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The Tories aren’t serious about protecting biological sex
Kemi Badenoch has announced that sex is biological – yes, and rain is wet, and the election is soon. So what? Are we seriously expected to celebrate this statement of obvious fact? A woman is an adult human female. She is not a piece of paper, she’s not an idea in a man’s head and she does not have a penis.
Everybody with half a brain, male or female, can see the Tories’ move for exactly what it is: opportunistic grandstanding. Many of them will also know that all the fine talk from Kemi about biological sex and common sense is worthless without full repeal of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA), and the removal of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic.
Biological sex is not a belief
The managerial class have decided that there are different categories of sex, and I don’t mean the fun kind of sex, I mean legal vs biological. They pretend that ‘legal sex’ is an actual category and though the Conservatives are keen on signalling that the current law is madness, they are not really serious about changing it. That would take real effort and sustained determination, not just the odd dog whistle.
If a man changes his ‘legal sex’ it means nothing in biological reality. It just means he has a fancy certificate – a government issued identification – to say he is legally a woman. It can, though, offer a predatory man access to vulnerable women in the very places designed to keep them safe from men.
In essence, the Conservatives now insist that they care about women’s rights and that femaleness is a biological thing. But unless they repeal the GRA they are also stating that it isn’t necessarily a biological thing.
Protected characteristics in the Equality Act prevent people from being discriminated against. Schedule 3 of the Equality Act allows providers to set up and maintain single-sex services. But it’s unclear at the moment whether sex in the Equality Act means just biological sex or biological sex unless modified by a gender recognition certificate, and this confusion makes ordinary life hard. Can a woman-only reading group at the local library exclude men whose ‘legal sex’ is allegedly female? As things stand, Dave/Davina might sue you for discrimination, and they sue full of righteous indignation. People like Dave/Davina, who can’t leave the house without slipping into an antique rose twin set and fishnets, can’t imagine that women even have legitimate aims beyond baking, wearing stockings and onlyfans.
What is the point of either the protected characteristic of gender reassignment in the Equality Act or the Gender Recognition Act? I’ve scratched my head all weekend and haven’t come up with a single thing the GRA can do for anyone that doesn’t have a negative impact on actual women. The idea of ‘legal sex’ as distinguished from biological sex is nothing more than a lie built upon the foundation of the Gender Recognition Act which is reaffirmed by the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.
You should be very careful indeed before deciding that any compromise is possible. Biological sex is not a belief. We now know that we cannot give men who think they’re women access to the things women have fought for and cherished without destroying them. Women need to be bold and firm. It’s beyond reprehensible for any politician to try to push to get women to accommodate men with fetishes. A fetish is not a belief system worthy of respect.
Kellie-Jay Keen joins Natasha Feroze on SpectatorTV:
What will Tory leadership hopefuls do about Farage?
What comes next? That is what many Tories are asking as they stare down the barrel of defeat. Even before Nigel Farage’s re-entry into the election campaign, most had privately conceded that the election was lost. An MRP/YouGov poll out yesterday suggested that the Tories are on course to win just 140 seats – the worst result in the party’s history. Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps and Jeremy Hunt are among those set to lose. If such a result came to pass, which of the survivors would be best placed to succeed Rishi Sunak and start the slow, painful process of building from such a meagre base?
‘Nigel Farage is still against many Conservatives,’ said Badenoch
Every contender is going to have to face a variation of the inevitable question: will you work with Nigel Farage? Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, got an early taste of this yesterday when she was asked if she would be willing to serve under the former Ukip leader in the event he became Tory leader.
‘Nigel Farage is still against many Conservatives, including some of my colleagues,’ she replied. ‘What he wants to do is destroy the Conservative party.’ Badenoch continued:
‘The Conservative party is an institution; it is the longest-running party in the history of the world. I think that what we should be talking about is how to make sure it keeps going from strength to strength, not trashing it, destroying it, or taking it over.’
Her reply was a striking contrast with how other leading Conservatives have chosen to answer similar questions. Suella Braverman, Liz Truss, Simon Clarke and Robert Jenrick have all said that they would welcome Farage into their party. Jacob Rees-Mogg last month called on the Conservatives to make a ‘big, open and comprehensive’ offer to Reform by giving them ministerial posts. Even Rishi Sunak – the object of much Faragist ire – did not dismiss the proposal entirely out of hand, saying at the last party conference that ‘the Tory party is a broad church. I welcome lots of people who want to subscribe to our ideals, to our values.’
Successive membership polls suggest that Sunak’s own party grassroots would prefer Farage to be leading them rather than their current leader. In the event that a Tory leadership race went to a membership round, it is easy to imagine one of the two contenders making overtures to Farage, either publicly or privately. Whoever wins will likely inherit an angry and divided party, susceptible to repeated calls to ‘unite the right’ from a vocal commentariat for whom Farage serves as catnip. Many right-wing Tory MPs are certainly friendly with Farage; David Davis, Liz Truss and Mark Francois all attended his 60th birthday earlier this year. But for other Conservatives, his readmittance to the party would be a red line. ‘If he’s in, I’m out’, says a member of the One Nation Group of 100 Tory MPs. ‘And others would follow.’
Farage himself likes to blow hot and cold on the subject, sometimes suggesting he could rejoin his old party and other times hailing its destruction. ‘Never say never’, he told the BBC last October, adding: ‘If after the next election they reset and realign then I might.’ Nine months on, he now leads Reform and spurns all talk of pacts and deals. He says he can win more votes than the Tories and promises a five-year-leadership into the 2029 election. Yet given the current relative strength of the two parties, it seems highly likely that within days of a Conservative defeat on 4 July, there will be talk, once more, of Farage joining up with the Tories.
Farage’s return is Rishi Sunak’s worst nightmare
From the moment the Conservatives called this summer election they seemed doomed: Sunak had failed to deliver on his five promises, much of the electorate had given up on him, and Starmer looked set for power. But there still seemed like the possibility of a hung parliament, or perhaps Labour only getting a small majority, rather than a landslide.
Last week, my polling firm J.L. Partners did a poll for the Rest is Politics podcast, which showed the Tories pushing Labour down to a 12-point lead. That was nothing to get excited about, but with Reform UK still on 12 per cent, it looked like there might be a way for the Tories to squeeze third-party voters to reduce Labour’s advantage further.
With current Reform voters Farage has a net positivity rating of +79. That is God-like
Even before Farage announced that he would be taking over as leader of Reform, this was already looking more difficult. Our latest poll, released on Monday, showed the Labour lead extending to 17 points, buoyed by ‘early middle aged’ voters and Liberal Democrats folding behind Starmer. Hesitations about Rishi Sunak and the party’s national service policy were part of the reason. Critically though, the Reform vote – which Sunak must squeeze to below 5 per cent if he wants to have any chance of depriving Labour of a majority – remained firmly at 12 per cent.
Whereas before it was theoretically possible for the Tories to win over these voters, Nigel Farage has now locked in that Reform vote. With current Reform voters he has a net positivity rating of +79. That is God-like. I’m not exaggerating: that is a higher rating than the King, and higher even than the late Queen had with the public.
In the same poll only one in three Reform voters said they were open to considering voting Conservative. Expect that number to come down further now their man is in the race.
Farage has had something of a reputation makeover in the last six months. Before he went into the I’m a Celebrity jungle in November, he was seen as frank and straight-talking but lacking in relatability. Now, as well as the strongman they always respected, many voters in the middle see Farage as someone they might like too.
All this means there is no understating the significance of his announcement yesterday. Farage’s presence and the excitement he brings to this campaign now means he will dominate it. His return is Sunak’s worst nightmare and a total repudiation of the prime minister’s ‘go early’ strategy that was supposed to flush Farage out.
Sunak now faces this new threat with a public deeply disaffected with politics, the Conservative party in the doldrums and immigration a top three issue for the public. It is the most fertile ground for Farage yet and truly dire for the Tories.
What should the Tories do now? It would be wrong, in my view, to assume their policy blitz of the last week has caused them problems. It is true that the national service announcement did drive up Labour votes. But it is reasonable to think this would have happened anyway as Labour rolled out their message to 2019 Liberal Democrat and Green voters. The only option for the Tories at this election is to target voters on their right: the pension triple lock plus resonated well with this group.
But policy has its limitations. Winning Reform voters is going to be so much harder now because Farage embodies their values. He can also make the fair observation that Labour will win anyway, so a vote for Reform is cost-free.
The Conservatives might do well to take a leaf from this playbook. Rather than pretending they can win, they should put the spotlight on the consequences of a crushing Labour majority. They should say that a vote for Reform simply means higher immigration levels under Starmer, or more woke culture, or higher taxes. This is likely to be more effective than trying to ape Farage at his own policy which will simply divide the Conservative party and make it harder to recover afterwards.
Keir Starmer should not rest completely easy. In an analysis for the Sun a few weeks ago, we showed that Farage re-entering the campaign could take some voters from Labour too. Farage in parliament also makes Starmer’s job in government harder.
But there are few Tory cherries to be picked here. Farage’s re-entry has changed the game. For the first time, a genuine wipeout of the Conservatives is a serious possibility.
The glorious downfall of Lloyd Russell-Moyle
It’s always handy for parents to have someone they can use to put their children off any particular profession. ‘Don’t be a comedian, son – you’ll end up like that Eddie Izzard!’ ‘Don’t be a journalist, my girl – you’ll end up like that Julie Burchill!’ Quite a few politicians have vied for this inverted ‘top spot’ – that Jeffrey Archer, that Matt Hancock and that Jeremy Thorpe come quickly to mind. But on balance, I believe that Lloyd Russell-Moyle may come to top parents’ precautionary playlist.
For those who believe in women’s rights, Christmas has come early, no matter who wins the election
What a ghastly creature he is. Some people – a minority, for sure, but a sizeable one – go into politics driven by altruism, but I’m convinced that the majority do it so they can show off, ‘showboat’ even. Russell-Moyle’s political career over the past eight years – when he was elected as Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown – resembles a charge-sheet rather than a résumé.
In 2018 Russell-Moyle was suspended from the House of Commons after waving the mace when it transpired that his extreme anti-Brexit views were due for an early bath. The following year he and a group of similarly fanatical pro-EU MPs protested on Westminster bridge under the banner ‘Love Socialism Hate Brexit’. They even lit red flares within spitting distance of Parliament, thus attracting the attention of the police.
On the eve of his re-election to parliament at the 2019 general election, he gave a crazed speech, swearing to ‘fight [the Tories] in the streets’. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Brighton Kemptown, but you’ve never seen a neighbourhood so chocka with poodle-grooming parlours and vegan cafes. The idea of this bijou ‘hood doing an impersonation of downtown Paris in 1968 made me snigger somewhat; not so much Stonewall as Farrow & Ball ‘Skimming Stone’ wall.
In 2019 LRM was criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews for hosting a meeting at the Commons to which to which a representative of the Houthis had been invited. The official slogan of the Houthis is ‘God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam’. You might think it odd that a proudly gay MP would throw a tea-party for an ultra-reactionary group who were rebuked by Amnesty International this year for sentencing men to death by stoning and crucifixion, including death sentences against 13 students on charges of ‘spreading homosexuality’. But perhaps LRM (which sounds like an unsatisfactory way of managing the capital’s traffic) and the virulently misogynist Islamists talked about how irritating uppity women are – because even more than democratic voters attempting to claim back their national sovereignty, it’s women’s rights which appear to make him the most unhinged.
To say that Russell-Moyle is a trans-fan is like saying Richard ‘Baby Reindeer’ Gadd enjoys attention. In 2019 LRM tweeted that parents who refer to their children as boys or girls according to biological sex are committing ‘abuse’ by ‘forcing a sex on a child’. In 2020, he was forced to issue an apology after writing a piece in which he accused J.K. Rowling of using her experience of sexual assault and domestic abuse to justify discrimination against transgender people – something she has never done. In 2023, he reacted to a speech in parliament by Miriam Cates in defence of women’s rights in a way that may be described as unbalanced. He was accused of crossing the floor to sit next to Cates in order to intimidate her, after he had already heckled several speakers to no avail. After calling Cates ‘transphobic’ and saying she ‘should be ashamed’ he was forced to apologise for his behaviour. ‘I recognise that I failed to control [my] passion’ was how he put it. As Rosie Duffield put it: ‘In other words, he had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t his fault; it was ours for daring to disagree with him. “Look what you made me do,” as my ex-partner would say when I had caused him to explode — perhaps by doing or wearing something he didn’t entirely like or voicing an opinion he didn’t want to hear.’
With this track record, it was a wonder it took until last week for LRM to be kicked to the kerb, but here he is suspended from the Labour party due to a complaint about something he is alleged to have done eight years ago. Of course he described the complaint as ‘vexatious and politically motivated’ adding with a supreme show of ego that it was ‘designed to disrupt this election’ – who died and made you Keir Starmer, Lloyd? As an egoist myself, I doff my chapeau to someone who can make the forthcoming election all about him – especially when most people only know him as that weirdo who looks funny at women who dare to disagree with him. ‘I’m gutted. I’ve spent the last decade of my life building one of the best campaigning CLPs in the country. I’ve been so inspired by everyone pulling together in the last week and excited for the campaign to come. We have an amazing local party, and I am sorry most of all for you party members do will be let down by this. I aim to cooperate with the investigations process to clear my name, but will now take this opportunity to contribute to public life in different ways under what I hope is a Labour government.’ Maybe he could run for dogcatcher?
Whatever the outcome, for those who believe in women’s rights, Christmas has come early, no matter who wins the election. The way we see it, Labour will be worse but the Tories let it get this bad, so who is there to choose from? (If there’s a candidate in my constituency, I would vote for the Party of Women, founded by the glorious Kellie-Jay Keen.) It’s poignant to remember how we used to expect misogyny to come from the Tories, whereas Labour is now the parliamentary home of those who want to erode women’s rights. In a decade’s time, what we widely recognise as feminists – people who put women’s rights at the centre of their concerns – may no longer exist in the Labour party, so widespread is the adoption of trans ideology. Labour is now the only major political party in the UK never to have had a woman leader and the way things are going, it’s entirely likely that the first one will have a penis. It’s not just the far-left nutters either. Take David Lammy, who spoke of ‘dinosaurs…hoarding rights’. Then there’s the ghastly presence of what I dubbed the ‘Transmaids’ in the party. It’s no good them getting angry about the repulsive level of violence against women and the pathetic police treatment of rape if in the next breath they’re saying it’s fine and dandy for a rapist to be housed in a female prison if he suddenly wants to be called Karen, not Kieron. What you end up with is not feminism, but Frankenfeminism which, whatever the intention, ends up gratifying men and degrading women.
It’s irritating when a word one created is used on social media by exactly the kind of people who inspired it. Owen Jones, for example, is keen on throwing my ‘cry-bully’ at anyone who disagrees with his cry-bully brand of politics. It doesn’t surprise me that wokers lack the originality and wit to create their own words – but it does annoy me. So in future, I will advise anyone who wants a definition of a cry-bully to google an image of LRM. I doubt that he will go much further in politics – finished at 37, such a shame! But he will always be the perfect personification of my brilliant word and for that, I’ll happily stand him a Woo Woo cocktail – or even a Unicorn’s Tears – next time I see him around Brighton.
The significance of J.K. Rowling’s defence of Kemi Badenoch
The opinion polls might be projecting a massive Labour majority, but there is a dynamic to this election that could yet derail Keir Starmer’s plans for government. Yesterday, J.K. Rowling spoke for many women when she fired off a volley of tweets on sex and gender. Her frustration was palpable, but also notable was her defence of Kemi Badenoch.
While pointing out that ‘Kemi Badenoch and I might not agree on a lot’, Rowling chose to support the Tory minister for women and equalities, who was in turn under fire from Ian Dunt and Alistair Campbell. It felt personal as Rowling added:
‘And what’s the issue with her [Badenoch’s] manner, Ian? Did she fail in womanly sweetness, kindness and deference?’
Campbell, meanwhile was thanked somewhat ironically for ‘highlighting Labour’s complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate’.
In normal times that would be a puzzling intervention from someone who is reported to have donated £1 million to the Labour party. But that was 2008; this is 2024 and for many women the battle lines today are in a very different place.
A Labour party that cannot commit to protecting the rights of women is one that many feel does not deserve their vote. On this topic, feelings can run far deeper than they might on the usual political issues – economic policy or the funding of public services, for example – and Starmer would be foolish to ignore them.
Starmer most likely has LGBT Labour pressing him on gender recognition (in favour of liberalising it) and conversion therapy (in favour of banning it). Beyond the political bubble, however, voters know that sex matters, and they can quite easily tell the difference between men and women. Starmer’s history of blundering and blustering over penises and cervixes, and who has what, will not have impressed. When it comes to conversion therapy, voters are increasingly aware that abusive and harmful practices are already illegal, and new bans could be a Trojan horse to prevent children getting the help they need when they struggle with the reality of their sex.
We have heard much about the red wall and the blue wall over the last five years. But in those seats and others there is another crumbling wall Starmer needs to worry about. That is the idea that people can change sex and as such women should be expected to accommodate anyone from the male sex who wants to impose himself on them, for whatever reason. There is an army of women ready to push that wall over and if Starmer doesn’t get out of the way, it will not end up well for him.
Later yesterday afternoon, Nigel Farage changed the dynamic further when he took back the leadership of Reform UK and announced he will be standing himself in Clacton. Reform’s approach to sex and gender is uncompromising, and the party would replace the Equality Act and scrap all diversity, equality and inclusion roles.
Reform might be even less attractive to someone of J.K. Rowling’s political background than the Tories, but for voters desperate for change, it provides an alternative free from gender identity ideology. Rowling’s interventions, however, run deeper than party politics. At least twice yesterday, she came to another woman’s defence – in this case Kemi Badenoch – when she was criticised unfairly by a man. That dynamic is as old as time, and it is one that the male sex ignores at its peril.
If Starmer chooses to disregard Rowling, then maybe he will listen to Rosie Duffield? Or perhaps the ordinary members who founded the Labour Women’s Declaration? There are lots of people with sensible views on sex and gender in the party, but they do not seem to have the ear of the leadership. Unless things change in the next four weeks, then it’s unlikely that Rowling will ‘wheesht’ – or be silenced – and the result on 4 July might not be all that Starmer is hoping for.
What Farage gets about politics and entertainment
Towards the end of last year, Nigel Farage set tongues wagging as he entered the jungle for I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! Yesterday he announced his return to electoral politics – and the national conversation about him now is curiously similar to what it was then. Will the masses actually vote for him? Will people find his rhetoric refreshing – or racist? And is this good or bad for GB News?
We’re used to talking in a slightly superior English way about Donald Trump, the former host of The Apprentice, as the reality TV president across the pond. But Britain is not so different. Our politics is not just downstream from culture, as the (American) Andrew Breitbart put it. Our politics and culture often seem to be merely tributaries of the great entertainment delta that is the United States of America.
Farage was right to start his speech yesterday by pointing out that the election had so far been boring. We are not entertained
Consider not just Nigel Farage, but George Galloway, the former Big Brother contestant and the other important maverick in this election.
We can consider both men to be vulgar populists. But we would probably be dishonest if we said we would rather not see them on a TV debate stage with Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Farage was right to start his speech yesterday by pointing out that the election had so far been boring. We are not entertained. He aims to change that and we’re grateful to him.
Farage understands that the unacknowledged legislators of today’s world are not poets but call-in radio and television show hosts. Galloway, Farage, David Lammy, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries, Nick Clegg, Esther McVey, Ed Vaizey, Ed Balls, Dehenna Davison – to name but a few – are all what my colleague James Heale called ‘presenticians’, prominent politicians who have swapped political lives for talk shows, or vice versa.
Talk radio, pioneered in America in the 1920s, is where Britain’s political conversation takes place. It’s where politicians pretend to have a real dialogue with the public for our amusement. It’s how statesmen and women, who have so often risked an embarrassing viral moment at the hands of an interviewer, can assume the more empowering role of broadcaster, or humiliation gatekeeper.
This all helps keep the revolving door between public life and entertainment moving. It also means politicians can redeem failure in one sphere by succeeding in another. Ed Balls and George Osborne are today successful podcast hosts. So are Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.
David Lammy once made a complete fool of himself on Celebrity Mastermind – he said that Georgia’s Rose Revolution happened in Yugoslavia, that Henry VII came after Henry VIII, and that Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize in 1903. He’ll be Foreign Secretary soon.
The most successful political figures can interchange effortlessly between politics, news media, chat and game shows and reality TV. The comparisons between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have been overdone. But what the two men have most in common is their skill as political entertainers. Both men had viral appeal in the age of online video. Both men also became media famous first then took over a major political party and thrived as a result.
Farage and Galloway by contrast only have start-up parties – Reform and the Workers party are the current placeholder names. In our first past the post system, as Farage pointed out yesterday, these new entities will always struggle to win office. But Farage and Galloway are still able to dominate the airwaves in a way Rishi Sunak simply can’t. Moreover, they can, through their popular clout, force the big parties to move in their direction. They prove, as Trump does, that in the new media and internet age, power stems not from politics or the law. It comes from fame and the ability to draw an audience.
The Scottish leaders debate won’t have changed voters’ minds
When Alex Salmond was leader of the SNP he used to complain bitterly to the broadcasters that it was unfair to stage TV debates with three unionist party leaders – Labour, Conservatives and the Lib Dems – against the one nationalist. In last night’s Scottish leaders debate though, the unionist imbalance hardly figured. That is because independence hardly figured.
Anas Sarwar arguably won by sheer persistence, though his robotic delivery might have alienated some voters.
The Tory leader, Douglas Ross got in his customary line about the SNP’s ‘obsession’ with separatism and the SNP leader, John Swinney, agreed that independence remained ‘line one, page one’ of the SNP manifesto, but that was about it.
If this was a rather tame and uneventful leader’s debate it was largely because of the relative absence of the issue that has dominated Scottish politics for two decades. For once it actually was about who runs Westminster.
The soundbite of the night was John Swinney saying Labour was going to ‘walk it’ on 4 July. This must be the first time that an SNP leader has ever conceded defeat before a vote has been cast. His point of course was that, since Labour had ‘signed up to Tory austerity’, Scots needed SNP MPs to ensure ‘Scotland had a voice in Westminster’.
The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, rebutted this with the much-rehearsed line that Scotland ‘cannot afford to miss this opportunity’ to get rid of this ‘rotten, corrupt, lying, cheating Tory government’. Say what you mean, Anas, why don’t you.
But he looked just a little uncomfortable when Swinney quoted the Institute for Fiscal Studies assessment that Labour faces an £18 billion budgetary black hole which will have to be filled by tax rises or public spending cuts. Sarwar disputed this vehemently. He insisted that cash raised from closing ‘non dom tax loopholes’ and from the ‘windfall tax on the obscene profits of the oil and gas companies’ will balance Labour’s books. I don’t think anyone was convinced.
Both Swinney and the Conservative leader Douglas Ross rounded on Labour’s plans to increase and extend the energy windfall tax. Ross claimed this would cost tens of thousands of jobs. Sarwar promised that there would be no ‘cliff edge’ for North Sea oil and gas ‘no turning off the taps’ and that Labour would work with the industry to secure ‘energy security’. He did not repeat his leader, Keir Starmer’s, promise to ban all future drilling licences.
It made a change to hear the oil and gas industry almost celebrated by politicians who’ve been highly critical of it in recent times. John Swinney sounded positively bullish on the future of the fossil fuel industry. But didn’t the SNP also want a ban on exploration? Apparently not.
Questioned repeatedly by Douglas Ross, and by the moderator Colin Mackay, Swinney refused to echo his party’s ‘presumption against drilling’, saying only that he would insist that any new development should pass a ‘climate compatibility test’ whatever that is.
The politician who had the most difficult night was undoubtedly the Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross. He sounded almost penitent when confronted with the mistakes of recent Tory prime ministers. He refused to condone Boris Johnson’s parties during Covid; said he was mistaken about Liz Truss’s mini budget, which he’d wrongly thought had been properly costed beforehand; and he declined the offer to back the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s handling of street demonstrations. ‘I hold my hands up’ said Ross, disarmingly. But the other party leaders were taking no prisoners. Anas Sarwar said Ross should be ‘begging for people’s forgiveness’ not ‘pleading for their votes’.
Mr Ross did however manage to deliver a swipe against Nigel Farage. A vote for Reform he said would be a vote for the SNP.
I doubt if any voters’ minds will have been changed by this somewhat somnolent debate. Lacking an audience and atmosphere, it sounded too much like the routine exchanges at First Minister’s Question Time. There were no obvious mistakes and no real revelations – except perhaps the change in tone about oil and gas. Anas Sarwar arguably won by sheer persistence, though his robotic delivery might have alienated some voters.
John Swinney avoided any obvious gaffes and was put under very little pressure considering the controversies of recent weeks. He wasn’t challenged seriously over his defence of the disgraced former minister, Michael Matheson, or over his recent confusion over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Nor was Keir Starmer’s remarks on nuclear weapons raised. Yet both the SNP and the Scottish Labour party have passed conference motions in recent years calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament.
The token Liberal Democrat, Alex Cole-Hamilton, got in his message about the sewage problem and about ‘fixing our relations with Europe’. And that was about it. Momentous it was not. You couldn’t help feeling that the action, politically speaking, was elsewhere.
Are the Tories telling the truth? A look at the data
A quirk of the UK system is that the requirement to tell the truth in adverts does not apply to politicians. This is, in effect, a license to lie – or, at least, to stretch the truth until the elastic snaps. The Conservatives have given some examples in their first campaign video an indication. It shows the Union Flag flying upside down, often taken as a sign of distress. The gist is that Rishi Sunak ‘is making progress’ with his plan, but when it lists that progress it says much that is – how to say? – at variance with the actualité. All can be checked on The Spectator’s data hub, designed so anyone with a suspicion that they’re not being told the truth can easily check.
‘Taxes are being cut’, it says. Well, some taxes are (National Insurance) but other taxes are rising – what matters is the overall effect. The tax burden is rising to the highest level since the late 1940s. It’s extraordinary to even pretend to the contrary.
‘Waiting lists are falling, month-on-month’, it says. No they’re not: the last data fell only due to a technical glitch and my understanding is that ministers have been told they will rise for the next two months. Waiting lists may start to come down soon (an old Institute for Fiscal Studies projection is below) but overall the story is this:
‘...And mortgage rates are coming down’, it also says. They were once, but have been rising since February. Since then, a five-year fix has been steadily rising from 5.2 per cent to 5.5 per cent (at the last count) because the market has come to expect base rates being higher for longer. It’s just a falsehood to say ‘mortgages are coming down’ – present tense – when they are rising. A financial adviser would be breaking the law if they made such a claim in one of the heavily (and rightly) regulated documents. If it’s not OK to mislead borrowers in this way, how can it be OK to mislead voters?
And this comes after an advert the Tories have been running online falsely saying ‘small boats down 36%’.
In fact, small boat arrivals in the year to date are the highest on record:
The 36 per cent figure refers to 2023, where there was progress in the second half of the year. By cutting the verb and not giving a date (‘small boats down 36 per cent’), it chooses a long-passed time period and deliberately misleads. This data is updated daily so there is no honest reason to choose the time reference points they have. They could have chosen a 12-month rolling period and managed to point to a 27pc decline (last year's progress outweighing this year's lack of progress) so could have roughly the same figure with some claim to accuracy. But no, they went for the porkie.
By faking progress, the Tories conceal the fact that they have been making progress. Nigel Farage yesterday claimed that crime was out of control, for example. In fact, strip out fraud and there is less crime in Britain than perhaps any time in the history of our islands. But it seems the Tory election claims are chosen not by topics where they have something genuine to boast about but, instead, topics that focus groups say are important.
I take no pleasure at all from pointing this out: I'm not exactly gunning for Keir Starmer to win the election. So why the nit-picking? Because if journalists won't point out deceit, no one will. This is the basic duty of trade: if politicians mislead then journalists (of any political persuasion) will point it out.
Once, you could lie with figures safe in the knowledge that no broadcaster would really challenge and no newspaper would have space to publish graphs to expose deceit. The press would see it as small beer, nit-picking. But in the digital era can hyperlink to a source in a split second to point out when parties are making statements so wrong that they would be illegal in a document regulated by the London Stock Exchange or Financial Services Authority. Or, indeed, by IPSO, the press regulator.
The line between truth, exaggeration and deceit is now very well policed by agencies that the Tories rightly empowered when in office. Respecting that line – and the intelligence of their potential voters – ought to be a given for any party seeking to fight this campaign with decency.
Tiananmen Square remade the modern world
Thirty-five years ago today, China’s leaders ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to disperse a student encampment. The death toll was never made public; it is likely that several thousand people were killed.
June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom
The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy protesters came as a shock and was an aberration. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Communist regimes toppled one after another, mostly peacefully. Only Tiananmen spoiled the celebratory mood.
June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom. Beijing waited, and learned, and gathered strength. It first emerged as the world’s workshop. But it was only a matter of time before it made its bid to reshape the world.
One man who understood China’s potential earlier than most was Mikhail Gorbachev. He travelled to China just days before the horrific blood-letting on Tiananmen Square, for the first bilateral summit between China and the Soviet Union in 30 years. As China’s ailing leader Deng Xiaoping told him, it was time to ‘close the past and open the future’. Gorby agreed: he wanted to turn the page on Moscow’s quarrel with China that had kept the two countries at the brink of war for a generation.
Gorbachev was sympathetic to the plight of the protesting students, but he rejected their request for a meeting. Nor did he condemn the crackdown (though many in the West did). China’s democratic future was not his business, Gorbachev thought. His business was to mend fences.
In fact, he thought China’s post-Tiananmen isolation was an opportunity to forge closer ties. ‘They [the Chinese] were grateful for our measured response,’ Gorbachev told the youthful Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi just weeks after Tiananmen Square. ‘And, perhaps, now they will value more their relations with us and with you.’
He then told Gandhi how he wanted to build a triangle between Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. It was not an idle thought. Gorbachev knew that the Cold War was lost. The Soviet Empire was beginning to fall apart. But here was an opportunity to pivot to what we would later call the Global South, especially China and India. ‘Perhaps now is that exact moment.’
But the Chinese Communist party leadership were deeply suspicious of Gorbachev. Deng privately called him an ‘idiot’ for prioritising democratisation over economic reforms. China’s Prime Minister Li Peng – one of Tiananmen’s hardliners – predicted that Gorbachev’s experimentation would lead to the break-up of the USSR: and then ‘it will no longer be a great power.’
Some believed that China would welcome the break-up of the Soviet Union. After all, the two countries were the bitterest of enemies for nearly 30 years, and even fought a brief, undeclared border war in 1969. But in August 1991, Beijing welcomed the reactionary coup attempt that aimed to preserve the USSR. It even reached out to the coup plotters. But the coup failed, and soon the Soviet Union itself collapsed, leaving in its wake a colorful assembly of independent nations.
The reason the Chinese were so keen on keeping their old foe afloat was that they understood a Soviet meltdown would change the very character of the international system, leaving America in charge. From Beijing’s perspective, it was not a comfortable place to be.
The Chinese leaders accepted the inevitable – not that they had any choice. But they grasped the first opportunity to reach out to Boris Yeltsin, still then ostensibly a democrat. Deng’s successor Jiang Zemin would soon become a frequent guest in Russia, singing Moscow Nights and bear-hugging Russian officials. The world was having its unilateral moment. But a quiet realignment was already under way.
Mikhail Gorbachev spent those years in quiet retirement. The Chinese never called him back to Beijing. They would later vilify the father of perestroika as a traitor to the Communist cause.
When I last saw him – some years before his death – Gorbachev recalled his maiden voyage to China with a note of wistfulness. I looked past him, at the wall of his office, and read the Chinese calligraphy, lines from the Tang dynasty poet Zhang Ji:
‘Moon’s down, raven’s caw, and the frost-filling skies,
River maples, fishing lights, and the sleep of eternal gloom.’
He still thought he did the right thing when he refused to condemn China for Tiananmen.
Or, as he put it just months after the events, when told that 3,000 students had been massacred: ‘We must be realists. They, like us, have to hold on. Three thousand… So what?’
Of course, in the end Gorbachev chose not to hold on and the Soviet Union collapsed. History moved on, and it is now Putin who bear-hugs Xi Jinping, whom he calls a ‘comrade’. China, meanwhile, is keeping Russia afloat by supplying it with critical technologies and consumer goods. In August 1991 Beijing was too weak to prevent the collapse of the USSR. Today, Xi looks on approvingly as Putin tries to salvage what pieces he can from that old wreck. Today, China can extend a helping hand – and it has.
Hundreds of thousands have perished already in Putin’s brutal attempt to conquer Ukraine and upend the world order. But you can almost hear the Chinese leaders quietly mutter to themselves: ‘They, like us, have to hold on. Hundreds of thousands… So what?’
Even Nigel Farage will struggle to make this election exciting
Unlike Brenda from Bristol, I usually love elections – but not this one. Theresa May’s self-destruction in 2017 was one of the most fascinating events I’ve ever seen. The high-stakes tension of Boris vs. Corbyn in 2019 had me gripped to the TV. Even as a child, I couldn’t get enough of the high drama of politics: on Friday June 10 1983, I threw a sickie from school just so I could sit at home and read all the newspapers about Thatcher’s triumph: it was my pitiful idea of fun at fifteen years old. Yet Sunak vs. Starmer feels like even more of a foregone conclusion than 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour crushed the Tories. It’s hard to get excited about the 4 July election.
With Labour we’ll just be getting more of the same, but worse
The 2024 election feels so tawdry – and there is no sense of enthusiasm or vigour to it, on any side. It all seems so pointless and perfunctory. It’s not even a Hobson’s choice, more a Buridan’s ass situation. It’s like choosing between bread and bread.
But there is some hope for politicos like me: the election after this one, whenever it may come, will be fascinating. The 2029 poll has already got me bubbling. That’s when things might get very lively and absorbing indeed.
Nigel Farage appears to have noticed this too. His late entry to the fray as leader of Reform and candidate for Clacton – after an uncharacteristic dither and a major comms slip-up – promises to add zest to the affair. There’s no show without Punch, after all. Yet despite this injection of vim, this is still going to be the dullest of elections. What comes next, particularly if Farage wins in Clacton, will be the good stuff.
Farage is convinced that Starmer will win in July and go on to make such a hash of running the country that voters will kick him out at the first opportunity in five years’ time.
It seems like a credible prediction, given that Britain’s likely next prime minister can’t even handle Diane Abbott. If the last few years have taught us anything though, it’s that making certain predictions is a fool’s errand. So many of the great political storms of the last decade – Corbyn, Brexit, Covid – could not have been foreseen, and indeed were not foreseen, by anybody. There is almost certainly another something, or somethings, we don’t even know we don’t even know about lurking in the wings to surprise us.
This strange and unsettling century has knocked our faith in the political norms. I used to have a fairly reliable sense of what the future might generally hold, but like the Delphic Oracle the prophetic spring has been silenced.
So maybe I have it all wrong about the incoming Labour government. I suppose it’s possible that they will herald a bold new age of peace and prosperity. That the many extremely disturbing things besieging us – from the effects of AI to the housing crisis to the flatlining health service – will evaporate like the morning dew under the assured stewardship of the likes of Jonathan Ashworth and Lucy Powell. That the towering intellect that is Anneliese Dodds will bring us racial harmony and an end to sectarian strife. That Yvette Cooper will stem the flow of immigration. That Rachel Reeves will bring plenty of cornucopia. That the threats from China, Iran, and Russia, will be deftly knocked into their pockets by David Lammy.
I mean, that could happen. In the same way that there could be an invasion from outer space, or that there could be a zombie apocalypse in Cleethorpes.
But, even though my predictive powers have waned like the Norns at the twilight of the gods, it’s far more likely that with Labour we’ll just be getting more of the same, but worse. First past the post has served up gridlock. We are about to lose the very few protections against the lunatic fringes of what calls itself ‘the left’. We will wave goodbye to Kemi Badenoch, the one-woman firewall fighting a rearguard action, the only minister taking the initiative and doing her job. We may possibly even lose her from parliament if the more extreme polls are accurate, though that prospect seems thankfully remote. The Labour replacements for her, and for her fellow, blithely unaware, minsters aren’t oblivious to or cowed by the grim ideology of the ‘sensible’ middle class. They march in lockstep with it. That can only lead one way: to disaster.
The only slightly reassuring thing about Starmer is that he’ll break any promise and drop any cast-iron commitment as if it was a casserole dish and he’s forgotten to put on his oven gloves. The Labour leader’s solemn oaths are written in sand. Miliband’s Great British Energy wheeze, for example, is so barmy that Starmer will surely be forced to drop it very quickly. How will his MPs react when he changes his tune as he has done before?
If disaster strikes, there will, at least, be some fun to look forward to under a Labour government. The prospect of Starmer and Trump in the same room is hilarious, sitcom heaven. Starmer visibly thinks about everything he’s about to say: it’s like watching an ancient grandfather clock grinding its gears up to strike the hour. Trump, meanwhile, has no filter at all between brain and mouth. The ‘special relationship’ will be in trouble.
This election is a squib, but the fireworks of the late ‘20s – a Labour government that swiftly turns out to be even worse than its loathed predecessor, Farage on the loose as the established head of a mass movement, a very angry country that will make today feel like an oasis of calm – promise to be spectacular. Personally, I can’t wait.
Pensioners should do national service
When Rishi Sunak proposed national service for 18-year-olds as the first big idea of his election campaign, my initial thought was: absolutely, bring it on. But then I had a second thought, which was that if Sunak was trying to boost the Conservative vote, rather than the nation’s preparedness, his big idea probably wasn’t going to fly. Younger voters would recall their 18-year-old selves and reject the whole prospect out of hand – as would parents, concerned that their now not so little Harrys (and Hannahs) might be sent off to fight in Ukraine. Meanwhile, all those older people agreeing that the nation’s youth could do with some toughening up will probably be voting Tory anyway.
There are plenty of roles that our new pensioner recruit could usefully perform
Then a light switched on: right idea, wrong demographic. How about requiring first-year pensioners to follow the Rishi recipe for national service by spending either the full year with the military or a weekend a month volunteering for a good cause? Think about it. The rise in average life expectancy may be stalling, but at around 80 it is still a decade more than it was (69) in 1950, when national service was still compulsory. I bet a good number of today’s 67-year-olds will be at least as fit as 41-year-olds, the upper age limit during wartime conscription. Your average 67-year-old might not be up for commando training (though some might), but with obesity and anxiety and all that plaguing the young, the fitness gap between 18-year-olds and 67-year-olds might not be as wide as the military fears. Plus, keeping your average 67-year-old fitter with some daily square-bashing could be a useful end in itself and help reduce pressure on the NHS.
In this day and age, there are plenty of roles that our new pensioner recruit could usefully perform. Sunak mentioned training in cyber – well, you don’t need to carry a 25kg SAS backpack to do that. Nor to trawl the web for disinformation, nor to help the police ferret out criminally offensive messages in social media.
Along with the military and the police, Sunak mentioned the NHS and charities. There’s a dire shortage of care workers, and training up school-leavers or graduates to do the job takes time, if any of them want to do it at all, which is why it has become so much simpler to recruit people from abroad. But consider this: the training that many seniors will need for such national service would be minimal, as most will have seen it all before with their own families. They have what even the most enthusiastic 18-year-old volunteer lacks: life experience.
There could also be a case for national service in other sectors that habitually complain of a labour shortage. Take fruit-picking. Gnarled hands and creaking joints might fractionally slow the harvest down, but think of the savings. Farmers wouldn’t need to provide visas or on-site caravans, as many older people live in rural areas and have homes and cars.
All that said, national service for those – how shall I put it? – of a certain age would come with a complication that would apply less with 18-year-olds. What to do with those hospital consultants, senior civil servants, and successful business people whose pension pots are so large that they have no real need of the state pension and would cheerfully give up a year of it as the price of not taking part? If appeals to common decency failed, there would have to be penalties stringent enough to convince them to comply. A forfeit of five years’ state pension, perhaps, plus a fine proportionate to someone’s last salary, and the social media equivalent of public boards of dishonour in town squares, for naming and shaming.
There would obviously have to be a medical dispensation for those in poor health. But a new pensioner national service scheme could also address the problem of those who say age discrimination prevents them from getting a job. Those forced unwillingly into early retirement could perhaps do their national service early, or extend it for another year or two, in return for pay equivalent to the state pension.
There is just one drawback I can see to introducing national service for pensioners, and it is this. Many retirees soon settle into a life that is almost as busy as it was before. What with baby-sitting for the grandchildren, care for family and friends, volunteering for charities, sitting on community committees, joining governing boards, writing minutes, doing accounts – all of it unpaid – well, our new pensioners may not have time even for those 25 days a year.
Then again, sending out call-up papers to 66-year-olds at the same time they are informed that they will soon qualify for their state pension could have a salutary effect. First, it would demonstrate to all those angry youngsters that most of their elders are not lounging around all day sipping wine in their huge mortgage-free houses and planning their next cruise, even if some are.
More to the point, though, it would warn any government thinking about trying to squeeze more work out of a supposedly leisured older population just how difficult that might be. They have quite enough to do already. They are keeping their families, other people’s families, and a host of vital services afloat, They are filling gaps in the state, largely unsung (and unnoticed, until a paid job tips them a few pounds over the threshold for carer’s allowance). National service for the pension generation? By all means. Many, though, are already doing it, just without the recognition.
What happened to the Evening Standard?
Like any bunch of ageing ex-hacks, those of us in the ‘Former Evening Standard Employees’ Facebook group are fond of reminiscing about the past. Occasionally, it’s at boozy reunions, when we recreate afternoon epics in the Elephant pub near the old Kensington office. More often, it’s when posting online RIPs to old colleagues who’ve passed to that great newsroom in the sky – sometimes, sadly, well ahead of deadline.
The last few days, though, a Facebook page often dedicated to mourning bygone scribes and sub-editors has suffered a rather wider bereavement. Last week, it was announced that the Standard would cease its daily newspaper altogether, ending two centuries of print-runs in the capital. Instead, there’ll be just the website, plus a once-a-week edition – the Weekly Standard? – which will be a news-and-lifestyle digest. No more front pages showing 9/11 or Grenfell as they were unfolding. No more breaking the news that London had won the 2012 Olympics – or, the very next day, the story of the 7 July Tube bombings.
The Standard could never quite make up its mind who exactly its readers were
For those of who worked at the paid-for Standard of yesteryear, which produced five editions a day between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., this is of course a poignant moment. Yet unlike when we mourn deceased colleagues, however, there’s been little hesitation in speaking ill of the dead. The consensus is that the Standard, like some gout-ridden old sub-editor, has not taken good care of itself in recent years. A paper that once ran to 80 pages and saw itself as a national newspaper in all but name has shrunk to a fraction of that.
The Standard’s management blame the introduction of wi-fi on the Tube, which has robbed it of a once-captive market, and the shrinking of its commuter readership, who now work increasingly from home. The paper’s bled £84 million over the last six years, despite becoming a freesheet in 2009 in a bid to increase circulation.
But apart from being a loss for readers, the Standard’s demise is also a loss for the trade of newspaper journalism. Like other big regional papers, such as the Glasgow Herald and the Yorkshire Post, it represented a valuable stepping stone between local papers and the more demanding newsrooms of Fleet Street. Young hacks who would have struggled had they gone straight to the Mirror or Times, could find their feet there, honing their skills to its ferocious deadlines. Or, in the rather more romantic words of former Standard man Tom Leonard (now at the Daily Mail): ‘The Standard was the closest you could get in the real world to a newspaper in a classic Hollywood film, with reporters and photographers actually rushing out together on stories… and editors actually occasionally saying dramatic things like “hold the front page”.’
It wasn’t just a case of bashing out wham-bam news stories either. In the Standard’s heyday, reporters also had to write so-called ‘colour’ as well – the chatty, humorous pieces that give light relief amid pages of crime and politics. The ultimate test was the page three piece – typically an upbeat, photo-led article involving a celebrity or lifestyle trend. In the space of less than hour, one would have to churn out 750 wry words on David Beckham’s latest tattoos, or Lewisham’s optimistic bid to market itself as the new Shoreditch. It’s hard enough writing somber reports on murders and train delays to a tight deadline. It’s another thing altogether to be witty and humorous. Especially when sat in the office at 5 a.m., when the first page three would be commissioned for the 7 a.m. City edition. Getting a Pulitzer had nothing on it.
Page threes were so hard that newbies like me weren’t often asked to do them. But even then, it was instructive to watch – proof that what other Fleet Street journalists might take an afternoon to knock out, a good Standard hack could do in an hour (albeit with a lot of cursing and fretting). Nor was it an excuse for sloppiness. Copy that was dull, flat, or typo-strewn, earned me worse bollockings at the Standard than I’ve had anywhere else.
Yet for all the nimbleness with which it served them, the Standard could never quite make up its mind who exactly its readers were. Was it the voice of London, with its multi-cultural, inner-city neighbourhoods? Or should it cater to its affluent, Conservative-leaning commuter readership, who’d buy it for the journey home to Tunbridge Wells?
While I was there in the 1990s and early 2000s, it cleaved strongly to the latter. Coverage of issues like migrants and asylum was similar to the Daily Mail, our Associated Newspapers stablemate. And under the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ editorship of Max Hastings, the newsdesk showed an interest in fox hunting that many staff found baffling. When the paper did cover city life itself, it was that of Sloaney west Londoners – the Hooray Henrys and Henriettas whose clubbin’, shaggin’, snortin’ exploits were already chronicled by the paper’s gossip diary. At the time, newly-gentrified districts such as Clapham and Stoke Newington were filling up with affluent young professionals, all of whom the paper could have wooed. But outside of SW3, the only thing the Standard seemed to cover much was crime. At a time when London was swinging again under Cool Britannia and Tony Blair, it felt out of touch.
Things didn’t improve when Hastings was replaced by Chelsea-born Veronica Wadley, a former debutante and Mail features executive, who turned the paper into what the newsroom nicknamed ‘the Baby Mail’. Out went much of the humour and urbanity. In came lurid ‘exposes’, such as a story revealing that cannabis was being sold openly on the streets of Brixton. For anyone who lived there, as I did, this was akin to being told that the Pope had Catholic leanings, or that bears relieved themselves behind trees.
At the time, I remember thinking that the Standard would be better off with the liberal tone of the Observer, back then required reading among the young urban middle classes. Indeed, just months after Wadley left in 2009, the paper ran an extraordinary advertising campaign strap-lined ‘Sorry for losing touch’, apologising for the negative tone of previous years. Some saw it as an implicit criticism of Wadley’s approach, which they felt was tone-deaf to a city that was increasingly Labour-leaning.
Others, though, would argue that the rot started long before. Besides, by then the Standard was facing the same existential challenges as every other newspaper – haemorrhaging ad revenues to social media platforms Facebook, where we ex-Standard greybeards now host our virtual alumni club.
It’s not all gloom. Many ex-Standard hacks have gone on to be editors and senior reporters elsewhere on Fleet Street, while I left the paper in 2003 to go freelance in Iraq. Post-Saddam Baghdad was a tougher beat than Kensington and Chelsea, but even so, those four years at the Standard stood me in good stead. Ironically. the papers that took most of my copy back then were the likes of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Scotsman – again, big regional papers that, like the Standard, punched above their weight, and are now likewise shadows of their former selves.
I still have my old cuttings from all three – including a few Standard page threes cranked out under speed. They’re a bit scrappy, to be honest, but they’re among the pieces I’m proudest of. Doing them to the gentler deadlines of the new Weekly Standard just wouldn’t be the same.
Do art attackers think they’re helping?
The latest painting to be attacked by an ovine climate protestor is Monet’s Poppies in Paris’s Musee D’Orsay. Thankfully, the initial reports that the painting was not protected by glass were inaccurate, and the alarming red rectangle – which at first glance looked as if the painting had been torn to the underlying canvas – was in fact a large red sticker.
How is it helping climate change to throw good food at works of art?
Video footage has emerged of a woman covering the surface of the painting then taking off her jacket to display her activist t-shirt. She then stood by the painting as if she was waiting for applause. It’s far from the first time that a famous work of art has been targeted. Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa was smeared with cake. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Monet’s Springtime in Lyon’s Museum of Fine art had soup thrown at them. The glass over Velazquez’s The Rokeby Venus was smashed. Monet’s Haystacks was pelted with potatoes.
How is it helping climate change to throw good food at works of art? If these protesters had an iota of grey matter in their heads instead of empty slogans, they might do something more worthwhile – pick up rubbish, for example, or shame litterbugs, or help out on a farm, or grow their own organic vegetables, or…
But they don’t want to do anything helpful. On several occasions, thick protestors have glued their hands to the wall or to the painting. Miscreants usually want to leave the scene of their crime, but these idiots glue themselves to the wall. What exactly is the point? If it is that art is a privileged activity, they should ask how it is exactly that they managed to gain access to this supposedly elitist space. It’s because art galleries are open to the public, and most are free at least part of the time. The Musee D’Orsay, in common with other galleries in Paris, is free one Sunday every month. I notice that the climate activist didn’t go then. Because it’s so packed with ordinary, cultured people on those days that these vandals would be lynched.
Cowardice meets privilege in these dunderheads, not in their targets. Most people are too busy working in order to feed themselves to target paintings in galleries. These young adult brats – bratults – don’t know how lucky they are.
They sometimes argue that the reason for damaging well-known artwork is that it attracts attention that their cause otherwise wouldn’t receive. Well, it’s true only in the sense that the activists and their activities receive attention. Few people end up actually looking into the purported cause. Most do little more than rolling their eyes. Is that really activism – or simply attention seeking?
It reminds me of when climate protesters from Extinction Rebellion shut down London by congregating in the streets, stopping ambulances from reaching medical emergencies and hospital workers from being able to do their jobs. Emma Thompson flew over to London first class from LA to show her support. The irony of a stinking rich woman contributing to thousands of tons of air pollution in order to show her support for less air pollution was not lost on many observers.
Ditto zealous politicians who bring in low emissions zones, which shut down a whole lane of traffic and give bicycles more space than four wheeled vehicles. This forces buses and cars to cluster in huge pollution-causing jams for hours. It takes hours to go from the West End of London to Gunnersbury now. It also means that bus stops are helpfully placed in the middle of the road, so those descending step straight out into traffic. Luckily, it’s so slow moving that it will probably only take your toes off.
Labour comes out of Scottish debate on top
There is a truism in British politics that things would be much more civil if there were more women in the room. Tonight’s all-male Scottish leaders’ debate undermined that: the exchanges were far less vehement and aggressive than they had been when Nicola Sturgeon was SNP leader and when she was facing other female leaders.
The real reason for this had nothing to do with the gender of the leaders standing in the STV studio, or indeed much to do with a new era of kinder, more civil politics and everything to do with the fact the wind has gone out of the SNP’s sails. John Swinney reminded the audience that he hadn’t expected to be in this position just five weeks ago, but that he wanted to ‘protect Scotland in these tough times’. It was a shift from the hugely popular ‘stronger voice for Scotland’ pitch that Sturgeon made when the SNP swept away nearly all other parties in Scotland in 2015. And it hadn’t little to do with independence. In fact, when he was asked what was the second line of his party’s as-yet unpublished manifesto after the promise on Scottish independence, Swinney answered that he wanted to address the issues that people were facing, almost as though he acknowledged that a deep desire for independence wasn’t one of them.
He clashed with Douglas Ross over whether the SNP would back new oil and gas licences for the North Sea. The First Minister refused to offer clarity on this point: under Sturgeon, there was a presumption against new drilling but Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn has suggested he has been trying to change the party’s stance (he is an Aberdeen MP). Ross wanted to push this because the Tories have rushed out more licences ahead of a potential Labour government which has pledged to halt the licences, but Scottish Labour has been deeply anxious about the impact on Aberdeen and the wider Scottish economy. ‘That’s a no,’ said Ross, curtly. ‘John Swinney and the SNP are against new oil and gas licences. just say it, be honest, John.’ Anas Sarwar and Swinney clashed over whether to tax oil and gas giants, with the First Minister warning that it would have the same effect as ‘what Mrs Thatcher did when she was in power… she created an industrial wasteland in central Scotland’.
The most aggression came between Sarwar and Swinney. The SNP are most threatened by Labour in Scotland and devote a considerable portion of their time in Westminster sessions to attacking the official Opposition rather than the Conservative government. Sarwar accused Swinney of being ‘the architect of austerity in Scotland’ and also said that only by voting Labour would Scots see the back of the Tory government in Westminster. Swinney wanted to suggest Sarwar was being complacent, arguing that it was already clear Labour was going to walk it in this election (implying that it is therefore safe to vote SNP in Scotland).
Swinney is a funny combination of courteous in person and energetic as a heckler in the Scottish parliament. This evening, he didn’t appear fully comfortable or confident. He opened by saying that times were too serious for a shouting match. But he ended up vying for least comfortable with Douglas Ross, who had to answer questions from everyone on why he had backed his national party so often. Ross pointed out that he had not supported Boris Johnson, but this allowed Lib Dem Alex Cole-Hamilton to remind everyone that Ross had submitted a letter of no confidence and then withdrawn it. He also struggled to answer the question from Swinney on why, after Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, he had demanded that the SNP follow suit. All Ross could really say was that he’d assumed the people in the Treasury had done the necessary work to ensure it was safe. Cole-Hamilton was the smoothest, but also under the least pressure: he and Sarwar ended up chuckling almost affectionately at one another at one point.
Sarwar is the most impressive of the party leaders and made a passionate attack on the Conservatives, telling Ross he should be ‘begging for forgiveness’ from Scottish voters for the ‘Tory Party damage of the past 14 years’.
All the party leaders got their soundbites in, but none landed a knockout blow on the other. Even though Sarwar was the most impressive, he will also have come away from that session feeling as anxious as Swinney: his party is doing so well in the polls that voters may well think they don’t need to turn out to a polling station at all. Here in Scotland where school holidays will have started by 4 July and many people will have gone on holiday, that risk is even greater than in the rest of the UK.
Nigel Farage knows the Tories are there for the taking
The one thing that had gone right for Rishi Sunak in the election campaign to date has now gone wrong.
Nigel Farage has been so energised by the first ten days of the election that he has taken back the leadership of the Reform party and decided to stand for parliament in Clacton after all.
Tory staffers who had expected to be running a ‘Stop Farage’ operation but were then stood down will now have to be stood back up again.
Farage has discerned that this time round, the Tories are truly there for the taking. They have drifted so far from their base on immigration, taxation, crime and net zero as to ignite white hot hostility among parts of it. They are also so far behind Labour that the traditional squeeze message that voting for a Farage vehicle will risk putting socialists into power has lost its potency.
Rishi Sunak’s catastrophic November reshuffle – in which he sacked Suella Braverman as Home Secretary and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary – was the moment he made everything possible for Farage.
Rishi Sunak’s catastrophic November reshuffle was the moment he made everything possible for Farage
Reform’s poll ratings increased, and Farage himself began to actively ponder and scope out a frontline political comeback. Perhaps the electorate would take against an ordinary political mortal who had messed it around about standing or not standing in this contest. But Farage is one of those figures who makes his own rules and U-turns are very much allowed.
Sunak’s battered and demoralised inner circle must now find a way to de-fang Farage inside a month, having not made the usual preparations to fight him. They will know that the blanket media coverage of today’s gambit and the sheer excitement it brings to a drab contest is bound to create an initial Reform bounce too. Were there to be polls in the next ten days showing Reform very close to level-pegging with the Conservatives, it would come as no great surprise. Are there enough grizzled veterans left in the Tory machine to hold it together, were that to transpire? One has one’s doubts.
Who does Sunak have that can compete with Farage for the parts of the right-wing electorate that the PM struggles to reach? Around the cabinet table, only Kemi Badenoch knows how to play any of the tunes and she does not yet have a wide following in the country. On the backbenches, the likes of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have made their disappointment with Sunak all too clear.
Outside parliament, a certain blonde bombshell may be persuaded to interrupt his lucrative ventures on the international speaking circuit to make a couple of ‘ra-ra for Rishi’ contributions. But his price will be high and most of us will know he is joking. It’s all opening up for Nigel now.
Watch: Shapps hangs up after being told he will lose his seat
Oh dear. It’s been another bad day for the Tories. Shortly after Nigel Farage announced his return as leader of Reform, the first YouGov MRP poll of 50,000 voters dropped, showing Sunak’s party down to just 140 seats. But for one Conservative, things were about to get even worse. As Sky’s Sam Coates discussed the MRP poll on air, his phone rang and his Apple Watch lit up.
On it was emblazoned the name of Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary. At Sophy Ridge’s insistence, Coates took the call, as the camera kept on rolling. ‘Hello Grant Shapps’, he said. ‘You’re live on Sky News.’ Amid background muttering and laughing from Shapps, Coates told him ‘I’m in the studio with Sophy Ridge. Have you seen you’re about to lose your seat, according to the Sky News-YouGov projection?’
There was a moment’s silence before the phone emitted a few beeps – meaning Shapps was no longer there. ‘He just put the phone down on me. There we go,’ Coates laughed. ‘He did say hello!’ ‘I thought he was calling up for a direct comment’, Ridge retorted.
Good thing Shapps took it in jest: Mr S suspsects that some Tories’ response to that YouGov poll can’t be broadcast before the watershed…
Rishi’s nightmare: YouGov MRP predicts Labour super majority
It never rains but it pours for Rishi Sunak. Less than an hour after Nigel Farage performed a shock U-turn, announcing he will not only stand for election but take over the leadership of the Reform party, YouGov has released its first MRP poll of the election campaign. It does not make pretty reading for the Tories. The MRP poll says that were an election held today, Labour would win back a whopping majority of 194 seats – a bigger landslide than 1997.
YouGov estimate that in, an election held now, Labour would win 422 seats in total and the Tories would be left with just 140 seats. Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats would boost their numbers to 48 seats. The SNP in Scotland would be reduced to just 17 seats. As for the Reform party, on the current polling they would have no seats – however, this poll was taken before Farage announced his return. Meanwhile, the Greens would double their intake to two MPs – including Bristol Central which would mean the shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire loses her seat.
However, there are far more Tory big beasts at risk of losing their seat. According to this poll, the cabinet members who would be ousted include Jeremy Hunt, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt (set to represent the Tories in Friday’s seven-party BBC debate) and Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary.
Labour’s success would be nationwide: they’re on track to have more seats than the Conservatives in London, the East Midlands, the West Midlands, the e West, the North East, the South West and Yorkshire and the Humber. In Scotland, the party would win 34 seat, meaning a big Scottish Labour recovery and causing damage to the SNP.
So, what does this poll mean for the campaign? Of course it is just one MRP poll – more polls will follow. Today a More in Common MRP poll suggested that the Tories would have 180 MPs were an election called today, and Labour 382. The Tories have also taken the view for some time now that YouGov modelling is on the less flattering end of the spectrum, often projecting larger Labour leads than rivals. However, the clear trend from all the polls so far is that the Tories are heading for a historic loss and there is little time to narrow the polls.
When an MRP poll from Electoral Calculus broke on Friday night suggesting the Tories could go down to 68 MPs, it was so bad most in the party did not take it seriously. But YouGov is much harder to dismiss. It doesn’t help that many of the ministers who are predicted to lose their seat thought a summer election was a very bad idea.
It means the Conservatives are having a bad start to the first full week of campaigning since parliament was dissolved on Thursday. The hope will be that tomorrow’s ITV head-to-head debate will move the dial. The official line will be that there is only one poll that matters and it is not for several weeks yet. However, with the nightmare scenario of a Farage comeback now a reality and the polls showing the party is on course for severe losses, there is a chance that more Tory candidates start speaking out in the coming weeks – and the job of reducing losses ahead of 4 July becomes even harder.
Joe Biden’s ceasefire proposal could sink Benjamin Netanyahu
Joe Biden’s introduction of the three-stage deal to end the war in Gaza was a clever rout to bypass Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden has lost confidence in Netanyahu’s readiness to present things to the Israeli public, and to his own cabinet, in an honest and truthful way. By presenting the terms of the deal clearly and independently from Netanyahu’s spins, Biden was in full control of the message, in the hope that the Israeli public will back the deal and make it impossible for Netanyahu to back out of it.
Netanyahu’s already unstable coalition is on even shakier ground now
Netanyahu has spent the past eight months manoeuvring between the demands from far-right members of his coalition, who oppose deals with Hamas, and centrist members who are pushing for a deal that will release the hostages. Each side has repeatedly threatened to leave the coalition and topple the government. Netanyahu has desperately tried to save his government, even at the price of damaging relations with Biden and other allies, undermining war efforts and negotiations for a ceasefire deal.
While members of Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, have half-heartedly criticised the deal, which they view as a victory for Hamas, hawkish ultra-nationalist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have threatened to leave and break apart the coalition if the deal is agreed to. Both reject any deal that will keep Hamas in power and include the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. Both also have a troubling history of calling for a ‘voluntary emigration’ of Palestinians from Gaza and for the rebuilding of settlements in Gaza – which isn’t, and won’t be, Israel’s policy.
On the other side are Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who joined the wartime coalition days into the war against Hamas. Gantz has already threatened to withdraw from the coalition. He gave Netanyahu a list of demands with the deadline being this Saturday. Should Netanyahu agree to the deal, it’s likely that Gantz – who enjoys a positive relationship with Biden – will remain in the coalition. If Netanyahu rejects the deal, under pressure from the right, Gantz’s withdrawal in itself won’t break the coalition, but it will leave it with a smaller majority in the Knesset (64 out of 120 seats). It may also trigger others to pull out, including Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and inflame the ongoing mass anti-government protests.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have threatened to leave the coalition numerous times and have yet to do so. One reason is Netanyahu’s capitulation to some of their demands. The other is that they’re reluctant to find themselves outside of government, perhaps permanently, with no power or influence.
Meanwhile, The ultra-orthodox parties in Netanyahu’s government are a lot less reluctant to leave the coalition, and have credibly threatened to do so if orthodox men no longer enjoy an exemption from national service. If the ceasefire deal won’t topple the government, this politically explosive issue might. The exemption is currently being debated, and, although the majority of the public – including many of Netanyahu’s voters – object to the exemption, Netanyahu would do anything to keep the ultra-orthodox parties in the coalition.
The ceasefire deal still has a lot of unknowns. Most importantly, it doesn’t stipulate who will be in control of Gaza after the war. Despite Biden’s claim that Hamas is no longer a threat, the terror organisation has retained some offensive capabilities and can recover after the war with the help of Iran and Qatar – unless there are measures to prevent this. A full withdrawal of Israeli forces, without creating a small but meaningful buffer zone between Gaza and Israel and giving up control of the Philadelphi corridor – Hamas’s lifeline – will compromise Israel’s security. Netanyahu’s mishandling of the war, his lack of long-term planning and tendency to avoid making tough decisions, means that Israel needs to accept a deal that’s far from ideal or keep fighting a war that has no strategic outlook.
Netanyahu’s already unstable coalition is on even shakier ground now. If Hamas rejects the deal, it’ll save Netanyahu (for now), but place Hamas in a direct collision course with the US, and possibly even with Qatar. If they accept the deal, Netanyahu may have to choose between it, or the future of his government.
Why Farage is back as Reform leader
He’s back. After all the teasing and all the rhetoric, Nigel Farage has finally announced his return as Reform leader. Having initially pledged that he would not stand at this election, he told a 100-strong room in Westminster: ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ He will now stand as Reform’s candidate in Clacton – the only seat Ukip ever won in a general election, back in 2015. ‘I cannot turn my back on the people’s army’ he said to the room. ‘I cannot turn my back on all those people who voted for us… I can’t let those people down, I won’t let those people down.’
If this is to be a change election, then Farage wants to lead the radical charge
If this is to be a change election, then Farage wants to lead the radical charge. ‘What I intend to lead is a political revolt’, he said. ‘Nothing in this country works anymore. The health service doesn’t work. The roads don’t work. None of our public services are up to scratch. We are in decline. This will only be turned around with boldness.’ It was his familiar narrative of betrayal and decline – but with an added emphasis on his self-regarding mantle as the people’s tribune. To those who ask whether Reform will do deals with individual MPs, Farage had two words to say: ‘2.4 million’. This is the number of legal migrants who have arrived here in the past two years.
The hacks in the room only had one question: how well will Reform actually do? Farage, as usual, was bold in his claims. ‘Our aim in this election is to get many, many millions of votes. And I’m talking far more votes than we got back in 2015 when we got 4 million votes. We’re going to get many, many, many more votes than that.’ This is quite something for a party that has just a handful of councillors and has never hit 20 per cent in a by-election. Yet that didn’t stop Farage from telling journalists, ‘I genuinely believe we can get more votes than the Conservative party. And you can hold me to that.’
Farage’s return as leader means that Richard Tice now becomes Reform chairman – an admission perhaps that the party’s campaign has not been going as well up to this point as the party might have wanted.
Regardless, this certainly is a further blow to the Conservative party, which is already forecast to lose more than half its seats on 4 July. Tory strategists breathed a sigh of relief ten days ago when they thought it would be Richard Tice, not Farage, as the face of Reform. Now they will have to contend with Farage spearheading the party’s efforts in the election debates.
Farage’s political hero is Enoch Powell who in February 1974 urged his followers to vote Labour to kick out Ted Heath’s Tory government. Fifty years later, Farage could now put the same party out of office for a generation.
Nigel Farage’s election U-turn could be deadly for the Tories
No wonder that Nigel Farage has decided that he would rather be leader of Reform UK than merely honorary president, and that he would like another shot at standing as an MP in Clacton. He looks as if he is the only politician – with the possible exception of Ed Davey – who is actually enjoying this campaign. Indeed, he seems to have engaged what used to be Boris Johnson’s secret political weapon: optimism. That could prove to be deadly for the Conservatives.
Farage’s thin skin seems to have thickened markedly
Farage hasn’t always been all smiles on the campaign trail. On the contrary, in 2015 Ukip’s then economics spokesman, Patrick O’Flynn, was moved to describe Farage – his then leader – as ‘snarling, thin-skinned and aggressive’; a comment for which O’Flynn later apologised, and resigned – shortly before almost everyone in Ukip also walked away.
Farage has always traded on public fears, and the message hasn’t really changed. The first thing he did in this campaign was to declare that this would be an election about immigration. On Sky News last week he eagerly grabbed the bait that Trevor Phillips hung out for him and started laying into Britain’s Muslim population for what he believes to be its lack of shared values with the rest of the UK population. He started today’s press conference, too, by talking about immigration.
But what has changed is the tone. In his recent interviews – those since his appearance on I’m a Celebrity – he has tried to position himself as a chat show guest. If you analyse his performances, they always begin with a smile and joke. Every photo of him on the campaign trail seems to involve him beaming. The thin skin seems to have thickened markedly. On last week’s Question Time, he appeared to enjoy sparring with a sour Piers Morgan, whose talent to rile even the good-natured is second to none.
Maybe it is the influence of US political campaigning, in which Farage now seems more interested in. The lesson from the US, as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both showed, was that an ability to make people feel good about themselves can be a deadly weapon. Who grins, wins. Maybe Farage is just demob happy: he is behaving like a man with a great political triumph behind him and who is on a farewell tour – even if he has said he will serve as Reform leader for five more years.
Either way, he is out-charming the opposition. Smiling politicians aren’t exactly new, of course, though very often it can come across as forced. Rishi Sunak over the past fortnight has looked as if his boyish enthusiasm is going to turn to tears as soon as the cameras stop rolling. Keir Starmer can’t really do charm at all. He doesn’t look interested. Ed Davey seems to be enjoying himself a bit too much – he doesn’t look as if he is really campaigning, more auditioning for a new career as children’s entertainer after inevitable disappointment on 4 July.
If you knew nothing about British politics and tried to judge what was going on purely from photos and small bits of footage from the campaign trail, you would conclude that it was Farage who was heading for the big majority and Starmer who was putting on a brave face about inevitable defeat.
Farage, of course, is not really going to win the election, and neither is he going to cut it as the nation’s uncle. For many British people, he will always be a figure of hate. The Reform party may not win a single seat, let alone challenge for government. But Reform certainly can do the Conservatives an immense amount of damage. If Sunak thought he was out-manoeuvring Farage by calling an early election, it looks as if he has failed.