Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The myth of Jeremy Corbyn, a kind and gentle man | 14 August 2018

I am relaxed about Jeremy Corbyn being thicker than mince but draw the line at the assumption, all too evidently held by most of his most devoted supporters, that you must be too. If Corbyn wishes to deny the obvious that is his prerogative; the notion you should be prepared to swallow any and every piece of whitewashing nonsense peddled by his fans is quite a different matter.  “I was present” when the wreath was laid “but I don’t think I was involved in it” is, I suppose, a step forward from the Labour party’s previous suggestion that “The Munich widows are being misled. Jeremy did not honour those responsible for the Munich killings”.

Monday

Katy Balls

Wasn’t my wreath, guv

Does Jeremy Corbyn harbour sinister views – or is he the unluckiest man in the world? That's the question being asked today after the Labour leader gave an interview to Sky News after allegations he attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia in 2014 for members of the terrorist group behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The official Labour line had been that Corbyn was paying his respects to the victims of a 1985 Israeli airstrike on Palestinian Liberation Organisation offices in Tunis. However, today he appeared to change tack. The Labour leader admitted he was present when a wreath was laid but added that he did not ‘think’ he was ‘involved’ in the actual wreath-laying.

Steerpike

Wreath-gate: Corbyn’s version of events – a timeline

Today, Jeremy Corbyn confirmed that he had been at a ceremony which commemorated the deaths of several terrorists linked to the 1972 Munich massacre. But it seems that Jeremy has had trouble recollecting what actually happened while he was there. So, to help jog Jeremy’s memory and to let our readers make up their own minds up about what happened on that day in 2014, Mr S has compiled every version of Jeremy’s story: 1. In 2014, soon after the visit to Tunisia, Corbyn wrote an article for the Morning Star, which said: ‘After wreaths were laid at the graves of those who died on that day and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991…’ 2.

Steerpike

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn’s terror tribute confusion

Poor Jeremy Corbyn, always ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. After revelations in the Daily Mail that he had laid a wreath near the graves of those involved in the 1972 Munich terrorist attack, he finally clarified what happened. Asked by Sky News if he was involved in the tributes, he answered: ‘I was present when it was laid, I don’t think I was actually involved in it’ https://twitter.com/jamin2g/status/1028983556939415552?s=21 In fairness, who hasn’t accidentally found themselves at a service where tributes were paid to the planners and perpetrators of a terrorist massacre? Update: There appears to be a problem https://twitter.

Brendan O’Neill

Boris Johnson is a victim of the modern inquisition

The Muslim Council of Britain wants Theresa May to subject Boris to a ‘full disciplinary inquiry’ over his comments on the niqab and burqa. Let’s call this by its true name: an inquisition. This inquiry would be a 21st-century inquisition of a man simply for speaking ill of a religious practice. May must resist this borderline medieval demand that she punish a member of her party for expressing a ‘blasphemous’ thought. She must put aside her Borisphobia and stand up for freedom of conscience against the inquisitorial hysteria that has greeted Boris’s remarks. Burqagate has been mad from the get-go.

Steerpike

Watch: Boris does the tea run

Boris Johnson has been in hot water for the past week over his Telegraph column which compared women in burqas to letter boxes, so it made sense for him to use the restorative powers of a hot drink to try and remove himself from trouble. The beleaguered MP has been on holiday in Italy for most of the furore, where he has been able to dodge questions about his column. But since his return, reporters have been camped outside his UK home waiting for answers. When he finally left the sanctuary of his house, the reporters could be forgiven for feeling mixed emotions. The former Foreign Secretary refused to any questions about the burqa, but did bring out tea for his pursuers: ‘I have nothing to say about this matter except to offer you some tea…’ https://www.youtube.

Steerpike

The Conservatives prepare for battle

It’s been all out civil war in the Tory party since the disastrous snap election which saw Theresa May lose the Conservative majority. Now it looks as though the party, tired of all the infighting, might finally be turning their attention to Labour. A job advert on the site w4mp went up over the weekend for a Conservative ‘Battleground Manager’: Key tasks for the role include planning election campaigns, working out target seats, and taking the fight to the opposition. The ideal candidate will of course be a ‘self-starter,’ ‘manage multiple tasks under pressure,’ and have excellent campaigning skills.

Saturday

Daniel DePetris

Angela Merkel sacrifices her principles to make a migration deal

There was a time not too long ago - less than three years to be exact - when German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the very top of her game. She dominated German and European politics for over a decade with her clear, effective, but cautious leadership, watching as the German economy solidified its place as Europe’s economic engine. When Merkel decided to open Germany’s doors in August 2015 to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria, she became much more than the steward of Berlin’s economic power - she transformed overnight into the moral beacon of the European continent.

John Connolly

Revealed: what voters think of party allegations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

Commentators on the left and right have been fiercely arguing for the past few weeks over which political party is more racist: Labour or the Conservatives. Conservatives have pointed out Jeremy Corbyn’s numerous links and associations with anti-Semites, Labour’s refusal to adopt the IHRA definition and Jewish conspiracy theorists on Twitter. In response, prominent left wingers have flung back at them calls by Sayeeda Warsi for an inquiry into Tory Islamophobia and comments by Boris Johnson about women in burqas looking like letter boxes. But what do the public actually think about allegations of racial prejudice within the two main parties, and who do they think is worse?

Gavin Mortimer

What happened to Je Suis Charlie, Prime Minister? | 11 August 2018

On January 11 2015, I was one of two million people who marched slowly and silently through Paris to honour the memory of the people slaughtered days earlier for being blasphemers and Jewish. It was an extraordinary day, an emotional one, too, soured only a little by the sight of presidents and prime ministers at the head of the march. These were the people who for years had been pretending there wasn't a problem with the rise throughout the West of political Islam. Now, following the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the shoppers in the Kosher supermarket, they had muscled their way to the front to claim they were the standard-bearers of liberty in the fight against an evil ideology.

Friday

Stephen Daisley

No, John McDonnell’s accusations of genocide against Palestinians are not ‘justifiable’

The Labour Party’s war on the Jews grows more lunatic by the day. The Daily Telegraph reports that shadow chancellor John McDonnell gave a speech in 2012 in which he accused Israel of attempting a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. According to the journalist responsible for the story, when Labour was contacted for a comment a party spokesman defended McDonnell’s charge as justifiable. The real story here is not that John McDonnell believes the Jewish state is engaged in the destruction of another people but that a Labour Party spokesperson, instead of saying ‘FFS, let me get back to you’, agreed with this assessment. Presented with McDonnell's outrageous position, the Labour Party officially adopted it there and then and spun it to a reporter.

Charles Moore

Labour plotters: please don’t overthrow Jeremy Corbyn just yet

According to the Daily Express, a tightly knit group of fanatical Labour moderates have been meeting in a country retreat to plot the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn. Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie and another ten or so smoothy-chops have met secretly for away-days at Fair Oak Farm, near Mayfield in Sussex, the paper claims. This scoop is a slight blow to me, since I live only a few miles away and failed to notice the plotters, but a much graver one to this country’s greatest defender of ordinary decent people, Paul Dacre, whose large southern estate all but borders Fair Oak. How did the Daily Mail’s inferior rival steal this story from under his nose? Those of us — including, of course, Mr Dacre — who support the cause of Leave, do not welcome such plots.

Steerpike

How the Miliband has fallen

When Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader in 2010, he must have imagined himself headlining Labour conferences for years to come. He would stand on stage delivering the defining political speeches and bold policy moves that would propel him to victory in a general election. Alas, many bacon sandwiches, conference gaffes, and an EdStone later, it didn’t quite end up as he wanted. Miliband can take heart that he is still on the line-up at this year’s Momentum sponsored conference ‘The World Transformed,’ but probably not quite as high up in the billing as he pictured eight years ago.

Steerpike

Letterbox-gate: who said it first – Boris or the Guardian?

In a strongly worded editorial on Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper did not hide its contempt for what it called Boris Johnson’s ‘tasteless newspaper column joke’ which compared women in burqas to letterboxes. ‘Baroness Warsi was absolutely correct to call Mr Johnson out on this on Tuesday when she called the remarks "dog-whistle Islamophobia"', it thundered. All of this somewhat surprised Mr Steerpike. Not because of the sanctimony, but because, as one eagle-eye reader got in touch to point out, the paper had already beaten Boris to the joke. In 2013, it published a column by Remona Aly entitled ‘Nine uses for a burqa … that don't involve bashing them.’ In it, the author suggests several alternative uses for the face-covering.

Steerpike

Ken Livingstone: Boris Johnson should be kicked out of the Tory party

Oh dear. Of all the figures to come out against Boris Johnson over his comments comparing women wearing the full face veil to 'letterboxes', Ken Livingstone is perhaps the most audacious. Despite his penchant for talking about Hitler and zionism at every broadcast opportunity, Red Ken has today declared that Johnson has gone too far and must go. Speaking on LBC, he said: 'He isn't really a politician, he just wants to be a famous celebrity. Frankly, I think the Tory Party should dump him.' Not the most obvious candidate for taking the moral high ground...

Steerpike

Is Boris Johnson a policing priority in London?

In case you were wondering where the Boris burqa row had left to go, Cressida Dick, the head of the Metropolitan Police, has waded into the debate. Despite no one actually coming forward to report a crime, Cressida decided to ask her ‘very experienced officers’ if Boris Johnson’s comparing of women in burqas to ‘letter boxes’ could constitute a hate crime. Unsurprisingly, they told her that the threshold for criminality had not been passed and she duly let the world know that the former Foreign Secretary would not be investigated. If Cressida Dick is looking for ways to best fill her time, can Mr Steerpike suggest that she busy herself with actual crimes in London?

Thursday

Peter Jones

Let’s hear Corbyn’s ‘logos’

Jeremy Corbyn regularly apologises on the subject of anti-Semitism, yet admits that he has done nothing wrong. So what does he actually mean by ‘apology’? He obviously does not feel the need to repent — the usual implication of the term — because he is convinced, as always, of his own unassailable rectitude. Perhaps it would clarify matters if he were to apologise in the Greek sense of the word. Apologia meant giving an account of what you had done and justifying your reasons for doing it. It was primarily a legal term. Socrates’ ‘Apology’ in 399 bc, for example, was his defence against charges laid at his door of corrupting the young and introducing strange new gods.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 9 August 2018

Home Brandon Lewis, the chairman of the Conservative party, demanded that Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, should apologise for saying, in an article defending the right of women in Britain to wear the burka or the niqab, that it was at the same time ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘The language that Boris used has offended people.’ Jennie Formby, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to Dame Margaret Hodge saying that no further action would be taken against her. Dame Margaret was said to have called Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader, an ‘anti-Semite’.

The Spectator

Bravo Boris

Ever since Boris Johnson resigned as foreign secretary, it was generally assumed that there would — in time — be a dramatic clash with Theresa May. But it was thought that the Prime Minister would pick her battle over a point of principle, perhaps on Europe, rather than over a joke in his Daily Telegraph column. Boris was defending the right of Muslims to wear what they like in public, but added that he thinks niqabs look like letterboxes. The ministerial reaction has been extraordinary, and deeply unedifying. Boris’s point was that, in banning the niqab, Denmark had passed a surprisingly illiberal piece of legislation — all the more surprising in that it has emerged from a country often viewed as a bastion of liberty.

Xan Smiley

Feeding the Crocodile

It is a tragedy that the party that has ruined Zimbabwe, led by a man who was one of the chief perpetrators of its misery, has managed by hook or by crook to win a fresh mandate. The narrow margin of 0.8 per cent by which Emmerson Mnangagwa secured his victory in last week’s presidential contest will inevitably raise suspicions of foul play. But he will almost certainly be given the benefit of the doubt, not least by the British government. Mnangagwa, known as the Crocodile for his habit of biding his time and crunching his enemies as Robert Mugabe’s chief enforcer and election-rigger, has said some sensible things since overthrowing his mentor on the back of a military coup last November. But he did not deserve the enthusiastic support of the Foreign Office.