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

Home

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

Bridge | 21 October 2023

When do you concede a match? I was considering it when, after 56 boards, we were a vast 48 IMPs down in our Gold Cup semi-final with eight boards to go. Fortunately my team wouldn’t hear of it and in they went with my battle cry of ‘Believe you can do it’ echoing around the room, although to be honest I didn’t think we had a prayer.

How wrong I was! The last set (do I need to say I didn’t play?) had six boards that held the possibility of generating huge swings and generate they most certainly did.

My Norwegian killer pair had to find a way to beat 3 NT on this last board of the set (see diagram).

In the first room, Tom Townsend had received a Club lead against 4H which let the contract in.

The first hurdle was cleared when Thomas Charlsen as South avoided the Club lead and instead found the inspired ♦️7. This held the trick (!), and he continued with the King.

Had declarer realised what the hand looked like, he could have taken four rounds of Hearts, discarding Spades from dummy, and exited a Spade; North would have to give dummy a trick in one of the minors. Possibly affected by the onslaught he was facing, he instead took all his Hearts and threw the Diamonds from dummy. Thor Erik Hoftaniska in the North seat could breathe a sigh of relief; when declarer finally exited with a Spade, he was able to underlead in Diamonds to partner’s 10 for the vital Club switch. One off and the miracle was completed. 69-0 and a place in the final. Never in doubt!

There’s no doubt this horse is something special

Aidan O’Brien is a superb trainer. You name it: he has won it. The Derby nine times, the Irish Derby 15. The 2000 Guineas ten times, the Irish 2000 on a dozen occasions. This year he passed the worldwide total of 400 Group One or Grade One victories.

He is an innately modest man who always credits every member of his team and suggests the big decisions are made by ‘the Lads’ of the Coolmore operation, John Magnier, Michael Tabor, Derek Smith, et al. But that doesn’t mean Aidan cannot be extravagant in praising his winners, notably the progressive youngsters: the multi-billion dollar operation that is Coolmore is, after all, in the stallion-making business. Many have been praised along the way as the fastest he has trained, the most resolute, the most consistent.

But his language last Saturday after City of Troy won Newmarket’s Dewhurst Stakes on Future Champions Day was from a different lexicon. It was as if he was describing an animal arrived from outer space with something more than flesh and blood about his makeup. Labelling him unequivocally as the best two-year-old he has ever trained, Aiden said City of Troy hated the gluey ground ‘but the stride on him is incredible. He just never gets tired. I’ve never before seen a horse that doesn’t get tired. I’ve never had a horse we don’t know where the limit is. We push them to the limit but we can never find his limit’.

And it wasn’t just Aidan. The octogenarian ex-bookmaker Michael Tabor, a man who knows how to write a betting slip with plenty of noughts, said: ‘I know the way Aidan speaks but we’re all optimists. This horse is special – the real deal.’ Even jockey Ryan Moore, who would as soon be heard gushing about a horse’s potential as Jacob Rees-Mogg would be saying complimentary things about the BBC, agreed that the first time he had ridden City of Troy at The Curragh, ‘He did something a horse had never done to me before: I couldn’t stop him.’

It tends to be said about the Coolmore operation that while they have had many top-class horses, they have not yet had their own Frankel, the superstar unbeaten in 14 starts, so when Tabor says this could be the one, we have been warned. The bookies are offering no better than 10-1 for City of Troy to be the first since Nijinsky to win all three of the 2000 Guineas, the Derby and the St Leger, and his sire, Justify, did after all win the American equivalent of the Triple Crown.

Irish trainers of a rather different stamp have been making a habit lately of winning the Cesarewitch handicap, the 2m 2f second leg of the autumn double and a race that has tended to be one where jumps trainers show the flat handlers what they can do with a decent stayer. Martin Pipe had a fine record in the 34-horse cavalry charge, as has Nicky Henderson. Three of the last six runnings have been won by Ireland’s Willie Mullins, who was trying hard again on Saturday with no fewer than five runners. Success went instead, though, to the 30-horse yard of his nephew Emmet Mullins, who at only 33 already has a Grand National winner to his credit with Noble Yeats in 2022.

Young Mullins insists that nobody can make a living out of training racehorses, arguing that you need to be breeding, buying and selling and sometimes betting on them to keep the books straight. That, it seems, requires keeping your cards not too far away from where most people keep their wallets. Visitors to his yard are said not to be given the names of the horses they might see galloping there who will be referred to only as Fred, Fintan, Henry or Heather.

On the strength of Emmet’s high success rate when sending horses over to contest British races I included his ten-year-old The Shunter in my perm for the race, although stupidly I took 10-1 the night before when he started at 14-1. Incidentally, it is just possible that during Saturday’s flat-racing at Newmarket we saw both the winner of next year’s Derby and Grand National. Emmet Mullins disclosed that The Shunter had been entered for the Aintree spectacle last year and pulled out at the 11th hour. All options remain open for 2024 and with the two potentially Derby-bound Dubawi colts Arabian Crown and Ancient Wisdom both scoring impressively on the card to restore some lustre to Godolphin’s season, it was not just City of Troy who went into the notebooks.

Alas, if The Shunter does go for next year’s National it will be against only 33 opponents, with the field being reduced from the previous 40 among some otherwise sensible adjustments planned to make the race safer. Cutting the number of runners seems wrong though. Sheer numbers have always been part of the National’s appeal. Any why do it now, encouraging last year’s protestors to believe they have won a victory?

Wasn’t AA meant to be about helping people?

The hatchet-faced woman who shouted at me pulled out her lipstick and sat reapplying it during the meeting. The pretty young girl next to her took out a nail file and sat filing her nails, as people shared. She was wearing see-through, skin-tight, skin-coloured leggings and a pair of six-inch wedged boots.

I sat opposite them in the church hall and brooded. This used to be a support group but after 20 years of going it no longer feels like I am getting support. Lately, I feel worse when I come out.

The woman with the stern face screeched at me at another meeting recently when I tried to speak up for my friend, the bricklayer, who had been texted and told not to come again. When I asked why, she and the other women in the room shouted me down, and I had to leave.

He was turned away because of his criminal convictions, I was later informed. I looked at these two women now who had both been in the room that day, one putting on her lipstick and the other filing her nails as they listened to people’s stories, and the word that came into my head was ‘Tricoteuses’. The female gang who have formed a #MeToo movement to cleanse meetings of men they consider ‘unsafe’ are sitting by the guillotine doing their knitting while low bottom drunks are flung out to dry.

My friend has two previous non-violent convictions relating to break-ups with ex-girlfriends.

He has been banned from 20 meetings now and many of them he has never been to. He gets emails from the ‘safeguarding officer’ telling him he has been the subject of a vote, usually described rather gleefully as ‘unanimous’.

I send lots of emails to head office complaining, and mostly they ignore me. But the other day, to my astonishment, I received a long-winded reply from the Big Cheese himself. It was so high-handed and condescending, showed so little mercy, and dismissed my heartfelt pleas for my friend to be given a fair hearing and readmitted to meetings in such a facetious way, that I burst into tears.

I sat in my budget hotel room, where the builder boyfriend and I are ensconced until we take possession of our new house in Ireland, and I wept like a baby in front of my laptop screen, reading this pompous email.

Of course I am emotional because I have just moved house. But I am also distressed to be leaving behind a friend who needs me because I am one of too few people who have helped him as this #MeToo movement sets about him.

What has broken out is a form of hysteria so all-consuming that when my friend turns up to a venue he has not been to before, they call a business meeting for the following week and at that point he is invariably banned from attending again.

Isn’t a support group of this type meant to be there for those with criminal convictions? Don’t the prisons release people on probation to such meetings? Isn’t recovery most urgently and precisely for the trouble-makers and the emotionally screwed up? How can they ban the very people they are meant to help? But since the end of lockdown they do, in the name of safeguarding.

The Big Cheese who emailed me said the behaviour my friend is accused of is something he intends to ‘call out’. Ooh get you, I thought, wiping away tears.

One of the things the bricklayer is accused of doing is texting women members and one of the text exchanges they seized as evidence, which I have read and it’s very boring – ‘nice to see you at the meeting’, and so on – contains a kiss or ‘x’, which is being cited as proof of something or other that is considered shocking these days.

At almost the same time as I received my reply from the Big Cheese, a friend of mine who also complained about the new banning policy received a reply from him too. He forwarded it to me, wondering what to make of it. His letter was very friendly indeed, and culminated in the Big Cheese signing off with an ‘x’.

I have written to head office to ask why the Big Cheese is allowed to put an ‘x’ at the end of his emails while my friend the bricklayer is being banned from meetings for putting an ‘x’ at the end of his texts.

As for making everything ‘safe’, I once knew a bloke who threw chairs during meetings, he was so messed up and angry. The other men would grab him, calm him down outside, then bring him back in. That was what convinced me I was in the right place. I’m not so sure now.

They call me the ‘problem teetotaller’

My guts went on strike last July. I was staying in a hotel and I spent several days sprawled on the bed, vomiting occasionally, eating and drinking nothing and barely able even to wet my lips with water. Meanwhile, a bottle of Prosecco offered by the management stood untouched next to the widescreen TV. I started to wonder if this was my Frank Skinner moment. My farewell to booze.

In his memoirs, Skinner describes how he gave up drinking by accident in his twenties when a virus confined him to his bed for a week and destroyed his interest in alcohol. Restored to health, he went back to the pub to meet his friends but he shunned drink because he’d realised it was superfluous. As rehab stories go, Skinner’s is bizarre because it’s so quiet and unassuming. There’s no clash of cymbals. No Wagnerian power-chords. No rock-bottom moment of remorse and renewal.

Skinner gave up drinking as easily as renewing his car insurance. And his tale of recovery undermines all the mighty epics offered by the psychiatric trade whose members insist that drugs can’t be defeated without a lifelong war that involves teams of shrinks on 24-hour stand-by ready to swing into action if the poor addict succumbs to a night-time craving.

My experience last summer took the same unshowy path. After two days without water my tongue was parched, cracked and almost bleeding, and I crawled out to a supermarket where I bought a flagon of tropical juice that contained at least a pint of concentrated corn syrup. The sugar-hit was instant, and I laid in extra supplies of this delicious fluid in my hotel room. Later on, still unable to touch alcohol, I met a few friends in a bar and I chatted away as they knocked back their wines and their ales.

The evening developed along the usual lines except that I spent no money and I left after an hour to go back to my hotel for a secret glass of sugary joy. Normally, I’d have stayed in the pub until closing time and finished the session with a whisky night cap. When I woke up the next morning I was sober but still groggy and sleepy. That’s normal for me. I’m always drowsy and heavy-lidded until about noon. And now, three months later, I still feel wretched every morning even though I’ve avoided alcohol every since. Sobriety, contrary to what they say, doesn’t correct your sleeping patterns. Neither has it improved my life in other ways. ‘Gosh. You look really well,’ people tell me with a cheerful grin. Which makes me feel paranoid. Have I been looking ill for ages? If so, why didn’t they warn me?

The great advantage of the Skinner temperance method is that there is no method at all. It just happens, out of the blue. There are no rules or procedures, no errors to watch out for. So I’ve avoided the meditative ceremonies of the 12-steppers. Probably just as well. What could drive a man to drink faster than a semi-circle of garrulous penitents wallowing in their recollections of injury, assault, vandalism and imprisonment that led them to give up the hooch for good? These alcohol-free synods are wildly popular, apparently. All over the world, they convene in hired village halls and in bleached scout huts where they provide a forum for ex-soaks and booze-free bodybuilders to indulge in the rites of remorse and public self-flagellation.

I seriously doubt if every visitor is a recovering addict. Quite a few must be failed comedians who can’t get a paid gig and are happy to perform for an audience of volunteers. I’d find it impossible to join such a pious and demanding fellowship. The title alone puts me off: 12 steps. Twelve of them! Nasa reached the moon in 11. Moses managed with ten. Hippocrates reduced it to one: ‘Do no harm.’

If you’re an adult who shuns alcohol (or any other medicinal concoction), you revert to your childhood experience when no stimulants or deadeners were available. I’ve turned into the 14-year-old I used to be. I’m solitary, bookish, arrogant, self-righteous and icily intolerant of my fellow human beings. Their lapses exist not to be forgiven but to be examined and, I hope, corrected under my benign direction.

I fear I’m becoming unpopular. At my current address, they call me ‘the problem teetotaller’. I get very worked up over tiny irregularities such as the misuse of the Hotpoint washing machine which I bought for £140 just 11 years ago. A few nights back, I gathered my house mates on the landing and shared with them my observations about how the Hotpoint ought to be operated. I covered the main areas, without getting too technical. I mentioned temperature settings, economy cycles and the recommended dosages of liquid detergent.

I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t lay down the law or threaten to distribute copies of the instruction manual. I simply asked the others to give my advice some consideration. Then I withdrew placidly to my room. As the door closed softly behind me, I heard an outraged cry from the corridor. ‘God. I wish you’d start drinking again.’  

Watch: SNP MP defects to Tories

Party conference season is over and now it’s back to school. Ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions today, all eyes were on the former SNP MP Lisa Cameron today as she defected to the Tories. The onetime Nat officially crossed the floor at midday to a hero’s welcome from the Conservative benches. The cheers were so loud in fact, that one MP was forced to shut up and sit down halfway through his question. 

Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, was far from impressed. He fumed at the Tories: 

Can I just say to the members, the member was in the middle of asking a question. I think it’s disrespectful to your own side. You should think about what you’re doing. Can I just say, people should wait. Just because you want to cheer somebody coming in, do it at the right time. Totally inappropriate!

Oh dear. Not really the best start for Ms Cameron. But if it’s any consolation, Stephen Flynn’s SNP group didn’t look best pleased…

You can watch the moment here: 

Why has there still not been a housing crash?

Not for the first time, a widely-predicted – and for many frustrated buyers, hoped-for – house price crash has failed to materialise. The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index (ONS HPI) shows average prices up 0.3 per cent in the month of August and up 0.2 per cent since August 2022. This is at odds with the Halifax House Price Index, which put house prices in September at 4.7 per cent lower than a year earlier. But it is a more complete data set based on all sales across the UK. The Halifax index, by contrast, is based on mortgage approvals by the Halifax bank – and there is no guarantee that all the mortgage approvals actually went through to completion.    

But even if you prefer to take notice of the Halifax Index (which effectively runs two or three months ahead of the ONS HPI) it hardly amounts to a housing crash – at least not yet. So why haven’t prices fallen more than they have done? How can a surge in the Bank of England’s base rate not cause a crash?

One factor is a lack of distressed sellers. Fewer than half of homes are now owned with a mortgage of any size, let alone a punitive one. This is in contrast to the early 1990s when a surge in interest rates caught out large numbers of buyers who had borrowed to the hilt in the late 1980s property boom. Moreover, fixed rate mortgages didn’t exist in the mass market in the late 1980s. Now, the pain of rising interest rates is deferred for many buyers, with the shock only hitting when an existing fixed rate expires.

But there has been a crash of sorts – in sales volumes. Today’s release registers 39,040 property transactions in June 2023, down from 60,921 in June 2022. It was over 160,000 in June 2021 when people rushed to complete ahead of the end of the stamp duty holiday. 

The housing market is subject to very different psychology compared to the stock market in that sellers rarely panic. If homeowners cannot get a price close to what they have convinced themselves that their home is worth, they tend to refuse to sell – unless they really have to. Prices, therefore are far less likely to crash. If they do slump it takes much longer for prices to fall, as sellers grudgingly come round to accepting that the market has fallen.

If interest rates remain high, this is likely to come – with prices sliding month on month for some time. Then again, no-one should rule out a return to central bank stimulus packages, with ultra-low interest rates used to try to stimulate growth and inflation worries taking a back seat. 

The story of the past 25 years has been one interest rates being lowered to prop up stock markets, bond markets and the economy in general – and inadvertently inflating the housing market, which never really had chance to slump before the stimulus arrived to pump it up again. Maybe this time will be different, but then again maybe not.  

Are we oversharing?

Someone on that old-fashioned online game called Twitter (renamed, but still not widely known as, X) told the world of the publication of his book in a post that began: ‘I’m thrilled to share that as of today…’

He probably thought of it not as publication day but the day on which the book was released (like a film or prisoner). But I was interested by the way that share had become just another synonym for ‘announce’.

It has come a long way from West Frisia, where, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, cows entered a lot into ideas of sharing (although the island of Texel is today famed for its sheep). In West Frisian, skar is ‘part of a common pasture, part of a pasture sufficient for one cow, hay required to feed one cow, manure produced by one cow’.

Share and skar come from the same Germanic origin as the English shear. In fact, before the Norman Conquest, share (spelt scære or in similar forms) referred only to shearing or cutting hair. The notion of a portion seems to have come from the idea of cutting or division.

We are familiar with the idea of sharing a pie. It’s a zero-sum game. The more there is for you, the less for me. That is true of the share of the vote in elections (if turnout remains the same).

But what of something you and another both use: a spade, a fridge, a house? I read of relatives who ‘share a congenital defect which can cause sudden heart failure’. One of them has no less risk if the other has more. Similarly with shared news, which whizzes around till everyone loses interest. ‘Fraud victims share their stories,’ it said in the Guardian.

There is, surprisingly, a meaning of share that does not specify the thing being shared. It derives from Moral Re-Armament movement, launched in the 1930s by the Oxford Group founded by Frank Buchman in 1921. ‘Oxford Group active. Aberdonians wait to “share”,’ declared the Aberdeen Press & Journal in 1931.

By 2020, the OED was quoting Twitter: ‘I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot.’

What could be more Shakespearean than a ghost?

In the final series of the Netflix programme The Crown, Princess Diana will appear as a ghost. We are told that her apparitions will be ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ – which is rather disappointing for anyone hoping for her to have a recurring role, like Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), perhaps wearing that white dress she wore to the British Fashion Awards. Yet this has not stopped the ‘friends of the King’ from saying that the programme has lost all the credibility it had in its earlier years. It is true that, in the first series, The Crown was more like Shakespeare than soap opera, with actors trained at the RSC delivering grand speeches about the nature of monarchy. But what could be more Shakespearean than a ghost?

It depends, of course, on what the poor ghost shall unfold. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it was generally understood that ghosts appeared ‘for the instructing and terrifying of the lyving’ – as Ludwig Lavater put it in his 1569 treatise De Spectris. According to Lavater, it is also ‘an horrible and heynous offence, if a man give no succoure to such as seeke it at his hands, especially if it be the soule of his parents, brethren or sisters’.

And this is what Shakespeare’s ghosts do: they seek the succoure of revenge for foul and most unnatural murder. In The Lion King – a far more Shakespearean epic than The Crown could ever be – Mufasa’s spirit tells Simba to take up his destiny (which is just Disney for avenge his foul and unnatural murder).

But this is not, apparently, what Princess Diana’s ghost will do. She is, says Netflix’s advance publicity, going to tell her husband that he looked handsome in the hospital, and Her Majesty the Queen to be more comfortable with her emotions. She is there to give succoure to the living – as if the spirit realm were a supernatural counselling service, passing on platitudes about loving yourself and #selfcare. This is more like those scenes in Channel 4’s satirical series The Windsors, in which a parade of British character actors show up as the ghosts of kings and queens of England’s past.

This is, perhaps, a more realistic portrayal of ghosts than Hamlet’s father. Crisis apparitions – the ghosts of people who have recently departed, appearing to those they have loved – are one of the most common forms of spectral manifestation; they may not, of course, even be paranormal at all. A friend of mine is a medium and has many stories of hearing from the other side – and all her ghosts ever want to do is convince the living that they have nothing to reproach themselves for. Or maybe those are the only ones where her clients accept the message as completely authentic (which are, naturally, the only ones she has stories about).

It does seem like a waste, though. I have always felt that if you are going to go supernatural, you should really commit to it. (I was very disappointed when the police procedural Whitechapel hinted that the devil lived in E1 and was cancelled before this was confirmed.) I would like to see the ghost of Princess Diana haunting the palace, demanding vengeance against drunk drivers, and causing each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.  

Dear Mary: How can I stop dinner guests squabbling about politics?

Q. How can I prevent my guests from arguing over politics at the dinner table? I have been working abroad for far too long so have taken a house in London next month to give a few dinners to catch up with friends. To one of these I want to invite two couples in particular. Both are good friends of mine, although they have never met each other. I know they would get on extremely well and probably even work together as they are in the same fields – but they have very different politics and are bound to start discussing these as soon as they walk through the door. Mary, how can I prevent the evening turning toxic before people have had the opportunity to find out what they have in common and exchange their creative ideas?

– J.C., Florence

A. Collaborate with an extremely old man or woman who would be prepared to play ball on this occasion. Greet your friends at the door and hiss the revelation that one of their fellow guests is a total gem, but frail and suffering from a heart condition. This guest will be leaving early so you are begging everyone to stall discussing the political scene until then as any tension could trigger health consequences. Then make sure the oldie stays till the bitter end.

Q. I’ve become so allergic to bores that I now turn down practically all dinner-party invitations. Even if I know four out of the five other guests, I say no for fear of sitting next to the unknown person, who might turn out to be a crasher. I don’t want to become a complete hermit. What should I do?

– M.H., London W14

A. Rethink your attitude. Many seasoned socialisers will head for the most boring person in a room. Not only will your host be eternally grateful, but the company of an established bore can be, paradoxically, the most rewarding. Just wait… and a reservoir of interesting nuggets will start flowing. These will be exclusive to you since few others have ever had the patience to listen to the bore long enough.

Q. At the party for my son’s 21st in 2019, I was irritated by several of his friends spoiling our carefully thought-out dinner placement by moving their name cards to what they considered more advantageous positions. Our daughter is now planning the party we are giving for her 21st and I wondered if you had any ideas how to prevent this happening again?

– N.M., Bodnant, Wales

A. Do not use name cards at the table. Instead employ a skilful calligrapher to write the guests’ names, in washable ink, directly on to the tablecloths above the relevant settings. In this way disruptors will be unable to deviate from your plan.