Labour will ‘destabilise’ Reform, Badenoch warns

Election day is just around the corner and politicians across the country are pulling out the stops. Now Kemi Badenoch has taken to the fine pages of the Telegraph to urge voters not to back Reform – after new analysis splashed across today’s papers (detailed by Katy here) suggests that 130,000 voters across 100 seats could result in a very different election outcome.

The Business Secretary has opined on the threat posed by an incoming Labour government – which she suggests is Reform’s favoured outcome. ‘Reform leaders have been clear about their aim in this general election,’ Badenoch writes. ‘Not to win it, but to ensure that the Conservatives lose so badly that the party cannot recover.’ In a piece that is not altogether unfriendly towards Nigel Farage, the Conservative candidate for North West Essex warns Reform’s leader:

I don’t know Nigel Farage personally, but like him I know what it is like to be targeted by a disdainful establishment and their luvvie friends. When he was ‘debanked’ by NatWest, it was Conservative ministers like Andrew Griffith and I who intervened and worked quietly behind the scenes to put right that injustice. Labour would not have lifted a finger.

But what will happen if the leaders of Reform get their wish? For a start, just imagine what Labour would have done if it had been in power when the banks started taking away their accounts? What fate awaits Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and their colleagues if they preside over a great thinning of the conservative ranks? I can tell them now. Endless harassment. Impotence. And the slow destruction of all they claim to hold dear. With no serious opposition, the Labour MPs I have watched for seven years would use all the might of the state to destabilise and marginalise organisations like Reform and anyone anywhere close to it…

The people who would suffer most are the people who Reform claims to stand up for – the overlooked and undervalued decent and conservative majority of this country. But that majority will be left defenceless by Reform if it gets its wish and gifts Labour a super-majority.

Strong stuff. Acknowledging there may be ‘unhappiness at what this government has left undone’, Badenoch attempts to woo Reform voters, writing that ‘many good people may be tempted to vote Reform because they share that sense of disappointment and frustration’. The Business Secretary admits that Reform ‘may be correct in identifying what is wrong’ with Britain but concludes a vote for the Farage-founded party will ‘let Labour in’. Slamming Starmer’s army, Badenoch criticises its plans to scrap the Rwanda scheme before turning to its treatment of gender-critical women like Rosie Duffield. The senior Tory then suggests Sir Keir will reverse Brexit and ‘replicate the rules of the single market by stealth’ before concluding: ‘The Commons will be a very cold house for the two or three Reform MPs that you get in exchange for 150 Conservative ones.’ Oo er. Talk about all guns blazing…

Recent MRP polls have suggested the Conservatives could end up with less than 100 seats on 5 July, while another survey suggested Reform could beat the Tories on vote share. The latest YouGov polling suggests over 800,000 voters in the 100 tightest seats could back Farage’s party on Thursday, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would need just under half of these people to back him to deprive Starmer’s party of a majority. Will Badenoch’s eleventh-hour warnings be enough to sway potential Reform voters? Watch this space…

Is it going wrong for Reform?

Has Reform peaked too soon? In the wake of Rishi Sunak’s D-Day debacle, the party was riding high in the polls. Successive surveys suggested that they were neck-and-neck with the Tories. After one poll even showed Reform ahead, Nigel Farage hailed it as a ‘crossover moment’. He jokingly referred to himself as the ‘Leader of the Opposition’, declaring he ‘absolutely’ believed Reform would win more votes than the Conservatives.

A fortnight on, things now look a little less rosy for Reform. Following Farage’s interview with Nick Robinson – in which he suggested the West helped provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the party faced an onslaught of cross-party criticism. Reform’s response was to go on the attack. Farage criticised Boris Johnson and the Mail newspapers and tried to frame the row as an indictment of the establishment’s foreign policy failings.

It wasn’t long before Reform was embroiled in a fresh scandal: Channel 4 broadcast secret recordings last Thursday which showed supporters making a series of offensive comments. Rather than simply sack the offenders and play down the row, the party leadership again chose to go on the offensive. Richard Tice, the party chairman, suggested darkly that one of the activists was a paid actor and pledged to refer Channel 4 to the Electoral Commission.

In the days since then, there has been a steady stream of newspaper stories featuring various Reform candidates making offensive comments. Several have now announced they are quitting the party in protest, with the latest being Georgie David – the Reform nominee for West Ham and Beckton. She defected to the Tories this morning, claiming the ‘vast majority’ of her fellow candidates are ‘racist, misogynistic and bigoted’.

Reform’s response has been to insinuate dark forces are at play. ‘Desperate toxic Tories sent us some Trojan horse candidates,’ tweeted Tice, ‘by offering jobs, safe council seats etc to spread lies.’ Such Machiavellian machinations might seem a little implausible, given the state of the rest of the Tory campaign. It serves though as another example of Reform hitting back hard at any criticism – at the risk of endangering their central message by becoming embroiled in minor spats. 

It remains to be seen whether these distractions have cost the party votes but it appears to have checked their previous momentum. YouGov has Reform down from 19 points to 17, while Savanta, JL Partners and Deltapoll have them dropping a point each to 13, 16 and 16 per cent respectively. Rather than punching the Tory immigration bruise, Reform is now playing defence, not attack, on a series of diversions – some by their leadership’s own design.

Listen to more analysis from Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls, and James Heale on Coffee House Shots:

Can Sinn Fein win the UK’s most marginal constituency again?

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue bunting, there are a sea of Israeli flags fluttering in the drizzle. Across town, in nationalist estates, Palestinian flags abound. These adopted tribal identities epitomise the immutable sectarian character of the competition for the seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. While Northern Ireland is slowly becoming a more homogenous society and progressive politics makes progress in the urban east, out here on the rural edge of the union, it’s different.

In the 2019 general election, just 57 votes separated the winner Sinn Fein’s Michelle Gildrenew from her Unionist rival. In 2010, after numerous recounts and a legal challenge Gildrenew won with a majority of four votes. The constituency as a whole has a narrow nationalist majority but a single unionist candidate and two nationalist contenders makes it mathematically possible for Ulster Unionist candidate Diana Armstrong to squeak through. Voting outturn here, sometimes as high as 70 per cent, routinely puts the rest of the Union to shame. The non-partisan alternatives to unionism and republicanism, mainly represented by the Alliance party struggles to make much of a dent in proceedings. Westminster contests, shorn of the nuance available in regional elections, is and ever was an orange and green dogfight.

Sinn Fein’s candidate is Pat Cullen and for once, they have put up a candidate who has something of a national profile, albeit one that is proving difficult to reconcile. Cullen was until earlier this year the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, negotiating with the government over the long-running nurses pay dispute. That battle ended with a below inflation pay rise giving rise to some criticism of Cullen as a negotiator. Others praise a ‘steely’ resolve that prompted her to lead nurses on their first strike in 106 years. Fermanagh and South Tyrone is a far cry from smoke-filled rooms in Whitehall. But standing for Sinn Fein requires candidates to adhere to a strict and limited set of lines to take on the recent conflict here – specifically on the IRA’s terror campaign. In the constituency she wants to represent, the Protestant population was traumatised by violent extremists who murdered dozens of their neighbours in cold blood in circumstances that were nakedly sectarian, cowardly and brutal.

These horrifying acts culminated in the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb in 1987 when the IRA killed 12 people in an attack at the town’s cenotaph. It was a horror so extreme that it was condemned even by the Kremlin. In that incident, three nurses were slain: two retired and one, Marie Wilson, was just starting on her career. All were, or had been, members of the Royal College of Nursing.

Cullen, who has been avoiding some media encounters, has been unable to condemn the murders of people who still have living and traumatised relatives. When pressed, she deploys the standard Sinn Fein line that all killings were awful and it’s time we move on.

It remains to be seen whether this ‘nothing to see here’ PR strategy will have any impact on her support base. This seems unlikely given the fact that this constituency has returned an IRA hunger striker in Bobby Sands and, after his death, his election agent, to parliament. Sinn Fein’s dismal performance in the recent local and European elections south of the border may have more of an impact. This is widely seen as a rejection of their pro-migration stance, which has led to widespread ill feeling and even riots as asylum seekers are bussed around the Republic of Ireland into communities badly prepared to receive them.

Unlike Pat Cullen, her Unionist rival, Diana Armstrong is born and bred in the constituency. She is a councillor and past chair of Fermanagh and Omagh district council and, unlike Sinn Fein, if elected she will take the King’s oath and her place in the House of Commons. She feels that Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy has damaged the reputation of this beautiful region and that the missing voice on the green benches has blocked representation and opportunities. She’s pointedly not going after Cullen’s refusal to condemn IRA attacks and focused instead on her record and the future:

‘I know this patch like the back of my hand. I’ve been to every corner of this constituency and knocked on thousands of doors, unlike my rivals. People might not like my politics but they know me and they know that as a public representative, whatever their national identity, I will do my best for them. Agribusiness in this constituency feeds the United Kingdom. The natural beauty here is waiting to be harnessed. Developing our potential in these areas needs a strong voice not a parochial one’

There’s nothing to suggest that Cullen won’t also do her best for all of the people of the constituency, the boundary of which has been redrawn slightly in the build-up to this election. However, her refusal to condemn the IRA bombing – as well as the fact she won’t take up a seat in the Commons – make this distinction real.

Churchill once decried the ‘integrity’ of the quarrel of the people in the ‘dull and dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ He was half right. This is a stunningly beautiful part of the world. The light pouring over the huge glacial bowl Lower Lough Erne sits in is heart-stoppingly beautiful. The killing that disfigured this edge of the Union has stopped and, for most of the people most of the time, the constitutional question takes a back seat to disaffection with roads, schools and healthcare. But every five years or so, the atavistic elements of grievance and identity are disinterred. This is a constituency that has bled much in the past and is now on a razor’s edge. Anything can happen.

Who cares what Keir Starmer does with his Friday nights?

As part of their vote-Tory-or-the-kitten-gets-it final push, the Conservatives have spent the past 12 hours pushing the idea that Keir Starmer would ‘clock off’ at 6 p.m. as prime minister. This was based on a radio interview the Labour leader gave where he said he would try to protect Friday evenings for his family: his wife is Jewish and they raise their children in that tradition. Labour has been pushing back pretty hard against the Tory attacks on this matter, saying Starmer didn’t suggest in the interview that he would refuse to take important calls on a Friday night, and pointing to the full transcript where he also argued that working non-stop isn’t good for decision making.

He has a point, not just about the principle of taking a break and spending time with your family one night a week, but also about the way the public views this kind of behaviour. The workaholism of other prime ministers, including Rishi Sunak and Gordon Brown, for instance, hasn’t automatically endeared them to the public. But other leaders have struggled with the suggestion that they aren’t fully committed to the job. David Cameron was often criticised for ‘chillaxing’, though that seemed to have a wider application to playing tennis and sitting around in meetings with colleagues with his shoes off and feet on the table. Boris Johnson was often accused of being too busy with a number of other activities ranging from his personal life to writing lucrative books. I’m not sure, though, that Starmer’s character flaw in government is going to turn out to be laziness. 

The Labour leader addressed the attacks when he spoke to Times Radio this lunchtime. He argued that ‘all I said was that on a Friday night, I try to protect time for my family… it is laughably ridiculous that this has become talked about by the Tories’. He accused the Conservatives of ‘desperation’, and complained that in the final few days of campaigning, the parties should be talking about ‘serious’ matters. He added: ‘In two days we are going to the polls. this should be about the change that is before the electorate.’ 

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This is interesting, because while Starmer’s slogan is ‘change’, much of his own campaign has ended up focusing on Tory behaviour. This election has been dominated by rows about conduct, whether in the campaign itself (Rishi Sunak leaving D-day early) or looking further back to the premierships of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. Even when the debate has drifted towards policy, it has ended up being about dodgy figures like the £2,000 tax claim made by Sunak about a Labour government. The ‘change’ Starmer talks most fluently about is doing government properly, behaving well, and making politics work again.

There is naturally a lot of purchase for a campaign based on behaviour, especially after the past few years. Tory MPs still say that their most visceral experiences on the doorstep were during the row over Partygate – worse, even, than when they were talking to voters angry about the expenses scandal. The public is particularly intolerant of bad behaviour when they feel that politics isn’t delivering for them: I suspect people would be happy for all MPs to be issued with a duck house on being elected if they had confidence that the economy was being well-run, that institutions had the right level of accountability and that public services were something they could have faith in when they need them. It’s not just the behaviour itself, it’s what’s not happening alongside it, or even as a result of it. 

Starmer has set a lot of store by the prospect of changing politics so that it works properly, though as with many other things, he is rather short on how he will actually do that. He also has a huge task of ensuring that the things that matter to people – the economy, institutions and public services – are at least changing enough by the time of the next election that people aren’t once again disappointed by someone who turns out to have over-promised. There are so many questions over how Starmer will achieve what he is offering. How he spends his Friday night isn’t one of them.

The shame of Royal Mail’s postal vote delay

Britain’s creaking infrastructure and frequent paralysis of public services deserved to be a bigger factor in the election campaign than it has been. But could it now actually affect the result by disenfranchising some voters?

A growing number of voters have complained about failing to receive their ballot papers in the post. Given that many people requested postal votes because they knew they were going to be away from home this week, it will now be too late for them to vote, even if delays are sorted out at the last moment.

It is not just ballot papers, either, which have been delayed. Until last Monday I had not received a single election communication through the post – the mailshots candidates are allowed to send at public expense. Then, suddenly, came a rush of them all at once. Other people I have spoken to have reported a similar absence of mailshots in the first four weeks of the campaign. I am not claiming that they make great reading or have contributed to helping me – or many other people – make up their minds, but these communications will have come too late for many postal voters.

Come Friday, and the late arrival of postal ballots threatens to become a major scandal. What if bags of ballot papers start arriving at council offices at the same time as Keir Starmer – or Rishi Sunak, or someone else – is heading to the Palace to be asked to form a new government?

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At the heart of this is a remarkable growth in postal voting. While volumes of mail have fallen dramatically in recent years, the postal service is playing an ever-greater role in our democratic process. In 2019, 6.9 million votes – 21 per cent of the total – were postal votes. Yet these votes are being handled by a company which is trying to wriggle out of its public service obligation to provide a six-day-a-week universal postal service to every address in the country. That’s without also mentioning that it is about to be sold to a Czech private equity firm which is sure to try to excuse itself to an even greater extent from having to provide a universal postal service.

At some point the government is going to have to consider the case for electronic voting. After all, when it comes to just about every other facet of human existence the government is trying to force us online with its ‘digital first’ strategy. Just try applying for benefits or paying your taxes via the post. Yet when it comes to voting, the state seems to drop all the guff about digital being the future and insists that we do everything via the Royal Mail.

Could delays in postal ballots change the result of the election? That is unlikely given the vast gulf in the polls. Yet there is some evidence that the Conservatives will suffer more if postal ballots are not delivered on time. A study published in the journal Parliamentary Affairs using data from the British election study 2019 found that the likelihood of someone voting by post rises steadily with age. Labour and Liberal Democrat voters were less likely to vote by post – which is unsurprising, given their age profile. What the study didn’t find, on the other hand, is significant variation in rates of postal voting between high density urban areas and low density rural areas – in spite of polling stations being closer at hand in the former.

A delay in postal votes, in other words, looks like it would hit the Conservatives the hardest – but not remotely by enough to make a difference to the outcome.      

How Hungary’s presidency could shake up the EU

Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its rotating presidency, under which the 27 member states take it in turns to do a six-month stint running its technically supreme political body, the European Council. This week, Hungary, the bad boy of Europe, took over the hot seat. It keeps it until the end of this year.

The difficulty is that the government of Viktor Orbán in Budapest, albeit still popular at home, is at loggerheads with the EU. Politically, its scepticism over Ukraine’s war effort and its open dislike for liberal social policies exasperate Brussels; legally, it is under attack over the so-called rule of law, LGBT rights and its intransigence on immigration and asylum. No wonder Brussels looks askance at having to take orders from it, or that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has already taken the symbolic step of calling off a proposed goodwill visit to the Hungarian capital.

Not that the presidency actually allows Hungary to do very much. No decision of import in the EU can be taken without the say-so of the Commission, and that body, notwithstanding populist successes in EU elections last month, remains firmly under the control of von der Leyen’s liberal ascendancy. Apart from a few ceremonial and bureaucratic functions, the main function of the country holding the presidency is setting the agenda for the Council.

Nevertheless, Hungary’s position does give it some promising opportunities to shake things up in Brussels while nevertheless acting, as the tradition has it, as ‘honest broker’ between the EU and the member States. First, even if it cannot do much of what it wants, its right to set the Council agenda allows it to obstruct a good deal of what it does not want. In eastern Europe there is, for example, unhappiness about the centre’s forays into social policy; it is a fair inference that such matters will be largely kept off the discussions at the table for the next few months.

Second, that same right allows it to set the tone of the discussion that does take place. A country taking on the presidency by tradition expresses some broad aims. Normally these are fairly anodyne: for instance Belgium, Hungary’s predecessor, comfortingly emphasised promoting a global Europe, reinforcing a social and health agenda, and ensuring a ‘green and just transition’ in fighting climate change.

Hungary’s expressed programme, by contrast, is disconcertingly muscular. It aims to force onto the table pressing issues such as bolstering its competitiveness, reinforcing its defence, addressing demographic challenges, and dealing with illegal migration. Another theme which will seriously unsettle the Eurocrats is ‘promoting a farmer-oriented EU agricultural policy’: code for an explosive attack on the current aggressive green EU agenda and a deliberate reference to the farmers’ revolts of the last few months in, among others, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

Thirdly, by turning the discussion to subjects he, and not Brussels, wants to talk about, Viktor Orbán may be able to rally other countries such as Slovakia and perhaps even Georgia Meloni’s Italy to be more independent-minded when it comes to dealing with Brussels.

If Orbán succeeds, Brussels will have to deal with, at least, a loss of face. To have to show respect to a country it has been bossing around for years is galling. Furthermore, with Hungary setting the agenda, the EU will find it more difficult to strut on the world stage on such matters as climate change or aid to Ukraine – something countries like China and Russia will know perfectly well.

One suspects the bloc’s machine is resigned to not being able to do a great deal for the next six months. Prior to yesterday, it took quiet steps to rush through the Council a Russia sanctions package and a formal start to accession talks with Ukraine. Today it is no doubt looking forward wistfully to 1 January, when the reliably pro-European regime of Donald Tusk in Poland will take over the reins and (it hopes) restore business as usual.

But behind all this there is a more ominous long-term worry. The European elections last month provided big gains to nationalist parties opposed to EU micromanagement; national elections in Italy a couple of years ago gave a shock promotion to the Fratelli d’Italia under Georgia Meloni. Even if Marine le Pen’s Rassemblement National does not win this weekend’s French poll it will be a close-run thing. Couple that with the farmers’ protests last month, and Brussels is looking increasingly out of touch with the peoples whose interests it claims to serve.

It is true that the EU’s constitution is arranged, rather like that of Bismarck’s Second Reich, to draw as much real power as possible away from the people and towards officials at the centre. But, especially in a system of nation states without a government able in the last resort to impose its will, there are limits to what this can achieve. Unless it treads carefully, in the next couple of decades the EU risks becoming not so much a superstate as a tiresome irrelevance.

Georgia’s Euros run gave the nation some respite

If you had told me a month ago that Georgia would make it into the play-offs, defeating Portugal on the way, I’d have called you mad – which, much like in English, isn’t a word in Georgian that necessarily carries a negative connotation. Over these last two weeks, especially after the historic 2-0 win against Portugal, we Georgians all went a little bit mad. With Georgia being the cradle of wine (we invented it), it’s perhaps unsurprising that copious amounts were consumed.

Come Sunday, however, after the utter demolition inflicted by a ruthless and vastly superior Spanish team, the mood was somewhat subdued. Georgians are like that. We believe we can always win, even when all the evidence points to the contrary. We get upset when things don’t happen exactly the way we envisioned in our feverish dreams. But still our boys wrote history.

Our team did better than anyone expected. Take Georges Mikautadze, deemed surplus to requirements at the decidedly mediocre Ajax team in the Netherlands: he proved his doubters wrong. Take the rock in the defence, captain Guram Kashia, who (at the twilight of his career) marshalled the defences as if they were going into battle. Or take Watford’s darling, Giorgi Chakvetadze, who mounted an unlikely comeback (twice!) from career-threatening injuries, to reinvent himself from a fleet-footed winger into a maestro of midfield. 

Giorgi Kochorashvili, from the Spanish team Levante, will be one of the biggest discoveries of Euro 2024 – and is unlikely to remain in Spain’s second tier for long. Otar Kiteishvili, the best player in the Austrian Bundesliga last season, was the team’s backbone and engine (he played a role not dissimilar to that which Didier Deshamps played for the French team that were crowned world champions in 1998) and it is no coincidence that his injury against Spain proved to be the beginning of the end for our side. With him in full fitness, we withstood relentless pressure from the Spaniards for 42 minutes.

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And what can you say about the goalkeeper, Giorgi Mamardashvili? He already enjoys a semi-mythical stature in Georgia. Every time he made an improbable save, our nation let out a collective sigh of relief. After his Euro performances, his transfer into one of the top European clubs seems to be a foregone conclusion and a question of when, not if. Less obvious is the contribution of the teams biggest star and talisman, Napoli’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, on whom all Georgian hopes rested prior to the Euros. He scored the all-important opener against Portugal, but this run was a group effort first and foremost. If his much-talked about move to Paris Saint-Germain materialises, it will be intriguing to see whether he proves himself a worthy heir to Kylian Mbappe’s throne.

The man who masterminded it all was former Bayern Munich and France stalwart Willy Sagnol. Already he is a national treasure: ‘Veni, Vidi, Willy’ was the headline one paper opted for after our group stage upset against Portugal. Sagnol instilled discipline and turned the team into a closely-knit group, but still he has his doubters. Many question his tactical acumen and flexibility, while some accuse him of arrogance and favouritism. There is much talk about him leaving Georgia for greener pastures as Ireland’s top man. Will the Irish press accept the way he speaks to journalists?

Finally, on geopolitics. For a country and people so divided, this championship proved to be a soothing balm – a healing that brought people together. For those that don’t know, Georgia is ‘at the crossroads’. While its people yearn for Europe, and have done so ever since regaining independence 34 years ago, its government, with a shadowy oligarch pulling the strings, seems determined to drag the country back onto Russia’s orbit with an array of laws aimed at curtailing civil liberties. (By the way, the oligarch in question, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the nation’s richest man and former prime minister, pledged a hefty sum of £8.4 million if Georgia were to advance from the group stage. Defender Luka Lochoshvili, quizzed over whether the money provided additional motivation for the team, said: ‘It’s a nice gesture, but we play for the country, not for the money.’) 

With Georgia heading towards a crucial, winner-takes-all election in October, the national team’s heroics gave the nation some needed respite. They showed, too, where we belong: in Europe.

Will there be an election upset on Thursday?

In just two days, voters will head to the polling booth to cast their vote in the 2024 general election. Will there be any surprises in store? So far, there has been little movement when it comes to the gap in vote share between Labour and the Tories. While Labour’s has fallen during the campaign, the Tories have failed to benefit too much from it thanks to the Reform party – which is eating into their vote share.

A poll by Savanta for today’s Telegraph finds that the Tory campaign has steadied things since their mid-campaign D-Day gaffe: the party is now at its highest level since the debacle with 24 points. Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s Reform party appears to have dropped a few points since its June high, following a series of rows over Farage’s comments on Russia and the past comments of Reform candidates.

Yet the big picture remains as it did when the campaign started: Keir Starmer looks set for a sizeable majority and Rishi Sunak for a historic defeat. In the final days of the campaign, both men appear to admit this. Sunak is spending his final days warning of the dangers of a Labour super majority, suggesting if 130,000 voters switch to the Tories the election result could look very different. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has countered in today’s Times that the larger the majority the better as he needs a ‘strong mandate’ to make the ‘difficult changes’ required to boost the economy. These include on planning reform, which a Labour government would make a priority in its first few weeks.

Yet in every election there tends to be a surprise factor that few saw coming. What could it be in 2024? One obvious factor is turnout – in France there was high turnout over the weekend in the first of Macron’s snap elections. In the UK, there are concerns that many voters will stay at home. ‘Our biggest opponent is the sofa,’ says a Tory aide. Another opponent could be mortality – the number of Tory voters who have passed away since the 2019 election.

Both Labour and Tory activists say that the polls do not reflect the feeling on the ground in a lot of places. Yes, Labour figures are increasingly confident they will win the election. But they still believe it is tight in lots of places and polls suggesting a super-majority do not capture the apathy and frustration they are encountering on the doorstep. In Scotland, while there are high expectations when it comes to a Scottish Labour resurgence, one of the big questions is how sturdy the SNP vote is – the majorities are so small in many of the Labour/SNP marginals that it could go down to the wire.

Meanwhile, the Tories say some areas are truly dreadful when it comes to the reception on the door: Suffolk and Derbyshire come up regularly as such examples. But more generally, it does not feel quite as bad as the polls suggest. The Tory hope is that their attacks on tax and warnings of the dangers of a big Labour win mean that voters will think twice in the polling booth. If so, the result could be a less bad loss than expected. ‘The polls just don’t feel right to me,’ says a Tory candidate. ‘I may be in denial but I don’t see it’.

Another factor that could skew things is the number of independent candidates. In the local elections, independents running on pro-Palestine platforms ate into Labour’s vote share in areas with a high Muslim population. There are seats where this could have an impact in this general election, such as in Birmingham (including that of the shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmood) and Yorkshire. As the Guardian reports, local community WhatsApp groups means that messages are being shared quickly and spreading fast in a way that could hurt the main parties. Starmer’s suggest in the final BBC election debate that ‘people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they’re not being processed’ was quickly shared on WhatsApp around the Bangladeshi community.

When it comes to the Reform party, one less noticed aspect of the party’s appeal is with younger voters, particularly young men. The party believes it is winning over the youth vote as the campaign goes on – partly helped by its social media game. If the party manages to start a mini youthquake of its own it could have a surprise impact on the result in some seats.

This is why there remains plenty of uncertainty across the parties as to what the exit poll will say at 10 p.m. on Thursday night.

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Scottish independence could be the biggest loser on election day

As the hours tick down to polling day, Scottish nationalists are beginning to assess the damage this election campaign has inflicted on the cause of Scottish independence. Far from being a springboard to a second independence referendum, as Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf had forecast, it looks set to draw a line under the wave of Scottish nationalism that has dominated Scottish politics for most of the last two decades as the SNP’s new leader, John Swinney fails to stop the party’s relentless slide in voter support.

It’s a hard lesson in the vicissitudes of politics. As recently as November 2022, the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, still riding high in the polls, claimed the SNP could win a majority of votes and seats in Scotland in this 2024 general election – for the first time since the Tories did the double in 1955. She said this would constitute a ‘de facto referendum’ and would trigger independence negotiations with Westminster. That looks ludicrously optimistic now. 

Even John Swinney’s amended forecast that a majority of seats would launch ‘negotiations with Westminster’ now looks like the rashest hostage to fortune. The SNP is in line to return 18 MPs on Thursday against Labour’s 28. If this were a de facto referendum on any franchise, then clearly the SNP has lost it. At least, that’s what unionist party leaders will be saying loud and clear on Friday morning.

But if it’s a historic set-back on the road to national liberation, it would be hard to tell from John Swinney’s demeanour in the past week. Jo Biden could do with a dose of whatever the FM is on. Swinney has been beaming with positivity and vigour as he parades around Scotland – in an SNP- yellow sports car wearing yellow-framed shades like a presbyterian version of Miami Vice. Brought out of retirement to fight this election, Swinney seems determined to make the most of it. 

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But if the SNP leader is living the dream his party looks set to inherit the nightmare. Election strategists in the SNP had hoped that the threat of a Starmer supermajority would be enough to bring back some disillusioned nationalist voters. After all, the adage that Westminster only listens to Scotland when it votes SNP is a pretty sound one. But those voters haven’t been tempted back.

Yet Keir Starmer’s recent pronouncements on tax, immigration and Brexit certainly haven’t chimed with what are usually supposed to be Scotland’s progressive sensibilities.  This may be why the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has now dangled the prospect of Scotland having a more liberal immigration policy than the rest of the UK. One of the less remarked upon failings of the past 17 years of SNP government has been the paucity of migrants coming to Scotland, despite chronic skill shortages in areas like social care.  Net migration to the UK in 2022 was 745,000 but only 20,000 migrants came north, for reasons that aren’t entirely reducible to the weather.   

But if anyone thinks Keir Starmer is going to give the Scottish parliament control over immigration they have another think coming. He’s not likely to offer a back-door via Scotland. Even Anas Sarwar says immigration overall is too high. 

However, UK Labour are in the market for offering concessions to Scotland, if only to assist Anas Sarwar in translating this week’s expected victory into success in the Scottish parliamentary elections in 2026. Labour is currently third in Holyrood in terms of seats, after the Tories. Gordon Brown will no doubt be pushing his plans for turning the House of Lords into a Senate elected by the nations and regions. Though Starmer has avoided any mention of this in the past week. 

What Starmer will definitely not be offering is a repeat referendum on independence. In fact he refuses to discuss the matter – for a very good reason. There is precious little demand for any kind of referendum in Scotland right now. Indeed, in this general election campaign the steam has evaporated from the entire independence movement.

Leaving the UK now comes far down the priorities of Scottish voters after health, cost of living, and education. In the latest YouGov poll, independence even came behind immigration, which is remarkable given that this has rarely been a key issue in Scottish politics. Perhaps Scotland is not so immune to Nigel Farage’s politics as everyone thought. Indeed, Reform is currently polling level with the Scottish Liberal Democrats and could overtake them on Thursday night. 

That would be the supreme irony of this election. The Scottish National party, icon of progressive internationalism, plunges to defeat as national populism gets a foothold in Scottish politics. It is a hard message for supporters of independence. Indeed, the Union, written off but so many only a few years ago, looks almost as safe as it ever has been in the past 300 years. 

Giorgia Meloni will enjoy taking revenge on Macron

The German government has expressed its ‘concern’ at the prospect of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally forming the next government of France. Poland’s PM Donald Tusk – the man who said Brexiteers deserved ‘a special place in hell’ – responded to the result by saying ‘this is all really starting to smell very dangerous’.

Not in Italy, where the odour wafting down from France after the first round of the parliamentary election was rather to the liking of Giorgia Meloni. ‘I congratulate the Rassemblement National and its allies for the clear success,’  she said.

As in Italy, she noted, French voters had been bullied and harassed by a cultural and media elite who ‘attempt to demonise and corner the people who don’t vote for the left’.

That this campaign of intimidation had failed was a cause for celebration. ‘It’s a trick that serves to escape from the debate on the merits of the different political proposals,’ explained Meloni. ‘But it’s a trick that fewer and fewer people fall for.’

When Meloni was on the campaign trail to become PM in 2022 she was frequently likened to Mussolini. Progressive journalists took exception to her traditional views on family, and her opposition to transgenderism and mass immigration. As I wrote at the time, ‘according to the world media Italy’s new leader is Il Duce in a blouse’.

When Meloni won the election, no administration was more ungracious in acknowledging her victory than France. The then Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, refrained from offering any congratulations to the first woman to be elected Italian premier; instead she issued a reminder that ‘in Europe we have values, and that each State must respect these values – the rule of law, human rights, abortion rights.’

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The French transport minister Clément Beaune, noted the similarities between the flame used as the symbol of Le Pen’s party and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy: ‘It is the flame from Mussolini’s tomb, the symbol chosen by Italian neo-fascists,’ he said.

The final straw for Meloni was when Macron’s European Affairs Minister, Laurence Boone, sniffed that ‘we will monitor respect for rights and freedoms’.

In a social media post, Meloni retorted: ‘I want to hope that, as often happens, the leftist press has misrepresented the real statements made by foreign government officials, and I trust that the French government will immediately deny these words, which resemble too much an unacceptable threat of interference against a sovereign state.’

There was no public comment from Paris and relations between Meloni and Macron have remained ice cold. As recently as last month the pair clashed over abortion rights at the G7 summit in Italy, and a clip of Meloni extending a less than warm welcome to Macron went viral.

Italy's Giorgia Meloni can't hide her contempt for Macron 🤣
pic.twitter.com/Rk4bhBzJkO

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) June 14, 2024

No EU leader will have enjoyed Macron’s humiliation at the hands of Le Pen more than Meloni. She may also have raised a smile at the news that Clément Beaune lost his seat in the first round of voting, and that Elisabeth Borne may lose hers in the second round of voting on Sunday.

Borne finished second behind the National Rally candidate, but she may salvage her political career if Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise withdraws its candidate from the second round and instructs its voters to support Borne in order to defeat the National Rally. But would Borne, a woman who places such emphasis on European values, wish to benefit from the support of LFI, a party which is widely perceived by French Jews as encouraging anti-Semitism?

Meloni has done Le Pen a big favour in extending her congratulations. Far from turning into a 21st century Mussolini since becoming PM, Meloni has become the most effective leader in the EU. She is also the darling of conservatives across the continent, and it was significant that she referenced the French centre-right Republicans in her remarks about the election. ‘Even the Republicans are oriented towards not participating in the so-called republican front,’ said Meloni.

This ‘front’, or coalition, has for many years been erected by parties in France in between voting rounds to ensure Le Pen doesn’t win.

Prior to the parliamentary elections, the president of the Republicans in France, Eric Ciotti, allied with Le Pen, to the anger of the party’s grandees. The Republicans polled 10 per cent in Sunday’s first round and have said they will not be advising their voters on whom to support in the second round.

But the fact Meloni has endorsed Le Pen will encourage the middle-class Republican supporters to fall in behind the National Rally. If they’re good enough for Meloni, then they’re good enough for us.

Meloni has conservative credibility. She represents what the Republican party in France once stood for: economic liberalism and social conservatism, before they moved to the centre and, like the British Tories, became social democrats and purveyors of progressivism.
Meloni has waited a long time to get back at Macron and his progressive government for their arrogance and disdain they have shown her. Revenge has never smelled sweeter.

Reform candidate called for Sturgeon to be shot

Oh dear. Just two days to go until polling day and Reform is once again in the limelight after yet more controversial comments by a candidate have come to light. It transpires that the party’s Orkney and Shetland choice, Robert Smith, is responsible for a series of damning social media posts – in which he takes aim at JK Rowling, Nicola Sturgeon and Ursula von Der Leyen amongst others.

Between 2016 and 2023, Smith took to social media to post about a number of political and public figures using rather derogatory language. The Times reports that Smith targeted journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and London mayor Sadiq Khan using vulgar sexual language. He called Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, ‘head bitch of the globalists’. And, after persistently using the word ‘bitch’ in reference to Rowling, journalist Kay Burley and Sturgeon, Reform’s Scottish candidate also shared an article about Scotland’s former first minister, writing: ‘Since the great David Attenborough legitimised calls for political leaders to be shot, why not start with this bitch?’ Good heavens…

Party leader Nigel Farage has already apologised for candidate choices who ‘should never, ever have been there’, adding he plans to put the party under ‘much, much stricter control’. Party spokesperson Ann Widdecombe has said that sexist language is ‘unacceptable’, telling Radio 4 that: ‘It’s perfectly true that in all parties, you sometimes get bad apples. And it’s also true that some slipped through the vetting processes.’ A fortnight ago, Farage slammed the vetting firm he had used for ‘stitching up’ Reform UK after the party signed a £144,000 contract with Vetting.com. However the company site says that instead of being an ‘outsourced background screening company’, it provides clients ‘with the ability to complete your own background screening in house’. How curious…

While the gap between the Tories and Reform narrowed significantly after Farage announced he would become party leader and stand as a candidate – with his self-described ‘start-up’ even overtaking Sunak’s boys in blue in one poll – more recently support for the right-wing group has fallen. A BMG Research survey for the i newspaper carried out between 24-26 June saw Reform UK slide down three points to 16 per cent from its record high of 19 per cent the week before. It followed Farage’s ‘Putin ally’ row, where the Reform leader said he ‘admired [Putin] as a political operator’ and suggested the West had provoked the war in Ukraine by giving the Russian leader an excuse to invade.

Will this latest candidate scandal further dent the party’s support? Well, it’s certainly not helping internal party relations. Only a few hours later, a second Reform candidate has now denounced the party. West Ham and Beckton choice Georgie David cited the questionable views of her fellow candidates – along with the leadership’s failure to tackle them – as fuelling her decision to leave, stating:

I am in no doubt that the party and its senior leadership are not racist. However, as the vast majority of candidates are indeed racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, I do not wish to be directly associated with people who hold such views that are so vastly opposing to my own and what I stand for.

Crikey. David has since suspended her campaign and is now backing her Tory rival. It comes after Liam Booth-Isherwood, formerly a Reform candidate for Erewash, disowned the party on Sunday over allegations of racism. Will the last candidate to leave Reform please turn out the light?

What the Supreme Court immunity ruling means for Donald Trump

Yesterday, reviewing last week’s Supreme Court decisions, I noted that the court would probably issue its final opinion of the season, on the question of presidential immunity.

So it turned out to be. Yesterday, ‘Trump v. United States’ dropped. For the first time, the Court pondered the question, ‘Does a president have immunity from prosecution?’ or, to use the language of the opinion, ‘Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.’

The answer was more or less what I predicted. I wrote that, while no one outside the hallowed halls of the Court really knew how the Court would come down on the issue, ‘most observers expect the Supremes to recognise immunity for “official acts” but to remand to the lower court the vexed question of what counts as an “official” and therefore protected act.’

That is precisely how the Court decided, 6-3 (Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissenting). Though in fact the opinion was even more robustly phrased than I could have hoped. ‘Under our constitutional structure of separated powers,’ the Syllabus of the opinion reads, ‘the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.’ The one caveat was this: ‘There is no immunity for unofficial acts.’

Donald Trump once boasted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone and not lose any voters, so loyal were his supporters. That may or may not be the case, but I think we can agree that such an action would fall outside the domain of ‘official acts.’

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How about disputing the results of the 2020 election? Jack Smith’s indictment included various curlicues, but that is what it boiled down to. Trump maintains that he believed he had won and was merely trying to protect the integrity of the elections, ergo, his actions were ‘official’.

That is the $64,000 question. It will be decided in the first instance by the same DC court that found Trump guilty. Since the Court is in Washington and the judge appears to be anti-Trump, you can take it as meaning that she will not find for Donald Trump. But then his lawyers will appeal, and the case will almost certainly not be decided until after the election.

Sonia Sotomayor wept bitter tears in her long dissent. The very idea of presidential immunity is anti-democratic. The Court’s decision ‘makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.’ She then indulged us with a little aria about Donald Trump’s ‘criminal and treasonous acts’ etc.

Were Justice Sotomayor’s view to prevail, a president would require a rearview mirror before he took office, for his every action would potentially be open to challenge or later legal action.

Where does President Trump’s behaviour fit on the schema laid out by the Court? That’s for the DC district court to consider. I would be shocked if they found for Trump. But it won’t matter, because by the time it is finally adjudicated by the Supreme Court, Trump will likely have been reelected and the question will be moot. 

This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.

Why does Japan want to build a 300-mile conveyor belt?

In a move that sounds like something out of the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis, the Japanese government has announced that it will build a 300-mile conveyer belt for trade to link Tokyo and Osaka. The ‘Auto-flow Road’ which is projected to be the first of many such arteries linking Japan, will consist of conveyer belts either in tunnels beneath major roads or on tracks alongside the hard shoulder, or perhaps even both. 

Pallets holding up to ton of cargo each will be transported on the constantly moving treadmill. The scheme, the brainchild of boffins at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism is projected to carry as much freight as could be delivered by 25,000 drivers, speedily, seamlessly and all at the touch of a button.

It all sounds rather fantastical, but the ministry has pointed out that such freight conveyer belts are in operation already, and not just in airports. There is a 23 km one at Torigatayama limestone mine in Kochi prefecture and a 100 km system in the western Sahara transporting phosphate. 

The proposed Osaka-Tokyo link is on another scale altogether though and, pointedly, no firm completion date or estimated cost has been announced. The first would seem to be anyone’s guess, and the latter is clearly astronomical. The Yomiuri newspaper had a go at figuring out the numbers and came up with 508 million US dollars for every 10 km stretch. For the whole thing… well, do the math.

The first question this announcement might provoke is why bother? Specifically, why can’t the Japanese transport freight on the roads the country already has – which are rather good by the way? Why the need for a gigantic national debt straining super project that makes HS2 look like a mere bagatelle?

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The answer is largely, manpower. One of Japan’s suite of looming disasters is a cargo crisis. The National Research Institute has estimated that there will be a 36 per cent shortfall of lorry drivers by 2030 with rural regions the worst hit. One study found that some remote areas would be facing a 41 per cent driver shortage within six years. This would not only deprive certain communities of the timely delivery of essential supplies but likely exacerbate one of Japan’s perennial problems – rural flight and the slow death of the countryside. 

So…yet more people in the cities competing for jobs, more people living in tiny apartments, existing only for their work, without the living space or perhaps the energy to settle down and raise a family and do something about the greatest crisis of them all – the shrinking population. Japan, according to the doomsters, might one day resemble the America of Judge Dredd, with two massive mega-cities (Tokyo and Osaka presumably) and the rest a rewilded wilderness.

Clearly something must be done, but there is plenty of cynicism about this project already. Of the numerous huge obstacles, the most salient would appear to be cost. Where is the money coming from exactly? The Japanese government’s ambitious plans for massively increased military spending were met with a chorus of ‘we can’t afford it’ (and nothing much has happened) and the same will be true of this mega-project.

Even if the money is found somewhere there are doubts about whether the project is even feasible. Japan’s international reputation tends to lag several decades behind the reality and the image of the country as a super-efficient high tech deadline meeting superpower probably no longer obtains. 

That reputation originated in the white heat of the early 1960s when Japan was desperate to advance and be re-admitted to the family of nations after the second world war. That urgency, spurred on by the era-defining 1964 Tokyo Olympics, led to the transformation of Tokyo and such marvels as the still futuristic looking and still superb Shinkansen train.  

But, that was quite a long time ago. Large scale infrastructure projects recently haven’t been quite so impressive. A conspicuous recent failure has been the proposed Maglev high speed train line between – you guessed it – Tokyo and Osaka which was due to open in just three years’ time but is now slated for 2034. Many of the large-scale solar panel farms that dot the countryside are believed to be dangerous too. And then there was Fukushima… 

And many will wonder if this isn’t anyway just some massive make-work scheme for the planners, engineers, and former bureaucrats parachuted into comfortable directorships (the so called ‘fallen from heaven’). This is the sort of thing that Alex Kerr wrote about in Dogs and Demons his seminal analysis of Japanese institutional corruption and the squandering of public resources by the political class aided abetted by Japan’s version of the blob. 

Kerr lamented the despoliation of the countryside and coast by the almost obsessive building of largely unnecessary dams and the siting of ugly and largely unnecessary tetrapods in hugely profitable public works projects whose only real beneficiaries were those on the payroll.

Maybe this will be another of those. 

Or maybe not. Less cynically, this might even be the real thing, a bold imaginative solution to a real and pressing problem, the kind of positive and inspiring project which in its full nationwide flowering may breathe new life into seemingly moribund communities.

As they say in Japan ‘jikan ga kakeba wakaru’ – time will tell.    

Why Labour keeps floundering on the trans toilet question

Labour politicians who cannot give straight answers on sex and gender will need to get their thinking caps on, assuming they find themselves in charge on Friday morning. The ‘what is a woman?’ question was just the start. The debate that has now moved on to toilets – and Labour needs to come up with some answers and fast.

Last week Bridget Phillipson was put on the spot; yesterday it was Jonathan Ashworth; today it was Keir Starmer. For a journalist, this is easy meat. The warm up is optional, ‘Do you think that women have a right to single-sex spaces, and will you uphold the Equality Act that protects the single-sex exceptions?’ Who is going to say no to that, after all. 

But then comes the question that floored Ashworth, ‘A trans woman, in a restaurant that only has a man and a woman’s toilet facilities, which does she use?’ 

'A trans woman in a restaurant that only has a man and a woman's toilet facilities, which does she use?'
'I'm not a toilet monitor.'

Jonathan Ashworth is the latest Labour politician to be asked by @NickFerrariLBC about the party's stance on gender identity. pic.twitter.com/mJ34b30QnW

— LBC (@LBC) July 1, 2024

After swiftly eschewing the post of toilet monitor general, the shadow paymaster general floundered. It’s an easy question, but hard to answer because the issues – and the consequences – are clear to everyone listening. The ‘what is a woman’ question has been problematic for Labour, but that can at least be steered into a philosophical ramble until the questioner decides they need to move on.

Not the toilet question – that is a simple binary. Transwoman? Men’s or women’s?  Unlike prisons, hospitals or even sport, public toilets involve most people most days when they are away from home for the day. A rambling non-answer will not pass muster and even the most cloth headed politician must know that. Obfuscation with the suggestion that it might ‘depend’ only delays the inevitable. Eventually the question ends up in as a clear binary, perhaps only minutes after the minister or whoever has promised to uphold the Equality Act with apparent sincerity,

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‘Minister, you have said that you are going to uphold the women’s right to all-female spaces and all-female services. Will you now defend those women’s right to say no to every male transsexual?’

During the blathering that will likely ensue, the hapless interviewee can then be skewered by the follow-up, ‘and will you allow those women to use the law to deal with male transsexuals who would not take “no” for an answer’. 

This is not how it was supposed to turn out when demands for self-identification were first made in 2015. Self-ID seemed such an easy win for socially liberal politicians. But they chose to overlook the need for safeguards, and ignored the most basic of reasoning. They forgot that if the law allowed any man to inherit the rights of women simply by signing a statutory declaration, then the process would be left wide open to abuse. With Self-ID, women would suffer, and as it undermined confidence in the legal process, so would male transsexuals who had been quietly using women’s spaces for years – sometimes without ever being noticed. In the end it didn’t even take a change in the law for the idea of Self-ID to do its damage. The social agreement about toilets – if that’s what it was – was based not on pieces of paper but on trust and confidence. That has been shattered and eight years later the grilling of Ashworth is the result.

Politically, there is a simple answer. As a male transsexual who does not use women’s spaces – including toilets – I know that there is often a third option. The new government must defend the concept of single-sex spaces, but at the same time encourage further provision of alternative individual unisex spaces for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex.  

That will likely be deeply unpopular with the LGBTQ+ brigade but it may also draw criticism from some ‘gender critical’ campaigners who think that male transsexuals should use the men’s and be done with it. That approach might sound good on the internet, but in real life where bodies are involved it has the potential to cause a new set of problems, especially if those bodies have been chemically and surgically altered to resemble the opposite sex.

But when the only real choice is between upsetting one side of a very passionate debate or disappointing both sides, the latter might at least bring some closure to a row that will otherwise end up dominating every interview. Human nature being what it is, we are more likely to accept not getting everything we want if at the same time our opponents suffer similar disappointment. Cynical? Perhaps, but politics is a cynical game at times and in the coming years Ashworth and co. might need to take whatever solutions they can get.

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Will North Korea send troops to Ukraine?

When dealing with North Korea, it’s important not just to look at what the regime says about its present and future policies. Arguably more important is what the regime doesn’t say. Sometimes we might need to read between the lines. 

The two meetings between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin within the space of a year indicate that the pair’s bromance is more than just for show.

Russia’s relations with North Korea look to be on an upward trajectory after the signing of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ between Kim and Putin. The mutual defence pact, where each side agreed to assist the other in the event of any external aggression, went far beyond a mere affirmation of ideological solidarity. Only last week, senior North Korean military official, Colonel General Pak Jong Chon, made clear how North Korea would ‘always be together with the Russian army’. Repeating Putin’s own words, Pak threatened a ‘new world war’ with ‘the worst-ever consequences’, including a Russian retaliatory strike, if the United States continues arming Ukraine as part of its ‘confrontational hysteria against Russia.’ 

It is nothing new to see the North Korean regime invoke the language of war in its rhetoric. Even in 1993, before the country acquired nuclear weapons, the soon to be leader Kim Jong Il declared that the Korean Peninsula was in a ‘semi-state of war’, after the United States and South Korea had conducted joint military exercises. During the Obama administration, the euphemistically-named ‘Guardians of Peace’, a North Korean state-sponsored cyberwarfare group, threatened terrorist acts on the United States if cinemas proceeded to screen the Seth Rogan film The Interview which mocked the hermit kingdom. Earlier this year, Kim Jong Un ominously threatened that North Korea’s nuclear weapons were not just for defensive purposes, but that it could resort to offensive use in the event of any war on the Korean Peninsula. 

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What is concerning about the present-day, however, is that North Korea now has mutual defence pacts with both Russia and China. The latest treaty signed between Kim and Putin made clear how the Russia-North Korea relationship is not just a cash-for-artillery exchange between two anti-western states. North Korea furnishes its Cold War patron with millions of artillery rounds and short-range ballistic missiles. In return, Pyongyang gets cash, but also food and military technology and knowhow. 

In addition to physical technology, recent reports in South Korean media have raised the possibility of manpower being sent to Russia from North Korea, both to aid reconstruction in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and for the battlefield in Putin’s ongoing war.

With the fourth-largest standing army in the world, amounting to 1.3 million active military personnel – out of a total population of 26 million – North Korean society is highly militarised. Mandatory military service lasts for between ten to 13 years for men, and seven years for women.

Both Pyongyang and Moscow have been reluctant to confirm or deny any such possibility. Nevertheless, if North Korea were to send engineers, soldiers, or construction workers to these Russian-occupied territories, it would certainly not be out of line with its foreign policy stance. Only five months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, North Korea joined fellow rogue states of Russia and Syria in recognising the ‘independence’ of the so-called republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine subsequently severed its diplomatic relations with the DPRK. 

Quantity, however, does not equate to quality. North Korea may have strength in numbers – both in terms of armed forces and, of course, nuclear weapons. But compared to its neighbour south of the Demilitarised Zone, Pyongyang’s forces are less well-trained, and reliant on conventional capabilities that are often from the Soviet-era. As the Pentagon’s Press Secretary aptly put it, any North Korean military personnel sent to Ukraine would simply be ‘cannon fodder’. This description is not inaccurate. Yet, it is certainly concerning for international relations. We do not know for sure many such personnel Russia will require; how many North Korea will be willing to send; and what Russia will give the North in return. It was perhaps expected that the South Korean Prime Minister has said that South Korea might ‘adjust’ its aid to Ukraine, given the strengthening North Korea-Russia cooperation. 

The lack of explicit details about the deployment of North Korean troops or engineers to assist in Putin’s war, at present, is frustrating. But we must remember that such silence is a tried and tested part of North Korea’s strategic behaviour. Ever since the creation of the North Korean state in 1948, tactics of lying and deception have formed part of the Kim regime’s playbook, across its three generations of leadership. Much like North Korea’s launching of ballistic missiles, these tactics are not going to stop anytime soon. Nothing can be ruled out. 

How to avoid the tourist backlash

Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, some of the coastline is now one-way, to restrict tourist traffic. On another bit of the Ligurian coast, plans are afoot to charge walkers. You can see why – the famous cities and resorts of Europe have become one vast Queueworld, where tourists gather in great numbers, intense heat – and, increasingly, intense misery.

So why not head for the empty places of Europe? Every single one of those overcrowded hotspots has a neighbouring city or beach that hasn’t been promoted by history or reputation – and so is blissfully tourist-free. Europe isn’t overrun – as long as you do a little research, flee from fashion and find the right safe haven. Last year, instead of visiting tourist-choked Venice, I went to Treviso – only half an hour from Venice on the train. It was a revelation – particularly the Romanesque church of San Francesco and the austerely elegant Loggia dei Cavalieri. Treviso even has its own canals – if not on the scale of Venice’s, they had the advantage of being empty. There were plenty of Italians around in the charming, cheap pizzerias – but the only annoying tourist I came across was me.

A quick look at a map of Europe – and at a guidebook – produces these quiet spots in every corner of the continent. Don’t visit Athens now, when the temperature’s hitting 100 – and they’ve had to close the Parthenon to the mad dogs and Englishmen who go there at this time of year. Go in spring or, even better, autumn – when the sea is still warm, and the crowds ease off. But why not track down an ancient Greek treasure that’s empty all year round? Like Messene, in the Peloponnese, my favourite ancient Greek city – with temples, an agora, a stadium and mighty walls, stretching along the floor of an enchanted valley. Every time I’ve visited, there have never been more than 20 tourists. And it’s only 15 miles from Kalamata Airport – again practically empty, despite having direct flights to Britain.

In your quest for quiet places, you’ll find many more if you’re prepared not to take a direct flight. So Mykonos, the once-enchanting Cycladic island, has been battered by mass tourism because of its airport. Well, in fact, only the main town on Mykonos has been tourist-blighted. Hire a moped, as I did last year, point it away from Mykonos town and you’ll find a quiet beach less than half an hour away. But, if you’re prepared to take a ferry to an island without an airport, the quiet spots start popping up everywhere. In two recent trips to airport-free Ithaca, I had Odysseus’s ancient palace all to myself.

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If you’re braver than me, you’ll use geopolitical tragedies to boost your quiet spot count. A cynical friend of mine bases his holidays in places that have recently suffered terrible tragedies – like, say, tourist-free Jerusalem and Kyiv. If you’re really clever with your planning, you’ll find quiet spots in the same city as the tourist hotspots. Don’t go to hellishly overcrowded Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Cross the Arno to the shaded, empty streets of San Niccolò. If you must go to Venice, don’t get off the vaporetto at St Mark’s Square, but stay on all the way to the deserted island of Torcello at the northern end of the lagoon. You can play the Quiet Spot Game for the rest of your life, particularly if you’ve already seen the greatest hits of European architecture.

If you haven’t, you must visit, say, the ancient Greek cities of Ephesus and Pergamon – but save them for the last hours of opening at the end of the day, when the tourist buses have pushed off. During the day, go instead to the deserted ancient Greek cities of inland Turkey – like bewitching Aphrodisias in Anatolia, only 60 miles from the coast. The same goes for Knossos, Crete. Do see King Minos’s city if you haven’t before. But I bet you’ll be more moved by other Minoan sites on Crete – empty Phaistos and Gortyn.

You can play the Quiet Spot Game in the United Kingdom and Ireland, too. I spent the last two weekends in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Sunny Dublin was crammed with international tourists, from O’Connell Street to Trinity College, from Grafton Street to St Stephen’s Green. I fled to County Westmeath and County Down – where I didn’t see a single tourist in eight days. I’ll be spending much of this summer in Pembrokeshire, where I’ve been going all my life. Since Covid, when thousands of new tourists discovered its delights, it’s been busier than I’ve seen it in 50 years. But I know two hidden beaches that are always empty at the height of summer. It’s partly because they can be slightly dangerous – one has sharp rocks that are concealed at high tide; the other involves a tricky, steep climb. But, still, it’s perfectly safe, once you’ve worked out the right route and the right time of day to get to xxxxxxx Bay and xxxxxxx Bay. You didn’t think I was going to tell you their names, did you? That’s the first rule of Quiet Spot Club – never reveal your favourite ones.

Sabrina Carpenter isn’t an industry plant – she’s worse

Sabrina Carpenter first emerged in 2014 as a child actress on the Disney Channel. From there, she signed with a record label, becoming yet another entertainer to take advantage of the tween-TV-to-music-charts pipeline (see Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez et al). Ten years and five average albums later, she was known only to a few teenage girls, but over the last few months this has changed. The 25-year-old is now everywhere: music videos, magazine covers, billboards, chat show sofas and, of course, Instagram and TikTok. If you’re under the age of 30, you can’t escape Carpenter. 

Her newfound stardom can be partly explained by her role as the warm-up act on Taylor Swift’s international tour, but among my friends there are whispers of a more sinister scheme. A heated debate has broken out over whether Spotify’s autoplay feature has been feeding Carpenter’s hits to unwitting, even unwilling, ears. Many users have complained that – no matter their tastes – the streaming giant is queueing Carpenter’s songs when their own playlists end. The music industry has tried similar tactics before. A decade ago, Apple downloaded a U2 album onto every device they sold, regardless of whether users actually wanted to listen to it.

There have been reports, too, of Spotify creating fake artists, paying producers a day rate to create songs that were then added to their wildly popular playlists. That way, the platform wouldn’t have to pay royalties. Interestingly, artists are not paid per play. Instead, profits are determined by their proportion of total streams. That means that even if an artist manages to increase the number of streams they get, they won’t necessarily receive more money. Instead, they have to outperform other musicians on the app. It’s an ingenious way for Spotify to keep more of its subscriber revenue. When it comes to mega stars like Carpenter, however, a cycle develops: if Spotify keeps pushing her, she earns her label more money, climbs further up the charts, and is promoted more voraciously. Oh, and of course Spotify is now promoting concerts through their app, which means the platform can take a cut of the inevitable ticket sales. 

Still, there is something about Carpenter in particular that seems to invite conspiracy. Many crazed listeners have accused the former C lister of being an industry plant. Historically, the term has been used to jab artists who present themselves as hard grafters while concealing the real roots of their success, namely that their image has been carefully manufactured by their management or a famous family member. In Carpenter’s case, there’s an easy case to make: her aunt is actress Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson. And it’s true that very often the only difference between those who make it and those who don’t is their marketing budget.

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In the 1940s, two Marxist theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer, argued that popular culture had become an industry, subject to the same conveyor belt production methods that factories were using. Popular media is now standardised so that, for example, films follow the same three-act pattern: set-up, confrontation, resolution. That’s a process that has only accelerated by the internet. In the last 30 years, Silicon Valley has embraced what the writer Evgeny Morozov refers to as ‘solutionism’, the idea that all problems can be solved by the optimisation of technology. For companies like Spotify, their main problem is listeners pulling off their headphones. The solution is songs like Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’, which uses a repetitive three-chord progression, a simple melody with a narrow range of notes and the continual use of an easily singable hook: ‘Es-press-so’. 

Hers is music that adopts the principles of the advertising ditty. There’s nothing complex in artists like Carpenter, only dopamine-hacking jingles that play on our anticipation-reward systems. Success is concentrated among those who know this formula. If you don’t get with the programme, you don’t get signed, and you don’t get the investment and industry connections that mean you’re pumped by the likes of Spotify. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, ‘culture today is infecting everything with sameness.’ 

The problem with algorithmically-selected art is how algorithms work in the first place. They’re predictive, which means that they work on the basis of what has gone before. This cycle promotes the same content, creating that homogenisation. This might explain why Dua Lipa is now getting parts in Hollywood blockbusters, despite an obvious lack of talent, or why social media influencers have replaced journalists as interviewers on red carpets. It’s why the movie industry is only willing to produce remakes and sequels and it’s why artists like Sabrina Carpenter, a musician who writes forgettable, sugar-rush tunes, finds success. Carpenter isn’t an industry plant, she’s something much worse: an artist who only knows how to do one thing. 

When the world goes mad

Anyone visiting the small Westphalian city of Münster in north-west Germany may notice three man-sized cages hanging from the handsome St Lambert’s Roman Catholic Church in the city’s main square, the Prinzipalmarkt, and wonder about their provenance. The cages are one of the last visible relics of an episode in which society took leave of its collective senses and went quite mad. It is my impression that the western world is currently undergoing just such a convulsion.

In Münster’s case, what the Germans call massenwahn (mass madness) took place in 1534 after Martin Luther had triggered the Protestant Reformation and torn Christendom apart. An extreme millenarian sect known as the wiedertäufer (Anabaptists) seized control of the city and set up a Christian primitive communist mini state.

During the Anabaptists’ reign of terror, private property was abolished and expropriated, all adults were forcibly baptised by total immersion, and all girls were obliged to marry as soon as they hit puberty. Because there were many more females in Münster than men, this compulsory polygamy meant that men had multiple wives, and the main Anabaptist leader in the city, a Dutchman called Jan Bockelson, had 16 of them (and executed another woman who apparently resisted his advances).

Of course the establishment, in the shape of the local Catholic prince-bishop, could not ignore this blatant challenge and laid siege to Münster in alliance with his Lutheran enemies. After months of fighting, during which the people of the city were reduced to eating cats and rats, Münster fell and the three chief Anabaptist leaders were exhibited in the cages on the Prinzipalmarkt.

Here, they were gruesomely tortured to death by having chunks of their flesh torn off with red-hot pincers. The cages were then hoisted up the church’s spire where the corpses were left to rot for the next half-century as a warning to Münster not to repeat such an experiment again.

The Münster madness was just one extreme example of a general phenomenon. When societies abandon previously accepted rules, customs, and laws, they can find themselves striking further into irrational and often bizarre behaviour. In the 16th century, the world was in the midst of climate change involving a succession of unusually cold winters, known to us as the Little Ice Age, bringing fears of famine, while swelteringly hot summers were often accompanied by devastating outbreaks of plague. Seemingly abandoned by God, people sought to appease the almighty by either altering their sinful conduct or turning on each other in a search for scapegoats.

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Thousands of innocent people – mainly women – were tortured and burned at the stake on the merest suspicion of being in league with the devil in a prolonged example of societal madness known as the European witch craze. Thirty years before the Anabaptists seized Münster, a strikingly similar situation emerged in Florence at the height of its Renaissance glory when a puritanical Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, and his followers gained control of the city state and instituted another reign of terror in one of Europe’s most sophisticated cities. Promising to set up a new Jerusalem on the Arno, Savonarola expelled the ruling Medici family, carried out an ascetic purging of the church’s corruption, and prevailed on the Florentines to rid themselves of their earthly possessions with his famous bonfires of the vanities.

The Pope, the spectacularly crooked Alexander VI, a member of the poisonous Borgia dynasty, reacted in the same way as the prince-bishop of Münster and declared the troublesome friar a proto-Protestant heretic. After Savonarola bottled out of a trial by fire to prove his purity and piety, discontented Florentines, tiring of his austere rule, overthrew the dictator and – in a prophetic preview of what would happen in Münster – put him and two fellow friars to death by simultaneously hanging and burning them in Florence’s central square, the Piazza della Signoria. The Medicis returned to rule, the Church resumed its leading role, and law and order were restored.

But what, you may ask, has this to do with our plight in today’s world? Simply this: prompted by our fears of climate catastrophe and the manifest decline of the international order, we too have abandoned our trust in the mainstays of Judeo-Christian civilisation. Like the mad millenarians of Münster, we have adopted untried modes of being. We have set aside rational thought in favour of feelings, uncritically accepting unproven theories dreamed up by half-educated American academics and French pseudo-philosophers, setting aside time-honoured standards of debate and polite discourse in favour of shouting down all those who question our new rules and rulers.

Where the 16th century had their crazed prophets crying down destruction on a doomed civilisation, we have our furious activists vying for their 15 minutes of fame; where they had their flagellant sects processing from town to town flogging themselves into a frenzy; we have our Pride festivals and Gaza marches celebrating the end of the family and praising fiendish acts of terror. Where the Church then sniffed out heresy on subjects like predestination and transubstantiation, our secular clerics hunt down unorthodoxy on questions of gender and self-identification.

Our galloping insanity is exemplified by the current ITV drama series Douglas Is Cancelled in which Hugh Bonneville stars as a popular TV presenter whose career is ruined when he is overheard making a sexist joke at a wedding. The series reflects reality all too horribly last week when the real ITN news presenter Tom Bradby suggested that white male news presenters like him are an endangered species in our toxically obsessed, racialised and sexualised environment. Never was Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean play A Mad World, My Masters more apposite.

Why does Starmer think he can finish early on Fridays if he becomes PM?

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has disclosed that he won’t work ’24/7′ if he wins the election this week and becomes Prime Minister. Starmer believes that spending time with his children – he has a son and a daughter – makes him a better politician. Starmer says he plans to continue his habit of having ‘protected time for the kids’ every Friday, arguing it would make him better at his job. What else did we glean about the Labour leader’s idea of a standard office day in Downing Street? Apparently, he will not do a work related thing after 6pm in pretty much any circumstances.

‘I don’t believe in the theory that you’re a better decision maker if you don’t allow yourself the space to be a dad and have fun with your kids,’ he told Virgin Radio. ‘Actually it helps me. It takes me away from the pressure, it relaxes me and I think actually, not only is it that what I want to do as a dad, it is better.’

It is a fascinating and revealing insight into Starmer’s thinking about the job. It even sounds vaguely sensible and normal: plenty of hard-working people who are parents may well find themselves nodding in agreement. Who doesn’t want to escape the perpetual demands of the office and working life, and enjoy more quality time with their children? The only problem with this line of thinking is that leading the country isn’t a normal 9-5 job. Decisions are required day and night, and the demands all-consuming and relentless.

Starmer’s idea of what is required of him in Downing Street is in marked contrast to Rishi Sunak, who has made a virtue of his punishing schedule in his relatively short time in office. Sunak gives the impression of burning the midnight oil, poring over policy papers and spreadsheets. In fact, Sunak resembles Gordon Brown, another prime minister who was keen to signal an appetite to work all hours of the day in Downing Street, with a relentless focus on policy wonk issues. This didn’t stop voters from calling time on Brown’s short reign in Downing Street in 2010. Sunak looks likely to meet the same fate this week. 

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The most obvious contrast of course is with Margaret Thatcher, who displayed a ferocious appetite for hard work. Sir John Coles, who served as her private secretary for foreign and defence affairs from 1981-1984, pointed out that her working day began whenever she woke up. Evenings were often taken up with dinners or other engagements. When there was a gap she would begin work on her red boxes, and could continue until midnight or beyond. 

Not all former leaders of the country can match Thatcher in this regard. David Cameron was famous for ‘chillaxing’ because of his reportedly laid-back attitude to weekends at Chequers. He made much of his ability to ‘switch off’ from politics – which perhaps explains his misreading of the public mood when it came to the Brexit referendum. 

The problem with Starmer’s ideas about work-life balance in Downing Street is that the demands of office are unpredictable and relentless. A leader has to be on call 24/7 to deal with any and every emergency, making decisions that only he or she can. Prime ministers often find that once they are in office they are much less powerful than they imagined and it is only through determination and eternal vigilance that they can enact change. A Whitehall machine that thinks the person running the shop in Downing Street is off duty on certain days or clocking off at 6pm will quickly adapt and do likewise. 

It was Roy Jenkins who once observed that the first attribute of a successful prime minister is not a first-class mind, but a first-class temperament. Jenkins was only partially right. What is required most of all in a prime minister is the desire and ability to work day and night to solve the problems facing the country. What is most curious about Starmer’s comments is that he isn’t even in Downing Street yet: why go for the top job if you’re not that keen on the endless hours? Starmer will find out soon enough that the role cannot be performed – and certainly not properly – on a part-time basis.

Will Starmer be a part-time PM?

‘Sir Sleepy’, it seems, is back. On the eve of taking up the most important job in the country, Keir Starmer has revealed that he will refuse to work around the clock should his party win Thursday’s election. Speaking to Virgin Radio this afternoon, the Labour leader contrasted himself with the current premier, well known for keeping long work hours.

Starmer, who has two teenage children, said that he ‘will not do a work-related thing after 6pm [on a Friday] pretty well come what may.’ He claimed that spending time with his kids ‘takes me away from the pressure [and] relaxes me’, adding that the time away from work made him a better decision maker. Having revealed that his relationship with his own father was ‘distant’, it is understandable why Starmer would want to change things for his own kids.

Yet it is quite the claim to make, given that the top job is, er, demanding to say the least. Mrs Thatcher famously slept only four hours a night to get everything done while Boris Johnson was woken at 4 a.m two years ago to be told of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Conservative source has already told the Sun:

Whether he likes it or not, if he became PM, Sir Sleepy would be required to work after 6 p.m. If he thinks he can just put his slippers on and make a mug of Horlicks while he tunes into the One Show, then he is in for a shock.

Running the country might not be as easy as defeating the Tories after 14 years in government…