The trouble with the Human Rights Act

The Human Rights Act (HRA), which is twenty-five years old today, has always been controversial. It unsettles the balance of the constitution, enabling judges, and lawyers, to attack policy and legislation in a way that is anathema to our constitutional tradition. 

Introduced under Tony Blair in 1998, the HRA was intended to help guarantee basic human rights. This was a noble objective, but it does not follow that the Act was a good idea. While securing the rights of others is a fundamental object of government, the act’s main problem is that it disables parliamentarians, and the public, from responsible action, putting parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in doubt.

The HRA’s tension with fundamental constitutional principle is easy to see. Consider section 3, which provides that legislation is to be read compatibly with Convention rights whenever possible. This provision has not simply been read as a presumption about Parliament’s intentions, but as a judicial power to rewrite legislation. This turns ordinary legal technique on its head, undermining Parliament’s authority and introducing uncertainty into legal reasoning and practice.  

More generally, the Act empowers courts to ask and answer morally and politically charged questions of policy, including about immigration and asylum, the balance between liberty and national security, how best to tackle forced marriages, how to protect the public from convicted sex offenders, military action abroad, the criteria for the adoption of children, whether to introduce same-sex marriage, or in what circumstances to permit abortion. The Act effectively invites judges to assert their moral preferences over and above the political authorities. 

Before 1998, the British constitution made provision for controversies about rights to be settled primarily by legislation not litigation. For the lawyers who drafted the HRA, this was reckless in the extreme, with our constitution failing to measure up to the example set by North America and continental Europe. But the case for the old constitution remains strong. Questions about how human rights should inform lawmaking are political questions in relation to which judges and lawyers have no special competence and which cannot reasonably be outsourced to them.    

In the quarter century since its enactment, the HRA has not stood still. Consider its scope. Parliament intended the HRA to apply only to events taking place after 2 October 2000, when the main provisions of the Act came into force, subject to some limited, clearly set out exceptions, and to apply only within the territory of the UK, or at best to have only very limited extraterritorial effect. While domestic courts for a time affirmed both propositions, both have since been abandoned, with courts wrongly relying upon Strasbourg case law to transform the scope of the Act, giving it extra-territorial and retrospective effect. 

True, under Lord Reed’s leadership, the Supreme Court has, since December 2021, begun to limit the Act’s retrospective effect (a welcome change for which Policy Exchange long argued). But the HRA’s shifting scope over time confirms that it is scarcely set in stone.  

The same trouble applies to the meaning of Convention rights. For a time, our courts took for granted that they should track (mirror) the Strasbourg Court’s case law, at least when it was clear and settled. This meant that British judges should not interpret Convention rights to impose additional limits on public bodies. But between 2008 and 2021, our courts held open the option of going beyond Strasbourg, using the HRA to attack legislation and policy even when the Strasbourg Court would conclude that it complies with the European Convention on Human Rights. 

This line of case law was a mistake and it was good that the Supreme Court recognised, almost two years ago, that it was not its place to invent new rights or extend old rights in this way. But this is in a sense only the latest in a series of destabilising twists and turns in how our courts have understood their relationship with Strasbourg. Without amending the HRA to put this point to rest, a future Supreme Court could, yet again, change how the Act is understood.

On the 25th anniversary of the HRA, the constitutional case against it remains strong. It is unfortunate that so much political energy has been wasted on proposals to replace it with a so-called British Bill of Rights. These plans would have domesticated the Convention and risked giving domestic judges more discretion to interpret Convention rights in ways that go beyond Strasbourg. A British Bill of Rights might well have compounded the HRA’s shortcomings. 

Thankfully, the Government saw sense and withdrew the recent Bill of Rights Bill. But the constitutional problem remains. The best and simplest option would be simply to repeal the HRA, with consequent amendment to the operation of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 to maintain the limits on Northern Irish institutions. This would help restore the traditional British model of rights protection, in which Parliament is central to rights protection, with courts playing an indispensable but ancillary role.

Watch: Douglas Murray takes on Piers Morgan from Israel-Gaza border

Douglas Murray popped up on Talk TV last night live from the Gaza border – and his head-to-head with Piers Morgan soon turned fiery. Morgan argued that Murray was wrong to suggest that all those taking to the streets of London to show their solidarity with Palestinians ‘are pro-Hamas’.

‘You don’t honestly think they’re all pro-Hamas, these people?,’ he asked Murray.

Murray shot back, ‘Well I think that anyone who, for instance, chants things like “from the river to the sea” is in fact what you describe or is criminally ignorant.’

Morgan insisted that not all protestors have been chanting such phrases. Then Murray pulled out his trump card: ‘Okay, well here’s a challenge Piers. If you decided to go on some kind of march and in week one you discovered that you had the BNP on your side calling, for instance, for the murder of all black people, would you not wonder whether or not you should go on week two? Would you not drop out by about week three? I’d have thought so – I would.’

Looking somewhat stumped, Morgan replied: ‘That’s a good question. And yes, I would.’

The Tory crackdown addiction

If there’s one thing this government is addicted to, it’s crackdowns. Rishi Sunak loves to talk tough on how he is going to ‘crack down’ on small boats, climate protestors, Mickey Mouse degrees, banks blacklisting, anti-social behaviour. Just last week Home Secretary Suella Braverman vowed to crack down on homeless people living in tents as a ‘lifestyle’ choice, as if the destitute choose to sleep outside because they like stargazing, rather than because they are crippled by poverty, addiction and mental health issues.

As the government chases ever more intense crackdown highs, it gets its hits from banning things. American Bully XLs. Smoking. Laughing gas. Drip pricing. Noisy protests. Leaseholds in new houses (but not in flats, where owners are much more likely to be exploited). Some bans are more needed than others, but it’s all very strangely unconservative: where are the principles of consumer choice, adult autonomy, individual liberty, free markets? It’s also, in many cases, wholly unnecessary over-reaching.

Take criminalising the possession of laughing gas. The last thing our government needs in its incredibly unsuccessful ‘war on drugs’ is to open up another battlefront. Police forces are already so under-resourced and over-stretched that, every day, 6,000 criminals get away with offences: that’s 30,000 sex offences, 330,000 violent crimes, 1.5 million thefts and 320,000 cases of criminal damage a year.

There is no point in outlawing more things when existing crimes are not prosecuted. Passing laws that have neither the means nor the will to be enforced is utterly pointless showboating.

It’s a similar story with the smoking ban, which risks potentially glamourising a habit which is losing popularity anyway, particularly with young people. In all likelihood the ban will simply lead to Prohibition-style racketeering and bootlegging, whilst taxing e-cigarettes will result in adult smokers going back to tobacco if there is no difference in terms of affordability. Teenagers will buy vapes and laughing gas online, where they can order industrial cannisters that are up to eighty times the normal size. 

The Conservatives can push compulsory clean living all they want, but they have lost sight of what voters want. In the grand scheme of things, who cares if grown adults want to inhale a mind-altering balloon at a festival when people can’t get a doctor’s appointment, can’t rely on the police to investigate a burglary, can’t get the train to work or afford to put the heating on?

We pay more and more for increasingly inefficient and ineffective public services because the quality of government intervention and regulation has been sacrificed for quantity. The social contract is broken: we can guarantee that police will pursue a speeding fine and local councils will penalise you for not putting your bins out correctly, but half of hyper-prolific criminals (with at least 45 previous convictions) are spared jail time. Our prisons are so over-crowded that judges are told to delay sentencing hearings and free criminals early.

Our sentences for violent and sexual crimes are laughably lenient. A man with six previous convictions, including battery, can kill his girlfriend whilst on a community order and serve less than three years in prison. A serial rapist can leave prison seven years early and go on to rape again. A driver without insurance can kill a 17 year old cyclist, and not stop, and only be banned from driving for a year. Yet Sunak wants laughing gas users to be imprisoned for up to two years?

The Tories continue to promise policies that are impossible to deliver in practice. For example, they can use all the hardline rhetoric they like, but they are never going to be able to check the bank accounts of every benefits claimant every month.

Besides, is this really a priority given our state of permacrisis? Are there not more pressing matters, like record NHS waiting lists? Labour aren’t offering an alternative vision either. Starmer’s proposal for supervised toothbrushing in schools (as if teachers don’t already have enough to deal with without being responsible for their students’ oral hygiene) suggests both sides of the political spectrum want to micro-manage more and more aspects of people’s lives.

Our relationship with the state fundamentally changed during the Covid lockdowns, when personal freedom deferred to public health. At the time, many Tories criticised the previously-libertarian Boris Johnson for suddenly becoming a nanny-state fusspot. Now both parties compete to do more, more, more, when voters really want them to do less, but to do it well.

‘The food is as good as you will find in London’: Saison at Raffles London, reviewed

The Old War Office (bad acronym OWO) on Whitehall is now a Raffles hotel: you can stay in Winston Churchill’s office if that helps you sleep at night. I’m not sure I could, but this is the rational endgame of privatisation: you can sleep inside British history, which is quite close to sleeping through it. War isn’t the jolly marketing riff it was five weeks ago, and the atmosphere in the OWO reflects this. Even so, you need the money of a (fleeing) Tory donor to stay here, and perhaps they won’t notice that pre-war is outside their door in the form of children setting off fireworks and picking fights with the police during marches ‘for’ Palestine.

I watched an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist child stand nearby while non-Jewish people posed for photographs with him, as if he were Darth Vader. Perhaps they will rethink the name. Or perhaps they will restyle it like a second world war variant of the Jorvik Viking Centre. They should. It is pleading to be a themed hotel.

It is as gilded as the Empire it was built for – its date is 1906, its form neo-Classical – and the Hinduja Group that renovated it because they believe people can, and should, relax this close to the centre of the British state. I never could. I would need Nembutal to sleep here, Churchill’s ghost with paintbrush or no. The doormen are red-coated and bowler hatted: their view is of a statue of HRH Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, with horse.

The hallway has a princely staircase and a chandelier for giants. The corridors are vast, and white: institutional still, and heavy. As with all such buildings, the visitor resents the present as the past is more interesting. There will be nine restaurants eventually, because it seeks to be a destination like Dubai, or Center Parcs. I book into Saison, which claims to be ‘Mediterranean all-day dining’ with the implication of informality.

That is impossible here: there has been too much money, and too much war. Saison is a vast atrium with wood floors, many mid-sized trees, green chairs, yellowish banquettes and the palest table linen. I see an odd painting of Herbert Kitchener’s faces (they are in triplicate) floating above Imperial soldiers soon to dissolve, which I like; whimsy also breaks through in the coffee cups, which are like Picassos.

Otherwise, it is Establishment, without the elasticity the Establishment has. It’s not a restaurant but a sombre museum that sells food because the exhibits are all gone. We eat fine lamb chops from the West Country with a glorious gnocchi and Swiss chard gratiné; then halibut with artichoke mousseline with capers, olives, and citrus beurre blanc; then chocolate mousse with hazelnut ice cream and tiramisu with coffee, Savoiardi biscuit and amaretto.

The complaint is there doesn’t seem to be anyone here besides the staff: the rich are seasonal, like swallows, and Whitehall feels peculiarly exposed just now. But these are early days for the OWO: perhaps Whitehall will relocate to Birmingham and Downing Street will become a spa and gift shop. The food is as good as you will find in London, and not appallingly priced – we paid under £100 a head for two courses – and I like that the James Bond theme tune is playing in the loos. It suits them. But all I felt was a terrible unease.

Did hapless Humza mislead parliament?

The Holyrood WhatsApp drama can now be upgraded from ‘mystery’ to ‘scandal’. As if not handing over important messages wasn’t bad enough, the First Minister and his deputy have today been accused of misleading the Scottish parliament on the UK Covid Inquiry. It seems pantomime season starts early north of the border…

Yousaf and deputy first minister Shona Robison told the Chamber last week that the Scottish government had only been asked for Covid WhatsApp messages in September. It now turns out this isn’t quite the case. After the Covid Inquiry requested the Scottish government set out the timeline of events in full, it became clear that it had first requested messages in February — seven months earlier than Yousaf had initially claimed. Mr S doesn’t have the greatest faith in the Scottish Government’s arithmetic skills, but even he can’t quite believe this was an accidental slip up…

Today’s developments come after taxpayer-funded apparatchik Scottish government repeatedly told Steerpike that it ‘does not have a culture of routinely using informal communications, including WhatsApp, to make policy decisions’. Yet Mr S has seen messages exchanged on Twitter of all places discussing decisions on where testing centres should be set up — from the former health secretary, no less. Small fry, but surely it wouldn’t hurt the government to just admit it?

Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Tories, has said it’s ‘clear that the First Minister and Deputy First Minister misled Parliament last week’ and has demanded that both ‘must immediately set the record straight’. Former SNP MP Angus MacNeil said that ‘they should both clear this matter up asap[sic]’, while deputy leader of Scottish Labour Jackie Baillie added: ‘The only thing clearer is the extent to which this shambolic government has lost control trying to cover up the truth and obstruct those seeking it.’ Ouch. 

Mind you, it’s not just Holyrood that’s facing questions over missing WhatsApps. Down in Cardiff Bay, Mark Drakeford’s government was today forced to admit that he did, in fact, have the app downloaded on his advice — despite having previously claimed that he didn’t. Looks like those WhatsApp wars are not just confined to those wicked Tories in Westminster…

Celebrity owners are ruining football

Tom Brady must get bored easily. After America’s superstar quarterback retired (for a second time) in March, he invested in a Las Vegas women’s basketball team, sorted out his divorce, bought a racing boat team with Rafael Nadal and, this summer, became a minority owner of Birmingham City. A few weeks ago, it was announced that he’d had a meaningful chat with Wayne Rooney, the club’s new manager. ‘It’s important for the players to see Tom Brady have an involvement. It’s very clear that Tom is fully involved in the club’ said Rooney, clearly aware that fans might be sceptical.

Brady is just one of several American celebrities who have invested in British football over the past few years. Although the celebs may be serious converts to football, most are too poor to buy a top club outright. Instead they are lured into partnerships with American hedge funds with promises of being able to do good deeds in the ‘local community’ and, ultimately, indulging their saviour complexes in vowing to save a struggling club. The set up is perfect for celebrities who hold no real stake in the club but can still appear as the face of the takeover. For them club ownership is a hobby, but for the financial backers it is a pure money making exercise, sometimes at the expense of fans.

Most celebrity investors want to emulate the Wrexham Football Club’s recent successes. Wrexham, the third oldest football club in the world, was wallowing in football’s fifth tier until Hollywood’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney stepped in and bought the team in its entirety two years ago. New sponsorship deals were signed using the duo’s celeb profiles and a successful documentary increased revenues, allowing the club to buy better players. The club was promoted back into the football league last season and enjoys an international profile on par with some top flight clubs. Tom Brady was following the story more closely than most. ‘The thrill of victory,’ he said after Wrexham’s promotion game. It was no surprise that just three months after Wrexham’s success, he emerged as Birmingham City’s new minority owner.

But Brady is powerless to mimic Wrexham’s revival in Birmingham. He doesn’t own the club outright so is subservient to the main shareholder, a hedge fund run by a US financier called Tom Wagner. Brady has been installed as the chairman of the advisory board where he was given the Sisyphean task of making the club ‘a respected leader in nutrition, health, wellness and recovery across the world of football.’ Under no circumstances, Wagner says, will Brady be used for ‘promotional purposes’. It was the first lie of the new regime and an unnecessary one. Wagner knows Brady’s profile will raise the club’s attraction in lucrative foreign markets, particularly America. The pair did the same last October when they bought a minor American sports team. During that takeover Wagner was clear: ‘Tom has a pretty gigantic media reach and I think his involvement should draw substantial interest to the league.’

The overall project in Birmingham is sound: Wagner has promised to invest in the stadium and return the club to sensible financial management. But it’s a bad sign that the American corporates are already skirting around basic truths with the fans.

Bournemouth’s new owners have a similar setup to Wagner and Brady, but it’s more transparent. The Premier League club was bought by the billionaire American sports investor Bill Foley with Hollywood A-Lister Michael B. Jordan as his co-investor partner. Self-described ‘dictator’ Foley has already told his junior partners, ‘there is nothing more limiting than being a limiting partner of Bill Foley.’ Even the coaching staff say it as it is: ‘Jordan’s involved in drumming up the interest and trying to create more support.’ There’s little else to it. The relationship between most football fans and owners is fundamentally a cynical one. The owner is, in essence, the steward of the club, investing to improve the team’s chance of success in order to raise value and withdraw some profits during years of plenty, all while under constant scrutiny from fans.

Burnley’s fanbase has experienced the ups and downs of this relationship over the past three seasons. The club’s American hedge fund owners initially faced distrust from fans when they took over three years ago. It was the first time the team had been owned by a non-local businessman in the club’s 140-year history. The disillusionment only grew after the club was relegated from the Premier League during the new owners’ second year in control. However, they invested in some promising players and brought in an even more promising manager and were promoted the following season. Now some two-thirds of Burnley fans have more faith in the owners than they had just after the takeover.

The Burnley owners are capitalising on last year’s success. Like Wrexham, they commissioned a documentary, Mission to Burnley, which managed to film their promotion season. They’ve also followed the trend of opening the club to US celebrity investment. The new minority owners are a mix of seven American sports stars and social media types including the YouTube ‘sports and comedy group’ Dude Perfect. The latter investors may have left some Burnley fans a bit bemused. After all, why are people who make videos about throwing a ping pong ball into a cup from far away minority owners of such a historic club? Dude Perfect has more than 60 million followers and 16 billion views on social media, mostly from a teenage audience, making them the second largest sporting channel on the website. Burnley’s ownership see a small portion of these fans as a potential global fanbase which could grow the club’s value. The YouTube stars were in turn supposedly attracted to the club by the prospect of the documentary which they say ‘captures [the owner’s] vision’. Just like Brady, they want to be part of the future mythology of a team. But what will happen to their enthusiasm for ‘the community’ and ‘exciting football club’ if the club suffers another relegation? They’ll probably go back to YouTube and forget Burnley and its dedicated fanbase.

Most US takeovers don’t bother with the façade of celebrity investment. At first glance Everton’s prospective new owners are another identikit US private equity firm called 777 Partners. However they’ve been rather outspoken over their intentions for developing the club, obsessing over the ‘hyper commercialisation’ of football and want to sell everything from hot dogs and beers to insurance to fans. Talk of ‘assets’ instead of players, ‘monetisation’ instead of success and ‘customers’ over fans may fill supporters with dread, but the brazen business talk is strangely refreshing. If a club’s value and revenues are derived from competition winnings and the subsequent increased television rights, then an owner’s competence is all that matters. Everton’s outgoing owner Farhad Moshiri might lament the end of the ‘days of a benefactor owner’ but he and his board were despised by fans for their abysmal management of the club which has only just survived back-to-back relegation scares.

It’s the same across the rest of the Premier League. Some 90% of Newcastle supporters’ trust members were in favour selling the club to the Saudi government if it meant getting rid of their ex-owner, the retail tycoon Mike Ashley who was reluctant to buy expensive players. Manchester fans would gladly welcome Qatari ownership over the current mismanagement of the Glazer family. As long as the team is performing well and the club’s finances are stable, most fans don’t care who owns their club and care even less about any celebrity mascot brought in to try and placate them. In the end it’s hedge funds who will keep the rewards. The celebrities will move onto some other short-lived passion project, leaving the clubs off none the better and the fans none the wiser.

The ugly truth about the SNP’s white roses

Anyone paying close attention to television coverage of the King’s Speech on Tuesday may have noticed that SNP MPs in attendance looked as if their next appointment was a wedding reception, with white roses on their lapels. In fact, the Nats wear the rose in honour of poet Hugh MacDiarmid, a founder of the National Party of Scotland which merged with the Scottish party in 1934, creating the SNP.

The nationalists’ boutonnière references MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Little White Rose’, a drab little celebration of the sort of insularism the SNP insists doesn’t exist within its brand of nationalism. If you think my critique harsh, judge for yourself:

‘The rose of all the world is not for me. / I want for my part / Only the little white rose of Scotland / That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.’

MacDiarmid’s petty little verse is the poetic equivalent of a great aunt’s lament that she hears lots of eastern European accents on the bus, or a grandpa’s refusal to eat food ‘with bits in it’. The SNP expends a great deal of energy insisting its is an outward looking, civic nationalism. It talks of the need to rejoin the EU and play a leading role on the world stage. It’s strange, then, that the party should so revere a poem which encapsulates Scottish chippiness. 

The SNP small man complex familiar to us Scots manifests itself in ways both exhausting and entertaining. Throughout the rise to sporting greatness of Sir Andy Murray, for example, one was never far away from a bore who’d tell you — without evidence, for none existed — that, as far as the big bad BBC was concerned, he was Scottish when he was losing and British when he was winning.

My favourite example of this hair-trigger defensiveness involves a poetry reading some years ago in the public library in the Aberdeenshire town of Banchory. The guest, a fellow from Brighton, explained that his next poem was inspired by watching lizards dart around the pier in his home town. ‘You probably don’t get many lizards up here,’ he told the audience. ‘We’ve got plenty of lizards, son,’ snapped a woman in the front row.

Even if ‘The Little White Rose’ were not such a miserable piece, the SNP’s reverence of MacDiarmid is baffling for other reasons.

The poet — real name, Christopher Murray Grieve — was quite the crank. During his lifetime, he flirted with both fascism and Stalinism. In letters, discovered in 2010, MacDiarmid suggested that Nazi rule in Britain might be preferable to the UK government at the time. In one missive, sent to fellow poet Sorley MacLean in April 1941, MacDiarmid wrote: ‘On balance I regard the Axis powers, though more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.’

The previous June, he wrote: ‘Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them.’

Perhaps more unpleasant still is another MacDiarmid poem, unpublished in his lifetime and discovered in the archives of the National Library of Scotland some 20 years ago. In the piece, entitled ‘On the Imminent Destruction of London, June 1940’, MacDiarmid wrote: 

‘Now when London is threatened / With devastation from the air / I realise, horror atrophying in me, / That I hardly care.’

So perhaps the Nats should rethink their continued use of the flowers. While beautiful to the eye, the SNP’s white roses represent something far uglier.

Is Keir Starmer in trouble?

Unless something extraordinary happens, Sir Keir Starmer will be the next prime minister. All the polls show Labour on course to win a large majority in next year’s general election. Yet it’s being widely reported that Starmer faces the gravest test of his leadership, all over a conflict more than 2,000 miles away. 

Imran Hussain has become the first member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet to quit over the war in Gaza. In an open-letter published on X last night, the Bradford MP said he wanted to ‘strongly advocate for a ceasefire’ and his views differed ‘substantially’ from Starmer’s. Others could follow the former shadow minister for the New Deal for Working (no, me neither) in stepping down.

Elsewhere, ten Labour councillors resigned from Burnley this week; several other councillors quit in other constituencies last month. What they all want is a ceasefire.

Starmer is right to ignore them. In a surprisingly statesman-like speech last week, he said a ceasefire would freeze the conflict at a moment of relative strength for Hamas. That’s no basis for a politically negotiated outcome. A ceasefire isn’t possible while Hamas holds 240 hostages, and refuses to allow the Red Cross to visit them.

Of course every sane, moral person wants to see an end to bloody conflict. But a ceasefire requires both sides to agree. Ever since 7 October there have been no indications that Hamas is a willing partner for peace.

Take the comments of the terror group’s deputy foreign minister, Ghazi Hamad, who said the massacre of 7 October will happen ‘again and again’ until Israel is ‘annihilated’, and that the terrible loss of life in Gaza was a ‘necessary price’. Other senior Hamas leaders have all made similar statements on their merry broadcast rounds. Hamas rockets continue to be fired at Israel from Gaza.

The reality is that Labour’s lead in the polls is so vast and has been for so long that anything that might dent that, however insignificant, is excitedly reported as a ‘crisis’. Channel 4 helped create some drama when they mistakenly reported that Muslims make up the majority in 30 constituencies. In reality, that’s the case in just three.

The latest round of the Israel-Palestine conflict will likely be over in a few months. The date for the next election will probably be in October next year. In 11 months will this conflict be a deciding factor in how people vote? That seems highly unlikely. 

Labour has traditionally been the party for Muslims: around 85 per cent vote for them. That’s hardly surprising looking at Office for National Statistics data. The 2021 census shows that less than half (45.6 per cent) own their own homes (compared to 62.8 per cent of the population); they have the highest percentage (26.6 per cent) of people living in ‘social rented’ housing (compared to 16.6 per cent of the population). They also have higher levels of unemployment (51.4 per cent in employment compared to 70.9 per cent of the overall population). Would a conflict in the Middle East really stop them from voting for a party that, well, mostly looks after their immediate economic interests?

Rishi Sunak isn’t about to call for a ceasefire. So Muslim voters are unlikely to suddenly change allegiance, en masse, to the Tories. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has made some noises about a ‘pause’ in the conflict but has stopped short of demanding a ceasefire.

So, the two main parties don’t appear like they are about to benefit from the ‘Muslim vote’. Even a council by-election in an area that is 25 per cent Muslim at the end of last month showed very little decline in the Labour vote.

Little else would change if George Galloway fires up his old Respect party bandwagon, which had some very limited success after the invasion of Iraq (one MP and 19 councillors), and a few more Labour figures step down. One recent attempt to register an Islamic party has already been rejected by the electoral commission.

And yes, of course, many Labour voters besides the party’s Muslim bloc might want to see a ceasefire. But will they, too, in little less than a year’s time not vote at all or lend their vote to the two other main parties who are also not demanding a ceasefire?

The Tories have been incapable of avoiding drama in recent years. Long after the war is over, another Tory MP will get nicked for rape or something else that offends the public. The news cycle will move on.

Starmer is playing a good hand. He can comfortably afford to live with the current levels of grumbling. The polls are unlikely to shift very much, if at all. He’ll likely survive, too, if there are damages to ‘community relations’ with the country’s Muslim population.

There is no pressing electoral need for him to change track, regardless of all the posturing among figures in his party of whom no one has ever heard, about a conflict over which he has absolutely no influence.

2627: Chronicled lives – solution

The eight unclued answers are names which appear in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire.

First prize Pam Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees

Runners-up Bill Ellison, Caversham, Reading; Peter Moody, Fareham, Hants

2630: Souvenir

The 37 and 38 evoke 16D 22A/26, once 19 26, the 19 being 6 at the 41 5, 41 26 and 41 13. 

        Across

   1    Language school opened by Republican state (8)

11    Repeatedly check bones in historical operation (10)

14    Sweet red Dutch headwear (8)

16    US city king boxes to unwind (5)

17    Blotto man does spirits (7)

18    Animal in vehicle, one about to get skinned (7)

23    Hangs from small steep rocks (6)

24    American English crudely translated☺? (6)

31    Linked quartet of women in Italy chasing opera conductor (9)

33    Portent consuming regularly at-risk crew (7)

34    Bug base following plot (7)

36    Maxim gun discharged over Middle East (5)

39    Back into car crash – end of insurance schedule? (10)

40    Cheers a couple of extras (3-3)

         Down

   1    Fast beat nothing held up (7)

   2    Lamb’s poor – rat taken from laboratory before cooking (7)

   3    In Greece, Diana satisfied about dividing out-of-bounds church community (7)

   4    Scholar in front having cracked simple exam (6)

   7    Corsica developed variable egalitarian system (8)

   8    Smooth, affected, naïve barons (3-8)

   9    Soon Musk perhaps interrupts some work (7)

10    Route changes between ends of destinations (7)

12    Dash of violet in indigo block (5)

15    Bank of Scotland runsinto former UK defence contractor (4)

20    Grass, half of which is dope (4)

21    Conservative plugs swine (4)

22    Mystery resolved about mass balance (8)

24    Small element of pride? (4,3)

25    Setter’s lines containing mature figures of speech (7)

27    Plant employees northbound, entering expanded major road? (7)

28    Nails up favourite scrap of news (7)

29    Goat on heat, initially with vigour (5-2)

30    Camera setting shows stone clasped by peacock (1-4)

31    Web covered by statute law (4)

32    Adjust recent focus (6)

35    Divine Caledonian spring close to Skye (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 27 November 2023. 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 2630, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Spectator competition: autumnal nonsense poems

In Competition No. 3324 you were in-vited to submit nonsense verse on an autumnal theme.

W.J. Webster confessed that ‘sense kept breaking in’ to his entry, but the line between sense and nonsense is not always clear. As Anthony Burgess observed, in a review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Anthology of Nonsense Verse, Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’

The winners below earn £25.

’Tis conkery and the glumptious drupes

are ruttling in the busky groove;

all slipshious are the treddly stoops

and the wild greetlings croove.

The scarvish dawns, the doofly nights,

the wrappit snaps of blainy chill:

beware the flewsome germlies’ flights

and the coffly Covigill.

Beware the boilsome gasalope,

its leakly poundsheds oozing thorms,

its greedish flames and whirling clope

and the emptish piggle gorms.

’Tis conkery and dreadly dark

enfolds with whoosh-mist and with blyre;

the newsly glumes and warrish crack

muttle in bankty ruptious quire.

D.A. Prince

I ate an Indian summer from a packet

And watch the treetops running out of cover

I had a patch of mud. It made a racket

Like a brambling ambling over to its lover

I held a bonfire bauble on my tip-tongue

And let it vanish into smoke and smoulder

Here is an apple. I would call it pip-sprung

Were I much younger, or if I were older

A conker has an eye for wax or polish

While brooks have many secrets – hear them babble

They handed me a solstice to demolish

But as it fell apart, I heard it gabble

The underfoot, it quoth, is toasty, crispin

But rather damp, so best to wear muldoons

My pockets filled – I put some will-of-wisp in

Fall out! I wish you happy harvest moons!

Bill Greenwell

Mistily, wistily, sunnily, gourdily,

Pensiverations on autumn explode.

Honey-filled hiveries, plumpiful fruiteries:

Preluminations for planning an ode.

Season meliferous, feelings versiferous,

Posily, rosily, where to begin?

Beesily busious, ergo odiferous;

Autumnly amorous thoughts in a spin.

Stanzily ruminal on things autuminal,

Mixity, maxity nullity comes.

Patiently pensical, gleanerly seasonal

Mind lubby jubby by bumblebee hums.

Clarificational, now meditational,

Huggledy cuddledy, musily kissed.

Valete visiting voices nonsensical:

My ode shall open with: Season of mists!

Frank McDonald

Dame Edith Sitwell in autumnal colours

Ascending a staircase one Octember Eve,

Bewailing the absence of fire-hearted lovers:

A windfall of gusts descant high in the eaves.

Ear-trumpet ochre and All Hallows scarlet,

Commingle with browns of innumerable hue;

The dress sheathing Edith glows fit for a starlet,

The wane toward winter all hers to construe.

Jangling stanzas and strange incantations

Issue from Edith like rivers in spate.

Autumn is fruitful; her ripened gestations

Emerge into air freshly crisped for the freight.

Bonfire to firework, up out through a skylight,

Edith ascending, declaiming her verse,

Meeting, arms beating the six o’clock twilight,

Winds fit to whisk her to winter and worse.

Adrian Fry

Beware the wombly wind that weaves

And whipples through the trumbling trees,

A glumping glip for raking leaves

And frimping anti-freeze.

A time for troles of tricky treaters;

Thermal thrumps and slothy socks,

Hoving up the humptious heaters 

Clumping back the clocks.

Cast aside your flimsy flabbers

While the skies are grimsome grey,

Date a doc for fluey jabbers,

Cry baloo belay.

Days truncated, darksome, drear,

View the vormidness with dread,

After autumn’s grume, prepare

For wintrous wodes ahead.

Sylvia Fairley

Because it was autumn, the leaves said farewell

…and leapt from their branches like Biles

artfully seeming to float as they fell

…into scattered, compostable piles,

and a bear, still awake, was seeking a cave

…to serve as its wintertime haven,

as a little girl’s mother said, ‘Don’t misbehave

…or I won’t let you dress like a raven,’

when out of the blue, or I should say the white,

…for the sky was as pale as a pearl,

a raven came soaring, a comical sight,

…for the bird was dressed up like a girl.

Robert Schechter

No. 3327: In short

You are invited to submit a rough resumé of the plot of a Shakespeare play such as might have been attempted by a well-known fictional character of your choice (please specify). Email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 November.

No. 777

Black to play. Donchenko-Mishra, Fide Grand Swiss 2023. Abhimanyu Mishra, 14, was one of the youngest players in the field. Which move allowed him to capitalise on his passed b-pawn? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 13 November 2023. 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 Qe5! For example, 1…Bxe5 2 Ra5# or 1…Bb6 2 Qb8# or 1…Bd6 2 Qa1#.

Last week’s winner Ben Hale, Flimwell East Sussex

Grand Swiss Gambit

Large chess tournaments are usually played according to the ‘Swiss’ pairing system. In each round, players are grouped according to their total points amassed so far, and match-ups for the next round take place between players in the same score-group. Even in a large field of diverse abilities, the potential winners tend to encounter their toughest competitors, and the lower seeded players are not forever overwhelmed by the strength of their opposition.

The ‘Swiss Gambit’, an obscure piece of chess lingo, refers to the idea that a savvy competitor might ‘gambit’ a draw or loss in an early round, so as to face easier games in the middle of the tournament and recover lost ground just in time for a high final placing. In truth, a player boasting of their Swiss Gambit usually has their tongue in their cheek – presenting their cock-up as a masterful ruse.

A formidable assembly gathered in the Isle of Man for the Fide Grand Swiss event, which concluded last Sunday. They included a majority of the top 100 players in the world, plus a few dozen grandmasters just below that level. In such a strong field, a ‘Swiss Gambit’ would be preposterous as a strategy; if you lose a game against the world no. 50, and face the world no. 100 the next day, it will hardly feel like an easier ride. So it is remarkable that the tournament’s outright winner (with 8.5/11), India’s Vidit Gujrathi, began with a blunder in round one.

Erwin L’Ami-Vidit Gujrathi

Fide Grand Swiss, Isle of Man, October 2023

Under pressure, Dutch grandmaster Erwin L’Ami had just uncorked an important resource 40 Ne4-g3! (see above left) counting on 40…Rxf4 41 Nh5+! Kh6 42 Nxf4 with a likely draw. Short of time, and presumably frustrated, Vidit blundered with 40… Nxb2? expecting 41 Rxd4 Nxd1, which is also drawn. But L’Ami seized his opportunity with 41 Nf5+!

Now moving the king to the f-file, allows Nf5xd4 with check, while retreating to g8 allows a fork on e7. All that remains is the h-file: Kh8 42 Rxd4 Nxd1 43 Rh4+ The decisive tactic. Kg8 44 Ne7+ Kg7 45 Nxg6 Kxg6 46 Rd4 Nb2 47 Kf2 At move 65, Black resigned.

By round 7, Vidit had fought his way into the leading pack. In the penultimate round, he found a beautiful tactic in position abive right.

Bogdan-Daniel Deac-Vidit Gujrathi

Fide Grand Swiss, Isle of Man, November 2023

17… g4! 18 Be2 Bxe4! Evidently, Romanian grandmaster Deac believed the pawn was well protected, but Vidit has a surprise in store 19 Nxe4 N6d5 This is the point. Now 20 Qg3 Nxe2+ wins the house. Deac cut his losses, but after 20 Nf6+ Bxf6 21 Qe4 Bg7 22 Bf1 Nf6 23 Qe1 Qxc2 Vidit held a large advantage. At move 55, White resigned.

Keeping the peace: the politics of policing protest

Armistice Day is meant to be a moment of solemn national unity. Yet this year it is expected to coincide with the rather less harmonious ‘Million March for Palestine’, as hundreds of thousands gather in central London on Saturday to protest against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Are these events compatible? Should the protest be banned? The Prime Minister says holding the protest on Armistice Day is ‘disrespectful’ but insists that only Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, can act to stop it. So Rishi Sunak is, in effect, saying his government cannot be blamed if there’s trouble at what Suella Braverman, his Home Secretary, calls a ‘hate march’. It’s all on Sir Mark. ‘My job is to hold him accountable,’ says Sunak.

Politicians can ban marches only if the police refer the decision to them. But the law states that even the police can ban them only in order to prevent ‘serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community’. They may ask protestors to delay a march (as the Met has done this week) but they cannot block one outright on the grounds of taste or cause.

‘The laws created by parliament are clear,’ Sir Mark has said. ‘There is no absolute power to ban protests, therefore there will be a protest this weekend.’ The legal bar to stop a demonstration is set very high for a reason: to make sure governments cannot silence protest. That’s why the power is used very rarely. The last time was in 2011, when Theresa May forbade an English Defence League rally in London.

Sir Mark, whom I know slightly, is cerebral and independent-minded. He’ll feel the political pressure but argues that it’s his duty to uphold the law – and only the law. He will not be considering whether the protest is provocative or distasteful. He’ll be asking if it contravenes Section 12 of the Public Order Act (1986). This is not just a matter of opinion, he argues: it requires specific intelligence reports flagging the danger of serious unrest. Without such firm intelligence, he says, no police chief can ban any march.

No. 10 is furious, thinking Sir Mark could be more flexible given the circumstances. Ever since 7 October, we have witnessed protests in London that look menacing and, at times, blatantly anti-Semitic. People ask: what are the police doing? The creeping escalation of hate-crime law has led to a peculiar system under which the police are often asked to pass judgment on the merits of a particular cause. Officers are expected to monitor not only what people do but what they say or write or wave around.

This leads to inconsistencies. Attend a vigil for Sarah Everard during lockdown? You’re nicked. March for Black Lives Matter during lockdown? The police will join you in bending the knee.

In fact, just a handful of policemen ‘took the knee’ – to the fury of Cressida Dick, the then commissioner – but, in the social-media age, such lapses of judgment go viral. And while most of the pro-Palestinian protestors plan to raise justifiable humanitarian concerns, there will be no shortage of hardliners with a more sinister purpose.

There have been reports that a former Hamas chief was behind one of the groups organising the protest. The Jewish Chronicle says we can expect a rerun of the 2021 ‘Convoy for Palestine’, in which thugs raced through Jewish neighbourhoods in London blaring out threats to rape mothers and their daughters. Four men were arrested in connection with that ugly event. The Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute them.

Commentators who seek to promote the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and Islam will no doubt be given plenty of ammunition. Social media will ensure that the most deranged, inciteful chants are given wide circulation. But you can’t ban a protest just because it causes offence or upsets people online.

Sir Mark says that gaps in the law allow ‘toxic’ messages to be propagated. That’s simply not good enough. We don’t need more laws. The problem is with the existing legislation – which is plainly not being enforced. And this is where debate should focus.

There is no shortage of extremists among pro-Palestinian protestors who will use anti-Semitic language, fly provocative flags and behave in a manner that falls directly into the scope of current laws criminalising incitement to violence, racial or religious harassment and the encouragement of terrorism.

The lack of empathy for Jewish citizens butchered by Hamas after the border incursion and the orgy of systematic sadism in which 1,400 men, women and children were murdered, prompting Israel’s invasion, has been striking and depressing. Sir Mark himself has admitted that the police response to hateful displays should be ‘sharper’.

He has not been helped by the Met’s Twitter account insisting, bizarrely, that the word ‘jihad’ – being screamed on the streets within earshot of police officers – had ‘a number of meanings’ apart from its ordinarily understood support for terrorism.

It has emerged that one of the Met’s senior legal advisers, lawyer Attiq Malik, took part in protests in 2021 and led a chant of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, a phrase commonly associated with the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jews within it. Quite why it took a scoop by the Sunday Telegraph to alert the Met to what they now call ‘language and views that appear anti-Semitic’ – leading to Mr Malik being sacked – remains to be seen.

Add to this the blunt operational reality: the problem of ratios. No police service in the democratic world can control the behaviour of all protestors by numbers alone. To do so would require the elimination of all our hard-fought freedoms, which is exactly what violent extremists yearn for. While there were an estimated 30,000 pro-Palestine protestors in London last weekend, the police presence was 1,300. That’s cops taken away from neighbourhood policing and all the other ongoing public protection work.

In previous weeks, the protestor-to-officer ratio was even worse. The truth is the Met, on present strengths, is barely able to contain such enormous marches. Intervening to arrest troublemakers could well create greater disturbances which would overwhelm available resources. Hence the tactic (seen during the statue-toppling protests) of police standing by, filming the offences and prosecuting people later. This may help avoid short-term riots but it encourages anarchic behaviour.

Those who want to cause offence and trouble will see and exploit these weaknesses. They are committed to confrontation. Critics who say the police lack the stomach for taking on criminal behaviour should see the levels of assault they are so often subjected to going about their normal duties. The problem is not a lack of courage among officers. It’s more a lack of clarity about what they should be doing.

Seeking to ban any parade on Armistice Day would almost certainly mobilise a hard core of protestors to target aspects of our acts of Remembrance in London and beyond. This would be at a time when thousands of veterans are travelling to the capital to remember their war dead and participate in one of the great moments of national solidarity.

Sir Mark will know that, if the protest is banned, smaller protests would probably break out – straining already stretched police resources. Creating a pretext to subvert Remembrance would be a potential disaster for community cohesion, drawing more people into spontaneous protests in more locations – precisely what extremists want. You only need watch the behaviour of Just Stop Oil this week to understand that creating a public spectacle by shock tactics is the end, as well as the means, of publicising a cause.

The right to peaceful assembly and protest has always been open to abuse. The anti-Semitic glee of extremist groups that seem to be a permanent parasitical feature of such parades, is hijacking those who only wish to protest the unfathomably miserable conditions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This fury is no less legitimate than the much quieter outrage over the fate of some 240 hostages seized by Hamas terrorists.

The Met should not stop a march taking place on Saturday – unless there is a serious risk of terrorism or disorder, and Sir Mark says there is no evidence this is currently the case. I have no issue with the march taking place after the two-minute silence, and away from the Cenotaph, as the organisers have promised. Instead, Whitehall to Trafalgar Square should be sealed off and there must be an overwhelming police presence to ensure good behaviour and everyone’s safety. If Sir Mark cannot guarantee these conditions, or put together the resources to allow police to be seen to be keeping the King’s peace, then all bets are off.

The message which needs to go out to anyone who wants to protest is that we have limits, and that these will be set down and enforced, on this weekend of all occasions. To do their work, the police also require effective prosecutions of those who have transgressed the law. That means a criminal justice system which doesn’t hang up its robes at 5 p.m. on a Friday.

This is a seminal moment when the rights of the majority must take precedence over those who want to subvert our freedoms. The most powerful way we can do this is to show we have a state that can allow public dissent yet keep it firmly within the bounds of decency and legality. The price is worth paying – if Sir Mark’s officers can hold the line.

Why was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown?

00:00 04:57

Michael Simmons has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models?

This week the inquiry heard from Ben Warner, who in December 2019 was brought in by Dominic Cummings to be the head of data at No. 10. He quickly became one of the most important special advisers in the building, given that the liberty and future of the country during the pandemic was decided not by parliament or the cabinet but according to the production and interpretation of data by a small number of officials. In his written evidence Warner made an admission that went unnoticed by the inquiry (though not by academics such as Oliver Johnson). It may stand to be one of the most important points of the whole debacle.

The key part of Warner’s statement sheds light upon Whitehall’s flawed decision-making. On 31 October 2020, some 14 million British TV viewers sat down to watch an emergency press conference in which Boris Johnson, flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, announced a second lockdown. Sir Patrick presented a slideshow giving the data that justified the restrictions.

It was terrifying. The argument was summed up by a graph saying that if there were ‘no changes in policy or behaviour’, there could be up to 4,000 deaths a day, three times the number from the first wave in the spring. The other scenarios (later presented with oversimplified caveats by the BBC) were hardly more reassuring. It seemed to be an open-and-shut case for lockdown.

But the graph was wrong. It was out of date and based on flawed information, as was later pointed out by academics including Cambridge’s David Spiegelhalter and by the UK Statistics Authority itself. Might this have been a genuine mistake? In the rush and the panic – news of the lockdown had already leaked to the press – surely officials would have published a wrong graph only if they believed it to be right?

In his testimony, Warner remembers seeing a graph being circulated among scientists two days before lockdown that was  ‘screen-shotted out of a SPI-M [the modelling group] working paper’. It ‘showed the predictions from different UK academic groups if the pandemic carried on with no further changes’. This precisely fits the description of the Halloween graph. Warner sent the screenshot to colleagues in No. 10 and the Cabinet Office.

Angela McLean, now Chief Scientific Adviser but then at the Ministry of Defence, sounded the alarm. The graph had been based on a rate of virus growth – the R number – that was by then known to be incorrect. ‘Angela flagged that, because of more recent data, R was now predicted to be lower and therefore the peak number of deaths would be lower than presented in the SPI-M graph.’ Warner and McLean agreed that a more sensible graph, the ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’, should be used instead.

Warner testified that he went into the cabinet room to raise the alarm to the Prime Minister and his officials. The Covid peak might be half of that forecast, he said. Having flagged corrupt data, he thought the graph would be taken out of circulation. He says he left No. 10 that day ‘under
the impression that the SPI-M working paper graph was not going to be used in any public announcement’.

Only later did Warner find out that this graph had been shown on national television. He was dismayed, not least because he knew it would look as if officials were incompetent. He was right: they were castigated. ‘Unfairly in my view,’ he wrote, ‘because these results should not have been presented when it was known in Government at this point that they were no longer up to date.’ He doesn’t claim the second lockdown was an error, but his evidence does question the quality of data upon which the policy was based.

If the second lockdown was justified to the public with data that was known to be wrong by the government before it was televised, then surely the government acted unethically. Public-health best practice stresses the need for transparency and honesty, including being frank about error margins in models. Honesty should have been paramount.

Given the consequences of lockdown – social, economic, educational – Warner’s discovery ought to be a scandal. There should be a flurry of follow-ups to discover how Whitty and Sir Patrick end up on national TV presenting information that was not just bogus, but known to be bogus.

The revelation raises other issues. How much government policy is based on models? How transparent are they? Are the assumptions published? The Covid Inquiry might have uncovered the biggest question in politics: how did broken models make their way through Whitehall without proper scrutiny? But we should not expect the Hallett Inquiry to pursue this argument.

Portrait of the week: Met in a muddle, King’s Speech and a wine production slump 

Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said of pro-Palestinian demonstrations: ‘To plan protests on Armistice Day is provocative and disrespectful, and there is a clear and present risk that the Cenotaph and other war memorials could be desecrated.’ The Metropolitan Police urged organisers of a pro-Palestinian march on 11 November to postpone it, but they refused. The Prime Minister then said he would hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘accountable’ for his decision to greenlight the ‘disrespectful’ demonstration. Imran Hussain MP left the Labour front bench over Sir Keir Starmer’s opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza, and Afrasiab Anwar, the leader of Burnley council, and ten councillors left the Labour party. The father of the Liverpool footballer Luis Díaz was still being held by left-wing rebels of the National Liberation Army in Colombia.

At the State Opening of Parliament the King was made to read out such sentences as: ‘My ministers will address inflation and the drivers of low growth over demands for greater spending or borrowing.’ The King’s Speech contained 21 Bills, to give serious offenders ‘tougher sentences’, replace A-levels with an Advanced British Standard, reform leasehold law, set up a new football regulator, deal with ‘the scourge of unlicensed pedicabs in London’, ban the sale of tobacco progressively, and award licences for oil and gas projects in the North Sea annually. Shell reported profits of £5.1 billion between July and September. In Edinburgh on Guy Fawkes Day, 50 youths threw fireworks and petrol bombs at riot police; Glasgow and Dundee had their own firework riots.

Women at high risk of breast cancer will be offered a preventative drug, Anastrozole. Glass protecting the ‘Rokeby Venus’ at the National Gallery was smashed in eight places by protestors against oil. Nadine Dorries recounted in a book a plot to bring down Boris Johnson by a cabal called the Movement, supported by Dr No, the Wolf, the Dark Lord and Michael Gove. Five farmers rescued a sheep, nicknamed Fiona, stranded at the bottom of cliffs in the Cromarty Firth for two years; it was found to be quite fat, scoring about 4.5 on the sheep condition scale.

Abroad

Israeli ground forces reached the sea south of Gaza City, which was surrounded and penetrated. Heavy bombardment continued. The Gaza health ministry, run by Hamas, said on 7 November that 10,300 people (4,100 of them children) had been killed in the Gaza Strip in the four weeks since 7 October. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, said the Gaza Strip was ‘becoming a graveyard for children’. Civilians were again told to flee southwards; more than 350,000 people remained in the north, according to a US diplomat. An Israeli air strike, Hamas said, killed 45 people in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp. Thousands protested outside Israel’s Ministry of Defence headquarters against the government’s handling of the hostage situation. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, visited Ramallah in the West Bank to meet the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas, who demanded an ‘immediate ceasefire’. Egypt and Jordan made the same demand when Mr Blinken met their leaders; he preferred a ‘humanitarian pause’. ‘Our advice to the Americans is to immediately stop the war in Gaza and implement a ceasefire, otherwise they will be hit hard,’ said the Iranian defence minister, Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani. In a video address, Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, refrained from declaring all-out war on Israel.

A Russian missile killed more than 20 Ukrainian service personnel during an award ceremony in the Zaporizhzhia region. Ukrainian missiles struck a shipbuilder’s at Kerch in Crimea. British defence intelligence said that Russia had probably lost about 200 armoured vehicles during assaults on the town of Avdiivka and might have suffered thousands of casualties there since 1 October. Delhi shut primary schools as air pollution became intolerable.

Anthony Albanese, the PM of Australia, visited China. António Costa resigned as PM of Portugal where an inquiry investigated lithium mining concessions. Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, was found guilty in New York of fraud, and faces decades in jail. Donald Trump appeared in a New York court for a civil fraud trial. Global wine production fell to its lowest since 1961.                                    CSH

Rishi and Suella’s fates hinge on the Rwanda ruling

The first King’s Speech for more than 70 years was a festival of the expected: the royal reading of a No. 10 press release. Some dividing lines were drawn between the Tories and Labour and some loose ends tied up – but there was no real change in political direction. ‘It’s a continuance of the direction and path we are on,’ explained a senior government figure.

But if current polls are any indicator, to continue in the same direction means a landslide Labour victory and a Tory defeat of historic proportions at the next election. ‘It won’t spark rebellion but it certainly won’t lead to much excitement,’ was one MP’s quickfire assessment of the speech. ‘[Rishi Sunak] has slid back into management mode,’ sighs a member of the government.

Sunak wants to fight the general election with a focus on energy and crime. He tried to put Labour in a bind as to how to respond with the announcement of a justice bill pledging tougher sentences for the worst offenders, as well as legislation requiring annual rounds of oil and gas licensing in the North Sea. It means Labour would have to make a choice on revoking the old regime – rather than simply hoping the Tories renew the licences before they get in.

The Conservatives are also trying to make Labour squirm over the media bill, which is intended to protect press freedom. They’re keen to highlight the threat of state regulation of the media under Labour. Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, is on record saying she wished to ‘bring down the house of Murdoch’.

Other bills – such as legislation for an independent football regulator – were part of No. 10’s efforts to tick off as much of the 2019 manifesto as they can ahead of making a fresh set of pledges next year. The complaint privately from ministers and MPs is that, taken as a whole, there was little to bind the various measures into a political vision. What connects the proposed ban on smoking, announced at Tory conference, and the crackdown on pedicabs, which came this week? ‘As with the conference speech there wasn’t an overarching narrative,’ complains a senior Tory.

The speech also showed the political limitations Sunak faces – both in terms of his party and how much time he has. There were fewer bills announced than in any Queen’s Speech for almost a decade, while several controversial policies – such as the conversion therapy ban promised by Boris Johnson – were not included. But ministers may still try to bring it in before the election.

Another decision still to be made is whether to whether to fine charities which give tents to homeless people as part of the criminal justice bill. Discussions in government are ongoing but the point of the potential policy is to encourage rough sleepers to accept the accommodation offered to them.

However, Suella Braverman’s declaration that tent-dwellers are making a ‘lifestyle choice’ has sparked a Tory backlash which extends to cabinet. ‘As ever with Suella, she has a point but it’s not the one she has made,’ says a government figure. Braverman’s critics, who want her moved out of the great office of state ahead of the election, have renewed their efforts. ‘She is distracting from good stories we have to tell,’ says one such MP. ‘The most inspiring thing Rishi has done is not the King’s Speech but refusing to endorse her comments,’ adds a former minister.

With the King’s Speech unlikely to make a difference to the Tories’ current trajectory, pressure is building for Sunak to find a game-changer. The next real opportunity for this is the Autumn Statement, due later this month. MPs on the right of the party are clamouring for personal tax cuts, but while this is possible (with no final decisions to be made until the latest OBR forecasts are published) it’s more likely that any significant tax cut will be saved for next year’s Spring Budget. ‘We’ll build a package based on the headroom,’ says a government aide.

The current focus for the Autumn Statement is to boost business investment, fix the labour market and encourage public sector productivity. That means difficult decisions on uprating benefits and pensions. Concerns over inflation may be used to delay tax cuts until the new year. ‘This time there are two tests for tax cuts,’ explains a Treasury figure. ‘Whether we can afford it and whether there is an inflationary risk.’

Sunak’s supporters fear that an anodyne statement could lead to a backlash – adding to a sense that a series of set-piece events – including the Prime Minister’s conference speech and the King’s Speech – have been missed opportunities for more significant announcements. ‘I think the Autumn Statement will be a damp squib,’ says one member of the government.

The decision that is most important to Sunak’s fortunes is one that is out of his control. The Supreme Court is expected to return its verdict on whether the Rwanda scheme is lawful next week. If it agrees with the Court of Appeal ruling that the scheme is unlawful, the policy will be close to dead in its current form. Should the appeal fail, Sunak will be facing a party that has lost hope in its own chances for victory at the next election.

If the Supreme Court does side with the government then deportations to Rwanda could come as soon as early February. Anyone booked on these flights would probably appeal to Strasbourg, so there may, in the words of one government insider, be ‘plenty of empty seats’. But the act of a flight carrying asylum seekers actually leaving Britain for Rwanda could change the political weather.

‘The Rwanda judgment is the totemic moment of the whole year’s big barometer of MP opinion,’ says a senior Tory. ‘It should also dictate the fate of Suella.’

The Prime Minister is running out of time. With the three big events this year unlikely to shift the polls in his favour, Sunak must face the fact that hoping for the best may soon become the only strategy he has left.

Britain has led the way on migration

Human trafficking is a multi-billion-pound global industry. It is fuelled by the desperation of migrants seeking a better life and the cynicism of those who are now adept at identifying and exploiting loopholes in western border controls.

As ever larger waves of migrants cross the Mediterranean, Rishi Sunak has told European leaders that their efforts at policing illegal migration are ‘not working’ – because there is no shortage of poor people willing to pay smugglers for their ‘barbaric enterprise’. He has raised difficult questions about how the rich discharge their duty to the poor in a world with about 100 million displaced people. The old postwar settlement is utterly unfit for the new global dynamics of migration flows.

Taking in more legal refugees and deporting those who arrive illegally would break the people traffickers’ model and, as Britain’s experience with Albania shows, that works. People would not pay £5,000 to travel to the United Kingdom if there was a realistic chance of ending up in Rwanda. The Rwanda plan is an imperfect and in many ways cruel solution, but it is less cruel than allowing thousands to drown in the sea or to start journeys which may result in them being in hock to gang-masters.

This week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz emerged from a marathon negotiation with the heads of Germany’s states to come up with a new deal intended to cut illegal migration. One of the proposals is to explore copy-ing part of the British model, and process asylum applicants in other countries. Denmark is already exploring this. The Sunak model – based on Australia’s success in fighting people-smuggling – is taking off.

Last week, the Austrian government signed an agreement to co-operate with the UK government on the offshore processing of asylum applicants. Italy, too, has expressed interest in the Rwanda scheme, and has done its own deal with Albania to process 3,000 asylum applications at a time there. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister, says her deal can stand as a model in how to move migrants outside EU territory.

Now and again, British politicians say that the issue is so important – and the scandal of migrant deaths so huge – that we cannot allow what parliament decides to be thwarted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. Jonathan Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, recently argued in this magazine that the ECHR’s processes are questionable enough to merit our withdrawal from the court.

At first, talk of leaving the ECHR prompted horror: could Britain put itself alongside Belarus and Russia in the sin bin of justice systems? Let us set aside that English law is already used as a global golden standard – which is why deals between two foreign countries are often agreed in London courts. The more pertinent point is that other European countries are now also thinking it’s time to place the wills of their parliaments and their voters above that of Strasbourg.

French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has announced that his government may in future simply deport illegal migrants deemed to be a threat to the country before they have had a chance to appeal to the ECHR.

What has changed? Reality has set in. The German experiment of 2015, when Angela Merkel opened her country up to vast numbers of new arrivals, underlined the fact Europe is not equipped to accept large inflows. It would take only a small proportion of the world’s 100 million displaced to make the journey to Europe for the continent’s welfare systems to be overwhelmed.

This does not mean washing our hands of our moral duty to help people in distress. On the contrary, the money European countries spend supporting asylum applicants on home soil could more effectively be spent helping refugees closer to their homelands. Indeed, this is exactly Britain’s policy: to increase our help for refugees in the immediate vicinity of Syria and elsewhere, while simultaneously discouraging illegal migration across the Channel.

Britain does also have a duty to accommodate refugees. To that end, Sunak should say that we will fly in two legitimate refugees whose cases have been assessed abroad for every person deported to Rwanda. The question is not whether we help the world’s dispossessed, but how.

There are reasonable objections to the UK government’s Rwanda scheme. Is that really the right country to be sending refugees to for resettlement, given its history of genocide? Might a Meloni-style deal with Albania be better? Should asylum-seekers sent to Rwanda really be barred from settling in Britain even if their applications are successful, as is the current plan?  

But no one can claim any more that the Tories have made Britain into an outlier whose policy on migration is horrifying other European countries. Sunak can claim to have a more effective solution than his critics are able to propose – and in doing so, he has set the terms of debate in the most important issue of our time.

How I tried to buy The Spectator

The Victoria and Albert Museum kindly threw me a leaving party after eight years as chair, plus a particularly apt present: a specially commissioned illuminated V&A logo made from powder-coated steel by the designer Toby Albrow. The logo is a reference to my megalomaniacal taste for giant logos atop museum buildings. We have placed a huge one on the roof of the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, and an even bigger one – 20 feet high – on the new V&A East in Stratford, visible from three miles away in Canary Wharf. What an exhilarating and happy gig the V&A has been. I’m going to miss it and the people. They hung my leaving portrait in the directorate corridor six weeks early, just to remind me it was over.

My attentive bank manager alerted me that ‘Barclays head office is currently investigating you as a potential PEP’. It seemed most unlikely; I’m not in any way a Politically Exposed Person. PEPs are supposed to be Colombian drug barons or Russian money launderers, – why would my high street bank of 50 years be investigating me? It had a sinister Nigel Farage vibe to it. My manager wondered: ‘Do you know any MPs or have you ever met an MP in the past? That can leave you open to bribery.’ Nothing more was heard for a month, until I was told: ‘The appeal process is progressing. The issue seems to be your chairmanship of the V&A, which they believe was an appointment by the prime minister.’ It was a red flag, apparently. How very surreal. In earlier days, your bank might have invited you to a slap-up boardroom lunch in their City HQ as chair of a national museum. Now you’re lumped in with sanction-busters. I hope they never discover I’ve become chair of Historic Royal Palaces, a royal appointment.

The news that many suitors are jockeying to acquire The Spectator reminds me of my own failed attempt to buy it for Condé Nast. For six weeks we worked intensely on business plans before offering £20 million, precisely four times what our bean counters reckoned was a fair price at the time. It was sold instead as part of the Telegraph group to the Barclay family. Not long after, I saw Aidan and Howard Barclay at the Ritz. ‘You guys were keen to buy The Spectator, weren’t you?’ asked Aidan. ‘Lazard told me that.’ ‘We were – and are,’ I replied. ‘It’s funny about The Spectator,’ Aidan said. ‘I hadn’t heard of that one when we bought it. It hadn’t ever crossed my radar. But afterwards I discovered quite a few of our friends read it, they say it’s quite interesting. They take it.’

Like Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk, I am a ChatGPT enthusiast. ‘Name five books Enid Blyton might have written in her Famous Five series but didn’t?’ Three seconds later: ‘Five and the Haunted Lighthouse, Five on the Treasure Trail, Five and the Midnight Train Mystery, Five and the Secret Code, Five and the Phantom Shipwreck.’ Pretty good. Next question: ‘Name Nicholas Coleridge’s five best books?’ Instant chatbot answer: ‘Godchildren, The Ornamental Gardens of Louis XV, A Much Married Man, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: a single mother’s relationship with her autistic son, The Fashion Conspiracy.’ Readers can decide which two I didn’t write. Where ChatGPT scores strongest is in lyric writing, its suggestions up there with Loudon Wainwright III and Mike Barron from Madness. ‘Write lyrics beginning with the line “My boyfriend chucked me at the service station”.’ Two seconds later: ‘He did it with no explanation/He said I’m fed up with you bitch/If you wanna go home you’ll have to hitch.’

I am literally going back to school next September, as the 43rd Provost of Eton. Exactly like an ambassador with a new posting, you don’t get to see the living accommodation until after you’ve got the job. It felt strangely impertinent to be venturing upstairs in the Provost’s Lodge to inspect bedrooms and bathrooms. It is Tudor and civilised. But, like the archaeological layers of Troy, the interior has vestiges of all previous Provosts – Sir Antony Acland’s wallpaper, Lord Charteris’s bedside rug and so on, with dashing recent additions by the Waldegraves.

What is the etiquette on clapping after eulogies at memorial services? At Mary Quant’s service at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court, a first-rate eulogy by Jasper Conran was met with a few exploratory handclaps which grew into a tumult of applause. Recently, clapping seems to be obligatory, regardless of whether or not the eulogy was any good. Perhaps it is the deceased we are applauding? And should we now also clap sermons?

Will Artificial Intelligence create Artificial Stupidity?

At a time when almost everything gets worse, it is nice to recount that this State Opening of Parliament was better than the last one. Last year, there was a wintry sense of fin de régime, as the Prince of Wales stood in for his ailing mother. Now that Prince is King. Everyone wanted it to go well for him, so it did. There was a feeling of excitement, and perhaps relief that the chilly hand of rationalisation has not used the new reign to tighten its grip. The ceremony was, in a way, grander than under Elizabeth II, because we now have both a King and a Queen. For the first time since 1950 (King George VI was too ill to deliver the speech in 1951) two trains were required and so – to avoid a train-crash – more pages.

In case the whole thing gets Starmerised, I feel it worth recording for posterity the atmosphere of such occasions. They are both impressively stately and oddly intimate. The Chamber of the House of Lords looks splendid but is actually quite small. It has a hugger-mugger feeling. Except for the dramatis personae, peers must find a seat where they can, some stuck on benches supported by no backs for more than two hours. There is a curious box in the far corner in which the eldest sons or daughters of peers (including, this time, our daughter), are penned standing throughout, like guillotine candidates in a tumbril. In addition to the two principals, many of those present looked splendid too: a bewigged Scottish judge with red crosses all over his robes; the bishops, shepherds of their flocks, with their ovine-looking collars; the Lord High Chancellor, Alex Chalk, is high in physical stature and walked backwards with aplomb; the Duchess of Wellington was perfectly lovely in her tiara. And, near me, a new entrant, Lord (Andrew) Roberts of Belgravia, wrapped copiously in what he tells me were the oldest robes in the chamber, lent to him by Lord Willoughby de Broke, whose ancestor received his writ of summons in 1491, when Christopher Columbus was trying to raise money for a certain voyage west.

Then there is the Cap of Maintenance, famous for its obscurity. The Order of the Procession in which it is carried stated: ‘The Cap of Maintenance The Lord True.’ The Lord True is a real person, the much-admired present Leader of the Lords. I prefer to falsify history and claim that The Lord True was a permanent office under our old ways, like The Lord Steward, to distinguish him from the many Lords Untrue who beset all sovereigns.

One measure reiterated in the King’s Speech was the commitment to building a Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens next to parliament. This is one of those projects which governments promise in haste and repent at leisure but try, embarrassed, to stick with as opposition and costs mount. It bids fair to be the HS2 of memorialisation.

As the Covid Inquiry rakes over the coals of the fateful spring of 2020, Boris Johnson has been assailed for having taken a bit of time off to get on with his book about Shakespeare. He had a role model. Here is Bill Deakin, recalling an evening in the Admiralty in late March/early April 1940: ‘Naval signals awaited attention. Admirals tapped impatiently on the door of the First Lord’s room, while… talk inside ranged around the spreading shadows of the Norman invasion and the figure of Edward the Confessor, who, as Churchill wrote, “comes down to us, faint, misty, frail.” I can still see the map on the wall, with the dispositions of the British fleet off Norway, and hear the voice of the First Lord as he grasped with his usual insight the strategic position in 1066.’ Adolf Hitler may have been on the point of invading Norway, but Winston Churchill was late with his deadline for The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

One of the many difficulties in thinking about AI is that I am sure the main figures in the story do not include themselves in the list of those who will have no work once it reigns supreme. Elon Musk obviously does not, and Rishi Sunak, who interviewed him last week at Bletchley Park, must feel fairly confident that a man of his modernity, non-artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley contacts will also find a place in the brave new world. Such men (about 90 per cent are men) probably feel quite perky; the rest of us, not. The trouble with intelligence is that it is not naturally humane. It tends be very bored by the slowness of others and rather self-admiring. One of the things I like about human beings is our intermittent stupidity. When I am wrestling with officialdom, a public service, a utility company, a local council, I am often buoyed up by the idea that those I am dealing with may be no more competent than I am and may therefore fail to overmaster me. It is a comforting thought. If Artificial Intelligence (AI) were truly as clever as it aspires to be, could it not create Artificial Stupidity (AS) as well?

It was typical of my trade that we covered our semi-exclusion from Bletchley Park as a major aspect of the story. ‘Journalists were at the event but were not allowed to ask questions,’ reported the BBC, as if this were lèse majesté. Of course we had to be restrained: otherwise we would have bombarded Mr Musk with questions about his treatment of X (the mania formerly known as Twitter) and ignored AI, which hardly any of us understand. The gathering reminded me of Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street meeting of scientists and thinkers, such as James Lovelock, to discuss climate change with cabinet colleagues in April 1989. Obviously, most ministers thought it crazy and boring; obviously, the media were not there, and not interested. But actually, it turned out quite important in the history of how this subject captured the Western world.