UK growth is creeping up – but tough decisions still lie ahead

Today the International Monetary Fund has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK: from 0.5 per cent this year to 0.7 per cent, followed by a 1.5 per cent rise in 2025 (unchanged from its previous update). These forecasts still sit slightly below the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent predictions – but only just. The IMF’s latest forecasts come less than two weeks after the UK economy defied predictions and grew by 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year, exceeding practically all expectations and confirming that recession ended back in 2023.

As I noted earlier in the month, when the provisional GDP figures were announced, the government must be careful about how it sells good news. The headline figures around growth, both forecast and confirmed, do not necessarily reflect how well-off voters are feeling, especially as GDP per capita still hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Still, it is hard to deny that the economic situation is improving, and you can tell from today’s comments that confidence in this narrative is growing. Responding to the upward revisions, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt noted that according to the ‘forecast we will grow faster than any other large European country over the next six years – so it is time to shake off some of the unjustified pessimism about our prospects'.

Hunt isn’t just relying on the IMF’s forecasts for his optimism. This week alone the Chancellor has other pieces of good economic news that point towards a better summer. The IMF’s estimate that the Bank of England has room to cut interest rates three times before the end of the year was hinted at just yesterday by the Bank’s deputy governor Ben Broadbent. While Broadbent (who is leaving the Bank in July) did not put a figure on the number of rate cuts the Bank might deliver in 2024, he all but confirmed speculation that Threadneedle Street is gearing up for its first rate cut this summer. ‘If things continue to evolve with [Bank] forecasts…’ he said in his speech, ‘...then it’s possible Bank Rate could be cut some time over the summer.’

We learn more about that evolution tomorrow, when the inflation data for April is published. It’s a big update: the headline inflation rate is expected to slow to (or around) the Bank’s target of 2 per cent, marking the end of the inflation crisis that has plagued the country since autumn 2021. The BoE does expect the rate to pick up slightly towards the end of the year, but nothing compared to what's happened the past few years. Having acknowledged on multiple occasions now that a rate cut is compatible with keeping monetary policy fairly restrictive, tomorrow’s inflation update should be another indicator to the Bank that it can start a slow and steady process of cutting rates.

These updates are no silver bullet for the long-term trajectory of the economy. Growth may be better than expected this year, but it’s still far below a rate needed to substantially boost the economy. Alongside calls for more pro-growth initiatives, the IMF also notes today that ‘tough choices’ cannot be avoided in the UK, as rising debt levels and growing demands on public services create an unsustainable situation. These are the problems, of course, that no political party wants to talk about heading into an election: at a time when politicians want to be making promises, there is no shortage of reminders that there is no scope to do so.

Listen to Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and James Heale discuss the IMF’s forecasts on Coffee House Shots:

Gove sounds the alarm on anti-Semitism

Multiple ministers are out giving speeches today but none will be as hard-hitting as that made by Michael Gove this morning. Britain, he warned, risks ‘descending into the darkness’ if it fails to tackle growing anti-Semitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks. Much of the Community Secretary’s ire was directed at the recent pro-Palestine campus protests, amid fears of the impact on Jewish students. University encampments are merely, in Gove’s words, ‘anti-Semitism repurposed for the Instagram age’; the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is ‘explicitly anti-Semitic’. It comes after anti-Jewish hate crime incidents rose by 147 per cent last year, two-thirds of which followed the attack on Israel, according to the Community Security Trust.

Gove’s argument was that the fight against anti-Semitism is crucial in the wider struggle to preserve free societies under attack. He contrasted the fate of those societies where Jews feel most at home to where they are demonised and persecuted. ‘It’s an ironclad law of history that countries which are descending into darkness are those which are becoming progressively more unsafe for Jewish individuals’, Gove said. He compared ‘the Spain of the Inquisition, the Vienna of the 1900s, Germany in the thirties’ to ‘the Netherlands of the seventeenth century [and] Britain in the first decades of the last century’. ‘When Jewish people are under threat, all our freedoms are threatened’ he said. ‘The safety of the Jewish community is the canary in the mine. Growing anti-Semitism is a fever which weakens the whole body politic.’ Both the far-right and the far-left share common ground in this respect, he argued. ‘Anti-Semitism is a virus that evolves’ said Gove: from that, the other pernicious conspiracies are spawned.

This being a Gove speech, there were some news-lines for the grateful hacks too. He suggested that pro-Palestine march organisers should stump up for policing of their protests, much like Chelsea Football Club funds policing for matches at Stamford Bridge. Gove condemned the ICC’s call for Binyamin Netanyahu’s arrest, arguing there ought to be no equivalence between a democratically-elected leader and the head of a terrorist group. His punchy rhetoric also caused a stir after he name-checked the Revolutionary Communist party, whose leader promptly accused Gove of a ‘disgusting smear’.

Rightly or wrongly, Gove’s speech is being viewed through the lens of the long-awaited Woodcock report on political protests, which is due to be published later today. Two months after he unveiled the new government definition of extremism, we are still waiting for the formal naming, shaming and shunning of the groups identified by Gove. Having sounded the alarm on anti-Semitism, the Communities Secretary will now be under pressure to back up fine words with prompt action.

The far right isn’t the only threat ahead of the European elections

In France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary and Austria parties described by their foes as ‘far-right’ are on course for significant gains at next month’s European elections. To the chagrin of progressive politicians, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are popular with many voters. But centrist groups in the European Parliament are determined to do everything to stop them.

‘We are facing a crucial moment in the history of our European project, where once more the far right is attempting to bring back the darkest pages of our history,’ said a communique issued by a coalition of left-wing, green and centrist outfits in the European parliament on 8 May. The timing was no coincidence: that day marked the 79th anniversary of Victory in Europe day. It warned that ‘far-right’ parties represented a threat to democracy, due to the ‘constantly growing cases of harassment, vandalism, spread of disinformation, defamation and hate speech’.

The statement ended with a declaration that they ‘will never cooperate nor form a coalition’ with a ‘far right’ party. It called on Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to endorse their message.

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The communique was an insult to the intelligence of the European electorate. Voters have eyes and ears, they are aware of what has unfolded in Europe in recent months. It is not far-right students calling for the destruction of Israel; it was not MPs from Marine Le Pen’s party who were questioned by police on charges of ‘apology for [Hamas] terrorism’; it was not a right-wing Spanish MP who tweeted soon after the October 7 attack: ‘Today and always with Palestine’; it was not a right -wing mayor in Brussels trying to prevent democratically elected politicians speaking at a conference because he objected to their views; it was not a Swedish right-wing MP who recently attended a conference linked with Hamas.

Europe does indeed feel like it might be returning to ‘the darkest pages of our history’; but it’s not the right which is responsible for many of the most troubling recent events: it is a toxic alliance of elements of the progressive left and their Islamist allies.

The man who was shot dead in France last Friday as he set fire to a synagogue was an Algerian; and the man jailed for life last week for killing a pensioner in Hartlepool, ‘for the people of Gaza’, was a Moroccan.

It is Islamofascism that frightens many Europeans today: teachers murdered because they showed images of the Prophet; girls beaten unconscious because they don’t wear a headscarf; men stabbed to death because of their sexuality or because they drank alcohol.

What also alarms voters is that so many progressive politicians live in a state of permanent denial; they can’t bring themselves to confront the truth. They wring their hands about ‘Islamophobia’ even as Jews are routinely persecuted in Europe.

Other than the deceit and delusion of their opponents, there are other factors that explain the popularity of politicians like Meloni, Wilder and Le Pen. They recognise the folly of Net Zero, and of open borders, and they know that only the male species has a penis.

The European left has lost its way this century, which accounts for the fact that most of the 27 countries in the EU are run by governments that lean in varying degrees to the right. The left will only reverse this trend if they begin to speak and act with courage and honesty.

A start would be to issue another communique, alerting voters to the real danger in next month’s European elections, a coalition that poses a genuine threat.  

The ‘Free Palestine’ coalition is composed of parties from countries including France, Belgium. Sweden and Germany. One of its spokesmen Belgian MP Fouad Ahidar has declared: ‘There are two major issues we want to discuss: Islamophobia in Europe, which is on the rise, and the Palestinian question.’ Ahidar has described Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis as ‘a small response’ to 75 years of ‘massacres’.

The Free Palestine manifesto demands a ‘radical’ change in the direction of European diplomacy. This could include legitimatising Hamas and Islamic Jihad as political organisations, and imposing sanctions on Israel. It could also become illegal for European citizens to enlist in the Israeli army.

The French component of the coalition is the Democratic Union of French Muslims (UDMF), which states that its raison d’etre is anti-zionism and anti-imperialism. Also operating in France is the Muslim Brotherhood. The academic Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, whose book about the organisation last year led to her being given police protection, told Le Figaro: ‘The Brotherhood networks in France operate in two ways: either they lay their eggs in cuckoo parties on the far left, hoping to infiltrate these organisations, or they openly display their own colours’.

It is time that the European left grew up. Prattling on about Mussolini and Marshal Pétain is passé. There is a new threat spreading across Europe, and once again its primary targets are Jews.

Europe’s leaders hail Rwanda scheme

Well, well, well. Rishi Sunak’s immigration plans have been met with a fairly underwhelming response in Britain – only a quarter of people believe the Rwanda scheme will work, while the PM has faced some rather public dissent from within his own ranks over his record on small boats. But the Rwanda policy does in fact have some political admirers – in the form of leaders from across the Continent. Finally a piece of good news for the PM…

Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer is the latest European politician to heap praise on Rishi’s Rwanda plan. At a press conference in Vienna this morning, Nehammer hailed Britain as a ‘pioneer’ on migration, telling journalists:

Asylum proceedings should happen in safe third countries. The UK is therefore a pioneer for this model – a model that will be important for Europe as well. The Rwanda model will be a solution for us to have asylum proceedings in safe third countries and that’s something we need to put on the EU’s agenda as well.

On the other hand we will be able to save human lives because having asylum proceedings in safe third countries means that we don’t have dangerous smuggling routes, it means putting an end to death in the Mediterranean or English Channel.

Talk about a sterling review. And Austria isn’t alone in supporting Sunak’s Rwanda policy. As many as 15 European states are on board with the UK’s new way of stopping the boats, Nehammer told reporters today. Elsewhere, the CDU, Germany’s centre-right party – formerly led by Angela Merkel – has also backed Sunak’s plan. Current Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz is ‘firmly convinced’ the Rwanda approach will work, adding that it is something his party ‘could emulate’. And Ursula Von Der Leyen, current President of the European Commission who is running for a second term, lent her support to third-country migration deals, proclaiming last week: ‘We Europeans are the ones who decide who comes to the European Union and under what circumstances.’ Quite the vote of confidence…

Will all this overseas support prompt some sheepishness from Sunak’s detractors for slapping down his scheme? Home Secretary James Cleverly is certainly keen to stress to his colleagues and critics that the UK’s Rwanda scheme is closely in line with mainstream European opinion. But though Europe’s leaders are lauding the PM’s policy, and Sunak himself has pointed to Ireland’s migrant woes as proof his plan is working, Mr S would remind readers that as of yet, the new Rwanda policy has not seen a single flight take off…

How did the EU get Raisi’s death so wrong?

Most of the world will not mourn the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash near Varzaqan in Iran, this week. Dubbed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’, Raisi was responsible for the deaths of thousands in a purge of political dissent in the 1980s. Since becoming president he has overseen the brutal crackdown on Iranians protesting against the regime’s punitive morality police. And he has led a country which is a key supplier of drones and weapons to Vladimir Putin, causing countless civilian deaths.

Accordingly, most world leaders did not offer condolences for Raisi’s death, with President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Meloni and other leaders of the democratic world choosing not to comment.

In the institutions of the European Union, however, senior figures immediately sent their commiserations. Charles Michel, President of the European Council rushed into action, expressing his ‘sincere condolences’ on behalf of the European Union. High Representative Josep Borrell likewise offered his condolences, again as a representative of the EU.

Janez Lenarcic, European Commissioner for Crisis Management, went a step further, saying he would make available the EU’s Copernicus satellite system to help Iranian rescuers seeking to find Raisi and save his life, in the name of ‘EU Solidarity’.

Why was it obvious to the United States, Great Britain, and almost all democratic countries, that commemorating Raisi would be morally contemptuous, but not to the bureaucrats in Brussels?

It is worth stressing the kind of man Raisi was. No one quite knows how many lives the Butcher took in the 1988 purge of political prisoners. Whilst some estimates stop at ‘only’ a few thousand, others reach as high as 30,000. We do know that, by the end, there were so many victims that the bodies had to be loaded onto forklifts and hung from cranes. The Butcher would maintain, until the end of his life, that his role in these executions of political prisoners was a source of great pride for him, for which he should be esteemed and respected.

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As president he was a fanatical supporter of sex segregation, with his rule marked by extreme policies such as the amputation of hands, open hatred of gay people, and the imposition of even stricter restrictions on what women can wear.

In late 2022, a young woman called Mahsa Amini was set upon by the Iranian morality police for violating these restrictions. Beaten savagely for wearing her hijab incorrectly, her subsequent death triggered huge protests against Raisi’s government.

It is no surprise then that Raisi’s death has triggered jubilant street celebrations in the Iranian diaspora, while videos from inside Iran show people baking celebratory sweets and giving them to strangers.

The people of Iran know exactly what kind of man Raisi was. It’s a shame that European Union officials are so clueless by comparison. Already the EU’s tone deaf response has led to widespread criticism from those who believe European institutions no longer speak for them.

‘Not in my name!’ responded Geert Wilders, of the Dutch Party for Freedom, to Charles Michel. Theo Francken, a Belgian MP of the conservative New Flemish Alliance, echoed his criticism.

On the other side of the political divide, Guy Verhofstadt, a long-time European liberal, responded by simply highlighting Raisi’s credentials as a mass murderer. Whereas Hannah Neumann, a German Green MEP, criticised Michel’s message and claimed that it was only made in a private capacity.

Remarkably, two of the European Union’s most senior foreign policy figures have managed to unite the entire political spectrum in anger. 

Make no mistake: this is a crisis for the EU. Whether through incompetence, misjudgement, or miscalculation, EU officials failed to understand that actively supporting efforts to rescue the Butcher and mourning his loss would be received with anger in Europe.

The EU institutions have been getting it wrong a lot, recently. The malaise runs deep. From migration to climate, they are increasingly out of touch with what European citizens think. In the recent Dutch elections, far-right leader Geert Wilders smashed former Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans, and looks set to repeat this feat in the European elections. All across the continent, from France to Finland, populist parties are surging, driven by the same poor judgement that drove President Michel to mourn the Butcher.

The EU has once again slipped into a crisis of its own making. Its latest blunder is exactly why figures such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen are now speaking for European citizens, and EU institutions increasingly are not.

A crackdown on foreign students isn’t the only reason universities will struggle

Reducing the number of overseas students able to come to Britain would be a needless attack on one of our most successful export industries. But should we really believe David Cameron’s warnings to Rishi Sunak that universities are in danger of going bust if the graduate visa scheme is removed, or reformed (graduate visas give graduates the chance to stay on and work in Britain for up to two years)?

Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) does not appear to show any desperate crisis in university finances. On the contrary, their income has shown a steady and healthy, above inflation rise over the past decade. Between 2014/15 and 2022/23, their collective income from tuition fees and education contracts nearly doubled from £15.5 billion to £27.0 billion. This was in spite of tuition fees being held down at below inflation. Funding body grants surged from £5.3 billion to £9 billion and research grants and contrast from £5.9 billion to £7.3 billion – all this in spite of universities bleating that Brexit would starve them of research money. Investment income also saw a healthy rise, from £230 million to £907 million.   

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Universities like to pose as highly-successful businesses when it comes to rewarding their vice chancellors – an analysis of 115 universities by the Times Higher Education Supplement earlier this year showed that the average Vice Chancellor is paid £325,000. In spite of rising income, a couple of dozen universities managed to make a loss in 2022/23, the biggest among them the £16.3 million lost by South Bank University. The then salary of £295,000 paid to the vice chancellor of South Bank came in for criticism by Lord Adonis in 2017. Wolverhampton University lost £11.8 million and Middlesex University £10.4 million. The only Russell Group University which made a loss was Durham, which lost £4.9 million. The biggest loss of any education provider in HESA’s statistics for 2022/23, by the way, was Multiverse, Euan Blair’s apprenticeship outfit, which managed to lose £43.8 million. Not that that prevented the younger Blair appearing on the Sunday Times’ rich list for the first time, with a reported wealth of £327 million.    

There seems to be plenty of money, then, for the people who run higher education – even as they plead poverty. There are also some universities which seem to be under poor financial management. It is not impossible that a university or two will go bust over the coming years, but it won’t necessarily be because they are losing out on foreign students – it may equally well be because they have failed to contain their costs. Many universities have continued to fob off their students with token amounts of teaching time, long after the pandemic. Yet even so, they have allowed salaries and other costs to rise out of control. 

The government would be foolish to choke off foreign students – although there is certainly some room for reforming the student visa system and properly enforcing it, so that it is only available for graduates who have obtained good degrees on proper courses. But no, we shouldn’t listen to highly-paid university chancellors who constantly plead for state bailouts under threat of going bust. 

Will Ken Clarke lose his peerage?

In the aftermath of the tainted blood scandal, there is no shortage of blame to go around – but some are more culpable than others. As a junior health minister from 1982 to 1985, Ken Clarke was at the heart of Whitehall as reports of the risks from blood transfusion began to be published.

According to Sir Brian Langstaff’s inquiry, by 1982 there was evidence that infections were occurring through imported blood products. The Department of Health even admitted it was ‘likely’ that HIV/Aids was transmitted through blood products. Yet still in 1983 Lord Clarke continued to say that there was ‘no conclusive proof’ of infection via this route. Sir Brian says that while this was ‘technically correct’, its use was ‘indefensible’ because:

It did not spell out the real risk. It gave false assurances, it lacked candour and, by not telling the whole truth, it was misleading.

Given this record, you might have thought Lord Clarke would be a bit contrite when it came to the issue of tainted blood and its victims. Yet the former health minister – who subsequently held many of the great departments of state – gave perhaps the most notorious witness statement before the inquiry back in 2021. Several victims accused him of showing ‘disdain’ for the inquiry when he gave evidence.

Clarke complained about what he ‘had to put up with’ because he was ‘the best-known person of all those people involved’, adding that campaigners were ‘always trying to steer [inquiries] to try to find some celebrity whose fault it was.’ At one point, he asked:

Why do we have to go through such meticulous detail through who said what when, when did he change his mind?

It is no surprise therefore that, following Langstaff’s inquiry, victims are now demanding that Clarke be stripped of his peerage – an honour that was afforded to him in 2020, despite the objections of the Haemophilia Society. Asked on the morning round about whether this should happen, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said it was one for the forfeiture committee and said Lord Clarke was ‘a decent and nice man’ who has ‘always been very polite and kind to me’.

Shame he couldn’t extend that kindness to the victims, eh?

The trouble with Labour’s new towns plan

Since last October, when Keir Starmer declared that he was a ‘Yimby’ – a ‘yes in my back yard’ – Labour has tried to position itself as the pro-housing party. We are now finally getting a glimpse of what this might look like in practice.  

Deputy leader Angela Rayner has promised a revitalisation of the postwar ‘New Towns’ programme, which, in the quarter-century from 1946 to 1970, delivered hundreds of thousands of new homes.  

This certainly signals the right ambitions, and if done in the right way, New Towns could indeed make a major contribution to solving Britain’s housing crisis. But they are not a panacea, and the devil is in the detail: there is a risk of overburdening the proposal by expecting it to fulfil too many policy objectives at once. But more on this in a minute.  

The original New Towns were an indirect response to Britain’s interwar building boom. In the 1930s, the British housing stock used to grow by close to 3 per cent per annum. Some see this as the golden age of British housing, not just because of the sheer scale of construction, and the positive impact on housing affordability, but also because 1930s housing tended to be of a reasonably high quality.  

But this success carried the seed of its own destruction. It mostly took the form of outward expansion of the UK’s larger towns and cities: much of outer London, for example, was built during that period – and not everybody liked it. It created a backlash. As Samuel Watling shows, the 1930s saw the rise of organised Nimbyism, which is still with us today. 

The early Nimbys won major victories in the postwar years, namely in the form of the Town And Country Planning Act 1947, a much more restrictive system of land-use planning than the one it replaced, and the designation of greenbelts in the 1950s.  

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With further urban expansion severely curtailed, New Towns became a vehicle to accommodate the spillover demand. In the new system, London could no longer grow very much, but the likes of Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow still could.  

At first sight, New Towns appear to be a clever way around the Nimby problem. Propose to build a few houses on the edge of a town, and the Nimby lobby will scream bloody murder – but build them far away in nobody’s back yard, and nobody will complain.  

However, Britain’s postwar experience suggests that New Towns do not become major self-contained economic centres in their own right. They become commuter towns of existing cities and conurbations.  

There is nothing wrong with that. But commuter towns need to be close enough – and well-connected – to wherever it is that people commute to. You cannot build them in the middle of nowhere.  

Yet if you build them as de facto extensions of existing towns, like a borough that just happens to be a bit removed from the rest, you run into the old Nimby problem again. That is one reason why the New Town programme went dormant after 1970.  

Apart from these general difficulties with New Towns, there are additional ones specific to Angela Rayner’s version of them. Rayner wants to impose a ‘gold standard target’ of 40 per cent ‘affordable’ (i.e. below-market rate) housing on New Town developers, on top of developer contributions to large-scale upfront investment in infrastructure and local amenities. If combined with earlier Labour proposals for stringent environmental standards for new buildings, this would risk making New Towns unviable. New Towns would be risky long-term investment projects at the best of times. If you want them to take off, the last thing you want to do is pile additional costs and risks onto them.  

If New Towns helped to ease Britain’s housing shortage, that would already be enough make them a major success. They do not also have to solve all of the country’s social and environmental problems at the same time. They do not need to be a cure-all.  

Rayner’s pro-housing ambitions are very welcome indeed, and a more focussed version of her New Towns plan, devoid of unrealistic expectations, could be a force for good. But if she makes the perfect the enemy of the good, she will end up getting neither.  

Dr Kristian Niemietz is the Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). He is the author of the report “Home Win: What if Britain Solved its Housing Crisis?” 

Ebrahim Raisi’s death won’t change the course of history

The Middle East never fails to surprise. Sunday was no exception. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and several other senior Iranian politicians were killed in a helicopter crash in East Azerbaijan. One cannot help but wonder at the extraordinary misfortune not only of crashing, but of doing so in a foggy, rainy, muddy area that took rescue workers 15 hours to reach. Despite the profile of the accident’s victims, however, this is probably not an accident that changes the course of history. The Iranian presidency has become increasingly irrelevant in an increasingly-Soviet system. That trend is set to continue. 

To understand the limited power of the Iranian presidency, it serves to recap the fundamentals of the Iranian system. The Islamic Republic is not comparable to the Soviet Union, with its anonymous, grey-suited politburos. It instead resembles an imperial court (or less charitably, Nazi Germany). The Iranian constitution is constructed around the figure of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The vision of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, is based on three simple arguments. The first is that the Twelfth Imam, who in Shi’a doctrine has been in hiding since 874CE, is the only conceivable legitimate ruler. The second is that in the Imam’s absence, it is the clergy – righteous people, fluent in Islamic law and its interpretation – that is most fit to rule. The third is that of those clerics, the most qualified of them should rule. This is strikingly similar to medieval Catholic claims that the Pope – a figure that used to have enormous temporal authority – was the ‘Vicar of Christ’, a literal stand-in for Jesus until the anticipated Second Coming. 

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Where does the president fit in such a system? As one might presume, the president is something of an afterthought. The function of the president is to carry out the day-to-day duties of governance, with as much leash as the Supreme Leader gives him. Over the last twenty years, however, that leash has gotten much tighter. For more than two decades, Khamenei has struggled with his presidents. The unclear role of the president has caused much confusion. In one way or another, all of Iran’s presidents have grown too big for their boots. Khamenei’s first president, Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani, was qualified enough to be Supreme Leader himself and nearly got the job. Under Rafsanjani’s presidency, the two clashed over Rafsanjani’s more liberal vision of economic and foreign policy. By the time Rafsanjani died in 2017, many – including his daughter – suspected that he was assassinated. 

Mohammad Khatami, who was president from 1997 to 2005, launched a failed attempt to improve press freedom and relations with the United States. In doing so, he made an enemy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who labelled him a traitor. The exposure of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Iraq War turned the tide against him. He is still thought to be under effective house arrest. In 2005, the ultraconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took his place. He has since been marginalised from political life. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, was allowed to win to fix Iran’s ailing economy. The Iran nuclear deal led to some respite in 2015. But by 2018, the Trump administration reimposed comprehensive sanctions. Rouhani was always despised by IRGC hardliners. That sentiment was ultimately shared by Khamenei, who tied his hands for the final years of his premiership. Rouhani and his associates have also been banished from political life. In this respect, Raisi was an exception to the rule. 

Raisi’s election was in many ways the ultimate sign that Khamenei and his inner circle were fed up with the competition. An associate of Khamenei for nearly 40 years, Raisi was the safest possible choice: a mild-mannered cleric with impeccable authoritarian credentials and minimal interest in foreign policy. All of his serious competitors were banned from running, allowing him to be elected with 42 per cent voter turnout – the lowest in Iranian history. It is still unclear what policy he carried out. Hardliners, who swept parliament in 2020 and 2024, have run domestic policy, implementing socially-conservative legislation favoured by Khamenei. Foreign policy, meanwhile, is run by the Supreme National Security Council and the Expediency Discernment Council, an advisory board to the Supreme Leader. Raisi was a member of both bodies. But again, it is the IRGC that has predominant influence in both and the Supreme Leader who decides.

As he approaches the end of his life, Khamenei has increasingly prioritised Iran’s culture wars, which he sees as the main threat to Iran’s unique theocratic system. Six in ten Iranians are under the age of 30. Internet penetration has risen from 13 per cent in 2010 to over 70 per cent today. As few as 30 per cent of young Iranians identify as observant Shia Muslims. Combine these statistics with low growth, high unemployment, and massive inflation and the long-term pressure on the stability of the regime is obvious. Khamenei’s answer has been to try and make Iran more ‘Islamic’ and less of a ‘republic’. The political theorist Khomeini valued public participation in politics. Khamenei cares less, and is more concerned with the state’s ability to enforce a positive moral vision and to extend the life of the state irrespective of popular opinion. To this end, he has leaned heavily on the Revolutionary Guard which, as we have written at Policy Exchange, increasingly acts as an Iranian shadow state. It is in this direction we must look to consider the future of the Islamic Republic. 

Nearly every ideological project has an indoctrinated and loyal vanguard. In the Islamic Republic, it is the Revolutionary Guard. The closest structural parallel is the SS in Nazi Germany had it survived the war. Like the SS, it began as a group of gangs, underwent consolidation by war, has its own idiosyncratic culture, and is highly indoctrinated. Promotion is designed on ideological suitability, and loyalty is to the Supreme Leader and not, unlike the regular army, to the nation. It has its own courts and intelligence services and is responsible for internal order. Its proximity to the Supreme Leader allows it to dominate foreign policy and the economy. Its members are an economically privileged class, making it a clear political elite. The Supreme Leader depends on it, and it depends on the Supreme Leader. This is what makes discussions about proscribing the IRGC so facile: besides symbolic value, when we speak of the Guard, we speak of the Iranian state itself. That will be even more-so the case after Raisi’s demise.

Iran will hold elections in 50 days’ time – a year sooner than they would have been. Raisi’s stand-in, Mohammed Mokhber, is a career bureaucrat rather than a rising political star. He lacks the charisma or standing to be president for long. As was the case in 2020, Iran’s ‘deep state’ will fall behind a single candidate with a suitably hardline background. The names most mentioned by Iranian commentators give a sense of where the wind is blowing. Possible frontrunners include parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, and former defense minister Hossein Dehghan – all of them are hardliners and former generals in the IRGC. The outlier is the diplomat Saeed Jalili, who ran the Supreme National Security Council, and Alireza Zakani, who spent three decades in the Guard. If recent legislative elections are any indicator, turnout will be poor.

What matters is how little this now matters. As many commentators have pointed out, the Islamic Republic is undergoing a slow transformation into a Soviet-style military dictatorship. Raisi’s successor, whoever it is, will be a symptom of this transformation – another de-fanged suit – rather than a cause.

The sad truth about ‘saint’ Nicola Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has finally come clean: ‘I was part of the problem,’ Scotland’s former first minister has admitted, referring to the ‘trans rows’ that dogged the late stages of her time as First Minister. What’s this? Is this, at last, a frank admission of fallibility and regret from Sturgeon? A reflection on her own flaws? No, of course it isn’t.

The sainted Sturgeon stepped down, by her own account, because politics in Scotland is ‘pretty polarised’. ‘There’s no one in Scotland who doesn’t have an opinion about me, whether good or bad,’ she told the Charleston Literary Festival in Sussex, as if this was anything out of the ordinary for the political leader of a country. If she only worked that out eight years into the job I suspect she might not have been cut out for it.  

‘It felt as if (with) every issue, people were coming at that issue in terms of how they thought about me – that felt true on the trans issue, it felt true on a number of issues – so I thought, well, if I take myself out of that maybe the politics, the discourse and the debate in Scotland will be a bit more healthy.’ This is classic Sturgeon, a textbook example of making absolutely everything about herself. Other people don’t have reasonable objections to a policy: they just don’t like her.  

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When politicians step back from the frontline some humanity is usually revealed. A move out of office – with all its necessary fudging, bluffing and plate-spinning – means that you’d expect a part of the ordinary person behind the job to emerge. This is how a few extremely divisive figures, after a decent interval, became almost loveable. Tony Benn packed them in on his speaking tours, and often his audiences were the kind of people who despised him during the period when he was busy bankrupting the nation. Michael Portillo the train lover is unrecognisable now as the blood-and-thunder speechifier of the 1995 Tory conference.   

Sturgeon is trying the same route but at an ungainly speed. She is attempting to reinvent herself as a literary pundit and sage elder stateswoman before her legacy has had a chance of fading from the public consciousness.  

At Charleston, she was interviewed by writer Juno Dawson, a man who claims to be a woman, and so the conversation naturally turned to gender. ‘I’ve had more abuse hurled at me over the issue of trans rights than probably any other issue I’ve discussed, including Scottish independence probably, so it has been really, really difficult,’ she told Dawson, taking the opportunity to restate that ‘trans women are women’ and that ‘people should be able to live how they want to be’. I think what she means here is that men should be allowed to assume the rights of women at their whim, but that doesn’t sound quite so reasonable, does it?  

But, as ever, nothing is Sturgeon’s fault. She is the embodiment of sweet reason. Anyone that opposes her is a monster of some kind. We shouldn’t forget what happened under Sturgeon’s watch. At the height of the gender storm back in 2023, she said of some of those opposed to gender self-ID: ‘There are people who have opposed this Bill that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’

It was an awful comment. Yet even now, after the disaster of her self-ID gender legislation, she is blind to a major part of what brought her down (and after gender brought similar doom to her successor). Sturgeon has made no attempt to explain or justify her gender policy or properly persuade opponents without denouncing them. Any objections were simply ‘not valid’. This is the response of a meter in a car park, not a human being.

At another recent event, Sturgeon opined that debates on the gender issue ‘descend into the most vicious, toxic rammy, with bad faith arguments all over the place’. She suggested – with absolutely no evidence – that bringing in same-sex marriage legislation would now be much more difficult. Sturgeon seems to think that reclassifying men as women was just the obvious next step on the shining progressive path. This is patent nonsense, conflating totally different issues. It’s like saying ‘these people who object to HS2 want to bring back hanging!’ It is in staggeringly bad faith.  

This rejection of any opposing view is politically inane and psychologically infantile. Most of us learn to get what we want by engaging with the rest of the world. Despite her bizarre reputation as a good politician – or at least good at winning elections for a while, which is the most a politician can hope for – Sturgeon remains arrogant and contemptuous.

It never seems to have occurred to Sturgeon to stop and think about why people were objecting to her gender policies, even when those doing so were overwhelmingly women and overwhelmingly of the socially liberal wing who should have been her natural supporters. Instead, she decided they were a bad lot, and probably all racists. That response is logical only if you think you are a saint.  

We can only expect more of this insufferable air of outraged innocence from the Sturgeon Show. Expecting honest reflection from her is like expecting a statue to do the cha-cha-cha.  

My teeth are falling out. I won’t miss them

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it. In France they are known as dents du bonheur – lucky teeth – due to the fact that the Napoleonic army recruited only soldiers with perfect teeth, classifying my gap-toothed brothers as unfit to fight and perhaps to die prematurely. 

Had I grown up in a middle-class milieu, I might have considered my teeth to be substandard – but so proletarian were we that my grandmother had not a tooth in her head and my father did his own dentistry by tying a piece of string to a door, knotting the other end around the rogue tooth, and slamming it. I’ve never been attracted by gleaming white teeth, and have been rather amused by the recent vogue for them among the young, who are generally lovely enough to be made even more charming by imperfections. There’s something very English about having wonky teeth; even the Queen Mother had them.

I had a very nasty experience with a dentist at the age of 12, started snorting copious amphetamine sulphate at the age of 17 and spent most of my twenties, thirties and forties taking enough cocaine to stun the Colombian army. I was aware that my teeth weren’t half as nice as most peoples but as I had a splendid rack and a talent to amuse, it never really bothered me. But in my sixties I started to lose a couple a year and as I face 65, it’s more like one a month. I was an attractive woman when young, but I now bear a distinct resemblance to Cletus Delroy Montfort DeMontblanc Bigglesworth Spuckler, also known as Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, of The Simpsons.

Why don’t I get new ones? Several reasons. I still have the odontophobia I developed as a child. The exception to this was a lovely dentist I met socially around the turn of the century and who persuaded me into his chair. He took an X-ray; I screamed when I saw it – surely this was the mouth of a monster? It turned out that I have an extra row of perfect teeth lodged in my gums – you can’t believe how scary it looks. But I was excited; ‘So when my teeth fall out, I’ll get these new ones?’ No such luck. I have hyperdontia, a condition sometimes referred to as ‘a third set of teeth’; generally they erupt into the mouth, crowding out their cousins, but mine have remained impacted in the bone. To get them out into public life would take an operation, a lot of pain and a year of brace-wearing. Approaching 65, I’m not sure I’m in the market for either such drastic measures. I’ve seen people my age with brand new teeth; it’s like when you buy a new sofa – everything else looks extra shabby.

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But still, I am aware of how comical I look with only 14 left, and I do think of the Pam Ayres poem ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth’:

My Mother, she told me no end, ‘If you got a tooth, you got a friend’ 
I was young then, and careless, My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.
Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin’
And pokin’ and fussin’
Didn’t seem worth the time… I could bite!

I’m far more philosophical about it than many would be. Maybe I take it as a warning; I’m immature in many ways and often think I can carry on behaving in a way that actually looks a little deranged when old people do it. My drinking – the cause of my latest tooth loss, one of my lovely gappy fronts – has become a cause not if quite of concern then of fleeting embarrassment to me. I am of the English working-class and became a journalist at 17 and thus am a veritable Venn diagram of sottishness; I always found my binge-drinking amusing, but over the past year both the ambulance service and the police have been involved in getting me home in one piece. I used to see myself as a Beryl Cook painting in my old age; increasingly I can see in myself in Martin Parr photographs, which isn’t half as jolly.

But still a part of me, forged in hedonistic times, feels that burning up one’s good looks by the age of 65 (I’ve always thought of beauty as fuel to be ignited rather than fruit to be preserved) in the process of having a lovely life is far from the worst thing that can happen. I think of what Hunter S. Thompson wrote – ‘life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”’ – and it speaks to me, or rather mumbles, through a mouthful of broken teeth. Amusingly, my husband – more than a decade younger than me – is losing his teeth too; I used to be mistaken for his mum whereas these days, we both rather resemble inhabitants of Skid Row. (I’ve noticed recently that many of the beggars I give to have better teeth than me.) So it’s a measure of my enjoyment of my life and my pleasure in my work – I’m a writer, not a toothpaste model – that I find my encroaching toothlessness amusing rather than upsetting. Having said that, if I find myself reduced to sucking soupy nourishment through a straw, the lure of gleaming white gnashers may well grow.

Why MPs love to hate the register of interests

The register of members’ interests for the House of Commons turns 50 today. Few MPs will be celebrating. Politicians have long shuddered over a document that provides fertile ground for journalists from which to dig out stories. The register – and the declarations within it – have cost more than a few MPs their careers. Plenty of other MPs and even PMs have come a cropper as a result of what is, and isn’t, in the register: Rishi Sunak is just one of the more high-profile figures to end up in hot water after being accused of failing to fill the register out fully.

While politicians dislike the register, its existence is good news for the rest of us. It’s easy to take it for granted that those we elect to represent us in parliament should declare their interests, but things haven’t always been this way.

For centuries, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ reigned supreme. In practice, this often meant that parliament stood wholly unaccountable – even to the voters – for there was no ‘need to know’ whether MPs were taking shareholder dividends from arms dealers, or wholly supported by trade unions. Whenever this was queried, MPs could claim ‘parliamentary privilege’, then as now an elastic term.

Into this cozy scene came an outsider: the journalist Andrew Roth. A refugee from the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the United States, Roth’s background was in naval intelligence, and he was a keen amateur psychologist. Working as a parliamentary correspondent, in 1953 he couldn’t work out why the Labour MP Richard Stokes took such a strong pro-Arab line when his party colleagues were mostly pro-Israeli. Eventually, he realised that Stokes’ company directorship, selling oil pipelines across Arab countries, was just one example of a plethora of MPs’ undeclared company directorships, shareholdings and sponsorships.

With little press interest in covering these, Roth privately published his own register: the first edition of The Business Background of MPs launched in 1957, the proofs literally cut-and-pasted together on a typewriter. Subsequent parliaments would see new editions published. When Roth had difficulties with libel threats, friendly MPs like Philip Noel-Baker and Willie Hamilton would read out excerpts on the floor of the Commons – protecting the contents under parliamentary privilege.

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While Roth pressed for an official register, the issue was dismissed as a crackpot scheme. This changed with the scandal of the architect John Poulson in the early 1970s, and the revelation that his corrupt practice had kept ‘tame’ politicians on its payroll, from the Labour council leader T. Dan Smith to the Conservative home secretary Reginald Maudling. ‘It’s just a few bad apples’ gave way to ‘something must be done’.

The register of members’ interests, long campaigned for, owes its existence to the unique circumstances of the hung parliament of March to September 1974. The incoming Labour government lacked a majority and was looking for ‘quick wins’ involving no public expenditure – and preferably which would disproportionately embarrass Conservative MPs, who were much more likely to hold company directorships.

Many of the issues debated in 1974 remain surprisingly topical. MPs were divided between those like Peter Shore, who insisted that MPs’ financial affairs were a private matter, and those like Brian Walden, who insisted that MPs should have nothing to hide.

Yet the fateful resolution of the House of 22 May 1974 that brought the register into existence was not the end of the matter. MPs tried to have the register strangled at birth. Resistance to filling out the mandatory new forms led to the first register not being compiled until 1975. Subsequent editions of the register were blocked for another five years, by the improbable alliance of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. They were united in leading backbench rebellions, claiming parliamentary sovereignty extended to MPs’ financial affairs – even after the House had decreed otherwise.

Margaret Thatcher’s government resurrected the moribund register in 1980. However, this resuscitation came at a cost. Categories were watered down, alongside their enforcement. There is a direct parallel here to another innovation of the first half of the 1970s, the parliamentary expenses regime, and how MPs in the 1980s were told to ‘spend it, boys’ as a perk of the job. Here, too, there was no mechanism for enforcement.

By the late 1980s, the register had become something of a joke, with reams of undeclared financial interests: Roth’s 1988 revelation that the lobbyist Ian Greer was paying a stable of ‘tame’ MPs like Sir Michael Grylls, who weren’t declaring these payments, foreshadowed the ‘cash for questions’ scandal of the early 1990s. By the time of the Major government, a string of financial scandals stood testament to the emasculation of the register. All the while, MPs like Neil Hamilton joked about properly declaring a biscuit.

What salvaged the register was John Major convening the committee on standards in public life in 1994, and Lord Nolan’s Seven Principles of Public Life, released in the committee’s first annual report the following year. The late 1990s saw a range of public institutions, including the civil service and the House of Lords, instigate far-reaching rule changes that were all aimed at embedding those seven principles. This included introducing the House of Commons’ first enforcement mechanisms, with the 1995 establishment of a parliamentary commissioner for standards. Rules were still flouted – Ted Heath continued to refuse to properly disclose payments from Chinese state-owned companies – but a formal mechanism existed to hold him to account.

The New Labour years saw fresh challenges. On the one hand, there was a broad consensus that the Nolan regime offered the best hope for moving on from the scandals of the Major years. On the other, this came with an assumption that such rules were only for Tories to observe, and a string of Labour MPs fell foul of the commissioner’s rulings. This was further complicated by the piecemeal nature of Nolan reforms for parliamentarians and ministers, leading to a ‘twin track’ of separate rules, and ministers arguing – with some success – that they should be exempt from both sets.

Recent years have seen a sustained assault waged on compliance with the rules, and the damage wrought under Boris Johnson’s premiership has yet to be fully processed. The Owen Paterson case – in which the Tory MP was accused of breaking lobbying rules, something he denied – saw an attempt by MPs to retrospectively rewrite the rules. Some saw this as a bid by politicians to let off one of their own. If so, it failed: the backlash was swift. Paterson – and Boris Johnson, who had attempted to defend his Tory colleague – paid a heavy price. Time will tell whether that was a turning point for the future of the register of members’ interests.

The stressful world of the Chelsea Flower Show

The man in the Post Office was a bit bemused by the three enormous boxes I was trying to send from my home just outside Edinburgh down to London. He’d asked what the value of the packages was. In one sense, they were worthless, I explained. But I really needed to make sure they got to the Chelsea Flower Show on time because in another sense, they were worth their weight in gold. It didn’t help when I explained that the contents were in fact just dead leaves. 

These dead leaves have become a total obsession ever since I was offered a place as a volunteer on one of the show garden builds for this year’s Chelsea. Most people appreciate that the show has as much attention to detail, as much artifice and definitely the same kind of budget as a London fashion week catwalk show. But I don’t think it is really understood quite how much the little details, like the kind of leaves under the trees planted in the temporary gardens, matter. Or how many people are worrying about these details for months on end. 

Sophie Parmenter has never had these kinds of worries before, because she has never done a show garden for any kind of festival before. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness she decided that her first entry into the world of show gardening would be the hardest one possible: not one of the smaller, more relaxed shows of the season like RHS Malvern or Gardener’s World Live, or even the smaller balcony or planting design gardens at Chelsea. The show gardens on Main Avenue at the Royal Hospital Showground are the biggest plots, with enormous six figure budgets and the most attention from public and press.

Sophie has been designing this garden with architect Dido Milne for more than two years. It is one of a number sponsored by Project Giving Back, a grant-making charity established during the pandemic to try to help the voluntary sector recover from a drop in donations. It has had a significant impact on the way Chelsea looks and feels in the past few years. Now, much smaller charities can get a garden at the show where previously it was dominated by investment banks, developers and the really huge charities like Cancer Research. Sophie is designing for the National Autistic Society, but there is also a Bowel Research garden, and one for the Terence Higgins Trust, as well as smaller organisations like Pulp Friction, which only works with adults with learning disabilities in Nottinghamshire. Not everyone is happy with the way Project Giving Back has influenced the show: it means there are many more gardens with a ‘message’ and often a design that involves a ‘journey’, the kind of thing that certain types really don’t like. 

My own journey to Chelsea involved scrabbling about in local woodlands under birch trees to find the right kind of leaf litter for the garden. I tried to do it in places where I thought I wouldn’t encounter any other dog walkers, because I felt vaguely nefarious crouching on the floor and scooping up leaves. On a Zoom call with her planting team, Sophie explained that because she had River Birch (Betula nigra), which is a particularly gorgeous tactile birch with pinkish-cream peeling bark, on the garden, she needed to find leaf litter from birch trees so that the trees looked as though they had always been there, rather than still tucked in their pots and rootballs under a layer of compost and moss. The RHS judges look for this kind of detail when they decide the difference between the levels of medals they award. 

The leaves arrived at the show ground shortly before I did. I’ve been going to Chelsea for years,  but I’ve never looked behind the curtain before and seen the build. During show week, the avenues are filled with people in floral dresses and high heels, linen suits and the odd (very odd, in fact) model wearing a costume made entirely from leaves preening on a stand somewhere. During the build, everyone is muddy, sweaty, and wearing steel capped safety boots. There is more high-vis than a George Osborne press call circa 2015. In fact, the world of show gardens isn’t a million miles away from the weird world of party conferences that I’ve been covering for more than a decade. 

The show gardens are always presented as the work of one or two designers. But there are three weeks of professional landscapers building increasingly complicated gardens involving excavations, metal pavilions and even pretend ruins. Then the planters move in. These people are not random amateur gardeners: they are all hugely experienced designers, many of them at the top of their own game but working behind the scenes to put together a garden that looks impossibly perfect.

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Sophie’s planting team was led by Humaira Ikram, who runs her own studio and teaches garden design. She knows how to get nursery-grown plants in five litre pots to look as though they’ve been growing merrily in this fake garden for years, how to space them just so they look natural, and what won’t make it onto the garden. I joined in the middle of all the planting activity. The garden at this point looked like the horticultural equivalent of the walk-in wardrobe at the fashion magazine in the Devil Wears Prada: surrounded by about 60 tall trolleys of plants, many of which were not quite perfect enough to make the cut for planting.

Sophie had hoped to have Meconopsis, a stunning blue poppy from the Himalayas, on the garden. But the wet spring followed by unusually warm April weather had done for most of them. They sat sulking on one set of trolleys while the garden filled up with candelabra primula and several different camassias. The volunteers sorted through the primulas to find ones that would keep looking perfect through to judging and show week beyond. And we spent a lot of time watering. This is a bog garden, covered in an enormous amount of moss. But Chelsea is not a bog. At times, the pressure on the planting team boiled over and the dehydration of the bog myrtle (Myrica gale) became a proxy for the way the team were feeling. Most of the time, though, everyone stayed rather jolly. 

The designers are competing for medals and other prizes such as best in show and the people’s choice award. But garden design is a collaborative world, and everyone knows everyone else, so frequently someone from another plot popped up to ask if there are any spare moss that they could borrow. As the week wore on, some of the rheums on the garden were looking a little dog-eared, and Sophie ended up pleading with another designer for their spares, before chasing the plants across the show ground and grabbing them just as they were being loaded into a nursery van to be taken away. 

In other gardens that were running behind, the teams seemed to be moving in double time to get everything planted and tidied. Everyone has to down tools by the middle of the morning on the Saturday, when the judges come round for the first of two assessments. They are working out how the garden performs against the brief written by the designer and the sponsor. And they are looking at every detail: whether the increasingly complicated structures on the gardens actually work, whether the materials are well-matched across the design, if some of the plants aren’t suited for the position they’ve been given, or if the leaf litter under the birch trees isn’t botanically accurate. 

The medals aren’t announced until this morning, so we still have no idea whether it was my Scottish birch leaf litter that cinched it or not. When the week is over, most of the garden will move up to an National Autistic Society residential site in Scotland for its full life. And the show ground will be re-turfed for another year before the safety boots move back in. 

What I resent about my dog

The main benefits of dog ownership are well-known – you get companionship, unconditional love and the exercise that comes with taking the thing for a walk. But there’s a side-effect that no one ever mentions: having a dog teaches you what it’s like to be famous.

I’ll be sitting in a café, happily reading a book or doing a sudoku. Then someone appears. ‘Do you mind if I say hello to your dog?’ ‘Of course not,’ I reply. They start fussing about him, and there’s a brief exchange in which the essentials are disclosed. ‘Ralph’, ‘lurcher’, ‘we think he’s eight – the rescue centre guessed he was three when they picked him up off the street, and that was five years ago’. If they’re dog owners themselves they might produce a treat, get Ralph to do ‘sit’ and ‘paw’ so he can take it, at which I call him a tart, everyone has a laugh and that’s that. It takes a minute or two.

But as Stephen Fry once said about being stopped for selfies, it’d be all right if it only happened once a week. What if it happens every two minutes? The cumulative effect can become a problem. It seems churlish to complain, but on a bad day, especially if Ralph’s giving people the eye because they’ve got their own dog with them and he knows treats are on the cards, things can get trying. Not ‘leave me alone you unfeeling bastards, this invasion of my privacy is driving me mad,’ levels. Just enough to get on my nerves.

Even as the irritation registers, I feel guilty. Most of the time I love Ralph being fussed over. You get into some fascinating conversations (some people even admit to buying a dog as a pulling tool), and the sum of human contentment is almost always increased. So on the odd occasion it does get a bit too much, my desire to avoid the encounter is quickly followed by the thought that I should get over myself. I’m reminded of Harry Enfield, who was once walking in the countryside and encountered a stile whose mechanism briefly confused him. As he struggled to open it, someone approached and said: ‘Now I do not believe you wanted to do it that way.’ ‘And you,’ Enfield snapped back, ‘don’t want to be the millionth person this week to recite one of my catchphrases at me.’ He stormed off – then instantly hated himself for his reaction.

It’s particularly bad when a parent approaches with their young child. ‘Is it OK if… ?’ they hesitantly enquire, and I say, ‘of course’ and tell the kid why we called him Ralph – ‘it sounds like a dog barking – “Rulf”’ – and the kid giggles and the parent starts asking questions and I’m thinking ‘can you please just go away, I’m sure that’s a seven in the top right hand square of my sudoku and you’ve interrupted my train of thought’. Simultaneously I’m thinking, ‘For God’s sake Mason, pack it in. It’s not as though you’re George Clooney being mobbed at an airport.’

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You can find yourself doing the ‘avoiding eye contact’ thing that becomes second nature for celebrities. I always think what a pity that is. Clive James once said that the average person couldn’t imagine what it was like, ‘to have several hundred uninstigated conversations every day’. This was his fate at the height of his television fame, and he recognised the danger: ‘You’ll be abrupt and short with someone you should be talking to.’ That person might have been genuinely interesting, told you something you wanted to know, but the other 99 bores have made you shut down. ‘You have to protect yourself. It’s sheer self-defence. I hated that.’

I’m always amazed at the patience shown by the famous. They keep moving, they never really engage but they never snap either. Paul McCartney is legendarily good at it, and if he can avoid losing his rag then anyone can. Mick Jagger has a skilful way of not getting trapped – after a brief chat he’ll politely say ‘how nice to have met you’. But despite the celeb’s best efforts, things sometimes go wrong. Jim Davidson says he’s often interrupted during meals by someone gushing, ‘I love you, Jim, I think you’re brilliant, I’ve always loved your shows, can I have a selfie?’, and when he says, ‘I’m really sorry, but do you mind, I’m eating,’ their reply is ‘I hate you, I’ve never thought you were funny’.

All of which, of course, is a long way from occasionally getting a bit narked that too many people want to fuss over your dog. But the principle is the same. It’s a reminder that what would really bother me about being famous is losing the ability to people watch, which is one of my favourite hobbies. Anonymity allows you to muse on the fascinating cast of strangers that pass before your gaze, eavesdrop on snatches of their conversations, generally be entertained by the variety show called Other People. But when Ralph is with me, and he attracts people’s attention, that anonymity is lost, or at least compromised. You go from being a watcher to being watched.  

Clearly I wouldn’t be without my dog, or indeed miss out on most of the social encounters he leads to me having. It’s just that, once in a while, I wish he’d keep his pointy head down a bit.

Sunak apologises during ‘day of shame’

Rishi Sunak’s Commons apology for the contaminated blood scandal was reasonably comprehensive. The statement opened with him saying he wanted to speak directly to the victims and their families, and ‘make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology for this terrible injustice’. The Prime Minister listed what the government was apologising for: the failure in blood policy and blood products, the repeated failure of the state and medical professionals to recognise the harm caused; for the institutional response to the failings, including denying and attempting to cover them up. He said: ‘This is an apology from the state to every single person impacted by this scandal. It did not have to be this way. It should never have been this way.’ 

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When Sir Brian Langstaff launched his report this afternoon, the inquiry’s chair made clear he was expecting a full apology, and clarity from the government about what the apology was actually for. Sunak answered that essay question with his opening statement. But there were other questions he did not address. One was compensation, which he and ministers had been clear the government was not going to respond on today because they wanted the report’s findings to get proper coverage, and for the victims and their families to be heard. That is fair enough. But there was a more specific question from Diana Johnson, the Labour MP who has campaigned tirelessly for the victims and who was instrumental in the inquiry happening at all. She asked whether Sunak accepted that he had made the situation  worse for victims by refusing to set up a compensation ahead of the publication of this final report. This was an interim recommendation of Langstaff’s from last year. Sunak did not answer that question.

His statement and the question-and-answer session following were both short because the government will offer a fuller response tomorrow. Most of the focus will be on the compensation. But the statement will need to address how the government intends to ensure that the things Sunak is apologising for today do not happen again in another context. Sorry, as children learn, means you won’t do something again. It’s a lesson governments often forget.

Roz Adams’s tribunal win is a victory for liberty

As the edifice of gender identity ideology continues to crumble, along comes another example of an institution not only captured but utterly distorted by this regressive and harmful theory. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has lost an employment tribunal case brought by a former staff member whose work life was made a living hell because she thought rape victims should be told whether the support worker assigned to them was male or female. Roz Adams was employed as a counselling support worker between 2021 and 2023, when she resigned after having been put through a gruelling disciplinary process over her belief in biological sex.

In a scathing judgment issued today, an employment tribunal unanimously found that Adams was unlawfully discriminated against because of her beliefs and unfairly subjected to constructive dismissal. The belief in question is that ‘biological sex is real, important, immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity’. ERCC has been at the centre of controversy over gender ideology since early 2021, when it advertised for the women-only post of chief executive officer then hired Mridul Wadhwa, a male who identifies as a woman. Wadhwa did not have a gender recognition certificate and therefore was not only biologically but legally male. Wadhwa, the tribunal said, was one of the ‘leading actors’ in the Adams case. 

Adams’ evidence to the tribunal paints an alarming picture of an organisation driven round the bend by gender ideology. When Adams used the word ‘transwoman’ in an email, Wadhwa informed her that the term was ‘othering and oppressive’. Wadhwa’s appointment prompted a flurry of complaints from women, which Adams says were filed in a folder marked ‘hate mail’. She told the tribunal of a woman in her sixties who finally felt ready to talk about having been raped in her twenties. She approached ERCC and asked if the service was women-only, but was told it was trans-inclusive. When the woman said she was uncomfortable talking about her experience with men, she was informed that she was ‘not suitable for their service and was excluded from the service’, according to the judgment.

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It was the case of another woman in a similar situation that brought Adams to grief with her colleagues and bosses. She raised the case of a female abuse survivor who wanted to know whether the support worker she would be meeting was male or female. Adams argued that there was good reason why a woman in that position would feel uncomfortable opening up to a man. She was told to tell this woman: ‘ERCC does not have any male volunteers/team members’. It was the ‘trans women are women’ doctrine taken to an obscenely literal conclusion. 

The evidence led before the tribunal reads like a right-wing parody of intersectional feminism and every other fashionable progressive stance. One of Adams’ colleagues complained that she had said ‘something about being inclusive of everyone, open to hear all views and for everyone to have representation’. The monster! 

Another snitched that she ‘seems to be closer to first wave white feminism, whereas ERCC is moving away from that and trying to rebuild our reputation with trans and non-binary communities’. Wadhwa sent staff an email about the opening of Beira’s Place, a women-only rape counselling service funded by JK Rowling which she described as ‘founded on a platform of exclusion, misinformation and what I would describe as white feminist imperialism’. 

Adams eventually found herself put through a protracted and chaotic disciplinary process. It was chaired by someone who had never headed up a disciplinary hearing before. When asked, the chair was unable to recognise the landmark Forstater case by name. The internal process eventually determined that Adams had committed two counts of misconduct but opted to take no further action, likely because Adams started asking awkward questions about the procedural fairness of the process. In the end, she resigned after concluding she would no longer be able to work there. 

Adams was onto something with her questions. The employment tribunal describes ERCC’s conduct in brutal terms, characterising it as ‘a completely spurious and mishandled disciplinary process’, ‘deeply flawed’ and ‘somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka’. It was ‘clearly motivated by a strong belief amongst the senior management… that the claimant’s views were inherently hateful’. The process was, the tribunal says, ‘a heresy hunt’. Perhaps the most damaging finding is that, despite claims to the contrary, it was ‘clear that [Mridul Wadhwa] was involved in the process’. He had, in fact, chosen the people who led it. Adams’ resignation was therefore ‘caused by the respondent’s unlawful breach of contract’. 

The question of an appropriate remedy will be dealt with at a later hearing, but Adams has already found a new position working for Beira’s Place, essentially doing the job she ought to have been doing at ERCC if only ERCC had let her. For its part, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, of which ERCC is a local branch, says: ‘We believe that it is important that survivors can make informed choices about the services they can access at rape crisis centres. We know it is important for some survivors to have a choice over the sex or gender of their worker.’ The centre has ordered an investigation into the Adams case. Given the damning nature of the judgment, it is difficult to see how Wadhwa can continue in post. 

Gender identity ideology did not march through the institutions so much as sprint and in the rush to embed its extreme and anti-rational prescriptions, many an organisation has stored up trouble for the future. As the ideology begins to lose its footing, those organisations would be well-advised to get out of the gender identity business while it is still possible to save face. There are more Roz Adamses out there and this judgment will give them the confidence to stand up to this pernicious ideology in their workplaces and elsewhere. 

Sturgeon takes aim at young people in politics

Back to Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is once again stealing the spotlight. This time the former first minister decided the Charleston literary festival held in Sussex this weekend would be the perfect place from which to ruffle feathers in her own party. The SNP’s Dear Leader bemoaned the number of young people entering politics ‘for all the wrong reasons’, telling her audience that: ‘I think politics, including in my own party now, is probably too full of young people who have just come through the political ranks’. Ouch.

It’s a kick in the teeth to senior SNP figures like net zero secretary Màiri McAllan who spent time as, er, Sturgeon’s SpAd before she became an MSP at 28. Or Mhairi Black, the SNP MP who was elected to parliament at just 20 years old while she was still studying at Glasgow University. Or the party’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, who, after working as a political researcher for SNP politicians became an Aberdeen councillor in his twenties before going on to become an MP when he was just 30. And though Sturgeon might have earned the title of ‘veteran’ politician now, she would do well to remember that she was only 21 years old herself when she contested the Glasgow Shettleston seat in the 1992 election — before becoming an MSP at 28. Talk about double standards…

And Mr S isn’t alone in thinking that there’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy emanating from Sturgeon’s statements. The ex-leader’s old colleague Angus MacNeil (now an Independent MP after being expelled from the SNP) took to Twitter this afternoon to berate his former boss — querying whether it was ‘National No-Self Awareness Day’. That’s, um, every day in the SNP, Steerpike is afraid…

Sturgeon’s rather bizarre intervention comes as her successor and ‘unity’ candidate John Swinney fights to hold the party together after a rather tumultuous 18 months. The new leader is facing trouble on several fronts, and polling has today suggested that Scottish Labour now has a 10-point lead on the SNP in the next Westminster election. Pollster supremo John Curtice predicts this would translate to a mere 11 seats for the Nats, with Labour taking 35 overall. Crikey.

The party’s underwhelming performance in the polls is a sore point for the nationalists, and Sturgeon’s ill-timed comments will hardly help calm tensions. How long will it be before they’re all back fighting like Nats in a sack? Watch this space…

The infected blood scandal should make us think twice about revering the NHS

Blood is central to the myths British people tell themselves. One of the many consequences of the contaminated blood scandal is that it may blow those myths apart. For if this scandal can make us face the reality of how badly we are governed, and indeed how selfishly we govern ourselves, then some good may come from so much needless suffering.

The scandal began in the 1970s. At the start of that decade, Richard Titmuss, the great social democratic theorist, placed blood at the centre of the justification for the British welfare state with an argument that complacent we Brits could not help but feel reflected rather well on us. The NHS was not just morally superior to the greedy privatised US health system, Titmuss said. It was more efficient too. Because the British believed the NHS was a moral institution, they voluntarily gave it their blood free of charge, and would never dream of donating blood if there was a chance it might be contaminated.

In the US, by contrast, the market ruled. Prisoners, the poor and the homeless sold blood to make the money they needed to survive. Blood came from ‘Skid Row’, to use the language of the day. Desperate people took the money whatever the state of their health. As a result, US blood was bad blood, Titmuss argued, while British blood was good. Altruism and voluntary giving was superior to the corruptions of the marketplace, Titmuss concluded in his study, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, and he could prove it.

Modern historians who say empire defined post-war, post-imperial Britain miss how much people thought that, if we were no longer an actual great power, we were a moral great power instead. The NHS became ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’ in Nigel Lawson’s words, because it proved our goodness.

They weren’t necessarily wrong. But like all nationalisms that say the favoured people are intrinsically more moral than foreigners, a belief in British superiority was way too optimistic. In reality, there were not enough altruistic people willing to give blood, and the blood service itself was ineptly managed.

As a result, Sir Brian Langstaff has today said, in one of the most devastating reports ever written on British public life, that in 1973, the medical authorities allowed ‘the importation and distribution of blood products (Factor 8 concentrates) made in the US or Austria which carried a high risk of causing hepatitis, and were known to be less safe than current domestic treatments for bleeding disorders’. This was a mere three years after blood donation had been held as an example of the superiority of the British.

You did not need to be a genius in 1973 to know the risks. Sir Brian emphasises that knowledge of the dangers had been around since the 1940s.

It’s been an incredible experience listening to the victims of this scandal today. I’ve heard people talking about how they or their families have been raising complaints for nigh on 50 years. On BBC radio this morning, one described how her family had contacted David Owen, now Lord Owen, who was health secretary in 1974. Back in the 1970s, Owen campaigned for Britain to become self-sufficient in blood products because of the risk of Hepatitis infection from the blood sold by poor and desperate US donors. Nothing was done.

In one of the most telling passages of the report, Sir Brian emphasises how this 50-year-old scandal that killed 3000 people also kills our sense of ourselves. ‘It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,’ he writes. ‘It may also be surprising that the questions why so many deaths and infections occurred have not had answers before now.’

However cynical we are about politicians, most people in the UK retain the hope that the system can be made to work eventually. Popular British fiction from Sherlock Holmes via George Smiley to Dumbledore attests to the yearning that somehow, somewhere, someone will appear who will overrule the incompetent fools and make everything all right. Yet in this case no one did for decade after decade, until Theresa May to her enormous credit ordered an inquiry in 2017 into the ‘appalling tragedy which should simply never have happened’.

May’s intervention illuminates a further dark corner. We know how to blame politicians. But this scandal is as much about the bishops and popes of our national religion: those who run the National Health Service.

Sir Bryan is not talking about politicians when he says that patients were lied to about the risks and, in some cases, infected during research carried out without their consent by the NHS. It was medical staff who failed ‘to tell people that they were infected and thereby denying them the opportunity to control the progression of their own illness more effectively and to prevent the spread of infection to others close to them’.

This is not to let politicians off the hook. It is just to say that the infected blood scandal goes far beyond the usual suspects and the usual whipping boys. What makes it so shameful is that so many were complicit. Sir Bryan talks of public servants peddling lies that included the ‘misleading’ oft-repeated statement that there was ‘no conclusive proof’ that Aids could be transmitted by transfusion of blood and blood products when the HIV epidemic let rip in the 1980s. The lying was followed by the deliberate destruction of official documents.

‘Standing back and viewing the response of the NHS and of the government, the answer to the question “was there a cover-up?” is that there has been,’ the report concludes. It continues:

Not in the sense of a handful of people plotting in an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead, but in a way that was more subtle, more pervasive and more chilling in its implications. To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth.

Over decades successive governments repeated lines to take that were inaccurate, defensive and misleading. Its persistent refusal to hold a public inquiry, coupled with a defensive mindset that refused to countenance that wrong had been done, left people without answers, and without justice.

There is a lot to learn here. The first lesson is that we don’t regard the NHS or any other man-made institution with religious awe. We listen to and protect whistleblowers instead, something the NHS has been hopeless at doing throughout its history. In short, we should give the people who run it a harder time – and perhaps give blood ourselves.

Javier Milei won’t stop insulting Pedro Sanchez’s wife

The Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires was recalled to Madrid yesterday after Argentina’s president Javier Milei described the wife of Spain’s prime minister as ‘corrupt’. Today Spain’s foreign ministry summoned Argentina’s ambassador in Madrid to demand an apology. 

Milei, who was speaking at a rally in Madrid, also mocked Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez for taking a five-day break last month in order to decide if he wanted to continue as prime minister. Even so, it seems something of an exaggeration for Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, to describe Milei’s words as ‘a frontal attack on our democracy, on our institutions and on Spain.’ 

Sánchez is very sensitive to criticism of his wife. His resignation threat last month was triggered by a judge’s decision to investigate allegations that she was involved in influence peddling. Sánchez insists that she’s done nothing wrong – that this is just part of the right-wing’s constant campaign of vilification. 

On that occasion, after several days of deep reflection, Sánchez emerged to inform the nation that he had decided that he would after all continue to be prime minister – indeed ‘with renewed energy, if possible’. He fulminated against the ‘degradation of public life’ and then threatened – rather ominously some felt – to tighten control of the media. He also alluded darkly to ‘a global reactionary movement’ against which, he suggested, he was now going to lead the fight. 

Shortly afterwards, perhaps taking his cue from Sánchez’s words, Óscar Puente, Spain’s transport minister, suggested that Milei had ‘ingested substances’ during Argentina’s election campaign. There are ‘very bad people’, Puente said, ‘who… have risen to the top. Milei, for example, Trump.’ In response Milei repudiated Puente’s ‘slanders and insults’ and suggested that Sánchez should attend to ‘the accusations of corruption against his wife, a matter that has even led him to consider resigning’.

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But it wasn’t until yesterday, when Milei referred to that matter for a second time that Spain decided to recall the ambassador. Albares also declared that unless Milei apologised, Spain’s government would ‘take any measures deemed necessary to defend our sovereignty’. 

Milei’s insults, Spain’s foreign minister stressed, came after he had been ‘in good faith’, allowed to land at the Torrejón de Ardoz air base in Madrid and provided with the security appropriate for a head of state, despite the fact that he was not going to meet with either Sánchez or King Felipe on his first visit to Spain after taking office. ‘A foreign leader does not come to the capital of another country to insult its institutions,’ Albares said.

He chose not to specify what deadline he is giving the Argentine president to apologise nor what measures he will take if Milei refuses to do so. Spokesmen for Milei meanwhile have indicated that Argentina’s president has not the slightest intention of apologising.

The rally Milei was speaking at was organised by Vox, Spain’s most right-wing party, ahead of next month’s elections to the European Union parliament. Marie Le Pen also addressed the rally, with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán joining via video link.

With polls suggesting that right-wing parties are set to make important gains in June’s EU elections, Sánchez has repeatedly positioned himself as a key player in the fight against any such surge. Since it was the best way to keep a right-wing bloc from governing Spain, his pact with Catalan separatists to keep him in power has, he has suggested, done the EU a favour. 

The centre-left El País, one of Spain’s leading national dailies, says that Milei’s words yesterday are typical of ‘one of the worst contributions of the extreme right to public life: the normalisation of insults and the demonisation of the political adversary’. But, before criticising others, Spain’s socialists and their allies in the media would do well to put their own house in order. The Financial Times pointed out recently that Spain’s left-wingers ‘are not afraid of dishing it out themselves’. And as Alberto Feijóo, leader of the right-wing Partido Popular, has suggested, Milei isn’t acting any worse than Sánchez’s government when it comes to its own enemies.

The ICC’s desire to arrest Netanyahu is far from impartial

In a dramatic announcement, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, declared today that he has applied for arrest warrants to be issued for Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. He has applied for three more for the Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniya.

On Hamas, Khan emphasised crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, taking hostages, rape and other sexual violence committed as part of a ‘widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Israel by Hamas and other armed groups’ as reasons for issuing the warrants. The chief prosecutor didn’t include alleged crimes perpetrated by Hamas again Palestinian civilians, including allegation that the terror organisation has been using civilians as human shields, that it has allegedly confiscated food and other humanitarian supplies meant for civilians in Gaza, or their well documented use of civilian buildings such as hospitals and schools, for warfare.

With regard to Netanyahu and Gallant, the ICC’s allegations include using starvation as a weapon of war, wilfully causing great suffering, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population and ‘other inhumane acts’ on Palestinian territory.

The announcement has been met with furious backlash in Israel. Israeli politicians across the political spectrum have criticised Khan for lumping together Islamist terrorists with a long record of alleged crimes against humanity alongside elected representatives of the region’s only liberal democracy who are fighting in self-defence. The prosecutor has been accused of hypocrisy and anti-Semitism. Israel’s president accused Khan of supporting terrorists, while Netanyahu called the move ‘outrageous’.

The announcement has also been met with fierce criticism from Israel’s closest allies. The UK government stated that it doesn’t support Khan’s decision and that they do not believe it would be conducive to reaching a ceasefire or for the release of hostages. It added that the ICC has no jurisdiction in this case, seeing as Israel is not a state party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that recognises the court’s jurisdiction. The UK also pointed out, correctly, that Palestine is not recognised as a state (Khan has referred to it in his statement as the ‘state of Palestine’). The Czech prime minster Petr Fiala called the move against Netanyahu and Gallant ‘completely unacceptable’.

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The threat of arrest warrants has been present for some time, prompting several Republican US senators to issue a warning to the ICC earlier this month that there would be ‘repercussions’ if the court issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials. The senators warned that acting against Israel would undermine the nation’s ability to act in self-defence against an organisation that seeks to destroy it by violent means and whose actions started this war.

Khan’s application for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant may not succeed. This will depend on the strength of the evidence submitted by Khan and whether the three-judge panel assessing it will determine that there is a reasonable basis to believe that the crimes have been committed. Accused parties do not get to defend themselves at this stage.

Even if arrest warrants are issued, Netanyahu and Gallant won’t be arrested so long as they visit countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute, such as the US. However, such warrants will harm Israel’s international legitimacy to continue fighting the war, increase criticism against it and may even lead to embargoes. It could also strengthen Hamas’s position and encourage other terror organisations to attack Israel. The ICC’s position on this may even have more far reaching and dangerous consequences, potentially limiting other nations’ ability to fight wars against terror organisations in the future.

The ICC was established to allow the international community to take action against those committing the most heinous crimes against humanity. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, has earned him an arrest warrant. However, plenty of other murderous tyrants have not been issued with warrants. Syrian president Bashar Assad, whose struggle to remain in power resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including through use of chemical weapons, has not been issued one. Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei, whose country has been violently targeting women and dissidents, violating human rights and sponsoring international terrorism, has also not been issued with one. It is also curious that it has taken the ICC seven months after Hamas’s hideous attack to threaten its leaders with arrest warrants. The court’s selective approach raises concerns that it may not be as fair and impartial as it should be, and therefore, not fit for purpose.