Portrait of the week: air strikes, train strikes and missile strikes

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Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, said that the ‘red lights on the global dashboard are very much flashing’. He was speaking after Britain joined American air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The Houthis, backed by Iran and allied with Hamas in Gaza, had been attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the Commons it was ‘a necessary and a proportionate response to a direct threat to UK vessels’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, supported Britain’s action, but said that future military interventions – especially sustained ones – should be brought before parliament. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, announced that 20,000 British service personnel would be deployed in Europe in Nato’s Exercise Steadfast Defender 24. Rishi Sunak returned from a visit to Kyiv, where he announced £2.5 billion of military aid to Ukraine over the coming year.

Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned as two of the five Conservative party deputy chairmen in order to vote, with 58 other Tory rebels, for Sir William Cash’s amendment to the Rwanda Bill. The Daily Telegraph forecast that on the basis of a YouGov poll, the Conservatives would win only 169 seats at the next election, leaving Labour with a majority of around 120. Two million British citizens who have lived overseas for more than 15 years are to be allowed to register to vote. The government committed itself again to building a series of nuclear power stations that could produce enough electricity by 2050 to meet a quarter of demand. Inflation rose from 3.9 to 4 per cent, fuelled by drink, pantomimes and cat food. Aslef, the train drivers’ union, announced strikes between 30 January and 5 February. Annie Nightingale, a DJ on Radio 1 from 1970 to 2023, died, aged 83.

Paul Patterson, the head of Fujitsu for Europe, which supplied a computer system to the Post Office, told the Commons committee investigating the scandal of the prosecution of sub-postmasters: ‘Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice.’ The Care Quality Commission approved the private Gender Plus Hormone Clinic to prescribe hormones for transgender young people over 16. A report on child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, 2004-13, found that mostly poor, white girls were ‘left at the mercy’ of grooming gangs of men of Pakistani and Afghan heritage for years by the failings of Greater Manchester Police and local authorities. James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, announced that the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir would be proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Five cross-Channel migrants died while trying to embark off Wimereux in cold conditions.

Abroad

Israel continued to attack what it said were Hamas positions and people in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that more than 24,000 people there had been killed since 7 October. Hamas released a video claiming to show the bodies of two dead Israelis who had been held hostage in Gaza; the video showed a woman hostage, speaking under duress, saying that the two men with whom she had been held had been killed – by air strikes, according to Hamas.

After the United States, with token British support, struck 13 sites in Yemen to deter Houthi attacks on shipping, an American merchant ship was hit by a Houthi missile, though with little damage. In a further strike, America destroyed four Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles ready to be launched. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards struck with ballistic missiles what they said was an Israeli ‘spy headquarters’ in Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq; four civilians were reported killed. The Prime Minister of Niger, appointed by its junta, flew to Moscow for talks on economic and military ties. Ukraine’s military said it had shot down a Russian A-50 long-range radar detection aircraft over the Sea of Azov. Lava from an erupting volcano set fire to houses in Grindavik, Iceland.

In the Republicans’ Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump won more than 50 per cent of the vote; Ron DeSantis came a distant second, closely followed by Nikki Haley. Vivek Ramaswamy withdrew from the race. Democrat voting for their own candidates will not be completed until March. Taiwan elected William Lai of the ruling Democratic Progressive party as President; there was no overall majority in parliament. Tens of thousands of people in Copenhagen waved little Danish flags and cried ‘Hurrah’ as Frederik X was proclaimed king. CSH

The West must stop playing Mr Nice Guy

Iwas intrigued to learn from our Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, that we are now in a ‘pre-war’ phase and that there is an almost inevitability of eventual conflict with one or two of the world’s superpowers. I read his comments on the same day that the German newspaper Das Bild reported that Russia was planning to invade western Europe within 18 months.

This is all very worrying, not least because Grant Shapps is our Defence Secretary. I don’t think I’d trust Grant to provide military back-up for a whelk stall, but then I suspect that his likely successor, John Healey, will be no more effective. The problem both men have is the problem which afflicts the West – we are incapable of being properly aggressive and can only really manage passive aggression.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, our behaviour over Ukraine has been the very definition of passive aggression, much as is inviting the Swedes and Finland into Nato. The problem with passive aggression is that it doesn’t win wars and instead serves only to nark our enemies – and they are easily narked. Even the limited strike by UK and US forces on the Houthi rebels in Yemen was swiftly written off by Rishi Sunak as a kind of aberration, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, no plans for repeat action, etc.

The reasons for our tentativeness are fairly straightforward. First, we have been suffocated by peace and affluence for perhaps longer than at any time in our history and whatever happens in the world, we still think we have a right to cling to it and the ability to do so. A mistake, I think. Second, we have been seriously bruised by the desperately ill-conceived and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the mess which it left behind.

Finally – and this is the crucial bit, for me – the people who run the machineries of state here, and in the US and Europe, do not believe that we have the moral high ground. Indeed a large contingent of our civil servants find the West, with its imperialist past and inclination towards regulated capitalism, morally repugnant. They don’t much like the idea of a nation state, full stop. They have sympathies with terrorists and are more anxious to ensure that our armies treat transgendered people nicely than they are with ensuring that they are properly equipped and ready to fight.

How can you win a war if the people charged with the task of administering that war don’t even remotely believe in the cause? They will not concede that our affluence in the West stems from being comparatively well-run democracies which have respect for the rule of law and by and large eschew corruption: the affluence, they will always argue, was ill-gotten, a case of theft. They would rather die than concede that Yemen was at its most prosperous and (comparatively) peaceful in recent years when it was run as a protectorate by the British from 1937 to 1963 and would be much better off now were a similar arrangement somehow put in place. And yet it is almost incontestable that this assertion is correct.

Left to its own devices, Yemen has become the worst country in the world outside Africa: it is hideously corrupt, utterly skint, starving, continually riven by violence between warring clans and tribes, all of whom adhere to different competing flavours of the marvellous ‘Religion of Peace’ – and has been that way for almost the entirety of its wretched existence.

The one-worlders find it impossible, though, to believe that poverty and misery in the world are caused by anything other than western perfidy: they will not grasp the hard truths because those truths undermine their flaccid ideology, which is that we are to blame. And this ideology is therefore eagerly taken up by Third World countries themselves and corruption, hideously bad government and rank stupidity are exculpated: it’s all down to colonialism, innit, bwana. I am reminded of the senior Ugandan politician I talked to a couple of decades back who spent his entire time ranting about British wickedness in Africa. What would your country be like if it had not been colonised, I asked him. He replied: ‘We would be an economic powerhouse, like China.’ Trouble is, you can’t rebut absurdities like that if your own ruling class believes it too.

So, while we’re on with difficult truths, let’s turn to South Africa briefly. It was the South African government, of course, which dragged Israel to the UN International Court of Justice to be prosecuted for its ‘chilling’ and ‘incontrovertible’ intent to commit genocide in Gaza. Accompanied by our own Jeremy Corbyn, I should add. The hard truth about South Africa that could not possibly be admitted by the one-worlders? That most black people are now less well off compared with whites than was the case under the National party.

Put simply, in 1991 the GDP per capita of South Africa was $3,300 and the average world GDP per capita was $4,400. In short, then, South Africa’s GDP per capita was roughly three-quarters of the world average. Today, South Africa’s GDP per capita is $6,000 and the world average is $13,270. In other words, South Africa has slipped from three-quarters of the world average to less than half of the world average. Over the same period of time, the average life expectancy in the world has gone up from an average of 65.3 to 73.2, while South Africa’s has risen from 63.3 to 64.9 – hardly at all, then.

Over the same time, corruption has soared, according to Transparency International, and over the past five years the number of South Africans experiencing ‘extreme poverty’ has increased and stands at 18.2 million. But it is seen as being in quite the worst taste to quote these sorts of figures, even when South Africa is presenting itself to the world as a country of conscience.

What Nikki Haley has over Trump

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organisation in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way – now highly unusual in US politics – of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. Today, after Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump? One factor, which one sees in Rishi Sunak too, could be the intense respectability of her middle-class, provincial Indian heritage, rather like that of Apu, the charming and diligent Indian grocer nowadays cancelled from The Simpsons. Respectability can be inhibiting. Respectable people are not usually forces of nature, and would not want to be. They believe almost devoutly in hard work and its just rewards. They therefore do not grasp the performative or the visceral aspects of politics. Donald Trump, triumphant in Iowa, is almost everything that Nikki Haley isn’t. Such is the force of his nature that he has persuaded millions he is the man who gets things done. Whenever he doesn’t get things done – his four years of supreme power provide ample evidence of this – he convinces people it is only because the wicked establishment blocks him. It is a frustrating spectacle: both the hopes Trump raises in his supporters and the fears he inspires in his opponents are largely illusory. He won’t do what he says, but what he says is sufficiently exciting to hide this basic flaw.

BBC Verify is a strange concept. The name suggests that, to adapt Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase, it seeks truth from facts. Surely an entire news organisation, not a special department, is supposed to do that. Since Verify exists, however, why not investigate how many people have been killed in Gaza? On 11 January, the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, asserted on air that Israel ‘is killing hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians every day’. If the phrase ‘hundreds and hundreds’ means anything more than the single word ‘hundreds’, it must surely mean a minimum of 500, and implies more. If Israel had killed 500 a day since it struck back against Hamas in mid-October, that would amount to nearly 45,000 dead by the time Bowen spoke. The death toll is terrible, but such a figure is wild. Even the Hamas health ministry, no truth-teller, puts the total figure at 24,000. Verify should inquire. If it did so, it should seek to find out more about the categories of people who get killed, and ask questions about who is killing whom. Israel claims that 9,000 of the dead are terrorists (not all of them Hamas). That is a success, not an atrocity. Israel does not claim total accuracy, but says that, because of the nature of the fighting, it is easier at this stage to estimate dead armed opponents than it is to arrive at a proper number for unarmed civilians. That will be attempted after victory. It also points out that Hamas has dropped a quarter of its bombs and rockets inside Gaza, killing Gazans. Verify could look at those claims too.

The latest figure shows that the population of China fell by two million last year. Xi Jinping’s favourite word to describe his own achievements is ‘rejuvenation’. A more accurate word would be ‘senescence’. It is striking that Xi is 70, Vladimir Putin is 71, Narendra Modi is 73, Joe Biden is 81 and his most probable successor, Donald Trump, is 77, their palsied hands struggling for mastery of the globe.

In our Christmas issue, Douglas Murray attempted to cheer us up by saying that the English equivalent of La France profonde still exists: he had seen it recently in Wiltshire, he reported. I want to agree, but I wonder if I really do (not about Wiltshire, but about the general proposition). A deep England – or France, or any country old enough to possess such an essence – depends on various conditions which may no longer apply. One is that life is not everywhere heavily dependent on the country’s capital city. If you consider the various factors – house prices, road and rail networks, job and retirement patterns, media power, sources of wealth, money management, the uniformity of so many shops etc, I think you would have to agree that London dominates almost everywhere in England, even for people who never go near the place. If you read a book like Corduroy by Adrian Bell (father of Martin, the Man in the White Suit), which describes his experience of mainly agricultural life in Suffolk in the 1920s, you find a community which, while not remote, lived its own English life in its own way. A century later, only a few wisps of such a culture survive in rural England and tiny numbers work on the land. The equivalent applies to the provincial England of market towns and small manufacturing. Some of these places remain attractive. Many have become in some ways more interesting than they were in the past, but hardly any have that ur-quality – that sense of a place where, in Eliot’s famous phrase (of Little Gidding) ‘history is now and England’. To use another line from Four Quartets, ‘the dancers are all gone under the hill’.

As is traditional, the editor has kindly let me advertise the Annual General Meeting of the Rectory Society in this space. Our guest speaker this year is Emma Bridgewater, the great ceramics manufacturer. She will speak about pilgrimage. The meeting will be held on Tuesday 6 February, at Chelsea Old Church, starting at 6.30 p.m. and ending at eight. Doors open at six. Tickets, which cost £25, should be booked by emailing the secretary, Alison Everington, at ali@everington.net.

How Britain sobered up

The people of these islands have long been famous for their drinking. A Frenchman writing in the 12th century described the various races of Europe: ‘The French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.’ By 1751, at the height of the gin craze that William Hogarth immortalised in ‘Gin Lane’, the English were drinking on average the equivalent of 20 bottles of gin per person per year. But Britain is losing its taste for alcohol. Around a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t drink at all.

It’s a far cry from when I was a teenager in the 1980s. We would sit in the park smoking and drinking, waiting until we looked old enough to go to the pub. In one recent study of young Britons, seven out of ten said that the reason they didn’t drink is because they have so many other ways to be entertained. Rather than go in search of sex in sticky-floored suburban nightclubs, young people just swipe right to find love. Clublife is dying, a victim of ever more restrictive licensing regulations.

When surveyed, Gen Z said they associate alcohol with ‘vulnerability’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘loss of control’. That’s precisely why my generation used to get hammered, but who would want to do the same today, with the ever-present possibility of online disgrace? Alcohol is also seen as unhealthy, and Gen Z are obsessed with their health. Teenagers look different to when I was young; they’re better groomed, with better teeth and skin. They want to look good for social media. They seem obsessed with drinking huge quantities of water. The water bottle has now become a cult item.

Perhaps that’s because water is cheap, and alcohol isn’t. The average pint costs £4.70 in Britain; it was £1.95 when we rang in the Millennium. It’s no wonder that Generation Z are going out and drinking less – it’s cheaper and safer to stare at a screen at home.

It’s easy to blame the yoof for everything, of course. But worryingly – at least for Britain’s booze industry – it’s not just young people who have sobered up. Since a peak in 2004, average alcohol consumption has declined. Sales of traditional Christmas drinks such as port, champagne and spirits were down on this time last year. To make things worse, Dry January – introduced as recently as 2013 though it feels like it has been around forever – has become a fixture. Nine million people are supposedly taking part this year. Even if most of them won’t see the whole month through, that’s a lot of lost alcohol sales.

In response to these trends, drinks companies such as Diageo have devised non-alcoholic ‘spirits’ that cost as much as gin and normally taste faintly of peas. They’re being pushed but the demand doesn’t seem to be there. As one former Tesco employee put it to me, you just need to look at the dust on the displays of such drinks in supermarkets: ‘They’re not exactly flying off the shelves.’

Alcohol-free beer, however, has proved more popular – sales have doubled in four years and are still rising at about 25 per cent a year. No pub nowadays would dare not stock one, such as Lucky Saint or Erdinger Alkoholfrei. Sales of Guinness 0.0 have increased 150 per cent in a year. One study found that a third of all pub visits are alcohol-free. There are even bars that only sell non-alcoholic drinks – and not just in Brighton. One recently opened in Manchester, which shows that teetotalism isn’t just a southern affectation.

Teetotalism is least prevalent among people in the 55-74 age bracket. As drinks companies try to win over a more youthful audience, you can spot the increasing desperation. Whisky brands, for instance, market themselves with adverts featuring groovy racially diverse youngsters rather than their actual customers: white middle-aged men. I received a press release describing a new whisky from an established producer as ‘the ultimate flex for those reaping and celebrating the successes of their hustle’. I had no idea what it meant.

Drinks industry types increasingly talk of ‘premiumisation’. With fewer customers, those left will inevitably pay more. The drinks industry is trying to seem sprightly, while continuing to price out many customers. There are signs that economic realities are finally hitting home. This year, after a long boom, exports of Scotch whisky were down 20 per cent. Meanwhile, wine has been stagnant for years with only prosecco and rosé seeing serious growth in Britain. The British wine trade is spooked, but over in the US there’s an air of panic. The creeping legalisation of cannabis has put a major dent in sales. Rather than pour a glass of merlot to take the edge off the day, many people would rather chew on a teddybear-shaped cannabis gummy.

The real losers in Britain have been pubs. Since 2000, Britain has lost more than 13,000 pubs – a quarter of its total – and the rate of closures is growing. It doesn’t help that we are all increasingly told to drink less: in 2016, recommendations for drinking levels were lowered to 14 units for men and women in Britain. The World Health Organisation even states that there is no safe level for alcohol consumption, despite numerous studies which show that in small quantities alcohol can be beneficial to our health. Not that you are likely to hear about the benefits of drinking from the alcohol industry. Instead, it is fighting a losing battle in enemy territory, up against public health officials and the NHS.

We’re a long way from ‘Gin Lane’. These days Britain isn’t even in the top ten booziest nations in Europe, and yet groups like the Institute of Alcohol Studies are taking a leaf out of the anti-tobacco handbook and pushing for ever-stricter control, such as plain packaging. The aim is to ‘denormalise’ alcohol consumption. Ireland is already preparing to introduce warnings on bottles from 2026; the Scottish government is planning to push ahead with increasing control of alcohol marketing which could see Scotch whisky, the country’s biggest export, become practically invisible. There will be no more alcohol sports sponsorship or even window displays in whisky shops in case children see them and are tempted to drink.

The young are, of course, more inclined to be glued to their phones several hours a day, using social media rather than actually meeting up. Whether this makes them happier is a hotly debated topic, but those who are less likely to meet are obviously less likely to drink. So the pub may be another victim of the smartphone.

If we’re not careful, we might soon discover that alcohol has become an unaffordable luxury, or something bought from the supermarket, with the only place to drink it being in the home. It’s a sobering thought. The cheap pint of beer in a local pub or the £10 bottle of wine imported by that funny little chap from France can’t exist without a lively drinking culture to support them.

What’s certain, though, is that mankind’s need for intoxication will never go away. When Pakistan went for full alcohol prohibition in the 1970s, young people in Karachi (which had a lively nightlife) turned to heroin. As T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’ The risk is that we throw away our infrastructure of sociable, controlled intoxication in pubs, bars and restaurants. The sort of places where we can meet others and random encounters can happen, where young people can dance, flirt and laugh. In other words, civilisation.

Sobriety isn’t worth it

00:00 04:03

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

Absolutely nobody feels better at the end of Dry January. Mornings are still a struggle, you’re as tired as ever, and if anything the neurotic voice in your head is even louder. Yes, you may have gone to the gym every Sunday, but how has your life improved? It hasn’t.

My own Dry January was forced on me by antibiotics. Though the NHS guidelines said the pills are alcohol compatible, my doctor (who has a record of my alcohol intake) took the liberty of writing ‘NO alcohol’ followed by five exclamation marks. This has allowed me to experience sobriety firsthand.

The main findings from my time on the wagon were pretty depressing: the low level of simmering anxiety that starts when you take your first tentative steps into the pub and subsides approximately a quarter of the way into your first pint just persists for the entirety of a sober night. You don’t need booze to have fun, but it certainly helps.

Sobriety is an unhappy and anxiety-inducing state, but even so the puritans are winning. This month more people seem to be going sober than ever: 200,000 is Alcohol Change UK’s target. Most of my friends have swapped the bottle for some over-sugared elderflower cordial. A mate’s tech company opted for a spinning class instead of a Christmas party. And worryingly for those of us not joining in, none of them seems to be cracking under peer pressure.

One alcohol charity offers a ‘toolkit’ for how to succeed as someone newly sober in the corporate world. The tips include ‘before a work event or party, let the organisers know you don’t drink’. So can we soon expect ‘alcohol-free’ to appear in our colleagues’ email signatures right next to ‘he/him’? Later the toolkit recommends sharing non-alcoholic drink recommendations with colleagues to ‘help boost your self assurance’.

These non-alcoholic drinks are getting weirder too if my local supermarket is anything to go by. If it isn’t elderflower-based, then there’s a whole range of CBD (cannabis) drinks. The latter seem particularly popular with the newly teetotal brigade, which is odd given that most people don’t associate cannabis with sobriety.

Drinking has become a battleground in the culture wars. Over Christmas, the organisers of a community bonfire night were criticised for encouraging firework-watchers to gather in a pub after the event. This ‘excluded’ people, according to the complainant. Other members of the booze police joined in and called for community groups not to use venues that serve alcohol at all. Goodbye pub Britain. 

I wouldn’t argue that problem drinking should go unaddressed. Alcohol deaths in the UK hit a record high in 2021 – the last year we have complete figures for. So recognising when one has a genuine problem and cutting back is to be lauded. Quietly. 

It’s the people whose personality becomes defined by not drinking who get my goat. These reverse pub bores can be split into three types: the ‘healthy’ drug addict who seems to engage in every vice but considers themselves a fitness freak because they would never touch a pale ale; the sober chronicler who, presumably because being sober is so bloody boring, takes great joy in recording every embarrassing thing said or done on a night out so that the next day they can regale their friends in their most hangxious state. And then there are the creeps: the ones who have never drunk because they ‘don’t like being out of control’. It’s as if they know a psychopathic monster lurks beneath their sober self just waiting to be unleashed by Bacardi and coke.

Being alcohol-free is just the latest in an increasingly long list of possible identities. It now seems compulsory for those of us in our twenties and thirties to identify our problems – and then announce to the world we’ll be addressing them. But abstinence could be doing more harm than good. Countless studies warn of the mental afflictions facing the youth of today. Poor resilience and impossible to meet lifestyle goals equal a whole load of stress. Might we all be a bit happier if we restricted ourselves less, and just had a drink?

Only 11 Tories vote against Rwanda Bill

As expected, the Commons has backed the Safety of Rwanda Bill at third reading by 320 votes to 276. Just 11 Tory MPs voted against, with the full list below. This afternoon, the noise from the rebels became rather more muffled, with the ‘five families’ of right-wing backbenchers announcing that the majority would be supporting it. The final attempt from former immigration minister Robert Jenrick to toughen the Bill up failed, which was expected too, but 61 Tory MPs did still rebel on his amendment, which aimed to block so-called ‘pyjama injunctions’ from European judges. 

In the debate, James Cleverly took care to reassure both sides that the Bill was what they were after. He told the Tory MP Tobias Ellwood that, ‘as drafted, as we intend this Bill to progress, it will comply completely with international law’. He immediately received a complaint from backbencher Bill Cash about this, who wanted more. Cash later said he would be voting against the Bill, saying ‘I don’t believe – to use the Home Secretary’s own words – that this is the toughest immigration legislation that we could produce, nor do I think we’ve done whatever it takes.’

From the rebel side, there wasn’t that much noise, because there were hardly any rebels left. Danny Kruger congratulated the whips on enjoying more success with his colleagues than he had, and said he understood why Tory MPs didn’t want to create the kind of political disruption that a government defeat would create. He added that the party was ‘united’ in its desire to stop the boats.

It hasn’t been a particularly bad-tempered debate today, either, despite the eternal mood in the Tory party. The main points of tension in the lengthy discussions over the course of the afternoon came when Labour’s Stella Creasy clashed with a number of Tories, including Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger, over what a foreign court is and what Churchill would have done, and when the Speaker pointed out how many members weren’t even bothering to stay to hear the end of speeches they had intervened on. Other than that, the impassioned warnings from Braverman and Kruger about the Bill not working were heard by a half-empty chamber.

They will continue to make that point even once the legislation is enacted, telling anyone who will listen that they did warn that this bill would not stop the boats after all. For those MPs who did rebel, the disruption that a revolt causes the prime minister is the point, because they think he is the electoral liability, not the legislation that Labour repeatedly branded a ‘farce’. 

Suella Braverman

Bill Cash

Miriam Cates

Simon Clarke

Sarah Dines

James Duddridge

Mark Francois

Andrea Jenkyns

Robert Jenrick

David Jones

Danny Kruger

Rwanda rebels fold to guarantee Sunak victory

The Rwanda Bill will tonight pass its Third Reading in the House of Commons, after right-wing rebels threw in the towel. Speaking after a meeting of the so-called ‘five families’, rebel sources confirmed that a majority of members from the European Research Group (ERG) and Common Sense Group (CSG) will be voting with the government tonight. A minority are expected to vote against the legislation on principle. Estimates for the number of Tories who are likely to oppose the government on its flagship legislation are in the region of 10 MPs; rather than the 30-odd which would be put the legislation at risk of a humiliating defeat.

Around 40 Conservative MPs attended the meeting tonight, with Jacob Rees-Mogg among those to subsequently confirm that they will be voting with the government later this evening. There was disquiet at some of the alleged threats used to entice MPs from the 2019 intake to vote in line with the government tonight. But for the Whips’ Office, the passage of the Safety of Rwanda Bill at Third Reading in the Commons will be a significant triumph. It is the third time they have managed to overcome vocal opposition from the ERG, following the Bill’s Second Reading and the Windsor Framework vote last year. Attention now turns to the Lords, where the government does not command a majority. For Rishi Sunak and his allies, it will be a satisfying end to a very long day.

Rishi Sunak’s nightmare PMQs

Wow. For Rishi fans, that was one to forget. The Tory leader lacked his usual fluency and focus at PMQs today. Instead of a hungry whippet leaping out of the traps, we watched a fretful hare being chased around the circuit.

Rishi’s sub-par effort coincided with a rare display of competence from Sir Keir Starmer who, for once, used clever tactics at the despatch box. He cooked up a difficult to answer question and asked it again and again. Why doesn’t he do that every week? Rishi kept parroting the same non-answers which made him look feeble. The issue was Rwanda, and Sir Keir accused the government of ‘losing contact with 85 per cent of the 5,000 people earmarked for removal… Has he found them yet?’ he asked.

Unprepared, Rishi flannelled and flubbered in general terms about large numbers of migrants arrested, bank accounts closed, claims processed at record rates. All irrelevant. Sir Keir went back to the disappearing deportees.

‘How do you lose 4,250 people?’ he said, translating his ‘85 per cent’ into a specific figure as a warning to Rishi that he’s not the only maths genius in the house.

Sir Keir then mentioned a handful of other Tory follies such as Rishi’s fruitless tiff with Greece over the Elgin Marbles and the HS2 money furnace. The bonfire has been scrapped and yet ‘the costs are still rising,’ said Sir Keir. And he returned to the unresolved question. ‘These 4,250 people the government have lost. Where are they?’

Dodging and shimmying, Rishi quoted an interview in which Sir Keir had vowed to scrap the Rwanda scheme even if it works. ‘He doesn’t have a plan. It’s back to square one,’ he cried.

‘That’s not a plan, it’s a farce,’ said Sir Keir. And he continued to pummel the bruise. ‘He’s dodged it three times. Where are they?’

By now Rishi was talking with all the conviction of a menswear dummy. ‘I’m happy to go over it for him again,’ he pleaded. Sir Keir duly swung at him again.

‘I’ll tell you one place they aren’t – Rwanda,’ he said. ‘The only people he’s sent to Rwanda are cabinet ministers.’

Eruptions of laughter greeted that quip. If mockery won votes, this was a landslide. Rishi tried to praise his Rwanda Bill amidst the hubbub by quoting legal experts. ‘Lord Wolfson,’ he shouted. ‘And four eminent KCs say it is undoubtedly the most robust piece of immigration legislation that…’

The Speaker stood up to quell the hurricane.

‘I want to hear what the Prime Minister has to say,’ he said. This plea only added to the laughter from the Labour benches. Rishi has never lost the house like this before. He soldiered on, repeating himself.

‘Four eminent KCs…’ he began.

‘Four!?’ jeered sarky Labour members. Sir Keir fired back derisively. ‘Absolutely pathetic nonsense.’

Rishi now laid on the ambush that he’d probably hoped to spring earlier. Flourishing a legal volume penned by Sir Keir, he read out the title but the Speaker was already on his feet. Rishi didn’t notice and he continued making his point. Oh dear.

‘Prime Minister, when I stand up, please sit down,’ said the Speaker in a fatigued voice. ‘And can I just say, we don’t use props in this house.’

It was a moment Rishi will relive forever in his nightmares. Slapped down twice by the Speaker in a single sentence.

His ambush was now devoid of firepower – even though it had merit. Rishi told the house that Sir Keir had lobbied against a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir and had earned specific praise from their spin doctors. ‘Our legal team, led by Sir Keir Starmer,’ boasted the revolutionaries. Having laid out this information, Rishi delivered his punchline.

‘When I see a group chanting “jihad” on our streets, I ban them. He invoices them.’

Good point. Decent soundbite. But lost today.

Watch: Braverman schools Stella Creasy on Nato

Oh dear. It seems that the right-on Member for Walthamstow is wrong again. Watching the Rwanda Bill debate this afternoon, Mr S was struck by an exchange between Stella Creasy and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. The latter was in full flow, decrying the indignities of Westminster’s subservience to Strasbourg’s judges when Creasy rose to intervene.

Braverman duly paused her remarks on the importance of respecting the 2016 referendum result to graciously give way. So, what was the point that Creasy urgently needed to make? That, er, the ECHR was just like the defence alliance Nato:

I just wonder if she could clarify, because she’s got a concern there about a “foreign court”. What does she think Nato is?

Many spectres have loomed large in the past two days of debate but the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has certainly not been one of them. It was left to Braverman to point out the obvious: ‘Nato is not a court, I’m slightly embarrassed that I have to make that clear to the Honourable Lady’ before adding the kicker ‘That’s really elementary politics.’

Perhaps Creasy ought to pick up a copy of Sir Keir’s book on European law…

Is the SNP changing its tune on free university places?

The SNP’s much trumpeted policy of free university tuition allows ‘radicals’ to indulge their fantasies of Scotland as a fair and compassionate country. Nationalist politicians sell the scheme as a way of opening up higher education to those who might previously have been priced out of post-school study. The reality is that the wealthiest are the scheme’s big winners: a higher proportion of children from better off backgrounds go on to university.

Is the SNP now having a long overdue rethink? Appearing before Holyrood’s finance committee on Tuesday, deputy first minister and finance secretary Shona Robison said 1,200 spaces for Scottish students would not be funded next year. When Labour MSP Michael Marra pointed out that a proposed £28.5 million budget cut would be the equivalent of a reduction of about 3,800 student places, Robison conceded that the number of student places cut might be higher than the figure she presented to MSPs.

Before the SNP won 2007’s Holyrood election, Scottish students were spared up-front charges for tuition and then, after graduation, they were expected to pay an endowment. The nationalists abolished this back-door payment, making tuition truly free for the first time. Popular with voters, especially the middle class ones who expected their kids to go to university, the policy was hailed by the SNP as a game-changer in terms of opening up access to young people from poorer backgrounds.

But the detail of the policy revealed its many flaws. In order to fund all this free tuition, universities had to ensure they had enough spaces for students from outside Scotland who would pay full bung. And in order to make room for these cash cow students, universities had to put a limit on the number of spaces available to Scottish students. 

As a result, a Scottish school leaver with five Highers at grade A, who once would have likely had their choice of university, is no longer guaranteed a place. A presumption within the system towards widening access to higher education for those from often poorer-performing school in deprived areas puts an extra squeeze on the middle-class families who love this policy until their kid can’t get into Glasgow to do medicine.

There have been fears in educational circles about the sustainability of the free tuition policy for some time now (I wrote about such concerns for Scotland on Sunday back in August 2015) but ministers have adopted the traditional SNP approach of burying their heads in the sand. The upshot of this inaction is that thousands of university places for Scottish students are now under threat.

Each year, over 30,000 new Scottish students enter university. Across the academic years, more than 120,000 students – resident in Scotland when applying to study – pay no tuition fees. But funding of what the Scottish government describes as ‘core teaching activities’ has been cut by six per cent and ministers have been advised to look at further cuts to the number of university places for Scots.

Just like the extension of the provision of free prescriptions to include the wealthiest, the free tuition fees policy is decorated to look like a bold act of social democracy but designed to win the support of those who truly benefit: the better off. Free tuition has been central to the SNP’s message for two decades but as the policy falls apart and it locks increasing numbers of bright Scottish teenagers out of university education, will the nationalists have the courage to admit it’s time for a rethink?

Sunak and Starmer can’t help but trade identical insults

Another week, another Prime Minister’s Questions featuring the two party leaders trading exactly the same insult: you don’t believe in anything. Keir Starmer wanted to argue that Rishi Sunak didn’t believe in his own Rwanda policy, while the Prime Minister tried to claim that the Labour leader would say anything to get what he needed at any given moment in time.

Starmer entered the chamber with the upper hand, given the turmoil in the Tory party over Rwanda. He maintained it throughout the session, painting the Rwanda policy as ridiculous and inviting MPs to laugh at the Prime Minister as often as possible. He labelled the deportation policy a ‘farce’, and opened with a jokey question about whether the government had found the 4,250 asylum seekers who had disappeared. ‘Has he found them yet?’ he asked, to laughter.

Sunak responded that ‘in spite of him blocking every single attempt that we have taken’, the government’s plan on immigration was working. ‘On this side of the House, we want to stop the boats. We have a plan, it’s working and under him we would just go back to square one.’ That last sentence is Sunak’s (current) election pitch: we’ll finish the job while Labour would take us back to square one.

It scarcely needed Starmer to point out that Sunak hadn’t answered the question, but he did anyway in order to make the story bigger. ‘My first thought is: how do you actually lose 4,250 people?’ He listed other examples of what he saw as being government incompetence, including HS2 spending and the row over the Elgin marbles. ‘Of course this farce of a government could lose the people it was planning to remove! He didn’t answer the questions, so I’ll ask him again. Where are the 4,250 people that the government has lost? Where are they?’

Sunak responded that the government had ‘actually identified and removed over 20,000 people’. That still wasn’t an answer, but Sunak decided to move on to defending his Rwanda policy overall. ‘He doesn’t actually care about solving this problem,’ he added, pointing to Starmer’s insistence that he would reverse the Rwanda policy even if small boat crossings fell.

The Labour leader repeated the ‘farce’ line, and offered more details of the way the Rwanda policy wasn’t working and didn’t make any sense. Then he asked the same question again, labouring heavily over the ‘4,250 people’. ‘It’s the same thing again and again!’ retorted Sunak, who insisted once again that the numbers of people coming here had fallen and that Starmer would still scrap the plan. ‘It’s because he has no values, no conviction and no plan. It is back to square one!’

Starmer kept going. ‘He hasn’t got a clue where they are, has he? I can tell you one place they aren’t – and that’s Rwanda! The only people he sends to Rwanda are cabinet ministers.’ Labour MPs laughed theatrically as he made these points. He then described ‘hundreds of bald men scrapping over a single comb’ in the Conservative party as he claimed Sunak didn’t believe in the Rwanda policy anyway. 

Sunak had come ready for that accusation, given it was levelled at him last week too. He produced a book on European human rights law written by Starmer, saying it showed he was more interested ‘in lefty lawyers’ because he had written a textbook for them. The Speaker then objected to him using props in the house. Starmer dismissed it as ‘pathetic nonsense’. It looked rather like the printout of the book cover that Sunak had produced: a bit thin. 

Sunak had another go on the inconsistency point, claiming that while Starmer had called for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be proscribed, he had ‘personally used the European Court of Human Rights to try and stop them being banned’. He didn’t wave the press release that he quoted, but it was from the extremist group. ‘When I see a group chanting jihad on our streets, I ban them, he invoices them!’

Often when voters complain that politicians are all the same, it’s because they’re not paying attention to the vast policy differences between the parties. Today, those who did tune in will have left with the conclusion that they really are identical, both in their flaws and their insults.

Iran’s attack on Pakistan shows how close the Middle East is to war

Iranian airstrikes on ‘militant bases’ in neighbouring Pakistan signal a dangerous and worrying escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. Details of what unfolded remain sketchy, but Iranian media reported that the strikes were aimed at the bases of a Sunni militant group, Jaish al-Adl. The missiles and drones landed in the Balochistan province, which lies along the 600-mile border between the two countries. Both countries have long bickered over the activities of Baloch separatists and other militant groups in the border region.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said two children were killed and three others were injured. The Pakistani authorities condemned Iran for an ‘unprovoked violation of its airspace’, and warned of retaliation.

The Iranian action came as something of a surprise because only yesterday Iran’s foreign minister and Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister met for talks on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland. What could they have discussed? What is abundantly clear is that the already delicate relationship between the two countries is now teetering on the brink.

Tehran’s military action has no direct or obvious connection with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, but it will do nothing to ease fears that the Middle East is slowly succumbing to a wider and much more unpredictable conflict. 

The timing of the latest Iranian attacks could not be worse, coming just a day after Tehran launched missiles against Syria and Iraq. The Iranian regime claims it targeted Islamic State bases in northern Syria, and an ‘Israeli espionage headquarters’ in Erbil in northern Iraq.

It all points to unprecedented levels of tension and mutual suspicion throughout the wider Middle East. All it would take is one misunderstanding or false move to spark all-out war: Lebanon, the Red Sea, Yemen, Iraq and Syria have all become spillover conflict zones from the Gaza war. Houthi rebels have launched attacks on Red Sea shipping — absurdly justified as acts of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. This has resulted in US and allied air strikes aimed at Houthi positions in  Yemen. The Biden administration is expected any day now to declare the Houthis ‘specially designated global terrorists’. Elsewhere, Hezbollah forces in Lebanon have launched rockets  into northern Israel and the Israelis have struck back at southern Lebanon. New flashpoints are developing almost daily

The epicentre of the forces fuelling unrest and instability across the wider Middle East lies in Tehran. The regime is careful to avoid any direct confrontation with the United States but is willing to press its proxy forces into action when it suits. It provides crucial support to Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The mullahs have two aims. Firstly, to sow unrest and strike at Iran’s enemies across the region and beyond. Secondly, to use the regional instability to reinforce their hold on power back home. The regime wants to create the impression that the country is under growing threat from a range of sinister forces and is engaged in a war to the death for the nation’s very survival. It is a conflict that demands loyalty from ordinary Iranians, or so the rulers would have their people believe.

The regime’s forty-year long grip on power is facing unprecedented challenges. The country’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei is 84 and increasingly frail. The eventual battle for succession – whenever it comes – will involve a bitter internal power struggle. The nationwide protests against the regime that erupted last year have been ruthlessly crushed but the grievances of ordinary Iranians have not gone away.

Unrest is never far from the surface. The bomb attack earlier this month on the city of Kerman – which left more than eighty people dead and scores more injured – shook the regime to the core, leaving the ruling elite keen to shore up its power and lash out at perceived enemies.

When the mullahs are at their most vulnerable they resort to the tried and trusted theme of an Iran under siege, most often in the form of the great ‘Satan’ America and its allies. Turmoil and instability across the Middle East suits Iran, helping to deflect from the growing problems at home.   

Would King William really break with the Church of England?

The Royal Family may have hoped that 2024 would begin in a quieter fashion than last year did, but if so, they must be disappointed. Once again, the reason for their unease is a revelatory book, this time Robert Hardman’s new biography Charles III: The Inside Story.

First came the disclosure that the Queen was incensed by Harry and Meghan naming their daughter Lilibet. Today’s story is that Prince William – not a man noted for his interest in ecclesiastical matters, it must be said – is considering breaking with the Church of England when he becomes monarch.

Once, this story would have been truly jaw-dropping in its implications. But it says much about our secular society that the book’s publicists did not consider it as noteworthy as the Harry and Meghan brouhaha. Nonetheless, the details are fascinating.

Hardman writes that ‘in royal circles, it is no secret that [William] does not share the King’s sense of the spiritual, let alone the late Queen’s unshakeable devotion to the Anglican church’. That old redoubtable, ‘a senior Palace figure’, is quoted as saying, ‘His father is very spiritual and happy to talk about faith but the prince is not. He doesn’t go to church every Sunday, but then nor do the large majority of the country. He might go at Christmas and Easter but that’s it. He very much respects the institutions but he is not instinctively comfortable in a faith environment.’

William, a 41 year old man, is thought to be one of life’s casual Christians at best. He attends church at Easter, Christmas and for ceremonial occasions, such as the annual carol concert at Westminster Abbey in December. But few have ever regarded him as having the deep religious faith of either his father or grandmother.

In fact, the member of the Royal Family that he most closely resembles in this regard – although, thankfully, in few others – is Edward VIII. His blithely godless demeanour led the then Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang to sigh that, ‘It was clear that he knows little and, I fear, cares little about the Church and its affairs’. Lang worried that, when his time came to crown Edward, performing the ceremony would be almost immoral. Lang complained that ‘as the months passed and his relations with Mrs Simpson became more notorious, the thought of my having to consecrate him as King weighed on me as a heavy burden. Indeed, I considered whether I could bring myself to do so.’

There is little such danger of Justin Welby, or his successor, having a similar crisis of conscience when it comes to the future King William. And, fascinating though the revelations in Hardman’s book undoubtedly are, they remain the tittle-tattle of anonymous and gossipy sources, rather than a public statement.

It seems incredible that the new monarch would ever wish to disassociate the Royal Family from the institution of the church. Yet just as King Charles has tried to be a moderniser, so it seems that his son might bring about such innovations as making his coronation service ‘less spiritual’ and ‘more discreet’, as well as a great deal shorter. For those of us who found aspects of last year’s event ridiculous – one thinks immediately of the stern-faced Penny Mordaunt, sword proudly held aloft – this would not be an unwelcome development.

Still, at a time when the Church of England is struggling to connect with the average citizen of this country perhaps more than ever – the recent revelations about one of its clergy, Paula Vennells, have certainly not helped its PR in this regard – stories about William’s general disinterest in religion will certainly be unwelcome. But who knows, perhaps his younger brother will yet develop a keen fascination in the more evangelical aspects of American Christianity and attempt to import it to his home country. Stranger things have happened.

Watch: Rishi goes for Keir on his legal record

A feisty edition of PMQs today, following the drama in the House yesterday evening. As predicted, Sir Keir Starmer opted to lead on Tory disunity over the Rwanda plan. He likened the Conservatives to ‘hundreds of bald men scrapping over a single broken comb’ before turning to reports that Rishi Sunak wanted to scrap the scheme when he was Chancellor. ‘Doesn’t he wish he’d had the courage to stick to his guns?’ he jibed. But Sunak hit back strongly, raising Sir Keir’s legal record and work defending the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir which was banned by James Cleverly on Monday.

Mr Speaker, it is rich to hear from the Honourable Gentleman about belief in something. And it will be news to him, it is actually the case that you can believe in something and stick to that position on this side of the House. Just this week Mr Speaker, we had another example of the Honourable Gentleman saying one thing and doing another because this week he backed the Home Secretary in banning the terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, despite him personally using the European Court of Human Rights to try and stop them being banned. And don’t take my word for it, Mr Speaker, the extremists’ own press release said, and I quote, ‘The Hizb ut-Tahrir legal team led by Keir Starmer’. Now I know he doesn’t like talking about them because they’ve been a client but when I see a group chanting ‘Jihad!’ on our streets, I ban them – he invoices them.

The subsequent Tory cheers said it all. You can watch the clip below here:

Joining Reform may be a smart move for Lee Anderson

Richard Tice of Reform may not be the most charismatic party leader, but he has impeccable timing. The ink was hardly dry on Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith’s joint resignation letter following their support for Robert Jenrick’s amendments to the Rwanda Bill, before he openly propositioned them to defect.

Predictably Anderson told Christopher Hope straight away on GB News that he was not for turning. But things can change fast in politics. The idea that at least some of the New Conservatives should jump ship actually makes more sense than you might think, whether you look at things from the point of view of the people concerned, the Tory party or the country as a whole.

The first point is an obvious one: the Conservatives’ current dire poll results reflect no love for Labour. Rumour has it that substantial numbers of voters in the midlands and north would struggle even to name the opposition leader. For those who know who he is, Keir Starmer’s wooden presentation and inability to answer embarrassing questions convincingly makes even Liz Truss look charismatic by comparison. Rather, what we have is a feeling that the Tories and Labour are probably about as bad as each other, but that at least the latter might be a bit more competent.

In Red Wall seats, this point matters. Whatever the official Tory line, the outspoken views of the New Conservatives who sit for them actually do tend to chime very neatly with those of their constituents. In Lee Anderson’s own Nottinghamshire seat, for example, it seems some 55 per cent support his hard line on immigration as expressed on Monday night.

What will hold the incumbents back in such places is nothing personal, but rather their association with the administration of the last 13 years. Almost universally the Tory party is now seen as ineffectual on the things that matter and obsessed with irrelevancies such as human rights or Net Zero. Were MPs to cut this link and represent a new party on a pragmatic ticket of promoting the actual concerns of their constituents, large numbers could well back them rather than falling back on Labour as the least worst option. In short, were these MPs to join Reform, this would become a very serious headache indeed for Labour.

Secondly, such an event would ultimately benefit the Conservative party by forcing it to face the future. One can see why, after his election as party leader in 2005, David Cameron deliberately wooed the comfortable high-tax, high-spending, socially-liberal establishment who had previously leant towards Labour and the Lib Dems. It was this that helped power the victories of 2010 and 2015.

But Cameron’s centrist move was ultimately short-sighted. It held back political innovation and alienated many traditional Conservative voters. While it may have worked when times were relatively easy, it spelt trouble when adversity appeared in the form of Brexit, and later Covid and the post-2019 economic difficulties.

This week too, many of Rishi’s problems have stemmed from the power of so-called One Nation Tories of this kind. They prefer not to rock the establishment boat and regard a scrupulous adherence to their view of international law and human rights as frankly more important than any attempt to give voters what they want on issues such as irregular migration. If it takes the loss of a number of previously loyal but now exasperated MPs to show that the party needs to deal with this problem rather than trying to be kind, centrist and uncontroversial, this can only be a good thing.

Were ex-Tories to actually win seats for Reform there would be at least two big benefits for the country. One is that fewer voters would feel politically homeless. Many with socially conservative views, whether on migration, education, the culture wars or a myriad of other issues, have up until now tended to vote Tory for lack of anywhere else to go. This time, faced with a Conservative party becoming increasingly unconservative and a Labour party that stands for very little at all, they will very likely stay at home and let the latter in by default. A party with an original conservative agenda but none of the baggage of the Conservatives would give them, and one suspects also a number of Labour voters, a much more comfortable home.

The second benefit is connected. Labour may well win by default this year. But the result is likely to be an unwholesome combination of increased tax and uncontrolled spending, increased trade union power, more restrictions on speech in the form of hate crime laws and more stifling equality laws. No-one wants this, but people like this inept and increasingly fractious Tory party even less. An alternative party that was anti-Labour and would oppose such measures might have very distinct attractions.

It probably would not be enough to prevent a Labour win this time around. But, in comparison to a humiliated and largely ineffectual Conservative opposition desperately looking for ways to make itself less unpopular and more relevant, it would do a much better job at making life more difficult for a Labour government. If you like that idea, you should be discreetly rooting for Reform and gently whispering to any Conservative MP you may know.

Cabinet Office turn the tables on Chris Bryant

When he’s not grovelling to the House for his latest error, there’s nothing that Chris Bryant likes more than a bit of Tory-bashing. Whether it’s popping up in parliament or firing off posts on his ever-active Twitter account, few Members bill themselves as being better at holding ministers’ feet to the fire than our Sir Chris. Lately, the chosen choice of weapon for the Rhondda rabble-rouser is the time-honoured favourite of the written question.

Bryant marked the new year by firing off one such inquiry to the Cabinet Office, the ministry known as the ‘thinking brain’ of government. His query concerned the status of one Dominic Cummings, back in the spotlight after his Sunday Times interview in which he disclosed details of private talks with Rishi Sunak. A fortnight after that interview, Bryant duly tabled his question, demanding to know details of all government meetings with Cummings throughout the past, er, 24 months.

Responsibility for the rejoinder fell to Tory MP Alex Burghart who, as Minister for Implementation, is the real-life equivalent of Yes Minister’s Jim Hacker in the Department of Administrative Affairs. And Sir Humphrey himself would be proud of Burghart’s reply. It cooly noted that long-standing Whitehall practice is to publish only details of official meetings with external organisations and senior media executives. It then turned the tables on Bryant’s party by noting drily that:

I would observe that since 2016, the Labour Party has stopped publishing its own meeting data on shadow frontbench meetings with senior media executives, breaking a commitment made by the then Labour Party leader (the Rt Hon Member for Doncaster North) during the Leveson Inquiry. The Hon. Member may recall how previous data illustrated his engagement with Evgeny Lebedev (now Lord Lebedev). As a shadow DCMS spokesman, the Hon. Member may wish to raise this subsequent shyness with his Opposition colleagues.

A particular embarrassment for Bryant, given his posturing on Russia. Still, at least it gives the shadow cabinet something to discuss at their next meeting…

The endless narcissism of Emmanuel Macron

I watched Emmanuel Macron’s prime time press conference last night but I wish I hadn’t. It was meant to be Macron’s relaunch of his presidency after a tough period of soaring prices, international and civil disorder, Europe in turmoil and awful polls. I should have known better than to stay up past my usual bedtime. Mr Macron is a president who delights in his own words yet is entirely unaware of his soporific effect on others. These were two and a half hours of my life I will never recover. 

This was Macron’s first press conference since 2019 so there was a lot to ask him but the questions were perfunctory and the journalists were accessories. This was Macron en continu, Jupiter hurling thunderbolts of statistics, claims, promises and revelations from the gilded Olympus of the Salle des Fêtes at the Elysée Palace, whose ostentation makes Buckingham Palace seem a slum.

Of course this wasn’t really a press conference. It was theatre. A one-man show where there was no director to tell the principal to shut up. The hacks were decorative and their questions merely a cue for further lengthy exegesis. At no stage did a journalist launch anything resembling a challenge. There are no Laura Kuenssbergs or Andrew Neils in the Elysée press corps.

Equally ornamental, members of his odd new government flanked the stage, feigning rapt attention. Gabriel Attal, the new prime minister, openly gay and at 34 the youngest ever fifth republic premier, had a fabulous hair cut. They were present to nod, sitting at the feet of the president, as disposable as a mouchoir. 

Macron was a keen high school drama student – indeed he married his teacher Brigitte. He also projects something of a divine right. His monologue was a ‘presidential cathodic high mass’, according to Politico. Credit where due, however. The president of the republic demonstrated a stamina that was simply exhausting to watch.

There are stories around that Macron was low and depressed last spring after he failed to get a legislative majority at the National Assembly elections. But last night he was at the hyper end of the manic-depressive spectrum. Indefatigable it might have been but not clearly signifying anything other than Macron’s love of declamation.

He declared his exegesis to be an account of ‘Where we’ve come from (and) where we’re going,’ but by the end of this long night in Paris, those still awake would not have been much enlightened. ‘Bla bla,’ declared the left. ‘Interminable,’ said Marine Le Pen. ‘I wish I was dead,’ declared a despairing colleague on a WhatsApp group, and this was at minute 55.

Media coverage this morning is predictable with lots of stenography and ‘What you need to know’ pieces in the groupthink media. And the president provided plenty of fodder. School discipline? Children will undergo civil education and sing the ‘Marseillaise’ every morning and the state will experiment with school uniforms. Infertility? Macron will pay couples more to have babies. Taxes? They will get lower. The cost of living? The worst is over and thanks to government efforts to cushion consumers from high energy prices, spending power has increased.

None of this will resonate much with the voters who are in an angry mood, believe none of this and who continue to put pouvoir d’achat (purchasing power) at the very top of their concerns, followed by law and order. Paris has always been another country but Macron now seems to be inhabiting another universe bounded by only the eighth arrondissement.

A paradox of the evening was that despite its heroic duration, so much was left untouched.

Macron’s failure after his presidential election to win a legislative majority in the National Assembly has made it impossible for his government to pass legislation other than by decree. But this recently changed on the new tougher immigration law, in which Macron did a deal for the Assembly votes of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. So what’s that about Mr Macron? Doing deals with the devil? This was not a subject that interested the journalists hand-picked to ask questions.

The crisis in Africa where the French have been humiliated? Not mentioned. The likely forthcoming wipe-out of the president’s party in the May European elections? Ignored.

It is a curiosity of political journalism on the two sides of the Channel that Westminster hacks take pleasure in eviscerating politicians, while their counterparts in Paris are pathetic poodles. The most painful and embarrassing element of this so-called press conference was the performance of the journalists. 

There is an element to Macron reminiscent of the story of the emperor’s new clothes. The president just talks and talks, indulging himself in narcissistic flights of fancy. Everyone pretends to pay attention. The journalists furiously scribble notes. But there’s no little boy to point out that his performance was simply weird and disconnected. 

What does this tell us about Macron? Well, he loves the sound of his own voice. He has absolute self-belief that he’s the smartest guy in the room. And he believes that just saying something is tantamount to doing something. He imagines he is a master communicator. He has certainly mastered the harangue.

Watch: Immigration minister stumped by Kay Burley’s sports question

Immigration minister Michael Tomlinson is a KC so is good at thinking on his feet – or so you might expect. But this morning the Tory MP was caught out when it came to what should have been a straightforward question: what does he watch on TV?

‘I watch very little,’ Tomlinson told Sky News’s Kay Burley, when asked whether he has seen the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs. the Post Office. ‘I’m not sure I can tell you the last box set I watched, but I do enjoy watching sport so if you want to ask me about cricket and sport, then please do.’

Absolute CAR CRASH interview with immigration minister Tomlinson (more of it in a bit), ends with this perfect gem: Burley having established he hadn't watched the ITV drama on #PostOfficeScandal asks him what he does watch.

What follows is straight out of The Thick of It. ~AA pic.twitter.com/2BfJyQ1fUk

— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) January 17, 2024

But when Burley asked Tomlinson who his favourite football team is, he was somewhat stumped:

‘I don’t really have a football team…it would be wrong to tell you that I have a football team. I’ve been to Bournemouth, I’ve been to various other grounds but I don’t have a specific football team’.

Just the sort of answer you’d expect from a self-confessed sports fan…

Rising inflation makes a speedy interest rate cut less likely

Inflation rose to 4 per cent on the year to December, up slightly from 3.9 per cent the previous month. It’s the first time the inflation rate has increased for almost a year – an unexpected uptick, as the consensus was for the rate to slow once more, down to 3.8 per cent. 

This is not the update politicians and central bankers were hoping for, but as far as monthly data goes, it’s not the end of the world either. The inflation rate doesn’t come down in a straight line, as evidenced already in the UK’s battle to get prices under control. The jump up to 4 per cent on the year in November seems to have largely been driven by an increase in alcohol and tobacco prices, while prices that have caused some of the most pain and grievances – like food and nonalcoholic beverages – accounted for the biggest ‘downward contributions’. These slowed from 9.2 per cent on the year in November to 8 per cent in December. 

December’s rate is still notably below where the Bank of England last predicted inflation would be at that point. The Bank’s forecast estimated the inflation rate at 4.5 per cent by the end of the year; where it landed, at 4 per cent, was not predicted to be achieved until this spring.

So what does today’s update mean for the prospect of an interest rate cut? UK two-year gilts jumped this morning in light of the inflation news, as the prospect of interest rate cuts happening sooner rather than later were dampened. The concern is that external events – like the disruption to commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which makes up 15 per cent of global seaborne trade – could produce more volatile inflation figures in the coming months. Expectation is rising that the inflation rate may pick up slightly again in January, reflecting the delays to shipping, before it starts to slow again in the lead-up to April when Ofgem lowers the Energy Price Cap and last year’s higher prices fall out of the calculation. 

Independent forecasters including Oxford Economics and Deutsche Bank have been predicting a much faster return to target than is currently expected by the Bank (something closer to the second quarter this year, rather than the start of next year). Capital Economics reports this morning that despite the ‘disappointing’ rise in December, it is still predicting inflation returns to 2 per cent this spring, which should enable rate cuts to start earlier than the Bank has been indicating. 

But having already taken so many hits to its reputation by failing to get inflation under control in 2021, the Bank is going to want to be certain about its inflation data before it looks to cut the base rate. This morning’s news makes it less likely that we’ll get any such update from the Bank when the Monetary Policy Committee meets in February or March.

In praise of Labour’s Dame Jackie Baillie

In an age of nepotistic knighthoods, dodgy peerages and now even returned CBEs, it is easy to understand the general cynicism around the honours system. Too often it is used to reward politicians for failure rather than success, loyalty rather than achievement, and party rather than principle. None of that, however, applies to Jackie Baillie, who will today officially become the first sitting MSP to be invested as a Dame at a ceremony at Holyrood Palace. 

The Scottish Labour member bestrides the devolution era like a colossus. Elected for her constituency of Dumbarton at the first Scottish parliament election in 1999, Dame Jackie has held it – much to the SNP’s chagrin – at every election since. This makes her the only non-nationalist to continuously hold the same seat over 25 years of devolution. Her reputation is so strong locally that at the 2021 election, even as Scottish Labour slumped to its worst result of the devolution era, she increased her majority by almost 1,400 votes, helping to deprive Nicola Sturgeon of her much-coveted SNP landslide in the process.

Such political longevity has – for better and worse – given Dame Jackie a ringside seat for Scottish Labour’s brief success and extended decline. Following Donald Dewar’s victory in the first Holyrood election in 1999, she rose to become Minister for Social Justice and founded a widely-respected homelessness taskforce, work that was included in her damehood citation. This was a period where the promise of devolution had yet to be tainted by questions of constitution and referenda, and Dame Jackie thrived in it.

It was during these heady early years that she also began to cement her reputation as a great parliamentary character. Often seen clad in a black cape, or driving her red Volkswagen Beetle, Baillie – who was born in British Hong Kong to a Scottish mother and Portuguese father – quickly became known for fixing opponents with a stern gaze over her trademark reading glasses, perched precariously at the tip of her nose.

Such flourishes were backed up by strong, but never aggressive, parliamentary performances, where she could engage with both passion and irreverence as the occasion demanded. As Alex Massie has put it, Dame Jackie ‘both loves to wind-up the SNP and is good at it’. Yet it was out of office that she would prove indispensable not only to party, but also to country. 

As Scottish Labour fell from triumph to tragedy, she became a ballast of moderation and prudence. A ruthless backroom organiser, Dame Jackie persuaded, browbeat and cajoled Labour colleagues into maintaining at least an outward semblance of professionalism during a decade of widespread and unproductive panic. It is indicative of the party’s turmoil after its first defeat in 2007 that she has twice had to serve as interim leader amid repeated leadership contests, in one instance in 2017 even having to replace a previous interim leader who was himself forced to resign.

Her greatest achievement in this period was keeping Labour as a party of the Union. Following its drubbing at the 2015 general election, there were increasingly loud calls – particularly from the left – for the party to drop its opposition to independence, support another referendum, or both. Such a move would have made Sturgeon’s task to break up the UK considerably easier – not least when Jeremy Corbyn was UK Labour leader – and it was Dame Jackie, almost through sheer force of personality alone, who stopped it happening. 

Similarly, despite being a great political survivor, she has never allowed party to trump principle. In particular, she has repeatedly spoken up in favour of the Trident nuclear deterrent, based at Faslane in her constituency, despite internal opposition in the Labour Party. As her damehood citation itself states, she has ‘not always taken politically convenient or comfortable positions, but instead has always put principle and the good of the country first’.

Dame Jackie’s staying power means that she is still in Holyrood to see the resurgence of the party she has served for 25 years, and the folly of those colleagues who demanded it must sell out to survive. Of course, the challenges facing a possible Labour administration after the next Holyrood election in 2026 will be immense. But the fact her party is once again in a position to beat the SNP is in no small measure down to Dame Jackie, who has rightly been recognised as a giant of the devolution era.