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Following Napoleon: my exile in St Helena
St Helena
Douglas Murray has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In an attempt to escape from the world, I have come with friends to St Helena. It is quite a good place for the exercise. Until a few years ago the only way to get to the island was a five-day boat voyage from Cape Town. Shortly before Covid, an airport for this British overseas territory was finally completed at UK taxpayer expense. To protect some local insects the runway was put at a slightly wrong angle, making it difficult – sometimes impossible – to land. The weekly flight from Johannesburg therefore refuels in Namibia in case landing is impossible and the plane has to about-turn.
A lifesize statue of Napoleon stands on the balcony. It takes a few days to get used to him
Jamestown is not the busiest metropolis, but for the island’s population of around 4,000 people this harbour town is the hub. The Consulate Hotel on the main street running down to the sea is run by the lovely Hazel and is a warren of rooms and memorabilia relating to the island. A lifesize statue of Napoleon Bonaparte stands on the balcony overlooking the street. It takes a few days to get used to him being over your shoulder as you take a morning coffee or the first drink of the day.
Exploring the hotel, I found a grand piano and put my fingers to work. While playable, it was slightly out of tune. I enquired whether this could be fixed and it was explained that the island’s piano tuner is in jail.
Down by the harbour that evening, I got chatting to a local friend who – like all the other islanders – attended the only school, which is named after Prince Andrew. I asked her whether it would be possible to spring the piano tuner from the local chokey even for a few hours. She told me that St Helena’s prison is at capacity. Even on holiday this is the sort of thing that interests me. I learned that there is one murderer on the island, happily now free, but that most of the inmates were there for the sort of sex offences that regrettably happen in small, remote communities where people are related.
As we were having this conversation, I became aware of a local drunk looking at us. I occasionally darted a look to check he wasn’t overhearing. He was, and sloped towards our table. ‘I ain’t no paedophile,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I said you were,’ I replied. ‘I ain’t sold no children,’ he went on. ‘You was looking at me whole time you have that talk.’ Slipping into the fascinating local patois, my friend managed to talk him down. We avoided further crowding the prison and parted with a reassurance from me that I agreed he had never sold his daughters.
Of course the most famous prisoner to have been on this island was Napoleon. One night we had a glorious dinner at his island abode – Longwood House – which has been magnificently restored. The view from Napoleon’s quarters is one of the best on the island, which is saying something. It is like a mini world out there, with vast mountain crops, lush greenery and of course thousands of miles of empty ocean.
People are no longer brought up to believe in the Great Man view of history, but you cannot doubt it here. There is a startling aura about the place. The idea that this man required battalions of British troops to be stationed on the island, forts on every hilltop and a fleet of British ships surrounding it, just to keep him confined is testament to the fact that whatever else he got wrong, he was a great man. One of my friends caught me alone in Napoleon’s coffee parlour, staring out across the South Atlantic. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.
‘Europe. Moscow,’ I told him.
I have been unfair to the local inhabitants. Most of the ‘Saints’ (as they are known) are superlatively lovely people. During the Sunday morning service, the ‘sign of the peace’ bit involved meeting the whole congregation. They are also a genuinely diverse people with a DNA pool which is as mixed as any on Earth. And they are proud of their British status, without any of the concomitant guilts forced on us at home. During the long and ruminous construction of the airport, the bones of several hundred former slaves were uncovered. They turned out to be the bones of slaves freed by the British from Portuguese ships. St Helena was a crucial port for the West Africa Squadron, tasked with stamping out the slave trade across the High Seas. One local piece of development is the rebuilding of Toby’s cottage. This is the former residence of a slave who became friends with Napoleon and to whom Napoleon gave a sum of money to be free.
Today, neither credit cards nor debit cards work on the island, phones barely do, and the wifi is patchy. To get money you have to go to the only branch of the island’s bank, show plenty of ID and sign many forms. With my £50 (plus commission) I can stand drinks for several nights. This is the sort of solitude I seek. I catch up on a pile of books, swim in the harbour and say hello to people I haven’t seen for hours.
The most striking thing about the island is not just its lushness but its extraordinary biodiversity. There are about five different landscapes across the island, from ones that look like the moon to others that look like England and others that look like nowhere else on Earth.
Down by the ocean is a memorial to the dead of the island from the two world wars and also a memorial to the crew of RFA Darkdale, which was torpedoed at anchor off St Helena in the early hours of 22 October 1941. The rollcall of the dead includes a 30-year-old Neil McMillan from Stornoway and 27-year-old John Macleod, 2nd Radio officer, from the Hebridean village my father grew up in. Like many a previous inhabitant of the island, I walk away reflecting that even when you come to the uttermost parts of the Earth, home follows you.
It rarely pays to be ahead of your time
Lionel Shriver has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.
Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality
The bad news: the lie that you can choose to be whichever sex you feel like is entrenched in Britain’s school system. Activist teachers who’ve blithely ignored cautious government guidance aren’t likely to drop their warped ‘genderbread’ lesson plans or their exciting collusion with children against their own parents merely because of a spot of bad press. The fashion for sexually neutral language that gave us ‘birthing people’ and ‘bonus holes’ is embedded in the NHS, the media and many charities, and these dehumanising linguistic abortions won’t likely evaporate overnight.
Pronoun badges may eventually be preserved behind museum glass as fascinating artefacts from an era in which the West lost its collective mind, but for now they’re still garnishing lapels and aren’t yet subject to widespread social derision. ‘Preferred pronouns’ in emails continue to helpfully inform recipients that the correspondent is either a frightened conformist or a proud conformist. Transgenderism is even more sanctified in the United States, where support for inadequately trialled experimental drugs and permanently disfiguring surgeries even for children remains the ultimate progressive purity test. Only a deluge of lawsuits is apt to dislodge the catechism in America. The president wants biological men in women’s sports.
For the past decade or so, the cultural glorification of what was once sensibly characterised as a rare mental illness has displayed all the hallmarks of an irrational social mania. The fact that we all got the message from the off that if we’re not on board with this stuff we’d better keep our mouths shut is a red flag. Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality as if clutching a signpost in a gale. Social hysteria does not permit dissent. Those few who refuse to get with the programme will pay the price with exile, opprobrium and professional disgrace – if not, amid the very worst of our communal insanities, with prison or death. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, but in a crowd we’re a hive species.
In the thick of mass psychosis, prophets are unwelcome. It rarely pays to be ahead of your time. Even as this perverse infatuation with pretending to change sex subsides, commentators who stuck their necks out and pleaded for us all to get a grip are not assured any retroactive recognition. My colleagues J.K. Rowling, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Abigail Shrier and Kathleen Stock won’t necessarily benefit from their foresight. When a communal derangement ebbs, everyone who got caught up in the craze feels a bit abashed and wants to forget all about it. Mavericks who bucked the trend are unpleasant reminders of everyone else’s cowardice. As a rule, no one ever thanks apostates, much less apologises for the grief, insult and ostracism they bore. In kind, the chances are poor that all the clinicians, teachers, therapists, activists and politicians who powered the trans assembly line will ever be held to account.
In 1633, the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of propagating the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. It took 124 years for the astronomer’s heliocentric dissertation to be removed from the Catholic church’s list of banned books. It took 187 years for the church to permit Copernican teaching. Only in 1992 did a pope formally correct the long-standing wrong of the church’s condemnation of Galileo – 359 years later.
We now surely dwell in the very eye of another manic social hurricane, the unfalsifiable theory of purely anthropogenic climate ‘collapse’. Put aside for a moment the debate we’re not even allowed to conduct over the ‘settled science’ (an oxymoron). For sheer argument’s sake, let’s suppose that the computer modelling-driven construct proves wrong-headed. If we didn’t fully acknowledge that Galileo was spot-on for 359 years, how long could it take for man-made ‘global boiling’ to be declared a busted flush? Vast are the vested interests in this latest belief system, which flatters our transitory species as capable of dialling the average temperature of our whole planet up or down. Frankly, I can’t see this dogma being officially de-bunked during my lifetime, even if we quietly suspect for years that it’s hogwash. The ‘deniers’ will keep getting called names and losing their jobs. If it turns out that the sceptics were right, no one will ever thank them or apologise, just as vindicated lockdown sceptics get little credit today.
I have my own depressing theory. It’s credibly to our evolutionary advantage to be conformists. At any given time, your chances of survival are greater if you parrot exactly what other people around you are saying and claim to believe exactly what everyone else around you claims to believe. None of this marching to a different drummer! Don’t call attention to yourself; just try to blend in. Even in secular societies, heretics are in statistically high danger of defenestration or immolation, if only metaphorically.
Starting circa 2012, then, you were super smart to have exalted the ‘transing’ of children as humanity’s glorious liberation from dumpy old biological sex. Maybe starting around 2024, you’re also super smart to wonder aloud to your friends whether arresting adolescents’ normal endocrinological development into adulthood and chopping off their healthy body parts is a totally good idea. Then round about 2026 or so, I bet you’ll be best off pretending you never bought into this breathtaking medical scandal to begin with.
The Candidates
Dommaraju Gukesh triumphed in a thrilling final round at the Candidates Tournament in Toronto. The Indian talent, who is still just 17 years old, thereby qualifies to face Ding Liren in a match for the world championship. He is by far the youngest in history to reach this milestone: Kasparov was 20 years old; Carlsen was 22.
One could hardly have scripted a more dramatic 14th round, in which four players remained in contention for tournament victory. Gukesh held a half-point lead over the field, but had the black pieces against Hikaru Nakamura, who would have overtaken him with a win. On the adjacent board Fabiano Caruana played White against Ian Nepomniachtchi, and a win for either player would propel them into a tiebreak for first place (provided that Gukesh did not also win his game).
As it was, Gukesh held his nerve and secured the draw in a game which was fought down to bare kings. But the battle between Caruana and Nepomniachtchi was still to enter its most dramatic phase. Caruana dominated the middlegame, but the ever-resourceful Nepomniachtchi kept finding ways to keep the game alive thanks to a passed pawn that was just one step from promotion. It was far from easy for Caruana to deal with that, since his king on the other side of the board was in constant danger of perpetual check or worse.
In the diagram position, the grovelly 59 Re1 was best, when 59…Nb3+ 60 Kb1 Qf5+ 61 Ka2 Qxf6 62 Qxh2 should win, though even this would require some patience. Instead, Caruana opted for a plausible rook check.
Fabiano Caruana-Ian Nepomniachtchi
Fide Candidates Tournament, Toronto, round 14
59 Rc7+? Ka6 60 f7 Nb3+ 61 Kb1 Qf5+? A counter-error, putting Caruana back on track for victory. Remarkably, 61…Nd2+ secures a draw: 62 Kc2 Qg6+ 63 Kxd2 Qd6+, though that is far from obvious. Moving the White king to the c-file allows …Qxc7+ while moving toward the kingside allows consecutive checks on e6/f6/g6, and Black meets Kxh2 with …Qh5+ followed by further checks on d5 or d1, which cannot be blocked. White may sacrifice the queen on h1 to promote on f8, but then the checks begin anew and the rook on c7 will not escape a fork. 62 Ka2 Nc5 63 Qa8+ Kb5 64 Qc6+ Ka6 65 Qa8+ Kb5 66 Qc6+ 66 Qe8+! was the only winning move, and then 66…Ka6 67 Qe2+ was the clincher. Then 67…b5 68 Rc6+! breaks the defence: 68…Kb7 69 Qxb5+, or 68…Ka7 69 Qe7+ Nb7 70 Qe3+ Kb8 71 Qe6! wins easily. Black could also try 67…Nd3 68 Qxh2 Qe6+ 69 Kb1 Qe1+ 70 Kc2 but the checks soon run out. Ka6 67 Re7 Qf1 68 Qa8+ Kb5 69 Qe8+ Ka6 70 Qa8+ Kb5 71 Qe8+ Ka6 72 Re4 There was nothing better to try. 72 f8=Q Qc4+ 73 Kb1 h1=Q 74 Re1 Qh7+ would even lead to a loss. Nxe4 73 Qxa4+ Kb7 74 Qxe4+ Ka7 75 Qa4+ Kb7 76 Qd7+ Ka6 77 Qc8+ Ka7 78 f8=Q Qxf8 79 Qxf8 h1=Q Despite White’s extra pawn, the endgame is a trivial draw: Draw agreed at move 109.
The result was a crushing disappointment for both players, who shared a poignant sporting moment as they shook hands. ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Nepo, but a dejected Caruana insisted, ‘It’s my fault.’ Nepo, for his part, was the only player to survive the tournament without losing a game. But Gukesh has proven himself a worthy challenger. I came across a video of him as an 11-year-old, in which he stated gently but confidently his goal to become the youngest world champion in history.
No. 798
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Philip Hamilton Williams, the Weekly Mercury, 1896. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 29 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Qxe5! Rxe5 2 Bxf7+ Kg7 3 Rxd8 and Black soon resigned.
Last week’s winner C. Moses, Richmond upon Thames
Spectator Competition: Memorials for monsters
Competition 3346 invited you to write an ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’. There were fewer Putins than expected but both T Rex and Caligula cropped up more than once. It was a strong field and hard to whittle down but £25 goes to each of the following.
Beast, twelve feet tall and forty long,
Fast, clever and immensely strong,
With eight-inch teeth and fearsome jaws,
The ultimate in carnivores,
He ruled the Mesozoic age,
Exulting in his cruel rage.
But something then occurred to bring
The mighty tyrant lizard king
Down to extinction from his throne;
The cause of death is still unknown.
Of theories there is quite a range:
Disease, volcanoes, climate change,
Or p’raps the earth could not avoid
A rather deadly asteroid.
His legacy’s not what he planned:
Mistaken for a glam rock band.
Nicholas Hodgson
Well, ‘Little Boots’ has clearly made his mark
on history when wearing adult shoes:
the senators were slaughtered for a lark,
their grisly deaths, it seems, would light his fuse.
Declaring war on Neptune – like the sea
his thoughts grew ever more tempestuous.
Was sibling fondness ever meant to be
an orgy, blatantly incestuous?His horse, his joy, not only was well-shod
but dressed in jewels – a marble stall for hay;
elected consul by the ‘Living God’
who’d license it to vote with ‘yea’ or ‘neigh’.
Assassinated, e’er he did the deed,
the rebels drew their weapons, muscles flexed,
a bloody end, the Roman Empire freed
from tyrant’s rule – that is, until the next…Sylvia Fairley
The tyrants’ ends are rarely good
And commonly will match their means,
Yet such plain facts, though understood,
Aren’t proof against a tyrant’s genes.
But tyranny is never just
The product of a single will:
Behind the leader’s manic thrust
Supporters pile in for the cause or the thrill.
Some are believers who dance to his beat
And feel there’s a vision that he and they share,
Others, impressed by his skills as a cheat,
Hang on for the ride as long as they dare.
For power is the glory that dazzles clear sight
So people seem blind to what’s done in their name
And blithely enjoy their vicarious might
Till the death of the tyrant puts them in the frame.W.J. Webster
Eternal Autarch Zubabrubabri, giving lie to his title, is dead. His date of death will be lightly falsified (his date of birth more heavily so), its cause denied before rumoured. Hagiographic generalities will abound, domestic detail expunged. His unforgettable seven-hour speeches to a mute legislature will be sepulchrally quoted, once. Much will be trumpeted of record-breaking harvests under his rule, the perpetually empty granaries of the nation left unreferenced. He will have defeated his enemies to the extent of never having had any. He will be said to have won his 40-year war against pluralism, the remaining 18 months of his reign a paradise of concord enforced by police no longer remotely secret, torturers no longer needing to pretend to careers in butchery. A week of national despair will be declared by a weaselly factotum, during which daggers secretly fly in the uncontested race to become Eternal Autarch Rubabrizabru.
Adrian Fry
Relative perfection was what he was after
So imperfect relatives were fed the mushrooms –
And he was the Nigel Kennedy of his time.
When he played, his music soothed the savage beasts
Who, spellbound, dropped their Christians, for now.Like Nigel, he was a Villa fan.
He had one in Greece, one in Antium, two in Rome;
He knew the Four Seasons like the back of his hand
And was greatly interested in other toppings.
He walked like a man.He fiddled and ate while Rome burned.
They say it was no accident.
They say he blamed the Christians.
And now his name is on every high street,
On every blue coffee cup.
How soon we forget our tyrants.David Silverman
Cruel, pusillanimous,
puling, proud, sadistic;
mad and not magnanimous,
nasty, narcissistic –these compliments are carved
in cold memorial marble –
‘He left his people halved and starved’,
a legend, do not garble.My little jests, dear mason,
I’m sure you’ll do me better –
or else I’ll find the time to chasten.
You redden. Touch of tetter?Chisel to the ready, sweet,
take 40 years, don’t hurry –
I’ll occupy my mercy seat
when you’re forgotten, slurry.Bill Greenwell
For Kim Jong-Il, perfection was the aim:
For Kim Jong-Il, smooth golfing was the game.
In 1994, aged 52,
He’d never hit a shot, his clubs were new,
But first time that he played, he blew the sport:
Eleven holes-in-one, came the report!
For mortal golfers, holes-in-one are rare,
But not for god-like leaders, debonair
In khaki flares and razored, bouncing hair.
Old Kim a tyrant? Surely you must jest.
When citizens his wonder score assessed,
They knew their leader’s driving was the best.
They questioned not his brilliance, heaven-kissed,
But wondered how on seven holes he’d missed?
‘Sheer modesty and bashfulness,’ said some.
‘With 18 shots, his best is yet to come!’Nicholas Lee
No. 3349: marking time
‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’. You’re invited to write a poem on this theme but substituting another object (max. 16 lines). Please send entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 May.
2651: Visionary
One artist’s ten-word comment on a critic runs round three sides of the perimeter; who spoke of whom fills the top line. Other unclued lights name two works by each: two of three words each, one pair, and one pair totalling four words.
Across
10 Insignificant type dropped in a river? That’s enough! (8)
12 Tough not to sound disgusted (3)
13 Secret agent holds the floor (5)
14 Creature has cuckoo sickness (6)
15 Thin, I am ordered a vitamin (7)
17 Fallen angel’s joy cut short on Earth (5)
19 A little bit of thanks to the Moon (4)
20 Old simpleton’s new beginning (4)
23 Witness takes in launch of missile: duck! (4)
25 A network assembled at rocky ridge (5)
26 Quiet, even radiance (5)
29 Artist embracing darling girl (5)
31 Sort of lip mike, originally one that’s found in sultan’s house (5)
32 Monarch remains impulsive (4)
33 On the edge, a chink (4)
34 Make to secure notice that runs round the room (4)
38 In Iberian city, run house (5)
39 Pig (mine) wrong to trespass (7)
40 Carried over island (6)
41 From the east, chap that is retained as a friend (2,3)
43 Avoid eating a little fish (3)
Down
2 Posh officer finally reduced (3)
3 Persistently annoy cobra over time (3,2)
4 Repair and set up game controller on computers (5)
6 Occasionally steps round down with swimmer (3,4)
7 Very poor editing – fired (7)
11 Cancel meal, might one say, for watery spirit (6)
21 Bald, shone moving light on top (3-6)
22 Head of nick has to open up for release (6)
24 Extra retentive, say, like a glacial deposit (8)
27 Carpet laid out for empress once (7)
28 In one day husband and I get together: I produce a kid (3-4)
30 Speaks of zero levels of VAT (6)
36 Film about Mrs French, a social creature (5)
37 Tongue and chin distinctly defective (5)
42 Blossom edible root put up (3)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 13 May. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2651, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Apologies that last week’s 1 Down clue was missing. It should have read:
Wearsider leaves capital with mother before noon (3,4)
2648: Thus at an end – solution
The eight unclued lights are all kinds of soup: COCK-A-LEEKIE (1A), SHCHI (21A) , PHO (40A), VICHYSSOISE (41A), CONSOMME (2D), MULLIGATAWNY (14D), MINESTRONE (19D) and PISTOU (25D). The puzzle’s title cryptically indicates the subject: ‘thus’ = SO, ‘at an end’= UP.
First prize Tessa Ferguson, Bath
Runners-up William Orriel, Newton Abbot, Devon; Gerry Fairweather, Layer Marney, Essex
Why the Cass report won’t change a thing
The Liberal Democrat candidate in the Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency recently released a video clip of herself sitting in a car and saying just the following: ‘As a Liberal Democrat, I believe that women can have a penis.’ When I’m feeling depressed or under the weather, I play this clip to myself over and over and it never fails to put me in a better frame of mind. It is less the bovine stupidity of the message that amuses than the fact that Jemma Joy – yes, yes, I know – felt the need to recite it, as if there were people out there determined to believe that she thought that women couldn’t have penises and might victimise her for this heresy.
An entire liberal elite has bought into these falsehoods and has no intention of letting them go
I have been tempted to ask Jemma how many penises women could have and would it be OK if they were not located in the usual place but perhaps dangled usefully from each knee – and when in a
priapic state could be deployed as a makeshift fork-lift truck. I don’t suppose Jemma would find such puerility amusing. I have considered the possibility that the woman actually believes what she is saying but have given her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she doesn’t.
I daresay an awful lot of Lib Dem candidates will be spouting similar idiocies in the months to come so that the party might reap the electoral benefits of being seen as much more stupid than Labour. It is determined to outflank Labour in terms of post-rational liberal overreach and already I have noticed that some party candidates have engaged in joint campaigning with George Galloway in constituencies with a large Muslim presence (such as the district of Spotland, in Rochdale) and this may cause problems for Labour. Those are the sorts of constituencies, of course, where the Lib Dem candidate would be ill-advised to announce that women can have penises, or even just one penis. Target your messages carefully, you Lib Dems: from the river to the sea in Rochdale, chicks with dicks in Middlesbrough South. All of this should remind us that intersectionality is a myth – none of the stuff they believe in intersects, never mind makes any sense or has any moral force.
It has been fascinating to watch the radical left turn paroxysms in the wake of Dr Hilary Cass’s review of gender identity and the transitioning processes available to eight-year-olds. By and large what the likes of Stonewall and Mermaids have done is tell lies and hope beyond hope that some prominent fellow travellers will take up the baton and run towards the finishing line with it.
So, well done, Dawn Butler, the Labour MP who appears to believe that children are born without a sex and that almost all giraffes bat for the other side, so to speak. Butler parroted a Stonewall briefing which insisted that Dr Cass had ignored a multitude of research papers which lauded the benefits of medically induced transitioning, which was indeed a lie – as Dr Cass painstakingly explained, and Butler was later commended to apologise for ‘inadvertently [misleading] the House of Commons’. Meanwhile, the Scottish Greens cleave to the same falsehood and cling to it like a spider will cling to the side of a bath as the water rises beneath it. Elsewhere, the valiant and commendable (for everything other than those bloody wizard stories) J.K. Rowling has demanded that Sir Keir Starmer apologise to the party’s one MP who was brave enough and intelligent enough to reject the post-rational stuff about transgenderism and was relentlessly bullied by her own colleagues for it – the admirable Rosie Duffield.
The shadow justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has now joined Duffield in her lonely corner in stating that she believes a person’s sex is immutable. All of these developments have given rise to a certain euphoria among the Terfs, the non-woke, the sensible, that this whole ludicrous and confected ideology has imploded and the battle has at last been won. How I wish that were the case. But it isn’t, for the following reasons.
An entire liberal elite has bought into these falsehoods and it has no intention whatsoever of letting them go. I will bet you that five years from now, both Stonewall and Mermaids will still be spewing their counter-factual propaganda into the nation’s schools and the teachers will be delighted to receive it. Let me suggest that Baron Sewell’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities indicates precisely how the liberal elite will treat the Cass report.
Tony Sewell’s exhaustive and fascinating investigation was driven by empirical evidence and objective fact-finding. It showed – among many other things – that there was no systematic or institutionalised racism in the UK. As a consequence, everybody in the extremely lucrative race-relations industry decided that it should henceforth be entirely ignored. The race grifters have continued with their corrosive and idiotic work, utterly undaunted by the fact that almost everything they claimed to believe in was demonstrated, objectively, as being a profound delusion. They may even have stepped it up a bit. There is too much money at risk to take any notice of Sewell, not to mention the prospect of an entire ideology unravelling before their very eyes.
What the Terfs et al forget is that we are in an age characterised as post-truth, sometimes masquerading as ‘my truth’. In fairness some of this is the consequence of post-feminist theory, to which many of those Terfs were committed adherents, and which quite disdains the notion of objectivity entirely, in a kind of mangled Derridean fashion. Therefore facts are not important. What is important is the centre of this ideology holding firm against the empirical assaults from outside. What Dr Cass concluded may indeed be factually correct, based upon her analysis of more than 100 studies. But being correct isn’t the point – grifting is the point.
Hyper-history: why did politics go crazy?
On the day Theresa May signed her Brexit withdrawal agreement with Brussels, Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned. She tried to dragoon Michael Gove, a leader of the Brexit campaign, into taking the job. Dominic Cummings, the erstwhile campaign director of Vote Leave, persuaded Gove to resign rather than take the job. It was mayhem. That day Cummings texted a friend in Westminster to say: ‘Sometimes nothing happens for years. Sometimes years happen in days.’
The phrase was originally Lenin’s, though he referred to ‘decades’ rather than years – but it was apt for the almost revolutionary cascade of events unleashed by the EU referendum of 2016, which we are still living with eight years later. When Sajid Javid announced he was standing down as an MP after serving as a minister for a decade, he said he felt he had lived through a lifetime of political tumult in ten years.
Once, it was Blair vs Brown every week. The speed at which things have moved since then is dizzying
I know how he feels. I set out to write a book, All Out War, about what struck me as an unusually dramatic period in British political history; then it turned into a trilogy. Now the last part has split into two books, the first of which, No Way Out, has just been published. The second has the subtitle A Year of Political Mayhem. Looking back, it has been more like a decade.
I started as a political reporter during the 2001 general election and the first seven years of my career consisted entirely of Blair vs Brown every week. Ten years ago I started at the Sunday Times. The speed at which things have moved since then is extraordinary. Within four months we had printed an explosive YouGov poll which suggested that Scotland was poised to vote for independence: a previously unthinkable proposition that came close to becoming reality. The chaos had begun, and I don’t think things have calmed down since.
It became a good rule of thumb to expect the unexpected. Just days before the 2015 election, the FT published a Populus ‘predictor’ polling model which gave David Cameron a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority. His surprise victory meant that he had to deliver on the manifesto pledge of a referendum on leaving the European Union. Oliver Letwin confirms in my new book what we all suspected: that Cameron had intended to ditch the pledge in what he thought would be new coalition talks with the Lib Dems. Instead we got Brexit.
Uncertainty reigned. Many of the Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn as leader only did so because they thought he had zero chance of winning. His 2015 win led serious Labour figures, including Tony Blair, to write Labour off as unelectable. So in 2017, the Tories had a 20 point lead and Theresa May thought she could risk a snap election: at the time, it looked like she could be PM for a decade or more. In a shock turn-around, Labour did far better than expected and the Tories lost their majority.
Two years on, Nigel Farage created the Brexit party from scratch (a wildly successful startup) and forced the Tories into a derisory fifth place in the 2019 European elections with a 9 per cent share. Now it was the Conservatives’ turn to look doomed.
Politics is simple but it is hard. To succeed, leaders must let themselves be steered by both conviction and polling; they need to plot a tactical path forward, and the communication skills to take voters with them. The only time in the past seven years when all these elements have been in play was in the latter half of 2019, when Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings used a combination of brute force and cleverness to get Brexit done. They forged a new voter base. Johnson won an 80-seat majority and the populists were nowhere to be seen. The future, it seemed then, was Conservative. But it was a coalition of voters that it seemed perhaps only Johnson could sustain.
Today, Keir Starmer – who had been on the verge of resigning in 2021 when Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election – looks like he’ll be weighing rather than counting his votes when the public gets a chance to decide at the general election. The opinion poll lead he enjoys is consistent with an almost unprecedented majority of 270 MPs.
What has caused this political chaos? One reason has been the breakdown of the traditional bonds of political loyalty which tied voters in certain places to the parties of their grandparents. That loyalty, once lost, is not transferred to a new party. Red-wallers who abandoned Labour in 2019 to lend Johnson their votes are now moving on again: many of them to a new party, Richard Tice’s Reform. Meanwhile, Scotland has gone from being regarded as a Labour fiefdom to an SNP fortress to a country where votes are once again up for grabs.
At the same time we have seen a breakdown of deference and whipping in parliament, where younger MPs have little time for the blackmail and brutality of 1970s party management. William Hague famously said that the Tory party was ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide’. Having tasted blood, Conservatives keep wanting more.
A revival in the politics of place, or national identity, is also a factor. It almost ended the Union in the Scottish referendum and it drove support for Brexit, particularly in England. But it never mapped on to party politics.
One reason for the unpredictability has been the breakdown of the traditional bonds of political loyalty
The result of the Brexit referendum was grafted on to the Westminster system of representative democracy: 70 per cent of MPs backed Remain but they were expected to deliver a Leave vote which commanded just 52 per cent of public support. It was a recipe for disaster, gridlock and extremism. This was exacerbated by the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which made it impossible for the May government to force people into choosing a compromise by threatening to call a general election.
Westminster’s first-past-the-post system is designed to turn close elections into more decisive outcomes – avoiding the coalitions seen in the continent (no bad thing in my view). This does mean violent swings of fortune. But it is also why, alone among major European countries, the UK has not had a breakthrough populist party in parliament. It’s quite possible that Reform will win five million votes but not a single seat.
Is there any pattern detectable here? For someone who has spent so long in the weeds of our politics and is fascinated by the interplay of personalities, I’d say the character and abilities of successive prime ministers have been decisive. If you could take Boris Johnson’s feral political skills, his boundless optimism and public charisma; Rishi Sunak’s meticulous attention to detail; Theresa May’s dedication to public service and Liz Truss’s bloody-minded determination, and mix these qualities altogether, you could construct a very good prime minister. But individually each was lacking.
Keir Starmer has only had to be sensible and a bit ruthless to position himself for victory. If Labour does win, the size of that victory will be vital for Starmer and for the country. A landslide would ensure that he could do as he wished, but that might expose the limits of his vision and the difficulty of tackling the problems that have lingered ever since the 2008 financial crash. It would also ensure that the Labour government’s main opposition would come from within the party. So: back to Blair vs Brown.
And after that? Whenever parties have revived themselves (as under Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and Johnson), the common factor has been dynamic new leadership that combines a sense of where we have come from with a clear vision for the future. The past few years have made the public wearier of politics and politicians, and more cynical about modern communications – but still willing to be galvanised. If this does not happen, we risk remaining in a hyperloop leading somewhere much worse.
The Xi files: how China spies
Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the world goes far beyond anything western intelligence agencies would typically gather. It encompasses masses of commercial data and intellectual property and has been described by Keith Alexander, a former head of America’s National Security Agency, as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history’. As well as collecting data from government websites, parliamentarians, universities, thinktanks and human rights organisations, China also targets diaspora groups and individuals.
Chinese cyber intrusions have targeted British MPs and stolen population-level data from the UK Electoral Commission database. In the US, meanwhile, Congress has just cracked down on the Chinese-owned TikTok, which has admitted that some of its employees had been spying on American journalists.
China’s intelligence agencies used to be circumspect about recruiting foreigners and using honey-traps
Three Germans were arrested on Monday for trying to transfer military information and procuring a special laser that was sent to Beijing without authorisation. On the same day, two British nationals, including a Tory parliamentary aide, were charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act by allegedly passing ‘prejudicial information’ to China.
Xi Jinping talks as if China is at war – on the occasion of ‘National Security Education Day’ this week, he said that every citizen must be vigilant for signs of espionage. ‘Foreign spies are everywhere,’ says a public service broadcast by China’s powerful civilian spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). ‘They can be disguised as anyone.’
The MSS is responsible for domestic security, counterespionage and collecting foreign intelligence. Although formally a state institution rather than part of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), its main job is to guard against threats to the system. A key criterion for employment is a commitment of absolute loyalty to the CCP.
As with many Chinese institutions, the structure at MSS headquarters is replicated at the provincial and municipal levels, and it’s the regional offshoots that do the bulk of foreign intelligence gathering, monitoring states with which they have historical, geographical or commercial links. The Shanghai state security bureau principally targets the US; the Zhejiang bureau focuses on western Europe including the UK; the Tianjin bureau collects on Japan and South Korea; and the Guangdong bureau on South-east Asia.
The harvested data serves a variety of purposes. Stolen medical data, for example, is used for biomedical research – which almost certainly includes not just pharma-ceutical but biowarfare programmes. Huge amounts of foreign data are used to train Chinese AI large-language models.
The CCP also employs private cyber companies to supplement its own activities. The UK Electoral Commission was hacked by the Wuhan-based Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology cyber company. A few weeks ago, a leak revealed that a Shanghai-based company, I-Soon, was hiring hackers for various missions run on behalf of the Chinese government. The yield was astonishing in range and ambition: from 95 gigabytes of Indian immigration data to the passenger records of a Vietnamese airline. Other targets included Nato, the British Foreign Office and the Chatham House thinktank.
China has been spying on an industrial scale for years, of course: when Xi visited Washington DC ten years ago, Barack Obama openly asked for it to stop. Instead the country has deepened its cyber capabilities, while building on old-fashioned human intelligence operations. In the past, Chinese intelligence agencies tended to rely almost exclusively on ethnic Chinese agents from the 60 million-strong diaspora community worldwide. One such was Chi Mak, a naturalised US citizen working in the US defence sector, who was sentenced to 24 years’ imprisonment for attempting to pass to China details of a radar system used to protect military ships.
Now, however, China worries that its diaspora includes anti-CCP activists and opponents – so another large part of China’s intelligence agencies’ work is to monitor (and, where necessary, coerce into silence) those Chinese abroad who are critical of the CCP. This coercion usually takes the form of putting pressure on relatives back home, but it can also involve China’s intelligence agencies and their proxies – criminal groups or local private detectives – taking more direct action to silence critics.
Stolen medical data is used for biomedical research; foreign data to train Chinese AI language models
Then there is Operation Fox Hunt, a secretive global operation to hunt down Chinese officials suspected of corruption who have fled to other countries. One report published this month says 12,000 people have been found in so-called ‘fugitive recovery operations’ in 120 countries over ten years. Beijing has quite a budget for its global manhunt and enlists private investigators. Michael McMahon, a former New York police officer, was last year charged with ‘interstate stalking’ and acting as ‘an illegal agent of the PRC [People’s Republic of China]’. One of the targets had a note put through their door that said: ‘If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend ten years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!’
Another section of China’s global law enforcement network are covert ‘police stations’ established in more than 50 countries, mostly liberal democracies. They’re a flagrant violation of diplomatic norms as well as often illegal. Officials insist these entities exist to assist Chinese nationals with a variety of bureaucratic procedures. But surely that is what the legitimate Chinese consulates are for? The reality is that these ‘police stations’ primarily exist to monitor and suppress anti-regime activity.
Most Chinese embassies will house an MSS station, which is normally not declared to the host government. There will also be a defence attaché’s office with a remit to collect intelligence. These will be supplemented by officers under journalistic and commercial cover. But the majority of agent recruitment running is done from within China, where the intelligence agencies can avail themselves of the full gamut of state capabilities, adopting identities in state-owned enterprises, universities, thinktanks and a variety of party and state organisations charged with developing and maintaining contact with the outside world.
China’s intelligence agencies used to be circumspect about recruiting foreigners and using techniques such as honey-traps. Now they appear to have fewer constraints. Nor are their endeavours limited to people who have obvious access to intelligence. There’s growing evidence that within China, foreign students are being approached in the hope that they can, in time, be manoeuvred into positions of influence within their home countries. This is the holy grail for any intelligence agency. In most cases, targets are approached by someone with a seemingly innocuous background, with an offer of money in exchange for something quite uncontroversial. In due course, this progresses into more sensitive information requests.
A similar approach is taken with targets outside China, who are initially contacted through social media sites such as LinkedIn and offered an expenses-paid visit to take part in (usually) an academic conference or similar event. Take the former CIA officer Kevin Mallory. Heavily indebted, behind on his mortgage and out of work, he responded to an invite on LinkedIn from someone posing as a Beijing-based headhunter. He hadn’t written that he was formerly CIA, but his CV left little doubt to those who knew what to look for. He was given what seemed to be a phone-based secure communications system to report information gleaned from his former colleagues to his case officer. He was later caught and given a 20-year prison sentence.
China’s intelligence agencies have ample funding, and agent payments can be surprisingly generous. The downside is that if you’re caught, you’re on your own: Chinese intelligence agencies provide no support, nor will they attempt to secure your release. Chi Mak was left to die in prison; the same is likely to be true for Xu Yanjun, an officer of the Jiangsu State Security Bureau, who was arrested in Belgium where he went to meet a US agent in the aerospace sector. It was a set-up: he was caught, extradited to the US and sentenced to 20 years. ‘Just the latest example of the Chinese government’s continued attacks on American economic security,’ said the FBI.
It’s wrong to think of the MSS as China’s KGB or MI6, a single intelligence agency with a spy chief. Espionage is a regular part of Chinese bureaucratic life, embedded in various agencies. The CCP is a Leninist organisation which was forged in a crucible of clandestinity that has remained central to its culture. Within the CCP there are various departments – from propaganda to international liaison – all of which pursue strategic objectives. All use a range of techniques from the fully overt to the totally secret.
From China’s perspective, it is just doing what British and US intelligence agencies have been doing for years. Neither make a secret of the fact that they collect intelligence on China, for reasons of national security and advantage. And while no western spy agency is actively seeking to subvert the CCP (though the last Trump administration came close), China perceives the activities of western media and pressure groups as having subversive intent, and enjoying at least a degree of government concurrence.
The scope and intensity of China’s espionage is overwhelming western defences. The FBI has admitted as much. And if this is true for the FBI, how much more so must it be for small services such as the Belgian Sûreté, which is facing a tsunami of Chinese intelligence activity? Western intelligence agencies also lack a critical mass of relevant language skills and regional expertise. During the Cold War, the West was full of Russian speakers and experts in Soviet culture. By comparison, there is little knowledge and understanding of China.
This is not (yet) another Cold War. It’s important to discuss the nature of the challenge China poses without creating a mood of latter-day McCarthyism, or suggesting that everyone of Chinese ethnicity should become the subject of distrust. China is not an adversary, says the government, but a ‘strategic challenge’. Managing that challenge will, for the foreseeable future, need to become an intrinsic part of western political thinking. We can do a lot better.
How can Europe counter Russian espionage?
Over the past few months, numerous reports have highlighted the United Kingdom’s unpreparedness for war. Issues such as the British Army’s struggle to attract new recruits, declining military spending over decades of peace, and dysfunction within crucial strategic military assets have been recurrent concerns. As the threat of the war shifting from Eastern Europe towards the UK exponentially grew, these warnings have frequently dominated headlines.
However, amidst these concerns, another critical aspect of UK security has largely escaped public attention: the state of the UK’s intelligence sector and its capability to conduct successful covert operations aimed at uncovering and disrupting enemy plans, particularly in the era of hybrid warfare.
Russia has learnt to capitalise on divisions in Western societies
The spike in Russian espionage across Europe has reached unprecedented levels, facilitated by the emergence of new technology and the ability to swiftly and discreetly interfere. Just this week, the Swedish Navy accused Russian tanker fleet of engaging in espionage activities while carrying petrol across the Baltic Sea.
In Germany, which has provided vast aid resources for Ukraine, reports have emerged of arrests of suspected Russian agents seeking to sabotage US military bases. Recent incidents, such as Germany’s blunder which allowed Russia access to a top-secret conference call that discussed Germany’s and its allies’ military tactics, highlight the real and immediate threat posed by foreign espionage.
The UK has also experienced its share of Russian espionage, evident in past poisonings and assassination attempts. These incidents may only represent a fraction of the potential threats posed by hostile actors today. A recent report from the think tank RUSI confirms Russia’s efforts to rebuild its covert capabilities with a clear intent to gain advantage in its geopolitical competition with the West. While Russian operations often exhibit flaws, their persistence and ability to learn from their mistakes pose a significant threat.
The question remains whether the UK is adequately prepared to counter covert campaigns from Russia or China, with reports of Chinese infiltration reaching parliamentary and governmental levels. Experts from the Alan Turing Institute suggest that the UK intelligence sector is outdated, often competes with open-source intelligence and private actors and is facing an existential challenge.
To address these challenges, the UK must prioritise agility in adopting innovative solutions to combat rapidly evolving technologies and hybrid warfare techniques. As with many international organisations, the UK security apparatus was built with consideration of threats and challenges of the past century.
Intelligence sharing with frontline partners can play a crucial role in identifying emerging threats and understanding adversaries’ strategies. The UK is part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance established during World War II. While intelligence arrangements have expanded to include countries such as Germany, Norway, Japan, South Korea and Israel, the current global challenges demand a deepening of these ties. Including Ukraine in a special intelligence sharing agreement with the Five Eyes could be a significant step forward. Ukraine serves not only as a battleground where adversaries deploy their latest warfare tools but also as a testing ground for collaborative responses. Leveraging Ukraine’s war theatre could provide invaluable insights and enhance the effectiveness of collective counterintelligence efforts by the West.
Ensuring societal resilience and combating disinformation are also vital components of any UK security strategy. Russia has learnt to capitalise on divisions in Western societies, weaponising these to influence the domestic political agenda. During a year of crucial elections in the UK and US, the importance of social cohesion and resilience is hard to underestimate.
Lockdown’s impact on children is only beginning
Children who started school in the early days of the pandemic will have worse exam results well into the next decade. That’s according to a study released this morning by the London School of Economics, the University of Exeter and the University of Strathclyde. Researchers predict that 60 per cent of pupils will achieve worse than a grade five in their English and Maths GSCEs in 2030, considerably more than the numbers achieving poor marks today.
The study, which looked at the effect of school closures on childhood development, is the first to look at both ‘cognitive’ skills as well as ‘socio-emotional’ skills, finding the latter to be just as important. The highest 20 per cent performing pupils in cognitive tests at 14 years old but who had average socio-emotional skills failed to attain five good GSCE’s including English and Maths.
‘Without a raft of equalising policies, the damaging legacy from COVID-19 school closures will be felt by generations of pupils’, said one of the report’s authors Professor Elliot Major. The results are hardly surprising given the persistent absence problems lockdowns left in their wake. Last spring, 140,000 children in England missed half or more of the school days they should have attended. Research by the Children’s Commissioner, published last year, found that only 5 per cent of these ‘severely absent’ kids go on to achieve five GCSEs. For year ten and 11 pupils who are persistently absent – meaning they miss one day of school a fortnight – just over a third get the minimum five GCSEs. For rarely absent children the figure is 78 per cent.
Today’s study goes further, predicting poor exam performance to last ‘well into the 2030s’. It also found that while most children experienced up to six months of lost learning on average, for poorer children an extra two months were lost. This attendance and attainment gap was already there, but Covid and lockdowns made it worse.
The authors also suggested that England’s pandemic response had focused too heavily on academic catch-up with less emphasis on the socio-emotional skills, extracurricular support and wellbeing that the study suggests are crucial to improving childhood outcomes. For teenage boys though, the study found that cognitive skills are twice as important as socio-emotional skills for determining exam prospects whilst the opposite is true for girls.
The report talks of a ‘double whammy’ for the Covid cohorts who are on course for ‘the biggest overall decline in basic GCSE achievement for at least two decades’ all whilst the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils continues to widen. Kids who were aged five when schools closed are up to 4.4 percentage points less likely to achieve good exam grades at GCSE whilst for girls it was nearly 5 percentage points.
Not only is this a tragedy for Britain’s kids – who missed out on key months of education for little if any public health benefit compared with countries like Sweden who managed to keep schools open and achieve better Covid outcomes than us – but it’s damaging our economy too. The education damaged Covid and closures have caused due to lower lifetime earnings from poorer exam results are estimated to cost the economy over £31 billion in today’s money all while harming income mobility too. Four years on from the first lockdown, much of life continues as normal but the kids certainly aren’t alright.
Was the London horse rampage avoidable?
The sight of runaway military horses – one covered in blood – wasn’t what any Londoner expected to encounter on their commute this morning. Seven horses from the Household Cavalry bolted during their daily exercise, having been frightened by falling concrete on a building site near Buckingham Palace. At least four people were hurt and several vehicles smashed. Two of the animals travelled five miles to Limehouse, in east London, before they were rounded up.
It’s no wonder people were surprised. If you live in London, you’re unlikely to see horses regularly – and, if you do see them, they’d usually be behaving themselves and on duty, not galloping blind and riderless through the roads.
At least four people were hurt and several vehicles smashed
While the horses that the army and police use for their respective duties are subject to thorough training and exposed to all kinds of sights and sounds before they’re allowed out on public duty, we need to remember that horses will always be horses. They are flight animals, whose instincts will tell them to run away from any dangerous situation. They’re also herd animals; if one animals gets scared and runs, the others are naturally inclined to follow.
Although the vehicle-packed London of today is not naturally suited to horses, it hasn’t always been this way. Only 150 years ago, the streets of the capital would have been equally packed with horses: some pulling private carriages; others harnessed to forms of public transport such as horse-drawn omnibuses or wagonettes pulled by two or three horses, and other horses carrying riders. Many houses in the suburbs had their own stable, as did most pubs – particularly coaching inns. The mews houses of central London which today sell for several million pounds a pop were built as stabling and grooms’ accommodation. And London’s street names still pay homage to equines: Dray Walk, Stable Way, Cheval Place, and so on.
People may well complain about air pollution caused by vehicle emissions today, but while there was no Ulez (Ultra-low emission zone) charge in the 1800s, there were plenty of equine emissions. In London alone, an army of around 8,000 road sweepers worked through the night to clear up horse manure, toiling in the darkness to tidy the streets in time for the morning rush. Wagons which had brought food and produce from the countryside to London returned home carrying horse manure back to the fields where it could be put to use.
The London of then was a very different place from today. After this morning’s furore, many people have been asking why there are still horses in London today, and questioning whether they ought to be there.
It’s true that, if given a choice, a horse would probably prefer to be in a green pasture somewhere far from the hustle and bustle of the capital than treading over tarmac every day. But the few horses that are still here in London do play an important role.
The horses of the Met’s Mounted Branch are housed at one of eight stables across the capital. The City of London Police also maintain a mounted branch. Just yesterday, as the police clashed with protestors at a St George’s Day rally on Downing Street, mounted police were on crowd-patrol duty. While being on a horse provides a better vantage point at events like this or at football matches, a policeman on horseback can also act as more of a physical deterrent to any would-be troublemakers.
The Army horses on the other hand – mainly those of the Household Cavalry – are mainly used for ceremonial purposes. There will almost always be two horses from the King’s Life Guard division on guard duty at Horse Guards: the official entrance to Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace. At events like Trooping the Colour, State Visits and the State Opening of Parliament, as well as at other ceremonial occasions, Household Cavalry horses will take pride of place at the centre of proceedings. The Army argue that the use of horses in their ceremonial duties sends a message to the rest of the world about their operational capabilities: ‘For a country with global interests these roles offer a powerful symbol of our operational military heritage, whilst enhancing the standing of the Sovereign and the Nation before both national and international audiences.’
London’s street names still pay homage to equines: Dray Walk, Stable Way, Cheval Place, and so on
Perhaps the London of 2024 isn’t the ideal home for a horse; but it’s both important to remember and a huge tribute to these animals that, 99 per cent of the time, these horses and the daily cacophony of London life go hand in hand with little or no disturbance to the daily grind.
The horses are wonderfully treated, and all those involved in today’s incident have already been seen by the vets and are being treated accordingly. During the summer, the Army horses travel to Norfolk for an annual training camp and enjoy a beach ride at Holkham Bay. Similarly, the horses of the mounted police regiments don’t live in London permanently, and regularly enjoy ‘time out’ in the countryside for a change of scenery.
It’s also important for some of the specific breeds of horse who suit police or army service that they continue to have a role. There are fewer than 3,000 Shire horses in Britain today, and the breed is classed as being officially ‘At Risk’, as many of the jobs that they were bred to do are now carried out by machines or tractors. Most people who want a horse these days don’t need anything of that size or strength. But the Household Cavalry’s drum horses are typically Shires, meaning that, as long as horses continue to carry out ceremonial duties, Shires will still have this role. Similarly the Irish Draft horses and crosses used by the Police and Army are less in demand as riding horses, but can continue their lines as long as the Mounted Regiments exist.
The sight of horses running amok in London was shocking, and we should hope that those injured are recovering well. But while there will be questions about how this incident was allowed to happen – and about why it took so long to bring the horses under control – the truth is that we’d miss these animals if they vanished for good from the streets of London.
Tommy Robinson and the truth about two-tier policing
Tommy Robinson, a self-invented English ‘patriot’, was free to attend yesterday’s St George’s Day event in central London which descended into ugly clashes between participants and police. Earlier in the day, he had been released from court after successfully arguing that a police dispersal order that resulted in his arrest and charge in November last year was unlawfully applied to him due to a paperwork blunder. He says he will now sue the Metropolitan police.
Robinson has nearly half a million followers on social media. They have, by now, fully absorbed the narrative that when it comes to protest, Britain has a two-tier system of policing. This is a dangerous accusation that is gaining traction, whatever the criminal justice boss class decide we should think. But is it justified?
Simply dismissing the charge of two-tier policing as far-right propaganda is dangerous and complacent
Yesterday’s police operation was proportionate to the circumstances. Robust action was taken against a minority of attendees who were clearly intent on engineering confrontation. The powers available to the police under our extensive and, some would argue draconian, public order legislation were used. A handful of far-right imbeciles who wouldn’t know St George if he fell out of the sky on top of them woke up this morning in custody nursing hangovers.
But there’s the rub. The actions of the police yesterday were proportionate when dealing with this form of disorder, but no-one can seriously argue that this same robust keeping of the King’s peace could be applied to the much larger and relentless pro-Palestinian marches.
Let’s start with some myth-busting. Police have arrested marchers during Gaza protests for public order offences including committing nakedly anti-Semitic offences. It’s also not correct to say that police haven’t used legislation to require Gaza marchers to remove face coverings as they did at yesterday’s St George’s Day event in Whitehall. In fact, there have been arrests of people under this legislation – Section 60aa of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Dozens more have been arrested for other offences including racially aggravated ones.
But what would a proportionate response to pro-Palestinian rallies look like if the same tactics were deployed against marchers who regularly number in the tens of thousands and in whose midst are extremists seeking to demonise and dehumanise Israel, its citizens and by extension the tiny British Jewish minority now living in fear in this country? That is, of course, unless they have passed a purity test that puts them in step with those who were out on London’s streets celebrating the Hamas atrocity that started this cycle of protest on 7 October.
I don’t doubt that the vast majority of London’s finest would like nothing better than to get stuck into hate marchers of this kind with the same vigour as was on display from them yesterday in Whitehall. But they are hamstrung by the physics of modern mass demonstration.
Public order policing in London has absorbed and exhausted tens of thousands of police officers from the capital, as well as those bussed in from the provinces week in and out to manage massive demonstrations. I say ‘manage’ not ‘police.’ The Peelian principle of policing without fear or favour has all but collapsed under the insurmountable weight of numbers and potential offences.
The reality is that there are simply not enough cops on the ground to intervene and arrest people behaving in an abusive or threatening ways either in deed or by displaying signs. The mass chorus of the avowedly anti-Semitic chant of ‘from the river to the sea’ calling for the destruction of Israel, and by extension its Jewish people, by violent means is simply too big to fail. Central London is closed down and cordoned off. Openly Jewish people are threatened with arrest to keep them safe when they exercise lawful rights to walk the streets. Ordinary front-line policing, under extreme pressure as it is, buckles further with officers constantly taken away from ordinary crime fighting. There are more tiers here than a wedding cake.
This form of policing by pragmatism, not principle, creates a paradox not lost on those who want to weaponise the issue. The Met frequently congratulates pro-Palestinian protesters for their peaceful intent because, in part, police cannot or will not intervene when the law is being broken in front of them with impunity. The likely chain reaction of such intervention would cause a full-scale riot beyond the capacity of a lightly armed and overstretched tactical response. The lack of political cover from London’s Mayor and the impotence of the Home Secretary add to a picture of law enforcement that is hobbled when more than a few hundred part-time football hooligans come out to play.
Simply dismissing the charge of two-tier policing as far-right propaganda is dangerous and complacent. This perception is firmly in place, whatever the nuances and challenges of public order policing.
The Met can demonstrate in deeds, not fumbling press releases, that their detractors are wrong. They have yet another chance to do so this weekend. We must allow people to peacefully protest the awful suffering of people in Gaza. We should also apply the law equally to people within these protests who threaten public peace with malevolent intent, whatever the scale of the challenge and however much this upsets progressive opinion. This includes the will of prosecutors and judges to show that a culture of impunity in mass demonstrations will not be allowed to grow. We should, but can we? All eyes will be on the Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and his colleagues this weekend.
Anti-colonialism and the distortion of history
In 2020, the National Trust released its ‘interim report’ on the connections between its properties and colonialism and slavery. It quickly became obvious that the report had not been commissioned in the spirit of free historical inquiry, but as a way to tarnish the National Trust and Britain’s history.
The report found that 93 properties or places owned by the Trust had a ‘link’ to colonialism and slavery, a fact that was widely reported in the news at the time.
According to the report, a ‘link’ could be anything from having wealth ‘connected’ to slavery, involvement in a colonial administration in a senior capacity, or even having a business with significant interests in a British colony. Using these criteria, even Winston Churchill’s family home of Chartwell was included.
Unsurprisingly, there was a significant backlash to the National Trust’s denigration of its own properties in this way.
Now, one of the main editors of the report, Corinne Fowler, a University of Leicester academic and the author of Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections, has written in the Telegraph to defend the history in the report, which she says wasn’t ‘new or controversial to experts in the field.’
Fowler writes that she has received a large amount of unpleasant abuse and trolling since her report was published, which of course must be condemned. But in the piece she also gives a perfect example of the way history can be distorted.
Fowler mentions in the piece that she has written a book of Walks Through Colonial Britain. The book ends in Cornwall, where:
‘Copper mines once employed a third of the local population, but I learned that a significant amount of that copper was used to sheath slave ships so that they lasted longer in tropical waters.’
This, I’m afraid, is a bit like saying that pens from a British factory were exported to Germany where they were used by bookkeepers in Auschwitz, making Britain complicit in the Holocaust.
To be clear, the copper sheathing of ships was developed by the Royal Navy in the 18th Century, and was used on all types of ships, not just those involved in the slave trade. Incidentally, this is the same Royal Navy that spent 60 years from 1808 patrolling the waters off West Africa to stop the slave trade, at vast cost in money and lives.
Fowler claims that the copper sheathing was developed so that ships ‘lasted longer in tropical waters.’ This is partially correct, but a distortion. The purpose of copper sheathing on ships was to prevent the growth of barnacles and weed – which slowed down all ships. Barnacles grow on ships’ hulls everywhere in the world, not just in the waters of the Caribbean and West Africa. If Fowler had driven a few miles from where she found out this supposedly awful truth about Cornish copper mining, she would have found them growing on Cornish rocks as well.
Now let’s move on to Cornish copper, of which she writes: ‘a significant amount was used to sheath slave ships.’ ‘Significant’ is a rather vague term. Significant annual production or significant in the context of Cornish production overall? If so over what period? I’m dubious of this claim. The only figures I can find begin at 1771, but they show that production of Cornish copper significantly increased after the abolition of slavery, with annual production rising between two and four times that of the years before abolition.
This copper was not just used to sheath ships, of course. Significant amounts were used in coin production and in the production of brass which, together with copper in its raw state, was used in great quantities in the Industrial Revolution.
All of this may seem like a small complaint, but it just goes to show the ways history can be distorted and shoehorned to fit a preconceived point of view. If this reflects the rest of Fowler’s research, it’s no wonder her National Trust report was so controversial.
Angela Rayner’s staggering admission at PMQs
Angela Rayner stood in for Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs, and she opened with fireworks. ‘They’re desperate to talk about my living arrangements,’ she said, referring to her property woes, ‘but the public wants to know what this government is going to do about theirs.’
Brighton resident, Natalie, contacted Rayner about ‘no-fault evictions’. This isn’t much of an issue. When your tenancy ends, you rent a new flat. Big deal. But Labour loves a victim. And they use emotive language to turn the chore of ‘moving house’ into a Dickensian tragedy. ‘Ban this cruel practice,’ cried Rayner. She hasn’t considered that if renters enjoy the same rights as freeholders, the rent will go up. The policy will wreck the benefits it hopes to deliver.
The agony of local taxation came up
Replying for Rishi Sunak, Oliver Dowden began with a quip about his frequent catfights across the despatch-box with Rayner. ‘Any more of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.’
Rayner was on decent form. Not quite a classic. When riled, she has a habit of improvising which can lead to odd results. Rather ungallantly, she poked fun at Dowden’s appearance and she suggested that fatigue and insomnia afflict him. How would she know?
‘Maybe it’s the 3 a.m. calls from the “bad men” that’s keeping him up,’ she said. Only Westminster geeks will get this reference to a so-called plot involving ‘bad men’ who demand cash from vulnerable backbenchers. She made another off-beat comment in relation to military spending.
Dowden told the house that the PM was on a jaunt around Europe to announce a massive British rearmament programme. And he dared Rayner to follow suit and commit 2.5 per cent of GDP to defence. She answered carefully at first. ‘We all want to see 2.5 per cent,’ she said, which sounds like an endorsement of the Tory plan, but isn’t. Then this:
‘But we haven’t cut the army to its smallest size since Napoleon.’ Military analysts began to scratch their heads. Does today’s army equal its proportions in the early 19th century? Maybe so. But a wiser historical expert might have chosen a different moment. In 1815, the British army, ‘cut to its smallest size,’ managed to defeat Napoleon in a victory that conferred 99 years of relative peace on mainland Europe. Perhaps Rayner knows how to pacify Europe for a century, as Wellington did. If so, let’s vote for her.
The agony of local taxation came up and both parties blamed each other. Dowden praised Andy Street, the Tories’ favourite alderman, who enjoys the title, ‘Mayor of the West Midlands,’ whatever that means. Rayner focused on Birmingham city council and accused Dowden of mugging paupers.
‘Councils are facing black holes because of his government’s austerity programme,’ she said. ‘Birmingham council has had over a billion pounds taken from their budget, from some of the poorest people.’
The problem is not a lack of taxes but a glut of bureaucrats. Sack the officials and the waste goes with them.
The exchange ended with an accidental confession that may acquire greater significance when histories of this decade are written. Launching a personal attack on Dowden, Rayner recalled that he ‘stabbed Boris in the back to get his mate into Downing Street… ditching their biggest election-winner for a pint-sized loser.’
This is a staggering admission from Labour’s high command: Boris was the adversary they feared most. No more discussion needed. No further denials are necessary. Boris’s Tory foes smoothed Sir Keir’s path to power.
Who will pay the price for the boost in defence spending?
Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the government will increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP has been warmly welcomed, but how much is it really going to transform the UK’s military? Former armed services minister James Heappey was quick to scotch expectations this morning when he said it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to reverse falls in the size of the Army, Navy or Royal Air Force – the money could quite easily disappear simply in upgrading equipment. Nor is there anything particularly novel about the Prime Minister’s announcement: Boris Johnson made the same promise – to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by by 2030 – at the Nato summit in Madrid in 2022, shortly before his defenestration by cabinet colleagues.
Downing Street has suggested the money would come from shrinking the civil service
A good dollop of the extra spending will be required simply to replace weapons and other military equipment which has been given to Ukraine over the past couple of years. In 2023, the UK government spent £52.8 billion on defence – equivalent to 2.3 per cent of GDP, which stood at £2.273 trillion. If the government had spent 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence this would have come to £56.8 billion – an extra £4 billion. It is hard to square this with the Number 10 press release which promised an extra £75 billion on defence spending over the next six years, with the defence budget reaching £87 billion in 2030 – until, that is, you read the annex of the document the government has put out today, Defending Britain, and realise that the £87 billion figure assumes that the economy will continue to grow in line with OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) forecasts, and that it includes not just core MoD (Ministry of Defence) spending but also forces’ pensions.
The extra spending, at least in the short term, will struggle even to make up for what the UK has spent defending Ukraine over the past couple of years. Since February 2022 the UK has either spent or pledged £12 billion on defending Ukraine. A further £500 million was announced yesterday. Nor would spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence come close to what the UK was spending during the Cold War. In 1990, the government was spending 4 per cent of GDP on defence, itself a long way down on the 7 per cent that was spent in 1960.
There is also a question mark over where the extra money will be coming from. Sunak suggested that it would not be raised from extra borrowing. So does that mean tax rises, or spending cuts? As for tax rises, it is being reported that the Chancellor is considering cutting another two per cent from National Insurance in a second ‘fiscal event’ of the year, most probably in the early autumn ahead of a November election – so it doesn’t seem as if tax rises are on the table, at least not before the election.
Downing Street has suggested that the extra money from defence would come from shrinking the civil service back to its pre-pandemic size and by reallocating money which has already been earmarked for research – which will inevitably mean less money for research, a blow for universities.
There is, obviously, a very high probability that Rishi Sunak will not be around as Prime Minister long enough to have to worry about funding the extra defence spending. Like much else, it will become Labour’s problem. Labour has announced it has an aspiration to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, but it has not out a date on this, suggesting only that it will happen when finances allow. Whoever wins the election it doesn’t look as if it will much change Putin’s assessment of Britain’s ability to defend itself.
French bureaucracy cannot be defeated
When Emmanuel Macron launched his campaign to win the French presidency eight years ago, he promised to cut the number of civil servants in France by 50,000 and impose fundamental reforms on the bloated state. So how’s that going?
In 2017 when Macron was elected there were 5.6 million fonctionnaires. By 2021 there were 5.7 million. Last year there were 60,000 more.
Debureaucratisation starts to look less like a bonfire of regulations than a tool to let bureaucrats regulate more, with less effort
So new promises to streamline France’s gargantuan bureaucracy must be taken with several kilograms of fleur de sel. The announcement this week by Gabriel Attal, Macron’s fourth prime minister (they’re as disposable as handkerchiefs), to ‘débureaucratiser la France’ is a classic example of the belief by politicians (and not just here) that saying something is the same thing as doing something.
Realistically, Attal’s so-called debureaucratisation seems more likely to presage an even larger number of officials, administrating an ever-expanding miasma of regulations on individuals and businesses.
‘I want to unlock, release, simplify,’ declared Attal. How often have the French heard this?
Bruno Le Maire, Minister of Economy and Finance, announced last year that he would pass a Bill on ‘administrative simplification’. It’s invisible. President Emmanuel Macron said at a press conference earlier this month that he wanted administrative formalities to be simplified or even abolished as far as possible. We’re still waiting.
It’s not just bureaucrats in France adding to the country’s burden, but those in Europe too. The number of intrusive regulatory texts and laws has exploded, often propelled by the extreme environmental ideology that obsesses the European Union. The revolt of farmers across France and Europe is a symptom of the disconnect between rule makers and those who are expected to obey them.
And now even more civil servants are to be recruited to bring so-called debureaucratisation to every nook and cranny of France.
In the past decade, incomprehensible regulations, absurd laws and fussy standards have flourished – 567 laws, 665 ordinances and 7,451 decrees have been introduced.The Code de Travail, governing every aspect of the relationship between employers and workers in France, runs to 3,400 pages.
‘Every business leader has an example of a despotic and cynical rule that he drags like a ball and chain,’ complains the business magazine Challenges.
‘In textiles, it is the myriad of eco-contribution tariffs for recycling that exasperates: sports pants result in a contribution of 0.0307 euros, while jeans are 0.0907 euros for men and 0.0687 euros for women. Men’s homewear/loungewear pyjamas cost 0.0507 euros, compared to 0.0677 euros for pyjamas.’
‘Like the Maze of mythology, bureaucrats have built a labyrinth of which we are prisoners, like the Minotaur,’ says Sébastien Le Fol, editorial director of the news magazine Le Point.
So debureaucratisation starts to look less like a bonfire of regulations than a tool to let bureaucrats regulate more, with less effort.
For citizens struggling to master their obligations to the state, Attal has promised to streamline French administration by adding yet more officials to work in 3,000 ‘Maisons de France’ tasked with helping citizens negotiate the administrative maze presided over by all the other officials.
The new structure will include representatives from nine public services including the postal service, the employment exchanges, the family benefit service, the health insurance scheme, services for the elderly, regulation and support of the agricultural sector, the tax office, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice.
On top of this, the reform is to be accompanied by the introduction of an an all-encompassing, made-in-France artificial intelligence agent named Albert, which will doubtless involve the employment of even more officials and consultants to create and maintain it.
‘AI will be a chance to put people back at the heart of public services,’ promised Attal. Not that Albert will manage to reduce the number of officials. Everything Albert does will naturally be checked by officials. This is the case with the recent reform of vehicle licensing, which is now ostensibly online, but only inasmuch as the documents produced must be verified by officials.
And none of this will affect the work of the 2.5 million officials employed by the departments, regions, municipalities, mixed syndicates, agglomerations and public hospitals.
Notwithstanding its terrible reputation, French bureaucracy is likely no more awful than that in comparable countries, like Britain, where the tax inquiry office doesn’t answer the phone. Bonfires of red tape have been promised in Britain for decades, with no evident smoke or fire.
Similar bonfires have ever been promised in France even as the rules proliferate. Albert, however artificially intelligent, will not deal with the fundamental problem that every aspect of life here is governed by a procrustean and unaccountable administration. Plus ça change…
What Israel should do about Hezbollah
On Tuesday, Hezbollah launched its deepest attack into Israel since the current round of hostilities between Jerusalem and the Iran-supported Islamist group began last October. Sirens sounded in the town of Acre as drones and rockets were launched at what pro-Hezbollah media described as ‘military targets’ between Acre and Nahariya. There were no casualties. In response, Israeli aircraft struck at Hezbollah targets across the border.
Hezbollah’s decision to strike further south appear to have come in response to the targeted killing by Israel of one of the movement’s senior commanders the previous day. Mohammed Khalil Atiyeh, a senior member of the organisation’s elite Radwan Force from the village of Sarfand in southern Lebanon, was killed in a targeted attack in the Arsoun area, on the night of 22 April.
The only realistic prospect for changing this situation would be an Israeli military operation over the border
Atiyeh, described in the death notice issued by Hezbollah as a ‘martyr jihadi’ killed ‘on the road to Jerusalem’, was the 287th Hezbollah member acknowledged by the movement to have died since 8 October. A second notable operative, Hussein Azkol, was killed on Tuesday morning in an IDF attack on Adlon, a village close to the border. Azkol was described in an IDF statement following his killing as ‘a significant terrorist operative in Hezbollah’s Aerial Defense Unit.’ Hezbollah’s own announcement depicted the slain fighter in identical terms to those used for Atiyeh. Azkol is the 288th Hezbollah man to merit such terms since October.
The details of the latest exchange of fire cast considerable light on the current state of the situation between Israel and its Lebanese enemy. On the one hand, tactically, Israel can derive a certain satisfaction from the daily dynamic. Hezbollah is being significantly bled, haemorrhaging senior and experienced operators.
Compare the figures: in the three-week war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, Hezbollah admitted to losing 250 fighters (both Israel and the UN put the number much higher). The IDF lost 121 killed in that war. This time around, 15 IDF soldiers have been killed, to Hezbollah’s 288.
The notable difference in the body count has resulted, incidentally, in the birth and rapid proliferation of a conspiracy theory on the Hezbollah/Lebanese side, in which Israel is deliberately concealing the real, much higher, death toll among its personnel. Khalil Nasrallah, writing at the English-language, pro-Hezbollah website The Cradle in late March, for example, asserted: ‘Since 8 October, more than 230 Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah fighters in cross-border operations against the occupation state.’
Nasrallah attributed this figure to ‘field data’ obtained by The Cradle, and went on to accuse Israel of ‘masking the true extent of its losses.’ In a country in which so many serve, and the national sport is talking, the idea of such a concealment is ludicrous.
Conspiracy theories aside, the wider story is considerably less heartening from the Israeli point of view.
Israel’s northern border is effectively shut down to a depth of five kilometres from the borderline – the low casualty figures among civilians are because the civilian population has largely moved further south, becoming refugees in their own country. This is a situation unprecedented in Israel’s history.
Around 65,000 people have left their homes. Before October 2023, Hezbollah fighters would patrol in the open on the other side of the border fence, sometimes just metres from Israeli civilian homes. With the October 7th massacres foremost in everyone’s minds, residents of Israel’s north want guarantees that this situation will not return once the current round of fighting ceases. Some 100,000 Lebanese have left their own homes on the other side of the border. American diplomatic efforts to achieve some change in border arrangements are stymied. Hezbollah is the effective ruler of Lebanon, and apparently sees no reason for flexibility in this regard.
The only realistic prospect for changing this situation would be an Israeli military operation over the border to move Hezbollah’s fighters north. But with fighting in Gaza continuing, and with the US administration apparently determined to avoid further escalation, it is not clear if Israel’s leadership will find itself able to order such an operation.
Regionally, the situation becomes less encouraging again. Hezbollah is a creation and instrument of Iran. Teheran, which since 13 April is an active participant in this war but which has been operating its clients and proxies from the beginning, currently maintains control or freedom of operation in the entire area of territory between Israel’s border with Lebanon, and the Iraq-Iran border. This is a vast body of land, taking in the areas of three broken Arab states in which Iran is now the primary actor – Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. In this area, Teheran has established semi-regular Shia, Islamist, client, military forces.
So while Israel may draw some satisfaction from its attrition rate against Lebanese Hezbollah, the situation in the north is to Iran’s advantage. It will remain so unless – until – Jerusalem can find a solution that removes Hezbollah from the border area.
Watch: Cameron squirms over Rwanda questions
Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill might have got through parliament, but are his own ministers convinced it will work? Among the sceptics appears to be Lord Cameron, who seemed a little apprehensive this morning when grilled on the government’s immigration plan. It’s hardly the best look when your own Foreign Secretary appears unconvinced…
Cameron was asked by interviewer Anushka Asthana on ITV’s Peston show whether he would have pursued this same policy if he still was in the top job. A rather reluctant Cameron replied: ‘Well, we had a totally different situation where you could return people directly to France. I’d love that situation to be the case again.’ Hardly a full-throated defence. The newly-created peer continued:
That’s the most sensible thing. People land on a beach in Kent, take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the people smugglers. But that’s not available at the moment.
Asthana suggested that Brexit might be to blame. ‘Because of the situation we’re in, because of the attitude of the others and all the rest of it,’ Lord Cameron replied, in a less than robust reply. The Foreign Secretary seems to be harking back to the days of the Dublin Agreement when the UK was allowed to return asylum seekers to the EU as part of its membership of the EU.
Yet Mr S isn’t sure that a return to the pre-Brexit system would do much to help the current crisis. After all, the Dublin Agreement never amounted to more than a few hundred removals, with a rather miserable net sum of 36 migrants being transferred out of the UK overall between 2015-17. Indeed, between 2010 and 2017, little more than 1,200 migrants were forcibly removed to France. How would the system cope with 50,000 arriving on small boats?
Still, anything is better than Labour’s plan – or, er, lack thereof. The Foreign Secretary was quick to turn the guns on the Opposition to blast the stance of Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour leader with a penchant for U-turns would, for all his talk, ‘do nothing’ about the migrant crisis, Cameron believes – in contrast to the ‘innovative action’ of Sunak. Quite.