The Queen’s sole mistake

It’s often been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II rarely if ever put a foot wrong during her 70-year reign. Trained from a young age to betray no sign of partiality, or even of individuality, she lived long enough to become the matriarchal figure at the centre of everyone’s favorite soap opera. In a world of change, she never wavered. Her death last year may have drawn a final line under the era we knew as ‘postwar’, where qualities like stoicism and self-effacement still just about prevailed in British life, and where nobody blamed, whined or emoted.

But as the curious events of exactly 60 years ago prove, the Queen, like most of us, was also capable of the occasional faux pas.

The story began on the morning of 8 October 1963, when the famously unflappable Harold Macmillan, Britain’s Conservative prime minister since January 1957, politely excused himself during the course of a cabinet meeting, admitting he felt a ‘trifle indisposed’. The 69-year-old Macmillan, who was actually in excruciating pain, was found to be suffering from the not-uncommon condition of an enlarged prostate. It wasn’t immediately known if cancer was involved. 

Although Macmillan’s illness came out of the blue, his political decline was by then well advanced. To many observers, he seemed to have become an increasingly anachronistic figure in a Britain where ‘classlessness’ was now all the rage, and the Beatles were seen gleefully shaking their pudding-bowl haircuts nightly on television. In particular, the lingering aftermath of the Profumo Affair had squared the circle of foolish trust and moral incontinence that appeared to hang over the government. Painfully aware that ‘political authority is like that of the lion-tamer — once undermined it can never be quite restored’, Macmillan accepted that it was now the end of his career. His illness had ‘come as manna from heaven… almost an act of God’, he told one of his doctors.

Macmillan’s surgery took place in London on 10 October, just as his colleagues were meeting 250 miles away in the seaside resort of Blackpool for an annual party conference that became a hurriedly improvised contest among the leading candidates to replace him. The main contenders were the superbly languid ‘Rab’ Butler, Macmillan’s long-serving deputy; the brilliant but volatile Quintin Hogg, more formally known as Viscount Hailsham, fresh from having led the British delegation at the successful nuclear test ban talks in Moscow; and chancellor of the exchequer Reginald Maudling, a genial alcoholic, at forty-six representing youth.

Three days later, Maudling had been ruled out after delivering a curiously disjointed speech to the party faithful, Hailsham was excluded by virtue of campaigning for himself in a manner widely thought vulgar, or in the Times’s view, ‘indulging in those excesses more worthy of an American convention’ (among them, bottle-feeding his infant daughter in front of the television cameras), and Butler, the heir-apparent, self-destructed by going to the opposite extreme and seeming not to care one way or another.

Out of the vacuum there emerged the diffident, blinking figure of the 14th Earl Home (soon to be plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home), the foreign minister, who was then aged 60 but looked at least ten years older. Lying in bed in a post-operative fog, still in pain and woozy from drugs, Macmillan seems to have been swayed by the reports reaching him of ‘rather undignified behaviour’ among certain members of a party that prided itself on tradition and restraint, and also by his fears that if the irascible Hailsham were made prime minister ‘this could spell trouble’ for Britain’s foreign relations. Soundings taken among the cabinet further revealed that some ministers disliked Butler intensely, while others would have emigrated to Australia rather than serve under Maudling. Alec Home may have had scarcely any active supporters, but he also had few real enemies.

On the morning of 18 October, the Queen took the unprecedented step of coming to her prime minister’s hospital bed in order to accept his resignation. Macmillan received her wearing his pajama bottoms and a white silk shirt, which he partly covered with a well-darned, brown V-necked sweater. He later noted the incongruity of the scene in an interview, calling it ‘extraordinary… the bed covers were down, and concealed underneath the bed was a pail with a tube full of bile coming out of me… I made my resignation to my monarch for an hour, in great discomfort.’

At the end of this, the Queen asked if perhaps Macmillan had any advice as to whom she should appoint as his successor, and Macmillan said that in his opinion ‘Lord Home [was] the best choice to gain general support’. After that, ‘she thanked me, agreeing that Alec was the one, and then we chatted some more and she left’. Whatever Home’s other merits, it has to be said that his unexpected promotion to the top job was not noticeably a step in the direction of modernizing Britain. Perhaps it was simply his misfortune in the television age to resemble a prematurely hatched bird, whose Adam’s apple danced up and down his narrow neck. Twenty minutes after the Queen left, a man wearing brown overalls then appeared in the outgoing prime minister’s hospital room and unceremoniously removed his special ‘scrambler’ link to the White House. ‘I knew that was the end’, Macmillan said. 

Home’s appointment caused something of a political storm, not least among the cabinet itself. Enoch Powell, the ever-contrarian health minister, accused Macmillan of ‘gross impropriety’ in having ‘deprived the Queen of the exercise of her principal prerogative’. The outgoing party chairman Iain Macleod was on turf well beyond this when he went on to publish a blistering article in The Spectator accusing Macmillan and a ‘magic circle’ of Tory grandees, almost all of them Eton-educated, of having forced the Queen to accept Home’s appointment as a fait accompli. 

Had the monarch herself erred, others wondered, by going to the hospital in the full glare of the media, knowing that Macmillan was planning to resign, rather than simply exchanging notes in which she could have invited him to stay on in a caretaker role pending further consultations? Macleod was far from alone in thinking it had all been an establishment stitch-up. As even the Queen’s private secretary Michael Adeane later recalled: ‘When she got the advice to call Alec she thought “Thank God”. She loved Alec – he was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together.’

The whole saga threw light on some of the murkier corners of the British constitution, which of course relies not a written set of rules, but precedent – which in 1963 still meant whatever the ruling elite felt it could reasonably get away with. By the time Home in turn came to resign the Conservative leadership in July 1965, the party had adopted the quasi-democratic consultation process that continues to operate on a roughly biennial basis today.

Macmillan sometimes sardonically referred to the remaining time left to him following resignation as his ‘life after death’. Once predicted to be a matter of months, or at best a few years, it lasted for nearly a quarter of a century. He died only in December 1986, aged 92. Certain friends said that he later regretted not only leaving office when he did, but also the manner in which he did so.

Labour’s new towns PR blunder

Ping! An email lands in Steerpike’s inbox. It’s a press release about Labour’s new homes pledge, touted with much fanfare in Liverpool last week. ‘Labour will jump start planning’ it declares, ‘to build 1.5 million homes and save the dream of homeownership.’ The ‘transformational package of reforms’ includes the ‘next generation of “new towns”, new communities with beautiful homes, green spaces, reliable transport links and bustling high streets.’ All very motherhood and apple pie.

But according to an accompanying document, the new towns are not just about homeownership. Labour claim that their ‘next generation of new towns’ will be ‘attractive investment products, generating stable and diverse income streams; sales of freeholds, rental income from housing, residential and commercial ground rents and public transport fares.’ However, the recently-enacted Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act put an end to ground rents for most new long residential leasehold properties in England and Wales on 30 June 2022 and from 1 April 2023 for leases of retirement homes. Are Labour now planning to reintroduce ground rents for new leasehold properties, potentially costing homeowners hundreds of pounds a year…?

The policy also appears at odds with Starmer’s promise to end leasehold for new properties. When Sir Keir was asked on BBC Breakfast in May this year ‘Would you scrap leaseholds, would you promise that you can do that?’ He replied ‘Yeah, there were some proposals in 2020 from the Law Commission that basically said that there should be more control on existing leaseholds and we shouldn’t really be creating any new leaseholds…we would do that leasehold reform’. But it now appears new leasehold properties are a key part of Keir’s new towns.

Steerpike wonders if there’s not a touch of Gordon Brown’s much-hyped pledge to deliver ten ‘eco-towns’ in 2007, none of which were ever delivered by Labour. New towns, same old problems…

The Treasury should stop paying attention to the OBR

A year ago Liz Truss’ brief government collapsed when markets lost confidence in Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. A large part of the problem, it was explained at the time, was that the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – founded by George Osborne specifically to provide some independent backing for Budget measures – had not been invited to give its views.   

But how much use would a judgement by the OBR have been in any case? Let no one say that the organisation has no insight into its own failures. Today it has published a mea culpa on the forecasts it made in March 2021 and March 2022, both extremely important as the first informed a Budget and the second a spring statement. Like Michael Fish and his non-forecast of the 1987 hurricane, it is an exercise in explaining how things went so horribly wrong.    

Both forecasts, the OBR recognises, significantly under-estimated inflation and over-estimated economic growth. In March 2021, it foresaw inflation as rising no higher than 2 per cent for the duration of that year as well as throughout 2022 and 2023. By the end of 2022 that forecast was a whopping 8 per cent out. The forecast made in March 2021 for economic growth in 2022/23 was not a lot better, over-estimating growth by 3.3 per cent. Government borrowing was £21.5 billion higher in 2022/23 than had been forecast in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, the OBR blames the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fair enough. We expect the cream of OBR economists to be experts in money supply and so on; it would be a bit too much to expect their forecasting skills to extend to what is going on inside Vladimir Putin’s head. And true enough, the Ukraine invasion had severe consequences for the global economy as European countries boycotted Russian oil and gas leading to a surge in energy prices.  

But is it really fair to say, as the OBR does, that its March 2021 forecasts can 'be thought of as a counterfactual for what might have happened if the invasion had not taken place'? That rather suggests that the OBR still thinks it would have been spot on had Putin kept his tanks parked within Russia. 

The OBR does say that it is going to have another look at its inflation models, as well as develop a deeper understanding of receipts for self-assessment income tax and onshore corporation tax. But isn’t the real problem that the OBR fails to make any allowance for political events when it is trotting out incredibly detailed economic forecasts for several years ahead? It might have been difficult to foresee the events in Ukraine, but they are hardly a one-off, once-in-a-century cataclysm. Events like that are happening all the time, not least in the Middle East in the past fortnight.   

Yet ignoring Harold Macmillan’s remark that governments are constantly undermined by ‘events, dear boy’, the Chancellor faithfully trots out the OBR’s forecasts ever Budget time as if they were forecasts of planetary alignments – which really can be forecast years ahead. The truth is that economic forecasting is a mug’s game. Governments would be better equipped to deal with, or even avert, economic turmoil if they took less notice of fairweather forecasts and instead asked themselves: what is the very worst that could happen over the next few years and how can we defend ourselves against it?  

Sunak tells Israel: ‘We want you to win’

Rishi Sunak is in Israel today for talks with the country’s leaders amid the ongoing conflict. The Prime Minister has just concluded a televised appearance with Benjamin Netanyahu, in which the Israeli Premier paid tribute to Sunak. He thanked him for his ‘strong statement of support’ and grounded Israel’s fight in the context of Britain’s own history. ‘You fought the Nazis 80 years ago,’ he said, ‘Hamas are the new Nazis.’ He framed the conflict as a fight between good and evil, modernity and barbarism, declaring that both Israel and the world were facing their ‘darkest hour’. On one side stand ‘the forces of progress and humanity’; on the other ‘an axis of evil, led by Iran through Hezbollah, Hamas and others’ who threaten ‘an age of bondage and war and slavery and annihilation’.

Sunak was resolute in his support, telling Netanyahu: ‘We will stand in solidarity, we will stand with your people. We want you to win.’ He said that the UK supports Israel’s right to defend itself in line with international law, as well as its right to go after Hamas, with Israel ‘taking every precaution to avoid harming civilians in direct contrast to the terrorists of Hamas which seek to put civilians in harm’s way’. Sunak’s statement came after an earlier meeting with President Isaac Herzog, in which he spoke of Israel’s ‘duty’ to restore its security. The meetings are all part of a whirlwind diplomatic tour. Sunak will later today fly to Saudi Arabia for talks with Mohammed bin Salman and only return to London tomorrow. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly will also travel to Egypt, Turkey and Qatar over the next three days.

Sunak is the latest in a succession of western leaders to visit Israel in the wake of the devastating terror attacks 12 days ago. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have all undertaken similar journeys. The purpose of these trips is twofold. First, they demonstrate to a grieving Israel that its pain is acknowledged and shared by the West. Second, Israel listens to humanitarian concerns about the laws of war and the fate of Palestinian civilians based in Gaza.

‘WFH Whitehall’ still afflicting Foreign Office

The Foreign Office is often called the grandest of all Whitehall’s ministries – so it’s just a shame then that so few mandarins appear to enjoy it. New figures unearthed by Mr S show that less than half its staff were working in King Charles Street at the beginning of this month, despite much talk about getting ‘back to the office’. And even last week, as the Gaza crisis raged, numbers working in the HQ building rose to just 56 per cent of staff. Hardly ‘Action this day’…

But one person who the Foreign Office was prepared to welcome was Erkin Tuniyaz, the governor of the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where ongoing human rights abuses are well-documented. Back in February he was due to come to London, though not at the invitation of the FCDO. However, internal correspondence obtained by Mr S shows one civil servant quoting Anne-Marie Trevelyan as saying that ‘an official level meeting is a good idea.’ Such a good idea in fact, that when news of the meeting leaked, an outcry ensued, with Tuniyaz subsequently cancelling his planned trip following a backlash.

Let’s hope that those who are in the office have a better feel for the limits of diplomacy eh…

Biden struggles to speak aboard Air Force One

Is it ageist to suggest that an obviously frail 80-year-old might not be well suited to the task of resolving global conflicts? Even a man in his prime would struggle to fly from Washington to Israel, do a frantic day of talks, greet the suffering, make a speech and jet off again hours later to go back to leading the free world. 

Joe Biden is not, to put it mildly, a man in his prime. The octogenarian Commander-in-Chief just about got through his duties in the Holy Land. He delivered a passable, albeit platitudinous speech about dealing with the pain caused by terrorism. 

But then he reappeared in front of reporters on Air Force One, and the world was duly given another distressing Biden cognitive failure episode. 

The President looked utterly shattered in his blue zipped retirement sweater. He appeared to be struggling with his balance. And couldn’t really talk at all. 

Biden remarked that Hamas ‘gotta learn to shoot straight’ – an extraordinarily clumsy and flippant reference to the bombed out hospital in Gaza. This qualifies as a classic Biden gaffe: in trying to show his support for the Israeli position that Hamas, not the Israeli Defence Force, were responsible for Tuesday night’s atrocity, he somehow managed to suggest that all would be well if only Hamas were better at successfully aiming their rockets at innocent Israelis. Just days after Hamas managed to kill 700 Israelis. 

All presidents make gaffes: George W Bush was a master of the rhetorical flub, Donald Trump said many crazy things and even smooth-talking Barack Obama had the odd slip. The bigger concern with Biden, however, is not that he misspeaks so often, but that he increasingly cannot really speak at all. 

Nobody should mock the elderly, but polls suggest the American public is seriously concerned about Biden’s health. If he staggers on to win next year’s presidential election, does anybody really expect him to make it through another four years? 

It’s time to take Italian wine seriously 

Tuscany: earth has not anything to show more fair. The landscape is charming. The gentle hills seem to smile down upon humanity. The inhabitants give the impression that they were already civilised when we British barely had enough woad to paint our backsides blue.

There are also the grapes. From early on, Tuscany sent its vinous plenitude to Rome. Today, it still does, and to Orbi as well as Urbi. There was a time when Italian wine was not taken seriously in the world, and Italians themselves seemed to concur with this patronising assessment. That is no longer the case. One of the most interesting intellectual disputes in vinous matters now concerns Italian wine.

There are the traditionalists who insist that every country should concentrate on its own grape varietals. If that view prevailed, Tuscany would restrict itself to Sangiovese. Others –me among them, for what that is worth – would argue that if the vines grow, salute their harvest. That will also ensure that the French do not plunder the wallets of everyone in the world who would like to drink good wine.

The other evening, I had the pleasure of helping the Tuscans to raise their banners in the battle against the French. I have recently praised the house of Jeroboams, wine merchants who are also missionaries. ‘I often wonder what the vintners buy/ One half as precious as the stuff they sell.’ Omar Khayyam had a point, but those who taste wines at Jeroboams will also be served with serious scoff.

In the 1960s, some ancient Tuscan families decided that it was time to enhance their repertoire. If the Bordelaise could grow Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, why should Italy hold back? Hence the super-Tuscans, a deliberate attempt to challenge the French on their own terroir. This might not seem a tactful moment to assail French sensibilities, after one of the greatest rugger matches of all time. France lost by one point, to the descendants of inter alia Huguenot Afrikaners, who have themselves created a serious wine industry. Apropos rugby, the Italians are still a work in progress. With wine, they are further advanced.

Jeroboams produced one of the earliest super-Tuscans, Ornellaia, and set it a challenge. We began the evening with a Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle, a very serious drop of stuff. There followed an Ornellaia Bianco. How could it cope with a first-rate champagne? The answer: surprisingly well. This is the best white super-Tuscan that is yet available. It could easily stand up to an upper-second-division white Bordeaux.

Ornellaia is better known for its reds. We tried the 2009 and the 2011. Around the table, there was general agreement that the older year was the finer. Moreover, 2011 had been a difficult harvest. The 2009 will keep for many years. I would rate it as a third-growth claret. Others felt that this was ungenerous. Be that as it may, it is a good wine. There was also a sweet Ornellaia, Ornus. Although it will improve, it is evidence of ambition and commitment. I would conclude that the pedant purists who believe that Tuscan wine-makers should confine themselves to local varietals have been conclusively refuted by the outcomes. The super-Tuscans have added to the repertoire of available wines, and assuming that the world economy does not implode, all wine-drinkers everywhere should salute these endeavours.

At the end of the evening, we congratulated ourselves. Three hours of serious drinking – and eating – without a single mention of the travails of the Middle East. Was this self-indulgence on our part? Or was it a necessary respite? Thank goodness for the brief escapism of fine wine.

Starmer channels Blair on Israel

The gears were grinding hard at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer shifted his party decisively away from its Corbynista past and pledged full support for Israel after the recent atrocities. He said he was ‘still mourning the terrorist attacks’. And having met relatives of British hostages held by Hamas, he was unequivocal. ‘Release them immediately.’

It’s a shame that his rhetoric felt so polished and poetic. Almost like song lyrics. ‘Too much blood, too much darkness,’ he crooned. ‘The lights are going out and innocent citizens are terrified they will die in the darkness, out of sight.’ And he indulged in a lot of glib verbal counterpoint. ‘Hamas are not the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people are not Hamas.’ His aim was to pose as a visionary peacenik who still believed in ‘a two-state solution’ at some unnamed future date. ‘When hope is at its thinnest, we must work hardest.’ It could have been written by Tony Blair. Maybe it was.

Sajid Javid, a former home secretary who knows how the cops work, (or don’t work, according to some), deplored the ‘foul abuse’ faced by Jews at demonstrations. He asked for ‘a specific policy of revoking the visa of any foreign national who commits an act of anti-Semitism.’ Note the words. ‘A policy’, not a law. Presumably such laws exist already. And his suggestion that racism should be tackled on the streets received a soapy reply from the PM. ‘I completely agree’, said Sunak, as he pledged an extra ‘three million pounds’ for something or other. Here’s the question. How many visas of foreign nationals have been revoked? Probably none. And the absence of law enforcement may explain Sunak’s weird attitude to the Metropolitan police. He spoke of them as if they were a brotherhood of Quakers with tambourines and free soup.

‘We will remain in contact with the police,’ he said, ‘to ensure that they are aware of the full set of tools available to them.’ Essentially, he admitted that the police aren’t policing criminality.

Desmond Swayne brought up the vast sums of aid remitted to Gaza since Israel withdrew in 2005. ‘Enlightened governance would have made a success of it. Hamas has turned it into hell’.

Stephen Crabb mentioned the hospital struck by explosives overnight. Responsibility for the attack has yet to be established but Israel was blamed early on.

‘The outpouring of Jew-hate on social media was vile,’ said Crabb. Sunak saluted this as ‘an excellent intervention.’

Stephen Flynn of the SNP condemned the ‘terrorist attacks on Jewish people and on the state of Israel.’ But he called for ‘ceasefire’ which some interpret as a denial that Israel has a right to defend itself. And he suggested that Palestinians might enjoy ‘a refugee settlement scheme’ in Britain.

That won’t play well in Hartlepool whose MP, Jill Mortimer, named an elderly male constituent who recently lost his life after a stabbing incident. An asylum-seeker is suspected. Mortimer spoke of the ‘intimidation’ endured by her constituency staff. ‘Most are young men who should be expelled’, she said, and she added that the townsfolk feel scared and angry. ‘I want these people out of Hartlepool now.’

Hearing this, Sunak hid behind legal sophistries. ‘I’m unable to comment on cases currently before the court,’ he said, fully aware that no such interference had been requested. He then moved from blatant misdirection to vacuous platitudes.

‘The government is doing everything to tackle illegal migration.’

So there it is. On immigration, ‘everything’ means nothing.

Will Yousaf come to regret his council tax freeze?

After the SNP won its first Holyrood election in 2007, foolish council leaders across Scotland rushed to sign up to what then finance secretary John Swinney described as a ‘historic concordat’. In return for Swinney pulling back from his threat to centralise education, Scotland’s 32 local authorities agreed to uphold the nationalists’ promise to freeze council tax rates. Lots of councillors swanked about, bragging about this brilliant deal. Look at us, they said, we’ve got a ‘historic concordat’.

And then reality slapped them across their faces. Swinney had stitched them up good and proper. The ‘historic concordat’ was worth less than the paper it was written on. The increased autonomy meant councillors were now responsible for the downsides of the council tax freeze.

For nine years — until 2016 — council tax rates remained unchanged across Scotland. The impact on local services was devastating. Departments had to scramble to find massive economies. For all the SNP’s talk of being a uniquely progressive party, it presided over an agreement which saw the most vulnerable hit hardest. And when opponents criticised, SNP ministers pointed the finger of blame at councils.

The nine-year council tax freeze had a devastating impact and yet it will be reactivated. During his keynote speech to SNP conference in Aberdeen on Tuesday afternoon, First Minister Humza Yousaf announced the local tax will remain at the current level when councils set their budgets for the year 2024-25 (it is pure coincidence, I’m sure, that there’s a Holyrood election in 2026).

Delegates at SNP conference cheered Yousaf’s announcement, which represented quite the change of direction for the Scottish government — which has previously proposed increasing council tax by as much as 22.5 per cent for homes in the highest bands.

Yousaf framed his announcement as part of his government’s effort to ameliorate the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on Scots. But he has no idea what price for this might be. The UK government has not yet settled on a figure for the block grant to be transferred from Westminster to Holyrood next year. And, until that figure is known, the Scottish government doesn’t know how much money it will be able to make available to councils and, therefore, how much more it will have to hand over in order to fund the council tax freeze. It appears that Yousaf has announced a flagship policy that he is simply unable to cost.

Oh, and then there’s the not inconsiderable matter of a warning, in advance of the council tax announcement, from the Scottish Fiscal Commission (Scotland’s official independent economic forecaster) that Yousaf’s government faces a £1 billion black hole in 2024-25.

Unsurprisingly the SNP’s partners in government, the Scottish Greens, are unhappy with the council tax freeze, about which they knew nothing until Tuesday morning. The Greens’ finance spokesman Ross Greer said the policy will favour the rich over the poor, adding that his party was concerned about the effect the freeze could have on ‘already-strained frontline public services if it is not properly funded’.

And there’s been a furious reaction from Cosla, the umbrella body for Scottish Councils, which has demanded an emergency meeting with Yousaf. After an emergency meeting on Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the organisation said:

The announcement of a council tax freeze as we said yesterday was made completely without reference to local government and there is no agreement to freeze council tax next year… Our cross-party group leaders held an emergency meeting first thing this morning on the back of the announcement and there is real anger at the way this has been handled and what it puts at risk…

We deplore the way the announcement was made and its substance, both of which fly in the face of the Verity House Agreement which we all recently signed. It has been shown that previous council tax freezes have been regressive, having no impact for the poorest in society and eroding the council tax base, compounding councils’ ongoing underfunding… We are clear that local taxation and particularly council tax should be left for democratically elected councils to determine.

There is nothing new about the SNP devising policies which benefit the wealthy and then marketing them as progressive. The ‘free’ prescriptions policy is, in reality, the extension of the removal of charges to the better off. Those in financial need were already excused from paying for medicines.

And the trumpeted removal of tuition fees has, in part, been made possible by cuts to colleges which are more likely to be attended by young people from less wealthy backgrounds. This new council tax freeze looks very much like a panic-driven move by an SNP leader under pressure from a resurgent Scottish Labour party.

Whether Yousaf will one day look back with pride on a policy that stands to hammer council services in the run up to the next Scottish election is, at the very least, debatable. Scottish Labour is quite happy to watch Humza Yousaf squirm. ‘The First Minister,’ said one Labour source, ‘has abandoned any pretence that he’s a progressive politician.’

Political Islam now commands the Middle East

No sane American president takes office hoping for war. Woodrow Wilson, a 56-year-old Princeton academic, said it would be ‘the irony of fate’ if his presidency came to be dominated by foreign affairs. He spoke in 1913. Joe Biden came to office in 2021 promising to end the ‘forever wars’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. But as he boarded Air Force One on Tuesday, another irony of fate was in evidence: the American-enforced world order is crumbling, and the results are now becoming clear.

Iran, far from being neutered by US sanctions, was able to start a war using its Hamas proxies and their Hezbollah allies to attack Israel. At a stroke, the Arab-Israeli rapprochement America had wanted to nurture has been put on ice. Biden had hoped this week to meet his Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian counterparts along with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. But the summit was called off when a hospital in Gaza was shelled (which Israel and a number of external open source intelligent analysts have blamed on a stray Palestinian rocket, and which Biden said was ‘done by the other team’ during his press conference on Wednesday). Containing this conflict might prove very hard indeed.

At the same time, Xi Jinping was keen to show off the other axis of allies at a gathering in Beijing to celebrate ten years of its Belt and Road initiative. Among the honoured guests were Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. The Russian media has been quick to contrast Xi and Putin’s multipolar vision of the world with the Biden administration’s floundering in the Middle East. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said Israel has already gone too far in its response to the Hamas attack and that Beijing and Moscow are working to ‘immediately energise the two-state solution as a fundamental solution’.

As demonstrations engulf the Middle East after the hospital attack, America’s moment appears to be over already. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, called on all Muslims worldwide to stage protests against Israel. Such protests have duly been happening, from Arab countries to the state parliament in Melbourne. Tear gas has been fired outside the US embassy in Lebanon to ward off demonstrators. We can expect this mass protest trend to continue.

There are many beneficiaries from the splitting of American attention – Russia, for one, will be emboldened in its campaign in Ukraine. But Iran is a country that has just seen history move its way. Even before the hospital bombing, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the foreign minister, warned of ‘pre-emptive action’ if Israel continues with plans for a ground invasion in Gaza. Skirmishes with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border have heated up all week, leaving many dead on both sides. (Through third-party intermediaries, the US has warned Hezbollah and Iran privately not to get involved in a fully-fledged war with Israel, according to the American news outlet Axios, which reports that the US is considering using military force if Hezbollah escalates its attacks.)

‘Our numerous intelligence reports show that the US is formulating the Zionist regime’s current policy,’ Ayatollah Khamenei announced on Tuesday. ‘The US must be held responsible for this situation.’ In the new geopolitical reality, Iran is a major force. Tehran has pursued policies largely in line with Russia’s interests, whether in Syria, the Caucasus, central Asia, or Afghanistan, but especially when it comes to Israel.

Indeed, the carnage of 7 October was itself part of this long-standing policy. Tehran, empowered by America’s Middle East withdrawal, has spent years surrounding Israel with client Islamist paramilitary groups. The aim is Israel’s eventual collapse, a key part of Tehran’s drive for regional domination as a global power.

Israel failed to discern Hamas’s terrible plans because its intelligence resources have been so focused on Iran’s nuclear programme. But the Iranians are seeking a nuclear capacity primarily as an insurance policy beneath which they can continue the aggressive regional strategy that has been developed over the past three decades and which is now coming to fruition.

Two components were needed to produce Hamas’s attack on Israel. The first was the ground presence of a powerful Islamist movement, with a degree of public legitimacy and the ability to recruit and command a sufficient number of committed young men. Hamas fits this bill. The second was the kind of weaponry, resources and organisation that only a powerful state can provide. Hamas counts a number of regional powers as friends, such as Qatar and Turkey. But only Iran offers military assistance. And only Iran could provide the know-how, tactical skills and hardware that made 7 October possible.

Hamas – the local representative of Muslim Brotherhood-style Sunni political Islam – is by far the most dynamic and co-ordinated Palestinian political movement. In this, it reflects a region-wide trend that has gone below the radar amid the excitement of the Abraham Accords, and the (postponed) hopes of an Israel-Saudi rapprochement.

In virtually every Middle Eastern country, Islamist movements of both Sunni and Shia varieties have unparalleled strength on the ground. In Lebanon, for example, the Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah is the de facto ruler. In Syria, the ‘secular’ regime of Bashar al-Assad remains only because of Russian and Iranian assistance: the popular uprising against from 2011-19 was Sunni Islamist in nature. In Iraq, the main Sunni force produced from below in recent years was Islamic State – and pro-Iranian Shia Islamist parties have formed the government since 2021.

There is an unpleasant pattern here. The world has grown weary of the Middle East and its endless wars. But political Islam continues to command the streets across the Arab world, at least outside the Gulf. And it is Iran that provides such groups with the required potency and capacity to operate.

There’s an obvious basis to the relationship between Iran and its franchise organisations: namely that the Tehran regime itself is the most successful expression of political Islam and represents the marriage of this outlook with state power. But there’s a more practical component too. With states in the Middle East fragmenting since the Arab Spring, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has established and located powerful Islamist forces, turning them into its instruments. These methods, adjusted to local conditions, have brought Tehran partial or complete power in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.

Whether Iran ordered 7 October is an irrelevant debate. It is Iran which provides the funding that makes such operations feasible, to the tune of $100 million per year. It is Iran that supplies the M-302 and Fajr missiles which give Hamas long-range missile capacity from Gaza. And it was almost certainly Iran that provided the physical space for Hamas’s men to discreetly learn the tactical skills needed for the assault – the use of paragliders, drones and so on. (The instruction likely took place in Iranian-dominated Lebanon.) Hamas provides the manpower, fervour and commitment from below, but the capacities on display are the result of the Iranian connection.

This formula – local Islamist fervour plus state capacity – has been successful for Iran across the Middle East. It forms the essential component in a bid to expand regional influence westwards to the Mediterranean and southwards to the Gulf.

For Iran and the Islamists, the area west of the Jordan is Islamic waqf (endowment) land, temporarily lost to infidels and requiring reconquest. But as Shias and non-Arabs, the Iranians also believe that investment in the fight against Israel will serve to cancel out their foreignness in the mainly Sunni Arab world.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its proxies are advancing a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy against Israel. This derives from a view of the Jewish state they inherited from their Arab and Palestinian nationalist predecessors. As formulated in a May 2000 speech by the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, it purports to see Israel as weaker than a ‘spider’s web’, despite its technological prowess. Its proponents believe that by striking at civilians, they will over time weaken Israel’s resolve, reduce its population, and isolate it diplomatically and economically. Eventually they will wound Israel enough, the thinking runs, to inflict a killer blow.

The escalating conflict with Hezbollah reflects the nature of the challenge facing Israel in this new multipolar climate; one theory is that the ground invasion of Gaza was delayed over concerns that Hezbollah would immediately launch an assault on the northern border. After meeting Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha on Monday, the Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said that the ‘pre-emptive action’ by the ‘resistance front’ (Iran’s preferred name for its alliance) should be expected soon. Israeli news website Ynet reported that the IDF conducted exercise drills ahead of a potential ground attack on Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit.

Biden’s decision to dispatch two aircraft-carrier groups to the Mediterranean is a tacit acknowledgement of the regional nature of the conflict. But is it too late? America’s unipolar moment appears to be over, and there is less of an appetite in Washington – and among American voters – for intervention than there was two decades ago.

The warships might have been intended to deter Tehran from committing further assets to the fighting. But with the protests that have followed the hospital attack, it’s increasingly unclear whether the rage throughout the Muslim world can be restrained.

Regardless of what transpires, recent events should serve as a be-lated alarm call to Israel and its allies about the new multipolar world – and about the nature, dimensions and existential seriousness of the Iranian and Islamist project that forms this new geopolitical landscape in the Middle East and beyond.

Netanyahu has failed Israel

Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is rapidly evolving into a war with all of Iran’s proxies on its borders, including Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. Its outcome will determine the country’s future for a generation, perhaps longer. The conflict is not even in its third week, and as I write these words the inevitable ground invasion of Gaza has still not begun, and yet this is already proving to be an epochal episode in the country’s history. 

The Hamas terror attack on 7 October not only revealed a conceptual flaw in Israel’s regional strategy, exposed glaring problems within its celebrated intelligence services and caused the terrible deaths of some 1,400 Israelis. It also shook the self-confidence of Israelis to their core. No more illusions of being a secure and prosperous outpost of the West which could afford short and sharp rounds of warfare with Gaza and then pretend nothing had happened. 

Hamas is not an existential enemy of Israel, that is true. Not even Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined with Hezbollah from the north could outlast Israel’s military might and economic resources. But to win both this war and the aftermath, Israel needs to rediscover the resourcefulness and determination that have ebbed somewhat in recent years under the stagnation and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long rule.

In ancient Jewish history, the independent kingdoms of the House of David and then of the Hasmoneans failed to survive their eighth decade as they went into terminal decline. Modern Israel is now in the middle of that fateful decade and is being tested. There are positive signs of renewal in recent days. Israelis of all political views, religious inclinations and ways of life, are casting aside the deep differences that almost tore their society apart in recent months and are joining together in reserve units preparing in staging-grounds for the bloody battles of Gaza. Behind the front lines too, communities are getting together to host and tend to the many thousands of families uprooted from their homes, some of them mourning their dead or in fear for the fate of a captive. 

So the prospects of renewal look promising. One good thing that has already happened to Israel in this war is that it has made it clear where the country is situated geopolitically. After years of intense courtship between Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, who even featured back in 2019 on Likud’s election posters, the masks are finally off. Putin, with whom Netanyahu used to boast that he has a ‘special friendship’, has not only failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians; he has likened Gaza’s situation to the siege of Leningrad in the second world war, inferring that Israel in this scenario is Nazi Germany.

Compare that with the way President Biden has rushed to Israel’s aid, sending two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean and even flying out to Israel on Wednesday to show solidarity. This is not for Netanyahu, whom he spent most of the last nine months ignoring, but because of his deep and lifelong Zionism. But it wasn’t just Biden. All of a sudden, other western leaders have gone out of their way to extend support to Israel. It’s almost as if Israel, which under Netanyahu was cosying up not merely to Putin but to every illiberal strongman from Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orban, as well as promoting tech sales to China, has rediscovered its place in the world. Compare the lists of the countries now supporting Israel, and you will see that they are almost identical to the supporters of Ukrainian and Taiwanese independence. And the reverse is true of their enemies.

Netanyahu himself is still incapable of acknowledging this. His office was not too eager to host Volodymyr Zelensky, who expressed an interest in arriving for a show of solidarity as well; perhaps they were aware of the less than favourable comparisons to the brave Jewish leader of Ukraine. Like so many other politicians, Netanyahu suffers from Churchillian delusions and was once heard to claim that he read all the biographies of the wartime leader. As the prospect of a long war on more than one front looms larger, it is tempting to compare him to Churchill’s predecessor Neville Chamberlain, who was unfit to lead at that fateful moment. But that would be something of an injustice to Chamberlain, who had the decency to resign and make way for a better man.

Even in the wake of the worst calamity to befall Israel in its 75 years of existence, Netanyahu is not contemplating resigning once the war is over. Nor has he followed the example of the chief of staff of the Israeli military, the commander of military intelligence and the chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, who have all put out separate statements admitting their blame for failing to foresee and prepare for the attack from Gaza. Once the war is over, they are all expected to do the honourable thing. But Bibi will try to hold on, though he will ultimately be removed in disgrace.

This war is also the end of an era for Israel. History may name it the Netanyahu era, after the man who has dominated Israeli politics for half the country’s existence. But it is possible that Israelis may not want to be reminded of him in future and will find another name for this period, which is ending in a terrible denouement for Israel’s longest-serving leader.

Facebook’s not-so-secret police

I was greatly tempted by Sam Leith’s suggestion in a column on The Spectator’s website this week that we should all shut up about Israel and Palestine because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Certainly the crisis there has made London dinner parties almost unendurable – and it is true that as soon as anyone brings up Sykes-Picot, which they always do, I begin to choke on my baba ganoush and start demanding that the host open another bottle of Fairtrade Palestinian pinot noir. But then I thought that if in future I wrote about only those things of which I have a perfect understanding, pace Wittgenstein, I’d be well and truly buggered as a columnist.

Old Ludwig didn’t think about that, did he? A lack of expertise has never stopped me weighing in with a jiffy bag of bile on every subject under the sun and I don’t see why Jews and Arabs should be exempt. Further, while I daresay my understanding of Middle Eastern politics is woefully incomplete, I have always tended to be on the side of civilisation when it is opposed by medieval barbarity. In making this choice, I consider myself progressive as well as – Ludwig, take note – both logical and positive.

This article is not about Israel and Palestine, as it happens, but about the way in which the narrative regarding that conflict is being carefully marshalled by our institutions. The BBC, with its – on the face of it – hilarious decision not to call Hamas ‘terrorists’, you will be well aware of; much as you will of the entirely justified protest outside New Broadcasting House. But the hi-tech social media giants are another issue entirely. I know you know this, but we have to keep an eye on these bastards, remembering their gleeful distortion of the narrative during the last US presidential election: the deliberate suppression of stories that might be damaging to the Biden campaign and finally the removal of the then president from all social media outlets so that he no longer had a voice. If they do that to presidents, what might they do to the rest of us?

Here’s a small example. A woman on Facebook was warned that her posts would be blocked because she was spreading ‘false information’. She had linked to a report on the apparent beheading of babies by the Hamas ‘militants’. There are some doubts about this accusation, which naturally the loveable little scamps in Hamas deny. The jury is not quite out on the issue, however, as it is undisputed that Hamas killed very young children and several sources reported beheadings. The fact-checking organisation that Facebook quoted was based in, uh, Pakistan – not a country renowned for its amicable relationship with Israel. They also quoted Al Jazeera.

Now, maybe this would be fine if such scrupulousness were distributed evenhandedly. But it patently is not. The Muslim Council of Britain’s Facebook page – which fails to offer so much as a word of criticism of Hamas – condemns the ‘targeting of innocent civilians’ in Gaza. Is that what Israel has been doing? Isn’t that something that might be fact-checked a little?

Meanwhile, I posted a short speech I made at the Social Democratic party conference about the Hamas invasion – its message was ‘We stand with Israel’. I have 5,000 Facebook friends and even my most banal and vapid posts will gather upticks and comments very quickly. This one got only four ‘likes’ in five hours. It could be, of course, that people were bored by, or possibly averse to, the speech. So I tried an experiment and posted a photograph of a beach with the fascinating observation ‘Look at this lovely beach’. It received the more usual plethora of ticks and likes. So I posted a third piece explaining my experiment and quickly discovered that nearly everyone who had commented on the beach post had not received the Israel speech in their newsfeed.

This is called ‘shadow banning’ and it is happening an awful lot right now. A fellow-writer, Christopher Gage, found that an article he had written about the crisis was simply held from view. Another Facebook friend of mine was warned he would be suppressed for the act of linking to an article from the Daily Telegraph which Facebook considered, in its journalistic brilliance, false information.

You might consider all this trivial, but it is not. There is a concerted attempt on the part of the liberal left to shift the narrative away from atrocities carried out against Israel and to focus instead on the retaliatory action in Gaza. This is a means of warping public opinion and Facebook has been an eager signatory to the project – just as during the US presidential election even to mention the name ‘Hunter Biden’ would find you visited online by the Facebook fact police. Hunter with his coke’n’whores and highly questionable business dealings in Ukraine was not something that the website thought should be shared with the voters. Hell, the liberal left in America even exalted about the degree to which they had gerrymandered the agenda – covertly, of course, at the time. I wonder what the big-tech social-media giants will get up to for our own election?

And then there are the universities. Professor Tim Luckhurst, of Durham University,wrote a kind of reality-check article about our equivocal attitudes towards the bombing of civilians for the Times, drawn from his scholarly analysis of public attitudes during the second world war. It was an excellent piece of work, but I have learned from a third party that Durham has now insisted Luckhurst submit all future articles to the university authorities for vetting. I haven’t had the chance to speak to him about this, so maybe Facebook could fact-check it for me. Whatever: there are people out there who will do anything to prevent views they dislike from reaching the public.

Which crimes no longer deserve prison?

More people are being jailed than the justice system can manage. There are only 557 places left across 120 prisons in England and Wales, while prisoner numbers are increasing by 100 to 200 every week. Justice Secretary Alex Chalk had some tough-sounding rhetoric on Monday to deal with the problem: lock up dangerous offenders and send foreign criminals back home. Yet it distracted – perhaps deliberately – from the most liberal penal policy reform announced by a government minister in decades: a legal ‘presumption’ against short sentences.  

Incarceration is expensive: it costs £47,000 per inmate per year. In many cases, the costs are hardly important compared with the need for public protection, punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. Yet for offenders given short jail terms, a growing body of research suggests prison simply makes things worse and is not cost-effective. 

Short sentences sever prisoners’ family ties, disrupt employment and provide little time to address offending behaviour, poor mental health or addiction problems. As the former prisons minister Rory Stewart put it, these terms are ‘long enough to damage you and not long enough to heal you’. Reoffending rates are appalling. More than 50 per cent of adults who are sentenced to less than 12 months in custody are convicted or cautioned within a year of release. For those who are jailed for up to six months, the figure is approaching 60 per cent. 

Criminal justice campaign groups have argued for many years that short prison terms are useless. Community sentences would be a better and a far cheaper option, they claim. Their calls were ignored by both parties, who were worried about appearing ‘soft’ on crime. But in 2019, then justice secretary David Gauke, encouraged by Stewart, secured backing from No. 10 for a change. Gauke had commissioned a study that found that offenders given a community order or suspended prison sentence were 4 percentage points less likely to reoffend than those jailed for less than 12 months. In a speech in July of that year, he announced plans for restrictions on the use of short prison sentences, saying it would lead to ‘thousands’ fewer victims of crime. Four days later, however, when Boris Johnson was confirmed as Theresa May’s replacement as prime minister, Gauke resigned. His departure, and Johnson’s premiership, stopped the reforms. 

It was a missed opportunity. Since then, the prison population has grown by almost 6,000 to 88,225 – the highest it has ever been. We’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that if Gauke’s plans had been implemented the capacity crisis now facing our prisons would have been averted.

Chalk revived Gauke’s ideas on Monday, saying that the government would legislate to ensure the courts move towards suspending prison terms of less than 12 months rather than sending criminals directly to jail. Exactly what that means in practice depends on the wording of the legislation and how the courts interpret it. Chalk has already said short prison terms will still be an option for prolific offenders, those who breach the terms of court orders and criminals who ‘blight’ communities. Nevertheless, with jail sentences of less than 12 months making up 55 per cent of all custodial penalties, it has the potential to make a sizeable dent in the prison population, reducing the number at any one time by up to 3,000 – the equivalent of two large jails. 

This approach has to strike a balance. If the rules are tightly defined and rigorously adopted by the courts, they risk creating a two-tier justice system: on the one hand, the most serious crimes will result in long spells behind bars while, on the other, a whole class of offending will seldom, if ever, lead to a prison sentence. At present, one in every eight sentences of less than 12 months is for shop theft. There is already huge concern about whether shoplifting is effectively legal. Does the government want the message to go out that shoplifters won’t hear the clang of the prison gates? There’s also the problem of violent offences, including common assault and attacks on emergency workers, which make up one in six short sentences. Will those responsible really have their sentences suspended under the new regime? At the same time, if ministers create too many exemptions, the changes will be pointless, and prisons will only get more crowded. 

Alex Chalk has made a bold move to halt the soaring prison population, and all things considered, this policy should help things. But the judiciary must still be able to impose short prison sentences on those whose behaviour has not been changed by other punishments – and where public confidence demands it. Fewer people in prison is a good thing, but the public will want to know which people and which crimes don’t deserve jail.

Joe Biden’s Middle East diplomacy is a wreck

Joe Biden prides himself on his decades of foreign-policy experience, his ability to talk tough yet be kind, and his talent for bringing opposing sides together. Touching down in Israel today, he gave Bibi Netanyahu a big hug – quite the gesture – and promptly told him he believed that ‘the other team’ – i.e. Hamas, not Israel – was responsible for the bomb that struck a hospital in Gaza last night, killing many of non-combatant Palestinians and inspiring another wave of anti-Israel protests. Biden will now set about trying to help release the hostages held by Hamas and persuading local powers to allow a secure flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  

Israel will be grateful for Biden’s show of support. The trouble is, the President’s standing among Israel’s neighbours is increasingly low. Last night, as Biden climbed up the steps of Air Force One, the Kingdom of Jordan announced that, following the hospital bombing, it would be cancelling the emergency meeting between its ruler, Abdullah II, America’s Commander-in-Chief, the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. 

Those Muslim leaders are in no mood for moral lectures from America, it seems. Ahead of Biden’s trip, too, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken jetted out to the Middle East, only to be rudely stood up by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, aka MbS. He was eventually seen the next day, then lectured about Israeli aggression against Muslims. Blinken reportedly received a similarly stern talking to by Egypt’s al-Sisi. 

America’s ruling class is not used to being treated in this way. But Biden’s problem is that nobody takes him all that seriously, even if America’s military strength remains unparalleled. 

Partly it’s the hypocrisy. As a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Saudi Arabia as a ‘pariah’ following the killing of the Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. Once in power, however, and especially after global energy supplies were squeezed thanks to the war in Ukraine, he realised he could ill-afford to alienate the Crown Prince. The White House did a spectacular reverse-ferret and defaulted to the usual US position on Saudi Arabia: one of awkward friendship, lubricated by vast quantities of oil. But MbS doesn’t appear to have forgotten Joe’s initial hostility. 

Team Biden, many of whom served under Barack Obama, also grudgingly had to accept a certain logic behind the previous US administration’s approach to the region. Donald Trump tore up the Team Obama’s cherished nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and essentially delegated Middle Eastern policy to his son-in-law Jared Kushner. A modern orthodox Jew with strong Israeli links, Kushner worked closely with Israel to harmonise relations between Jerusalem and the Sunni gulf states and further diminish Shia Iran’s influence. Even after Trump left the White House, this process appeared to be heading towards its ultimate goal, the ‘normalisation’ of Saudi-Israeli relations. Then came October 7, Hamas had their brutal say, and now the Israel-Gulf détente appears to be unravelling. 

Biden’s White House also had to accept that Trump had successfully killed off the JCPOA. It did, however, want to pursue the Obama-era approach of easing relations with Iran. This jarred somewhat with the ongoing effort to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together as a bulwark against Tehran. Last month, America struck a deal to unfreeze $6 billion of Iran’s money in exchange for some released prisoners. Whether that agreement served as some kind of screen or prompt for Hamas’s attack the weekend before last, and the extent to which Iran is behind Hamas’s actions, is a matter of debate in intelligence circles. 

What’s certain is that now Iran is now threatening Israel over its revenge assault on Gaza, and large parts of the Muslim world, Sunni and Shia, appear to have rediscovered their unitive love of Israel hatred. After years of exhausting efforts, America’s Middle Eastern diplomacy now appears wrecked. Biden is failing to contain Iranian hostility and appears to have alienated the Gulf states, too. The ‘war on terror’ is rekindled. America has reverted to the George W. Bush-era approach towards containing Iran: sending aircraft carriers to the Gulf (Trump did it, too) and warning Iran that any military actions or major attacks by Iran-sponsored Hezbollah will be met with a fierce US-led response. Historically, such threats have proved effective. Today, however, with the Arab world seeming to grow in its contempt for American diplomacy, Iran may feel less constrained.

The SNP’s reckoning is coming

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Katy Balls has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The SNP party conference in Aberdeen this week wasn’t the nationalist jamboree activists had hoped for. Even though it was Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader, several of his MSPs stayed away and the main hall was half-empty most of the time. ‘The key word was “flat”,’ says one attendee.

It was Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf’s predecessor, who attracted the most excitement, when she made a cameo appearance on Monday. The former first minister had to deny she was the ‘Liz Truss of the SNP’ – a reference to the former prime minister’s attempts to upstage Rishi Sunak. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her for the hubris,’ said one unimpressed nationalist.

At least Yousaf has won praise for his handling of the events unfolding in Israel and Palestine. The First Minister, whose in-laws are trapped in Gaza, met with the mother of a victim of the Hamas attack and emphasised his support for Scotland’s Jewish community.

But none of this changes the fundamentals facing his party. In the past month, the SNP has lost the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election to Labour and one SNP MP has defected to the Scottish Conservatives. Then there’s the ongoing Police Scotland investigation into possible fundraising fraud.

Of the three issues, it’s Scottish Labour that’s the greatest concern to the nationalists. The Scottish Labour candidate for Rutherglen and Hamilton won twice the number of votes of his SNP rival. Polls suggest Labour will overtake the nationalists as the largest party in Scotland next year, and if the swing were replicated in the next general election, Labour could win around 40 of Scotland’s 57 seats. However, given that by-elections tend to encourage protest voting, Labour MPs feel a more realistic target is around 25 seats.

Labour victories in Scotland would make Starmer’s path to No. 10 much simpler. Peter Kellner, the former YouGov president, calculates that a good result for Scottish Labour and tactical voting elsewhere could mean Starmer only requires a 5 per cent lead in the popular vote for a Commons majority. Current polls put him 20 points ahead.

Already private conversations are going on in SNP circles about what will happen if Yousaf can’t turn things around before next year’s election. The First Minister describes his party as ‘slightly down but definitely not out’. But even a slight decrease in the vote share spells trouble for the SNP. ‘Their problem is that when they have 45 per cent of the vote evenly spread across Scotland, they win everything,’ says one seasoned unionist. ‘When they have 35 per cent and unionists rally round their principal opponent, they can win virtually nothing.’ It’s not just Labour licking their lips at the idea of SNP problems – the Scottish Conservatives also believe they can benefit. Party briefings suggest that on a good day the Tories could hope to win 16 seats in total.

Yousaf’s new Scottish independence strategy depends on stopping this collapse of Westminster seats. Sturgeon used to say that the general election was a de facto referendum, but this stance led to a rebellion from SNP MPs who feared that the cost-of-living crisis was likely to be a bigger priority for voters next year than independence.

In a bid to find a compromise, the SNP’s independence pledge has been scaled down – the party will push for another referendum if they win a majority of the 57 seats up for play. This will allow SNP MPs to say they are focusing on cost-of-living issues while also keeping the party’s base happy on independence. Not everyone is impressed with the fudge. Yousaf’s argument that there will be a mandate for independence even if the SNP wins considerably fewer seats than it did at the last election has raised questions about expectations. ‘It shows the party is braced for losses,’ says one Scottish Labour politician. Even if the party does win a majority of Scottish seats, it is unlikely that much would change. Whether it’s Sunak or Keir Starmer in No. 10, neither would grant a referendum. While support for independence remains pretty static at around 48 per cent, support for the SNP is falling, which is why senior figures in the party are already wondering what will happen if there is a disappointing election result.

Many believe Yousaf could be pushed out. ‘Humza will need to carry the can and I predict a new first minister next year,’ says a Scottish Tory. If Sturgeon is Yousaf’s Truss, then his former leadership rival Kate Forbes is his Sunak. Forbes, MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, is one of a handful of rebellious nationalists who are opening up a new front against the SNP leadership in Holyrood. When her colleague Fergus Ewing lost the SNP whip after a string of backbench rebellions, Forbes stood alongside him as he addressed the media. She explained she didn’t think he should have to ‘stand alone’.

Forbes chose to stay away from the SNP conference, citing a pre-arranged trip to the USA. Given that the conference happens the same month every year, however, few were persuaded that the diary clash was entirely coincidental.

Even some of Yousaf’s supporters believe Forbes could make a comeback; the First Minister is aware that she poses a threat. He used his leader’s speech at conference to try to set out a growth plan that is friendly to business, which had been Forbes’s policy platform during the leadership contest.

If Forbes were to take over, though, she would face the same question: can the SNP hold together? Holyrood’s Greens – who are in a coalition with the SNP – say they would not work with her. If the prospect of independence recedes further, then it becomes hard to see what could unite the party. The current crop of nationalists are divided on gender issues, taxation and the best way to try to secure independence. ‘It will become the Tartan Tories vs the progressives,’ predicts a party figure. If Yousaf leads his party to disappointment next year, an SNP reckoning will soon follow.

Sunak unites the Commons behind Israel’s right to defence

Most of the questions to Rishi Sunak today at Prime Minister’s Questions can be usefully summarised by the point put to him late on by SNP MP Stewart McDonald.

McDonald said: ‘Of course the sadism of Hamas can only be condemned and there’s no question of Israel’s right to defence and security. But international law is very clear, Mr Speaker, that acting against international law in response to terrorism is unjustified. So in all of these packages that the Prime Minister has announced vis a vis humanitarian aid, and the military package he announced last week, can he tell the House how the government will ensure that international law is adhered to beyond just statements from Israel’s head of state?’

Much of the session had been spent labouring the point that Israel does have a right to defend itself against the terror attack by Hamas. McDonald’s claim that there was ‘no question of Israel’s right to defence and security’ didn’t really acknowledge how many countries around Israel think that right is very much in question, and that indeed Israel’s very existence isn’t a right. But the point of today’s session was largely to underline that the UK parliament does speak with one voice on Israel’s right.

Keir Starmer explicitly made this argument in a sombre set of questions, which were really statements rather than any real attempt to probe Sunak. His opener was on the attack on the Al Ahli hospital, and included the statement that was also repeated throughout the session, that ‘international law must be upheld’.

He asked when the Prime Minister might be able to update the House on the investigation into what happened. This allowed Sunak to remind MPs not to ‘rush to judgement before we have all the facts on this awful situation’, and to say that the intelligence services were ‘analysing the evidence to independently establish the facts’. Starmer then reiterated that Israel had a right to defend itself and that if ‘Hamas had a single concern… for the safety of the Palestinian people, they would never have taken these hostages’.

For his third question he asked about humanitarian aid, medicines, food, fuel and water getting into Gaza immediately, to which Sunak responded with a list of what Britain was doing to help. Starmer then condemned the rise in anti-semitism and Islamophobia in this country following the 7 October attack, but made his question for the Prime Minister an easy one: ‘Does he agree with me that every member of this House has a duty, a duty to work in their constituency and across the country to say no to this hate and to ensure every British Jew and every British Muslim knows that they can live their lives, free from fear and frequent discrimination.’ Sunak agreed.

After a penultimate question on redoubling efforts to reach a two-state solution, Starmer summed up the point he had been aiming to make: ‘This is a crisis where lives hang in the balance and where the enemies of peace and democracy would like nothing more than for us to become divided and to abandon our values. Does the Prime Minister agree that during this grave crisis, this House must strive to speak with one voice in condemnation of terror, in support of Israel’s right to self-defence and for the dignity of all human life that cannot be protected without humanitarian access to those suffering in Gaza, and the constant maintenance of the role of international law?’ Sunak agreed.

Elsewhere in the session, Sunak reiterated that while Israel needed to act within international law, Hamas was purposefully embedding itself within civilian areas, including hospitals and schools. He did have to answer a few questions on other matters, though largely they were on how great his decision was to scrap the northern leg of HS2 and replace it with transport upgrades across the north of England.

Those questions all came from Tory MPs, funnily enough, who proceeded to list the roads and stations in their own constituencies that would benefit, to the extent the Speaker stopped one of them, describing him as an ‘A-Z’. It was comforting that even in the middle of a crisis, MPs are never far from being totally parochial.

Europeans are rejecting the EU’s unworkable vision

The recent election in Poland has been presented by some as a triumph of liberalism over the dark forces of populism, but this is a misreading of events. It’s said that the Law and Justice party, which has ruled Poland for the past eight years, was trounced, but it won the largest share of votes (35 per cent) and the largest number of seats in parliament. It is nevertheless almost certain to lose power because three other parties – Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), the centre-right Third Way and the Left party – will likely form a coalition against it.

The result does little to reverse Europe’s rightward drift, and neither does it turn Poland back in the direction of the EU (Tusk is better known in Britain as the former president of the European Council).Tusk made a big issue of abortion rights, promising to reverse the near-complete ban introduced by the Law and Justice party. One of his first acts, he has said, will be to legalise abortion up to 12 weeks. But it is by no means certain that he will be able to get this measure through parliament, given that many MPs in his would-be coalition are unsupportive.

Poland remains a socially conservative country whose population is resistant to many of the prevailing values of western Europe. An arrogant assumption that Poles would change their minds explains why Law and Justice remains the most popular party.

The idea that Brexit revealed Britain to be a right-wing aberration on a continent otherwise committed to social democracy could not be more wrong. Only five EU countries can currently be said to have left-leaning governments. Moreover, one of them, Germany, has seen the right-wing AfD win local elections in recent months. Another, Denmark, has a government that holds onto office through a migration policy that would be considered far-right by many in Britain.

Far from turning in a liberal direction, voters in Europe are making it clear that they reject the migration policies forced on them by the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. There is little appetite for EU attempts to distribute migrants across the bloc. Southern European countries have been left to shoulder the biggest burden and are losing patience. The EU’s efforts to force member states to accept more migrants – and face fines if they do not – resulted in Poland and Hungary being overruled by qualified majority voting earlier this year.    

The tension that is evident in Britain between a public which wants illegal migration stopped and the human rights infrastructure which tolerates and promotes mass asylum claims can be seen in all EU countries. The major difference is that anti-migrant feelings are much stronger elsewhere than they are in Britain.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic all clashed with the EU far more robustly than Britain did in the years leading up to Brexit. In Poland, the EU threatened to withhold funds in protest at the country’s stance on abortion and gay rights and its authoritarian treatment of the media.

That this hasn’t led to a large movement in Poland demanding withdrawal from the EU is largely down to financial self-interest. Britain was a net contributor to the EU budget, whereas countries like Poland and Hungary have done well out of membership.

As prime minister, Tusk will inevitably try to reposition Poland at the heart of the EU though this ambition is doomed to fail. There’s little Tusk can do about the European people’s growing rejection of the EU’s unworkable vision and the fact that they are pushing back against political integration. Even Tusk’s party has said it will not sign up to any EU proposals that see the numbers of migrants rise in Poland. This is a position Tusk would have blasted from Brussels.

The scope of the EU’s ambition has been its downfall. The absorption of former Soviet countries nearly two decades ago has changed the dynamic. The EU is no longer a comfy nuclear family of wealthy western European social democracies; rather it has become a raucous extended family of conservative cousins and aunts.  

When Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz recently advanced their idea of a concentric Europe formed of a committed core and less-committed outer rings, it was widely interpreted as being an invitation to Britain to take up some kind of associate membership. Tusk had been visibly mortified when Theresa May presented him with her letter informing him of Britain’s intention to leave the EU. He then led the efforts to make an example of the UK for its temerity in leaving the club.

This will have been part of the Macron-Scholz calculation, as evidenced by the announcement of the idea just ahead of Keir Starmer’s visit to the Élysée Palace. But perhaps the notion of a concentric Europe was not just about attracting Britain: EU leaders may be looking ahead to the day when the drive for ever-closer union becomes incompatible with the membership of Poland, Hungary and other recalcitrant member states.

In spite of this week’s Polish election results, that day could be fast approaching.

Why do I need security guards so I can play Shylock?

These are very odd times. The project of my life – The Merchant of Venice 1936, which sets Shakespeare’s play in East End London during the rise of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – was postponed because of Covid, but is now alive and kicking. It’s kicking hard. We’re on a ten-week tour and I’ve been moved beyond words at the reactions of audiences and critics. Yet for the last week, the production has had to have security men around keeping an eye on things. It’s like a dystopian nightmare. A Jewish actress putting on a play about anti-Semitism which needs to be made secure because of Jew-hating extremists. As one reviewer said: ‘Written in 1600, set in 1936, as relevant today in 2023.’ Ain’t that the truth.

When I was at school, I admired the beauty of the language in The Merchant of Venice, but I hated the play. Aged 12, as one of the only Jewish girls in the class, I was asked to read Shylock out loud when we studied it (terribly, I may add, with no context or discussion about themes, racism or history). Then I had the indignity of my classmates running around in breaktime rubbing their hands together shouting ‘my ducats my daughter’ in a Jewish accent like something out of the Nazi propaganda film Jew Süss. 

Shakespeare probably never met Jewish people because there weren’t any in England. The Jews were viciously expelled by Edward I in 1290 and weren’t readmitted until 1656. And yet Shylock is probably the most famous Jewish archetype in the canon of literature and his character had an enormous legacy on how Jewish people are seen by non-Jews. Regardless of what Shakespeare may have intended, Shylock – and his demand for a pound of Antonio’s ‘fair flesh’ for defaulting on a payment – became synonymous with the devilish, money-obsessed Jew. The Merchant of Venice was one of Hitler’s favourite plays and Goebbels oversaw a special adaptation, without Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, obviously.

In our production of this difficult, trope-filled play, Shylock still represents The Other, the instigator of the un-Christian vice of money breeding. But she is not a pure villain nor a victim. She’s a woman whose generational trauma and own experiences have brutalised her to the point of becoming the monster she has constantly been accused of being. I based my Shylock on three family matriarchs: my great-grandma Bubbe Annie and two of my great-aunts, ‘Machine-Gun’ Molly and Sarah Portugal (who smoked a cigar and wore a slash of red lipstick). Bubbe Annie escaped the pogroms of the Pale of Settlements and was sent to London to work in Aunty Yetta’s factory, for a penny a week. She slept on the floor of the factory on a rolled-up mattress until Isaac, the boy from the next village and a fleeing Jew himself, married her. Then they lived off Cable Street in one of the slum tenements alongside other Jewish immigrants. Annie called England the Golden Medina – no one wanted to behead or rape you for being a Jew. Then in October 1936 she watched Mosley and his private militia put up poster after poster and nail leaflet after leaflet about the slippery, alien, untrustworthy Jew, who was not welcome on England’s shores.

I was brought up on stories from the Battle of Cable Street, where our play starts and ends. My great-uncle Alf was pushed through the plate-glass windows at Gardiner’s Corner by a Blackshirt and my entire family stood on the front line alongside their neighbours – the Irish, the small Afro-Caribbean community, the English working-class, the dockers and the unionists – who screamed at the fascists and their mounted police protection: ‘You shall not pass. If you come for the Jews, you come for us all.’

And I have to say, ever since Hamas’s terror attack on Israel, with the pogrom-like brutality towards babies, women and girls, including rape and burning alive, I have felt broken. On stage, when I say the lines ‘When you prick us do we not bleed? When you tickle us, do we not laugh? When you poison us do we not die?’, I weep for all the innocent victims, and I know we must stand together against an evil that wants to rip us apart. And the audiences cry too. 

Europe needs to step up on Ukraine

Vasyl, a burly, tattooed infantry commander who lost a leg to a Russian mine on the eastern front, sits swinging his remaining leg on the edge of the treatment table in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic in Lviv. He’s been inside the Russian trenches 50 times, he tells me. His stories are reminiscent of the first world war. I ask him what Ukraine needs for victory. Answer: ‘Motivated people.’ His T-shirt proclaims ‘no sacrifice, no victory’. After we shake hands and I wish him luck, he suddenly jumps off the table and starts skipping at amazing speed, his blue skipping rope whizzing around under his one foot, while he looks at me with a broad grin, as if to say ‘Here’s your answer’.

Maksym, a sturdy marine and professional sniper, who lost a foot to a hidden Russian mine on the southern front, is less exuberant. The minefields are terrible, he says, and the Russians well dug into their defensive positions. And, he adds, ‘they have more men’. He believes that victory will come only if Vladimir Putin dies or there’s a coup in Moscow. Otherwise, ‘this war can continue for years, or even decades’.

According to American estimates, Ukrainian fatalities in the first year and a half of this full-scale war exceed the US losses in two decades of involvement in Vietnam. I visited the military cemetery in Lviv to lay flowers on the grave of a volunteer soldier called Yevhen Hulevych, who I met in this beautiful western Ukrainian city last December, shortly before he was killed near Bakhmut. I was shocked to see that the forest of fresh graves had almost doubled in size since I was last there. There were now 520 fallen from this one city, including three women, all medics. But Ukraine is running short of people ready and able to fight.

Before I travelled to Lviv earlier this month, I spent two months in the United States. Opinion polls showed a worrying decline in support for continued funding of Ukraine. Sitting in a Washington airport hotel with nothing better to do, I switched to Fox News. A so-called comedian was joking about AI. Her riff went like this: ‘Biden typed into ChatGPT “How to screw the American middle class” and the answer came back “Send $75 billion to Ukraine.”’ With the unprecedented toppling of House speaker Kevin McCarthy, partly because he worked with Democrats to get more money for Ukraine despite a threatened government shutdown, the issue is now fatefully entangled with hyperpolarised US politics.

I was told it’s unlikely that Ukraine will be invited to join Nato at the 75th anniversary summit in Washington next July, because that might cost Joe Biden – or, if he steps aside, another Democrat candidate – votes in November’s presidential election. ‘You’re getting us into another for-ever war!’ Donald Trump would shout. And a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for Ukraine.

All this was before the Hamas invasion of Israel began another terrible war which will be at the very centre of American attention. It will absorb most of Washington’s diplomatic and political time, and may take some of the funding and military equipment that might otherwise have gone to Ukraine. In signalling his unconditional support for the US in its battle against Hamas, President Volodymyr Zelensky is obviously aware of that danger.

What’s the right conclusion from these two worrying trends, one on the battlefront and the other in distant Washington? I think it’s clear: Europe must do more. That’s also how we persuade the US to stay the course and go on offering the kinds of weapons, ammunition and other equipment which only the world’s military hyperpower has in sufficient quantity.

Europe should give more military support. Britain has led in this respect, but its own – anyway diminished – stocks of arms and ammunition are running low. Germany, following a very slow start, has overtaken the UK to become Ukraine’s second-largest supporter, after the US. Honour to a country which, to do this, has had to jump over its own shadow. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz is still given to nervous hesitation about each particular weapon system – most recently, declining to send German Taurus missiles, even though the UK, France and the US have already sent comparable weapon systems. Of course the escalation risks always have to be weighed carefully. But this is not how you help a country win a war.

Equally important is gearing up European (including British) defence industries so we can continue to supply the almost second world war levels of arms, ammunition and other equipment that Ukraine will need. When I met the country’s then defence minister earlier this year in Kyiv, with a delegation from the European Council on Foreign Relations, we were already discussing the country’s requirements for the next counteroffensive, next summer, and quite possibly the one after that. The heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, brother of Kyiv’s mayor, put it vividly. If you can’t land a knockout blow, he said, you need to have the stamina to go 12 rounds.

Above all, though, Europe needs to lead on economic, social and political support. In moments like this, people always reach for the metaphor of a Marshall Plan, but by its very name, that suggests the US will play a leading role. The American public is just not ready for that any more. And in any case I don’t see why Europe should expect the US to do the lion’s share, nearly 80 years after the end of the second world war. Ukraine is in Europe, after all, and Europe has a very large economy of its own. If we succeed in the reconstruction and European integration of Ukraine – a breadbasket of the world with a significant potential for economic development – Europe will be the biggest beneficiary.

The Marshall Plan metaphor is also wrong because this has to be done very differently. What might be called the three Rs – reconstruction, reform and reaching for EU membership – must be conceived and implemented together. Reconstruction can’t wait until the end of the war: people need homes, schools and hospitals now. Nor can reform of the Ukrainian state. On that, there are some concerning signs, such as an apparent reversal of the decentralisation which was an important element of the country’s post-2014 renewal. Nor can the first steps of getting closer to the EU. The EU needs to start an incremental process which at each stage creates a positive incentive: you reconstruct, you reform, you gain more access; you gain more access, that helps you reform further, that boosts reconstruction; and so on.

I returned to Britain from Ukraine and the US strongly persuaded that this is what we in Europe must do. The alternative – unfortunately almost as probable as it is bad – is that the West will eventually settle for a ‘peace’ which involves Ukraine effectively losing a large chunk of its sovereign territory. That would not be peace, but a semi-frozen conflict – just a pause before another round of war, very much as we have seen it for decades in the Middle East. In the meantime, it would also enable Putin to declare victory at home, and therefore stay in power for longer, send precisely the wrong message to Xi Jinping over Taiwan and feel like a terrible defeat to every Ukrainian. The memory of soldiers like Yevhen, who have paid the ultimate price, and the sacrifices of those like Vasyl and Maksym, demand better.

Portrait of the week: Israel tensions rise, inflation stalls and Australia votes No

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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, spoke on the telephone with the rulers of Qatar and Saudi Arabia about Israel’s war against Hamas. The annual rate of inflation remained at 6.7 per cent. Wages in the period of June to August rose at an annual rate of 7.8 per cent. The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, which had blocked a previous bid, said its concerns had been addressed over a $69 billion takeover by Microsoft of Activision Blizzard; Microsoft will now control games such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush. A new set of coins reflecting the King’s interest in nature is being minted, with a dormouse on the 1p, a capercaillie on the 10p and bees on the £1.

Prisons in England and Wales will be allowed to release ‘less serious offenders’ on probation early to relieve overcrowding, Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, said. Signals failed at Euston, stopping all trains for several hours. People were left hanging vertically for half an hour on the Rage rollercoaster at Southend, Essex.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards recommended suspending Peter Bone from the Commons for six weeks after a complaint of his exposing himself to a man working for him more than ten years ago and hitting him with a pencil. The MP was suspended from the Conservative party. Andrew Bridgen MP, formerly a Conservative, complained that the Conservative MP Crispin Blunt had hit him on the back of the head with his hand and said, ‘You’re a bastard’; this he denied. The Guardian sacked its cartoonist Steve Bell because it mistakenly thought his drawing of Benjamin Netanyahu referred to The Merchant of Venice rather than to a celebrated cartoon by David Levine of President Lyndon Johnson.

Abroad

President Joe Biden of the United States visited Israel on the eve of its planned invasion of the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea. He hoped to prevent the war spreading through the region. About 1.1 million people living in Gaza’s north-eastern areas, including Gaza City, were told by Israel to move to the south-western parts. Some water supplies to southern Gaza were turned on again after a week’s blockade of electricity, fuel, water, food and medicine. Hundreds of people were killed in a strike on the Anglican-run Ahli Arab hospital. Bombing of Gaza had already killed more than 3,000 people there and left 423,000 without shelter. A thousand were said to be buried under rubble. ‘The protection of civilians is essential,’ said the secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg. ‘There are rules of war.’ The Pope said: ‘It is urgent and necessary to guarantee humanitarian corridors.’ The United States evacuated citizens by air. Through talks with Egypt and Israel, Britain tried to get the Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt open for its nationals to leave. ‘If they do not cease their atrocities in Gaza, Iran cannot simply remain an observer,’ said the Iranian foreign minister. Israel had formed a government of national unity to pursue the war against Hamas. The number of Israelis killed by Hamas during its initial attack had risen to 1,400, with 199 hostages taken into Gaza. Hamas made public a video of an Israeli-French woman hostage aged 21.

The Israel Defence Forces attacked Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon. France banned pro-Palestinian rallies, mobilised 7,000 soldiers for security patrols and closed the Louvre. A teacher in Arras was killed with a knife by a man who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’. In Brussels a Tunisian man, thought to be inspired by the Islamic State group, wounded a Swedish man and shot dead two others; he was later shot dead by police.

Ukraine said it had destroyed nine Russian helicopters in air strikes on Berdyansk and Luhansk. Russia bombarded Avdiivka. Russia failed to be re-elected to the UN’s human rights council. President Vladimir Putin visited China. In elections in Poland, the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party won 35.38 per cent of the vote, ahead of Donald Tusk’s opposition Civic Coalition with 30.7 per cent, but Mr Tusk set about forming a coalition; the turnout was high, at 74.38 per cent. Australians decisively voted No in a referendum proposing to amend the constitution to create a body for First Nations people to advise the government. The opposition National party won the New Zealand election, with enough seats to form a moderate right-wing coalition. The US House of Representatives failed to elect a new Speaker.                                    CSH