Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 per cent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretence that things can be made cheaper by fiat.
Is it just because I am a soft southerner, or am I am right to be shocked that the Burnham cabinet contains (so far as one knows) 33.333 per cent fewer gay men than the Starmer one? Out go Steve Reed from south London, to whom Lord Alli gave a pair of wellington boots worth more than £400 to help him be Defra secretary, and Peter Kyle from Brighton, friend of Peter Mandelson. The only pink cabinet survivor in this red regime is Wes Streeting (east London). He has been sent to the Ministry of Defence, perhaps on the northern, borderline ‘homophobic’ assumption that a sergeant-major can make a man of him. Possibly on a similar principle, Sir Chris Bryant has been promoted to Northern Ireland.
For the ceremony of prime-ministerial departure and arrival, amplified music in Whitehall, such as that which drowned out Sir Keir’s original resignation statement, was banned. It was justified: free speech is endangered if you cannot hear anyone speak. But why a ban only to help here-today, gone-tomorrow PMs? Daily megaphone propaganda blares across Whitehall and Parliament Square, torturing local workers and legislators. Why not a blanket ban?
Once the killer of poor Ann Widdecombe has finally been brought to justice, it will be worth reviewing the behaviour of the officer originally in charge, Matt Longman, assistant chief constable of Devon and Cornwall. Mr Longman gave the first press conference after the murder. Despite asking people not to speculate, he said emphatically that ‘The incident is not being treated as terrorism’; there was ‘no information to believe it is a politically motivated crime’. Three days later, the head of counter-terrorism policing said the killing had been ‘a targeted attack’, implying Mr Longman had rushed to judgment. Some of us have come across Mr Longman before. As the National Police Chiefs Council ‘lead on foxhunting crime’, he has often asserted guilt without proof. In 2023, he spoke on a platform of the League Against Cruel Sports calling for a new law to ban trail hunting: ‘The Hunting Act is not working effectively and illegal hunting is still common practice. I know it, you know it, the public and the hunts know it.’ In 2024, when the British Hound Sports Association invited Mr Longman to witness their trail-hunting education open day, he indignantly refused: ‘This is hunt activity and very clearly designed to be good PR for hunting… I do not believe this to be an appropriate space for me to be in.’ The candidate dressed as a fox who stood beside Andy Burnham at the Makerfield by-election count used a video clip of Mr Longman’s thoughts to advance his campaign for a trail-hunting ban. I do wonder whether policing is an appropriate space for Mr Longman to be in.
Two weeks ago, I mentioned here that Edward Stourton, the distinguished broadcaster, had read out the speech of his cousin James at his 70th birthday party, James being too weak from cancer treatment to speak himself. What I felt unable to write at the time was that Edward himself was fatally ill. Last Saturday, Edward died. He had declaimed that birthday speech with the easy professionalism and natural warmth characteristic of his radio performances. If you knew his situation, as many at the dinner did, you felt its poignancy, but if you did not, you would have noticed nothing untoward. Comment after Edward’s death has focused on his removal from the BBC Today programme on the unspoken grounds that he was too posh. Yet Edward, a friend of almost exactly 50 years, was just what a BBC reporter and presenter should be – and once was – impartial, courteous, clear, well-informed and authoritative without showing off. Privately, he held most of the usual BBC soft-left views (I remember genial disagreements about the EU, for example) but he never paraded them in public. A seeker after truth; he loved real news. A real loss.
My wife the churchwarden invites distinguished persons to come and speak in aid of our 14th-century parish church. Last Saturday, we listened to Bijan Omrani, whose new book, God is an Englishman, is taking enlightened parts of this country by storm. Himself a churchwarden, he sets out how the English Church, its King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer expressed and advanced the Christian culture on which our law, governance, language and literature depend. His eloquent words confirmed an idea recently fermenting in my head: how about a new British organisation with global reach – possibly incorporating or superseding the British Council? It would be entitled, in a nod to the rule of Desert Island Discs, ‘The Bible and Shakespeare’. Its sole duty would be to foster interest in those two works in their 17th-century English forms. The founding purpose of the British Council in the 1930s was to counter the anti-British propaganda of the Axis. We face our Axis equivalents today. Why not deploy the greatest soft power England ever possessed?
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