Politics

I often joke that when I became an MP in 2019, after being a charity chief executive, I went from saint to sinner in the mind of the public. When you work for a charity, people assume you’re one of the good guys: honest, principled, in it for the right reasons. Too often politicians are seen as the opposite: dishonest, unprincipled, in it for themselves – and probably fiddling their expenses. Both stereotypes are wrong, yet they persist. I am regularly asked why I made the switch – not least by friends and family members, who know politics matters but wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. It is a question that I know will be asked more regularly after the senseless killing of Sir David Amess.

The news that Labour and the Liberal Democrats will not contest the by-election caused by David Amess’s murder is not a surprise; the Tories and the Liberal Democrats took the same approach in Batley and Spen in 2016. (It should give us all pause that there is recent precedent for how parties should behave in a by-election when the sitting MP has been killed.)  The principle they are standing up for is that violence should not change the party-political balance of the House of Commons. But the pragmatic reason that the last thing a town in mourning needs is a fiercely contested by-election is just as potent a factor.

On 12 October this year, Columbus Day, a statue of the Italian in Belgrave Square was vandalised by activists from Extinction Rebellion who described Columbus as ‘father of the slave trade’. Entirely ignorant of his life and ambitions, Columbus’s critics frequently turn to the searing denunciations of Bartolomé de Las Casas who excoriated the Spanish policy towards the native peoples of America. They are unaware that Las Casas was a great admirer of Columbus, and that this friar, who felt such pity for the native Americans, actively recommended the mass importation of black African slaves as an alternative labour source. In the same week as the Extinction Rebellion stunt a new plaque was unveiled at Oriel College, below a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

Why does every government department and agency seem to feel it hasn’t done its job unless it has expressed some hysterical reaction to the threat of climate change? Launching the Environment Agency’s latest report on its plans to prepare for possible changes in England’s climate over the next century, its chair Emma Howard Boyd said: ‘Some 200 people died in this summer’s flooding in Germany. That will happen in this country sooner or later, however high we build our flood defences, unless we also make the places where we live, work and travel resilient to the effects of the more violent weather the climate emergency is bringing. It is adapt or die.

I have often criticised BBC journalism on the issues of sex and gender because that journalism has often been quite bad. So it’s all the more important to for me to highlight instances when the Corporation does good journalism here. Stephen Nolan of the BBC has done that this week, and more. You might not be aware of the series of outstanding podcasts that Nolan released this week, examining the influence that Stonewall, a charity that lobbies on sex and gender issues, has over public bodies including the BBC itself. One reason you might have missed those podcasts is that the BBC itself has hardly bothered to promote them, even though they represent the very best of its journalism, the sort of inquiry that a public service broadcaster exists to carry out.

There are two ways Number 10 can look at new polling which shows only 14 per cent of Britons understand the slogan ‘levelling up’. The first: the government has utterly failed to communicate its signature policy. The second: at least they didn’t poll the Cabinet. The findings, which come in research by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for PoliticsHome, are interesting for what they tell us about now much the slogan has cut through (66 per cent have heard of it) versus how much it's been understood (one in three haven’t the foggiest what it refers to).