Gareth Southgate has finally shown some bottle

The provisional England squad for the Euros unveiled by manager Gareth Southgate contains one notable omission: Jordan Henderson. That’s a big surprise, not because the midfielder deserves to be on the plane to Germany this summer, but for what it says about the thinking of the normally ultra-loyal Southgate, who is often accused of picking his personal favourites for the squad, regardless of club form.

The England manager had this to say about why he left Henderson out: ‘The determining factor was the injury he picked up in the last camp. He missed five weeks and wasn’t able to get back up to the level of intensity. It was a difficult decision. He will be a miss. He’s an exceptional individual and fantastic human being. He’s been in that leadership role for a long time.’ Fine words aimed at softening the blow to the midfielder’s pride but – make no mistake – Henderson’s England career is over.

Few neutral observers will shed tears on his behalf. Henderson has paid the ultimate price for his decision last summer to leave Liverpool and play in the Saudi Pro League. At the time, he said it was important for him to play more regularly: ‘England is a big thing for me. You have got the Euros coming up.’ It is fair to say that things haven’t quite worked out as he hoped. The Saudi move damaged his reputation among the LGBT+ community, who had come to believe the midfielder was their most vocal supporter in the game. Many felt betrayed. Henderson insisted the move was not motivated by money and sought to appease his critics by suggesting that he would be a force for good in the country: ‘Having someone with those views and values in Saudi Arabia is only a positive thing.’ The mental gymnastics on display were embarrassing: Henderson is no villain, just a fool.

Things unravelled pretty quickly. Henderson decided to terminate his contract with Al Ettifaq less than six months into the deal, and opted to move to the Dutch giants Ajax in January. It hasn’t quite worked out for him there either: his form has been indifferent at best. The payback has been brutal, more so because it comes at the hands of Southgate. In the past, the England manager has chosen to stick with Henderson through thick and thin, despite widespread ridicule and disbelief from fans and pundits alike. To be fair, Southgate is not the first England manager who has found it hard to let go of a player he deemed a part of the core group, a trustworthy and capable lieutenant, charged with imposing the manager’s instructions on the field of play. No longer. Even Southgate can see that Henderson, who would have turned 34 this summer, is no longer up to it. The England manager is right to pull the plug, and Henderson can have few complaints.

There are quite a few other surprises in today’s announcement. A number of notable contenders didn’t make the cut, including Marcus Rashford. Few could have predicted last year that Rashford would not feature at the Euros. He scored 30 goals in all competitions last season but his form has fallen off the cliff this campaign. He will be gutted, but he simply doesn’t merit a place. Raheem Sterling, Reece James and Ben Chilwell are out as well. Anthony Gordon, who has been a revelation at Newcastle – makes the cut. So too does Jack Grealish, who has been in and out of the title-winning Manchester City side. A quintet of five uncapped players, including Jarrad Branthwaite of Everton and Curtis Jones of Liverpool, feature in the squad.

England, packed with young talent, are one of the favourites to win the tournament. Yet Southgate has often come across as stubborn and lacking in tactical imagination when it comes to the big moments in the final stages of international tournaments. His journey with England must surely come to an end this summer – unless he wins the Euros. His decision to omit Henderson and some other under-performing England stalwarts sends a strong message to all the players. Southgate has been ruthless for once. More please.

Is Venezuela preparing for war?

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population. But the conflict is much more than that and has less to do with Guyana’s land border and more to do with the maritime domain.

An Iranian warship, a merchant ship converted to a military vessel for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy called the Shahid Mahdavi crossed the equator into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time on May 4. Its mission is secret and destination unknown. Three years ago, two other warships from Iran’s conventional navy followed a similar route when they sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and crossed into the South Atlantic with a reported destination of Venezuela. Back then, the warships changed course and proceeded around West Africa en route to St. Petersburg.

It’s unclear whether the Shahid Mahdavi will cross the Atlantic this time but what is clear is that the IRGC’s armament has already arrived in bulk quantities to Venezuela.

While the IRGCN warship sails somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, a Venezuelan naval vessel, the Guaiquerí-class patrol vessel PC-21 was spotted on May 8 sailing toward Guyana’s territorial waters equipped with stealth technology and anti-ship missiles courtesy of China and Iran. This happened at least once before in recent weeks but this time the Venezuelan naval vessel was escorted by Iranian-made Peykaap-III small boats, the most advanced fast attack craft in the IRGCN arsenal that arrived in Venezuela last year.

For more than a decade, Iran has been equipping Venezuela with modern weaponry to include long-range drones, smart bombs, cruise missiles, rockets, and, of course, the combat boats. These weapons systems are not meant to be used in a conventional military fashion but instead used in asymmetric amphibious assaults, like the tactics used by the Houthi rebels off the coast of Yemen and in the Red Sea.

The Iran-sponsored, Houthi long-range piracy attacks against commercial vessels that froze commercial shipping through the Red Sea is a template that needs to be carefully studied by Latin American military analysts. The net effect of choking off the Egyptian economy and further isolating Israel as it fights a three-pronge war against the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas is a modus operandi that Iran is taking across the Atlantic into the Caribbean. This time aimed at the United States with the mounting Venezuela-Guyana conflict as the catalyst.

Most analysis of the Venezuela-Guyana conflict revolves around the Esequibo region. The dense jungle between Guyana and Venezuela was delineated by the UK in the late nineteenth century when Guyana was a colony and negotiated with Venezuela via the United States. Venezuela cried foul and argued that backdoor shenanigans were involved in the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award that established the Esequibo as part of Guyana’s sovereign territory. Decades later, Venezuela took its case to the UN who mediated the 1966 Geneva Agreement known as the “agreement to come to an agreement” tabling the border dispute for resolution in the future.

The future arrived in 2020 when the International Court of Justice accepted the Esequibo case under its jurisdiction and began the proceedings to arbitrate the border dispute. Venezuela’s Maduro regime does not recognize the ICJ’s authority and, instead, held a national referendum about the Esequibo on December 3, 2023, to prompt the passage of a new law last March in the regime-controlled National Assembly declaring the “Guayana-Esequiba” as Venezuela’s twenty-fourth state. This is the casus belli for Venezuela’s war.

The history is important, but the current framing of this dispute as one of recovering lost territory and claiming sovereign lands is what the Maduro regime’s propaganda machine wants the world to believe. Venezuela neither has the means nor motivation to recover a territory that effectively has been governed by Guyana for more than a half century. This conflict is not about the Esequibo. It’s about the Atlantic.

Even if Maduro were to “invade” the Esequibo with ground forces, the Venezuelan military would be withered away by Mother Nature while the Guyanese continues to grow its GDP at more than 30 percent per year by bringing the largest recent offshore oil discovery in the world to market. The 11 billion barrels of light crude discovered in 2015 is the source of Guyana’s recent economic boom.

But the boom could be a bust if Venezuela and Iran are able to disrupt commercial shipping in the maritime corridor that connects the Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea.

If Israel and Ukraine have taught us anything it’s that the second and third order economic effects of those wars are what is changing the geopolitical landscape of the world, especially in the maritime domain. In the case of the Ukraine war, it’s the inflation of food prices due to supply chain disruption of wheat and fertilizers produced in Russia and Ukraine that has impacted African and Latin American agro-industries and economies. In the Gaza war, it’s the shutting down of shipping lanes through the Suez Canal that has slowed humanitarian aid, further pressuring Israel and diverting maritime traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, where the IRGCN warship is currently headed.

The South Atlantic is a maritime domain that is arguably among the strongest in illicit trade and weakest in maritime security. Known for transatlantic criminal and terrorist networks, notably Hezbollah who operates from Brazil to Guinea Bissau. It’s a body of water, prime for revisionist, authoritarian powers in Iran, Russia, and China to test out their ambition for a new multi-polar maritime security belt.

Iran, Russia and China have already carried out a half-dozen joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean since 2018 and aspire to bring these drills to the Atlantic Ocean. Venezuela may provide them the pretext to do so.

The third smallest country in South America with the fastest growing economy in the world is about to enter the fight of its life. But Guyana is not Ukraine and does not have the military means to deter Venezuelan aggression. This war, however, is not really about Guyana.

Iran, Russia and China have ensured their proxy, Venezuela, is ready to start the first inter-state war in Latin America since 1941, when Ecuador and Peru fought a border war that lasted less than a month. But unlike that war, this is less about the local conflict and more about the international context of turning Great Power Competition into Great Power Conflict. After Ukraine, amid Gaza, it’s now Venezuela’s turn to take proxy warfare to the shores of a US-allied nation.

What will Iran – and the United States – do next?

From time to time, even the most belligerent warmongers get taken down: whether it’s bad weather, or other unseen forces, there are always bigger powers at work. For now, the helicopter accident that claimed the life of Iran’s president appears to have been an act of nature, the will of God, as we like to remind ourselves in Islam. Sometimes good things do happen in bad helicopters.

In the days before his death, Ebrahim Raisi was busy. Right before he left Azerbaijan for Iran, Raisi met with the country’s president at a ceremony to open a dam. Days earlier in Tehran, Raisi saw the president of the Kurdish regional government. Their talks, initiated by the Kurdish president, had been on building peace in the region and diminishing the intense conflict Iran had generated. The tone of the Tehran meeting, as recounted to me, had been conciliatory and friendly; the Kurds had appealed to Iran to lay off the regional conflict and instead build bridges with neighbours rather than exploit them in pursuit of Iran’s proxy wars. The meeting ended with the prospect of ongoing discussions. 

Had Raisi lived, the destination of his next international trip was Erbil, the Kurdish capital in northern Iraq and home to the Kurdish regional government. The Peshmerga heartland is a refuge for the Yazidi and Kurdish survivors of the war against Isis and is home to a growing population of Christians. The president of Kurdistan, Nechirvan Idris Barzani, a pragmatic man of reason, is unusually well liked, not only by the Kurds but also by both Iraq and Iran – a rare feat. Rumour has it that he may even be considered a possible candidate for the Iraqi presidency.

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But Raisi’s visit to Erbil was not God’s will. Official narratives around the world confirmed the death of Raisi and the Iranian foreign minister to be an accident. Raisi and the Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian were seated in the best of three aged Bell helicopters that may have been 50 years old. The aircraft is thought to have gone down in bad weather not long after it took off. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units scoured the rugged wilderness where the helicopter crashed; they found the wreckage and their president and foreign minister dead at the scene.

Iran’s paranoia is such that, while the helicopter crash appears to have been an accident, it may suspect foul play. The crash comes at a difficult time for Tehran: Iran is still recovering from the global humiliation it suffered at attempting an ambitious and massive strike on Israel, only to be deterred, not only by the remarkable Israeli military, but by other military powers in the region.

Paranoia can be corrosive over time and make for more belligerence. Iran’s unspooling proxy wars continue to rage in Gaza between Hamas and Israel; the red-hot Israeli-Hezbollah northern front with Lebanon risks spilling over; the hinterlands in the Yemen with the difficult-to-control Houthis and their spillover conflict into the Red Sea continue: these conflicts are close to spinning out of control, even of Iran. Ever paranoid of internal conflict, it might not be unreasonable for Iran to fear its own proxies may have become too powerful to be directed, even by the Iranian regime itself.

The United States and Israel are also struggling to maintain control of both the Gaza war and the information/propaganda war surrounding it. Since October 2023, the US and Israel have both haemorrhaged massive international political legitimacy; Israel, in particular, has suffered catastrophic reputational damage which may takes decades to rebuild. The conflict is so devastating that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is mulling international arrest warrants against Hamas and the leaders of Israel on the basis of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. Perversely, the victims of Hamas are now criminalised for the defense of their people from Hamas, which seems an extraordinarily unjust recommendation coming at a frighteningly critical moment in the Israel-Gaza conflict as the Rafah operation deepens.

Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden, facing the prospect of a resounding election defeat, escalating domestic protests, and the rise of open Jew hatred inside the United States, both verbal and physical, is flailing.

As well as being unable to get a grip on domestic matters, Biden is utterly failing to keep Iran in check. Nowhere has this failure been more apparent than in Iraq. US assets have faced numerous strikes by Iran or its proxies since the beginning of the Gaza war. Many attacks go unanswered. 

US ambivalence at deterring Iran places American commanders in an impossible position: do nothing and remain a sitting duck to the IRGC or Iranian-backed militias; or protect the men and women under your command who have been placed in danger but rendered defenceless by order of their commander in chief. This is a daily dilemma across Iraq for American force leadership.

Inside Iraq, people are sickened by the US’s failure to crack down on the Islamist regime of Iran while neglecting the suffering of their own populations. Even the loyal and deeply pro American Kurds have lost all confidence in US foreign policy: they realise they are now effectively left to fend for themselves in a neighbourhood perhaps even more hostile than Israel’s. 

As Iran emerges from mourning next weekend, Iran will train its crosshairs and fury on vulnerable US assets in Iraq and particularly the Kurdish region. If it fails to respond, the US will be showing all too clearly that it has forgotten the vast amounts of Kurdish blood that was shed to defend the world against Isis – a terrorist army that threatened not only Iraq and Syria but Europe and the United States.

‘We are not your mercenaries,’ one Kurdish commander emotionally told me, upon learning I was American, during my first visit to Duhok, Kurdistan in 2018. 

The US doesn’t have long to act. We may be approaching the final moment to concentrate US forces in Kurdistan, guarantee Kurdish autonomy and support a true Kurdistan. This is not only our moral obligation. Guaranteeing a heavily-armed Kurdistan ensures the United States could restrain both Iran and Turkey while empowering a deeply pro-Israel ally. Deterrent has a wonderful way of making conflict less likely. 

But under Biden, this is wishful thinking. Today, Kurds face an emboldened Iran and a salivating Turkey licking their chops as they trade plans to carve up control of Iraqi Kurdistan. If the US does not act now, we can anticipate Iranian and Turkish incursions in Kurdish territory. Overwhelmed and denied support, the noble Kurds will be deemed ‘unfit’ to secure their region, and Turkey and Iran will subjugate the Kurds ending decades of regional autonomy and the end of the Kurdish dream.

Israel knows America is ambivalent. Kurds know America has bailed. Iran knows the US is weak. Without assertive US engagement, these conflicts will rapidly deepen, become less and less ‘contained’ by those who launched them and those who must fight in them. There will come a time when no one will have full control. 

Indeed, we may have already crossed that Rubicon, and perhaps, as Caesar once said, ‘The die is cast’.

Taxpayer-funded porn project causes uproar in Scotland

Scottish government-backed quango Creative Scotland is back in the limelight over its porn project controversy. As Mr S wrote in March, the director of a hardcore pornographic performance, ‘Rein’, managed to secure £85,000 of taxpayers’ cash for her rather, um, explicit work. Now it can be revealed that, despite officials denying full knowledge of the show’s contents before this point, Creative Scotland was in fact aware of the show’s plans to include ‘non-simulated sex acts’ a year before signing off on the hefty sum. Just when you think events in Scotland can’t get any madder…

While quango bosses suggested that it was only this year that the full extent of the project’s explicit plans became clear, documents dating back to 2022 indicate otherwise, expressly noting that the show ‘involves sex choreography and scenes’. It transpires that Creative Scotland had sight of a ‘monitoring form’ submitted in 2023 by director Leonie Rae Gasson, which detailed proposals for explicit on-stage sex scenes and the hiring of an intimacy coordinator. Gasson, who promotes herself as someone who approaches her work ‘from a queer and neurodivergent perspective’, described her project as ‘pro-sex worker’. In the creator’s cash request from 2022, the director added that her team were ‘researching legal and ethical frameworks’ to showcase explicit acts. ‘In this [research and development stage] we will not be filming or performing any explicit sex acts,’ the submission notes, before adding: ‘We anticipate the final performance to do so.’ In descriptions of the performance provided to Creative Scotland, officials were told of plans for the use of ‘nude Doppelbangers’, ‘leather-clad Daddies’ and ‘sheer tulle draped Princesses’. Crikey.

Those assessing the project’s funding request noted that ‘it strongly meets [equality, diversity and inclusion] as a diverse-led team’ which will ‘prioritise artists based in Scotland, and those who are queer, disabled and/or neurodiverse’, adding that it ‘meets environmental sustainability in its plans to develop an eco-friendly design and set’. The assessor agreed with Gasson’s initial application that stated her show ‘sits in a theatre context but straddles dance, digital arts and visual arts’, noting this ‘gives it wide appeal’. Instead of focusing on the explicit nature of the performance, the Creative Scotland assessment is instead more concerned by the project’s ‘outdoor shooting location’ and ‘precise design of the set’. The quango official added: ‘What is exciting is the potential for a sex-positive approach to these themes…and storytelling from queer and diverse perspectives.’ Anything goes in the name of diversity and inclusion, eh…

Even the progressive SNP government is rather agog at the whole thing, with culture secretary Angus Robertson today admitting he is ‘deeply concerned’ about the revelations and that he has requested ‘an urgent meeting with the chief executive and chair of Creative Scotland to understand how the current situation has transpired’. Meanwhile Creative Scotland bosses are desperately trying to distance themselves from the rather embarrassing developments. Chief executive Ian Munro has defended funding decisions, claiming that there was an understanding that performances would be ‘simulated’. He added:

As became clear in March 2024, when the project team developed new content for their website and publicised that as part of a call-out for participants, one new and significant difference emerged which took the project into unacceptable territory. That was the intention to include real sex, as opposed to performance depicting simulated sex, in the work.

But application forms from two years ago dispute Munro’s claims, while further email evidence proves Creative Scotland staff voiced concerns about ‘the press’ finding out about the ‘risky’ material in September 2022.

Creative Scotland is trying to claw back the cash, but the company has admitted that more than £31,000 of public funds will not be returned due to ‘contractually legitimate’ spending. Mr S can imagine that Scottish taxpayers will be rather displeased to hear what their hard-earned money has been spent on – while their NHS continues to crumble and the cost-of-living crisis intensifies. Steerpike just hopes that Creative Scotland – and the Scottish government – will clean up their acts sharpish…

Place your bets: what drugs is Biden on?

Who has a better chance of passing a drug test, Joe Biden or Hunter? At this point, Cockburn thinks it’s probably a coin toss. What he’d rather know is what the president is doped up on in his more energetic moments. Thanks to an online betting platform, voters can now gamble on which drug they think Biden is using.  

“BetOnline.ag, which infamously set odds on who the White House cocaine belonged to, has created a wagering market for which drug Biden will test positive for,” Josh Barton, a BetOnline rep, told Cockburn. So far, the odds favor amphetamine followed by methamphetamine. Bettors think Biden is poppin’ more Adderall than a college student during finals week.  

The question of Biden’s drug habits came to the forefront last week after Trump demanded the president get screened before their debate in June. “I just want to debate this guy, but you know — and I’m gonna demand a drug test too, by the way,” Trump said on Friday at a GOP dinner in Minnesota. “I am. No, I really am. I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union. He was high as a kite.” 

Biden’s performance at the State of the Union was unlike anything Cockburn has seen from the president since he took office. The eighty-one-year-old, who usually appears to be on beta blockers, was cogent and unusually aggressive for almost a whole hour, right when Jill would normally be tucking him into bed. Whatever narcotic cocktail the Biden campaign supposedly cooked up for the night, Cockburn wants some too. 

Trump isn’t the only GOP member to suggest Biden was jacked up during the State of the Union. Last week, Republican representative Greg Murphy told Fox News that he had some “good knowledge” that Biden really was on drugs. “I believe they gave him something to help him sustain the lights and sustain the vigor that he had,” Murphy said. He then told an incredulous Maria Bartiromo that he would show her the evidence off-air. 

Unsurprisingly, cocaine also made BetOnline’s list, coming in third. This whole time Cockburn’s been telling everyone it was Hunter’s cocaine in the White House, but could it have been the “Big Guy” all along? Trump seems to think Joe and Hunter have been in on it together for a while. “Does anybody really believe that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, is for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden,” he posted on Truth Social last year. 

But it’s not just Biden’s State of the Union address that has people wondering. The president’s policy has been suspiciously soft on drugs recently. Last week, Biden announced plans to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana, reclassifying it from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III. Last summer the president’s younger brother, Frank, revealed that Joe is also “very open-minded” to using psychedelics for medical treatment. Perhaps the president is a step beyond that now. Come late June, CNN could find itself hosting the debating equivalent of the Enhanced Games...

UK growth is creeping up – but tough decisions still lie ahead

Today the International Monetary Fund has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK: from 0.5 per cent this year to 0.7 per cent, followed by a 1.5 per cent rise in 2025 (unchanged from its previous update). These forecasts still sit slightly below the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent predictions – but only just. The IMF’s latest forecasts come less than two weeks after the UK economy defied predictions and grew by 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year, exceeding practically all expectations and confirming that recession ended back in 2023.

As I noted earlier in the month, when the provisional GDP figures were announced, the government must be careful about how it sells good news. The headline figures around growth, both forecast and confirmed, do not necessarily reflect how well-off voters are feeling, especially as GDP per capita still hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Still, it is hard to deny that the economic situation is improving, and you can tell from today’s comments that confidence in this narrative is growing. Responding to the upward revisions, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt noted that according to the ‘forecast we will grow faster than any other large European country over the next six years – so it is time to shake off some of the unjustified pessimism about our prospects'.

Hunt isn’t just relying on the IMF’s forecasts for his optimism. This week alone the Chancellor has other pieces of good economic news that point towards a better summer. The IMF’s estimate that the Bank of England has room to cut interest rates three times before the end of the year was hinted at just yesterday by the Bank’s deputy governor Ben Broadbent. While Broadbent (who is leaving the Bank in July) did not put a figure on the number of rate cuts the Bank might deliver in 2024, he all but confirmed speculation that Threadneedle Street is gearing up for its first rate cut this summer. ‘If things continue to evolve with [Bank] forecasts…’ he said in his speech, ‘...then it’s possible Bank Rate could be cut some time over the summer.’

We learn more about that evolution tomorrow, when the inflation data for April is published. It’s a big update: the headline inflation rate is expected to slow to (or around) the Bank’s target of 2 per cent, marking the end of the inflation crisis that has plagued the country since autumn 2021. The BoE does expect the rate to pick up slightly towards the end of the year, but nothing compared to what's happened the past few years. Having acknowledged on multiple occasions now that a rate cut is compatible with keeping monetary policy fairly restrictive, tomorrow’s inflation update should be another indicator to the Bank that it can start a slow and steady process of cutting rates.

These updates are no silver bullet for the long-term trajectory of the economy. Growth may be better than expected this year, but it’s still far below a rate needed to substantially boost the economy. Alongside calls for more pro-growth initiatives, the IMF also notes today that ‘tough choices’ cannot be avoided in the UK, as rising debt levels and growing demands on public services create an unsustainable situation. These are the problems, of course, that no political party wants to talk about heading into an election: at a time when politicians want to be making promises, there is no shortage of reminders that there is no scope to do so.

Listen to Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and James Heale discuss the IMF’s forecasts on Coffee House Shots:

Gove sounds the alarm on anti-Semitism

Multiple ministers are out giving speeches today but none will be as hard-hitting as that made by Michael Gove this morning. Britain, he warned, risks ‘descending into the darkness’ if it fails to tackle growing anti-Semitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks. Much of the Community Secretary’s ire was directed at the recent pro-Palestine campus protests, amid fears of the impact on Jewish students. University encampments are merely, in Gove’s words, ‘anti-Semitism repurposed for the Instagram age’; the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is ‘explicitly anti-Semitic’. It comes after anti-Jewish hate crime incidents rose by 147 per cent last year, two-thirds of which followed the attack on Israel, according to the Community Security Trust.

Gove’s argument was that the fight against anti-Semitism is crucial in the wider struggle to preserve free societies under attack. He contrasted the fate of those societies where Jews feel most at home to where they are demonised and persecuted. ‘It’s an ironclad law of history that countries which are descending into darkness are those which are becoming progressively more unsafe for Jewish individuals’, Gove said. He compared ‘the Spain of the Inquisition, the Vienna of the 1900s, Germany in the thirties’ to ‘the Netherlands of the seventeenth century [and] Britain in the first decades of the last century’. ‘When Jewish people are under threat, all our freedoms are threatened’ he said. ‘The safety of the Jewish community is the canary in the mine. Growing anti-Semitism is a fever which weakens the whole body politic.’ Both the far-right and the far-left share common ground in this respect, he argued. ‘Anti-Semitism is a virus that evolves’ said Gove: from that, the other pernicious conspiracies are spawned.

This being a Gove speech, there were some news-lines for the grateful hacks too. He suggested that pro-Palestine march organisers should stump up for policing of their protests, much like Chelsea Football Club funds policing for matches at Stamford Bridge. Gove condemned the ICC’s call for Binyamin Netanyahu’s arrest, arguing there ought to be no equivalence between a democratically-elected leader and the head of a terrorist group. His punchy rhetoric also caused a stir after he name-checked the Revolutionary Communist party, whose leader promptly accused Gove of a ‘disgusting smear’.

Rightly or wrongly, Gove’s speech is being viewed through the lens of the long-awaited Woodcock report on political protests, which is due to be published later today. Two months after he unveiled the new government definition of extremism, we are still waiting for the formal naming, shaming and shunning of the groups identified by Gove. Having sounded the alarm on anti-Semitism, the Communities Secretary will now be under pressure to back up fine words with prompt action.

The far right isn’t the only threat ahead of the European elections

In France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary and Austria parties described by their foes as ‘far-right’ are on course for significant gains at next month’s European elections. To the chagrin of progressive politicians, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are popular with many voters. But centrist groups in the European Parliament are determined to do everything to stop them.

‘We are facing a crucial moment in the history of our European project, where once more the far right is attempting to bring back the darkest pages of our history,’ said a communique issued by a coalition of left-wing, green and centrist outfits in the European parliament on 8 May. The timing was no coincidence: that day marked the 79th anniversary of Victory in Europe day. It warned that ‘far-right’ parties represented a threat to democracy, due to the ‘constantly growing cases of harassment, vandalism, spread of disinformation, defamation and hate speech’.

The statement ended with a declaration that they ‘will never cooperate nor form a coalition’ with a ‘far right’ party. It called on Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to endorse their message.

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The communique was an insult to the intelligence of the European electorate. Voters have eyes and ears, they are aware of what has unfolded in Europe in recent months. It is not far-right students calling for the destruction of Israel; it was not MPs from Marine Le Pen’s party who were questioned by police on charges of ‘apology for [Hamas] terrorism’; it was not a right-wing Spanish MP who tweeted soon after the October 7 attack: ‘Today and always with Palestine’; it was not a right -wing mayor in Brussels trying to prevent democratically elected politicians speaking at a conference because he objected to their views; it was not a Swedish right-wing MP who recently attended a conference linked with Hamas.

Europe does indeed feel like it might be returning to ‘the darkest pages of our history’; but it’s not the right which is responsible for many of the most troubling recent events: it is a toxic alliance of elements of the progressive left and their Islamist allies.

The man who was shot dead in France last Friday as he set fire to a synagogue was an Algerian; and the man jailed for life last week for killing a pensioner in Hartlepool, ‘for the people of Gaza’, was a Moroccan.

It is Islamofascism that frightens many Europeans today: teachers murdered because they showed images of the Prophet; girls beaten unconscious because they don’t wear a headscarf; men stabbed to death because of their sexuality or because they drank alcohol.

What also alarms voters is that so many progressive politicians live in a state of permanent denial; they can’t bring themselves to confront the truth. They wring their hands about ‘Islamophobia’ even as Jews are routinely persecuted in Europe.

Other than the deceit and delusion of their opponents, there are other factors that explain the popularity of politicians like Meloni, Wilder and Le Pen. They recognise the folly of Net Zero, and of open borders, and they know that only the male species has a penis.

The European left has lost its way this century, which accounts for the fact that most of the 27 countries in the EU are run by governments that lean in varying degrees to the right. The left will only reverse this trend if they begin to speak and act with courage and honesty.

A start would be to issue another communique, alerting voters to the real danger in next month’s European elections, a coalition that poses a genuine threat.  

The ‘Free Palestine’ coalition is composed of parties from countries including France, Belgium. Sweden and Germany. One of its spokesmen Belgian MP Fouad Ahidar has declared: ‘There are two major issues we want to discuss: Islamophobia in Europe, which is on the rise, and the Palestinian question.’ Ahidar has described Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis as ‘a small response’ to 75 years of ‘massacres’.

The Free Palestine manifesto demands a ‘radical’ change in the direction of European diplomacy. This could include legitimatising Hamas and Islamic Jihad as political organisations, and imposing sanctions on Israel. It could also become illegal for European citizens to enlist in the Israeli army.

The French component of the coalition is the Democratic Union of French Muslims (UDMF), which states that its raison d’etre is anti-zionism and anti-imperialism. Also operating in France is the Muslim Brotherhood. The academic Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, whose book about the organisation last year led to her being given police protection, told Le Figaro: ‘The Brotherhood networks in France operate in two ways: either they lay their eggs in cuckoo parties on the far left, hoping to infiltrate these organisations, or they openly display their own colours’.

It is time that the European left grew up. Prattling on about Mussolini and Marshal Pétain is passé. There is a new threat spreading across Europe, and once again its primary targets are Jews.

Europe’s leaders hail Rwanda scheme

Well, well, well. Rishi Sunak’s immigration plans have been met with a fairly underwhelming response in Britain – only a quarter of people believe the Rwanda scheme will work, while the PM has faced some rather public dissent from within his own ranks over his record on small boats. But the Rwanda policy does in fact have some political admirers – in the form of leaders from across the Continent. Finally a piece of good news for the PM…

Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer is the latest European politician to heap praise on Rishi’s Rwanda plan. At a press conference in Vienna this morning, Nehammer hailed Britain as a ‘pioneer’ on migration, telling journalists:

Asylum proceedings should happen in safe third countries. The UK is therefore a pioneer for this model – a model that will be important for Europe as well. The Rwanda model will be a solution for us to have asylum proceedings in safe third countries and that’s something we need to put on the EU’s agenda as well.

On the other hand we will be able to save human lives because having asylum proceedings in safe third countries means that we don’t have dangerous smuggling routes, it means putting an end to death in the Mediterranean or English Channel.

Talk about a sterling review. And Austria isn’t alone in supporting Sunak’s Rwanda policy. As many as 15 European states are on board with the UK’s new way of stopping the boats, Nehammer told reporters today. Elsewhere, the CDU, Germany’s centre-right party – formerly led by Angela Merkel – has also backed Sunak’s plan. Current Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz is ‘firmly convinced’ the Rwanda approach will work, adding that it is something his party ‘could emulate’. And Ursula Von Der Leyen, current President of the European Commission who is running for a second term, lent her support to third-country migration deals, proclaiming last week: ‘We Europeans are the ones who decide who comes to the European Union and under what circumstances.’ Quite the vote of confidence…

Will all this overseas support prompt some sheepishness from Sunak’s detractors for slapping down his scheme? Home Secretary James Cleverly is certainly keen to stress to his colleagues and critics that the UK’s Rwanda scheme is closely in line with mainstream European opinion. But though Europe’s leaders are lauding the PM’s policy, and Sunak himself has pointed to Ireland’s migrant woes as proof his plan is working, Mr S would remind readers that as of yet, the new Rwanda policy has not seen a single flight take off…

How did the EU get Raisi’s death so wrong?

Most of the world will not mourn the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash near Varzaqan in Iran, this week. Dubbed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’, Raisi was responsible for the deaths of thousands in a purge of political dissent in the 1980s. Since becoming president he has overseen the brutal crackdown on Iranians protesting against the regime’s punitive morality police. And he has led a country which is a key supplier of drones and weapons to Vladimir Putin, causing countless civilian deaths.

Accordingly, most world leaders did not offer condolences for Raisi’s death, with President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Meloni and other leaders of the democratic world choosing not to comment.

In the institutions of the European Union, however, senior figures immediately sent their commiserations. Charles Michel, President of the European Council rushed into action, expressing his ‘sincere condolences’ on behalf of the European Union. High Representative Josep Borrell likewise offered his condolences, again as a representative of the EU.

Janez Lenarcic, European Commissioner for Crisis Management, went a step further, saying he would make available the EU’s Copernicus satellite system to help Iranian rescuers seeking to find Raisi and save his life, in the name of ‘EU Solidarity’.

Why was it obvious to the United States, Great Britain, and almost all democratic countries, that commemorating Raisi would be morally contemptuous, but not to the bureaucrats in Brussels?

It is worth stressing the kind of man Raisi was. No one quite knows how many lives the Butcher took in the 1988 purge of political prisoners. Whilst some estimates stop at ‘only’ a few thousand, others reach as high as 30,000. We do know that, by the end, there were so many victims that the bodies had to be loaded onto forklifts and hung from cranes. The Butcher would maintain, until the end of his life, that his role in these executions of political prisoners was a source of great pride for him, for which he should be esteemed and respected.

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As president he was a fanatical supporter of sex segregation, with his rule marked by extreme policies such as the amputation of hands, open hatred of gay people, and the imposition of even stricter restrictions on what women can wear.

In late 2022, a young woman called Mahsa Amini was set upon by the Iranian morality police for violating these restrictions. Beaten savagely for wearing her hijab incorrectly, her subsequent death triggered huge protests against Raisi’s government.

It is no surprise then that Raisi’s death has triggered jubilant street celebrations in the Iranian diaspora, while videos from inside Iran show people baking celebratory sweets and giving them to strangers.

The people of Iran know exactly what kind of man Raisi was. It’s a shame that European Union officials are so clueless by comparison. Already the EU’s tone deaf response has led to widespread criticism from those who believe European institutions no longer speak for them.

‘Not in my name!’ responded Geert Wilders, of the Dutch Party for Freedom, to Charles Michel. Theo Francken, a Belgian MP of the conservative New Flemish Alliance, echoed his criticism.

On the other side of the political divide, Guy Verhofstadt, a long-time European liberal, responded by simply highlighting Raisi’s credentials as a mass murderer. Whereas Hannah Neumann, a German Green MEP, criticised Michel’s message and claimed that it was only made in a private capacity.

Remarkably, two of the European Union’s most senior foreign policy figures have managed to unite the entire political spectrum in anger. 

Make no mistake: this is a crisis for the EU. Whether through incompetence, misjudgement, or miscalculation, EU officials failed to understand that actively supporting efforts to rescue the Butcher and mourning his loss would be received with anger in Europe.

The EU institutions have been getting it wrong a lot, recently. The malaise runs deep. From migration to climate, they are increasingly out of touch with what European citizens think. In the recent Dutch elections, far-right leader Geert Wilders smashed former Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans, and looks set to repeat this feat in the European elections. All across the continent, from France to Finland, populist parties are surging, driven by the same poor judgement that drove President Michel to mourn the Butcher.

The EU has once again slipped into a crisis of its own making. Its latest blunder is exactly why figures such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen are now speaking for European citizens, and EU institutions increasingly are not.

A crackdown on foreign students isn’t the only reason universities will struggle

Reducing the number of overseas students able to come to Britain would be a needless attack on one of our most successful export industries. But should we really believe David Cameron’s warnings to Rishi Sunak that universities are in danger of going bust if the graduate visa scheme is removed, or reformed (graduate visas give graduates the chance to stay on and work in Britain for up to two years)?

Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) does not appear to show any desperate crisis in university finances. On the contrary, their income has shown a steady and healthy, above inflation rise over the past decade. Between 2014/15 and 2022/23, their collective income from tuition fees and education contracts nearly doubled from £15.5 billion to £27.0 billion. This was in spite of tuition fees being held down at below inflation. Funding body grants surged from £5.3 billion to £9 billion and research grants and contrast from £5.9 billion to £7.3 billion – all this in spite of universities bleating that Brexit would starve them of research money. Investment income also saw a healthy rise, from £230 million to £907 million.   

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Universities like to pose as highly-successful businesses when it comes to rewarding their vice chancellors – an analysis of 115 universities by the Times Higher Education Supplement earlier this year showed that the average Vice Chancellor is paid £325,000. In spite of rising income, a couple of dozen universities managed to make a loss in 2022/23, the biggest among them the £16.3 million lost by South Bank University. The then salary of £295,000 paid to the vice chancellor of South Bank came in for criticism by Lord Adonis in 2017. Wolverhampton University lost £11.8 million and Middlesex University £10.4 million. The only Russell Group University which made a loss was Durham, which lost £4.9 million. The biggest loss of any education provider in HESA’s statistics for 2022/23, by the way, was Multiverse, Euan Blair’s apprenticeship outfit, which managed to lose £43.8 million. Not that that prevented the younger Blair appearing on the Sunday Times’ rich list for the first time, with a reported wealth of £327 million.    

There seems to be plenty of money, then, for the people who run higher education – even as they plead poverty. There are also some universities which seem to be under poor financial management. It is not impossible that a university or two will go bust over the coming years, but it won’t necessarily be because they are losing out on foreign students – it may equally well be because they have failed to contain their costs. Many universities have continued to fob off their students with token amounts of teaching time, long after the pandemic. Yet even so, they have allowed salaries and other costs to rise out of control. 

The government would be foolish to choke off foreign students – although there is certainly some room for reforming the student visa system and properly enforcing it, so that it is only available for graduates who have obtained good degrees on proper courses. But no, we shouldn’t listen to highly-paid university chancellors who constantly plead for state bailouts under threat of going bust. 

Will Ken Clarke lose his peerage?

In the aftermath of the tainted blood scandal, there is no shortage of blame to go around – but some are more culpable than others. As a junior health minister from 1982 to 1985, Ken Clarke was at the heart of Whitehall as reports of the risks from blood transfusion began to be published.

According to Sir Brian Langstaff’s inquiry, by 1982 there was evidence that infections were occurring through imported blood products. The Department of Health even admitted it was ‘likely’ that HIV/Aids was transmitted through blood products. Yet still in 1983 Lord Clarke continued to say that there was ‘no conclusive proof’ of infection via this route. Sir Brian says that while this was ‘technically correct’, its use was ‘indefensible’ because:

It did not spell out the real risk. It gave false assurances, it lacked candour and, by not telling the whole truth, it was misleading.

Given this record, you might have thought Lord Clarke would be a bit contrite when it came to the issue of tainted blood and its victims. Yet the former health minister – who subsequently held many of the great departments of state – gave perhaps the most notorious witness statement before the inquiry back in 2021. Several victims accused him of showing ‘disdain’ for the inquiry when he gave evidence.

Clarke complained about what he ‘had to put up with’ because he was ‘the best-known person of all those people involved’, adding that campaigners were ‘always trying to steer [inquiries] to try to find some celebrity whose fault it was.’ At one point, he asked:

Why do we have to go through such meticulous detail through who said what when, when did he change his mind?

It is no surprise therefore that, following Langstaff’s inquiry, victims are now demanding that Clarke be stripped of his peerage – an honour that was afforded to him in 2020, despite the objections of the Haemophilia Society. Asked on the morning round about whether this should happen, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said it was one for the forfeiture committee and said Lord Clarke was ‘a decent and nice man’ who has ‘always been very polite and kind to me’.

Shame he couldn’t extend that kindness to the victims, eh?

The trouble with Labour’s new towns plan

Since last October, when Keir Starmer declared that he was a ‘Yimby’ – a ‘yes in my back yard’ – Labour has tried to position itself as the pro-housing party. We are now finally getting a glimpse of what this might look like in practice.  

Deputy leader Angela Rayner has promised a revitalisation of the postwar ‘New Towns’ programme, which, in the quarter-century from 1946 to 1970, delivered hundreds of thousands of new homes.  

This certainly signals the right ambitions, and if done in the right way, New Towns could indeed make a major contribution to solving Britain’s housing crisis. But they are not a panacea, and the devil is in the detail: there is a risk of overburdening the proposal by expecting it to fulfil too many policy objectives at once. But more on this in a minute.  

The original New Towns were an indirect response to Britain’s interwar building boom. In the 1930s, the British housing stock used to grow by close to 3 per cent per annum. Some see this as the golden age of British housing, not just because of the sheer scale of construction, and the positive impact on housing affordability, but also because 1930s housing tended to be of a reasonably high quality.  

But this success carried the seed of its own destruction. It mostly took the form of outward expansion of the UK’s larger towns and cities: much of outer London, for example, was built during that period – and not everybody liked it. It created a backlash. As Samuel Watling shows, the 1930s saw the rise of organised Nimbyism, which is still with us today. 

The early Nimbys won major victories in the postwar years, namely in the form of the Town And Country Planning Act 1947, a much more restrictive system of land-use planning than the one it replaced, and the designation of greenbelts in the 1950s.  

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With further urban expansion severely curtailed, New Towns became a vehicle to accommodate the spillover demand. In the new system, London could no longer grow very much, but the likes of Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow still could.  

At first sight, New Towns appear to be a clever way around the Nimby problem. Propose to build a few houses on the edge of a town, and the Nimby lobby will scream bloody murder – but build them far away in nobody’s back yard, and nobody will complain.  

However, Britain’s postwar experience suggests that New Towns do not become major self-contained economic centres in their own right. They become commuter towns of existing cities and conurbations.  

There is nothing wrong with that. But commuter towns need to be close enough – and well-connected – to wherever it is that people commute to. You cannot build them in the middle of nowhere.  

Yet if you build them as de facto extensions of existing towns, like a borough that just happens to be a bit removed from the rest, you run into the old Nimby problem again. That is one reason why the New Town programme went dormant after 1970.  

Apart from these general difficulties with New Towns, there are additional ones specific to Angela Rayner’s version of them. Rayner wants to impose a ‘gold standard target’ of 40 per cent ‘affordable’ (i.e. below-market rate) housing on New Town developers, on top of developer contributions to large-scale upfront investment in infrastructure and local amenities. If combined with earlier Labour proposals for stringent environmental standards for new buildings, this would risk making New Towns unviable. New Towns would be risky long-term investment projects at the best of times. If you want them to take off, the last thing you want to do is pile additional costs and risks onto them.  

If New Towns helped to ease Britain’s housing shortage, that would already be enough make them a major success. They do not also have to solve all of the country’s social and environmental problems at the same time. They do not need to be a cure-all.  

Rayner’s pro-housing ambitions are very welcome indeed, and a more focussed version of her New Towns plan, devoid of unrealistic expectations, could be a force for good. But if she makes the perfect the enemy of the good, she will end up getting neither.  

Dr Kristian Niemietz is the Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). He is the author of the report “Home Win: What if Britain Solved its Housing Crisis?” 

Ebrahim Raisi’s death won’t change the course of history

The Middle East never fails to surprise. Sunday was no exception. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and several other senior Iranian politicians were killed in a helicopter crash in East Azerbaijan. One cannot help but wonder at the extraordinary misfortune not only of crashing, but of doing so in a foggy, rainy, muddy area that took rescue workers 15 hours to reach. Despite the profile of the accident’s victims, however, this is probably not an accident that changes the course of history. The Iranian presidency has become increasingly irrelevant in an increasingly-Soviet system. That trend is set to continue. 

To understand the limited power of the Iranian presidency, it serves to recap the fundamentals of the Iranian system. The Islamic Republic is not comparable to the Soviet Union, with its anonymous, grey-suited politburos. It instead resembles an imperial court (or less charitably, Nazi Germany). The Iranian constitution is constructed around the figure of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The vision of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, is based on three simple arguments. The first is that the Twelfth Imam, who in Shi’a doctrine has been in hiding since 874CE, is the only conceivable legitimate ruler. The second is that in the Imam’s absence, it is the clergy – righteous people, fluent in Islamic law and its interpretation – that is most fit to rule. The third is that of those clerics, the most qualified of them should rule. This is strikingly similar to medieval Catholic claims that the Pope – a figure that used to have enormous temporal authority – was the ‘Vicar of Christ’, a literal stand-in for Jesus until the anticipated Second Coming. 

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Where does the president fit in such a system? As one might presume, the president is something of an afterthought. The function of the president is to carry out the day-to-day duties of governance, with as much leash as the Supreme Leader gives him. Over the last twenty years, however, that leash has gotten much tighter. For more than two decades, Khamenei has struggled with his presidents. The unclear role of the president has caused much confusion. In one way or another, all of Iran’s presidents have grown too big for their boots. Khamenei’s first president, Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani, was qualified enough to be Supreme Leader himself and nearly got the job. Under Rafsanjani’s presidency, the two clashed over Rafsanjani’s more liberal vision of economic and foreign policy. By the time Rafsanjani died in 2017, many – including his daughter – suspected that he was assassinated. 

Mohammad Khatami, who was president from 1997 to 2005, launched a failed attempt to improve press freedom and relations with the United States. In doing so, he made an enemy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who labelled him a traitor. The exposure of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Iraq War turned the tide against him. He is still thought to be under effective house arrest. In 2005, the ultraconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took his place. He has since been marginalised from political life. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, was allowed to win to fix Iran’s ailing economy. The Iran nuclear deal led to some respite in 2015. But by 2018, the Trump administration reimposed comprehensive sanctions. Rouhani was always despised by IRGC hardliners. That sentiment was ultimately shared by Khamenei, who tied his hands for the final years of his premiership. Rouhani and his associates have also been banished from political life. In this respect, Raisi was an exception to the rule. 

Raisi’s election was in many ways the ultimate sign that Khamenei and his inner circle were fed up with the competition. An associate of Khamenei for nearly 40 years, Raisi was the safest possible choice: a mild-mannered cleric with impeccable authoritarian credentials and minimal interest in foreign policy. All of his serious competitors were banned from running, allowing him to be elected with 42 per cent voter turnout – the lowest in Iranian history. It is still unclear what policy he carried out. Hardliners, who swept parliament in 2020 and 2024, have run domestic policy, implementing socially-conservative legislation favoured by Khamenei. Foreign policy, meanwhile, is run by the Supreme National Security Council and the Expediency Discernment Council, an advisory board to the Supreme Leader. Raisi was a member of both bodies. But again, it is the IRGC that has predominant influence in both and the Supreme Leader who decides.

As he approaches the end of his life, Khamenei has increasingly prioritised Iran’s culture wars, which he sees as the main threat to Iran’s unique theocratic system. Six in ten Iranians are under the age of 30. Internet penetration has risen from 13 per cent in 2010 to over 70 per cent today. As few as 30 per cent of young Iranians identify as observant Shia Muslims. Combine these statistics with low growth, high unemployment, and massive inflation and the long-term pressure on the stability of the regime is obvious. Khamenei’s answer has been to try and make Iran more ‘Islamic’ and less of a ‘republic’. The political theorist Khomeini valued public participation in politics. Khamenei cares less, and is more concerned with the state’s ability to enforce a positive moral vision and to extend the life of the state irrespective of popular opinion. To this end, he has leaned heavily on the Revolutionary Guard which, as we have written at Policy Exchange, increasingly acts as an Iranian shadow state. It is in this direction we must look to consider the future of the Islamic Republic. 

Nearly every ideological project has an indoctrinated and loyal vanguard. In the Islamic Republic, it is the Revolutionary Guard. The closest structural parallel is the SS in Nazi Germany had it survived the war. Like the SS, it began as a group of gangs, underwent consolidation by war, has its own idiosyncratic culture, and is highly indoctrinated. Promotion is designed on ideological suitability, and loyalty is to the Supreme Leader and not, unlike the regular army, to the nation. It has its own courts and intelligence services and is responsible for internal order. Its proximity to the Supreme Leader allows it to dominate foreign policy and the economy. Its members are an economically privileged class, making it a clear political elite. The Supreme Leader depends on it, and it depends on the Supreme Leader. This is what makes discussions about proscribing the IRGC so facile: besides symbolic value, when we speak of the Guard, we speak of the Iranian state itself. That will be even more-so the case after Raisi’s demise.

Iran will hold elections in 50 days’ time – a year sooner than they would have been. Raisi’s stand-in, Mohammed Mokhber, is a career bureaucrat rather than a rising political star. He lacks the charisma or standing to be president for long. As was the case in 2020, Iran’s ‘deep state’ will fall behind a single candidate with a suitably hardline background. The names most mentioned by Iranian commentators give a sense of where the wind is blowing. Possible frontrunners include parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, and former defense minister Hossein Dehghan – all of them are hardliners and former generals in the IRGC. The outlier is the diplomat Saeed Jalili, who ran the Supreme National Security Council, and Alireza Zakani, who spent three decades in the Guard. If recent legislative elections are any indicator, turnout will be poor.

What matters is how little this now matters. As many commentators have pointed out, the Islamic Republic is undergoing a slow transformation into a Soviet-style military dictatorship. Raisi’s successor, whoever it is, will be a symptom of this transformation – another de-fanged suit – rather than a cause.

The sad truth about ‘saint’ Nicola Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has finally come clean: ‘I was part of the problem,’ Scotland’s former first minister has admitted, referring to the ‘trans rows’ that dogged the late stages of her time as First Minister. What’s this? Is this, at last, a frank admission of fallibility and regret from Sturgeon? A reflection on her own flaws? No, of course it isn’t.

The sainted Sturgeon stepped down, by her own account, because politics in Scotland is ‘pretty polarised’. ‘There’s no one in Scotland who doesn’t have an opinion about me, whether good or bad,’ she told the Charleston Literary Festival in Sussex, as if this was anything out of the ordinary for the political leader of a country. If she only worked that out eight years into the job I suspect she might not have been cut out for it.  

‘It felt as if (with) every issue, people were coming at that issue in terms of how they thought about me – that felt true on the trans issue, it felt true on a number of issues – so I thought, well, if I take myself out of that maybe the politics, the discourse and the debate in Scotland will be a bit more healthy.’ This is classic Sturgeon, a textbook example of making absolutely everything about herself. Other people don’t have reasonable objections to a policy: they just don’t like her.  

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When politicians step back from the frontline some humanity is usually revealed. A move out of office – with all its necessary fudging, bluffing and plate-spinning – means that you’d expect a part of the ordinary person behind the job to emerge. This is how a few extremely divisive figures, after a decent interval, became almost loveable. Tony Benn packed them in on his speaking tours, and often his audiences were the kind of people who despised him during the period when he was busy bankrupting the nation. Michael Portillo the train lover is unrecognisable now as the blood-and-thunder speechifier of the 1995 Tory conference.   

Sturgeon is trying the same route but at an ungainly speed. She is attempting to reinvent herself as a literary pundit and sage elder stateswoman before her legacy has had a chance of fading from the public consciousness.  

At Charleston, she was interviewed by writer Juno Dawson, a man who claims to be a woman, and so the conversation naturally turned to gender. ‘I’ve had more abuse hurled at me over the issue of trans rights than probably any other issue I’ve discussed, including Scottish independence probably, so it has been really, really difficult,’ she told Dawson, taking the opportunity to restate that ‘trans women are women’ and that ‘people should be able to live how they want to be’. I think what she means here is that men should be allowed to assume the rights of women at their whim, but that doesn’t sound quite so reasonable, does it?  

But, as ever, nothing is Sturgeon’s fault. She is the embodiment of sweet reason. Anyone that opposes her is a monster of some kind. We shouldn’t forget what happened under Sturgeon’s watch. At the height of the gender storm back in 2023, she said of some of those opposed to gender self-ID: ‘There are people who have opposed this Bill that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’

It was an awful comment. Yet even now, after the disaster of her self-ID gender legislation, she is blind to a major part of what brought her down (and after gender brought similar doom to her successor). Sturgeon has made no attempt to explain or justify her gender policy or properly persuade opponents without denouncing them. Any objections were simply ‘not valid’. This is the response of a meter in a car park, not a human being.

At another recent event, Sturgeon opined that debates on the gender issue ‘descend into the most vicious, toxic rammy, with bad faith arguments all over the place’. She suggested – with absolutely no evidence – that bringing in same-sex marriage legislation would now be much more difficult. Sturgeon seems to think that reclassifying men as women was just the obvious next step on the shining progressive path. This is patent nonsense, conflating totally different issues. It’s like saying ‘these people who object to HS2 want to bring back hanging!’ It is in staggeringly bad faith.  

This rejection of any opposing view is politically inane and psychologically infantile. Most of us learn to get what we want by engaging with the rest of the world. Despite her bizarre reputation as a good politician – or at least good at winning elections for a while, which is the most a politician can hope for – Sturgeon remains arrogant and contemptuous.

It never seems to have occurred to Sturgeon to stop and think about why people were objecting to her gender policies, even when those doing so were overwhelmingly women and overwhelmingly of the socially liberal wing who should have been her natural supporters. Instead, she decided they were a bad lot, and probably all racists. That response is logical only if you think you are a saint.  

We can only expect more of this insufferable air of outraged innocence from the Sturgeon Show. Expecting honest reflection from her is like expecting a statue to do the cha-cha-cha.  

My teeth are falling out. I won’t miss them

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it. In France they are known as dents du bonheur – lucky teeth – due to the fact that the Napoleonic army recruited only soldiers with perfect teeth, classifying my gap-toothed brothers as unfit to fight and perhaps to die prematurely. 

Had I grown up in a middle-class milieu, I might have considered my teeth to be substandard – but so proletarian were we that my grandmother had not a tooth in her head and my father did his own dentistry by tying a piece of string to a door, knotting the other end around the rogue tooth, and slamming it. I’ve never been attracted by gleaming white teeth, and have been rather amused by the recent vogue for them among the young, who are generally lovely enough to be made even more charming by imperfections. There’s something very English about having wonky teeth; even the Queen Mother had them.

I had a very nasty experience with a dentist at the age of 12, started snorting copious amphetamine sulphate at the age of 17 and spent most of my twenties, thirties and forties taking enough cocaine to stun the Colombian army. I was aware that my teeth weren’t half as nice as most peoples but as I had a splendid rack and a talent to amuse, it never really bothered me. But in my sixties I started to lose a couple a year and as I face 65, it’s more like one a month. I was an attractive woman when young, but I now bear a distinct resemblance to Cletus Delroy Montfort DeMontblanc Bigglesworth Spuckler, also known as Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, of The Simpsons.

Why don’t I get new ones? Several reasons. I still have the odontophobia I developed as a child. The exception to this was a lovely dentist I met socially around the turn of the century and who persuaded me into his chair. He took an X-ray; I screamed when I saw it – surely this was the mouth of a monster? It turned out that I have an extra row of perfect teeth lodged in my gums – you can’t believe how scary it looks. But I was excited; ‘So when my teeth fall out, I’ll get these new ones?’ No such luck. I have hyperdontia, a condition sometimes referred to as ‘a third set of teeth’; generally they erupt into the mouth, crowding out their cousins, but mine have remained impacted in the bone. To get them out into public life would take an operation, a lot of pain and a year of brace-wearing. Approaching 65, I’m not sure I’m in the market for either such drastic measures. I’ve seen people my age with brand new teeth; it’s like when you buy a new sofa – everything else looks extra shabby.

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But still, I am aware of how comical I look with only 14 left, and I do think of the Pam Ayres poem ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth’:

My Mother, she told me no end, ‘If you got a tooth, you got a friend’ 
I was young then, and careless, My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.
Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin’
And pokin’ and fussin’
Didn’t seem worth the time… I could bite!

I’m far more philosophical about it than many would be. Maybe I take it as a warning; I’m immature in many ways and often think I can carry on behaving in a way that actually looks a little deranged when old people do it. My drinking – the cause of my latest tooth loss, one of my lovely gappy fronts – has become a cause not if quite of concern then of fleeting embarrassment to me. I am of the English working-class and became a journalist at 17 and thus am a veritable Venn diagram of sottishness; I always found my binge-drinking amusing, but over the past year both the ambulance service and the police have been involved in getting me home in one piece. I used to see myself as a Beryl Cook painting in my old age; increasingly I can see in myself in Martin Parr photographs, which isn’t half as jolly.

But still a part of me, forged in hedonistic times, feels that burning up one’s good looks by the age of 65 (I’ve always thought of beauty as fuel to be ignited rather than fruit to be preserved) in the process of having a lovely life is far from the worst thing that can happen. I think of what Hunter S. Thompson wrote – ‘life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”’ – and it speaks to me, or rather mumbles, through a mouthful of broken teeth. Amusingly, my husband – more than a decade younger than me – is losing his teeth too; I used to be mistaken for his mum whereas these days, we both rather resemble inhabitants of Skid Row. (I’ve noticed recently that many of the beggars I give to have better teeth than me.) So it’s a measure of my enjoyment of my life and my pleasure in my work – I’m a writer, not a toothpaste model – that I find my encroaching toothlessness amusing rather than upsetting. Having said that, if I find myself reduced to sucking soupy nourishment through a straw, the lure of gleaming white gnashers may well grow.

Why MPs love to hate the register of interests

The register of members’ interests for the House of Commons turns 50 today. Few MPs will be celebrating. Politicians have long shuddered over a document that provides fertile ground for journalists from which to dig out stories. The register – and the declarations within it – have cost more than a few MPs their careers. Plenty of other MPs and even PMs have come a cropper as a result of what is, and isn’t, in the register: Rishi Sunak is just one of the more high-profile figures to end up in hot water after being accused of failing to fill the register out fully.

While politicians dislike the register, its existence is good news for the rest of us. It’s easy to take it for granted that those we elect to represent us in parliament should declare their interests, but things haven’t always been this way.

For centuries, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ reigned supreme. In practice, this often meant that parliament stood wholly unaccountable – even to the voters – for there was no ‘need to know’ whether MPs were taking shareholder dividends from arms dealers, or wholly supported by trade unions. Whenever this was queried, MPs could claim ‘parliamentary privilege’, then as now an elastic term.

Into this cozy scene came an outsider: the journalist Andrew Roth. A refugee from the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the United States, Roth’s background was in naval intelligence, and he was a keen amateur psychologist. Working as a parliamentary correspondent, in 1953 he couldn’t work out why the Labour MP Richard Stokes took such a strong pro-Arab line when his party colleagues were mostly pro-Israeli. Eventually, he realised that Stokes’ company directorship, selling oil pipelines across Arab countries, was just one example of a plethora of MPs’ undeclared company directorships, shareholdings and sponsorships.

With little press interest in covering these, Roth privately published his own register: the first edition of The Business Background of MPs launched in 1957, the proofs literally cut-and-pasted together on a typewriter. Subsequent parliaments would see new editions published. When Roth had difficulties with libel threats, friendly MPs like Philip Noel-Baker and Willie Hamilton would read out excerpts on the floor of the Commons – protecting the contents under parliamentary privilege.

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While Roth pressed for an official register, the issue was dismissed as a crackpot scheme. This changed with the scandal of the architect John Poulson in the early 1970s, and the revelation that his corrupt practice had kept ‘tame’ politicians on its payroll, from the Labour council leader T. Dan Smith to the Conservative home secretary Reginald Maudling. ‘It’s just a few bad apples’ gave way to ‘something must be done’.

The register of members’ interests, long campaigned for, owes its existence to the unique circumstances of the hung parliament of March to September 1974. The incoming Labour government lacked a majority and was looking for ‘quick wins’ involving no public expenditure – and preferably which would disproportionately embarrass Conservative MPs, who were much more likely to hold company directorships.

Many of the issues debated in 1974 remain surprisingly topical. MPs were divided between those like Peter Shore, who insisted that MPs’ financial affairs were a private matter, and those like Brian Walden, who insisted that MPs should have nothing to hide.

Yet the fateful resolution of the House of 22 May 1974 that brought the register into existence was not the end of the matter. MPs tried to have the register strangled at birth. Resistance to filling out the mandatory new forms led to the first register not being compiled until 1975. Subsequent editions of the register were blocked for another five years, by the improbable alliance of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. They were united in leading backbench rebellions, claiming parliamentary sovereignty extended to MPs’ financial affairs – even after the House had decreed otherwise.

Margaret Thatcher’s government resurrected the moribund register in 1980. However, this resuscitation came at a cost. Categories were watered down, alongside their enforcement. There is a direct parallel here to another innovation of the first half of the 1970s, the parliamentary expenses regime, and how MPs in the 1980s were told to ‘spend it, boys’ as a perk of the job. Here, too, there was no mechanism for enforcement.

By the late 1980s, the register had become something of a joke, with reams of undeclared financial interests: Roth’s 1988 revelation that the lobbyist Ian Greer was paying a stable of ‘tame’ MPs like Sir Michael Grylls, who weren’t declaring these payments, foreshadowed the ‘cash for questions’ scandal of the early 1990s. By the time of the Major government, a string of financial scandals stood testament to the emasculation of the register. All the while, MPs like Neil Hamilton joked about properly declaring a biscuit.

What salvaged the register was John Major convening the committee on standards in public life in 1994, and Lord Nolan’s Seven Principles of Public Life, released in the committee’s first annual report the following year. The late 1990s saw a range of public institutions, including the civil service and the House of Lords, instigate far-reaching rule changes that were all aimed at embedding those seven principles. This included introducing the House of Commons’ first enforcement mechanisms, with the 1995 establishment of a parliamentary commissioner for standards. Rules were still flouted – Ted Heath continued to refuse to properly disclose payments from Chinese state-owned companies – but a formal mechanism existed to hold him to account.

The New Labour years saw fresh challenges. On the one hand, there was a broad consensus that the Nolan regime offered the best hope for moving on from the scandals of the Major years. On the other, this came with an assumption that such rules were only for Tories to observe, and a string of Labour MPs fell foul of the commissioner’s rulings. This was further complicated by the piecemeal nature of Nolan reforms for parliamentarians and ministers, leading to a ‘twin track’ of separate rules, and ministers arguing – with some success – that they should be exempt from both sets.

Recent years have seen a sustained assault waged on compliance with the rules, and the damage wrought under Boris Johnson’s premiership has yet to be fully processed. The Owen Paterson case – in which the Tory MP was accused of breaking lobbying rules, something he denied – saw an attempt by MPs to retrospectively rewrite the rules. Some saw this as a bid by politicians to let off one of their own. If so, it failed: the backlash was swift. Paterson – and Boris Johnson, who had attempted to defend his Tory colleague – paid a heavy price. Time will tell whether that was a turning point for the future of the register of members’ interests.

The stressful world of the Chelsea Flower Show

The man in the Post Office was a bit bemused by the three enormous boxes I was trying to send from my home just outside Edinburgh down to London. He’d asked what the value of the packages was. In one sense, they were worthless, I explained. But I really needed to make sure they got to the Chelsea Flower Show on time because in another sense, they were worth their weight in gold. It didn’t help when I explained that the contents were in fact just dead leaves. 

These dead leaves have become a total obsession ever since I was offered a place as a volunteer on one of the show garden builds for this year’s Chelsea. Most people appreciate that the show has as much attention to detail, as much artifice and definitely the same kind of budget as a London fashion week catwalk show. But I don’t think it is really understood quite how much the little details, like the kind of leaves under the trees planted in the temporary gardens, matter. Or how many people are worrying about these details for months on end. 

Sophie Parmenter has never had these kinds of worries before, because she has never done a show garden for any kind of festival before. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness she decided that her first entry into the world of show gardening would be the hardest one possible: not one of the smaller, more relaxed shows of the season like RHS Malvern or Gardener’s World Live, or even the smaller balcony or planting design gardens at Chelsea. The show gardens on Main Avenue at the Royal Hospital Showground are the biggest plots, with enormous six figure budgets and the most attention from public and press.

Sophie has been designing this garden with architect Dido Milne for more than two years. It is one of a number sponsored by Project Giving Back, a grant-making charity established during the pandemic to try to help the voluntary sector recover from a drop in donations. It has had a significant impact on the way Chelsea looks and feels in the past few years. Now, much smaller charities can get a garden at the show where previously it was dominated by investment banks, developers and the really huge charities like Cancer Research. Sophie is designing for the National Autistic Society, but there is also a Bowel Research garden, and one for the Terence Higgins Trust, as well as smaller organisations like Pulp Friction, which only works with adults with learning disabilities in Nottinghamshire. Not everyone is happy with the way Project Giving Back has influenced the show: it means there are many more gardens with a ‘message’ and often a design that involves a ‘journey’, the kind of thing that certain types really don’t like. 

My own journey to Chelsea involved scrabbling about in local woodlands under birch trees to find the right kind of leaf litter for the garden. I tried to do it in places where I thought I wouldn’t encounter any other dog walkers, because I felt vaguely nefarious crouching on the floor and scooping up leaves. On a Zoom call with her planting team, Sophie explained that because she had River Birch (Betula nigra), which is a particularly gorgeous tactile birch with pinkish-cream peeling bark, on the garden, she needed to find leaf litter from birch trees so that the trees looked as though they had always been there, rather than still tucked in their pots and rootballs under a layer of compost and moss. The RHS judges look for this kind of detail when they decide the difference between the levels of medals they award. 

The leaves arrived at the show ground shortly before I did. I’ve been going to Chelsea for years,  but I’ve never looked behind the curtain before and seen the build. During show week, the avenues are filled with people in floral dresses and high heels, linen suits and the odd (very odd, in fact) model wearing a costume made entirely from leaves preening on a stand somewhere. During the build, everyone is muddy, sweaty, and wearing steel capped safety boots. There is more high-vis than a George Osborne press call circa 2015. In fact, the world of show gardens isn’t a million miles away from the weird world of party conferences that I’ve been covering for more than a decade. 

The show gardens are always presented as the work of one or two designers. But there are three weeks of professional landscapers building increasingly complicated gardens involving excavations, metal pavilions and even pretend ruins. Then the planters move in. These people are not random amateur gardeners: they are all hugely experienced designers, many of them at the top of their own game but working behind the scenes to put together a garden that looks impossibly perfect.

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Sophie’s planting team was led by Humaira Ikram, who runs her own studio and teaches garden design. She knows how to get nursery-grown plants in five litre pots to look as though they’ve been growing merrily in this fake garden for years, how to space them just so they look natural, and what won’t make it onto the garden. I joined in the middle of all the planting activity. The garden at this point looked like the horticultural equivalent of the walk-in wardrobe at the fashion magazine in the Devil Wears Prada: surrounded by about 60 tall trolleys of plants, many of which were not quite perfect enough to make the cut for planting.

Sophie had hoped to have Meconopsis, a stunning blue poppy from the Himalayas, on the garden. But the wet spring followed by unusually warm April weather had done for most of them. They sat sulking on one set of trolleys while the garden filled up with candelabra primula and several different camassias. The volunteers sorted through the primulas to find ones that would keep looking perfect through to judging and show week beyond. And we spent a lot of time watering. This is a bog garden, covered in an enormous amount of moss. But Chelsea is not a bog. At times, the pressure on the planting team boiled over and the dehydration of the bog myrtle (Myrica gale) became a proxy for the way the team were feeling. Most of the time, though, everyone stayed rather jolly. 

The designers are competing for medals and other prizes such as best in show and the people’s choice award. But garden design is a collaborative world, and everyone knows everyone else, so frequently someone from another plot popped up to ask if there are any spare moss that they could borrow. As the week wore on, some of the rheums on the garden were looking a little dog-eared, and Sophie ended up pleading with another designer for their spares, before chasing the plants across the show ground and grabbing them just as they were being loaded into a nursery van to be taken away. 

In other gardens that were running behind, the teams seemed to be moving in double time to get everything planted and tidied. Everyone has to down tools by the middle of the morning on the Saturday, when the judges come round for the first of two assessments. They are working out how the garden performs against the brief written by the designer and the sponsor. And they are looking at every detail: whether the increasingly complicated structures on the gardens actually work, whether the materials are well-matched across the design, if some of the plants aren’t suited for the position they’ve been given, or if the leaf litter under the birch trees isn’t botanically accurate. 

The medals aren’t announced until this morning, so we still have no idea whether it was my Scottish birch leaf litter that cinched it or not. When the week is over, most of the garden will move up to an National Autistic Society residential site in Scotland for its full life. And the show ground will be re-turfed for another year before the safety boots move back in. 

What I resent about my dog

The main benefits of dog ownership are well-known – you get companionship, unconditional love and the exercise that comes with taking the thing for a walk. But there’s a side-effect that no one ever mentions: having a dog teaches you what it’s like to be famous.

I’ll be sitting in a café, happily reading a book or doing a sudoku. Then someone appears. ‘Do you mind if I say hello to your dog?’ ‘Of course not,’ I reply. They start fussing about him, and there’s a brief exchange in which the essentials are disclosed. ‘Ralph’, ‘lurcher’, ‘we think he’s eight – the rescue centre guessed he was three when they picked him up off the street, and that was five years ago’. If they’re dog owners themselves they might produce a treat, get Ralph to do ‘sit’ and ‘paw’ so he can take it, at which I call him a tart, everyone has a laugh and that’s that. It takes a minute or two.

But as Stephen Fry once said about being stopped for selfies, it’d be all right if it only happened once a week. What if it happens every two minutes? The cumulative effect can become a problem. It seems churlish to complain, but on a bad day, especially if Ralph’s giving people the eye because they’ve got their own dog with them and he knows treats are on the cards, things can get trying. Not ‘leave me alone you unfeeling bastards, this invasion of my privacy is driving me mad,’ levels. Just enough to get on my nerves.

Even as the irritation registers, I feel guilty. Most of the time I love Ralph being fussed over. You get into some fascinating conversations (some people even admit to buying a dog as a pulling tool), and the sum of human contentment is almost always increased. So on the odd occasion it does get a bit too much, my desire to avoid the encounter is quickly followed by the thought that I should get over myself. I’m reminded of Harry Enfield, who was once walking in the countryside and encountered a stile whose mechanism briefly confused him. As he struggled to open it, someone approached and said: ‘Now I do not believe you wanted to do it that way.’ ‘And you,’ Enfield snapped back, ‘don’t want to be the millionth person this week to recite one of my catchphrases at me.’ He stormed off – then instantly hated himself for his reaction.

It’s particularly bad when a parent approaches with their young child. ‘Is it OK if… ?’ they hesitantly enquire, and I say, ‘of course’ and tell the kid why we called him Ralph – ‘it sounds like a dog barking – “Rulf”’ – and the kid giggles and the parent starts asking questions and I’m thinking ‘can you please just go away, I’m sure that’s a seven in the top right hand square of my sudoku and you’ve interrupted my train of thought’. Simultaneously I’m thinking, ‘For God’s sake Mason, pack it in. It’s not as though you’re George Clooney being mobbed at an airport.’

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You can find yourself doing the ‘avoiding eye contact’ thing that becomes second nature for celebrities. I always think what a pity that is. Clive James once said that the average person couldn’t imagine what it was like, ‘to have several hundred uninstigated conversations every day’. This was his fate at the height of his television fame, and he recognised the danger: ‘You’ll be abrupt and short with someone you should be talking to.’ That person might have been genuinely interesting, told you something you wanted to know, but the other 99 bores have made you shut down. ‘You have to protect yourself. It’s sheer self-defence. I hated that.’

I’m always amazed at the patience shown by the famous. They keep moving, they never really engage but they never snap either. Paul McCartney is legendarily good at it, and if he can avoid losing his rag then anyone can. Mick Jagger has a skilful way of not getting trapped – after a brief chat he’ll politely say ‘how nice to have met you’. But despite the celeb’s best efforts, things sometimes go wrong. Jim Davidson says he’s often interrupted during meals by someone gushing, ‘I love you, Jim, I think you’re brilliant, I’ve always loved your shows, can I have a selfie?’, and when he says, ‘I’m really sorry, but do you mind, I’m eating,’ their reply is ‘I hate you, I’ve never thought you were funny’.

All of which, of course, is a long way from occasionally getting a bit narked that too many people want to fuss over your dog. But the principle is the same. It’s a reminder that what would really bother me about being famous is losing the ability to people watch, which is one of my favourite hobbies. Anonymity allows you to muse on the fascinating cast of strangers that pass before your gaze, eavesdrop on snatches of their conversations, generally be entertained by the variety show called Other People. But when Ralph is with me, and he attracts people’s attention, that anonymity is lost, or at least compromised. You go from being a watcher to being watched.  

Clearly I wouldn’t be without my dog, or indeed miss out on most of the social encounters he leads to me having. It’s just that, once in a while, I wish he’d keep his pointy head down a bit.

Sunak apologises during ‘day of shame’

Rishi Sunak’s Commons apology for the contaminated blood scandal was reasonably comprehensive. The statement opened with him saying he wanted to speak directly to the victims and their families, and ‘make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology for this terrible injustice’. The Prime Minister listed what the government was apologising for: the failure in blood policy and blood products, the repeated failure of the state and medical professionals to recognise the harm caused; for the institutional response to the failings, including denying and attempting to cover them up. He said: ‘This is an apology from the state to every single person impacted by this scandal. It did not have to be this way. It should never have been this way.’ 

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When Sir Brian Langstaff launched his report this afternoon, the inquiry’s chair made clear he was expecting a full apology, and clarity from the government about what the apology was actually for. Sunak answered that essay question with his opening statement. But there were other questions he did not address. One was compensation, which he and ministers had been clear the government was not going to respond on today because they wanted the report’s findings to get proper coverage, and for the victims and their families to be heard. That is fair enough. But there was a more specific question from Diana Johnson, the Labour MP who has campaigned tirelessly for the victims and who was instrumental in the inquiry happening at all. She asked whether Sunak accepted that he had made the situation  worse for victims by refusing to set up a compensation ahead of the publication of this final report. This was an interim recommendation of Langstaff’s from last year. Sunak did not answer that question.

His statement and the question-and-answer session following were both short because the government will offer a fuller response tomorrow. Most of the focus will be on the compensation. But the statement will need to address how the government intends to ensure that the things Sunak is apologising for today do not happen again in another context. Sorry, as children learn, means you won’t do something again. It’s a lesson governments often forget.