Can we blame universities for cashing in on foreign students?

As an English teacher and sixth form tutor, I spend a lot of my time at the moment celebrating and comforting students as they hear about their UCAS offers. I try to reassure them when they are disappointed – which many of them were last week in particular, when Cambridge offers came out – that the system is flawed and far from always fair. Many of them this weekend will have realised just how unfair it can be, as a Sunday Times investigation revealed that British universities are paying tens of millions of pounds a year to recruit lucrative overseas students with far lower grades than those required of UK applicants.

Up to 15 Russell Group universities now offer special one-year foundation courses for international students with ludicrously low entry requirements: for example, if an overseas student wished to study an economics foundation pathway at Durham, they would need CCD grades; if one of my students wanted to study economics at Durham, they would need A*AA. This is not a case of comparing apples and oranges either; the vast majority of international students who study on one of these foundation programmes go straight onto the undergraduate programme, with end-of-year exams described as little more than a ‘formality’.

Economics is a highly competitive course: Durham receives 34,000 applications for just 4,700 places, and yet younger international students can earn a place with only 5 GCSEs and no A-levels, whereas one of my students can have 11 level 9s and 3 As and still get rejected.

Of course, this is shocking, and people (myself and my students included) have a right to be outraged. It devalues higher education, something we should be very proud of (the UK has the second-most Nobel laureates of any nation and four of the world’s top 20 universities). It also undermines claims that universities should be recruiting the best and brightest, regardless of background: universities spend hundreds of millions of pounds on widening access and supporting disadvantaged students, yet the number of places for domestic students at Oxbridge and other top universities has fallen since 2015. Yet the outcome of the investigation is hardly surprising: universities’ over-reliance on international students is an open secret. Just last month a leaked memo from the University of York revealed that they were giving places to international students with BBC grades at A-level for AAA courses. Universities have become less about academic prestige and more about being competitive in a global market.

However, it is also all too easy to cry that ‘universities sell immigration, not education’ without considering the impossible financial position that universities are in. Inflation means that domestic tuition fees are only worth about £6,000 in today’s money, and the amount the government directly spends on higher education teaching has fallen in real terms by about four-fifths since 2010 (Germany’s government currently spends over double on each student that we do). This means that universities face an average shortfall of approximately £2,500 on every home undergraduate student they teach each academic year, which helps to explain why over 80 universities currently report annual deficits. Brexit has also cut off access to EU funding schemes that were previously worth an average of £800 million a year, and many universities will also be hit by the increase in employers’ contributions to pensions from April.

The system needs radical reform, but, much like the behemoth of the NHS, no one seems willing to start this difficult conversation. Given the current economic climate, the idea of giving more money to universities, either from taxes or raising tuition fees, is hardly an obvious vote-winner. Neither party seems to have any idea how to bring about institutional change or how to fix the funding model: Keir Starmer has already backtracked on a longstanding Labour promise to abolish tuition fees entirely, and has instead made vague noises about a ‘fairer’ tuition fee system; meanwhile, the Conservatives have made small reforms to student loans repayments but ultimately calculations suggest that half of these are still picked up by the taxpayer. We therefore have this strange paradox in which the government wants economic growth after years of sluggish productivity, but doesn’t know how to invest in and prioritise the very sector which will lead to new ideas, innovation and technologies. 

In the absence of any real alternative, international students and the premium they pay are therefore the best way for universities to balance the books. Many idealists (like myself) will wistfully say that universities should be hubs of learning, but the reality is they have been told to act like businesses, and therefore we must not be surprised when they do so. My students may rightly say that this isn’t fair, but I suppose that is an important lesson in itself.

Ireland is falling out of love with Sinn Fein

Is the Sinn Fein star starting to wane? Support for the party has hit its lowest level for four years according to a poll for the influential Business Post newspaper. While Sinn Fein still remains the most popular party in the Republic, it has dropped seven points since October 2023.

A reason for the loss of support has been its prevarication around the question of immigration; riots gripped Dublin in late November after an attack by an Algerian man on three children in the heart of the city. Since then, the so-called ‘land of a thousand welcomes’ has grappled with arson attacks on asylum seeker hotels and seen the government reduce welfare benefits and accommodation for Ukrainian refugees.

Most Sinn Fein voters are fine with this sort of stuff, incidentally. A majority of those who support the party take a dim view of immigration compared with their compatriots; over 70 per cent said too many were entering the country. A mere 38 per cent said they felt the Republic stood to benefit economically from immigration.

Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of the party in the Republic of Ireland, has engaged in a difficult dance, calling protestors far-right while simultaneously criticising the Irish governments’ laxity around immigration and its effects the housing market. Such contortions have harmed the party – but Sinn Fein’s problems are not just confined to Ireland’s borders.

McDonald and Michelle O’Neill, the leader of the party in Northern Ireland, will attend the annual White House St Patrick’s Day shindig in March. That decision has enervated the bit of the party’s base which sees the Palestinian situation as analogous to Northern Ireland. Remarkably, the party have even been outflanked by the mild-mannered SDLP on the issue, with their leader Colum Eastwood saying he will not be attending the events in Washington in protest at Joe Biden’s ‘atrocious’ stance on Gaza.

There was an attempt by Gerry Adams to explain away the DC jaunt by saying Palestinians would understand the party’s reasonings and that Sinn Fein is going ‘in pursuit of peace’. With an Irish election in a little over a year, is it any wonder that Sinn Fein’s hierarchy has decided that cosying up to its funding base is a more judicious move than niceties about the situation in Gaza?

Sinn Fein’s opponents have enjoyed the spluttering of recent weeks and the party’s rhetoric around an inevitable march of history has lessened. Yet in many ways this situation is not totally unexpected. After all, this is the most abnormal of political parties. Given its steadfast commitment to a maximalist ideology, it is hardly surprising that when it does begin to prevaricate, its supporters are turned off.

The recent polling surge in support of many independent, rural and populist politicians who have a stronger line on immigration is testament to the fact the Irish electorate want a different answer to the immigration question. Sinn Fein can only be all things to all people for so long. Failure to identify a clear stance on immigration could see the party snatch defeat from the jaws of what many saw as an inevitable victory.

Banning disposable e-cigarettes won’t stop kids vaping

The government thinks it has finally found a popular policy. Better still, it is a policy that it can implement, or at least legislate for. According to a press release from the Department of Health and Social Care, a ban on disposable vapes is supported by ‘nearly 70 per cent of parents, teachers, healthcare professionals and the general public’. The British public love a ban. Last month a survey found that 29 per cent of us want to close the nightclubs to deal with the remnants of Covid-19 and 20 per cent want to re-introduce lockdown.

So, vox populi, vox dei? I think not. Support for banning disposable e-cigarettes needs to be put in the context of another survey carried out a few weeks ago which found that 41 per cent of the population think that vaping is as unhealthy as smoking; a further 11 per cent think it is worse. Only 24 per cent picked the correct answer which is that smoking is a lot worse. When the majority of voters are so woefully misinformed, politicians should not pander to them.

At the heart of this issue lies a genuine problem. In recent years, there has been a glut of cheap, brightly coloured disposable vapes coming in from China and being sold to minors by unscrupulous retailers. The vapes themselves are often illegal (over four million of them were seized at the border last year). The illegal sale of illegal vapes to children is a problem of law enforcement, but it is easier for the government to create another law than to enforce the laws that already exist.

For the minority of Britons who understand that vaping is much less hazardous than smoking and that e-cigarettes are proven to be the most effective way to get people off cigarettes, banning a whole category of vapes is a risky move. A study funded by Cancer Research UK concluded that banning disposables ‘has the potential to slow progress in driving down smoking prevalence and reducing smoking-related harm’. The pressure group Action on Smoking (ASH), which usually shares the public’s love for banning things, says that ‘the risk of unintended consequences is too great for us to support a ban’. ASH’s former director, Clive Bates, says the proposed ban ‘sinks further into empty gesture politics, goes against evidence, does more harm than good, and makes everything worse’. He has called on the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, to resign for publicly supporting it.

There is also the small matter of personal liberty. Banning adults from buying products because minors sometimes buy them illegally has never been a principle of UK law. Many more 11-15 year olds drink alcohol regularly than vape regularly, but no one is talking about banning cider.

What are the 2.6 million adult users of disposable e-cigarettes going to do when they get banned? We don’t have much direct evidence, but we can learn lessons from what happens when e-cigarette flavours are prohibited. This evidence is particularly pertinent since the government is also talking about banning some e-cigarette flavours.

A study from the USA found that a ban on non-tobacco flavours led to a 4.6 per cent increase in cigarette sales. A study of seven US states also found that flavour bans were associated with higher cigarette sales. Two studies have looked at what happened in San Francisco after flavoured vapes were banned. Both of them found that cigarette smoking increased.

This is consistent with evidence showing that e-cigarette taxes are associated with more cigarette sales. The lesson is simple. Vaping and smoking are direct substitutes. If you make one of them less appealing, less available or more expensive, you give the other a boost. Anti-vaping policies are effectively pro-smoking policies.

Supporters of a ban on disposable vapes will argue that adults who use these products can simply switch to refillables which are better for the environment and cheaper in the long run. Many of them will doubtless do that. A study published last week noted that ‘disposable brands have already launched refillable versions with similar branding and flavours, which are sold for ∼£8.’ But if adults respond to the ban by buying cheap refillables, what is to stop children doing the same? We are not addressing the problem unless we stop retailers selling e-cigarettes to minors. That would take some hard work and would not fill a day in the government’s grid, but it is the only answer.

Time is running out to crack down on Iran

Three American soldiers on the Syria-Jordan border were killed by Iranian drones on Sunday. Since October, Iranian drones and missiles have injured nearly two hundred American troops. The pipe dream that was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the Iran deal – could not seem more distant.

The equation at the heart of the deal, more money for more Iranian concessions, vanished shortly after an agreement was concluded in 2015. In the years since, Iran’s funding to its regional proxies exploded, and its proxies’ attacks on Israel and the Gulf states continued unabated. The Houthis in Yemen, who emerged in earnest after the deal was struck, are now a global pest. Iran’s reformist movement, which the carrot of doux commerce was meant to empower, has been all but decimated. Iran’s nuclear program is more advanced than it has ever been. From the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, its proxies are harassing British ships and British allies. Globally, Iran threatens to use terror and assassination against British citizens. After nearly six years, British policy has barely moved an inch. It now needs to move a mile, and fast. 

The Middle East is aflame, but our heads apparently remain in the sand. Performative pseudo-sanctions are one thing. But on Wednesday, Lord Cameron (or perhaps his underlings in Whitehall) thought it appropriate to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Davos. Any ‘important messages’ Cameron passed along surely paled in comparison with the image of weakness he presented. Sure enough, within hours, the Iranian media spun the meeting as a perfect example of Western grovelling and feebleness. It is rather hard to disagree. One doubts that Amir-Abdollahian asked for the meeting, or that he will give much consideration to Cameron’s grumbling about Houthi missiles. But such foibles are downstream from the central problem, which is that we do not understand Iran and do not have an Iran policy.

As Saeid Golkar writes, Iran is a ‘captive society’. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is its principal captor. The best structural analogy for the IRGC is the SS. It is highly-indoctrinated, independent of the regular army, an elite social and political network, and swears loyalty to the Supreme Leader rather than the nation. Today, the IRGC controls two-thirds of Iran’s economy. Its proximity to the Supreme Leader gives its commanders an outsize influence in policymaking. Consequently, politicians who sought to rein in the IRGC’s sprawling remit have been banished from political life (or worse.) For forty years, the IRGC’s network has slammed shut every opening for glasnost or perestroika à l’iranienne. The reason why is in the name. 

The proper name of the IRGC – sepah-e-pasdaran-e-enghelab-e-eslami – translates to ‘the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution’. Its job is written on the tin: to ensure that Iran remains an ‘Islamic Republic’ per the definition of its founder, Ruhollah Khomeini. Since its creation, its raison d’être has been to be ‘nezami’, ‘pro-regime’. It is there to stay. Iran will continue to support terrorists in the name of ‘resistance’. It will plot kidnappings and murders worldwide. It will maintain its commitment to fanatical anti-Westernism, in word and in deed. What we needed before October 7 is a strategy aimed at countering and containing the state that the IRGC commands. It is nothing short of extraordinary that we still lack one.  

In Policy Exchange’s paper The Iran Question and British Strategy, published early last year, we suggested implementing UN ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran. Failure to do so, we wrote, would put Iran on an internationally-legitimised glide path towards advanced nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Had those recommendations been heeded, we would have been in a better position to handle the current crisis. The UN Resolution 2231 could have been used by the UK to trigger the ‘snapback’ of the sanctions suspended by the original deal, formally killing the JCPOA. This did not happen: the UN embargo on Iranian missile testing and arms embargoes expired last October. Iranian drones already bomb Ukrainian infrastructure with our effective condonation. Now, Iranian missiles are flying all over the region: several dozen missiles were fired Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria over two-day span. Iranian ballistic missiles are flung at ships from Yemen on a daily basis. 

Snapback is just one example of where an obvious cost-free step could have been taken. We also pointed out the risk of ‘serious disruption to international commerce’ from Yemen, noting that the UK’s military capabilities in the region were not ready to handle a regional crisis and that our enemies know it. We highlighted that the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence had not reviewed its Middle East evacuation procedures, even after the humiliating evacuation of Kabul. We recommended that the UK expedite the sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as a diplomatic incentive and to prepare them for a possible contingency in Yemen. We arrived at these conclusions from a clear-eyed look at the region. That none of these measures were taken onboard sooner is a damning indictment of the blob’s creativity deficit. 

The ‘blob’ and its intellectual enablers continue to call for de-escalation, as they have for years. The appeasement camp – what else to call it? – continues to fear that a comprehensive strategy could ‘light the region on fire.’ They have long been the sort to fiddle while Rome burned, but now it is literally the case.

Time is on Tehran’s side. Despite rampant inflation in Iran, the IRGC’s budget was buffered for a third consecutive year. It will likely be expanded again in March. The IRGC remains embedded in the command structures of every regional militia, from Yemen to Lebanon to Iraq. Iran is still the principal source of funding and knowledge for all the West’s local antagonists. Iran’s stockpile of highly-enriched uranium is expanding, as is its store of advanced centrifuges. Worse still, our partners in the Gulf have effectively fallen in line with the Iranian narrative that a ceasefire in Gaza – in other words, leaving Hamas intact – is the only way to forestall a ‘worse disaster’. It is hard to blame them, though. If anything, a policy of effective capitulation is something they learned from us. 

For years, Tehran’s atomic scarecrow distracted the world from both its foreign policy, which violently disturbs the peace across the Middle East; and from its domestic policy which, as the events of recent months have shown, violently robs Iranians of their basic freedoms. The consequences of our inaction and inertia are plain to see. It is already too late to avert a looming storm or to brace ourselves for one. The storm has already arrived. But if we do not adapt soon, our interests will be washed away with it. 

Jay Mens is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and Ernest May Fellow for History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is the co-author of the Policy Exchange report ‘The Iran Question and British Strategy’

Estate agents shouldn’t need A-Levels to sell houses

Last week the shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook tabled an opportunistic amendment to the government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. This would require the government to closely regulate all estate agents selling leasehold properties or properties carrying management or service charges (in essence flats, or houses on managed estates). 

There is a lot that is wrong with this idea. It derives from a 2019 report by a committee chaired by the crossbench peer and social housing campaigner Lord Richard Best. Featuring among its demands were a proposed licensing regime of enormous complexity more appropriate to lawyers or doctors and a dedicated governmental regulator. The committee also recommended multi-tier rules and codes, the considerable expense of which would be borne by, and hence added indirectly to the fees of, estate agents everywhere – with doubtful benefits to their customers. 

But one element particularly stands out in this bureaucrat’s blueprint. Following Lord Best, Pennycook wants to prohibit anyone from working as an estate agent without at least one A-level, or managing an agency unless qualified to degree level. Even existing practitioners would not escape: unless qualified, back to night school or university they need to go, or leave the profession. This needs to set us thinking seriously.

We can start with the obvious. This idea is so eye-poppingly silly, and the arguments against it so obvious, that it is hard to understand anyone putting it forward with a straight face.

Left school without A-levels, interested in property and want to learn on the job? Sorry, not allowed: you’re unqualified. But if you scraped an E in Art or Physical Education on the retake? That makes all the difference: welcome aboard the real estate gravy train. Two people apply for promotion to management: one has market savvy and long experience but no degree; the other is younger and less talented but some years ago unwillingly sat, supremely bored, through a degree in Fashion Studies because their school told them they should. You have to take the latter. How the quality of estate agents can possibly be improved by a government diktat limiting its practice to those holding a technical but often entirely irrelevant diploma is anyone’s guess. 

Indeed, the proposed rule is not only senseless but positively harmful. We already have way too many people at university – not because of a burning desire to study but because they have been told to go there, or because they see a degree as necessary to getting a job. Do we really want to worsen this trend by telling those interested in the real estate market that they are forbidden from rising to the top unless they get a degree they do not want to read for and that is irrelevant anyway? 

The UK has long suffered from grotesquely overvaluing academic qualifications and underappreciating on-the-job learning. As any employer will confirm, the result is a grievous lack of practical skill coupled with a surfeit of graduates combining high expectations with doubtful employability.

Recently, to our credit, we have at least tried to redress the balance in favour of those with natural talent but no serious liking for academic work. Estate agency should be a classic beneficiary, being a business that, unlike for example law or accountancy, largely depends on people skills rather than a dry technical competence. But not, apparently, for Pennycook and the Labour party. They seem determined, for no appreciable reason apart from a blind faith in promoting paper diplomas for their own sake, to take away a golden opportunity for non-academic school leavers.

How have we got here? The reasons Lord Best gave for imposing paper qualifications on property professionals – that they demonstrated skills and commitment and reassured consumers – are laughable. The idea that one bad A-level (or, in the case of a manager, a pass degree) in a subject entirely unrelated to bricks and mortar guarantees some necessary realtor’s skill, or confirms motivation, is preposterous. The notion that it reassures consumers is even more so, not to mention seriously insulting the intelligence of the average consumer. 

What one really suspects lies behind this proposed amendment is two other factors. One is a politician’s desire to massage professional vanity. Professional bigwigs naturally tend to respond positively to proposals whose effect is to inflate their own self-importance and keep out the riff-raff. Not surprisingly, enthusiastic support for Pennycook came from trade body Propertymark, which gushed: ‘We want a properly regulated industry where our professional knowledge and skills are trusted and respected.’ Quite.

The second is, quite simply, intellectual snobbery. Labour, remember, is increasingly the party, not of the traditional worker, but of the credentialled classes. Those with diplomas, including almost all the opposition front bench, tend naturally to look down on those without them. It is their natural instinct to assume that any profession would be improved by limiting entry just to those like themselves.

This is an opportunity for the Tories. They must resist Pennycook’s blandishments and loudly reiterate what the rest of us regard as obvious: estate agents should be competent at reckoning what a property is worth and getting the best price for it. If someone is good at this, even if they left school at 16, good luck to them. If the Labour party won’t champion the rights of the ambitious but unacademic, another party must step up and do just that.

What explains the rise of Austria’s Freedom Party?

We don’t hear much about Austrian politics in Britain, which is not perhaps surprising since the landlocked Central European republic of some nine million souls, is scarcely a major player on Europe’s chessboard. Nonetheless Austria, like Britain, will hold elections this year, and a populist party with Nazi roots looks certain to emerge with the most votes.

On Friday, thousands of young Austrians took to the streets of Vienna and Salzburg in demonstrations spilling over from neighbouring Germany against the rise of right-wing anti immigration parties in both countries. They were specifically protesting about a recent meeting of far-right activists near Berlin that discussed a plan to deport migrants to their countries of origin.

On the streets of Vienna, it’s not hard to discern the issue that has propelled the Freedom Party (FPÖ) to outstrip it’s traditional socialist and conservative rivals to win a standing of 30 percentage points, according to current polls.That issue – as elsewhere in Europe, where populist parties are riding high – is immigration.

Like Austria’s mighty German neighbour, where another right-wing party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), is also rising, the ascent of the FPÖ sends shivers down the spines of some onlookers because of the country’s 20th century history. For the FPÖ began life back in the 1950s as a home for former Nazis who didn’t support either the Socialist ‘Reds’ in the capital Vienna, or the conservative Catholic ‘Blacks’ in the countryside.

At first, the FPÖ affected to be a ‘Liberal’ third force, but in the late 1980s a charismatic and controversial young politician called Jorg Haider took over the party and pulled it sharply to the right. Haider’s parents had both been Nazi party members, and he made little secret that his own sympathies tended in a similar direction, attending reunions where former SS men were present, and praising Hitler for getting rid of unemployment.

When I worked in Vienna as a journalist in the 1990s, Haider was the enfant terrible, constantly disrupting the cosy consensus that had divvied up Austrian politics since 1945. For decades, the Reds and the Blacks had held an agreed balance of jobs in every walk of life in a system known as ‘proporz’. My boss in Austrian state radio was a ‘Red’ but his deputy was a ‘Black’.

Although Vienna is classed as one of the safest cities in Europe, it is the only one where I have witnessed a murder by one immigrant of another with my own eyes. In 1999, largely fuelled by concerns over immigration, the FPÖ gained a quarter of the electorate’s votes, and were admitted to government as junior partners to the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP).

Although Haider did not personally join the government, the right-wing coalition caused vapours in Brussels. Austria was labelled as a pariah state. The prospect of EU economic sanctions loomed over Vienna in a manner which would become familiar in Poland and Hungary when they elected right-wing governments twenty years later. Austria, where civic courage has never been much of a virtue, bowed to the pressure and the coalition crumbled.

Always an abrasive personality, Haider split from the FPÖ and formed a breakaway party. In 2008, after a heavy drinking session, he died in a car accident in the southern province of Carinthia, where he was governor.

Reunited under a new leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ once again climbed steadily in the polls, and Strache became vice chancellor in a new coalition with the ÖVP in 2017. In 2019, Strache, while on holiday in Ibiza, was caught up in a sting in which the politician was recorded offering government contracts to a fake journalist in exchange for favourable publicity for his party. The FPÖ chief resigned in disgrace and another ÖVP-FPÖ coalition collapsed.

Five years on, and once again the FPÖ have returned from the depths of Ibiza-gate under a new chief called Herbert Kickl to enjoy a sustained lead in the polls over their rivals. Kickl, who was a speechwriter for Haider, was a notably hardline interior minister in the 2017-19 coalition, opining that Islam is incompatible with other cultures, proclaiming that his goal was to make it almost impossible for asylum seekers to settle in Austria, and trying to rename immigrants’ hostels as ‘departure centres’. 

Like many of Europe’s ultra-right leaders, Kickl also has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia. In the pandemic, he took a strong anti-vaccine line. But if, as expected, his party comes out on top in this autumn’s elections, Austria’s Green president, Alexander van den Bellen – who dismissed Kickl when he was a minister over the Ibiza scandal – will be constitutionally obliged to name him chancellor, possibly in a new coalition, this time with the FPÖ as senior partners to the ÖVP.

Austrian politics mirror those in Germany, where last week thousands took part in protests after AfD members attended a meeting at which a plan for the mass deportation of migrants was discussed. One of the meeting’s attendees was Austria’s Martin Sellner, a Kickl supporter and co-founder of the European Identitarian movement which advocates white Christian culture and opposes mass migration.

Attitudes in Austria towards mass migration have hardened considerably in recent years, as they have across the rest of Europe. My son, who lives in Vienna, is a gentle giant with his own bodybuilding business. At the age of 30, he’ll vote for the first time. He is no fan of Kickl but is likely to back him anyway. The reason why is simple enough: Kickl is, at least, willing to crack down on an asylum policy that many Viennese think is far too liberal.

Dorries goes left field with Sunak replacement

Nadine Dorries has never been shy about publicising her disdain of Rishi Sunak. Whether it’s criticising his £3,500 Prada suit or accusing the former Chancellor of sabotage, the former I’m a Celebrity… star could never be accused of being a card-carrying Sunakite. But Mr S was nevertheless surprised to hear who she thinks ought to replace him as Prime Minister.

Appearing on the BBC’s flagship Laura Kuenssberg show yesterday, Dorries was asked which popular figure from outside politics ought to become Britain’s next premier. A focus group of voters produced names like Carol Vorderman and Martin Lewis but Dorries’ own choice was anything but predictable. For the Boris-backing Brexiteer said that her choice would be none other than departing Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp.

Now while Dorries is a long-time reds fan, Klopp isn’t exactly a true-blue Tory. Back in 2021, he declared that the leadership of Boris Johnson – Dorries’ great hero – was ‘really a bad sign for the whole world.’ He previously called for a second EU referendum based on the ‘right information’ and in 2017 declared he was ‘on the left, of course,’ telling journalist Raphael Honigstein that ‘I believe in the welfare state. I’m not privately insured,’ adding ‘If there’s something I will never do in my life it is vote for the right.’

A left-wing striker for PM? Talk about an inspired tactical substitution from the former Culture Secretary…

The Tory cigarette rebellion will likely go up in smoke

Back when Rishi Sunak was trying to pitch himself as the change candidate, he used his party conference speech in October to announce three big policies: the scrapping of HS2, a ‘new Baccalaureate-style qualification’ to replace A-levels and a plan to create the first smoke free generation. The latter idea was inspired by a similar policy introduced in New Zealand by the Labour party that has since been scrapped after the conservative National party triumphed in the recent election. Despite this, Sunak plans to press on and today on a visit to a school will announce further measures to ‘protect children’s health’ when it comes to vapes.

The government plans to ban disposable vapes for everyone, following a consultation looking at the number of children taking up vaping. Recent figures suggest that the number of children using vapes over the past three years has tripled, with 9 per cent of 11 to 15 year-olds now using vapes. As well as banning disposable vapes (which are seen as the most appealing to children), the government wants new powers to restrict certain flavours, such as ‘pink lemonade’, and to introduce plain packaging to reduce their appeal.

With this announcement, Sunak is also recommitting to his initial pledge of a new law that will make it illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009. This is despite calls by Tory MPs for Sunak to think again. They are arguing that it constitutes a new type of illiberalism to make it so that someone born on 1 January 2009 can never buy a cigarette, even at the age of 80, when a sibling older by just one year could smoke as much as they liked into old age.

This group of MPs see other deterrents (even higher taxation) as preferable to the current proposal. Overnight, the former prime minister Liz Truss put out a statement: ‘Banning the sale of tobacco products to anyone born in 2009 or later will create an absurd situation where adults enjoy different rights based on their birthdate. A conservative government should not be seeking to extend the nanny state. This will only give succour to those who wish to ban further choices of which they don’t approve.’ One of the other criticisms from MPs towards Sunak when it comes to the policy is that he is rushing it through so he has a legacy from his premiership.

Right on cue, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has said his party supports the policy and will lend Sunak any votes he needs. As for when the vote will take place, at present the whips’ office is looking to hold it in February. No matter how many Tories choose to rebel (and right now the number if fairly small), No. 10 are quietly confident it will pass. Sunak has said it will be a conscience vote meaning there will be no whipping. As the policy polls well, some Tory MPs who oppose it plan to abstain for fear that a vote against could be weaponised against them in an election.

With Labour and other opposition parties voicing support, it is hard to envisage a scenario where the vote fails. Instead, the bigger risk for Sunak is it further moves the right of the party against him.

Trump is right – the world is less stable under Biden

Donald Trump said yesterday that we’re ‘on the brink of world war three’ after a suicide drone killed three US soldiers and injured a further 34 in Jordan. ‘This attack would never have happened if I was president, not even a chance – just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would now have peace throughout the world,’ said Trump. ‘Our country cannot survive with Joe Biden as Commander in Chief.’

It’s cynical, of course, to score political points over military deaths. Yesterday’s US combat fatalities were reportedly the first in three years under Joe Biden. Some 45 servicemen were killed in the war in Afghanistan under Donald Trump – a conflict Joe Biden ended in 2021. 

But Trump is not necessarily wrong to point out that the world has become more unstable under Biden. Trump wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he didn’t because he feared it would be a mess. Biden’s withdrawal was shambolic. He does appear to have emboldened the West’s enemies – Russia, Iran and China – and made global affairs more fraught. 

Trump’s approach – what he calls, in caps, ‘PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH’ – did also contain Iran, which the White House has blamed for the weekend’s attack. ‘Thanks to my maximum pressure policy, the Iranian regime could barely scrape two dollars together to fund their terrorist proxies.’ 

This is hyperbole, though Trump’s scrapping of the Obama-Biden era nuclear deal did put Tehran on the back foot. The Biden administration has tried a contradictory approach of continuing the Trump-era strategy of isolating Iran, while at the same time reviving the Obama presidency’s policy of accommodation. It unfroze some $6 billion (£4.7 billion) of Iranian assets in Qatar and, even after the 7 October Hamas atrocities in Israel, another $10 billion (£7.8 billion) in Iraq. 

Foreign policy is playing an unusually significant part in the 2024 presidential election. Americans are comparing Trump’s record of relative success with Biden’s three years of growing instability – and reaching their own conclusions. That might in part explain Trump’s lead in the polls. 

From the Middle East to Ukraine to possibly Taiwan, the America-led world order looks increasingly feeble. The Biden administration has vowed to avenge what it calls the ‘significant escalation’ last weekend. What happens next could decide whether or not Trump’s dark warning proves true. 

France’s furious farmers are marching on Paris

Paris will be under siege from 2 p.m. today as farmers intensify their protest action and attempt to cut off the capital from the rest of France. They have announced plans to blockade all roads leading to Paris with their tractors, a threat that prompted interior minister Gérald Darmanin to summon police chiefs to his office on Sunday.

Darmanin ordered them to ‘deploy a major defensive operation’ to ensure the farmers are not successful, particularly in their ambition to prevent access to airports and the international food market at Rungis. Prime minister Gabriel Attal had hoped he’d defused the anger of the agricultural industry on Friday when he travelled to the Haute-Garonne region in the south, where the protests began ten days ago, with a list of concessions.

The diminutive Attal, dwarfed by the farmers he courteously confronted, said that he understood their anger and reiterated what he’d said earlier in the week about farming being a ‘source of pride for France’. Much of what Attal promised was financial: an end to the rising cost of diesel fuel used for farming machinery (a result of tax breaks on the fuel being scrapped) and an emergency fund for cattle farmers.

His words were enough to lift the blockade on the A64, the motorway west of Toulouse, but they’ve had little effect on the rest of the country’s demoralised farmers. ‘We need to go further,’ said Arnaud Rousseau, president of the powerful FDSEA union. One of his regional representatives, Lucie Delbarre, meanwhile declared: ‘We have a government that doesn’t care about its farmers…it’s a pressure cooker ready to explode.’

Amid Attal’s rhetoric and suggested measures there was not one word about Europe, the source of much of the farmers’ anger. The EU’s decision to suspend quotas and tariffs on imports of Ukrainian chickens and cereals into Europe is seen as driving the farmers’ prices down, and they also fear the consequences of the trade deal signed last year between Brussels and New Zealand.

Even as the farmers were protesting last week, the EU signed off a trade deal with Chile, which will facilitate the importation of raw materials and fuels such as lithium, copper and hydrogen into the European Union. The deal was described by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) as strengthening ‘Europeans’ place in the “à la carte” world.’

Tell that to French farmers. FDSEA were opposed to the trade deal from the start, with a spokesman complaining that ‘as always, agriculture and its most sensitive sectors have been the currency of the latest negotiations’. They predict that Chilean exports will saturate the French market with 9,000 tonnes of pork each year, 4,000 tonnes of lamb and over 30,000 tonnes of poultry.

What particularly enrages French farmers is the fact that they are subjected to ever more bureaucracy such as restrictions on animal feed, veterinary medicines and the use of phytosanitary products. Meanwhile, the same regulations don’t apply to farmers from Chile, New Zealand or Ukraine.

I live in a village in Burgundy and my neighbour is a cereal farmer who has recently turned organic. His family have farmed the land for decades and he is fully behind the protest movement. Why in particular? I asked him at the weekend. Too much administration and too many imports from the east, by which he meant Ukraine.

A few miles down the road is a livestock farmer from whom I buy milk each week. Bureaucracy is the bane of her life, too – she was one of the farmers who protested last week outside the local prefecture. She will be participating in the blockade of Paris this week.  

She and my neighbour have little affection for the EU but their real anger is directed towards their own government. ‘They’ve gone along with Brussels,’ says the cereal farmer. ‘Rather than sticking up for us.’

Recent opinion polls have found that an overwhelming majority of people support the farmers’ protest. Some commentators wonder if a blockade of Paris might be counter-productive and drain away much of this goodwill. The farmers don’t care if they upset Parisians. Such has been the decimation of the agricultural industry this century, there is a feeling among them that this is their last chance to save their way of life. ‘We’ve got nothing left to lose,’ is a refrain heard often among protestors.

It is not just farmers who feel this way. Their wail of despair echoes throughout the provinces where deindustrialisation has devastated large swathes of the country. This is why the government is so worried. What began as a farmers’ revolt could easily spread into something far greater.

On a trip to Denmark in 2018, Emmanuel Macron mocked provincial France for being ‘Gauls who are resistant to change’. It was their refusal to embrace his economically liberal world view that frustrated the president. He subsequently laughed off his remarks, telling journalists that he loved France and its people. ‘I think what our neighbours, partners and friends want to see is a France that is proud of itself and knows how to look hard at itself and history and the transformations under way.’

They have looked hard at the transformations imposed by Paris and Brussels – and they don’t like them. The Gauls’ pride is on the line and they intend to fight for it to the bitter end.

The shame of Britain’s ‘cash for courses’ universities

‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times. He boasted that ‘foundation’ course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants ‘pay more money […] so they give leeway for international students […] It’s not something they want to tell you, but it’s the truth.’ 

And how. The paper reports that ‘overseas students wishing to study an economics degree using one of the pathways needed grades of CCC at Bristol; CCD at Durham; DDE at Exeter; DDE at Newcastle; and just a single D at Leeds. Yet the same universities’ A-level entry requirements for UK students is A*AA or AAA.’ Odd, isn’t it, when we’re making such a noise about immigration policy favouring only the cream of international talent that we seem to be applying the opposite metric when it comes to university admissions. I don’t think it makes you a little Englander to find it perverse that it’s much harder for British than foreign students to get a place in a British university.  

These universities have been quick to pooh-pooh the Sunday Times’s reporting – which, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, ‘they would, wouldn’t they?’ They say that it can’t possibly be the case that foreign students are ‘squeezing out’ domestic applicants because, look, domestic admissions to Russell Group universities are at a record high and foreign applications have slumped. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re right about this. I would be surprised, though, if that trend was privately regarded by the average vice-chancellor with anything but horror. There’s a reason they spend millions pimping themselves abroad.  

If there’s a temporary shortage of foreign students, in other words, it’s not for want of trying. The slump in foreign students, particularly from the EU, is down to that awkwardness in 2016. That and the fact our general enthusiasm for making it harder for foreigners to live here may yet put a dent in the flow of Indian and Chinese money. This will cook the universities’ gooses yet further. The way university funding is now set up means that all but a very few universities positively rely on foreigners to pay the bills.   

The universities further complain that the Sunday Times failed to differentiate between the traditional, front-door admission system via UCAS and the one-year ‘foundation’ courses offered to foreign students. It seems to me that the paper differentiated between them rather well: it made the point that getting into the latter, more or less, requires the offspring of your average Chinese billionaire to be able to make a smudge on a bit of paper with his thumb, whereas the former asks a native Briton to get a clutch of A*s at A-level. They grumble that this is not comparing like with like… but that’s sort of the point.  

Sure, a foundation course doesn’t guarantee a straight-C student will go on to join the regular undergraduate course the following year alongside higher-achieving British peers. But the paper found all sorts of people prepared to testify that the end-of-year exams needed to get you through aren’t especially taxing. Pass rates of between 93 and 100 per cent were reported. So the back door does, to all intents and purposes, exist.

And why on earth wouldn’t it? Vice-chancellors are encouraged to run universities as businesses, and businesses tend to look for profit. If student fees for Britons are capped at a quarter of what you can charge a foreigner, you’re going to do everything you can to get some wealthy foreigners in through the door before you go bust. 

There are two models of what a university education is for, and they have always jostled along together. One is the humanistic, perhaps slightly hippy-dippy notion that learning is in and of itself a good thing: that it benefits both the individual human and the common lot of humanity, on average, to have minds expanded and assumptions tested. This is the version that thinks that the Greats are great, that studying poems for three years partially or wholly on the taxpayer’s dime is just the sort of thing a civilised society should encourage, and that universities are the engines of our commonwealth of knowledge.  

Then there’s the instrumental version, which is that learning is a good thing because it increases your human capital, creates the sort of people who will power a high-skill economy, boosts the graduate’s expected lifetime earnings by a measurable amount, and all in all keeps the wheels of industry whizzing merrily round. This is the version, increasingly favoured by government these last few decades, which wants to see a return on investment one way or another. It wants its students to cover their bills; and it wants, with a view to boosting the wider economy, to encourage the sorts of students who go on to become engineers or tech wizards rather than poets. (There is, of course, a third model of what a university education is for, favoured by many undergraduates back when it was free, which had to do with getting blootered and trying to shag people, but that need not detain us overmuch here.) 

As I say, these models have always jostled along together. The balance has shifted dramatically to the latter lately, with times being tough and Wordsworth looking more optional. But there’s always been a sense that universities do both things at once. I’m not sure if the current funding situation continues, though, that they are likely to be able to do either for much longer.  

The trend is towards a larger number of foreign students, and a larger number of students tout court. As Kingsley Amis said, ‘More will mean worse.’ If, as the Sunday Times suggests, they aren’t starting on an even academic footing with their British fellows, teaching wealthy but derr-brained foreign students will slow the progress of the brighter kids. One lecturer told the paper: ‘They might struggle to keep up on the courses, especially with the written work, and this can mean more work for me and a slower pace for the rest of the students in the class.’   

Even if these foreign cash-cows aren’t actively displacing domestic students, they are unlikely to stick around – and will become ever more unlikely to as we make it harder for foreign graduates to live and work here. In effect, they’ll swoop in, enjoy the cachet of an elite education, and then repatriate their human capital smartly to their countries of origin or to the international job market. The national circulatory system of scholarship – where the smartest graduates either boost the UK economy by working here or refresh the lifeblood of British academia with postgraduate work – will have sprung a leak. Or, perhaps, invited a vampire across the threshold.  

Britain’s higher education sector has, historically, been something to be proud of. The fact that all these foreigners still want to study here is testament to that. But if its short-to-medium-term survival strategy is to lower its standards and change its demographic, which over time will diminish its attraction to foreign students in the first place, there may not be a long term. 

Once you wear black, you’ll never go back

Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘I like to express myself through what I wear’ I know we’re dealing with a dim bulb – how about expressing yourself through, I don’t know, your words and your actions? Fran Lebowitz once said ‘If people don’t want to talk to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your clothes?’ and though she was referring specifically to slogan T-shirts, I often think of it when I see people dressed in an ‘interesting’ manner. Anyone who’s spent time around fashion people will easily excuse the amount of cocaine taken in such circles, as the dullness of the conversation verges on the surreal; I knew one boulevardier who, on attending a dinner party, would quickly make a note of the best-dressed women and instruct the hostess to sit him nowhere near them, on principle.

Though I may not know much about fashion I certainly know what I like – and that’s black clothes. Before any of you rotters refer rudely to the fleeing of my sylphlike charms, I’ll have you know that this lifelong love affair started when I was a girl of 14 – and size 8. I was a pretentious and precocious little madam, and when I read Chekhov’s Masha in The Seagull say ‘I am in mourning for my life’ when asked why she wears only black, it struck me as such an outrageously brilliant thing to say. For ages I’d wanted to wear only black, but as my mother bought my clothes, this was about as likely as my being allowed to wear a feather boa and nipple tassels to the school disco. There was nothing for it – a lively career of adolescent shoplifting was called for.

Half a century on and I still wear only black – maybe a bit of grey when I’m feeling particularly extrovert. I’ve never been a goth, an emo or an undertaker but I’ve stuck to my chosen colour with the dedication of all three combined. I’ve worn black when I was thin and fat, happy and sad, young and old; I started when I was a tall blonde girl – who probably look better in black than anyone – and I continue with equal enthusiasm now I’m a defiantly dark-haired pensioner. My Jabba the Hutt years are now behind me and I’m a reasonable size 16 64-year-old – and I still can’t get enough of black dresses, leggings and sweaters. One day shortly before Christmas, I turned up at the charity shop where I volunteer wearing an olive green jumper and a red tartan kilt as a nod to the season; not only did my colleagues stare at me in amazement, but one was deputised to have a word with me shortly after to ask me if I was ‘OK’. I howled at the fact that my not wearing black for the first time in the eight years she’d known me indicated that I might be experiencing some sort of trauma and was ‘acting out’ by donning the preferred shades of the season.

According to a recent report in the Daily Mail, I’ll soon be blending in nicely as black is about to come back in a big way: ‘It’s official: black is back. Not the faded “charcoal” black of 2022 but black-black. Inky black. The sort of black that signals sophistication and drama. A full-body black that has been absent from catwalks and front rows and Instagram feeds for years.’ In the shameless sunshine of Los Angeles last month – at Balenciaga’s ready-to-wear fall 2024 show – the likes of Nicole Kidman, Eva Longoria and Kendall Jenner stepped out in ‘black velvet coat dresses, black witchy shoes, black gloves, black shades, black tights, black leggings, black tuxedos, black boots, black bags… you get the idea.’ Add to this the highly unusual sight of Margot Robbie in black Prada, Elizabeth Debicki in black Bottega Veneta and Dua Lipa in black Chanel on recent red carpets.

Coco Chanel started the fashion for black when in 1926 American Vogue published a photograph of her straight-skirted, calf-length little black dress, predicting that it would be ‘a sort of uniform for all women of taste’. But black clothing hasn’t always just been about being chic; in the 16th century it represented wealth among European merchants and aristocrats as it was the most expensive colour to produce dye for, made of imported oak apples, while in the 19th century it became a bohemian thing. And of course, the Victorians made it the colour of mourning – with widows expected to wear it for four years – as well as the preferred colour for maidservant uniforms. As Chanel said ‘Black has it all.’

Though I know it’s a silly conceit, black still feels like rebellion to me; mothers generally don’t like their daughters to wear it, often scolding that it draws all the healthy colour from our complexions – ever heard of make-up? Like red, black is a colour for girls who want to be women and women who like being women – not women who want to be girls. It’s both sexy and seditious, interested in interesting men while giving the finger to all of them who advised you as a youngster to ‘cheer up’ as ‘it’ might ‘never happen’. Dull types who think black ‘boring’ only reveal their own lack of vividness in the personality department; the black dress unites women of substance as disparate as Betty Boop, Audrey Hepburn, Edith Piaf, Princess Diana and Morticia – my own personal favourite would be Anouk Aimee in La Dolce Vita. There’s that famous poem about being an old lady who wears purple – but I prefer to look like an Italian widow than a superannuated Prince impersonator. My feeling about brown clothing is so strong that it feels like a phobia, though even as a purist I reluctantly concede that there was something cool about the late Jean Muir’s choice of black in winter and navy in summer.

Some broads just don’t like it and respect to them; some won’t even wear it to funerals while many won’t wear it in the country. A Facebook friend commented ‘In black I look like a consumptive Victorian mourning the loss of everyone around them and awaiting their own demise.’ Some people give it up because of eczema and some because of pets; ‘I stopped when I got a white cat and started looking like a Bond Villain gone soft.’ I do like colours on others – my friend Kellie-Jay Keen in her shocking pink jumpsuit, the centre of the action at a Terf rally, comes to mind – just not on me. Black looks tough, and it looks expensive – and who wouldn’t prefer that to looking wimpy and cash-strapped, especially in these perilous times? As for me, it transpired that, unlike miserable Masha, I was never in mourning for my life; I was in a state of preparation for it – and I still feel that I am, oddly, though I’m an old lady now. I had an inkling back then that my life would be vivid, original and shocking – and that only black would provide the perfect backdrop to it. I was right.

The best place to see art? Twitter of course

We hear a lot these days about how social media causes many of our ills. You may have heard some of that from me. And I was right. But I’ve recently realised that there’s one thing where the socials – in particular, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) – score a positive triumph. They are the best medium for the appreciation of paintings.

I know, I know, that sounds loopy. I can hardly believe I’m saying it myself. But hear me out. The purely visual arts have always been a bit of a problem area for me. Until my revelation, I’d never been quite sure how to react to paintings. I thought that my own lack of artistic skill meant that I just couldn’t, at a very deep level, get a handle on art. I can be quite toffee-nosed about all kinds of music and literature but my taste in visual art seemed very Philistine, even to me. Orson Welles’s dictum ‘I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like’ struck a chord, but I felt embarrassed by what I liked.

A few years ago, there was a mini-craze at the very bottom end of the market for quite horribly gaudy nature scenes ­– sylvan glades and tropical Edens – that incorporated moving LED waterfalls. Some of them even came with the sounds of babbling brooks or fluttering fauna. I found myself oohing and aahing at them in shop windows to the shock and horror of friends. The law was very firmly laid down – ‘You are not going to get one of those’.

In contrast, I found that the wonders of the Renaissance left me cold. I would shrug at Titian or van Eyck, but a mass-produced print of a forest on the wall of a Travelodge would hold me captive. Now yes, there was probably something of a pose going on there, but it was a pose that came from a genuine place; I was trying to make the best of my lot.

But now, thanks to Facebook and X, I’m all over painting like your actual connoisseur. It took me a while to puzzle out why. The key thing about paintings in the medium of social media is surprise. You can be – in fact, you will be – deep in the morass of bad takes and banter and outrage and crudity. All good dirty fun, but dirty. And then, with no warning, something beautiful appears. You don’t have time to think, or even to prepare. It’s just suddenly and randomly there, so you get the hit of it pure. Your reaction is all gut. The contrast with the toxic twitter fumes makes a good painting a sight for sore eyes, a refreshing squirt of Optrex.

And you can save the pictures for your own little collection. My taste has become much less chocolate box – I can now look at the Ghent altarpiece and think corrr, where my eyes used to just bounce off it. The townscapes of John Atkinson Grimshaw, the Catalan modernism of Ramon Casas – it’s all new to me, and it all bowled me over.

That key element of surprise is why I don’t include Pinterest or Instagram here. Those are places you visit for the specific purpose of seeing pleasing images, or at least someone’s posh tea. You expect to see nice pictures there, which makes them predictable.

Instagram, particularly if you follow accounts dedicated to visual art, is a bit too much like an art gallery. I like art galleries not because of the art but because of their atmosphere. They are that rarest of things in the twenty-first century, quiet public places, at least if Just Stop Oil aren’t lurking behind a pillar with tins of Baxters. But the art itself never stuck with me. Oversupply is an issue; I’ve always found the National Gallery dizzying, like trying to listen to a thousand different symphonies at the same time.

There is also an element here of age. Like most of us, I was corralled around museums and galleries as a child. But expecting children ­­– or worse still, teenagers – to have a sense of awe and patience is very silly; lobbing great dollops of culture at them in the hope that something might stick. How can the young, for whom everything is new, have any appreciation or even understanding of aesthetics? I couldn’t understand what the big deal was with nice views until my twenties, which is when some of the wear of life gets in to the grain of you. I spent a lot of time as a kid in Oxford, where my grandparents lived. I had no idea the city was beautiful until I was about 30. ‘Why are there all these endless shots of old buildings?’ I wondered during every episode of Inspector Morse. Even as I got older, the finer points of visual art were lost on me. 

But thanks to the socials, I’m catching up now, and in a wonderfully arbitrary and uncoordinated way. I’ve followed a small and reliable clutch of X painting accounts such as @ahistoryinart, @DrLivGibbs, @PaintingsLondon, @artinsociety etc (you may have your own favourites) that post every so often ­– it’s important that they don’t swamp you, or tweet to a timetable. Social media may be destroying western civilisation, but in one way it has opened my eyes.

Is this the worst pop song ever recorded?

On a cold January night 39 years ago in Los Angeles, 46 of the world’s biggest egos gathered together to record a song that was, according to Netflix ‘The Greatest Night In Pop.’ The song was the grandly titled ‘We Are The World’, a hastily composed follow up to the monumentally successful British charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’? Just seven weeks earlier.

Band Aid’s effort was hardly a great song but the occasion captured the UK’s imagination and wallets so soon after pictures of starving Ethiopians had sent shockwaves across the nation. But ‘USA For Africa’, as the American supergroup called themselves, was seen as a poor follow-up. A sequel less like Godfather II and more like Weekend At Bernie’s II and the song itself has been described by veteran music journalist and writer David Quantick, this week, as ‘one of the worst records ever made.’

That has not stopped Netflix from its over-the-top description which it plans to inflict on paid subscribers at the end of this month with behind-the-scenes footage including some never seen before. Perhaps this includes the full buffet in the back room waiting for the stars when they’d finished singing about the horrors of famine.

Written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, reportedly in one night, it was a lacklustre dirge, barely scanning and without rhyme even if it had reason – namely to raise millions of dollars to show that anything we could do, they could do better. Except it wasn’t better. As an exercise in solipsism it remains unsurpassed. As a musical feat, it will go down as one of the worst songs in the back catalogue of most who performed.

In a recording studio in January, 1985, Wacko Jacko and Lionel assembled a group that included genuinely stellar stars such as Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen with lesser known talents including Huey Lewis, Kim Carnes and James Ingram hanging on their coat-tails knowing they would get another number one to their CV.

One imagines their agents and record company PR execs furiously ringing up clients telling them ‘Bobby baby, imagine what this will do to your career’. To his credit, Dylan looked totally embarrassed and confused while others rolled out their full repertoire of emotional gurning – head upwards, hands over headphones, eyes closed and the anguished pained look of someone desperately hoping this will give their flagging career a boost.

At least those appearing in the British version came across as less wholesome and more honest, some arriving at the studio looking like they’d been up all night, others going through the motions because to be seen not to join in would ruin their reputation and even a much-repeated rumour that a couple of the stars had brought round a decent stash of cocaine which they shared out among those wanting to keep the mood going throughout.

Of course, on each side of the Atlantic, the events were, in the worlds of Smashey and Nicey, the obnoxious DJ creations of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, ‘all for charidee’ but along with the predictable glut of sales, the US version it was also met with a healthy dose of cynicism.

The satirical writer P.J. O’Rourke, in his book Give War A Chance pointed out that the opening line ‘we are the children’ was being sung by a group whose average age was 40 and the line ‘we’re saving our own lives’ was merely ‘absurd.’

Reviews were, at best, mixed. One American journalist, Greil Marcus, said the song felt like a Pepsi jingle because the lyrics ‘there’s a choice we’re making’ were similar to the soft-drinks trademarked ‘the choice of a new generation’ and that both Jackson and Richie were contracted to the company. At least Pepsi’s pop is fizzy compared to the flatness of ‘We Are The World’. Marcus wrote at the time:

‘We Are The World’ says less about Ethiopia than it does about Pepsi and the true result will likely be less that certain Ethiopian individuals will live, or anyway live a bit longer than they otherwise would have, than that Pepsi will get the catchphrase of its advertising campaign sung for free by Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and all the rest.

It should be pointed out that the single helped raise donations from the public and corporations totalling more than 50 million dollars and did lead to much needed humanitarian aid.

But for those of us around back then, it was seen as an attempt by the US to outdo the Brits and led to some gloriously cruel but funny parodies, perhaps most notably by Spitting Image whose grotesquely exaggerated puppet versions of Jagger, Tina Turner et al performed the song ‘We’re Afraid of Bob’ in reference to Band Aid’s originator, Bob Geldof.

Even the Americans themselves joined in. An episode in the third series of The Simpsons, when it was still funny, showed the real Sting and a host of Springfield’s residents performing a charity single ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ when they thought a child was stuck down a well.

Despite all this, however awful ‘We Are The World’ was, a new version in 2010 to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Haiti was arguably even worse as it featured Janet Jackson ‘duetting’ with her dead brother, a rap section and Wyclef Jean singing one of the final lines in a wavering voice that the San Francisco Chronical described as ‘not unlike a cross between a fire siren and the sound of Wyclef giving himself a hernia.’

Labour suspend MP over Holocaust Memorial Day comments

Oh dear. Every time Labour looks just about electable, up pops one of Keir Starmer’s MPs to help make that harder. Today it is the turn of Kate Osamor, one of the hard-of-thinking Corbynites who populate the opposition backbenches. She shot to fame back in 2018 when she threatened a Times reporter with a baseball bat after he had the temerity to ask her about her son’s conviction for drug offences. Nice, eh?

This weekend, Osamor has brought her famed diplomatic talents to the sensitive subject of Holocaust Memorial Day. She used the occasion to, er, call for the Israeli military action in Gaza to be remembered as ‘genocide’, in a message to party members in her Edmonton constituency. Alongside an image of her signing the Holocaust Educational Trust’s commemoration book in Westminster, the North London MP suggested that ‘Gaza’ should be added to a list of ‘recent genocides’ to be remembered alongside the murder of six million Jews.

Osamor, a party frontbencher as recently as December 2018, said that there was an ‘international duty’ to remember the victims of the Holocaust as well as ‘more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza’. Following an outcry, the Labour Whips’ Office has now belatedly moved to strip her of the whip. She has tonight been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, pending an investigation.

First Tahir Ali’s PMQs rant and now Kate Osamor’s crass comments. Any other Labour MPs want to remind the voters of the talent (or lack thereof) who comprise the Keirleaders?

Kemi Badenoch: Tory plotters are ‘not my friends’

This week there have been reports of Tory ministers calling for Rishi Sunak to be replaced by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, who consistently tops polls on the popularity of cabinet ministers. On Sky News this morning, Trevor Phillips showed Badenoch a graph which gave her a favourability rating of 64 per cent, contrasted with Rishi Sunak on minus twenty-six per cent, and asked her if she was involved in plotting for a leadership change. Badenoch said she was not, and said prime ministers ‘cannot be treated as disposable’, and Tory MPs needed to ‘stop messing around and get behind the leader’. Later on with Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC, Badenoch responded to a focus group that was disaffected with politicians by saying there was too much focus on personality in politics. Badenoch claimed the Tory rebels did not care about her or her family, ‘they are just stirring.’

Staff from UN agency for Palestinian refugees accused of participating in Hamas attack

The UK and other western nations suspended funding for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine this week, after an investigation into 12 of its members of staff who may have participated in the Hamas attack on 7 October. Trevor Phillips asked Kemi Badenoch if this would have dire consequences for the people of Gaza who are reliant on aid. Badenoch said the allegations against the agency were ‘very significant’, and that suspending funding was the right thing to do. She claimed that aid would still arrive via other organisations that the UK is continuing to fund.

The Post Office has a ‘series of problems’

The fallout from the Horizon IT scandal continues. Badenoch confirmed to Trevor Phillips that the Post Office chair Harry Staunton had been asked to leave on Saturday night, despite only holding the position for one year. Phillips asked if Badenoch had picked the wrong person for the job. Badenoch said she hadn’t appointed Staunton, but ‘difficulties with the board’ had meant she had to intervene. She added that the Post Office has issues that ‘go well beyond the Horizon scandal’, and hinted that there could be further changes, although she claimed she didn’t want to do ‘HR on TV’.

Jonathan Reynolds: ‘People don’t want promises they don’t think can be delivered’

Having watched the BBC’s focus group give tepid reactions to Keir Starmer, even among Labour voters, Laura Kuenssberg asked Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds why so many people say they don’t know what Starmer stands for. Reynolds listed clear positions Starmer had taken, but Kuenssberg pointed out Labour’s uncertainty surrounding their £28 billion-a-year green ambitions as an example of his vague plans. Reynolds claimed Labour were trying to react to financial realities and did not want to make false promises.

US Navy chief says the world should be worried about Trump

Lastly, in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro was criticised Donald Trump, and said President Biden had shown ‘mature leadership’ and built up relationships with US allies. Trump aligned himself with dictators. Del Toro claimed Trump had a ‘suspicious attitude to democracy’, and that the world ‘would suffer’ under a second Trump term.

John Fetterman’s noble support for Israel should be no surprise

Politicians are like bad boys: never fall in love with them, they’ll always hurt you in the end. But try as I might, and I have tried mightily, I can’t fight it anymore. I’ve fallen head over heels for the junior senator from Pennsylvania.

Friday night tipped it for me. John Fetterman was at home in Braddock, a rundown Pittsburgh suburb where he lives with his wife and three children, when an anti-Israel mob gathered outside and began chanting: ‘Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide; you’re supporting genocide!’ Another Democrat might have requested a police evacuation or issued a cuckish statement of solidarity with the demonstrators in the hopes they would leave him alone, but Fetterman took a rather different approach.

As the mob screamed and waved Palestinian flags below, Fetterman appeared on the roof of his loft apartment, which looks out onto Braddock’s last remaining steel mill. In his hands was an Israeli flag, which he held aloft. And as the chants shrieked louder and louder, he remained there, a US senator, spending his Friday night standing silently, defiantly holding that flag.

Since the 7 October pogrom, in which Palestinian terrorists exterminated 1,200 Jews in Israel’s southern communities, John Fetterman has emerged as a clarion voice in condemnation of that massacre and in support of Israel’s right to defend itself. In an earlier time, Fetterman’s stance would have been unremarkable, even on the left of the Democrat Party. True-blue liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke about Israel, its Arab enemies and the threat of terrorism with a bracing clear-sightedness that is difficult to find anywhere in American politics today but especially among Democrats.

Progressive commentators tend to pin American liberalism’s break with Israel on that country’s shift to the political right. There is probably some truth to this, though as Israeli right-wingers like to point out, their country moved rightwards because of the failure of the Oslo peace process, which was foisted upon Israel in large part by American liberals. The more salient shift has arguably been in the opposite direction. Over the past 30 years, Democrat voters have lurched steadily to the left. In 1994, half of all Democrats called themselves ‘moderate’ while only a quarter identified as ‘liberal’; today, a majority embrace the ‘liberal’ label while only a fifth describe their politics as ‘moderate’.

A Gallup poll published last year showed Democrat sympathy having swung from the Israelis to the Palestinians for the first time since polling began. Left-leaning Americans backed Palestinians by an 11-percentage-point margin. (Independents favour Israel by 17 points while Republicans back the Jewish state by a healthy 67-point margin.) Those with only some college education back Israel 10-points more than those with degrees, while white people are 13 points more sympathetic than people who aren’t white. These are burgeoning demographics, with the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded doubling between 1991 and 2021 and the 2020 census showing that white people now make up less than half of America’s under-18 population. 

These political and social changes in America are distilled in Generation Z – those born after 1996. They are markedly less likely to be Christian (a reliable marker for pro-Israel attitudes), more reliant on social media (where extreme anti-Israel narratives flourish) and tend to view Israel as a white supremacist nation like the United States, and the Palestinians as the equivalent of oppressed black and brown Americans. Gen Z, who describe themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans by a 29-point margin, are half as likely as baby boomers to deem it important to ‘protect Israel’.

Fetterman appears to have set his face against these trends. Following the October 7 attacks, he pledged to ‘fully support Israel neutralising the terrorists responsible for this barbarism’. As calls grew for a ceasefire, he said:

Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire. We must support Israel in their efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children. Hamas does not want peace, they want to destroy Israel. We can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is neutralised.

Confronted with bawling protestors outside the Senate, he retrieved a small Israeli flag and held it aloft as he passed by the angry gauntlet. When American Jews gathered for a peaceful march in support of Israel in Washington DC, Fetterman turned up to march with them — draped in an Israeli flag. The senator was dismissive of South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, remarking: ‘Maybe South Africa oughta sit this one out.’ As of this week, he is one of only two Democrats to refuse to sign on to a Senate resolution backing a Palestinian state — because the motion fails to stipulate the destruction of Hamas as a necessary precondition.

The left is not taking any of this well. There has been a rash of protests outside his offices; former campaign staffers accused him of ‘a gutting betrayal’ in an open letter; and anti-Israel activists paraded a puppet effigy of Fetterman complete with a hoodie bearing the words ‘Silent on genocide’. His stance is particularly stinging for progressives and journalists, who mounted a fulsome defence of his fitness to serve after he suffered a stroke during the 2022 midterm elections. Had Fetterman’s Republican rival Mehmet Oz won the Pennsylvania seat, the Senate would have been divided 50-50. (In one of those delicious ironies that sweeten the political process, progressives had another good reason to back Fetterman: Oz, who would have become the first Muslim senator, was outspoken in his support for Israel.) Meanwhile, Fetterman’s right-wing critics have done a 180-turn and, instead of calling him unfit for office, they are rushing to embrace him. This is especially the case after he broke with his party to speak out against illegal immigration, telling CNN: ‘I honestly don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we need a secure border.’

What has prompted this turnabout? Although a blue state, Pennsylvania has significant pockets of social conservatism. Democrat strategist James Carville once summed it up as ‘Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle.’ Republicans are desperate to win back this Senate seat, but Fetterman isn’t up for re-election for another four years. Tacking right three or so years from now would make more sense. Defying the left at this moment, and doing it so brazenly, puts him at risk of being primaried. Nor is it as straightforward as his veering from progressive Democrat to a more conservative variety. He remains staunchly liberal, calling abortion rights ‘non-negotiable’, supporting an expansion of Medicare, endorsing universal healthcare, backing a wealth tax, refusing donations from corporate lobbyists or fossil fuel interests, and receiving a zero-per-cent rating from the NRA. He is no Clintonite, third-way Democrat.

The truth, I suspect, is that Fetterman hasn’t moved to the right at all. He remains what he has always been: a mainline Pennsylvania Democrat who is for blue collars, hard hats and unions, and against elites, big corporations and free trade. Having served as mayor of an economically depressed town with severe drug and crime problems, he understands all too well what ‘balanced budgets’ and deficit hawkery means for left-behind communities and has no time for unworldly libertarianism on firearms availability. A graduate Gen-Xer, he is instinctively in favour of legal abortion and takes a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to gay and lesbian equality and transgender rights.

What sets Fetterman apart from other Democrats is a seeming unwillingness to go along with every progressive lurch out of fear of the TikTok Taliban and its political tantrums. And while moderation and pragmatism might not seem terribly exciting, they are a thrill in an era of abrupt certainty and strutting self-righteousness. John Fetterman is that rare thing in progressive politics: a grown-up willing to say No to the cool kids, no matter how much they kick and scream.

So, I can’t help it. I love the guy. Will he let me down eventually? Of course he will: he’s a politician. But until then I have a new political pin-up and, whether he’s in the US Senate or on a rooftop in eastern Pittsburgh, you’ll find him draped in an Israeli flag and not giving a damn what anyone says.

Not everyone will miss Jurgen Klopp

So, farewell then Jurgen Klopp. What memories you will leave us. You were exuberant, passionate and unorthodox. You ran up and down the touchline, gesticulating manically. You had a nice, albeit cosmetically enhanced, smile. You could be charming and witty.

You won. seven trophies in nine years for Liverpool, most significantly the Premier League title that ended an excruciating generation long wait and a sixth Champion’s League. Your place in the Pantheon is assured and things will be duller without you.

But is your leaving really a ‘disaster’? From the press reaction it would appear that your tenure at Anfield was an unbroken period of glory and joy the imminent cessation of which has precipitated something akin to mourning and existential angst. One wouldn’t be surprised at calls for a statue to be erected or a stand renamed.

Is this justified?

One league win in eight attempts is surely a tad disappointing for a club of Liverpool’s stature, and last year’s failure to even make it into the Champion’s League is similar to relegation for managers of teams outside the super elite. And as for trophies won, take out the not so super ‘Super Cup’, the glorified training exercise that is the Community Shield and the frankly rather silly World Club Championship and we’re down to four, one of which is the League Cup.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quibbling with the idea of Klopp as a very good manager. Spurs and Arsenal, let alone Manchester United fans, would kill for four trophies in a decade. And given the enormous pressure and soaring expectations of the Liverpool faithful and the hyper competitive environment of the premiership, it’s a decent return. But the anguish and despair at your decision to move on, seems somewhat disproportionate.  

Partly this is explicable by Liverpool’s footballing psychology. The red half of the city was experiencing something akin to a slow motion nervous breakdown as each title less year ticked by. Klopp’s 2019/2020 triumph was a supremely cathartic moment that must have felt like a release from prison and what had seemed like a life-sentence for the long-suffering fans.

Klopp now has mythic status and limitless reserves of gratitude. But winning the league in 2020 was no more of an achievement for having broken a long winless run. A more realistic response for a club that can field teams worth 500 million pounds or more would have been: ‘why did it take so long?’ or ‘about time’.

Klopp has probably also benefitted from the hard-wired irrationality in football that conflates charisma with success and allows charm and an indignant refusal to accept blame to distort the statistical record. (Call it the ‘Mourinho effect’.) If Klopp had been dull, humourless, uninspiring, and prone to shouldering responsibility for poor results rather than lashing out at referrees and VAR, he might even have been given the heave-ho after last season’s grave disappointments, never mind what had come before. 

And if we are going to wish Klopp well, and recognise his contribution, we ought to at least acknowledge the less appealing side of his personality. Klopp’s off-the-field antics were frequently inappropriate and came close on occasion to bullying. There were numerous run-ins with referees such as after this season’s defeat to Spurs when Klopp virtually demanded a replay for a bad VAR decision, conveniently overlooking all the bad decisions, VAR and others,  that have advantaged Liverpool over the years. Then there are the journalists who were belittled and snubbed for asking mildly critical questions (in other words doing their job). 

Worst of all perhaps was his behavior after an FA cup game with third-tier Shrewsbury in 2020 which ended 2-2 and necessitated an inconvenient replay. Klopp, incensed at having to play the extra fixture, claimed the FA had reneged on an agreement to a mid-season break (it’s far from clear that this is what happened).

He refused to attend the replay and fielded an ‘under strength’ team led by youth coach Neil Critchley. This not only short-changed the fans, who would have expected at least a reasonably strong team, but was an insult to Shrewsbury, whose journeyman players’ one night in the spotlight in of the game’s great stadiums, was turned into a sour politicised non-event with all the focus on Klopp, in absentia.

The manner of his departure is controversial too, and smacks of a similar solipsism. Why announce now, with Liverpool top of the league and still in three cups? It can only have a disruptive effect, as players whose futures are suddenly in doubt (will the new boss have a clear out?) ponder what comes next when they should be focussed on winning games. Could he not have waited three months?

So, farewell the Jurgen Klopp and thanks for the memories. But let’s be honest, they weren’t all good.

Scotland’s juryless rape trials are based on a myth

Scotland currently faces a huge threat to the criminal justice system, in the form of juryless trials in rape cases.  

In the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, currently making its way through Holyrood, there is a proposal to carry out a pilot scheme where rape cases are adjudicated by a judge without a jury. A key reason given is that there is ‘overwhelming evidence’ that the public are prejudiced and believe in what are called ‘rape myths’ – with people blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator of a rape. Essentially, the argument is that the public cannot be trusted because they are backward and sexist and cannot possibly be expected to come to a just decision in a court of law. 

When you examine this ‘overwhelming evidence’ though, it suddenly appears very shaky. 

The proposal for juryless trials in Scotland first came about via the paper Improving the Management of Sexual Offence Cases, written by Lady Dorrian, the second most senior judge in Scotland. The paper relies heavily on the research of professor of criminal law and criminal justice, Fiona Leverick, who is cited 19 times to justify the need for juryless trials.  

Leverick’s key paper, What do we know about rape myths and juror decision making was published in 2020. In it, she states that:  

there is overwhelming evidence that jurors take into the deliberation room false and prejudicial beliefs about what rape looks like and what genuine rape victims would do and that these beliefs affect attitudes and verdict choices in concrete cases. 

This idea – that rape myths are endemic in the justice system – has been repeated time and again to justify the abolition of juries in rape cases. But, as I show in a journal article out this month, Leverick’s claims appear to be unscientific and biased.

In her paper, Leverick cites a mass of evidence, largely from mock jury trials, as asking actual jurors about their decisions is banned. Participants in the mock trials are given evidence and asked to judge whether an imaginary person is guilty of rape. The studies use volunteers, many of whom are students, and often feature unrealistic scenarios that bear no relationship to a real trial. 

To begin with, we should be extremely wary of this kind of evidence being used to influence public policy. As professor of legal psychology Andreas Kapardis has observed, ‘Many psycho-legal researchers would agree…that authors of unrealistic jury simulations should qualify their findings and should refrain from putting them forward as the basis for policy changes’. 

But the problems with the research run much deeper. 

As well as carrying out mock trials,  participants are asked to fill out a rape myth acceptance survey. This usually consists of around 30 questions, which are intended to assess if a participant has problematic views or values regarding sexual aggression. The idea behind the study is simple: if a person has these problematic views, and they are more likely to judge someone as ‘not guilty’, then this shows rape myths are to blame for people not being convicted of rape. 

On a scale of one to seven, participants are asked to rate statements like this: 

• When it comes to sexual contacts, women expect men to take the lead.  
• After a rape, women nowadays receive ample support.  
• If a woman invites a man to her home for a cup of coffee after a night out this means that she wants to have sex.  
• Most women prefer to be praised for their looks rather than their intelligence. 

If you answer with a one, it means you strongly disagree and are therefore an ethically good person. If you answer with a high number this means you are ethically problematic. You can see the problem with this already. These questions are based on a particular form of feminist ideology that has an in-built ideological and political bias. And it should be obvious that there is a huge gulf between thinking women like to be praised for their looks and being a rape apologist. 

The problems do not end there.  

In general, the mock trials do not feature any strong evidence against the accused. There tends not to be any incriminating forensics, eyewitnesses accounts, or CCTV footage showing the alleged crime. As one academic explains, there is a ‘lack of compelling evidence’ to find guilt.  

In this case, ‘problematic’ participants are perfectly entitled to arrive at a not guilty verdict. In fact, you would think that the majority of the mock trial participants would find the accused not guilty. There is a presumption of innocence in Scottish law – and it is up to the prosecution to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that someone is guilty of a crime. If that threshold is not met, someone should not be found guilty. 

Disturbingly though, time and time again, around a quarter of participants come to a guilty verdict in Leverick’s mock trials. These participants are exactly the kind of people who answer the above survey suggestions ‘correctly’. Yet if they are the model for juryless rape trials, we could potentially see a significant number of miscarriages of justice.  

Almost nothing is made of this by the researchers who carried out this work. Indeed, it would appear that their own bias and belief that we should believe all (alleged) victims means that they are blind to the fact that in a court of law we do not know who the victim is.  

There appears to be no concern in this research that a victim could be a falsely accused man. Instead it is presumed that false allegations of rape are extremely rare, when in reality the research into false allegations is inconclusive.  

The Scottish government and those in the Scottish criminal justice system need to take a closer look at this evidence. Judges in Scotland will soon be receiving ‘trauma informed’ training, so that they too can be more understanding and empathetic in rape cases. Very soon the possibility of a fair and just trial will be almost completely undermined. 

Tory MPs must share the blame with Sunak for the party’s troubles

Rishi Sunak is a drab technocrat mired in a failed political paradigm and with a tin ear for public opinion. And yet to blame him for the current dreadful state of the Conservative party is largely to miss the point.

The Tory party is facing an extinction-level general election result, not primarily because of Sunak but because it has reached a philosophical dead end. It has proved time and again over the past few years that it is incapable of addressing the foundational issue of border control, even while in possession of a bumper House of Commons majority.

As I have pointed out many times before, restoring robustness to our immigration and asylum system is the top priority among Conservative-leaning voters. According to YouGov’s latest issues index, it is running ten points clear of the state of the economy among 2019 Tory voters. And yet such voters have been served up with half a decade’s worth of unremitting failure to control legal immigration levels as well as to ‘stop the boats’.

Take the current Rwanda Bill. Only around 60 Conservative MPs backed amendments designed to bolster it against the disabling prospect of individual appeals and the effect of European Court of Human Rights emergency injunctions. Since then, the head of the ECHR has confirmed its view that member nations are indeed obliged to obey these so-called ‘Rule 39’ orders, just as the Tory rebels had warned.

Yet it is facile to blame Sunak alone for this failure of nerve. During the legislation’s Commons passage leading lights from among the 106-strong ‘One Nation’ caucus of left-wing Tory MPs made clear that the incorporation of strengthening amendments would cause them to join with Labour to vote it down. So no Tory prime minister could have delivered legislation guaranteed to remove illegal immigrants to Rwanda.

It follows that dumping Sunak and replacing him with a more gifted performer or someone more in tune with right-of-centre voters will not crack the basic problem. A Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman pre-election premiership would, in essence, amount to an invitation to re-elect the same divided parliamentary party with the same substantial blocking minority of ‘liberal Conservatives’ within it.

And right-of-centre voters do not want that. They will no longer rally to the party of Tobias Ellwood, Robert Buckland, Theresa May and Caroline Nokes. On several of the most major issues of the day – penal policy, foreign aid policy and the war-on-woke are other examples – such establishment-minded politicians generally line up alongside Labour and the Liberal Democrats and against the instincts of the electoral coalition that returned the Tories in 2019.

Across the western world we can see that it is anti-establishment and pro-nation political offers that are making dramatic electoral progress, not the global summit-goers of the conventional backslapping ‘centre-right’. And as the rise of Reform UK in the polls illustrates, there is growing potential for that to be the case in Britain soon too.

It was often said that Boris Johnson’s relationship with Tory MPs was strictly ‘transactional’ – based on the idea that they would support him only on condition that he won elections. This was odd given that in most respects he was far more a globalist liberal than a national conservative. But indeed, as soon as he fell behind in the polls, they ditched him. The same was true of Liz Truss. Yet it does not seem true of Sunak.

Installed by MPs against the wishes of the grassroots, this prime minister is clearly a more authentic representation of the overall dispositions of the present crop of Conservative parliamentarians. In this regard, there is not just one Rishi Sunak on the green leather benches but about 200 different versions of him. In other words, it is the troops who are the problem as much as the general who leads them.

When Johnson – under relentless pressure from Dominic Cummings – withdrew the whip from a couple of dozen establishment-minded and Brexit-blocking Tory MPs, many pundits said it would be the final nail in his coffin. In fact, the move served as a springboard for a huge election win a few months later. It turned out that right-of-centre voters loved the idea of a leader taking their side against the massed ranks of chinless wonders.

Sunak’s removal as PM is undoubtedly a necessary condition for a Tory electoral recovery but it is not a sufficient one. The party will not win again while its parliamentary ranks are so dominated by patrician liberals.