Watch: Partygate video threatens to derail Johnson honours’ list

Will Partygate ever be over? Today’s front page of the Sunday Mirror splashes on leaked footage of Shaun Bailey’s mayoral campaign team enjoying an illicit Christmas party in December 2020. At least two dozen revellers were filmed drinking and laughing while two even twirled past a sign that reads ‘Please keep your distance’.

The news hook for this story is that two of those involved – Bailey himself and his aide Ben Mallett – have just been given honours in Boris Johnson’s resignation list. Bailey gets a peerage while Mallett had to make do with an OBE. The latter might be feeling especially embarrassed today because he’s currently running Moz Hossain’s campaign to be the Tory candidate in next year’s mayoral contest. Hossain wants to be the ‘clean slate’ candidate and pitches himself as a complete break from the past. Is that still plausible?

You can watch the clip in all its glory below…

Levi Bellfield must never be allowed to marry – and I should know

There is a rare outbreak of unanimity on social media. Save a few lawyers who – correctly – point out that it is not currently against the law, nobody thinks there is a moral case to allow Levi Bellfield to marry in prison.

For many I am sure it is simple. He is serving four whole-life orders for murder and attempted murder and thus to him everyday privileges are forfeit. As he deprived his victims of them. It is part of his punishment.

It might be surprising that the man who led the team that condemned him to those sentences supports their stance yet disagrees with their reasoning – but I do.

While my life as a murder detective was motivated to a degree by a sense of justice, in which punishment and retribution played an obvious role, much more important was the opportunity to safeguard others.

In the case of a serial predator like Bellfield my greatest satisfaction is in knowing that we protected scores of women who would have suffered at his hands had he not been incarcerated.

When he was free, every unfortunate woman he charmed into a relationship emerged from it with scars, of body and of mind. Let us not forget that our ‘holding charges’ were nine offences of rape and physical assault on three former partners. In comparison to the murders even such a serious indictment was judged sufficiently irrelevant to be left on file after his conviction – notwithstanding that, on its own, it would have resulted in a long prison sentence.

Life as Bellfield’s partner meant giving up your mobile phone, it being replaced by a handset he controlled with just one number (his) in the memory. You had no bank cards, you were restricted to using the cash he gave you. Sex had to be available on demand – for Bellfield but also for his friends when he decreed – and any disobedience was met with violence, humiliation or rape. And sometimes all three.

The stories we were told by former partners were stomach-churning. Being forced to sit on a kitchen stool for more than eight hours, terrified to move and answering calls of nature where she sat. Being turned out into the back garden naked on a winter’s day and locked out of the house for hours. Conversely, being locked in the house for days and forbidden to leave. And the ultimate humiliation of being told to have sex with a friend or acquaintance to repay a debt or favour.
 
Even when behind bars, on remand awaiting his murder trial, he continued to wield cruel coercive power. In a call to his 16 year-old mistress – a relationship which had started when she was just 14 – he accused her of being out with another man. She pleaded with him that she was at her parents’ house, so he set her a test. He asked her to take her phone upstairs to the bathroom and hold it over the toilet bowl as she flushed it. He explained that he knew the distinctive sound it made and so he could verify her story. Meekly and with a resignation typical of the downtrodden, she complied.
 
For me the marriage is not the issue, it is just a manifestation a greater ill; one that is applicable not only to Bellfield but to the handful of prisoners like him. That they are permitted to continue to have access to vulnerable women despite having been convicted and imprisoned for offences against them.
 
And that will not be addressed by provisions in the Victims and Prisoners bill which will forbid those serving whole life orders from marrying. That is a start and a sensible restriction, sure. But it applies only to a tiny number of cases involving impressionable women and controlling, narcissistic, prisoners. Can anybody think of a publicised case before Bellfield?

The criminal justice system as a whole should focus on the protection of the vulnerable inherent in the imprisonment of these predatory men. The effect of coercive control on the mental well-being of survivors is universally accepted and appreciated. The system is therefore failing them if it permits the perpetrators to continue with their abuse from inside prison. Letters sent by inmates are screened and will be refused if the content might be harmful. So why do we permit telephone calls during which the predator has complete freedom to abuse, control or groom new victims?

These unlikely marriages are but one manifestation of the ability of the imprisoned to exert control beyond their confinement – but they are rare and extreme. Where a prisoner has been convicted for offences of abuse, the ban ought not be restricted to marriage but extend to all forms of contact whereby abuse could be effected or control exerted.

A prison sentence should keep women safe and we should not allow these despicable men to continue their offending from behind bars.

In defence of Howard Donald

The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – ‘Only women have periods’. For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been damned as a vile bigot and dumped from July’s Nottingham Pride Festival.

Next time someone tells you cancel culture is a myth, point them to the unpersoning of Howard Donald. For here we have a good bloke, a veteran of the boyband era, being publicly shamed not even for anything he said but simply for using his thumbs to signal agreement with other people’s ideas.

And what were those scandalous ideas? What terrible heresies did he associate himself with? I hope you’re sitting down. He liked a tweet that said: ‘Men cannot menstruate. Transgender “women” cannot menstruate.’ And another that said: ‘No woman has a penis. No man has a vagina.’ He also liked an anti-vax tweet, a tweet about ‘the Great Reset’, and a tweet saying ‘Defund Disney’ next to an image of a banner advertising a Pride-themed Disney event in LA.

This is perverse. It’s sinister. Cancelling a man for his Twitter likes is a ruthless act of thoughtpolicing. Mr Donald made no un-PC utterance. He did not give voice to wrongthink. He simply exhibited a little intellectual curiosity towards gender-critical ideas and vax-sceptical commentary. He’s being punished not for any public pronouncement but for the contents of his heart and mind, which is the truest form of tyranny.

His greatest offence, judging from the crazy media meltdown, was liking the idea that biological sex is real. He was seen consorting with the devil of scientific fact. But it is true that men do not menstruate and women do not have penises. That people can be cast out of polite society for approving of truth itself is a testament to the cloud of unreason that now hangs over our society.

Truth is being rebranded as heresy. Biology has been refashioned as bigotry. Just look at the unhinged headlines about Donald’s Twitter crimes. He liked ‘transphobic tweets’, they say. The treatment of factual speech as ‘hate speech’ is one of cancel culture’s most ominous features. Damning certain ideas as ‘phobic’ is the 21st-century equivalent of yesteryear’s treatment of dissent as ‘blasphemy’. Now, as then, shaming labels are attached to those who demur from elite consensus opinion, in order to reduce them to social lepers.

The Donald affair highlights the cruelty and irrationalism of cancel culture. Behold the organiser of Nottingham Pride Festival Groovebox’s statement. ‘We are dealing with this situation as a matter of urgency’, it said in response to the snitches who bombarded it with complaints about Donald’s likes. (‘Please bare with us’, it continued, which I loved.) ‘A matter of urgency’? It was a few Twitter likes. Has everyone gone mad?

The conformism of Pride is now clear for all to see. Pride claims to be about diversity and yet it will ruthlessly exile any sinner who deviates from the correct-think of identity politics, whether that’s a pop star who thinks men don’t menstruate or lesbians who don’t fancy sleeping with anyone who has a penis. See the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in that velvet rainbow glove.

Mr Donald clearly believed he had no choice but to recant his blasphemous likes. He’s issued a craven mea culpa. ‘I am deeply sorry’, he said. He says he regrets his ‘uneducated actions’ and acknowledges that he has ‘a lot to learn’. He is offering himself up for re-education, for moral correction. It is a chilling echo of Maoism when a hounded man publicly pleads for forgiveness and signals his willingness to have his mind washed of its unholy thoughts. Perhaps he’ll appear in public with a sign hanging round his neck. ‘Transphobe’, it might say.

I really wish he hadn’t apologised. It’s the worst thing you can do when cornered by activists so staggeringly narcissistic that they believe they should have the right to glide through life without ever encountering someone who thinks differently to them. Apology emboldens their juvenile tyranny. Their authoritarianism grows fat from the penitence of their victims. Every time someone says ‘sorry’, the cancellers feel their power expand, their taste for blood intensifies. ‘Who shall we drag down next?’, they gleefully wonder.

Never apologise. Don’t even engage with them. Especially if you’re a member of Take That, a famously gay-friendly band without a ‘phobic’ bone in its body. If anyone should be apologising here, it’s the mob, to Howard Donald, for so flagrantly defaming him.

Why I’m with Boris Johnson on Ozempic

Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then taking the plunge and thinking the morning after – ‘Gosh, that was nothing to be scared of – I might even do it again!’

I’ve been quite the reprobate myself during my long, louche life, and I’ve certainly lied and adulterated, so of course I can’t condemn anything that I’ve done too, as that would make me a filthy hypocrite. What I can’t forgive in a politician is sanctimoniousness – and he had none.

Another reason I’ve found Johnson’s presence on the public stage appealing is that living in an age which witnesses his antics is like living in a novel. (You can’t say that about Starmer or Sunak, who have about as much dramatic hinterland as a balance sheet.) I first met him when he was nineteen, when I went to visit my best friend at Oxford in the 1980s, and I remember thinking even then that he was going places. When I think of this rake’s progress, I feel pleasantly vertiginous, as if as my life has been lived out in a roman-fleuve, probably by Anthony Powell. Or that I’ve been a bit-player in de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, that cracking tale of a power-mad hack on the make, whose alternate title was The History of a Scoundrel.

I thought it a shame that he was forced out of office by a sour-faced posse of witch-hunters and then found wanting by another legion of lemon-suckers. It’s especially galling that the super-sanctimonious Harriet Harman – now treated as a secular saint – was in charge of the proceedings. But I wasn’t going to sit around sobbing as I knew he’d have a far more enjoyable life than his bed-wetting detractors – people of the type who lie awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere is having fun. And now here he is, popping up as the Daily Mail’s new star columnist! His writing is as funny and fresh as ever – and he’s writing about taking the slimming wonder-drug Ozempic, which for the past three weeks I’ve been taking too. 

I’ve had an interesting relationship with my weight. In my teens, I was so thin that my mother would cry when I went home to visit. In my twenties, I started to ‘fill out’ a bit, which was strange as I was a coke fiend. In my thirties I got so fat that a magazine printed a photograph of Jabba the Hutt holding court and said that it was me with my fan club. In my forties, a private doctor prescribed me a drug called Reductil; the effects were so rapid and extreme that I started to wear tight black yoga shorts under my skirts, as there was a chance that a waistband which fitted me in the morning would be down around my ankles at sundown and I’d have to cooly step out of the errant garment and chuck it in the bin. Like most good things, it was banned and I packed it all back on. In my fifties my son died and I lost a third of my body weight; the fact that the worst thing that ever happened to me was also the thing which caused the most people to say ‘You look great – I didn’t recognise you!’ has made me sceptical about weight-related happiness. 

Nevertheless, when everybody started talking about these new-fangled semaglutides, I had to have a go. I bought a month’s supply of the starter dose online and I’m just heading into my final week before I need to decide whether I’ll move on to the higher level. Though I’ve lost two pounds a week for three weeks with no exercise besides a bit of high-spirited splashing about in the sea most days. I’m thinking I might give the next level a miss. Unlike poor Boris, I’ve never felt nauseous on these meds – but then, his life isn’t exactly stress-free at the moment. The only thing I don’t care for about this remarkable medicine (a piece in the Atlantic begins ‘Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting’) is that it’s made me less convivial. I was dismayed last week when, lunching with a charming and highly entertaining young couple visiting from Essex, I consumed three prawns, two bites of a lemon sponge and a pathetic one bottle of rose wine. I was back at my desk within two hours, whereas once I’d have been roistering till dawn.

Maybe if it felt speedy like the amphetamine-based weight-loss meds of the past I might be more tempted to stick to it – I do like a rush. But it feels exactly like Reductil did – like one has a sort of Jiminy Cricket on one’s shoulder, a little voice in the ear saying ‘Are you sure you want that?’ The reason I got fat is that I am a thoughtless eater, my appetite like a magpie, snatching at pretty things. Now I look at rows of cakes in the Real Patisserie’s window and they look to me like piles of differently-coloured  birdseed – that dry, dusty and resistible. 

I have nothing but good things to report about the semaglutides – right drug, wrong time. It’s just not the med for me when I want to be romping around the watering holes of my city by the sea having fun. I’m already back into my sea-swimming habit and I’ve been delighted to find that I can easily fit into a the very largest size of Norma Kamali swimsuit. Besides, my younger husband – who regularly used to be mistaken for my son – has really piled on the timber in the past few years: ‘You look prosperous – not fat!’ I tell him happily. When I took Reductil, I was still youthful – wearing nice clothes again was a novelty. But I’m going to be 64 next month and I can’t help thinking that wanting to get all gussied up at my age is a bit pathetic. 

Which brings us back to Boris and his smashing new Mail column; ‘I was going to search for the hero inside myself – the one that was three stone lighter. I was going to locate that svelte and dynamic version of Johnson, imprisoned for decades in pointless extra body weight, and I was going to set him free.’ But he concludes that though this really is a wonder-drug – capable of saving the NHS millions and hopefully getting millions back to work – it’s not for him. Despite the travails of his career, I suspect that – like me – he’s too content in his private life to want to be a ‘better’ version of himself. Why bother?

Though Prime Minister Johnson might have felt it necessary to lead by example his nation of porky malingerers, Journalist Johnson has no such responsibilities – and he always was like a journalist pretending to be a politician, though he has been the latter for longer. The capacity of we hacks for carousing and corruption is legendary; we consistently rate second only to politicians in the list of professions the public distrust. Never mind; we have our own church (St Bride’s of London) and our own patron saint (Saint Francis de Sales) – and for a while we had our very own Hack Prime Minister, one of us in his perfidy and his charm. I hope he gets back into politics, if that is what he wants, but I’m glad to have him here again, on the only slightly less shadier side of the street. Welcome back, Bouncing Boris.

Albanian small boat arrivals fall 99 per cent

With the return of Tory psychodrama and the leak of CCHQ lockdown party videos, Rishi Sunak needs something to go badly right for him. His best hope will be the Court of Appeal green-lighting his Rwanda deportation plan which he hopes will show major progress towards his pledge to ‘stop the boats’. The latest data on Albanian deportations, published on The Spectator data hub, will give him some reason for optimism.

Sunak’s rationale is that small boats are a symptom of a people smuggling industry run on an economic basis: people will fork out $15,000 to get to Britain because once you’re here there is little realistic chance of deportation. But if there’s a 20 per cent or a 30 per cent chance of deportation, and you can see people being sen to Rwanda amidst much uproar, how many would still pay the money? That’s the logic. You increase the risk, and ruin the rationale. It won’t be necessary to send thousands, just let the world know that Britain is a country that does deport anyone who arrives illegally. This chill factor, it’s hoped, should be immediate.

Albania is the test case. Last autumn, Albanians made up almost half of small boat arrivals and government officials calculated that about 2 per cent of all working-age Albanian men were in the UK claiming asylum. When Sunak became PM he started talks to deport Albanians; a deal was reached in December. It emerged the Q4 Albanian small boat arrivals had dropped to just over 1,000, down 88 per cent from Q3. Deportations have been continuing regularly and the latest figure, recently published, shows just 28 Albanian small-boat arrivals in Q1 (Jan-Mar): a drop of over 99 per cent.

The Court of Appeal heard the government’s case in April and its verdict is due soon. If they find for the government then Strasbourg is unlikely to block: it has never struck down primary legislation of a member state. So if Rwanda deportations can start, there’s reason to believe that the effect on small boat arrivals will be significant and pretty quick. Sunak can but hope: at this stage, it’s one of the few obvious things that can go right for him.

PS I came across the Albania figure browsing The Spectator's data hub. We have a system set up that automatically updates most metrics of public interest.

Britain’s war in Malaya

On 17 June 1948, seventy-five years ago this weekend, the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee declared war on the ethnic Chinese Malayan Communist party (MCP). Except he did not call it a war; he called it an ‘Emergency’.

It seems that the British plantation and trading companies in Malaya, such as Sime Darby, Guthrie, Harrisons & Crossfield, London Tin and Dunlop, demanded that the word ‘war’ should not be used because it would make their businesses uninsurable. By contrast the Chinese Malayan insurgents called ‘the Emergency’ the Anti-British National Liberation War. The Malayan War, which lasted for 12 years, might better be called the ‘Forgotten War’. Of all the Cold War conflicts it is arguably the least known. Why?

Firstly, there were no pitched battles. The MCP, which morphed into the Malay National Liberation Army (MNLA), fought a guerrilla war from the start. But, unlike, communist insurgencies in Korea and North Vietnam, there was little help to be had from Malaya’s northern neighbour, Thailand. There the right-wing dictator, Field Marshall Phibun had just returned to power after a successful coup against the royalist faction.

Secondly Mao Zedong, who might have been a natural champion of the MCP, was still fifteen months away from completing the defeat of Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang forces in China. Meanwhile Stalin’s Russia, not yet in possession of a nuclear weapon and, preoccupied by their support for communist action elsewhere, had neither the resources nor capability and inclination to supply the MNLA by sea. Support for the insurgents was thus limited to secret supply by the Min Yuen (People’s Movement) or support from Chinese villagers from whom food was extorted.

For Cold War historians therefore, the absence of the major powers, America, Russia and China, from the narrative, has led them to overlook the Malayan War. As American historian Joseph White noted ‘the extra-Indochina American experience is often relegated to footnote status.’ With the absence of American soldiers or even US financial assistance to the British Army, the interest in post-war Malaya has been minimal.

Nevertheless in 1943, as the Allies nudged their way toward victory against Japan, America did have its eye on Malaya. In January 1942 the United Nations Declaration asserted the ‘the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.’

Thus, there was some fear in Churchill’s cabinet that the US would try to insert itself into Malay governance as the Pacific War drew to a close. Indeed ‘trusteeship’ for Southeast Asia was a concept bandied about in Washington. In practice however, Roosevelt and his successor President Harry Truman took a pragmatic course with regard to the resumption of colonial rule in post-war Asia.

They divided the European colonial powers into good and bad: Britain ‘good’ and France ‘bad’. In the end the American government was happy for Britain to resume its colonial role if there was some sort of path to independence. On this point Attlee’s post-war government gave little pushback as the United Kingdom, impoverished by World War Two, was only too happy to renounce its interest in Imperial assets… or rather liabilities.

There was a second reason for Washington’s concern about Malaya. The geopolitical importance of Southeast Asia grew as Mao’s armies began to push back Chiang’s nationalists. A 9 June 1947 report by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘United States Policy Toward China’ reasoned that if China fell to the communists, ‘conditions would be such as to facilitate the eventual expansion of Soviet power in Asia southward through China and towards Indonesia, Malaysia and India.’ Ergo ‘Domino Theory’.

There was yet another reason for America’s post-war interest in Malaya – tin and particularly rubber. Rubber trees were transplanted to Malaya from South America in the mid 19th century and prospered. When a leaf blight destroyed South American rubber plantations, Malaya established a virtual rubber monopoly in the pre-war period as first bicycles and then motorcars created a boom in demand.

Although the US managed to get by on synthetic rubber to meet the demands of the US war machine, after 1945 a return to natural rubber was required. The pent-up demand in the US for cars was enormous. Even before the Japanese surrendered, three US executives including two from the Goodyear and Firestone inveigled their way onto a British Ministry of Supplies mission to Malaya.

For the America government, the return to political and economic stability in post-war Malaya, and the normalisation of its commodity supplies, were more important than preaching de-colonisation to the British. The US accounted for 42 per cent of Malay exports in the pre-war period. Malaya’s economy was more important to the US than Indochina and Indonesia combined. America needed Malaya’s imperial masters, Britain, to get a grip… and quickly.

Ironically it was rapid growth in the Malay economy in the first half of the 20th century that helped cause the communist Chinese insurgency. A result of the commodities boom and the fabled indolence of the indigent native Bumi (Bumiputra) Muslim population, British companies had to import Chinese labour. By 1934 the Chinese population of Malaya had risen to 41.5 per cent compared to 34.7 per cent for the Bumis. Remarkably Bumis accounted for just 10 per cent of the rapidly expanded urban centres.

Luckily for Britain, although some radical anti-colonial British ideas filtered into Malaya from Egypt, their influence remained muted. It helped that Britain ruled with a light touch. In the 19th century the British intervened to prevent conflicts between the Malay mainland’s eight tribal monarchs, and, as in India, appointed ‘residents’ to act as advisers. Malaya developed a stable hybrid form of government that was both modern and archaic. By the end of the 1930s Britain was moving toward a model of self-rule in Malaya with power being devolved to the Malay states.

These good relations between the Malay aristocracy and the British continued after the war. Given the brutal treatment of the Japanese occupying army this was not surprising. As Chin Kee Onn noted in Malaysia Upside Down [1946], the Japanese ‘lacked the genius for compromise and adjustment of the British whom they supplanted.’ Even when the UMNO (the United Malays National Organisation) was formed there was little animosity toward a colonial power that was quite willing to move toward independence.  In this they were helped by the leadership of father of the nation, Tunku Abdul Rahman, a shrewd but affable man, who always maintained friendly relations with the British. 

By contrast portions of the Chinese population became radicalised by Marxist ideas that filtered through from China. During the war this was a boon to the British as the Chinese dominated Malay Communist party (MCP), temporarily suspended its anti-British propaganda. Moreover, with a force of 6,000 troops the MCP undertook what little resistance there was to the Japanese. After the war it was a different matter.

Foolishly Prime Minister Clement Attlee, not ideologically opposed to communism, encouraged the development of a trade union movement in Malaya. The result was that MCP members, in time honoured communist fashion, infiltrated the General Labour Union from its inception in 1945. They soon became its leaders.

Radical unionism combined with post-war depression, was inevitably a catalyst for social unrest. Simmering violence came to a head after the murder of four British plantation managers on 16 June 1947. The MCP was outlawed. A state of emergency was declared throughout Malaya. After the killing in July of Tam Kam, president of the All-Johor Labour Union, in a gun battle, communists were soon cleared out of the cities.

The MCP retreated to Malaya’s ample jungle and waged a war for over a decade with British and other colonial troops, including Australians and New Zealanders. At its peak Britain deployed a force of 67,000 police, 300,000 home guards and 23 infantry battalions. Plaudits were won for Lt. General Sir Harold Briggs plan to deny MCP food by placing Chinese villagers into ‘protected’ cantons. Later his replacement, Sir Gerald Templer, who was appointed Commissioner in 1952 after the ambush and assassination of his predecessor Sir Henry Gurney, was credited with securing Britain’s victory with his ‘hearts and minds’ strategy.

In fact, it was old fashioned soldering, laced with doses of brutality, that won the war. Anticipating events to come in Vietnam, Britain used Agent Orange or napalm to defoliate the communist protective cover. The MCP forces were wiped out one area at a time. Britain even had its own ‘Mai Lai’ episode when civilians were shot and burnt at the Batang Kali Massacre.

All the British tactics were copied by the US during the Vietnam war including ‘cantonments’ and ‘hearts and minds’. So why did it work in Malaya and not Vietnam? The answer is twofold. The MCP was only supported by Chinese dissidents and not the Bumi population.

Secondly the MCP, as has been previously noted, could not be turned into a professional army armed to the hilt by modern Russian weaponry, as was the case in Vietnam. There the Vietcong could be continually supplied by sea and by land via the Ho Chi Minh trail that skirted through Laos and Cambodia. Unlike Indochina, ‘Domino Theory’ was never a threat to the geographically isolated Malay Peninsula.

In winning the war in Malaya, the British Army was, unlike first the French and then the Americans in Vietnam, lucky rather than brilliant. The brilliance, if any of the British, lay in the fact that its generally beneficent rule of Malaya, the economic prosperity that it brought and later its promise of independence, undermined support for the violent attainment of national freedom. In the current climate of interpretation of history through a woke lens, the Malayan War should be a reminder that not all colonialism was bad.

Is Isis preparing to exploit Europe’s open borders?

There is a growing sense of unease in France that a new wave of Islamist terrorism will soon break over Europe. In February, Adel Bakawan, a Franco-Iranian specialist in Islamic extremism, said that the Islamic State is regrouping and is planning a mass casualty attack in ‘Berlin, London or Paris’. This week Thibault de Montbrial, president of the Centre for Reflection on Homeland Security, spoke in similar terms during a radio interview.  

While Isis, or the Islamic State, no longer has a caliphate as it did between 2014 and 2019, it still has many fanatical followers scattered in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Referencing a report written by the Dutch intelligence services in May, de Montbrial said that the Islamic State ‘has already started reintroducing active commando units’ into Europe with the intention of attacking the West.

The route used by the Islamic State is from Syria and Afghanistan, coming through Turkey and then heading for Germany or Sweden because, de Montbrial said, these countries ‘are considered to be the most Islamic in terms of numbers’. In his opinion, the ease with which the Islamic State has been able to infiltrate its fighters into Europe is down to the ‘absolutely tragic’ decision of Angela Merkel in 2015 to thrown open Europe’s borders to more than a million migrants and refugees.  

It is not only security experts sounding the alarm. In April, the DGSI (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure), France’s equivalent of MI5, issued a communique entitled: ‘The state of the terrorist threat’. It began with some statistics: since 2012, 271 people have been killed in France by Islamist terrorists and nearly 1,200 wounded. Those grim figures would have been higher had not 71 attacks been foiled, 63 by the work of the DGSI.  

According to de Montbrial, French intelligence services (working closely with their American and Israeli counterparts) ‘are doing a fantastic job’. They are, he said, fully supported by successive governments which have adapted well since 2015, when two decades of complacency were exploited by Islamists with a series of bloody atrocities. The challenge, says de Montbrial, is that Europe is ‘facing a large-scale wave over the long term’. 

The DGSI communique warned that the Islamic State’s ‘capability remains intact’, and it also cautioned that Al Qaeda has new designs on the West. Once the pre-eminent Islamic terror organisation, Al Qaeda has been overshadowed by the Islamic State in the last decade. Nevertheless, it has affiliates in Africa, particularly in Somalia and the Sahel, who are ‘distinguishing themselves locally by their rise in operational strength’.  

Also increasingly active in Africa is the Islamic State. According to Wassim Nasr, the author of Islamic State: Fait Accompli, they have an ‘abiding interest in Africa, now the epicentre of jihadist activity around the world’.

Then there is the threat from homegrown extremists who belong neither to the Islamic State or Al Qaeda. These are fanatics often described by the western media as ‘lone wolves’ – a term rejected by most terrorist experts.  

France’s pre-eminent authority on Islamic extremism, Gilles Kepel, has coined the phrase ‘atmospheric jihadism’ for these zealots, whom he describes as ‘angry entrepreneurs’. Usually young and impressionable, they are groomed on social media by older Islamists whose strategy is the ‘creation of a culture of rupture with the Republic and its values…something that will then quite naturally create the designation of the other as an infidel’. The 18-year-old killer of the schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, was one such example. 

There was an ominous conclusion to the DGSI communique. ‘The risk of a projected threat, which has diminished in recent years, could re-emerge as a result of certain regional developments,’ they forecast. 

This was echoed last month by France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, during a trip to New York to discuss international security cooperation. In an interview, Darmanin said that while American homeland security is focused on ‘white supremacism, repeated shootings, conspiracy theories’, the greatest threat in Europe is from ‘Islamic terrorism’.  

It is no surprise that France is worried. In September, they host the Rugby World Cup and in the summer of 2024 they welcome the world for the Paris Olympics. It will be a security nightmare and, according to a report in Le Figaro, security services are practising for the worst-case scenario of a ‘dirty bomb’ attack. 

One might have hoped that, faced with so many grave warnings, Europe would have exhibited more collective determination to police its borders. It’s what the people want, as shown in repeated opinion polls. But the majority of the political class remain wedded to the idea of free movement despite the danger this poses to the continent.   

After the Paris massacre of 2015, when 130 people were killed in a series of co-ordinated attacks, Frontex, the EU Border Agency, published a 76-page report. It couldn’t have been more explicit: ‘The Paris attacks in November 2015 clearly demonstrated that irregular migratory flows could be used by terrorists to enter the EU,’ it stated. It then described how two of the Islamic State terror cell had exploited the migrant route to enter Europe using ‘fraudulent Syrian documents to speed up their registration process.’ 

Since then, no lessons have been learned, and few improvements made to strengthen Europe’s borders. If anything the chaos and disorder has intensified, and the numbers of migrants and refugees arriving this year are approaching a scale not seen since 2015. Europe can only hope that among them are not men sent by the Islamic State. 

Is the war on ultra-processed foods justified?

Ultra-processed food is back under the spotlight. ‘In the last decade, the evidence has been slowly growing that ultra-processed food is harmful for us in ways we hadn’t thought. We’re talking about a whole variety of cancers, heart disease, strokes, dementia,’ Tim Spector, a professor of epidemiology at King’s College London, told a recent BBC Panorama documentary.

Calls for a crackdown are growing: Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins says a ban is ‘common sense’. The idea sounds appealing: outlawing the sale of foods that some people believe are the main reason for obesity, type 2 diabetes and other disease would clearly have an impact – although not necessarily the one intended. Banning infant formula, classed as ultra-processed food, would clearly endanger many lives. And there will be many other unintended consequences, such as rising food costs.

As a professor of nutrition and food science, I have seen a lot of diet fads. Most are based on a very narrow and selective interpretation of science and make unrealistic promises. They often require very restrictive diets and, instead of improving health, can lead to eating disorders. The human body is able to thrive on a wide range of different foods. A balanced diet – boring as it might sound – is still the best option.

The focus on the ‘ultra-processed food’ concept is a variation of the ‘clean eating’ idea. It stems from the belief that processing destroys the healthiness and wholesomeness of food. It is derived from the ‘Nova’ classification, a framework to classify foods, according to the extent and purpose of processing instead of the more common nutrient profile. Within Nova, ‘ultra-processed foods’ are seen as foods that should be avoided – but there are several problems with this concept. Even after more than a decade, there is no single agreed upon definition – and those that are available are ambiguous and vague. The most common definition is along the lines of ‘anything that is wrapped in plastic and contains an ingredient that you wouldn’t find in a domestic kitchen’, but this is not a meaningful description.

Fish fingers – a sustainable source of fish often without any additives – are considered ultra-processed because of the way the fish is prepared. Ham and bacon, which usually contain E250 (sodium nitrite) are not considered ultra-processed. Fermented drinks like beer are not considered ultra-processed, even though making beer can include an extensive number of industrial processes. Conversely, distilling, an ancient process, makes any food automatically ultra-processed. In many cases, even experts struggle to make the correct assignment.

This ambiguity has consequences: consumers have become wary of all processed food and start to shun frozen and tinned foods, even though they are an affordable and healthy alternative to fresh produce. The discussion creates anxiety about food choices and is likely to fuel eating disorders. It also makes it very difficult for any regulator to investigate the claims of adverse health effects.

Is the concern about ultra-processed foods justified? The evidence is far from conclusive. Most data are from epidemiological studies – they show that people with high ultra-processed food intake have an approximately 20 per cent higher risk of early death than those with low intake. This is broadly comparable to many other diet-related risk factors like processed meat – and much lower than the risk of smoking, which is often compared to eating ultra-processed foods.

On its own, this figure might justify a warning – like the recommendation to reduce the intake of processed meat. But it is more complicated as the category of ‘ultra-processed food’ is very broad. Studies that have separated different types of these foods give a more nuanced picture: some were even associated with health benefits, such as cereals and whole grains – and for many others there was no meaningful association at all.

There are some reasons why studies show that ultra-processed foods affect health: they are often high in saturated fat, salt and sugar (so called ‘junk foods’) and would already be considered as ‘unhealthy’. Some can also encourage overconsumption, and one of the criticisms is that they have been designed to taste ‘moreish’. However, it is not yet known whether this explains the observed effect on health.

Speculation about how ultra-processed food could cause obesity have also focused on possible changes to the microbiome or the effect of additives – but there is no conclusive evidence for either. Adjustments to the microbiome in response to a new diet are a normal reaction, and there are no data that additives in food cause harm. There are also social factors that are important: people who consume a lot of ultra-processed foods are often poorer – and poverty is one of the main risk factors for health.

There are many ultra-processed foods that have a healthy nutrient profile – wholegrain breads, fish fingers or baked beans – and there is no evidence to call them all unhealthy. Likewise, there is no reason to avoid ultra-processed foods – they all can be part of a healthy and balanced diet.

Brits have a troubling approach to death

You never forget your first corpse, do you? Cold, visceral, mute, lying there immune from the world and its cares. But, for many people in Britain, seeing a dead body has become a rare spectacle – something that many of us may never see at all. Given that we will all one day die, this aversion to death – a subject which most of us don’t even like to talk about – is bizarre.

In the Iliad, King Priam longs for the ‘heart-comforting embrace of my dead son Hector in my arms’, but the English way of death has become ever more removed from the corpse itself. Direct cremations, where the deceased is shipped straight from the hospital mortuary to an unattended crematorium burning, have risen from three to eighteen per cent of all deaths in the last three years, according to a ‘cost-of-dying report’ from SunLife insurance. 

The rise in such cremations reflects an ever-greater distancing in the English funereal tradition from the remains of the deceased – once the very heart of Christian belief in the risen body of Jesus. 

There’s another troubling issue with the English approach to death: over the last 20 years, the lapse of time between death and cremation, or burial, has lengthened, in some cases by up to six weeks. Sometimes this delay is voluntary, with burials fitting around the availability of relatives. But often, the hold-ups are not: instead, delays are effectively forced on mourning relatives by coroners’ bureaucracy and the self-interest of the funeral trade. 

It doesn’t have to be this way: in France, the law states that a funeral must take place within six days of a death. But, this side of the Channel, the long wait kills off the swift gathering of friends or neighbours to mourn properly with the bereaved. By default, most English funerals have become memorials, in the presence of a closed coffin. An event distanced in time and emotional connection to the dying day of the relative within. 

‘It’s all to do with the commercialisation of death. The big corporate chains of undertakers, who only have so many cars and staff, want to make sure they can run five to six funerals a day for up to six weeks in advance. I often have to tell people to phone up the crematorium themselves to check the truth of what they have been told,’ says Poetic Endings undertaker Louise Winter, who runs a bespoke independent funeral directorship in south London.

After decades of rising prices, where the cost of a funeral jumped up to 7 per cent annually, the Competition and Markets Authority has finally intervened: in 2021, it forced a reluctant undertaking profession to display prices on websites and in their offices to their grief stricken would-be clients.

In spite of this change, a funeral remains a ‘distress’ purchase where few families feel able to shop around. The market is dominated by the two big players – Dignity and Co-op Funerals – who between them own 1,800 funeral homes and have a combined market share of nearly 30 per cent. Even if you wanted to, it’s not easy to pick and choose in the British undertaking trade. Dignity also own almost one in six of Britain’s 300 crematoria. When the Grim Reaper visits, individual consumer choice is not high up the agenda.

By the time you have paid for the catering, flowers, and cards it costs up to £9,200 to die in the UK, with £4,000 of that spent on serviced cremation costs, or £5,200 on burial. For the poor, the cost of a funeral can consume 25 per cent of their annual income, hence the rising attraction of a £995 direct cremation package.

Death, of course, is not just about an arbitrary choices between oak, teak or pine coffins. Or working out the cheapest exit plan for what to do with dad’s dead body. As social and funereal rites around mortality have shrunk, a new grief industry has flourished. Legions of bereavement counsellors and grief therapists are on hand to soothe and cater for a generation who, in the absence of communally-held rituals, have rediscovered death all by themselves, when the worst happens to a loved one.

In the United States, the all-powerful American Psychiatric Association recently declared prolonged grief – those still grieving after a year – as a billable medically defined disorder. Its adoption in the UK is almost certain to swiftly follow. Grief has become a pathology we now suffer alone rather than a common human condition reflecting our inevitable mortality.

Perhaps it might be wiser instead, and more therapeutic, to copy how our ancestors learned to survive loss. We should be going to more funerals, even as children, and seeing how others grieve in common. Death is an inevitable part of life, but, for too many people in Britain, it remains hidden – until tragedy inevitably strikes.

Kevin Toolis is the author of My Fathers Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die

Fourth by-election looms for Sunak

Not another one. Less than a week after the resignations of Boris Johnson and Nigel Adams prompted by-elections in their respective constituencies of Uxbridge and Selby, another contest now looms in Somerton and Frome. David Warburton, suspended as a Tory MP since April 2022, has tonight said he will shortly stand down from parliament too. Nadine Dorries meanwhile is expected to (at some point) follow through on her promises to quit the Commons and her Mid Bedfordshire seat. It means that Rishi Sunak  now faces the nightmare scenario of losing four elections in North Yorkshire, North London, the East of England and the South West, all within the space of weeks or months.

Warburton lost the Conservative whip 14 months ago after allegations of drug use and sexual impropriety were published in the Sunday Times. Tonight he uses an interview with its rival the Mail on Sunday to announce his intention to resign. He says that he has been ‘prevented’ from ‘speaking out’ while under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Warburton said: ‘My constituents who elected me have for a year been deprived of the voice they need. It is with sorrow that I have to provoke the upheaval of a by-election. I hope that, in so doing, I can freely illuminate the methods of an oversight system not fit for purpose.’ He also accused the parliamentary authorities of being ‘terrified’ of the MeToo movement, saying he ‘didn’t stand a chance’ from the outset. 

Doesn’t sound like the Commissioner’s report will make for happy reading for him…
But now that Warburton’s toast, will Rishi be too? To lose one seat might be regarded as misfortune: to lose four seems slightly more serious…

Douglas Ross has been a coward about Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson’s dwindling brigade of supporters point to the Conservatives’ landslide election win of 2019 as evidence he’s too gifted a politician for his party to lose. But they conveniently ignore the fact his charm stopped working at the border with Scotland.

Voters across much of England may have flocked to Johnson but he repelled many Scots. In 2019, the SNP won back 13 of the 21 seats it had lost two years previously, when Theresa May was prime minister. The Tories lost seven Scottish seats.

There is a particular caricature of the distant, uncaring Conservative that repels Scottish voters. And that caricature is Boris Johnson-shaped.

So, over recent years, it has made very good political sense for the Scottish Tories to make it clear they share the public’s doubts about Johnson.

This was something former leader Ruth Davidson understood very well. Her absolutely heartfelt contempt for Johnson has never been in doubt. Not only did she thoroughly dislike the idea of a Johnson premiership, she saw good political reasons – after helping revive her party’s fortunes in Scotland – for making sure everyone knew it.

Current Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross should have taken his lead from Davidson. Instead, he has been weak when it comes to the disgraced former Prime Minister.

Ross – an MSP and an MP – will have his say when the Commons votes on the Privileges Committee’s report into partygate on Monday. He has said he will back its findings.

But there will be no whipping of Scottish Tory MPs on the issue, no matter the damage support for Johnson would cause to the party in Scotland. Some Scottish Tories are bracing themselves against the possibility that Scottish Secretary Alister Jack – a longtime Johnson supporter – will continue to back the disgraced former prime minister.

The fact is that Ross has handled the Johnson issue badly for some time, flip-flopping on whether the former PM was fit for office.

In January, last year, Ross hinted he might just understand the feelings of the majority of Scottish voters when he joined those Tories calling for Johnson to quit over lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street. His position was clear and necessary. An attack that followed from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared Ross a ‘lightweight figure’, did the Scottish Tory leader no damage.

Two months later, Ross had changed his mind, joining in with the patent nonsense that the Russian invasion of Ukraine meant it simply wasn’t the right time for a change of leadership in the UK.

It turned out Ross did not hold that conviction especially strongly. Last July, as members of the then-Prime Minister’s team began resigning in their droves, the Scottish Tory leader decided that Johnson should go, after all. There wasn’t a peep out of him on the impact this might have on Ukraine.

In the aftermath of publication of the Privileges Committee report, Ross was doorstepped by a journalist at Holyrood. Did he regret past comments, she asked, in which he described Johnson as an honest man?

In reply came waffle and evasion. Perhaps you remember the unseen teacher in the old Charlie Brown cartoons who only ever spoke in a wordless stream of wah wah wahs. It was kind of like that.

When he became Scottish Conservative leader in August 2020, top of Douglas Ross’s to-do list was the maintenance of clear distance between himself and Boris Johnson. He failed in that simple task.

Spotify exec: Harry and Meghan are ‘grifters’

It seems the Americans are belatedly waking up to the reality of the Sussexes. Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation, has finally cottoned on to the fact that Harry and Meghan aren’t exactly model Stakhanovite grafters. He has this week come out and attacked them as ‘fucking grifters’, after their £15.6m Archetypes podcast deal with Spotify was unceremoniously canned. The Wall Street Journal reports that the couple may not have met the productivity requirements to get the full payout. How will they cope?

You can see why Simmons is angry: the pair really embraced ‘quiet quitting’. The Duke and Duchess of the Sussex signed on for the podcast in 2020; the first episode didn’t appear until two years later. In fairness, there was a lot of Oprah, Netflix, and moaning to get on with in the meantime. And when the couple did get around to Archetypes, it didn’t look much look like two years’ of thought had gone into it. Just 12 episodes appeared, mainly consisting of Meghan musing on such riveting topics as ‘stigma’, ‘activism’ and ‘manifesting’. Star guests included failed funny man Trevor Noah and, er, Justin Trudeau’s wife. Truly, they weren’t bringing their best.

And now it’s all over: not a moment too soon. Simmons said yesterday that Archetypes should have been called:

the f***ing grifters. That’s the podcast we should have launched with them. I’ve got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories.

Sounds spicy. Mr S applauds Bill Simmons return to the side of reason: if he wants to speak his truth, he’s welcome on Spectator TV anytime…

A spokesman for Archewell Productions said: ‘The team behind Archetypes remain proud of the podcast they created at Spotify.’

Keir Starmer has let slip the truth about his plan to abolish the Lords

Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold a pass giving him access to the Parliamentary Estate as a former MP. So it is odd then that almost nobody has commented on Keir Starmer’s exposure for the commission of a new political fraud – even though it came in the high-profile setting of PMQs.

While lambasting Rishi Sunak for permitting Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list to go through, Starmer argued that the result would be that:

‘Those who spent their time helping to cover up Johnson’s lawbreaking are rewarded by becoming lawmakers for the rest of their lives.’

But how can this be so given that Starmer himself claimed as recently as December that he is committed to abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected second chamber, as envisaged by the report of Gordon Brown’s constitutional commission? He told Sky News that he wanted to get the reform done in a first term ‘because when I asked Gordon Brown to set up the commission to do this, I said what I want is recommendations that are capable of being implemented in the first term’.

Starmer is also quite clear that he believes he will be prime minister by the end of next year, for instance declaring after the local elections that Labour was on course to win a majority.

If he was remotely serious about abolishing the Lords, he would have remembered this going into PMQs and have made a virtue of contrasting his plan for urgent democratic reform with the cronyism of the Tories. Yet he didn’t even mention it. Instead, we learned that he continues to regard the appointed House of peers as a permanent part of the constitutional furniture.

In reality, I suspect he is as serious about scrapping the Lords as he was about abolishing student fees or nationalising utilities. That is to say, not serious at all. At best we can now expect the pledge to abolish the Lords to be downgraded to the Neverland of a second-term goal. Brown will soon realise that all his worthy work has been in vain and that his report is destined to be filed on a shelf to gather dust alongside past charades, such as the report of the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform. It will be interesting to see if he is capable of further furrowing his already-heavy brow.

As with so much of Starmer’s output, it is all quite reminiscent of the late Peter Cook’s joke that: ‘I met a man at a party. He said: ‘I’m writing a novel’. I said ‘Oh really? Neither am I.’’

Of course, this is the same Keir Starmer who was once going to ensure ‘as a matter of principle’ that Labour did not try to block Brexit but then spearheaded Labour’s fight to block Brexit. Then he was going to fight to keep free movement yet later decided that he had a ‘red line’ against bringing back free movement.

Amusingly Starmer often refers to himself as someone of the utmost integrity. At least Johnson has never gone full Malvolio after his various Toby Belch excesses. Starmer, by contrast, is so deeply in the grip of personal vanity that he is unable even to contemplate that he too might have committed shockingly dishonest political misdeeds.

The political system and the political media has ultimately not permitted Johnson to get away with his shenanigans. So why are Starmer’s so often allowed to pass unlamented and even studiously un-noticed?

What’s behind Germany’s far-right surge?

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right populist party, is enjoying a surge in support. A poll by broadcaster ARD this month revealed that 18 per cent of voters backed the AfD – its highest rating since the party was founded in 2013. This level of support – which puts the AfD on level pegging with the SPD – is ringing alarm bells in Berlin.

Since the end of the second world war, Germany’s post-war identity has been moulded around coming to terms with its history. Germans even have a word for it: ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’. The national mantra for eight decades has been ‘never again’. But is something sinister afoot in German politics? 

ARD’s damning poll revealed that support for Germany’s traffic light coalition government, made up of the SPD, the liberal FDP and the Greens, was steadily melting away. A further nail in the coffin for the coalition came last Friday, when a YouGov survey revealed that a fifth of Germans would vote for the AfD in an election. Support for the SDP had ebbed even lower to 19 per cent; the Greens and FDP managed just 18 per cent between them.

Germany’s mainstream parties have fallen over themselves to point fingers at each other over where the blame for the AfD’s surge in popularity lies. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right opposition party CDU/CSU, accused the governing coalition and ‘particularly the Greens’ for being responsible for the AfD’s rise. Ricarda Lang, co-chair of the Greens, hit back, saying that politicians should work together ‘instead of pointing fingers at each other and losing themselves in one-sided accusations. Because that only strengthens the AfD.’

Those who fear the AfD have good reason to do so. Last year, a court in Cologne ruled that the AfD was a threat to democracy and granted permission for it to be monitored by the country’s security services. This year, its youth branch was labelled an extremist group. In May, Björn Höcke, the local leader of the AfD’s Thuringia branch was charged for intentionally using a Nazi stormtrooper slogan at a campaign rally (Nazi symbolism, including emblems, slogans and flags are strictly banned in Germany; using them can be punishable by up to three years in prison). 

However, with Germany plagued by a series of economic, social and cultural issues and a government more focussed on political point scoring than any sort of effective governing, it is hardly a surprise that some Germans are looking elsewhere for political leadership. Disenchanted voters are turning to the AfD over what they see as the party’s fearlessness in voicing what others are too nervous to say, and seem undeterred by the party’s unsavoury comparisons to the Nazi party. 

So what exactly is responsible for the AfD climbing through the polls? According to the ARD survey, the issues most concerning those backing the AfD are immigration, followed by the energy crisis and climate policy more generally. Concerns over Scholz’s handling of the economy, after Germany officially entered a recession last month, also play into rising support for the party: 84 per cent of respondents said Scholz has failed to show clear leadership.

In April, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees released figures showing the number of asylum claims had doubled in the ten months to March to 25,000 a month. How to solve the large number of migrants entering the country is something Scholz’s government has been battling since they came to power. 

That migration is the number one concern for the majority of AfD supporters should hardly be surprising. The AfD experienced a surge of similar proportions after 2015 when Angela Merkel introduced her ‘open doors’ policy, allowing over 1.2 million people to seek asylum in the country. The party’s rhetoric on the subject has been notoriously hardline, with their manifesto outlining their proposal to stop illegal migration and immediately send back those whose asylum claims are rejected.

But there are other factors at play in the rise of the AfD. The consequences of Scholz’s inability to get a handle on the cost of living crisis and soaring energy costs in the wake of the war in Ukraine are also coming home to roost. While the war is not the only factor contributing to soaring prices, it is clear this is the reason Germans most strongly associate with it. Many also feel alienated by the coalition government’s messy efforts to push through costly environmental reforms on petrol-fuelled cars and oil and gas boilers at a time when households are struggling to make ends meet. 

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, support for the country in Germany has, at best, been lukewarm. The close historic relationship between Germany and Russia from the 1950s onwards has complicated perspectives over how far Germans believe their country should get involved in ending the conflict. While just 43 per cent of Germans think their country’s current support for Ukraine is appropriate, 37 per cent of AfD supporters think it goes too far. 

This uncertainty is something the AfD have also capitalised on, offering those Germans opposed to the war a flag to rally around. The party is known for its pro-Russia and pro-Putin stance, and since last February has called for sanctions against Russia to be scrapped and warmer relations between the countries to be restored. The influx of more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees into Germany since the war began has not helped local attitudes.

The AfD enjoys its strongest backing in the regions that used to belong to the former East Germany (GDR). Three of the former GDR states, Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia are scheduled to have elections next year – popularity for the AfD is currently averaging 29 per cent there. This is a legacy of Germany’s divided history, and arguably a failure of previous post-1989 German leaders: even nearly 35 years after the country’s reunification, these parts of the country experience lower employment and higher poverty levels – and often feel ignored by politicians in Berlin.

When Scholz announced last February that the invasion of Ukraine represented a ‘Zeitenwende’ or ‘changing of the times’, he almost certainly didn’t anticipate that this would apply to Germany’s domestic, as well as international, politics. Granted, Scholz does not bear sole responsibility for the domestic problems now destabilising the country – many, including the environment that led to soaring energy prices last winter, are a legacy of Angela Merkel’s time in office. But he is now being judged against his failure to tackle them – and the AfD are cashing in. 

The rise of the AfD in Germany is not merely deeply humiliating for Scholz, but represents a window into the menacing future the country could face if the traffic light coalition can’t get a grip on its government. The AfD will do its best to show it is not the modern day successor to the Nazi party and will no doubt continue to entice voters with its show of ‘respectability’. But the party’s gains in the polls strike at the heart of the identity painstakingly crafted by the country since 1945. If Germany continues to lurch towards the far right, it’s not just a democratic crisis it will trigger, but also an existential one.

Emmanuel Macron must get over his Aukus sulk – before it’s too late

When the Aukus trilateral security pact was signed between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom in September 2021, Emmanuel Macron was furious. France’s president took Australia’s decision to terminate France’s ‘contract of the century’ to supply diesel-powered submarines to Canberra personally.

The French have since declared the incident officially closed, although Macron – as he is wont to do – still bears a grudge. But as Aukus’ importance increases – and the alliance morphs into something that could shape the West’s coordinated response to regional strategic threats – it’s time for Macron to bury the hatchet.

For now, Macron’s reluctance to forgive and forget is proving problematic. Any association, or even mention of Aukus in official circles, is eschewed, despite greater pragmatism in the French Foreign Ministry. As the foremost defence power in the EU with a serious Indo-Pacific strategy, the Elysée is cutting off its nose to spite its face, for France has an important role to play in an expanding Aukus.

Twenty months on, Aukus has already deepened. Beyond submarines, it now covers undersea, advanced cyber and quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, as well as hypersonic and counter-hypersonic missile cooperation and nuclear technology. It is not an alliance in the traditional sense of having clearly-defined strategic objectives, nor does it need to be. For at the heart of Aukus is the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership – the world’s oldest, deepest and most sophisticated international intelligence-sharing, ‘all-source’ gathering and analysis organisation, between the three present Aukus founders plus Canada and New Zealand. That Anglosphere nucleus of shared values, interests and interoperability recuses any formal structure. It allows Aukus to evolve and adapt nimbly to regional strategic requirements, without prior commitment to action and without unduly provoking China by a formal alliance. 

Aukus is also on the cusp of widening. Canada expressed a desire to join in May 2023, while New Zealand may feel out in the cold and strategically vulnerable outside the pact. How might the expansion continue? Rather as with international intelligence sharing, concentric circles radiate from the ‘Five Eyes’ inner core (‘Nine Eyes’, ‘Fourteen Eyes’). Whereas Ottawa would default to the inner core, one can well imagine other threatened regional nations forming the next Aukus circle with limited links to inner core members. Japan is the most obvious. The 11 January 2023 defence treaty with the UK, its participation in the UK’s next generation stealth combat aircraft, and increasing joint military exercises point in that direction. In November 2021, influential former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe called for greater Japan-Aukus cooperation. More recently, in December, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles announced Canberra’s desire for Japan to become a member.

Further widening could include other regionally vulnerable actors, such as South Korea. The North Korean strategic threat prompted Seoul, a US treaty ally, back in 2017 to request Washington’s help in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. This was denied in September 2020 on the grounds of nuclear non-proliferation. But one could imagine Seoul joining a greater Aukus. While the most internationally sensitive potential member – and a bridge too far – would be Taiwan.

But there is also a home for France in a greater Aukus after Australia in June 2022 made a half-billion dollar payment for terminating the original contract. This payout encouraged new French defence minister Sébastien Lecornu to propose rebuilding the relationship with Canberra. Since the Aukus humiliation, Paris has tried to fill the gap by closer ties with that key Indo-Pacific player, India. But this is short-sighted. India is already tied into another exclusive regional club with Australia, Japan and the US – the Quad – albeit not a security pact, but a body that leans in the direction of Aukus, even if India remains ambivalent about China.

Under Macron, however, France is most likely to bolster her Indo-Pacific presence and strategy through the EU, at present building its Indo-Pacific strategy. But while Macron reiterates his mantra of ‘EU strategic autonomy’, individual EU member states are unconvinced by his ‘additional way’ beyond the US and China blocs, especially since the war in Ukraine. Many continue to participate in joint naval exercises with the UK and the US in the Indo-Pacific, including none other than France herself. And with Macron’s recent initiative for a continent-wide European political community, which includes Britain, the structure is there to coordinate certain aspects of the EU’s Indo-Pacific initiatives when they are shared with those of a greater Aukus. 

In 1948, Winston Churchill spoke of the ‘three majestic circles’ defining Britain’s place in the world: the Commonwealth, the English-speaking world and a united Europe. Could the West coordinate its Indo-Pacific strategy through the ‘majestic circles’ inherent in the geometry of a Greater Aukus: original Aukus, regional actors, Europe? It’s time for Macron to forgive and forget – and seize the initiative, before it’s too late.

John Keiger is a former Research Director in the Department of Politics and International Politics, Cambridge University; Guibourg Delamotte is a professor of  Japanese defence and security policy at the French National institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations (Inalco)

The West could pay a heavy price for the Taliban’s war on drugs

The meth and heroin addicts were still gathering in their hundreds in a squalid encampment under the Pul-e-Sokhta bridge in the Afghan capital of Kabul. It was a sorry sight to see them squatting beside bonfires while stray dogs ran around them, barking. Many were homeless and had nowhere else to go. 

‘It’s easier to access the substance here,’ a dealer and one of the bridge camp’s scruffy inhabitants told me. ‘Everything is available here, best quality. They (the police) come here but they don’t bother us a lot. We are friends with the dogs; when it’s cold the dogs sit next to us; they may get high when we smoke, too, but not directly.’

The man noted I don’t look like one of the bridge’s regulars. What am I doing here, he asked. Then he asked if I wanted to buy anything. A dose of morphine cost a hundred afghanis, or $1 (80p). Another man offered me a drag on his morphine-laced cigarette. Eventually, my translator and guide started to get nervous. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any Taliban to see us here.’

When the Taliban swept back into power in 2021 after the American withdrawal, they promised to stamp out the illicit narcotics trade that began in the poppy fields and ended in the veins of junkies as far afield as Moscow, Manchester and Mombasa. 

At the start of the decade, it was estimated that Afghanistan was the origin of 82 per cent of the world’s opium supply, which is then refined into heroin and morphine. At first, the Taliban went around rounding up drug addicts at gunpoint to be taken to forced, prison-like detox centres. But by the time I visited in November last year, they seemed to have given up: the addicts were back under the bridge, and the poppy farmers had just planted a new crop. 

I was warned by my guide that Afghanistan’s new rulers were still serious about cleaning it up. He was right. Satellite images now show that opium cultivation has shrunk by 80 per cent in some parts of Afghanistan over the past year. Video clips shared online show tractors tearing up poppy fields. The trade in ephedra, a plant used to make crystal meth, is being shut down too. 

They sure showed us up. In 2001, Tony Blair said stopping Afghan heroin from reaching British shores was one of the main reasons for sending in troops to oust the Taliban. The Taliban, it seems, achieved what two decades of our occupation could not. So, does this mean there’ll be less smack sold on the streets of Britain? Fewer deaths? Sadly, that’s not how narco-nomics works.

Targeting dealers alone won’t stop drug addicts from finding ways to access narcotics. You haven’t saved anyone from addiction or overdose because those who are desperate for their next fix are simply going to find someone else, and the opportunity is so profitable that they’ll never run out of possible pushers. It’s a simple case of supply and demand. 

You might, temporarily, break up a drug ring, but that only makes matters worse: a recent study of policing in Indiana in the US has shown that when police make a major drug bust, the number of fatal overdoses may actually increase, as buyers seek out new sources of unknown strength and quality.

Imagine this drug crackdown playing out on a global scale. Poppies can grow anywhere. In fact, there’s nothing stopping you legally planting them in your garden, provided you don’t harvest their stupefying sap. 

If Afghan poppy farmers are knocked out of the game, others will quickly fill their shoes. Afghanistan itself only became a heroin heartland after poppy fields were eradicated from Pakistan and the Middle East. This is what’s called the ‘balloon effect’: if you squeeze the drug trade in one place, it simply re-emerges somewhere else. In the 1980s, the chief heroin producer was Myanmar, where poppy plantations still flourish deep in the jungle.

While the UK suffers needless drug deaths, we can at least be grateful we’re not the States. Last year, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose – almost twice the number who died during the Vietnam war.

No-one can accuse America of being soft on drugs, yet the drug crisis keeps getting worse. This is the so-called ‘iron law of prohibition‘: the fiercer the war on drugs is fought, the stronger, and deadlier, the drugs become. 

In 1870s America, fears that Chinese railroad workers were using it to seduce white women led to the first opium ban. This was the start of a pattern, where traffickers switched to ever-more potent products while lawmakers played catch-up, blaming whichever group the American public feared most at the time. In the 20th century, opium was replaced by heroin. President Richard Nixon’s response was to toughen the law further. 

‘We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the (Vietnam) war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,‘ Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman admitted. ‘Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.‘

By the 2010s, traffickers began replacing heroin with synthetically-made fentanyl, fifty times stronger than heroin. Unsurprisingly, deaths shot out of control. More recently, yet another deadly drug cocktail known as ‘tranq dope’ is wreaking havoc on the streets.

From the drug cartels’ perspective, it’s better to discreetly cook fentanyl in a lab than fuss over brightly-coloured poppy fields catching the eye of the cops. It gets your customers higher, and, being more potent, you don’t need to sneak as much of it over the border.

Fentanyl has made inroads into Europe before. The last time the Taliban banned opium in the early 2000s, Russian-produced fentanyl flooded the neighbouring nation of Estonia. In Russia today, suffering from sanctions and home to a massive clandestine chemical industry, traffickers might be tempted to cash in on any heroin drought, possibly with the help of the security services. It wouldn’t be the first time the Kremlin has co-opted organised crime. Ironically, the Taliban’s crackdown on Afghan poppy farmers could soon come back to bite the West.

Why Boris’s critics might regret celebrating his downfall

Imagine a Tory prime minister who gave the liberal left almost everything that it wanted. Higher migration? Sure, let’s treble it. End austerity with more tax and spending? Sure, let’s pay the wages of 9 million people from the state’s purse, hand the NHS another £34 billion – and let’s jack up corporation tax to pay for it. Climate change? Let’s close down every gas-fired power station by 2035, ban fracking and lumber oil and gas companies with a windfall tax. Culture wars? Let’s make gay conversion therapy a crime.    

You might think that the liberal left would at least bring itself to show some gratitude, but apparently not. We already have had a Tory PM who has brought about all of the above. His name is Boris Johnson. 

But thanks? Come off it. To listen to the rage against him over the past couple of years, you would think he was the most evil figure ever to stalk the land. To many, he is preposterously cast as an English Donald Trump – a man from whose ideology he is far removed.

I say that Johnson gave the liberal left almost all it wanted for a reason. There is one issue, of course, on which he did not share their views: Brexit. His achievement in persuading the country to vote to leave the EU, in the eyes of many, will forever be a great dark stain on his record. The words of Labour MP Chris Bryant – who called Johnson a ‘scoundrel’ whom he hopes never to see in public life again – and SNP leader Humza Yousaf, who accused Johnson of ‘betraying’ Scotland, are typical of the extreme reaction the former PM generates.

Brexit Derangement Syndrome, which continues to conflict large sections of those in public life, has blinded them to the reality: that Johnson is on the left of the Conservative party. He took its economic policy further leftwards than it had been at any time since Edward Heath’s tenure of Downing Street. He would have been kept out of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet as an incurable ‘wet’.   

Never under a Johnson government was there going to be the slightest risk of meaningful reform of the NHS. He was never going to privatise anything significant. Criminal sanctions were never going to be made more severe. There was never going to be any hectoring about the good of marriage, not changes to taxation which favoured married couples over others. The chances of a return to austerity were nil. Johnson was rarely a man to say no to demands for extra public spending. Had he still been in office it would have been no surprise had rail workers walked off with huge wage rises.

In many ways, Johnson enacted a Labour manifesto. But rather than be hailed as a champion for left-liberal causes, he had to be destroyed because of Brexit. True, he could never have won, even without Brexit: for some on the left the word ‘Tory’ has become something that you define yourself against – so no Tory MP by definition could ever win their praise. But the truth is, there is unlikely to be a Conservative leader for a long while who espoused the causes of the liberal left as much as Boris Johnson.

When will the Department for Education get a grip on its transgender guidance?

Who’s running the show on trans and gender? Elected ministers? Or an activist civil service? A publication put out by the Department for Education (DfE) – Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) – suggests it may be the latter.

Schools and colleges rely on this document to keep children safe. But, while the 2023 version contains a few updates, there are none regarding the safeguarding issue everyone has been talking about: children who want to change their gender. So why has the department chosen to turn a blind eye to the concerned parents, teachers and schools desperate for guidance? 

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan must answer some difficult questions. Why did she sign off on this guidance? What was in the submission presented to her? Did officials even consider whether gender, trans and RSHE (relationships, sex and health education) issues should be addressed? If not, it cannot be because they were unaware of the issues, for the evidence has been covered over and again by every media outlet – and by Parliament – in recent months.

Over 60 per cent of schools are failing to inform parents when a child discloses that they want to change their gender, according to a survey conducted in March by Policy Exchange. A third do not inform the Designated Safeguarding Lead, the standard procedure for all safeguarding issues within a school. Nearly three quarters of the schools we asked teach that everybody has a gender identity – and a quarter that some children may be ‘born in the wrong body’. Such ideas have no basis in scientific reality – and can cause serious harm to vulnerable children.

There are numerous other examples of harmful material being presented to children in RSHE lessons, not least the normalisation of harmful sexual practices such as choking or the false suggestions that puberty blockers are a harmless and safe intervention, many of which have been extensively documented in dossiers compiled by various organisations. 

The Education Secretary has said this is unacceptable. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has said that this is unacceptable. Even Labour leader Keir Starmer has said that parents should be involved in these matters. And yet the show trundles on, as if nothing has changed.

Every year, KCSIE is updated to reflect new safeguarding risks. This year, revisions focused on online safety. After the Everyone’s Invited scandal two years ago – when students shared their horror stories of sexual abuse and harassment at schools – there was a renewed focus on children assaulting other children. So why has the latest update done nothing to address the widespread safeguarding failings around gender dysphoria, single-sex spaces and RSHE?

The deliberate refusal – once again – to include these matters within the statutory safeguarding guidance demonstrates that the DfE remains gripped by an unscientific and harmful ideology, to the severe detriment of tens of thousands of children across the country.

Nor is the DfE alone in this matter. The NHS Confederation has published a document saying that staff feelings come above patients’ rights, that women have no general right to same sex intimate care, and that dementia sufferers should be ‘challenged’ if they don’t recognise someone’s self-declared gender.

Senior officials in the NHS and civil service actively promote politically contentious views on gender, such as last November when the chief of Health Education England committed the organisation ‘to become active trans and non-binary allies’. Hundreds of public sector bodies are still members of Stonewall’s controversial ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme, which encourages organisations to adopt its own radical stance on gender issues.

The Government need to get a grip. The occasional well-meaning platitude from a minister is worthless while public services remain in the grip of activist groups promoting unscientific ideologies. Heads must roll at the DfE – of every civil servant who has allowed the fear of challenging gender ideology to overcome their duty to safeguard the nation’s children.

Lottie Moore is head of Biology Matters at Policy Exchange

Boris’s big column backfires

Boris! Boris! Boris! For a week now, the cry has been incessant among our national media. Liberated from his parliamentary cage, what will the albino gorilla do next? And last night we got our answer: a new column with the Daily Mail, that organ of Middle England sensibility. Eagerly, the whole of Fleet Street awaited Johnson’s first column, published at 5 p.m today. What would he write about, they speculated furiously? State secrets, perhaps? A denunciation of Sunak, Gove and all the sinister forces that they embody? Or some great revelation about his future plans?

The answer, it turns out, is, er, no. Rather anti-climactically, Boris published his first Mail column on a weight loss drug – two weeks after every other newspaper did a feature on it. Johnson wrote how he hoped the drug would curb his chorizo and cheddar late-night raids but, alas, he didn’t quite take to it. Having splashed out a substantial six-figure sum on hiring the onetime Telegraph star, you would think that the bosses at Northcliffe House might at least get some return on their investment in the form of a front-page splash about something vaguely newsworthy. Still, this being Boris, he at least managed to include one cryptic reference to Sunak, in a homage to well-rounded advisors:

“Let me have men about me that are fat,” said the Roman dictator, shortly before his assassination. “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.” As it turned out, Caesar was right to be worried about Cassius.

Who could he possibly be talking about? Johnson’s column was published just hours after he received a slap down from the transparency watchdog Acoba. Johnson’s office informed the sleaze-busters that he had taken up the new gig just 30 minutes before it was officially announced, rather than waiting for official sign-off in line with government rules. The same rules that the Johnsonites slammed Sue Gray for not following…

This means that Johnson broke government rules barely 24 hours after being found guilty of breaking parliamentary ones. Well, at least he’s consistent…

Is this Wickes’s Gerald Ratner moment?

Big businesses are increasingly torn between activist leadership and a customer base that just wants to stump up its cash and be on its way. Customers’ patience is wearing thin. The latest company seemingly eager to pick a fight with its clientele is DIY chain Wickes.

A video dug up by campaigner James Esses shows the shop’s chief operating officer Fraser Longden taking part in a panel at PinkNews’s Trans+ Summit. The discussion, which took place last month, was entitled ‘The Role of Senior Leaders in Trans+ Inclusion’. So far, so corporate. At least it was until Longden was asked whether Wickes had received any backlash for its stance. He told the panel: 

‘I just decided to ignore it, right, because I wasn’t doing what we were doing at Wickes for them… I don’t think I’m ever going to change some of the bigots out there’s mind. I’m never going to win that argument with them. So we were doing it to show support to the community and hopefully to try and get more people to be curious, in where most of the population are, which is this sort of slightly ignorant, but mostly kind position…’

It’s a bold customer-retention strategy. But Longden wasn’t finished there:

‘I’m just not prepared to spend time as an organisation or as an individual putting effort into that ten per cent at the bottom because I’m not gonna win, I’m not gonna change their mind, and it’s just going to be soul-destroying… They’re just not worth the airspace. I didn’t respond to one email.’

He went on to discuss the DIY retailer’s attitude towards a potential boycott. It was essentially a shrug of the shoulders, only wordier:

‘The people who are sort of going, “Oh, we’re gonna boycott you”, and we’ve had a few of those and stuff, they’re not. You know, they need a tin of paint, they’re going to go the nearest place to them next time they need one.’

He expanded on this by drawing a contrast between the vast majority and the truly reprobate: 

‘The other ten per cent, at the other end — and I’m making up the numbers of ten per cent — you know, they’re just hot air. They will go and buy a tin of paint in the nearest place to them. That might have been us before, it might not have been us after afterwards. Equally, if they do come in and buy that tin of paint and behave in that way, then they’re not welcome in our stores.’

I asked Wickes if Longden was speaking for the company with his remarks, and if Wickes considers ‘most of the population’ to be ‘slightly ignorant’ and gender-critical people ‘bigots’. In particular, was the company really saying that customers who disagree with its stance on trans issues were ‘not welcome in our stores’? A spokeswoman told me:

‘At Wickes we are proud to be an inclusive home improvement employer and support the LGBTQ+ community in its entirety. We are committed to building a workplace and culture where all colleagues can feel at home.’

That seems like a pretty clear answer.

Longden is Wickes’ former head of human resources. Of course he is. Time was when HR managers were content to look busy by visiting their petty, pointless tyrannies on their employees. Now all of us have been added to the company Slack and told to be mindful of our micro-aggressions.

The corporate world’s embrace of the LGBT movement should make us pause to ask where that movement has gone wrong. But its embrace by HR managers is an even more troubling phenomenon, a real ‘are we the baddies?’ moment. 

It’s nice that Wickes wants to be inclusive, but calling people ignorant and bigots is not the way to go about it. Telling customers you don’t want their money is pretty exclusive, not to mention the worst spot of retail comms since Gerald Ratner confessed that his company’s products were ‘total crap’. 

My theory is that people with non-jobs who invent non-priorities in response to non-problems are just unhappy with their careers. It’s not easy to admit your job is mundane when you’re bursting with idealism and want to make a difference. But the answer is not to turn an entire company into a platform for you to cosplay like you work at Greenpeace. The answer is to find a different job. 

If you’re in the paint-flogging business, stick to flogging paint. And if your customers object to being scolded and disdained, it’s not because they’re bigots but because they don’t want a sermon on gender identity every time they buy emulsion. Those customers include some of us who belong to that alphabet-soup identity group you claim to be offering your allyship. 

Wickes is far from alone in refusing to stick to the day job. US retail giant Target can’t decide whether to stock LGBT-themed products up front or hide them in the back. Bud Light even tried to market itself to followers of Dylan Mulvaney. Surprisingly enough, men who like to chug a cold one while talking Rugers, rotors and running backs weren’t keen on sharing a cultural milieu with Pride, pronouns and privilege-checking.

Sermonising is an opportunity for high-income executives with high-status views to pronounce anathema on people with much lower incomes and lower-status attitudes. The educated middle-classes have found a new way to sneer at the hairdressers, the taxi drivers and the till workers — and a progressive way at that.