Columns

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Revealed: the missing Mandelson messages

Darren Jones has become the government’s Walter Model, the general known during the second world war as ‘the Führer’s fireman’ for his deployment to shore up any position which appeared lost. In that capacity, Britain’s first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had the thankless task of presenting the government’s case to the House of Commons on Monday following the publication of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson. Jones himself was spared direct embarrassment because none of his exchanges with the disgraced peer came to light in the trawl of memos, emails and WhatsApp exchanges.

Rod Liddle

Kemi gives me hope

I had a notion the other day that there was possibly more I could offer to this fleeting world. A feeling that with life having been comparatively kind to me, perhaps there is something I could put back. I have these thoughts about once every month – and usually they are idly dismissed because they are either unrealistic or homicidal. For example, it would be well nigh impossible to smash every single white, middle-class, middle-aged liberal in the throat until his trachea exploded in a chiaroscuro of livid pink foam and vaporised black lung stuff. Way too many tracheas and not enough time, sadly.

Lionel Shriver

Who fancies a pint in Rachel Reeves’s ideal pub?

Even the most gormless of Labour politicians don’t try to persuade the electorate that taxation is a privilege – a glorious, much cherished opportunity to contribute to the greater good. Implicitly punitive, taxes are often levied on things that government wishes to discourage: smoking; drinking; latterly, carbon emissions. It follows that governments with severe, progressive tax regimes hope to discourage success, ambition, optimism, self-confidence, calculated risk-taking and a functional economy. That’s the big picture, but let’s get into the British weeds. Under this government’s guidance, HMRC is undertaking a revaluation of British pubs.

Douglas Murray

The lessons from Henry Nowak’s murder

I wonder how many readers have ever heard of the name Kriss Donald? The young Glaswegian was just 15 years old in 2004 when he was kidnapped by a local gang of Pakistani men. The group selected him because he was white and they had some beef with a group of white men with whom Donald had no connection at all. After driving around for hours, the gang – led by one Imran Shahid – stabbed Donald repeatedly before dousing his body in petrol and setting him alight. I also wonder how many readers have heard of the name Tony Timpa? The white, unarmed Texan was 32 in 2016 when he suffered some sort of mental breakdown in public. Instead of assisting him, police arrived at the scene and restrained him in such a way that he died.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Reform’s strange balancing act

Nothing illustrates the challenge facing Reform UK better than the strained interview Danny Kruger gave to the Today programme on Monday morning. Kruger, a former Tory MP who defected to Reform last September, has been charged by Nigel Farage with preparing the party for government. He clearly wanted the interview to be a high-minded examination of the intricacies of the Whitehall machinery. Instead, he had to deal with more pungent street politics. The interview quickly descended into questions about Robert Kenyon, the ‘plucky plumber’ and Reform candidate in the Makerfield by-election. Kruger, a thoughtful Christian, was clearly uncomfortable answering questions on sexual comments about Carol Vorderman which Kenyon had shared on social media in the past.

Rod Liddle

Might Restore scupper Reform?

I was as appalled as I dare say many of you to discover that Reform’s candidate in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election has a social media history of being opposed to the concept of abortion on demand. Those who wish to whitewash Robert Kenyon’s views will argue that this (reported) stance simply puts the candidate in roughly the same area as the Pope, Buddha, the Islamic scholars, Hinduism, Judaism, much of the world and UK populations and indeed the law. But it’s this kind of whataboutery which is, to my mind, destroying politics.

Douglas Murray

When did Sturgeon first notice her husband’s kleptomania?

What would you say if your spouse bought a luxury campervan? I know what I would say – something along the lines of: ‘Get that thing away from me. I refuse to spend wet weekends campervanning around the Highlands, and I don’t care whether the bathroom facilities are “luxury” or not.’ In other words, any spouse of mine would get a tongue-lashing. But then I have a spiritual aversion to campervans, having spent many a childhood summer stuck behind them on single-track roads in the Highlands, watching their foul residents bespoil many of Scotland’s best beaches. We cannot know what Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction was to this luxury monstrosity. She would have us believe that when Peter Murrell took receipt of his top-of-the-range campervan she had nothing to say.

Matthew Parris

Pity Andy Burnham

There is something infinitely melancholy in hearing what political ambition does to perfectly nice people. I awoke on Monday to hear Danny Kruger (an MP, formerly Conservative, now defected to Reform) defending his party’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election, one of whose past social media posts was simply too disgusting for me to repeat here. True, Mr Kruger was not defending the post itself, but the candidate’s right to a ‘private’ (protested Kruger) history of such social media comments. Well, maybe. But I seem to remember Kruger’s past speeches have been especially admired for their high moral tone – he is a strong Christian – and so his being forced to defend a candidate’s right to a history of filthy misogyny in a public forum will have hurt him.

Mary Wakefield

The rise of the child-haters

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’ But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit!

Wednesday

Noa Hoffman

Kemi has saved herself – but can she save the Tories?

Instinct matters in politics. Overthink and you can underperform. Try to box too clever and you get punched in the mouth by an opponent who trusts their own unrestrained judgment. Kemi Badenoch’s newfound popularity within her party is the result of trusting her instincts. The Tory leader is finding that no argument is as persuasive as being herself. Ahead of the King’s Speech debate, Badenoch had worked hard on a script with some well-honed attack points. But the most memorable line was unscripted.

Douglas Murray

My encounters with Wes Streeting

The Labour party seems to have ignored the advice I gave it in last week’s column, and so we are going to be treated to one of those down-market beauty pageants where candidates for the Labour leadership spend weeks talking competitively about the evils of Thatcherism, the nobility of miners and the perpetual threat of NHS privatisation. We might also look forward to watching the leadership candidates go for a jog, play football in an amusing manner and eat this country’s most disgusting foodstuffs as evidence of their authenticity. One of the candidates for this pie-eating competition is the now-resigned health secretary Wes Streeting. And on this particular candidate I have some history to narrate.

Rod Liddle

The secret shame of being ‘Reform-curious’

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single ‘My Life’. The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular schtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

Lionel Shriver

If you think your bills are bad now, just wait

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. Last week, a Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer for her party’s leadership told Times Radio that investors would see the UK as ‘the best place to be’ if only the government pursued ‘progressive policies that do speak to our communities’. She added darkly, ‘The markets will have to get into line’ – which was like brandishing a sabre at the heavens and threatening that the weather ‘will have to get into line’… or else!

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Things can always get worse

I have spent the past week marvelling at the behaviour of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. ‘He has to go’; ‘The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime’; ‘Things can’t go on like this’ – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in last week’s local elections. The problem is that some of us have a long-ish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May?

James Heale

Farage’s plan to win over the left

The loudest man in politics knows when to keep his silence. Nigel Farage held his tongue on Monday as Keir Starmer’s premiership floundered. Aside from a few PFLs – proper f***ing lunches – to celebrate the local election results, the Reform UK leader was already looking to the next challenge. Like a shark, Farage keeps moving forward, into new waters, hungry for more. One ally sums up his approach to politics in a single word: ‘Momentum’. For the past few months, Farage has had one goal: destroying the Tories. The figure ‘1,453’ was the total of gains proudly pumped out on Reform’s Instagram. For Farage, 7 May was the political equivalent of the fall of Constantinople – the point when the Conservatives ceased to be a national party.

Rod Liddle

The unstoppable rise of stupidity

Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.

Madeline Grant

What the Two Fat Ladies taught us about Britain

‘Grab that crab, Clarissa!/ Eat that meat, Jennifer!’ It was with these words – the start of their self-sung theme tune – that Two Fat Ladies first burst on to our screens 30 years ago. Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright were exceptionally unlikely stars. Both heavy drinkers and smokers, they had slightly fallen into cooking careers on the edge of the British Establishment. Jennifer used to be the cook at The Spectator, creating cream-laden dishes for staff while necking wine. Clarissa developed quinine poisoning from consuming around six pints of gin and tonic a day. Jennifer died in 1999; Clarissa in 2014. Clarissa was sober by the time Two Fat Ladies was filmed, but she had been seriously affected by her love of booze.

Matthew Parris

Stopping the boats shouldn’t require magical thinking

The BBC’s tracking-down of Kardo Ranya as a people-smuggling mastermind is a triumph of investigative journalism. But anyone who thinks this will seriously help ‘smash the gangs’ is deluded. As the drugs trade illustrates, where there is demand there will be supply. What’s to be done? Imagine you were the party leader of a mainstream British political party. Daydreaming, you see a vision – pouffe! A bang and a flash, and there stands the Fairy Queen herself. ‘What, oh party leader,’ she demands, ‘is your heart’s desire?’ Your reply is unhesitating but – you suppose – hopeless. ‘A winning strategy for the next general election,’ you wail. ‘I ask only for that.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

18 ways to save your political career

Dear wannabe leaders of Britain. What a lot of you there are! I’ve been writing about leadership and the craft of politics for 25 years and I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated. I’m keen to help. So listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn. 1) TL;DR: If you have no time for impertinent journalists, here’s the executive summary. You need a plan, plus strategy and tactics to deliver it. You need a narrative to explain it to voters. You need the charisma and application to take your party, the civil service and the country with you. And you need to build a team to do the bits that you cannot accomplish alone.

Rod Liddle

I admit it: I was wrong about the Premier League

Yes, of course, one sometimes yearns for the old days. The friend who, appearing in court on a charge of racial hatred for having shouted ‘Pikeys!’ at some Gillingham fans, was able to produce a shirt bought in the Gillingham club shop which bore the slogan ‘Pure Pikey’. Case dismissed. And then the case that was not dismissed – another friend, his face contorted with outrage and disbelief, found guilty of violent and abusive language towards the manager of an opposing team. ‘What sort of game has this become, Rod, when you can get done for calling Russell Slade a fat c**t?’ It is hard to say even from my antediluvian standpoint, that things haven’t got better A salient question.