The reality of food banks

00:00 04:33

Lloyd Evans has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The old man next door asked me to collect his parcel from the food bank. ‘Sure,’ I said. I joined a queue of 20 starvelings outside a chapel in the East End. Most were migrants carrying rucksacks or bags for life, and there were a few Cockney mums with fidgety nippers in tow. Everyone in the queue had a mobile phone – which is normal these days – and most were dressed for the Olympic Games in Adidas sprint shoes, Nike jogging pants and Reebok breathable weightlifting shirts. I felt distinctly under-dressed in my Oxfam castoffs. Despite their keep-fit attire, many of the applicants seemed to be on the corpulent side, and one or two had stepped proudly out of the closet and were openly obese. Good for them.

After waiting in a gale for 25 minutes, I was ushered into a brightly lit Anglican chapel which had been systematically stripped of any reference to Christ, the cross, the commandments and so on. Nailed to the walls were abstract posters bearing mottos for zombies: ‘We Are All One’ and ‘My Spirit Shall Bring You Life’.

 I filled in a form and took a seat opposite an elderly adjudicator whose wrinkled face was hidden by a surgical mask. ‘Is English your first language?’ she asked. I told her that I was collecting food for an elderly neighbour and she queried the reason I’d given on the form. I wrote ‘debt’ as it sounded better than ‘grinding poverty’ or ‘starvation’. She said: ‘Let’s put “rent arrears” as it’s more sympatico.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but why?’ She misheard me. ‘Sympatico,’ she explained. ‘It’s Italian.’

She showed me the options on a laminated sheet with the words and symbols printed adjacently, as pub signs are, to help the illiterate. Shampoo and loo-roll were offered along with sanitary towels, moisturiser and other women’s toiletries. I could have got some pet food too. The mood among the staff was gushingly, and exhaustingly, friendly. ‘Mia! What a beautiful name,’ yelped a volunteer from a nearby table where a Ukrainian refugee was being processed.

On the other side of me, a Sri Lankan male handed his passport to a volunteer who noticed that he’d recently turned 30. ‘Congratulations for last week,’ she beamed. The birthday boy didn’t appear to understand her, even though he claimed to be studying engineering at a London university. To complete his paperwork, she asked him how he’d travelled to the food bank. ‘On foot or by public transport?’ He frowned uncertainly and said: ‘Yes.’ When she’d finished transferring his answers to the computer, she handed him the form with a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s yours. Take it with you,’ she said. ‘Throw it in the bin. Do whatever you like with it.’ She mimed ripping it up, as if to assure him that the food bank wasn’t a front for the secret police.

The terms of trade were tougher than you might imagine, and the system is designed to thwart scroungers. You can collect a three-day supply of food but you can’t return for at least a month. So the notion that anyone in Britain is ‘reliant’ on food banks must be a myth. The banks themselves prevent dependency.

I joined a third queue at a delivery point across the road and collected my free goody-bag. It looked like the contents of a dead bachelor’s pantry. Packets of powdered soup and butterscotch mousse. A pound of caster sugar. Plastic pouches filled with rice and lentils. A can of ‘Del Monte quality halved pears in light syrup’ (which looked quite tasty in the picture). For energy, I was given a kilo of ‘wheat biscuits’ from Morrisons which a performing elephant might enjoy. The fresh veg was limited to a bag of fist-sized yams. Finally, for pudding, I got a family pack of four Mars bars. In Tesco, my haul would have set me back about £18 which is the sum you’d earn working on the minimum wage for 90 minutes. And that’s how much time I spent in the queue. Financially it was the same as having a crap job for an hour and a half.

When I got back, the old guy was at home with his son and daughter and he asked me to call again later. Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit that we’re on speaking terms. Fair enough. Or maybe he wanted to conceal his straitened circumstances from his family. Anyway, I felt a little stung by his rebuff so I wolfed all his Mars bars and ate his Del Monte halved pears in light syrup. Then I simmered his yams for ten minutes but they dissolved into a puddle of reddish phlegm so I slung them into the garden for the foxes to fight over. No takers. Even vermin are too sniffy for my cooking.

I’ll do anything to get a decent plumber

The plumbers come and go, but mainly go, and I am now so desperate for a bath that I will do anything for a man carrying a pipe wrench.

If only I had more Botox in my face and my highlights done, I found myself thinking, as we sat at the kitchen table one night rowing about the seemingly impossible problem of trying to get tradesmen who are also farmers on EU subsidies.

The bathrooms in this old Georgian pile are so cranky they might as well not be there. In fact, it would be better if they weren’t. The heating and plumbing is a death trap. We found an old log burner in a back snug that was venting up a chimney stack passing through the main bathroom and when the builder boyfriend took the stud wall out he found a mass of smouldering black timber, half on fire, half dripping in damp, with a tangle of electrical wires wrapped around it for good measure.

Evidently, the previous owner waited so many years for a plumber that he kept taking matters into his own hands. He probably never did succeed in persuading one, because there is a sweet spot here
relating to a very precise sum of money and size of job, whereby the thing is worth a fellow devoting to it just such time and tax allowance as will not interfere with his agricultural hand-outs.

Added to which, the Irish very sensibly do not like old houses. They prefer a nice concrete bungalow with uPVC windows, and easy to wipe down plastic railings out front. When you first see these dwellings you regard them as blots on the landscape.

Pounded by enough wind and rain, however, you start longing for an ugly modern bungalow that holds the heat, and brings in the boiler and solar panel subsidies, which are almost as good as the farming ones.

I understand this now I am permanently covered in mud but also because I have talked to so many plumbers. Most of them walk into our crumbling country house, look horrified and tell us we’re mad.

Some give us hope, banter, and promises about when they can start. Those ones never answer our calls again. One fellow didn’t speak. He walked round the house in one swift circuit and back out the door without uttering a word. Another told us his mental health would never stand it. He was a former caretaker at a school and was looking for a job that would boost his self-esteem after a breakdown. I told him working with the builder boyfriend shouting obscenities down a ladder would do the opposite of that.

But then I found a guy on Facebook who was particularly chatty. When he came to look, he joked that the English couple he was currently working for were rich as Croesus. Money was no object. They had even sent to London for more labourers.

The builder b started to laugh along with him, but I had a better idea. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s how we feel. We’ve decided to throw money at it. Also, we don’t care when you come or how long you take to do the job. Spread it out over a year if you want.’

The BB went to argue and I gave him my ‘shut your trap’ face. ‘You’re not going to get a good deal here,’ I told him later as he berated me. ‘We are going to have to let someone take our pants down and treat us like idiots. It’s the only way.’

What I didn’t tell him was that if the promise of stupidity didn’t work I was going to start flirting with this guy.

I‘m so fed up with the makeshift electric shower dribbling three strands of water on me that every plumber who comes through the door looks like Mel Gibson. So the BB better not force the issue.

He knows only too well that when we first moved here he tried and failed to get hay until I got a delivery by bursting into tears on the phone one night to the biggest hay dealer in the west of Ireland. ‘Please help me,’ I sobbed, and he did.

‘Face it,’ I told the BB, as we argued over the plumbing. ‘You’re not getting anywhere here by knowing what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to leave this to me.’

A few days after me showing him how daft I was, the plumber answered my call. A few weeks after that he said he might be able to start work the following week. One evening that week, when the BB happened to be in London, he said he might pop round. And I sat on the sofa all dressed up, listening out for a car.

Viazi the dog had a lucky escape from a baboon

Viazi is a Samburu mongrel bitch with a curly tail. She is one of the most delightful, wonderful creatures I’ve known in my life. Her energy is boundless, she is always cheery and she’s been my great friend. When our collie Sasi had her litter of puppies in a heavy thunderstorm on the farm before the pandemic, we assumed Jock the labrador was the father. It later became evident that Sasi had been jumped by a roving Samburu cattle dog. We found homes for all of the puppies except for this little girl, who was as brown and as round as a baked potato – so we named her Viazi, which in Swahili means ‘potatoes’. I suppose our son Rider loved Jock the most, Claire and our daughter Eve loved Sasi, and I was left with Viazi to love.

It has been an adventurous life for her. On our very long walks across the farm, the dogs always have an antelope, African hare or flock of guinea fowl to chase after. Sasi used to go like a bullet, but as she has grown older, Viazi has taken over as the one who leads out in front. We have been lax in our training and cannot stop them when we encounter a herd of plains zebra, which buck and kick their hind legs out as Viazi barks at their tails.

Several times we have had run-ins with snakes, including the Ashe’s large brown cobra, the largest of all the spitting cobras. These can be 10ft long and they have a habit of slithering into the house on hot dry days.

I’ve seen a neighbour’s dog blinded by cobra venom, but ours have miraculously managed to dodge the flying spit and the serpents end up either dead or in flight from the barking pack. The only thing Viazi fears is Echo, one of the cats, though she gets on well with the other felines, Bernini and Omar.

One day Viazi took off on a mission at full speed and as she got close to a thorn tree, we saw there was a sub-adult leopard in the branches. Viazi did not check her stride and the leopard then went into full retreat across the savannah – but not before taking a swipe at the dog, opening a nasty gash along her flank.

The vet later said Viazi was lucky to survive, because had the leopard been an adult, she would have been killed. Cat wounds can also turn bad very quickly. Leopards love the taste of a dog and there is a big, old male cat around here who returns regularly to the farmstead after dark to sniff around near where the pets sleep. A couple of years ago, a leopard, probably that same one, ate a man on a nearby farm and stored his remains in the high branches of an acacia.

But this is how we came closest to losing Viazi. I was out doing my rounds on the farm when I heard the bark of apes somewhere in the bush up ahead. A troop of about 30 baboons often wanders in and out of the farm. We rarely bother each other, though once when the children were little I happened upon a big dog baboon sitting in a tree in the garden, quietly observing Rider, evidently planning how to seize and eat him.

Baboons are formidable animals, with big teeth, very sharp dirty claws and a simian bloodlust. On this day out with Viazi, before I knew it, she had torn off ahead of me into a thicket and a few seconds later I heard a loud yelp. When I finally caught up with her, she had deep bite wounds and long claw gashes along her flank. She was bleeding badly as I took her home to the farmstead. Everybody else was away and I called my neighbour Tom, who sent over some lidocaine and a veterinary stitching kit.

I cleaned out Viazi’s bloody sides, soaked the injuries with Betadine and jabbed her with antibiotic, but I had no idea what to do with the needle and thread by myself. I couldn’t pinch her wounds together and stitch at the same time. After fiddling about and losing valuable time getting nowhere, I got a tube of superglue, squeezed this along the gash lines and pulled the wounds together. Incredibly, the glue held and I was able to get Viazi to stay quietly in our bedroom to recover. Within days she bounced back, though now she looks highly impressive with large chunks of fur all gone and long scars down her back and sides.

Bridge | 10 February 2024

The Reykjavik Bridge Festival, held annually at the end of January, is one of the great treats of the bridge calendar, and this year it was twice as good: Thomas Charlsen decided to hold his terrific World Bridge Tour (WBT) just preceding it to make it easier for teams who wanted to play both.

In a sea of world-class talent, the outstanding performance of young Danish superstar Dennis Bilde was breathtaking. He was not only on the winning team in both events, but also walked away with first place in the pairs.

Here he is working his magic to make the opps go wrong (see diagram).

Contract 3NT by South

Almost all tables were in 3NT, which is an interesting contract: you have to be a bit careful not to set up a long Heart for West, or lose two Diamond tricks. About three out of four tables made it, while the rest went down. But that’s not the story today!

Dennis always has a throng of kibitzers watching him play and he did not disappoint. On this hand he was West and started with the Ace of Spades to have a look around. This wouldn’t normally be a very attractive lead, but on this occasion he knew his partner had next to nothing, so taking a look at dummy was not a bad idea. He continued at trick two with the 10 of Spades (!) round to South’s King.

Declarer tested Clubs and then knocked out West’s ♥A. Dennis won and continued with the ♠2. Declarer put in the 8 and East – whose interest in the hand had so far been minimal, suddenly found himself taking the setting trick with the ♠9!

Should South have got it right? I’ll leave that for you to work out!

Do asylum-seekers really want to convert to Christianity?

Slightly bored last Thursday afternoon, I converted to Islam to see what it was like. All I had to do was intone the Shahada – ‘La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah’ – and then have a nice shower with some Head and Shoulders to wash away the deluded Christian filth that had hitherto cloaked my physical being, the musty detritus of a decadent creed. I have to say, once converted, it didn’t feel terribly different inside but on the plus side I was immediately offered several senior posts with the BBC and the Arts Council which I may or may not take up.

Bored again on Friday, I decided to renounce Islam, which I did by reciting the Shahada backwards: ‘hallA lusaR nudammahuM, hallA alli ahali aL’ and having another shower – at which point a small shaitan with glowing red depthless eyes materialised by the sideboard and told me to ‘Stop taking the piss, sunshine.’ Theoretically I am dead meat, as Sharia law insists that the punishment for apostasy should be execution, which fact the shaitan kindly explained to me. It is not the most easily forgiving of religions, which is perhaps its greatest strength. When, on that Thursday, I renounced Christianity all that happened was a kind of hologram of Justin Welby briefly flickered in front of me and said: ‘Ah well, no use crying over spilt milk. Jesus won’t mind, so long as you still carry out your waste recycling diligently and don’t mis-gender anyone. Have a nice day.’

Meanwhile, on the good ship Bibby Stockholm, the Muslim asylum-seekers are queuing up to convert to Christianity. At least 40 migrants have made the metaphysical journey from Muhammed (pbuh) to Jesus Christ (and him, too, although not as much, obvs, if you are a Muslim), the consequence perhaps of having watched Welby talking on TV and understandably having been smitten by the power of his word, the intellect, the consistency of thought and so on. Or maybe the process was more epiphanous and their bodies really were somehow suddenly suffused with the spirit of our Lord and saviour, as well as his offer of regular welfare benefits, child support and a council flat. You may have heard a church elder, David Rees, boasting about the conversion rate in an interview with an almost dumbstruck Ed Stourton on the BBC Sunday programme. Dave said there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that these young men were entirely genuine in their wish to be accepted into the body of the church and heaven forfend anyone saying otherwise. He added: ‘Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church. So those are the sort of questions that we ask them, and they have to give a public testimony, at their baptism, which they did in their native language, and it was translated into English. There were no qualms at all about the content of that testimony, which was clear and conclusive about their faith in Jesus Christ.’

Dave was convinced because he had a translator who had been to Iran, he said. This left me open to ponder several possible explanations for this remarkable exhibition of credulousness. There are three possible scenarios. The first is that Dave really is thicker than a large slab of Osmium, a man deprived of almost all the normal human critical faculties. The second is that Dave is basically doing the same gig as the aluminium siding salesman in Barry Levinson’s rather lovely film Tin Men and that he does not really care if his clients actually buy into the whole Holy Trinity shebang, because he’s basically just working on commission.

The third is that Dave and the rest of these idiots, including the one who decided that the Afghan asylum-seeker Abdul Shokoor Ezedi would make a model Christian, is motivated by a fashionable loathing of the Conservative party and indeed anybody else who thinks that immigration, legal or illegal, needs to be controlled. Let everyone in, it’s what Jesus, as well as Jeremy Corbyn, would have wanted. Having met quite a few people from the evangelical Alpha course – members of which carried out these ‘conversions’ – I am reasonably convinced that the answer is scenario number one. But maybe scenario number one with a certain whiff of scenario number three in there as well.

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The reason these migrants are lining up to embrace the Church of England and thus in the future – theoretically, at least – spending every Sunday listening to some mithering halfwit spewing out hand-wringing tendentious progressive bollocks with no relevance to the Bible whatsoever – is that they have been told by the real enemies within, the ‘refugee’ NGOs, that this will greatly improve their chances of securing asylum. The people in these NGOs are the same people who are perfectly content to see more and more migrants lose their lives in fantastically dangerous cross-Channel journeys in an inner tube, because at least some will make it to Dover and that will cause trouble for the Tories. The people who think that borders should be entirely open, being not possessed of the intellectual capacity to understand what would happen if they really were.

Much like the lawyers and the same NGOs who oppose sending illegal asylum-seekers to Rwanda – or, let’s be clear, anywhere else – for processing and thus contribute towards the deaths of more migrants as they mass to cross the Channel. These people are entirely devoid of moral or rational agency – and yet we allow them to thwart, quite brazenly, the government’s attempts to solve this crisis. Me? I would remove the charitable status from any NGO which was found to have encouraged migrants to claim asylum. But maybe that’s just the vestigial tail of a more resolute religion still wagging in my brain.

The need for the monarchy has never been greater

The natural reaction to this week’s news that King Charles III is suffering from cancer has been one of concern and compassion. As the Prime Minister said, consolation can be drawn from the fact that the illness has been caught early and that Charles is continuing with his duties – albeit stepping aside from public-facing engagements for the time being. But it hasn’t taken long for conversation to stray on to other questions: might it be better for him to step back from all duties? And perhaps at some point he should give way to Prince William?

Such an idea is to be resisted. Charles III is the oldest monarch to take the throne in British history, and there are obvious health implications. But the King has long been an advocate of the British tradition of monarchy: that it is not a job from which one retires. The crown comes before the person.

Abdication has become a common feature in other European monarchies. Margrethe II of Denmark recently decided to step down, having previously ruled out the idea. But in Britain it has happened only once in modern times, when Edward VIII, a fairly young man at the time, put his relationship with Wallis Simpson ahead of his duty as a monarch. Going further back in history, Edward II and Richard II were forced out and James II fled. In more than a thousand years of monarchs, none has simply retired and handed the throne to a younger generation.

Just because something hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t of course. Pope Benedict XVI broke a convention of 700 years when he resigned due to ill health. Charles III has already broken the rule that forced his great uncle off the throne: he is married to a divorcée, and is himself on his second marriage. Times change, and monarchies change with the times.

To introduce the idea of retirement, however, would diminish the status of monarch to that of a job, reducing it to the level of our here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. That the British monarchy is so strong and has survived into the 21st century in spite of huge social change and the less than ideal behaviour of some members of the royal family is largely down to the remarkable example of Elizabeth II. Duty, she told us on her 21st birthday in 1947, would guide her whole life, whether it be long or short – and she meant what she said.

There has never been any evidence – no matter what Netflix’s overimaginative writers may have postulated – that abdication was ever on the late Queen’s mind. She kept working until shortly before her death: her last official duty, ironically, being to receive a new prime minister whose brief time in office only served to emphasise the difference between the role of head of government and that of head of state.

In her determination to carry on until the end, Elizabeth II reminded us that some of the happiest, most settled times for Britain have been towards the end of long reigns.

Charles III’s reign is necessarily going to be far shorter than his mother’s, but there is little to suggest that the King sees his role any differently to how his mother viewed hers. He showed that he had little time for the proposition that the monarchy should ‘skip a generation’ and go straight to William. Were he even to mention the possibility of abdication, it would reduce him to a lame duck. Every speech, every anniversary, every doctor’s appointment would lead to speculation: is this the moment when Charles III steps down?

None of this is to say that the King should be forced to make public appearances when he is unwell, or that he should feel obliged to keep to the schedule of a much younger man. In the United States there is understandable concern about an ageing President Biden’s ability to cope with the heavy workload of constant and crucial decisions. But the role of the British head of state is completely unique. Just as Charles himself stood in for his mother at the last State Opening of Parliament of her reign, he has a willing heir who is ready to step into his shoes when he is needed.

The potential back-up is not vast, however. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have opted out of royal life and Prince Andrew has been obliged to relinquish his royal duties after scandal. Buckingham Palace certainly needs to be thinking about how to ensure that the royal family is broad enough to cope with illness, incapacity and any additional withdrawals from life as a working royal. As our politics becomes more divided, the need for the unifying force of the crown – one that crosses borders of race, country and class – has never been greater.

Like everyone else this week, we wish the King a quick recovery. And most of all, we look forward to many more years of the reign of Charles III.

Éric Zemmour: ‘I am not intending to conquer Europe’

Two years ago, Éric Zemmour was the most talked-about man in France and a serious contender to be the ninth president of the Fifth Republic. A controversial journalist turned incendiary politician, he vied with Marine Le Pen for second place behind Emmanuel Macron in the polls. Crucially, he seemed to have something she lacked – an ability still to appeal to the Catholic bourgeoisie while tapping into widespread anger at mass immigration.

But then Russia attacked Ukraine, the mood of Europe changed, and Zemmour’s political fortunes sank as quickly as they had risen. He finished a distant fourth in the first round of the presidential election, with 7 per cent of the vote. The experience did not put him off running for high office, however, and today he is back in campaign mode looking ahead to the European elections in June and beyond.

He rejects the idea that his 2022 campaign was a failure. ‘I would call it a huge victory,’ he says. He points out that, having founded his Reconquête! party only a few months before polling day, he still won more votes than Les Républicains and the Parti Socialiste, the two parties which governed France from the time of Charles de Gaulle to the advent of Macronism.

Zemmour squarely blames Vladimir Putin’s invasion for derailing his candidacy. ‘The media talked about little else,’ he says. His big political theme – what he calls the Islamification of France – was blocked out by more immediate existential fears about a major war in Europe. ‘There was a rally–around-the-flag effect,’ he says. His poll scores took a nosedive from late February onwards. Zemmour’s criticisms of Nato and past praise for Putin got him into political bother. He was also accused of being heartless because he initially said that France should be wary of an ‘emotional response’ when it came to accepting Ukrainian refugees.

Zemmour concedes that he gave his opponents too much ammunition. He has written a book in which he explores his mistakes. Yet he baulks at the suggestion that his pugnacious, journalistic style makes him ill-suited to politics, and he’s adamant he’s not giving up. ‘I fight against the Islamification of my country and the continent,’ he says.

Zemmour talks a lot about ‘the Great Replacement’ – a controversial term invented by the novelist Renaud Camus – and he knows that sounds alarmingly racist to many in Britain. ‘It shocks in France, too,’ he says. ‘I am the only one in the political class to use it. Mme Le Pen refuses to use it. She pretends that it has connotations of a great conspiracy… we always have to invent some fascist, Nazi or whatever else origins to everything. There is none of that.’

Camus coined the phrase, he says, ‘to explain the historical phenomenon which witnesses the replacement of a white Christian – or a Judeo-Christian population of Greco-Roman culture, as General de Gaulle would have described it – by a Muslim population that comes from Africa’.

‘French women these days give birth on average to 1.1 to 1.6 children per woman,’ he says. ‘Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian women have about 3.5 children. In France, we do not allow ethnic statistics, in England you do, and we can see that in London only 37 per cent of the population now belongs to the category you call “white British”.’

It’s difficult to stop Zemmour, whose grandparents were Jewish Berbers from north Africa, when he’s in full flow. He hasn’t much time for the argument that Britain has been better than France at dealing with immigration. ‘The French and the English have battled against each other for the best part of a thousand years and still we manage to fight over the best way to kill ourselves,’ he says. ‘So the English say, “No it’s my multicultural model that is the best” and the French say, “No it is my model, the assimilation turned integration model”. In truth, both models have failed. Assimilation is only possible individually. We cannot assimilate populations.’

For him, assimilation means adapting to your host country with the zeal of a convert: ‘It means you change your story, consider Napoleon to be your father and Joan ofArc to be your grandmother, and live like a French man who has been here for a thousand years.’ That seems to be the creed by which Zemmour himself lives. He talks proudly of his Arabic-speaking father, yet he adopts the manner of a 19th-century homme de lettres. He says ‘chère madame’ when responding to women, and his speech, studded with literary and historical allusions and the occasional imperfect subjunctive, has a formidable Gallic grandeur.

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Zemmour admits he hasn’t a firm grasp of British affairs, though his intellectual self-confidence permits him to say: ‘England is a republican monarchy whereas France is a monarchical republic.’ He spies similarities between the UK Supreme Court’s obstruction of the Rwanda scheme and the recent rejection of most of the French government’s immigration bill by the Conseil constitutionnelin Paris. In Rishi Sunak and Macron, he says we see ‘politicians pretending’ to care about voter concerns ‘when they really think that immigration is good because it will solve economic problems’. In both their cases, too, ‘we are experiencing the takeover by judges over the democratic representatives of the people, which are the parliaments and the politicians’.

This is a long-standing theme of Zemmour’s work: in 1997, he wrote a book called Le Coup d’Etat des Juges. Today he believes that Britain’s Brexiteers made a grave mistake in assuming that their political sovereignty could be seized back from Europe when it is in fact ‘the judicial oligarchy’, French in origin, that is busily suffocating democracies the world over, from Donald Trump in America to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. ‘In France, since the Middle Ages, the judges come from the church and they consider themselves priests,’ he says. ‘Before it was the Catholic religion. Now it is human rights – but it is always a religion. And they are there to impose that religion on politicians, who must submit.’

Zemmour’s oratory may be powerful, but his party remains far behind Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in the polls. Still, he believes that the decade-long struggle of populism against centrism, as represented by Le Pen vs Macron, is giving way to a new clash of right against left, as an emergent conservative patriotism aligns itself against a dangerous fusion of Islam and socialism.

His concept of ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ might also sound batty to some British ears. Medieval concepts of Sharia do not appear to reconcile themselves naturally to the progressivism of the 21st century. But Zemmour insists that the connections between ‘le woke-isme’ and Islamism are becoming increasingly apparent, ‘since both are allied against the West and western civilisation in order to destroy it’.

He places Le Pen on the wrong side of this new Islamo-left vs new right divide. She represents the ‘somewheres vs anywheres’, he says, referring to the work of the British academic David Goodhart, whereas he stands for a more epoch-defining battle against what he calls the ‘invasion or maybe even the colonisation’ of Europe by an antithetical religion. Unlike him, Le Pen believes that ‘good Islam’ can be separated from ‘bad Islamism’ and she is a protectionist whereas he believes in free markets. ‘She does not see herself as right-wing,’ he says.

Doesn’t Zemmour’s reputation for controversy serve to make Le Pen more acceptable to the French middle classes? ‘Non,’ he says flatly. Instead, he regards the rise of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Geert Wilders in Holland as evidence that he is on the right side of history. Zemmour wants to enlist elements of the British right into this movement, too, even if he accepts that Nigel Farage (whom he met a couple of weeks ago on his visit to London) and the Reform party do not share his criticism of Islam. He met Kwasi Kwarteng too, though the former chancellor found him disturbingly ‘obsessed with Islam’ in a way that is ‘not relevant to the UK’.

As part of what Zemmour calls ‘this ideological evolution’, he’s joined forces with Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece, who will lead Reconquête! into the European elections. Maréchal may not win a majority of French seats, but with the backing of other conservative groups across the continent, the new right may well emerge as a majority bloc in the European parliament. ‘I am not intending to conquer Europe, let me assure you of that,’ he says. ‘What I am saying is this is the division which will impose itself all over Europe, and is in fact already happening.’

Sunak should apologise, says Brianna Ghey’s father

Brianna Ghey’s father has called on Rishi Sunak to apologise for his ‘degrading’ comments at Prime Minister’s Questions. Peter Spooner told Sky News:

For the Prime Minister of our country to come out with degrading comments like he did, regardless of them being in relation to discussions in parliament, they are absolutely dehumanising. Identities of people should not be used in that manner, and I personally feel shocked by his comments and feel he should apologise for his remarks.

As reported earlier, Sunak didn’t edit his oft-used script about the number of things Keir Starmer has flip-flopped on at PMQs today, despite having just heard that Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther would be in the public gallery. He did, at the very end of the session, pay tribute to Ghey as ‘the very best of humanity’, but didn’t withdraw his joke about Starmer struggling with ‘defining a woman – although, in fairness, that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn’.

This is just the latest example of Sunak’s tendency to go into broadcast mode to the extent he forgets to show his humanity. Brianna’s murder had, in part, a transphobic motive and to not edit a script with the knowledge her mother was supposed to be in the gallery (she actually arrived a bit later and missed the exchange) seemed unthinking.

Once again, the trans debate has ended up being nastier than it needs to be, and politicians have a hugely important role in shaping public discourse. It is also a misreading of many of those who hold a gender-critical position, who don’t think it’s very funny that Labour has had such agonies over biological sex and gende, either. The gender debate is too serious for it to become part of a silly joke that’s trotted out at Prime Minister’s Questions, and Sunak doesn’t help the very people he claims to represent – those who are concerned about the erosion of sex-based rights – to be so flippant. 

Keir Starmer’s shameful behaviour at PMQs

‘Apologise!’ This was the bogus battle-cry that rang out repeatedly at today’s PMQs. Rishi Sunak was asked to genuflect to his enemies and show contrition for fictional sins. The trouble began when Sir Keir Starmer told us that the mother of Brianna Ghey, a transgender girl killed in February, was present in the public gallery. ‘As a father, I can’t even imagine the pain she’s going through,’ he said, strangely placing himself at the centre of somebody else’s nightmare.

Sir Keir, unaware of what was about to transpire, then mounted a routine attack on Rishi’s unfulfilled pledges. The PM called this ‘a bit rich’ coming from a Labour leader who had broken ‘almost 30 promises.’ He gave a list including pensions, reform of the peerage and ‘defining a woman – although in fairness that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn.’ 

Sir Keir saw his chance. He pretended to be so incensed by Rishi’s quip that he could barely speak. ‘Of all the weeks to say that!’ he said, gasping breathlessly from the depths of his outrage, ‘when Brianna’s mother is in this chamber. Shame!’

The Speaker rose to quell some noise on the backbenches and as Sir Keir sat down, apparently close to tears, a hand settled on his right shoulder to offer him comfort and solace. The hand belonged to Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor. She caressed the shoulder-pad of his tailored suit and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Sir Keir nodded weakly at her, acknowledging her sympathy. It might have been a scene carved by Michelangelo. Sir Keir then stood up and lambasted the PM for unseemly conduct.

‘The role of the prime minister,’ he pronounced loftily, ‘is to ensure that every citizen in this country feels safe and respected.’ This was an invitation to his backbenchers to pursue Rishi further over trans rights. 

Sir Keir went on to complain that Rishi had ‘casually made a £1,000 bet in the middle of an interview,’ referring to Piers Morgan’s attempt to corner the PM by offering to pay £1,000 to a refugee charity if the Rwanda scheme succeeds before the general election. Whether or not Rishi accepted this bet is open to question. Probably not. But he shook Morgan’s hand on TV and that strengthens the impression that he accepted Morgan’s terms. This prompted Stephen Flynn of the SNP to ask Rishi to acknowledge his error.  

‘The public are used to Tories gambling on the lives of others’ he said, and he declared that Rishi had ‘accepted a crude bet regarding the lives of asylum-seekers… Will he apologise?’

Rishi rebuffed him and stuck to the policy issue. Flynn reacted with quiet fury. ‘The Prime Minister does himself no favours,’ he said and added that the bet had been contracted, ‘just hours before he withdrew cost of living support worth £900.’ And Flynn glanced up at the public gallery and offered his ‘heartfelt sympathies to Brianna’s mother.’ Clearly he expected Rishi to apologise to her as well. Many in the House appeared to agree. 

But would he? The chamber remained unsettled and testy for the rest of the session. All it required was a backbencher with the wit to put the PM on the spot. Liz Twist, MP for Blaydon, did just that. She laid it on the line to Rishi.

‘Apologise to Brianna’s mother for his insensitive comments.’ 

Rishi was in trouble. He’d been skewered good and proper. But Twist ruined her ambush. Rather than sitting down and letting Rishi answer, she pursued her prepared question about the mishandling of a regeneration project in the north-east. Rishi wriggled free. 

At the end, he dealt with the issue in his own time and in his own words. He said that Brianna’s mother had reacted to an ‘unspeakable and shocking murder’ by demonstrating ‘the very best of humanity.’ 

This was a distasteful exhibition by Sir Keir and Stephen Flynn. Misuse of the public gallery, and the exploitation of grieving relatives, should be reviewed by the House authorities. 

Why are schools ‘off-rolling’ pupils?

Schools dramatically change a child’s life chances, as I’ve seen in my 24 years of teaching. How we measure their performance couldn’t be more important, but in recent years it’s gone wrong.

The key metric that secondary schools in England are judged on is called ‘Progress 8’. It looks at the progress that students make across eight subjects from the end of primary school to GCSE, and then ranks schools against each other. It’s zero-sum: for every winner, there is a loser. Some school leaders treat ‘good’ scores with humility and caution. Others plaster their badge everywhere.

However, it’s too easy to game the system and too many schools are taking advantage in ugly ways. The published figures do not tell us which students are counted in a school’s data and which aren’t.

The most egregious example is ‘off-rolling’ pupils, which is technically illegal but there are some wheezes. Years ago, some school leaders worked out that if you remove underperforming students from your roll before January, then they are not counted on the school’s results. Schools would move them into ‘alternative provision’, and then they won’t come up in the figures. Some pupils are marked down as ‘guests’, a status that usually describes children who are between schools. This toxic practice reached its peak in 2017 when 49,000 Year 11 students disappeared from rolls without explanation.

Ofsted, the regulator, initially called out a few high-profile cases. But a recent report from the Centre for Social Justice has again identified sharp spikes in Year 11 students moving off mainstream rolls to pupil referral units shortly before the January census. Not all of these moves will be improper, but the writers of the report conclude that some schools ‘are removing pupils with lower attainment, who could compromise the school’s overall performance data’.

The numbers being home-schooled have shot up too: they have risen from 37,500 in 2016 to 86,200 last year. It is hard to believe that the home-schooling philosophy has suddenly grown so popular. Instead, what too many of us hear from parents is that they were encouraged to consider the ‘option’ of taking their child out of school. The CSJ says that some ‘vulnerable and/or lower performing pupils are coerced into moving to home education’. The end result? A better Progress 8 score. 

Most schools have good intentions, and genuinely want to help children get better grades. But we know that some schools go down the route of off-rolling. Some schools end up with lower proportions of pupils with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), while some are much higher. Every school should be asked whether they are educating a proportionate number of children with SEND. 

This is the government’s mess to sort out. It should scrap the single word Ofsted verdicts on schools, and it should check the roll of every school every year. At the moment, there is no reason to trust league tables.

Watch: Rishi goes off script

Back in the far-flung days of 2019, the Tories won plaudits for their unconventional use of social media in their landslide electoral triumph. Five years and two leaders on, it’s looking like a tough ask to turn it around this time. But in Rishi Sunak, the party at least has a leader who has never been afraid of embracing novel forms of social media, from hand-signed graphics to Home Alone spoofs.

And tonight Mr S hears that an innovative tactic is being trialled by the bright young things of CCHQ. Sunak is releasing a new party political broadcast in which he stands before a whiteboard and improvises his set speech. Normally, such PPBs are heavily scripted and dependant on flashy graphics. So does it work? Steerpike will leave it to his readers to be the judge of that…

You can watch the clip below:

Javier Milei is no populist

When Javier Milei visited Israel and announced that he would be moving Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, I suppose that was terribly ‘populist’ of him.

Try as I might, I can’t find it in me to be appalled by Milei’s pronouncement, and not because he already floated it during his election campaign. For one thing, it must be nice to have a government that decides its own foreign policy rather than contracting out such matters to the European Commission, the US State Department and the NGO sector. For another, Argentina’s president is taking a stand that Britain ought to have taken long ago. As The Spectator’s move-the-embassy-to-Jerusalem correspondent, I am by now a veteran of this particular debate and well aware that any attempt by a British government to adopt this policy would be blocked by the SOAS graduate employment scheme more commonly known as the Foreign Office. Nevertheless, I persist. 

With so much of the international community as uninterested in Israel’s millennia-old connection to Jerusalem as they are to the country’s security concerns, renting some office space in the business district and calling it an embassy is a low-cost but highly symbolic way of reassuring the Jewish state that you understand the tough street it lives on. That reassurance would not only be for Israel’s benefit but for the Palestinians’ benefit, too. A reassured Israel would be more likely to take further risks with its security for a chance at peace. 

One of the most scarring phenomena for Israelis since the Oslo Accords has been diplomatic double-dealing. Time and again, Israel was urged to make concessions – withdraw from Gaza, hand over major West Bank cities, evacuate settlements. In each case, the promise from foreign capitals was the same: do this and, if the Palestinians exploit these concessions to attack you, we will back your right to self-defence. 

Well, Israel made the concessions, the Palestinians exploited them, and, with some honourable exceptions, the international community went wobbly whenever Israel mounted a military operation. This has left Israelis deeply cynical, and while it is not the only reason the country has move to the political right, it is a contributing factor. If Washington and Brussels want to advance the cause of Middle East peace and Palestinian statehood, they need to regain Israelis’ trust. Given how shamelessly they squandered that trust, and how much Israeli blood was shed in the process, re-engaging could take a generation. But recognising Israel’s capital and moving their embassies there (as the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Papua New Guinea and Kosovo have done) would be a good will gesture that could speed things up considerably. 

And, yes, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas would wail and gnash their gums about it. Any number of Arab and Muslim countries would, too. But they know as well as the White House and the UN Security Council that, despite the current rhetoric of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel can be very pragmatic about territorial concessions. Successive prime ministers have been open to land swaps – handing a percentage of Israel to the Palestinians in exchange for retaining the major settlement blocs – and there is a record of right-wing premiers giving up territory. Menachem Begin returned the Sinai to Egypt, Netanyahu handed most of Hebron to the Palestinians, and Ariel Sharon gave them all of Gaza. Other countries could follow Argentina in the full knowledge that the final status of Jerusalem would have to be agreed in eventual bilateral negotiations. 

That reassurance would be welcome in light of the 7 October attacks and the ugly responses (some anti-Israel, some anti-Semitic, some patently pro-Hamas) seen on the streets of major western cities. It would strengthen the international community’s hand much more than the proposal by David Cameron and his fellow-travellers in Washington and Brussels to pre-emptively declare a Palestinian state without requiring the Palestinians to first make peace with Israel. If you’re wondering why Milei’s recognition of Jerusalem is a dangerous unilateral move but Cameron’s proposed recognition of Palestine is not, there is a very simple answer: Milei does things policy-makers and opinion-formers disapprove of, and is therefore wrong, whereas Cameron is willing to do things they approve of, and is therefore right. 

Which is why I’m sceptical that Milei’s Jerusalem gambit is an act of populism. I mean, it’s not as if the location of Argentina’s embassy is on the lips of every voter in Córdoba and Mendoza. (Argentina doesn’t even have an ambassador in Israel at present.) By definition, it is not a policy designed to pander to popular sentiment. It is a judgment call on Milei’s part and, whatever one might think of his other positions, this one shows a moral clarity and strategic nous largely absent from the professional foreign policy industry. 

I’d like to go one step further, and turn these concepts on their head by suggesting that not only is Milei’s stance not populist, but that it is the stance of the international community that is populist. It’s a niche kind of populism, though: elite populism. Withholding recognition of Jerusalem and generally treating Israel like an embarrassing distant relation is the preference of those who populate the foreign policy industry: the diplomats and the civil servants, the academics and the lawyers, the lobbyists and the NGOs, the activists and the journalists. 

These are the people who gave us the Oslo process, dismissed every Israeli warning that it wasn’t working, then abruptly decided it had always been doomed, that Israel was entirely to blame, and the international community’s focus should be on building up a Palestinian state that the Israelis would have no choice but to agree to. Their new doctrine is as irreconcilable with the evidence as their old one, but evidence hardly comes into it. These are their base prejudices. Elite actors feel left behind by developments such as the United States relocating its embassy and Arab states forging ties with Israel. They are angry and resentful and so they scorn the nuance and complexity of a position such as Javier Milei’s. Their problem with him is not that he’s a populist. It’s that he refuses to pander to them. 

Badenoch backs Sunak in PMQs trans row

Rishi Sunak’s transgender jibe at Prime Minister’s Questions has riled Labour and Lib Dems MPs. The PM mocked Keir Starmer for not knowing what a woman is, just moments before Esther Ghey, the mother of the murdered trans teen Brianna, came into the Commons.

‘Of all the weeks to say that when Brianna’s mother is in this chamber,’ said Starmer. Labour MP Liz Twist urged Sunak to ‘apologise to Brianna Ghey’s mother’. Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper MP said the prime minister was ‘sinking lower and lower’.

Yet one MP leapt to Sunak’s defence: step forward Kemi Badenoch. The minister for women and equalities said it was in fact Keir Starmer who was being ‘shameful’.

Every murder is a tragedy. None should be trivialised by political point-scoring. As a mother, I can imagine the trauma that Esther Ghey has endured. It was shameful of Starmer to link his own inability to be clear on the matter of sex and gender directly to her grief.

As Minister for Women and Equalities I’ve done all I can to ensure we have take the heat out of the debate on LGBT issues while being clear about our beliefs and principles. Keir Starmer’s behaviour today shows Labour are happy to weaponise this issue when it suits them.

Some Tories want Badenoch to replace Sunak, but on this issue Kemi appears to be fully behind the PM.

Fact check: Tim Spector’s frightening climate claims

The BBC just can’t seem to stop itself trying to frighten people over climate change. On Tuesday morning it was the turn of Radio 4’s Food for Life by King’s College London professor Tim Spector. The show began with an extraordinary claim: ‘Most predictions concur that if we don’t change our habits fast, by 2050 the Earth will have lost most of its trees and habitable areas.’

Really? I contacted Spector over where he sourced this claim and was told that the claims were ‘in the IPCC reports’. But are we really on course to lose most of our trees in just 26 years’ time? The IPCC’s latest Special Report on Climate Change and Land does not appear to make any confident prediction for future tree cover, and there is not a lot of support for Spector’s claim from data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. There has been a substantial net loss of global forest area in recent years: 4.7 million hectares per year between 2010 and 2020. But to put that into context there is still an estimated four billion hectares of forest. The net loss in the 2010s, in other words, represents less than 1.2 per cent of the total. Moreover, the rate of deforestation has been gradually falling in recent decades – it was 78 million hectares in the 1990s and 52 million hectares in the 2000s.

In other words if we carry on the way we are going we might expect to lose no more than around 3 per cent of our forest over the next three decades – which is hardly ‘most’ of our trees.

As for the claim that we will lose most of our habitable areas, it is hard to know what is meant by this. Did Spector mean wide areas are going to be flooded? The IPCC suggests global sea levels will rise by between 0.15 and 0.29 metres by 2050. That might nibble away at some coastal areas but will hardly reduce habitable areas by half.

Did he mean places would become scorched, or too hot for habitation? Even in the very worst-case modelled scenario presented by the IPCC global temperatures would rise by a further 1.3 Celsius by mid-century. It hardly seems remotely plausible that over half the inhabited area of the Earth is going to become too hot for habitation, even at that level.

Or did he mean that half the Earth’s agricultural land will become degraded? That is hardly borne out by the data presented in the latest IPCC report, which quotes a number of studies on land condition.

One suggests that between 22 and 24 per cent of global ice-free land is currently in a declining physical condition and 16 per cent is improving; another claimed that between 1999 and 2013, 20 per cent of land declined in condition and 20 per cent improved. Just because land is declining in condition, by the way, doesn’t mean it is going to become uninhabitable or unavailable for cultivation – it just means it is declining to some extent. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land doesn’t try to quantify possible loss of habitable land, but it does come up with a scenario in which land which is home to 178 million people becomes ‘vulnerable to water stress, drought intensity and habitat degradation’ if temperatures are 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels by 2050 and 277 million if they are 3 C above pre-industrial levels. The latter figure is equivalent to 3.4 per cent of the current global population.

In short, there is nothing remotely to back the professor’s assertion – it is the sort of hyperbole which you might think the BBC had by now become wise to.

Israel cannot accept Hamas’s hostage deal

Following weeks of stagnation in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a deal for the release of Israeli hostages, Hamas has finally responded. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the terms they have proposed are unacceptable to Israel.

Hamas is demanding a long ceasefire, lasting four-and-a-half months, that would lead to a permanent truce. Their terms include the withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza and an end to the war, rehabilitating Gaza under Hamas’s continued governance, and the release of 1,500 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails with the guarantee that they will not be rearrested for the same offences. This would include 500 prisoners of Hamas’s choosing, whose offences are so severe that they are serving life sentences.

In return, Hamas would release the hostages they still hold in three stages, each lasting 45 days. In the first stage, women, the elderly and children would be handed over. In the second stage, male hostages would be released; the final stage would include the return of bodies.

The terror group’s proposal comes a day after a leaked Israeli intelligence report revealed that at least 30 of the 136 hostages held by Hamas are believed to be dead. Of those, the majority were killed by Hamas during the 7 October attack and their bodies taken to Gaza to be used for negotiations with Israel.

Families of the hostages, along with the majority of Israelis, are urging the government to reach a deal with Hamas. They know that with each passing day, more of the hostages – some wounded or sick – could die, or be killed. Protests in favour of a deal, along with those against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, now happen regularly and are gathering momentum.

However, even those who support a deal know that Hamas’s current terms would be unthinkable. An outcome of the war where Hamas still rules Gaza cannot be accepted. The terror organisation has proven its determination to destroy Israel. Hamas leaders have vowed to conduct more attacks similar to the savage 7 October attack in which 1,200 men, women and children were brutally murdered and over 250 were abducted and held hostage under inhumane conditions where they faced torture and sexual assault.

If Hamas continues to rule over Gaza, the organisation would rebuild itself, its weapons arsenal and its tunnels, and continue to target Israel. It would also continue to radicalise generations of Gazans and indoctrinate them into Islamist ideology that favours war over peace and glorifies martyrdom and bloodshed over reaching a settlement. It would be a triumph that would cripple Israeli deterrence against other enemies that want to destroy it – namely the Lebanon-based militant organisation Hezbollah, and Iran.

Qatar, one of the main negotiators between Israel and Hamas, understands that Hamas’s deal is unacceptable to Israel and is trying to get Hamas to soften its demands. This won’t be an easy task: the hostages are Hamas’s only bargaining chip and they are trying to use them in order to guarantee the organisation’s survival in Gaza. With the stakes so high for Hamas, they are unlikely to budge much on their demands.

A crucial step forward would be if Hamas agreed to more realistic terms. But even if Hamas agreed to a temporary ceasefire, rather than a full withdrawal from Gaza, Netanyahu may still find it difficult to sign a deal. The far-right ministers and members of Knesset (parliament) in Netanyahu’s government have threatened to withdraw from the coalition if the government agrees to a ‘bad’ deal with Hamas. They object to the release of dangerous Palestinian prisoners and to a prolonged ceasefire. Although they represent a minority, their departure would collapse Netanyahu’s government.

This places Netanyahu in a difficult position. On the one side, is the Israeli public, who overwhelmingly favours a deal (although not the one currently proposed by Hamas); on the other, are the members of his own coalition. One of Netanyahu’s staunchest critics, former prime minister Yair Lapid of the opposition party Yeah Atid, vowed that he would join the coalition in order to keep the government from collapsing should Netanyahu’s ministers abandon ship. This is an attempt to provide Netanyahu with the assurance to go ahead with a deal, and to reassure him that political differences would be set aside to make it possible for the hostages to return. 

Israeli officials believe that the only way to get Hamas to soften its position is through continued military pressure. The IDF is advancing in an effort to tighten the noose around Hamas’s leaders in Gaza to such an extent that they might be willing to accept a deal. However, Hamas’s leaders outside Gaza, in Qatar and elsewhere, are encouraged by the sight of Israel coming under intense international scrutiny and are hardening their positions.

In praise of Elliot Colburn

All power to Elliot Colburn, who used today’s Prime Minister’s Questions to talk about surviving a suicide attempt in 2021. The Carshalton and Wallington MP told the chamber:

In recent years, something like 6,500 people in the UK die due to suicide. And in 2021, I was nearly one of them. Luckily, my attempt failed, I was found by family members quickly, I received amazing care at St Helier and Springfield Hospitals, it didn’t do any permanent damage, and I was well looked after by the NHS in the months that followed. And I wanted to take this chance to say thank you to everyone who saved me, and sorry to my family and loved ones who I put through such an awful ordeal. In that moment, I felt alone and scared and like there was no way out and like the world would be better off without me in it. But I don’t recognise that man any more, I know that nothing is ever really worth that, and help is out there, and I’m pretty awesome. Does the Prime Minister agree that one death by suicide is one too many and will he send a message from the dispatch box today that whatever you are going through, you are not alone, that help is out there and better days lie ahead.

His voice shook as he spoke, and there were approving and supportive noises from around the chamber as Colburn spoke. This isn’t the first time an MP has talked about their own mental illness: since Charles Walker, Kevan Jones and others did so in a remarkable debate more than a decade ago, it has become much more normal for politicians to talk about their diagnoses. But this degree of honesty about a suicide attempt is still unusual, especially given it happened when Colburn was a member of parliament. 

It’s easy to get cynical about this sort of thing: I find some of the public discussion around it being good to talk rather cloying, not least because it still seems to suggest that depression is a sadness that can go away if you do enough #selfcare. But the power of Colburn’s question was that it wasn’t about the more palatable bits of the mental health debate: it was raw, and personal, and touched on the true horror of an untreated illness nearly killing someone. Anyone who has seen the bomb crater left in a family by a suicide wishes there was more discussion, especially amongst men, of suicide and where to turn. It is the biggest cause of death in men under 50, and three quarters of suicides every year are men. It is still taboo, even when anxiety, ADHD and other conditions have become quite normalised.

MPs can always use their platform for good or ill, and Colburn has done the former today. It is, though, perhaps a sign of how unhealthy parliament is that he is not the only MP who has tried to kill themselves or has come close to doing so: the more pastorally-minded members of the whips offices in all parties deal with suicidal colleagues more than you might expect. Perhaps this is just because suicide is such a major killer. Or perhaps it is because the life is lonely, the hours are long, and the real friends are fewer than a job that is all about popularity might suggest. Either way, Colburn will find that he’s not just helping the wider public, but many of the people he walks with through the voting lobbies every day.

‘Shame’: Starmer fury over PMQs gender dig

Today’s lethargic PMQs session was brought to life by a furious row over comments made by Rishi Sunak about transgender people. Labour leader Keir Starmer began the exchange by paying tribute to Esther Ghey, the mother of the murdered teenager Brianna. He then moved on to NHS waiting lists which Sunak had previously promised would come down on his watch. ‘Isn’t he glad he didn’t place a bet on it?’ he joked – a reference to the PM’s ill advised handshake with Piers Morgan.

Sunak shot back by suggesting that Sir Keir would only place a bet if it was an ‘each way’ one. He remarked it was ‘a bit rich’ to hear about promises from someone who had broken ‘every single promise he was elected on’. Sunak listed ‘pensions, planning, peerages’, among others, before adding that the Labour leader had u-turned on ‘defining a woman, although, in fairness, that was only 99 per cent of a u-turn.’

A visibly shocked Starmer took a while to compose himself by replying, in a tone of disgust: ‘Of all the weeks to say that, when Brianna’s mother is in this chamber. Shame.’ You can watch the exchange below:

Rishi Sunak accuses Keir Starmer of being incapable of "defining a woman".

This was less than a minute after Starmer welcomed the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, who's watching #PMQs from the House of Commons visitors' gallery. pic.twitter.com/hSy4xiIEQz

— Adam Schwarz (@AdamJSchwarz) February 7, 2024

Sunak makes ill-judged gender jibe at PMQs

Rishi Sunak’s £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan continues to cost him more than the wager itself. It dominated today’s PMQs, with both Keir Starmer and Stephen Flynn attacking him on it. The Labour leader also gave a striking retort to one of Sunak’s regular lines mocking him on not knowing what a woman is. When the PM trotted out that claim again, Starmer reacted with outrage, reminding the chamber that he had opened with a tribute to the murdered transgender teenager Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther, who was in parliament. He said:

‘Of all the weeks to say that, with Brianna’s mother in the gallery. Shame. Parading as a man of integrity.’

He added that everyone should be able to feel safe and respected. Later in the session, Labour MP Liz Twist demanded that Sunak apologise for his comments, which he ignored, despite shouts of ‘apologise!’ from the Opposition benches. Finally, at the very end of the session, he addressed Ghey’s mother directly, praising her ‘compassion and empathy’, saying ‘she deserves all our admiration and praise’.

Rishi Sunak attempts to attack Sir Keir Starmer over how Labour 'defines a woman' as the mum of Brianna Ghey, a trans teenager who was murdered, was sat in the Commons listening to prime minister's questions

A shocked Sir Keir replies: 'Of all the weeks to say that… Shame' pic.twitter.com/CxW79NJ3Jb

— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) February 7, 2024

The two men also continued their election slogan-off, arguing over who had broken more promises, and going over the same ground once again. The first question was on Sunak’s admission that he wasn’t going to meet his target on NHS waiting lists: ‘Isn’t he glad he didn’t bet a grand on it?’ Starmer asked. Sunak’s response was: ‘At least I stand by my commitments: he’s so indecisive that the only bet he’d make is an each way bet.’ Starmer carried on, reminding the Prime Minister that when he made the pledge, ‘it will be on me’, and asking what he had meant. That led to the list of things the Labour leader couldn’t make up his mind on, including the difference between a man and a woman. Starmer also accused Sunak of blocking the pay deal for doctors.

In case you were worrying about the NHS in Labour-run Wales, it came up in the next answer, in exactly the same way it does every week, and again in a question from Tory Alun Cairns, who claimed Nye Bevan would be ‘turning in his grave’ if he saw the state of the service today. If the Welsh health service charged royalties on the number of times it was raised, it would be in a much better spot. 

Labour-run Wales is one thing, but the chaos in the Westminster party over its £28 billion green investment pledge is more of a problem for Starmer, which is why it came up again, accompanied by a Tory dossier published at the same time. As did Starmer defending Hizb-ut Tahrir. Did we learn anything? Only that Starmer felt sufficiently emboldened to turn a subject that he has genuinely agonised over – that of trans rights – back on the Prime Minister. At one point, the Speaker intervened on rowdy MPs and said he hoped election fever wasn’t coming yet. Some MPs looked as though they might be grateful for the relief of an election, rather than several months more of these repetitive exchanges. 

Starmer’s green spending problem is getting bigger

Once again Labour’s internal debate over its £28 billion green spending pledge is playing out publicly. On Friday there was some talk of clarity following a report that the headline figure would be ditched – with the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones then going out on the media where he appeared to confirm it. Jones said Labour would decide how much to spend on environmental programmes once in government, adding that ‘the number will move around just as a matter of fact’. But then Keir Starmer popped up on Monday to declare in an interview with Times Radio that the £28 billion a year on green spending is ‘desperately needed’.

Starmer said:

We’re going to need investment, that’s where the £28 billion comes in. That investment that is desperately needed for that mission… you can only understand the investment argument by understanding that we want to have clean power by 2030 … We need to borrow to invest to do that.

The comments have been taken by those pushing for the figure to stay as a recommitment, and a sign that Starmer will not be bounced into a position.

It means that for the first time, there appears to be a significant difference of opinion between Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. Reeves has been careful not to recommit to the £28 billion figure while Starmer is happy to mention it. ‘There comes a point when you can’t just put it down to confusion on the media round’, says a party figure. Shadow ministers joke that at this point that they are having to decide the line for themselves when sent out to do the media. There is still an expectation – as I previously reported – that Starmer will junk the headline figure of £28 billion around the time of the Spring Budget, blaming the Tories for using the remaining headroom. However, each time Starmer mentions the figure, there is more doubt as to whether this will really happen, given he doesn’t appear to be ramping down the speculation.

The Tories are delighted by the confusion over the policy and are trying to make hay from it. Today the Tories have released a new official Treasury costing on Labour’s insulation pledge to spend £6 billion a year to hand out grants to upgrade 19 million homes with an EPC rating below C. This pledge forms part of the 2030 clean power policy that was originally costed to form in total £28 billion. However, the official costing alleges that the £6 billion is wide of the mark and it would actually cost closer to £13 billion. Inevitably, this has led to an immediate row over the use of civil servant time for political attack. What’s more, Labour has dismissed its findings, issuing the statement: ‘This costing is ludicrous and uses bogus assumptions. They have costed someone else’s policy, not Labour’s.’

If the figure does go in the next month, then the Tories will keep going in this direction, suggesting that the party’s clean power by 2030 target is incompatible with the spending figures the party has announced. But for now Starmer’s most immediate problem relates to his grip on his party. The mixed messages from senior members of his shadow cabinet is raising questions about how policy is decided and who is in control. For Starmer, the row over green spending is fast turning into a question on his authority over his party.

Will anything reconcile William and Harry?

In this most eventful of weeks for the Royal Family, the unanticipated return of Prince Harry to Britain has created new drama. Indeed, so unexpected have the tidings of the last few days been that the sudden arrival of the Duke of Sussex at his father’s side yesterday – a seismic and unprecedented event, given the current state of relations between Harry and the rest of the Royal Family – has barely been given the attention that it deserves. The meeting between the King and his younger son is said to have lasted around half an hour and to have taken place at Clarence House, before Charles headed off to Sandringham and Harry – who, notoriously, has no permanent residence in Britain – headed to the luxurious confines of a five-star hotel.

It is, as yet, unclear as to how the meeting between the two went, although given their  recent moves towards a reconciliation, the potential for awkwardness has largely already been defused, despite the unobliging things that Harry has written and said about his father over the past year. The King, understandably, was said to have been exhausted from the first round of cancer treatment that took place on Monday, and so the encounter between him and his son – the first time that they have been face to face privately since the Queen’s death in September 2022 – was shorter than it might otherwise have been. Yet it has been suggested that the two may well try to meet again during Harry’s time in Britain, to firm up the relationship that had been distinctly imperilled by the publication of Spare and the attendant hoo-ha that it produced.

But there remains little chance that Harry will be patching up his relationship with his brother. The bad blood that exists between the two is so tainted now that even their father’s illness is unlikely to bring them together. William has the excuse that his wife’s indisposition has meant that he does not have the time to see his younger sibling; as one palace source put it, ‘there is no plan, there is nothing in the diary.’ Given that Harry is expected to return to California at the end of the week at the latest, the chances of any encounter, however fleeting, seem to be zero.

William has a justifiable reputation for bearing grudges and for a short temper – a consistent feature of his family. And the sheer number of insults and damaging revelations that were brought out into the public domain in Spare and in interviews around it will be extremely hard to forgive. The two brothers have not had any direct contact for years, and although it has been speculated that their mutual friend Mark ‘Marko’ Dyer might be able to step in as a go-between, William shows little interest in reconciling with the Duke of Sussex. This is, it must be said, understandable. Harry stated in an interview last year that ‘There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know, because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.’ To which the only response must be that, if the jaw-dropping revelations in his book represent his pulling his punches, God knows what else has been omitted.

It is impossible to know whether Charles’s health issues will bring the family together, or whether William’s steadfast determination not to reconcile with Harry remains consistent, even amidst the latest news. He can certainly be praised for his implacable dedication to doing what he believes to be right, but there are some who might suggest that maintaining the integrity of ‘the Firm’ – at a time when its key member is facing ill health – is a more complex matter than might be imagined. Perhaps William should take note of Charles’s words reported in Spare – ‘Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery’ – and consider what he should be doing in this situation to ameliorate a difficult situation. The ball, after all, remains firmly in his court.