching this deal to protect the continued operation of the UK/US military base on Diego Garcia. He underscored his steadfast duty to national and global security which underpinned the political agreement reached today.’ 

The most striking thing about today’s decision is its speed. It was less than a month ago that Jonathan Powell was appointed as the special envoy on talks: a move which suggested a lengthy period of negotiation. The Ministry of Defence and the Americans have traditionally been seen as the stumbling blocks to a deal. The question is therefore whether their objections were addressed or overridden.

News of a treaty follows a shift in the UK’s long-standing position on the islands. In recent years, there has been increasing international pressure to surrender what some have called Britain’s ‘last colony in Africa.’  Mauritius has long complained that it was illegally forced to give up the territory as an exchange for its own independence in 1968, with the British government having already secretly negotiating a deal with the US for the base on Diego Garcia. The UK later apologised for removing islanders from the archipelago and pledged to give up the territory when it was no longer needed for strategic purposes.

International pressure has now forced the UK’s hand. Britain’s focus on maintaining support for Ukraine means it cannot afford to alienate allies around the world. In Whitehall, the hope is that the 99-year-lease will alleviate fears that the new government has sacrificed British interests in one sphere to aid efforts in another. The fact that New Delhi is on board is a positive too. But given the Chagos Islands’ strategic access to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, a backlash at home is inevitable. The Tory leadership contenders have already waded in: Tom Tugendhat calls it a ‘shameful retreat’; James Cleverly says ministers are ‘weak, weak, weak’ – despite the negotiations beginning on his watch.

The governments of Mauritius and China have been increasing their ties in recent years, with their respective national banks signing a bilateral currency agreement less than a month ago. Given Beijing’s expansionist posturing in recent years, promises of a 99-year-lease seem optimistic, to say the least.

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The baffling decision to defund a national academy for mathematics

The government has shocked the mathematics community by announcing that it is withdrawing £6 million in grant funding from a new Academy for Mathematical Sciences. 

The impetus for creating this Academy came from a 2018 review chaired by professor Philip Bond. His review recommended how to maximize the benefits of mathematical sciences to the UK economy and to wider society. It drew on responses from a host of universities and all the learned societies in mathematics and was advised by a board of mathematical luminaries. Its number one recommendation was the creation of this new academy – which would improve links between academia, government and industry. 

According to estimates by Deloitte, in 2010 mathematics contributed over £208 billion to the UK economy. Annual spending on mathematics research in the period 2008-2013 was £354 million. Using this data, the Bond review suggested the cost-benefit ratio of mathematics research is one to 588. In fact, the report made a miscalculation, underestimating the value for money of mathematics by a factor of five.

Presumably the error crept in because it is hard to believe that the UK would have only spent £75 million on mathematics research in 2010. With the slip corrected, the cost-benefit ratio of mathematics is an astounding one to 2,773. In other words, for every pound spent on mathematics research, £2,700 is gained in investment. 

It is reassuring to know that even the great and good of mathematics slip up in their calculations from time to time, but this in no way detracts from the central message of the report: investing in UK mathematics is one of the most cost-effective measures the government can take to boost our economy.

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Nevertheless, making the most of this potential is not easy. To see the challenges, consider the experience of computing. The benefits of making computer programming a standard part of school education have been crushingly obvious since the 1980s. Yet it still possible for maths and science students to come to university without any meaningful programming experience. 

With the current revolution in data science, it is similarly obvious today that all students should continue to develop mathematical skills after the age of 16. Nobody should be able to graduate with a social science degree, for example, unless they have some understanding of statistics. And no mathematician should be able to graduate without being able to explain the implications and limitations of a model in words. We also need to address the long-standing issue of women choosing not to pursue a career in mathematics, and to reverse the drop in enrolments in mathematics programmes that we have seen in recent years.

Although there are several longstanding mathematical societies in the UK, such as the Royal Statistical Society and the London Mathematical Society, they each represent specific niches. There is currently no mathematical equivalent of the Royal Society of Chemistry or the Institute of Physics to create a single coherent UK strategy across mathematical disciplines. This has resulted in mathematics being something of a second-class citizen in policymaking and in funding. In 2008-2013, physics received seven times the funding of mathematics, while delivering about a third of the economic benefit.

In the distant past engineering experienced similar problems in reaching the ear of government. This was addressed in 1976 with the founding of the Fellowship of Engineering. Its accomplishments in shaping research and education policy was recognised in 1992 when it was granted the new title of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The ambition of the Academy for Mathematical Sciences was to replicate this. 

Since the Bond report in 2018 considerable work has gone into the development of the new fledgling academy. A particular focus has been to ensure that different constituencies are reached, including schools and industry. Care has been taken to develop the processes and structures needed to build consensus across the mathematical sciences. This is no mean feat. Mathematicians are by nature a contrary bunch and require a great deal of convincing before they will agree on anything. It is a considerable achievement that the current proto-academy enjoys the support of all the existing mathematical learned societies. 

Given the broad support for the academy from across the mathematical community, it is extremely hard to understand Labour’s decision to withdraw funding. The academy seems to tick all their boxes. It has a strong focus on expanding access to mathematics to underrepresented groups. It is non-elitist, giving equal weight to the needs of teachers and industry as well as academia.

The government’s explanation is that, ‘substantive action rather than an additional academy represents the most effective way forward to ensure maths supports our missions.’ But these actions remain unspecified. This makes it impossible to perform a cost-benefit analysis. Besides, the costs of the academy are nugatory. With mathematical sciences employing 2.2 million people across the UK, the cost of the academy is less than £1 per job per year.

If the government has new substantive ideas for mathematics, that is great, but it needs to say what they are. The real policies we need will take years to implement. Any proposals will require careful debate to develop consensus and cross-party support. This is of course precisely the job of the new academy, and it has been working hard to achieve this. The government must understand that science strategy is a long game and that it will need expert help to build the right strategy. Otherwise, it is hard not to worry that the only reason the government is not supporting a powerful new voice for mathematics is that they don’t want to listen to it.

Andrew Bailey should be wary of helping Labour

Business confidence has plummeted back to the levels last seen in the wake of Liz Truss’s unfortunate mini-budget. Hiring has slowed down as employers worry about all the new rights Labour is about to award their staff. Consumer confidence has fallen, as people worry about the tax rises that will be imposed in the ‘Horror Budget’ set for the end of the month. And the economy, which was growing at a decent clip when the Conservatives left office, has now stalled, with zero growth in the latest quarter. The new Chancellor Rachel Reeves was facing a spluttering economy. But, hey, never mind. It turns out that the Bank of England is here to help – the only problem is its Governor Andrew Bailey may come to regret that decision. 

In an interview published today, Bailey offered the Chancellor a rare piece of good news. After keeping rates on hold following a single, modest quarter-point cut earlier this year, Bailey argued there was a chance the BoE could become ‘a bit more activist’ in its approach. He was encouraged to see inflation coming down, and although there was a risk that conflict in the Middle East might drive it up, that should allow the Bank to start reducing the cost of money again. As the remarks were published, the pound started to fall as the markets assumed rate cuts were on the way. 

Sure, that will help Reeves. It was starting to look as if she had talked her way into a recession, but lower interest rates will help consumers as mortgage rates will come down. It will also reduce the vast costs of servicing the government’s huge debts, while a lower pound will help exporters. It might be just enough to allow the British economy to eke out the 1 per cent growth that now seems to be the most it can aspire to.

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The trouble is, there are two big problems with Bailey’s intervention. To start with, it is far from clear that inflation is still falling. In September, the rate stuck at 2.2 per cent, even though it is still coming down in the US and the euro-zone, suggesting that, as so often in the past, price rises are stickier in the UK than elsewhere. Even worse, many of the government’s policies, from massive pay rises for the public sector, to soaring energy bills to pay for net zero, are likely to drive it even higher. If Bailey can actually detect signs of easing price pressures in the UK he must have a very powerful microscope. Next, it will look dangerously close to helping out a government that has, despite taking office with a huge majority, been flailing around for an economic strategy. The Bank is meant to be strictly impartial, but having declined to cut rates in the run-up to the general election it will look odd, to put it mildly, to cut them soon afterwards unless there is overwhelming evidence for doing so. In reality, there is very little case for accelerating rate cuts – and Bailey will regret hinting that there is.

Sir Keir pays back £6,000 worth of gifts

To the latest development in Labour’s freebie fiasco, as it transpires that Sir Keir Starmer has paid back over £6,000 of gifts he received from wealthy donors. No. 10 revealed the Prime Minister chose to cough up the funds for six Taylor Swift tickets, four Doncaster racing tickets and the clothing gifted to his wife. The news that Sir Keir would be paying back the cost of the freebies himself came last night as the donations were about to be uncovered in the latest list of MPs’ financial declarations.

Starmer’s about turn poses some rather awkward questions for the rest of Starmer’s cabinet however – who haven’t quite found it in themselves to do the same. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner declared £836 for an Ibiza DJ booth visit, while Foreign Secretary David Lammy was given tickets to for an Arsenal game, the latest register shows. The revelations follow the frockgate scandal, where it emerged that Lady Starmer had accepted clothing donations from Lord Alli which were not initially declared in line with parliamentary rules. It then transpired that Starmer had received £107,000 worth of gifts since 2019, including £40,000 of football treats. The developments sparked outrage among Sir Keir’s parliamentary party, with one MP remarking: ‘This is what hypocrisy looks like. Most of us have been fighting the “they’re all the same” rhetoric for our whole careers and Keir’s double standards just prove it’s entirely accurate.’ Ouch.

The update follows the news that Lord Alli – who funded workwear and luxury accommodation for the Labour leader – is now under investigation by the Lords Commissioner, with the millionaire businessman being looked into over ‘alleged non-registration of interests leading to potential breaches of paragraphs 14(a) and 17 of the thirteenth edition of the Code of Conduct for Members of the House of Lords’. Goodness. Downing Street is expected to publish a new code of conduct for ministers in the near future, in a bid to tighten the rules on gifting. Yet despite Sir Keir’s best efforts, the freebie fiasco continues to rumble on…

BBC cancels Boris interview after Kuenssberg gaffe

Well that’s awkward. Former prime minister Boris Johnson was due to be interviewed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg today, ahead of the release next week of his memoir, titled Unleashed, which is currently being serialised by the Mail.

Licence-fee payers would no doubt have been treated to Boris’s expositions on why he considered invading Holland to seize the country’s Covid jabs, and given the inside details of his ‘manly’ chat with Prince Harry to prevent the calamity that was Megxit. 

Unfortunately though such delights will be denied to the nation, after an embarrassing BBC gaffe. Kuenssberg wrote on Twitter late last night that she had accidentally sent her briefing notes to Boris ahead of the interview, and as a result the tête-à-tête had to be cancelled: 

While prepping to interview Boris Johnson tomorrow, by mistake I sent our briefing notes to him in a message meant for my team. That obviously means it’s not right for the interview to go ahead. It’s very frustrating, and there’s no point pretending it’s anything other than embarrassing and disappointing, as there are plenty of important questions to be asked. But red faces aside, honesty is the best policy. See you on Sunday.

The BBC’s press team added that the slip-up had made the interview ‘untenable’, and ‘under the circumstances, both the BBC and Mr Johnson’s team have agreed this is the best way forward.’

Red faces all round it seems. Still, Mr S can’t help but wonder, given all the resources the BBC has at its disposal, couldn’t someone in Broadcasting House have come up with a new set of questions to grill Boris with before the interview went ahead?

War in Lebanon could end up creating Isis 3.0

As Israeli troops make incursions into southern Lebanon, in the wake of recent successful aerial and covert campaigns against Hezbollah, Tel Aviv appears ascendant. Iran, by contrast, seems on the back foot, at odds with its proxies and divided internally as to the way forward. 

Israel’s response to Iran’s missile strikes, and the West’s ability to check Israel’s actions to prevent all-out war, will determine how the next 48 hours pan out. Iran has strongly signalled that it is relying on the US to curb Israel’s response to its missile strikes last night, a statement that carried with it a whiff of desperation. 

Wars in the region tend to follow a pattern, in which lightning early successes for the technologically advanced power (Israel) drag them into a ground conflict which turns into a counter-insurgency campaign in which morale suffers as the insurgents slowly make gains and the invading force loses men. 

This has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. It was a feature, too, of Israel’s wars in Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. Israel may well be walking into a trap in southern Lebanon, made more enticing by its stunning decapitation of Hezbollah’s senior leadership. Iran knows this; it’s why it built up a network of proxies, able to fight a regional insurgency against the US and Israel. When you take away Tehran’s proxies, what are you left with? Israel is aggressively trying to find out. 

Yet Israel still can’t answer the crucial question that has hovered over this entire conflict: how does it end? It is unrealistic to expect a total defeat of Hamas, Hezbollah and all of Iran’s proxies across the region. It is also unrealistic, given the evidence from 50 years of military engagements in the region, that the IDF can win a war in Lebanon against a determined and well-armed Hezbollah, no matter how damaged it may be. 

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The same goes for Gaza. The stated aims in Gaza and Lebanon, of returning hostages and allowing 60,000 Israelis to go back to their homes in northern Israel, are good ones. But these aims seem at odds with the tactics used to achieve them. A ground incursion, fraught with complexities, will not be a cast-iron guarantee of peace for northern Israel and the return of displaced Israelis to their homes. An intensified bombing campaign in Gaza will probably kill any remaining hostages. 

That’s not to say Iran has the upper hand. On the contrary, there are splits emerging not only between Hezbollah and their masters in Tehran, but also between the Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, and the IRGC over how to respond. Both want to avoid all-out war, but Pezeshkian favours dialogue, de-escalation and diplomacy, while the IRGC prefers continued military pressure to restore Iranian deterrence. 

Some within Hezbollah have recently been vocal in criticising Iran’s timidity towards Israel. The growing perception among Iran’s proxies is that Tehran is hanging them out to dry as IDF bombs rain down. The hardliners, the IRGC, are winning the day, as we saw with Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles on Tuesday. That operation was designed to be a step up from April’s attack, but simultaneously not a declaration of war: the IRGC said as much as the missiles were in flight.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s message on Sunday to the Iranian people in which he said, ‘Our quarrel is not with you,’ was a clear attempt to exploit these tensions within Iran. It could also be read as a possible hint that the regime in Tehran is next in Israel’s sights.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s policy of strategic patience, formulated in 2020 after the killing of IRGC commander Qassim Soleimani, has been the guiding principle of Iran’s regional foreign policy: ‘We will respond at the time and place of our choosing.’ Yet his internal critics argue that this idea has run its course: what is the point of a policy of patience, if the destination is war? Why not get on with it? These voices are in the minority, for now, but that could change. 

But perhaps a bigger danger is that of sectarian conflict rearing its head throughout the region.

Sunni Syrians were filmed parading through Idlib in celebration of the death of Nasrallah. Lebanese Sunnis, too, have been seen tearing down Hezbollah posters in the north of Lebanon. Isis and their Sunni affiliates in the region will be salivating at the prospect of western boots on the ground, or even a conflict that balloons into Iraq and Syria. For now, Iran’s strategic headaches strike Israel and its western allies as good news. But the last thing the world needs is Isis 3.0. The many western analysts now applauding Netanyahu’s boldness and the Israeli military’s (undeniable) operational brilliance might want to reflect more on those longer-term dangers.

These won’t be the last casualties Israel sustains in Lebanon

Israel has sustained its first casualties since the launch of its cross-border incursion into southern Lebanon. Eight soldiers have been killed in battles with Hezbollah and, tragically, they are unlikely to be the last casualties of this conflict. 

Captain Eitan Itzhak Oster, 22, a squad commander in the ‘Egoz’, an elite commando unit specialising in guerrilla warfare, was killed in what was reported to be an ambush by Hezbollah fighters in a village in southern Lebanon. Other Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) personnel killed in clashes with Hezbollah on Wednesday include four members of a commando unit, two soldiers serving with a reconnaissance squad, and another who was part of the engineering corps. The IDF has named the soldiers as Captain Harel Ettinger, Captain Itai Ariel Giat, Major Noam Barzilai, Major Or Mansour, Major Nezer Itkin, Sergeant Alamkan Tarfa, and Sergeant Ido Breuer.

These soldiers were killed in a battle with Hezbollah operatives in a southern Lebanon village, according to a report in the Times of Israel. Five other soldiers were seriously wounded. One survivor of a Hezbollah ambush said everyone in his unit had been injured but they had managed to withdraw.

Even for Israel, a country so used to war and sacrifice, losses so early on in a campaign will come as a shock. The eight deaths also demonstrate that fighting in the coming weeks and months will be costly and difficult. Hezbollah will want to make the IDF pay in blood for every inch of their soil they are forced to surrender in the hope that Prime Minister Netanyahu may decide that the sacrifice being asked is too much.

Southern Lebanon represents a different strategic problem to Gaza, where the IDF was able to target Hamas strongholds with air, drone and artillery strikes before Israeli troops moved in on foot in a series of clearing up operations. Even then, with all of the military hardware the IDF has at disposal, the war in Gaza has dragged on and the casualty rate increases daily for both the civilian population and the Israeli army.

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Geographically, southern Lebanon poses a different threat. It is a hilly area, dotted with abandoned villages and criss-crossed with a vast network of tunnels – all of which make it the perfect ground for snipers, ambushes and the use of improvised explosive devices, designed to maim and not kill.

Israel possesses one of the world’s most effective and highly capable fighting forces and the country’s intelligence network is second to none – exactly what you would expect from a country which has more or less been fighting for its survival for the past 70 years.

But as one former senior British Army officer told me in Afghanistan in 2006 – the enemy always has a vote. By this he meant that no matter how well trained and equipped a fighting force, the enemy will always play a role in how a plan unfolds. 

The Taliban were poorly trained and ill equipped – their weapon of choice was an ageing AK-47 assault rifle taken from a dead Russian soldier. They had no artillery, air power or tanks. While British troops fought in increasingly heavy and restrictive body armour and helmet, the Taliban wore traditional dress and sandals but were able to hold both the British and US forces at bay for more than ten years and inflicted thousands of casualties in doing so.

Hezbollah are infinitely better equipped, trained and possibly more motivated than the Taliban and they are fighting for what they perceive as their land. Like the Taliban, Hezbollah will also have a vote and it’s likely to be a big one.

Netanyahu’s plan in Lebanon, we are told, is a limited one – degrade Hezbollah and push it away from the border, north of the Litani river. It is anyone’s guess how long this will take and at what the cost will be in blood and treasure. But in all likelihood it will not be small.

Israel is fighting for its very survival and the West needs to ensure that it doesn’t fail, in exactly the same way that the West needs to ensure that President Vladimir Putin is not victorious in Ukraine.

We should ensure that Israel has the military hardware it needs to achieve its limited aims. If the IDF can hit Hezbollah hard and fast before withdrawing it will, hopefully, limit the number of casualties it sustains.

Don’t blame Ukraine for not giving up

Two years ago, Volodymyr Zelensky was hailed as a hero in America. He was the man who stood up to Putin, who saw off the pillar of Russian tanks advancing on Kyiv – the man who’d fight the revanchist autocracy so the West didn’t have to. How times have changed. To a great many in Washington he is now a liability, a hustler, someone trying to pour American money and his countrymen’s lives into an unwinnable war. An increasing number of Republicans are making him the scapegoat for a war that only the Kremlin can end.

The outcome of next month’s US presidential election will be watched more closely in Ukraine than perhaps even in America. Kamala Harris has pledged to do ‘everything’ to help Ukraine win the war. Donald Trump has slammed Zelensky for refusing to ‘make a deal’ with Russia and promised to end the conflict ‘immediately’ by making a good deal for ‘both sides’. Just what that means in the context of an invaded country is hard to tell.

China has also been busy, teaming up with Brazil to launch the ‘Friends of Peace’ platform proposing to freeze the fighting. Hungary, Switzerland, Turkey, Mexico, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are already backing it. Zelensky sees this is a euphemism for giving Putin his conquests – then time to rearm and return. ‘Maybe somebody wants a Nobel Prize for a frozen truce instead of real peace’, he said last week. ‘The only prizes Putin will give you in return are more suffering and disasters’. 

Zelensky’s own ‘victory plan’ aims to strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position. He went to Washington last week seeking permission to strike Russian military bases using British Storm Shadow and American ATACMS missiles. Boosting Ukraine’s military capabilities will disrupt Russian advances on the front line, with the hope of creating a deadlock that could compel Putin to seek diplomatic solutions. The word is that Biden administration officials are unpersuaded. Kyiv’s dream of fast-track Nato membership was shattered last week by Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan who said that the US and other Nato members ‘don’t want Ukraine to be a member state’. 

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Ukrainians know the difference between genuine peace and delayed, but certain, war. Zelensky had his first and only meeting with Putin in Paris five years ago where he asked him to withdraw Russian troops from Donbas. A ceasefire was agreed upon – the third after the failures of Minsk-1 and Minsk-2. This one didn’t work either. Still, Ukraine kept asking for talks right up until the point when hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were massacred in Bucha in March 2022. Asking for peace had a radicalising effect on Moscow: Putin saw Zelensky as a weak leader and Ukraine as an easy prey.

When the Kremlin sees weakness, it escalates. Over 3,200 civilians were injured in Ukraine this summer with almost 600 killed. Last month was the first when the country was under drone attacks every single day. This is Putin’s strategy: to cause unbearable suffering to the civilian population to force them to give up. He’s upping Russia’s defence budget by 25 per cent next year and plans to draft over 130,000 recruits over the autumn. Freshly-supplied Iranian missiles are being saved for winter attacks.

Last week, Zelensky told the United Nations general assembly that Russia intends to attack three nuclear power plants ahead of winter. In recent weeks, Russian drones have been flying low over nuclear facilities, exploring them, a pattern similar to attacks on thermal power plants, all of which have now been destroyed. Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is already on the verge of blackout after a Russian attack cut off a power line to the facility this week. When temperatures drop below zero soon, Ukrainians will have to endure hours without electricity, heat, or water. 

The threat to Ukrainian nuclear facilities is seen by Kyiv’s allies as less escalatory than Zelensky seeking permission to strike deep into Russia with western missiles. Washington continues to set ‘red lines’ for Ukraine while avoiding any clear stance on the West’s own red lines with Moscow. This leaves uncertainty about when Russia’s actions will be considered serious enough for allies to increase their support for Ukraine. The missile attack on the children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv in July once again proved that the Kremlin is allowed to commit all kinds of atrocities with no consequences.

In a video message this week, addressing his people to ‘celebrate the day of reunification with Russia’ of Ukraine’s four partially-occupied regions, Putin said that ‘all the intended goals will be achieved’ in the country. His terms remain the same: that Ukraine gives up some 20 per cent of its territory, shrinks its army and declares neutrality. Ukrainians see acceptance of these conditions as suicide. Some 91 per cent of Ukrainians polled in June believe that Russia would simply bide its time to prepare for a new offensive, while 86 per cent think Russia is likely to attack again even if a peace treaty is signed. 

The greatest challenge to securing lasting peace in Europe lies in preventing Russia from continually invading Ukraine in the years and decades to come. The reality is that no alternative can offer Kyiv the level of security that Nato membership would provide. However, Hungary’s Viktor Orban could single-handedly block any effort to secure Ukraine’s accession, even if just the unoccupied territories were to join. The allies would also need to keep supplying Ukraine with weapons, strengthening its air defences, and delivering Nato-level military training. A powerful, well-equipped military is Ukraine’s best deterrent against future aggression. Like Israel and Taiwan, Ukraine must maintain a fully prepared army at all times. 

Ukrainians would be far more open to dialogue if a concrete security package were on the table. The public debate won’t begin while the country is offered pinky promises and vague assurances. At home, Zelensky also needs to be more honest. The dream of complete victory has sustained high morale for a very long time, but it’s crucial to confront reality and adjust expectations on time. Four out of five Ukrainians have now lost a family member or friend due to hostilities. It is hard to say how much more grief and suffering the nation will be able to endure.

There is no quick way out of this war, and rushed agreements will bring temporary solutions. Ukraine may never have a better opportunity to fight off Putin than it does now – until Russia replenishes its losses. While allies decide which path to take, the country is bracing for a long, dark season: the upcoming winter will be the hardest in almost three years of full-scale war. Last week, Zelensky tried to reassure the nation that it is almost over, that ‘we are closer to peace than we think’. ‘We just have to be very, very strong’, he said. But as things stand, few at home believed him.

Could Iran target Jews outside Israel?

After the massive direct Iranian attack on Israel, many breathed a sigh of relief that Israel’s defences were mostly well prepared and highly effective. The one death reported was that of a Gazan Palestinian man killed by shrapnel near Jericho. So much for Iranian solidarity with the Palestinians. Yet tensions remain high as further Iranian aggression may follow. This time, it could the Jews of Europe, the UK or America who are the targets. 

Israel’s impressive strategic operational activities in Lebanon and Syria have not only severely limited Hezbollah’s abilities, but also restored Israel’s intelligence and military deterrence in the region. By thrashing Hezbollah so severely, Israel badly humiliated the terror group’s puppet-master, Iran. Iran’s ability to damage Israel directly has so far proved to be lacking, but at the start of the Jewish New Year, many Jews around the world have a pronounced sense of unease.

Among some Iran analysts, there is a rising fear that the regime could continue its retaliation in a way more aligned with its traditional strategic playbook: through asymmetric warfare. Iran has a history of responding to setbacks with global terrorism, and the infrastructure for such attacks is already in place, including here in the UK and across much of the West. Our weakness in the face of their extremism and manipulation has put all of us at risk, particularly Jews and Iranian dissidents.

Iran’s embarrassment over its proxy Hezbollah’s failures cannot be overstated. For decades, Hezbollah has been Tehran’s primary asset, a formidable force against Israel and a key component of Iran’s regional power projection. However, in recent months, Israel’s unprecedented intelligence-led strategic planning and precision strikes have severely weakened Hezbollah, exposing the limitations of the group that was once considered nearly untouchable.

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When Iran cannot strike a powerful military blow, it frequently turns to asymmetric warfare, often targeting Jewish and Israeli civilians far from the Middle East. We have seen this pattern before, most notably in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, orchestrated by Hezbollah under Iranian direction. The terror attack killed 85 people as part of a broader strategy to exert pressure on Israel by hitting Jewish targets globally.

Today, the threat is particularly acute. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been busy mapping Jewish institutions across Europe, preparing for precisely this type of retaliation. Several foiled terror and murder plots, especially in the UK, have shown how far Iran’s reach extends. Tehran’s global terror networks, cultivated over decades, make Jewish communities in the diaspora easier targets than the well-protected state of Israel.

Iran has long been recruiting foreign nationals to carry out attacks on its enemies. A recent case illustrates the lengths to which the regime is willing to go: Iranian agents attempted to recruit Russians and Americans to assassinate Iranian dissidents in Europe and the U.S. during discussions with an Israeli man they had also allegedly recruited for assassination plots. The Islamic Republic’s determination to operate across borders, targeting not just its immediate enemies but anyone standing in its way, is undeniable. It could well apply this strategy to Jewish civilians outside Israel, who are more vulnerable than ever amid the current geopolitical tensions.

Jewish communities in Europe are particularly exposed, especially around significant holidays like Rosh Hashanah, when they gather in large numbers. Islamic terrorists have a history of choosing symbolic moments to strike, knowing the psychological and political impact such attacks can have. While Israel remains on high alert for further retaliation, Jewish communities outside Israel do not enjoy the same level of protection, making them tempting targets for Iran’s proxies.

This danger is compounded by the deep networks the IRGC has established across Europe. Over the years, Iranian influence has taken root in mosques, cultural centres, and radicalised Shia Islamist communities, providing Tehran with ready-made infrastructure to carry out attacks far beyond its borders. In the UK, for instance, IRGC-linked centres have been known to host events glorifying terrorism and spreading antisemitism, further radicalising local populations and creating fertile ground for recruitment.

Despite the clear and present danger, the West’s response has been inadequate. One of the most glaring failures is the refusal to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. Without this designation, law enforcement agencies lack the legal tools to crack down on Iran’s networks and disrupt its operations. Proscribing the IRGC would not only hinder its ability to carry out attacks but would also send a strong signal that Iranian-backed extremism will no longer be tolerated.

This reluctance to act, however, has emboldened Iran. Civil servants and politicians, particularly in Europe, often fear being labeled Islamophobic, which creates a paralysis in addressing the very real threat posed by the IRGC. This leaves Jewish communities, as well as Iranian dissidents, dangerously exposed.

The time for inaction is over. As Israel continues to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in Lebanon, Jewish communities across the globe could find themselves in the crosshairs of Iran’s rage. Rosh Hashanah, traditionally a time of renewal and reflection, is more than ever also a moment of heightened risk. The West cannot afford to wait for another tragedy to unfold, and should learn from Israel’s bold efforts to face down the Islamic Republic’s threats. Let there be no doubt: Iran’s dark strategy of terror must be met with firm resistance, and its time of impunity must soon come to an end.

What our prisons get wrong

‘Purposeful activity’ is a phrase often heard in discussions about our prisons. It describes work, training, therapeutic courses and other meaningful activities which improve prisoners’ mental health and make them less likely to behave antisocially in prison or offend after release. In theory our prisons should make sure that most prisoners are spending a significant amount of time out of their cells participating in this purposeful activity. Unfortunately, a report published last Friday by His Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons reveals that the reality falls far short of that. Of 32 closed prisons inspected in 2023-24, 30 of them were rated ‘poor or not sufficiently good’. In practice this means that ‘more than two thirds of prisoners were spending most of their days in their cells with little to occupy them’. In men’s ‘reception prisons’ the picture is even worse. These are the local jails which most remand and newly-sentenced prisoners are sent to before being distributed to ‘training’ or ‘resettlement’ prisons across the country. They are often particularly crowded, and have a highly varied population. While in theory prisoners should not spend very long in reception prisons, in reality many are jailed in them for months or years. In these jails ‘50% of prisoners reported spending more than 22 hours in their cells on a typical weekday’, while 72 per cent report this at weekends.

So what? You may think that prison should be tough, and that locking people up all day is an effective punishment. In my experience though, it does no good and a great deal of harm. During the spring and summer of 2020, while imprisoned at HMP Wandsworth, we were under lockdown because of Covid. As a result, almost every prisoner spent 23 or more hours a day behind his cell door. Cells at Wandsworth, like those in most prisons, are about the size of a car parking space. In that tight, cramped tomb is squeezed a bunk bed, a loo, a basin, a narrow table and a stand for the television. Two men eat, sleep, crap, talk and stare at the TV. In an environment which is simultaneously empty of sensory variety, and surrounded by clanging, banging, shouting and jangling, it is no wonder that many prisoners turn to drugs or drink, or succumb to depression and despair. As Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons told me: ‘Prisoners locked in their cells for long periods of time become bored and demotivated and the temptation to take drugs to pass the time becomes stronger.’ Charlie’s right. Staring at daytime television doesn’t make people more likely to find work after release, improve mental health, or reduce dependency on substances.

Further, frustrated prisoners who spend all day locked up are more likely to become violent, either with their cellmates, or with other prisoners and staff on the wing. I remember the night my neighbour assaulted his cellmate. After 15 minutes his victim screamed and pleaded before staff finally opened the cell door and brought the assault to an end. According to the most recently available data, covering the twelve months to March 2024, there were 28,292 assaults on prisoners (327 per 1,000 prisoners), representing a rise of 19 per cent over the previous year. Meanwhile, there were 9,847 assaults on staff, an increase of 24 per cent over the previous year. Given this high level of risk and danger, it is no wonder that prisons struggle to retain officers, putting ever greater pressure on those who remain, and making it even more difficult to offer productive time out of cells.

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Building more prisons and restoring staff numbers will take time which the government doesn’t have. They need to pursue radical action. One solution which would significantly reduce pressure on the reception jails is to change what happens when prisoners are sentenced. Instead of sending the vast majority of prisoners to reception prisons, we could look to assess risk as a part of sentencing. Courts already have on-site probation staff who produce pre-sentencing reports for people convicted of crimes and awaiting sentencing. They, in conjunction with judges and lawyers, could identify those people who represent the lowest risk, and who could be sent immediately to open prisons.           

Our open jails are environments where serious, meaningful purposeful activity happens, often outside the prison, with inmates allowed out each day under ‘release on temporary licence’. I spent the second half of my sentence at Hollesley Bay, an open jail on the Suffolk coast. There I saw the ways in which a good open prison can transform lives for the better. Men attended college, university or work, and built the habits of pro-social, law-abiding and positive behaviour which mean they are much less likely to offend again and be returned to prison. A bold government would change how sentencing operates, take pressure off the most crowded jails, and reduce reoffending. I hope the Lord Chancellor and Prisons Minister are feeling bold.

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In defence of Rosie Duffield

Rosie Duffield’s magnificently rancorous resignation of the Labour whip has reduced the number of MPs on the government side who are able accurately to identify what a ‘woman’ is by about 30 per cent. This is, then, a grave loss to Sir Keir Starmer, who could have wheeled Rosie out every time he was asked the tricky question and told his interlocutors: ‘Ask her, she seems to know. I haven’t a clue. I have been shown diagrams, of course, many of them in full colour. But a proper definition still eludes me because, for me and the vast majority of my colleagues on the left, such things as diagrams and scientific facts are easily trumped by the post-truth wish–fulfilment pleading of shrill lunatics.’

I cannot remember a newly elected government losing one of its MPs so quickly and with such an expression of contempt and disgust, nor one which has so speedily won the scorn of the people who voted for it. Duffield, a wholly admirable MP for whom I once voted, never seemed to me to be on the hard left of the party – rather, she is idiosyncratic soft left and, crucially, not terribly concerned about her own career. In her letter to her erstwhile leader, Duffield described in full Starmer’s political ineptitude and lack of principle. Later she expanded upon the theme, suggesting that the government was in the hands of a group of ‘lads’: ‘They have now got their Downing Street passes. They are the same lads who were briefing against me in the papers and other prominent female MPs and I was really hoping for better, but it wasn’t to be.’

This is what happens when you let them vote, these women-people. They start getting really arsey. Perhaps we should have let them throw themselves in front of horses and simply put it down to the time of the month, rather than caving in and letting them march towards the polling booths. What interests me however, is the apparent problem which left-wing men have with women – which may well stem from an inability to identify a woman in the first place. After all, if there is no essential difference between the two sexes then we may as well forget about feminism, because it cannot by definition exist.

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Or perhaps it is a little more complex than that. Those who are on the left believe not simply that they are correct about stuff, but also that they are morally good and that those who oppose them are immoral scum. The left has always been swathed in self-righteousness, of course – a consequence of believing in historical inevitability, I suppose: we are ordained to triumph. It also seems to be the case that on those vexed identity issues, the left believes it can do no wrong because it is signed up to the whole shebang. How can a liberal man be ‘sexist’ when he is so obviously on the ‘right side of history’? And so they behave however the hell they like, inoculated from opprobrium by the simple fact that when it comes to issues such as abortion, glass ceilings, gender pay gaps etc, they always vote in the right way. Therefore they cannot possibly be sexist.

And yet if you look at the complaints of Rosie Duffield and then turn your eyes to the gentlemen who provoked the whole #MeToo movement, notice that the transgressors, in almost every case, are liberal–lefties. Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, the even more odious Bill Cosby – all lefties whose respect for women was, of course, beyond doubt, despite those assaults and stuff. The truth is that the more a bloke professes his status as a feminist, the tighter the chicks should grab their canisters of mace. Convinced of their own inviolable rectitude, they believe themselves beyond the realms of accusation and indeed often seem very surprised when the accusations arise. This is  not to say that the behaviour of conservative men towards women is always exemplary – but in many cases a certain old-fashioned chivalry does pertain. A chivalry which may well anger a feminist, but tends to act nonetheless as a means of self-restraint. The modern left has not found a suitable replacement for chivalry.

The left’s approach to race issues is very similar. Compare the Labour front bench with the Conservative front bench, and remember what party it was that first had a person of colour as foreign secretary, chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister.  Labour patronises black and Asian people, telling them they will never get anywhere without the party’s help in this corrosively racist country. The right, meanwhile, empowers them, much as it has done simply and effectively with women. I suppose it might also be the case that people of colour who join the Labour party are rather less talented than people of colour who join the Tories (or the SDP, or Reform).

But we are getting ourselves into difficult waters here. All I would add is that if your country were in a desperate crisis, who would you prefer to help us all out of it? David Lammy and Clive Lewis? Or Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel?

Almost all of the holes Labour has dug for itself stem directly from the misapprehension of those in the party that they have a monopoly on morality, that they cannot do wrong because they mean well. It is there in the fatal failure when designing policies to put more faith in hope than in examining potential outcomes, though outcomes are really what matters. It is there in the blitheness with which they dismiss all those accusations of freeloading and greed while kicking the pensioners in the teeth. ‘How can you think this of us?’ they ask, plaintively, not understanding that buying into the left-liberal worldview leads directly to such a consequence. As we shall see time and again over the next five years.

Israel’s Iron Prime Minister

At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.

Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck.

Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, not quite the 19 years Bismarck served as German chancellor. For nearly a decade, whether Bibi should stay or go was the central question of Israeli politics. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel held five elections in which one of the rallying cries of the opposition was ‘Just not Bibi’. In August last year, Israel was racked by anti-Netanyahu protests that drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, including almost every member of the country’s cultural and even military elite. The surprise attack of 7 October was seemingly the final nail in Netanyahu’s political coffin.

Yet there Bibi still sits in his office in Jerusalem: still Prime Minister. As the anniversary of 7 October approaches, he is again ahead in the polls.

And no wonder. Hamas has largely been vanquished in Gaza, its remaining fighters confined to tunnels under a heap of rubble. More impressively, Israel has conducted arguably the most successful clandestine operation of the 21st century, maiming around 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with explosive pagers. And it is waging a war in all but name in Lebanon, attacking more than 5,000 targets in the past month and eliminating 16 of Hezbollah’s most senior operatives.

Last week, Bibi was at the UN General Assembly, defiantly quoting the Prophet Samuel: ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter.’ Half an hour after he stepped down from the podium, from his hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he ordered the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the seemingly invincible secretary-general of Hezbollah. On Monday, Netanyahu went even further. In a video addressing the Iranian people, he hinted that Iran ‘will be free sooner than people think’.

At the time of writing, Iran has launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Judging by his recent performance, Netanyahu may seize the opportunity to hit the Iranian ‘octopus’ over the head, seeking to topple the theocracy in Tehran, or at least to strike a blow against its nuclear weapons programme. 

When we met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem in February, we were struck by his Bismarckian demeanour. Throughout our conversation, he kept glancing sideways to a map of the Middle East that hangs on his office wall, as if to remind himself of his country’s predicament. Bismarck famously said that his map of Africa was a map of Europe. Bibi’s map of the world is a map of Israel, tiny and surrounded by foes.

Asked what a future historian in 20 or 30 years’ time might think about him, he replied: ‘The United States was declining. But Israel was able to resist the regional ambitions of Iran by defeating or containing the tentacles of the octopus.’ He added that in pursuing this objective, he always took care to avoid antagonising ‘superpowers’, meaning Russia and China. The future historian may add that, by focusing relentlessly on the Iranian threat, Netanyahu succeeded in building bridges to the Arab states, including those in the Gulf, while at the same time marginalising the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords were the result not of idealism but of vintage Realpolitik. In pursuit of his goals, Netanyahu has worked with Russia in Syria, enabled Hamas in Gaza, and defied first Barack Obama and then Joe Biden in Washington.

Moreover, like Bismarck, Bibi has combined devious foreign policy with devious domestic politics. He took the soft-left Yair Lapid as his finance minister, the hard-right Itamar Ben-Gvir as his national security minister and rallied the conservative masses against the liberal bourgeoisie with the lightning rod of judicial reform, repeatedly dividing the nation to secure his own political position.

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The oppression of Sally Rooney

Owen Matthews

Putin’s trap: how Russia plans to split the western alliance

Bismarck instrumentalised German unification to defend the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy against the threat posed to them by bourgeois liberalism. He built the German Reich with a series of short, sharp wars: against Denmark, against Austria and against France. Having founded the Reich, he never lost sight of Germany’s vulnerable position between France and Russia. He devised the intricate diplomatic instrument of the Secret Reinsurance Treaty to avoid being dragged into a fight with Russia on Austria-Hungary’s behalf. All this could be sustained domestically only with a series of artful measures to divide the liberals, exploiting their anti-Catholicism and anti-socialism, as well as the susceptibility of the industrialists to the temptation of tariffs.

Yet, for all the resemblances, Netanyahu seems to be reliving Bismarck’s career in reverse. In 1874, 16 years before being forced out of office, Bismarck complained: ‘I am bored. The great things are done.’ After close to the same amount of time in office, Netanyahu has never been less bored, for he now has the chance to do the great things. The decapitation of Hezbollah may be his Königgrätz, the battle in 1866 which confirmed Prussian primacy over Austria. Destroying the Iranian nuclear programme – or the regime itself – would be his Sedan, the battle that doomed the Second French Empire of Napoleon III.

In Krav Maga, Israel’s national martial art, breaking out of a headlock requires striking the opponent in the head with a free hand, disorienting them, then going on the offensive. This metaphor describes many episodes in Israeli military history. In 1955, Operation Elkayam killed 72 Egyptian soldiers in retaliation for the Fedayeen insurgency, humiliating Egypt into a ceasefire. In 1967, Israel launched the Six-Day War as a response to Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran. In 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani to end PLO raids in northern Israel. Israel’s headlock, before and after 7 October, was obvious. Iranian proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad – threatened it from multiple sides. We now have a sense of how Netanyahu seeks to emerge from it.

Launching a new war in Lebanon gave Israel three options. The first was to trigger an Iranian response, which would yield an opportunity to strike either the Iranian nuclear programme or the stability of the regime itself. The second, had that not materialised, was to hit Hezbollah so hard that Iran weighed in to try to push Hamas into a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The third was to pre-empt a harsh reaction by a weakened Hezbollah, which would have given Israel the opportunity to effect lasting strategic change north of its border.

As with all Bismarckian stratagems, there were many risks involved. It seems unlikely that the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, if he is still alive, will be more likely to agree a ceasefire now, as Hamas does not depend on Iranian supplies, and a larger war might even save it from perdition. And an all-out Lebanon War would absorb Israel’s capabilities, giving Iran a window to sprint to a bomb. 

Bismarck saw five fronts in his famous ‘combinations’ (Austria, Britain, France, Russia, Italy). Netanyahu has to think about more than seven (Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran – to say nothing of Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf states). The coming days, more than any other period in his career, will determine Netanyahu’s place in history. As the son of an historian – his father Ben-Zion wrote The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain – Bibi is no doubt aware of that.

Perhaps the most profound similarity between the Iron Chancellor and the Iron Prime Minister is the way they look at history. Survival is more important than ideology, a principle that extends as much to one’s own political career as to the life of the state. Bismarck was born in 1815. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the great powers’ Congress System. Netanyahu was born in 1949. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the Pax Americana.

After living through the revolutions of 1848, Bismarck concluded that the advance of modernity was unstoppable. Netanyahu’s father taught him that Jewish history is a ‘history of Holocausts’. The conservativism of the two men is perhaps rooted in this essential pessimism. Netanyahu, unlike his settler allies, can all too easily imagine a world in which Israel no longer exists. Unlike his opponents on the left, he cannot imagine a utopian end of history. Like Bismarck’s, then, his is a vision of perpetual struggle.

The key question for Israel is what follows Netanyahu. Henry Kissinger’s critique of Bismarck was that it is impossible to institutionalise a multi-year tour de force.  The same may be said of Bibi. He has no obvious successor, and that is by design. The Israeli political landscape is littered with protégés turned enemies: former prime minister Naftali Bennett, former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former justice minister Gideon Sa’ar (though Netanyahu managed to coax him back into the cabinet last week).

Netanyahu’s view that there is no one up to the task may be true. But after Bismarck came Caprivi. And eventually came Bethmann-Hollweg, the chancellor whose miscalculations plunged Europe into war in 1914. Netanyahu’s most likely successors in the Likud party are avowed populists without his historical sensibility or facility with the English language. He thus bequeaths his country as uncertain a future as Bismarck left to his. Bismarck unified Germany but failed to unite the Germans. His successors embarked on a road that led to war and the dissolution of the Reich.

To be the Israeli Bismarck is no mean feat. But there may be a sting in Bibi’s tale.

Will Rachel Reeves’s Iron Age morph into a Golden Age?

Rachel Reeves seems to be promising us an initial Iron Age of misery which will mutate into a glorious Golden Age. How very classical of her.

It is true that some ancient Greeks saw it the other way round. They argued that it was early civilisation that was the Golden Age, inhabited by men who lived ageless and free from hardship, while Nature poured forth its fruits, harvested by men at leisure (comic poets greatly enjoyed imagining a world in which it rained wine and pease porridge, hot sausage slices rolled down rivers and inanimate objects jumped to obey orders: ‘Table, come here! Cup, go wash yourself! Fish, turn over and baste yourself with oil and salt!’). But, the story went, this Golden Age deteriorated over five stages into the violent Iron Age of the contemporary world, when men held ‘the law in their fists’, honoured criminals and scorned oaths, ‘exulting in misfortune with a face full of hate’, until Decency and Moral Disapproval, veiling their faces, abandoned mankind to join the immortals.

But Ms Reeves clearly could not associate the Tory party with a Golden Age and has decided to opt for the alternative classical model. In that account, Greeks like Herodotus, travelling about the known world exploring different cultures, came across what seemed to them savage, uncultured ways of life which they came to believe must have represented a primitive stage of civilisation before their own enlightened version emerged. Poets picked up the theme, talking of the time when mortals lived like lawless beasts in sunless caves on the mountains, without farming skills and living off human flesh, until sheer necessity – or, in this case, the Labour party – revealed to men the way to escape Tory barbarity into a polished, civilised existence.

All we have to do, then, is to hunker down under the time-honoured insecure, cold, poverty-stricken Iron Age of Labour as (almost) foreseen by Thomas Hobbes (1651) – ‘no industry, no culture… no arts, no letters… and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short’ – for the miracle to occur.

How Ed Miliband plans to conjure electricity out of nothing

Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world.

We found out last week that Britain has now for the first time achieved top spot, among 25 nations, in terms of the price we pay for this supernatural ichor, for both domestic and industrial use.

This is a disaster. Electricity prices have doubled in Britain since 2019. They are 46 per cent above the International Energy Agency’s median for industrial and 80 per cent above the median for domestic electricity. As the independent energy analyst David Turver points out, British business pays almost four times as much as American business for each unit of power and British consumers pay almost three times as much as Americans. And that is last year’s data, before Ed Miliband has even started on his policies to accelerate decarbonisation: all the technologies he champions are more expensive than gas.

High electricity prices make companies based here less competitive, so some will leave or die; and consumers less well off, so some will freeze and all will buy less of other things: a drag on both production and consumption. Consumers pay for high electricity prices both when we use it and again when we buy things that have been manufactured or refrigerated with it. Given that the plan is for us all to use a lot more electricity in the future, for cars and home heating, this is alarming news.

How was the double triumph of chart-topping electricity prices for both business and homes achieved? Green lobbyists say that it is because we have not built enough wind farms and are too reliant on gas. But this is belied by the facts. Last month, the results of an auction of contract bids for generating electricity were announced. You will recall that because of inflation, the subsidy junkies in the ‘unreliables’ industry boycotted the previous auction for offshore wind, demanding and getting more generous terms.

Sure enough, last month’s bids by onshore wind, offshore wind and solar power are at average ‘strike prices’ higher than the recent going rate, which is set by the price of gas. The way contracts for difference work, the suppliers pay us if market prices are higher than the strike price; we pay them if they are lower. Only very briefly, when gas prices spiked during the early phase of the Ukraine war, did we get a little money back under the scheme.

In August, contract-for-difference subsidies were £237 million, the third highest ever and a record for August. That includes a £72 million rise in offshore wind subsidies, caused by a windy month, new wind farms coming online and falling gas prices. The more the wind blows and the lower the gas prices fall, the bigger the subsidies we pay wind farms. It’s a system of beauty as far as producers are concerned, but a thing of horror for consumers. ‘For the generators it’s heads they win, tails the consumer loses,’ says Turver.

Yet the strike price is only a small part of the cost of relying on unreliable wind and solar. National Grid plans to spend around £11 billion a year upgrading the transmission grid by 2035 to connect distant wind farms to where people actually live.

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When national flags are a warning sign

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Add the extra cost of balancing the grid when supply varies, and backing it up with just-in-time gas power when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. And the cost of storing electricity in batteries, for which Mr Miliband just announced new subsidies: forecast by Edinburgh University’s Professor Gordon Hughes to hit £5 billion a year by 2030.

Had we stuck with coal, like China and Germany have partly done, storing energy in heaps would be all but free and our electricity would be far cheaper (I can say this now I no longer have an interest in coal). We closed the last coal-fired power station this week. Had we gone for shale gas, like America did, it would also have been much cheaper: imported gas is always much more expensive than home-grown (unlike coal and oil, where there are world market prices). Mr Miliband is intent on shutting down the North Sea gas industry, ensuring we pay more still. The slogan that unreliables are now cheap remains a lie however often the subsidy junkies repeat it.

When things cost more, people buy less. Because of these high prices Britain is using less electricity every year. Final electricity consumption is down by about 23 per cent since 2005 – in spite of a rising population. Dr John Constable, of the Renewable Energy Foundation, adds: ‘And no, it’s not efficiency. This is price rationing pure and simple.’ We are de-industrialising.

It is not just old industries like steel that are driven away by high electricity prices. Data storage and bitcoin mining are getting more energy hungry. A query with ChatGPT costs ten times as much as a Google search.

Despair not. Ed ‘Baldrick’ Miliband has a cunning plan. As a tweet from his department revealed last week, the government plans to repeal a couple of laws, making electricity cheaper at a stroke. Which laws? Why, the first and second laws of thermodynamics of course. The tweet read: ‘Did you know a heat pump is 3x more efficient than a gas boiler? Meaning it generates 3 times more energy than it consumes.’

Apart from the fact that the second sentence definitely does not mean the same as the first, it implies that you can conjure energy out of nothing, breaking the first law of thermodynamics, and that entropy-eating perpetual-motion machines are possible, breaking the second. Hooray!

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‘No win, no fee’ has no place in war zones

The guilty plea of the former human rights lawyer Phil Shiner this week to charges of fraud is a story that deserves considerable attention. Shiner had tried to claim £200,000 in legal aid without disclosing that – in the breach of the rules – he had employed an agent to cold-call potential ‘victims’ of mistreatment at the hands of British service personnel in Iraq.

An inquiry held by the UK government in 2014 found that the allegations of abuse or violence which Shiner brought forward had little basis in fact: one fighter who was said to have been killed in custody by a British soldier was established to have died in battle, never captured alive. Yet the conclusion of the long case against Shiner – who was struck off as a solicitor seven years ago after his actions came to light – does little to solve an underlying problem: that laws established for civilian life are being inappropriately applied in war zones.

Soldiers should not, of course, murder captives in cold blood, nor torture or mistreat them. Where these crimes are committed, the perpetrators deserve to be punished. At the same time, armed forces operating in a war zone cannot be expected to observe the niceties afforded to citizens in peacetime.

For many years, enemy combatants were considered to be protected by international humanitarian law, derived from the Geneva Convention, which sought to minimise human suffering without compromising the ability of a nation to use lethal force to defend itself and others against aggression. 

International humanitarian law demands, for example, that captives are fed, clothed and protected against acts of vengeance. Yet it also accepts that war involves violence and killing. In such an environment, the right to life – not to mention the right to a fair trial, to work, freedom of association and collective bargaining and so on – has little relevance. 

But in recent years there have been growing attempts to apply full human rights law to wartime situations. Following the Iraq war, lawyers such as Shiner saw the opportunities presented by an unpopular conflict and seized their moment. Warfare has in effect been opened up to the no win, no fee culture which had already taken hold in civilian life. UK soldiers facing daily snipers, booby traps and suicide bombs in what had become a vipers’ nest of guerilla warfare suddenly found themselves treated as if they were police officers handling suspects in a London police station.

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When national flags are a warning sign

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The role of legal aid in this shift was instrumental. UK citizens even of modest means find it hard to obtain legal aid, since the rules demand that they dip into their savings before calling on the taxpayer. Yet when it came to Iraq, copious sums of legal aid were offered to foreign nationals to take cases out against British service personnel.

Those claiming to have been maltreated risked almost nothing: win, and they would earn a large payout from the UK taxpayer; lose, and their legal bills would also be met by British taxpayers. This produced a fundamental asymmetry, since British soldiers had little or no recourse to claim compensation from the guerillas and militias who had attacked them in combat. 

The Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick has touched on the issue of human rights in wartime. He claims that British special forces are killing terrorists rather than taking them captive, for fear they would end up having to be released under human rights laws. This, in Jenrick’s eyes, adds to the argument that Britain should leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.

Jenrick has been criticised for his comments by, among others, his leadership rival Tom Tugendhat, and has so far been unable to present evidence for his claims. But if former ministers are arguing over such a point, it rather shows up the legal muddle when it comes to war zones. To fight effectively, our armed forces deserve to know the rules under which they are operating. There should be no doubt, either, as to which authority they are answerable if they should break those rules.

We have court martials for a reason: to separate military justice from civilian courts, in recognition that different rules ought to apply. Such a distinction is absolutely necessary for the functioning of military forces – we can’t have soldiers having to assert their right to self-defence every time they shoot an enemy combatant when they are just doing their job. That is not to say that an off-duty soldier who starts a fight in a pub should be excused from civilian justice, but it does mean that when the bullets are flying in a war zone, concepts of civilian law are suspended. There should be no legal aid, and no human rights lawyers touting for business.

The incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law has introduced all kinds of grey areas, as its critics warned it would. We no longer have clearly written laws so much as general principles that must be balanced against each other. The uncertainties have helped to transfer power from our elected politicians to judges. That is a serious enough problem in everyday civilian matters. But when it comes to the people defending our country’s interests with their lives, it is vital that they know where they stand – and that the real army is not undermined by a metaphorical army of ambulance-chasing lawyers.