Where do shutdown negotiations go from here?

The choose your own adventure surrounding House Republican leadership is leading to a predictable dead end. The approach House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has used to great effect to this point, achieving far more legislatively than he was expected to in a Speakership with a razor-thin majority, has been to let conservatives get a seat at the table to demand what they want, and work from there. The strength of that strategy was giving House conservatives buy-in on the negotiating process, thus using them as an ally, not an adversary. The weakness of that strategy? It doesn’t work when the conservatives can’t agree about what they want.

For the past week, Republican leadership tried to give conservatives an opportunity to pursue what they wanted on government spending, with key members Chip Roy and Scott Perry attempting to negotiate a deal. But while roughly half of the House Freedom Caucus wants to fight about spending, and the other half thinks they should fight on the border, they found they can’t really pass something that accomplishes both goals. The leadership now seems to be adopting a different strategy: they are pushing forward with votes they know they will lose instead of just pulling bills before they go down. The goal seems to be demonstrating to their conservative flank that the votes just aren’t there to achieve what they want, and that their lack of unification hurts any ability to find agreement.

In the immediate, expect a version of a continuing resolution with border-focused policy to go to the floor this week — which, again, is expected to fail. In the wake of that failure, House Republican leadership will in all likelihood turn to work with the waiting Democrats in a bipartisan can-kick. Even though McCarthy will show with the series of failed votes that he has no other option than to find votes across the aisle, he faces the prospect of an October spent getting repeatedly vacated by Representative Matt Gaetz, who just called the speaker a “misogynist” for criticizing Victoria Spartz. 

Perhaps the most amusing story to come out of the week was the news that Representative Ralph Norman, a seventy-year-old congressman from South Carolina, accidentally voted for a CR he had committed to oppose in the House Rules Committee. His excuse: he was distracted, “asleep at the switch.” It might sound ridiculous to those outside Washington, but for people who pay attention to the way this House works, it absolutely tracks.

–Ben Domenech

On our radar

THE GOP’S BLACK VOTE A recent slate of polls shows both former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party writ large enjoying historically high support from black and Hispanic voters. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post identifies an enthusiasm problem for Democrats among minority groups.

DRESS CODE BLUES All but three Republican Senators sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday urging him to reverse his decision to drop the Senate’s dress code for members. The letter said a lack of dress code “disrespects the institution we serve.”

GAETZ’S WARNING SHOT A reporter stumbled across a resolution authored by Representative Matt Gaetz to vacate Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a Capitol building bathroom on Tuesday. The piece of paper was conspicuously found folded neatly in half under a baby-changing table and next to a half-empty iced coffee, leading some to speculate that it was left behind intentionally. 

Garland’s testy day on the Hill 

Attorney General Merrick Garland got his much-anticipated grilling today from an energetic House Judiciary Committee hearing that was all about Hunter Biden.

It seemed Garland wasn’t prepared at all for questions Republicans were obviously going to ask him. In a telling instance, Representative Mike Johnson asked him if he’s ever spoken to anyone at the FBI headquarters about the investigation into the younger Biden. Garland responded, “I don’t recollect the answer to that” and “I don’t believe that I did.” During a break in the hearing, Johnson noted to me that he wishes he “could say I was surprised by AG Garland’s lack of transparency today, but this is what we’ve come to expect from him and his DOJ. His evasive tactics when faced with point-blank questions begins to shine light on why 65 percent of Americans don’t trust this DOJ.”

At one point during the hearing, Representative Jeff Van Drew and Garland were almost shouting at each other. Van Drew demanded answers on an FBI memo painting traditional Catholics as “violent extremists” as Garland repeatedly dodged the question. 

Unsurprisingly, Democrats treated Garland with kid gloves, focusing on issues like Donald Trump and abortion (coincidentally two of the only issues they see as winners for the elder Biden in 2024).

Garland, who was confirmed on a bipartisan vote of 70-30, has a long way to go to restoring any trust within the GOP. Representative Darrell Issa, who’s been one of the attorney general’s fiercest critics, told me after the hearing that “what this Garland testimony revealed to us is that the attorney general realizes he is presiding over the Department of Justice with the most severe credibility crisis since Watergate.” To Issa, “the Hunter Biden slow walk and then attempted immunity deal have taken a toll that no part of this testimony made better.”

Johnson seconded these concerns to me. “It’s clear partisanship is the ruling power in the Biden Garland DOJ,” he lamented. 

– Matthew Foldi

Non-binary Biden official parts with stolen women’s clothing 

Gender-fluid and bald-headed Sam Brinton worked in the White House’s Office of Nuclear Energy until the world learned about the disgraced official’s favorite pastime: stealing luggage at airports. Biden’s White House apparently saw no red flags in Brinton’s eccentric style of dress and penchant for red lipstick, nor in his leadership position with an anti-Catholic group at the center of a recent LA Dodgers controversy. Months after news broke about Brinton’s luggage theft, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) Police Department announced that it found and returned some of the stolen property to victim Asya Khamsin. Khamsin, a designer who caught Brinton wearing her clothing after losing her bag years ago, played an instrumental role in Brinton being charged with grand larceny. The items were recovered during a raid on Brinton’s home in May. An MWAA spokesperson said the case “is still under adjudication.”

– Juan P. Villasmil

Biden issues American Climate Corps executive order 

President Joe Biden has decided that, come hell or high water — or “escalating natural disasters and sustained global warming” — he will force American taxpayers to foot the bill for what the AP is calling “a New Deal-style American Climate Corps.” 

The White House announced today that Biden will sign an executive order to launch a workforce training program that will “focus on equity and environmental justice.” When Biden tried a similar move a year ago, House Whip Steve Scalise summed up most Republicans’ attitude, saying the plan would “[waste] billions of dollars in Green New Deal slush funds.” 

The White House statement released today says, in part:  

The American Climate Corps will mobilize a new, diverse generation of more than 20,000 Americans — putting them to work conserving and restoring our lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, deploying clean energy, implementing energy efficient technologies and advancing environmental justice, all while creating pathways to high-quality, good-paying clean energy and climate resilience jobs in the public and private sectors after they complete their paid training program. 

– Teresa Mull

From the site

Roger Kimball: The Biden crime family is our own reality-TV mafia show
Ben Domenech: Donald Trump’s foolish abortion gamble
Charles Lipson: It’s time now for President Biden to grant RFK Jr. Secret Service protection

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Oh, how Emmanuel Macron wishes he was a king!

King Charles arrived in Paris today on the first stage of a three day state visit to France, a country his mother adored. The French media view the trip as a chance to repair Anglo-French relations, which according to the front page of Liberation have been ‘strained since Brexit’.  

The general tone of the French reporting is that this is solely the fault of those 17.4 million fools who, to paraphrase Emmanuel Macron, fell for the ‘lies and false promises’ of the Leave campaign.  

In Liberation’s opinion, Brexit has proved a ‘catastrophe, notably economically’ with inflation and the cost of living soaring. It’s true that Britain is not thriving at the moment, but nor is the eurozone. The EU Commission has just cut its growth forecast as Germany slips into recession, and other economies, particularly Italy and Holland, are also in trouble. What is to blame for their decline?

Liberation is correct, however, in describing relations between Britain and France as ‘strained’, but don’t point the finger at Brexit. There is one man above all others who is responsible for the deterioration, and he resides in the Élysée Palace. 

An intriguing imponderable is to imagine what might have happened had the Remain vote triumphed in June 2016. Would Anglo-French relations have been fine and dandy?

David Cameron would have probably stayed prime minister until 2020, and perhaps beyond. Would Cameron have had a good relationship with Emmanuel Macron? How would Cameron have reacted to the strutting Gallic pipsqueak, a political novice, throwing his weight around in Brussels?  

Cameron had a brief run-in with Macron, indirectly, in 2012 when he mocked the sclerotic French economy and boasted that Britain would ‘roll out the red carpet’ to business leaders wishing to escape Hollande’s Socialist hell-hole.  

A month before Cameron’s jibe, Macron had joined Hollande’s administration as an advisor and he rose swiftly through the ranks. He was the economy minister by the time he visited London in 2014 to challenge what the BBC described as the ‘anti-French mood in London economic circles’. In a briefing with French journalists en route to the British capital, Macron revealed what he thought of the nation’s journalists: ‘Whether we like it or not, the Anglo-Saxon press are the opinion formers in Europe.’

These are clues in Macron’s backstory as to why he really harbours a grudge against Britain; it’s not Brexit, it’s our irreverence. From Cameron to Fleet Street, the president of France believes he is never been accorded the respect he deserves. 

Macron demands respect, and the only Britons ever to show him any are members of the Royal Family. That is why he is so gushing in his praise of the monarchy. He was eloquent in his eulogy of Queen Elizabeth II twelve months ago, and he is genuinely delighted to host Charles and Camilla on their State Visit. 

It was initially scheduled for March but was postponed after violent protests against Macron’s pension reforms. Some of the left were cock-a-hoop. ‘Two kings were to meet in Versailles’, crowed La France Insoumise MP Raquel Garrido. ‘One down, one to go.’

It was a puerile taunt but one that contained an essential truth: Macron does regard himself as the king of France, and when he hosts Charles and Camilla to a state banquet this evening at the Palace of Versailles he’ll act like the Sun King, the nickname bestowed on him when he acceded to power in 2017 because of his regal behaviour. 

Two years earlier, when still a relative unknown, Macron was asked in an interview if the democratic process disappointed him. It did, he replied, because there was a glaring absence in French politics. ‘This absence is the figure of a king, who I think fundamentally the French people did not want to die.’

Macron is not the president of France, he is its king. It explains his aloofness and his disdain for the little people, which includes British prime ministers.  

Macron recently raged against the French constitution because it precludes him standing for a third term; he would love to stay on his throne until the end of his days. Just like Queen Elizabeth.  

But she was royalty: Macron is just a here today, gone tomorrow politician. 

The BMA isn’t striking to protect patients or the NHS, just itself

What a fall from grace. Three years ago, the British Medical Association (BMA) could barely put a foot wrong. It could moralise over Tory failures – austerity, health inequalities, poverty, chronic underfunding of the NHS, mishandling of the pandemic – and even Tory politicians would quietly nod along. Its members were national heroes, even angels within the country’s national religion. And, importantly, most people believed the BMA was a medical body.

Now, people will be far more aware that the BMA is a militant trade union for doctors, representing their financial interests above the welfare of patients or the reputation of the institution they purport to protect. It wields enormous power, exploiting the NHS’s position as a monopoly to get all it can for its workers at the expense of the taxpayer. These workers add up to over 190,000 members and nearly 1,000 staff. Standard membership costs just over £39 per month.

Over the next two days, the BMA, along with other doctors’ unions, will inflict terrible damage on an NHS, which is already on the brink of collapse. Thousands of appointments and operations will be cancelled during the coordinated action, unprecedented in the NHS’s 75-year history, by junior doctors and consultants striking together. It is, in the words of NHS Confederation chief Matthew Taylor, ‘the nightmare scenario’.

The doctors’ unions maintain that the government’s refusal to negotiate on the basis of their 35 per cent pay claim is the principal blockage. In response to the latest offer recommended by the independent pay review body, the BMA’s chair Professor Phil Banfield accused the government of ‘making ordinary people sicker and poorer’ and said it ‘completely’ ignored the union’s calls to ‘value doctors… by full pay restoration to 2008/09 levels’. 

They may be right that a 35 per cent pay rise would make up for 15 years of below-inflation wage increases, though the details of the comparison are obscure and they conveniently ignore the exceptionally generous pensions awarded to doctors. Yet in a time of economic uncertainty, stagnant productivity and low growth, their demands are unrealistic. And their argument that walkouts have thus far cost the NHS roughly the same amount it would have cost to meet the 35 per cent is spurious given industrial action is a one-off, and a permanent pay increase would form the basis on which all future claims would be made.

The BMA’s PR machine must have gone into overdrive last month when Dr Rob Laurenson, co-chair of its junior doctors committee, suggested in a BBC interview that the deal the union has backed from the Scottish government would not be accepted if put forward by Westminster. It seems that ideology, not the professed desire to protect the needs of patients and the NHS, is driving these strikes – and risking lives. The union has long struggled to untangle doctors’ financial self-interest from the duty of the profession to its patients, but rarely have these tensions been played out so publicly and in such a reckless manner. 

In 1832, the BMA was founded to help doctors share scientific and medical knowledge during the cholera outbreak. A hundred years later, it had 100 branches, 250 divisions and a membership of 35,000. It vehemently opposed the creation of a new national health service in the 1940s, given its members’ discomfort at being directly employed by the state on set salaries, until Aneurin Bevan promised to stuff their mouths with gold.

Over the intervening period, those concerns have been turned on their head. The BMA has resisted many attempts at reform, typically shrieking about a secret plot to ‘privatise’ our ‘most cherished’ institution. Back in 2008, the union voted to restrict the number of medical student places in the UK, for fear of ‘over-supply’ which risked forcing down doctors’ generous salaries. 

In 2012, the BMA rejected the Lansley reforms. Then, in 2021, it rejected the government’s Health and Care Bill, which mostly consisted of reversing those reforms. This year, it opposed shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s suggestion that patients be able to refer themselves to NHS facilities without needing a GP to act as gatekeeper.

The BMA may claim to be acting in the NHS’s long-term interest, but complaints over working conditions only add to the inescapable feeling that our healthcare system is unfit for purpose. The pile of studies on its underperformance relative to systems in peer nations keeps growing. Demands for pay increases that will cost hundreds of millions a year, on top of the £168 billion we are pouring annually into the NHS England money pit, suggest something has gone terribly awry.

Public opinion matters: support can edge strikers towards victory – and hostility towards defeat. The more that the public look like sacrificial lambs in an ideological battle, the more their patience will wear thin. The BMA is destroying its own reputation – and the NHS’s with it. 

Boris leads Tory backlash against Rishi’s net zero climbdown

It’s back to the good old days of Tory wars. Rishi Sunak hasn’t even got to the microphone to unveil his plans to delay a number of net zero commitments and already a conservative rebellion has begun. Boris Johnson is the most senior voice to raise concern with Sunak’s plan. The former prime minister has released a statement in which he says ‘we cannot afford to falter now or in any way lose our ambition for this country’. While Johnson refrains from personally criticising Sunak, the implication is clear when he says that businesses must have confidence in the government’s net zero policy.

As for unlikely figures in the Sunak camp, Johnson ally Jacob Rees-Mogg has hit out at his old boss – telling the BBC that he’s ‘never been as much of a net zero zealot’ and Sunak’s approach is ‘absolutely’ the right one. There are plenty more who take the opposite view. Tory peer Zac Goldsmith – who recently suggested he could vote Labour – has floated the idea of a snap election on the grounds that Sunak has no mandate for this policy shift. Meanwhile, many Tory MPs are raising concerns privately over the new direction of travel. Lord Deben, the former chair of the Committee on Climate Change which advises the government, has called the expected relaxing of pledges ‘stupid’. Other critics include frustrated businesses and the Labour party – though notably Starmer has so far simply attacked it on the basis that Liz Truss suggested the same a few days ago.

Does this mean Sunak’s policy is already unravelling? The fact that the change was leaked and the speech has now been moved forward shows that it isn’t going to plan. Sunak has been caught on the hop. But the backlash so far won’t come as much of a surprise to 10 Downing Street. The Tory splits on the green agenda have been evident all summer. The hope in government will be that mainstream Tory opinion doesn’t turn against it – ultimately the policy was always going to be blasted by the likes of Goldsmith. As one government figure puts it: ‘The Westminster village will go mad. The rest of the country will be relieved’. This is the test of whether Sunak’s plan has misfired. It will take time before we have the answer.

Rees-Mogg slaps down Boris

Talk about politics making strange bedfellows. It seems some unlikely alliances are being formed on this wet Wednesday afternoon, following the news that Rishi Sunak plans to water down his Net Zero commitments this evening. On the Tory side, two of Liz Truss’s former supporters – Chris Skidmore and Simon Clarke –were straight out of the blocks to attack Sunak’s plans.

They were joined by Zac Goldsmith, an ardent Boris-backer who told Newsnight that Sunak was ‘dismantling credibility’ by backtracking on government’s net zero plans, and that this would be looked back on as a ‘moment of shame’. Johnson himself has now come out today and said:

It is crucial that we give those businesses confidence that government is still committed to Net Zero and can see the way ahead. We cannot afford to falter now or in any way lose our ambition for this country.

Yet not all the Johnsonites are on the same page it seems. In a signal of the tensions which underpinned Bojo’s leadership, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg hailed today’s news, telling Radio 4’s World at One programme that:

I’ve never been as much of a net zero zealot as Boris is. I mean, he genuinely believes in a more high wire approach in this area. I like to have a safety net under any high wire and I think what the government’s doing now is using the safety net. And I think it’s absolutely right. I could not be more supportive of what the Prime Minister is doing under these circumstances.

It comes just two days after Liz Truss herself called for the 2030 ban on petrol cars to be dropped. So that’s, er, Truss, Rees-Mogg and Sunak now in favour, with Johnson, Clarke, Skidmore and the Labour party all against. Joined-up government at its finest…

The radical mob is ruining Oktoberfest

Cockburn wouldn’t be so skeptical of the radical left nearly as much if they didn’t have an insatiable need to suck the joy out of holidays. First they replaced the Christmas tree with the Kwanzaa bush. Then they told us that tofurkey tastes just as good as the real thing. Now, they are attempting to crush Oktoberfest too.  

The two-century-old German tradition, which kicked-off in Munich on September 16, is under attack for its skimpy costumes and environmental impact. The man leading the charge: Luitpold Rupprecht Heinrich, the seventy-two-year-old Prince of Bavaria whose great-grandfather was the last Bavarian king.  

“When I see Chinese-made folk costumes made of plastic, pseudo-costumes with tight dirndls, then the whole thing becomes a carnival. We all talk about cultural appropriation today,” Heinrich said. “Here it’s happening to us Bavarians!” 

Heinrich added that wearing a costume to get drunk in degrades the festival’s tradition. Cockburn, who has stumbled out of many beer tents, would apologize for cultural appropriation, but feels his ambiguous European heritage protects him. And while he isn’t one to question royal authority, he feels he must correct Heinrich’s account of the festival. The first Oktoberfest celebrated the wedding of a 19th-century Bavarian prince. And what is a wedding if not an excuse to dress up and drink?  

As if the removal of busty women weren’t enough, environmentalists are driving up the cost of festivities. Traditionally, revelers have enjoyed whole rotisserie chickens sold by vendors lining the streets. But this year, the Paulaner festival tent, a historic Oktoberfest tent in Munich, serves organic chicken only, costing 20.50 euros ($22). Paulaner’s chickens are 50 percent more expensive than non-organic ones, meaning many a reveler will go chickenless. An Oktoberfest official and a Green Party member told the Wall Street Journal that the changes are part of the city’s goal of becoming climate neutral by 2035 — and also zero fun, apparently.   

Despite activists’ attempts to institute food mandates at the festival, Munich officials have yet to impose them. The spirit of Oktoberfest is protected by a coalition of innkeepers opposing the measures. “I don’t think anyone really wants a planned economy in which a small group decides what is good for the people and what is not,” said Thomas Geppert, head of the Bavarian Hotel and Restaurant Association. 

Prost! to that.

Has Humza Yousaf misled the Scottish parliament?

‘I will lead by example in adhering to this Code and knowing it is an incredible privilege to serve the people of Scotland. I know that Ministers will do likewise,’ is how First Minister, Humza Yousaf, ends the foreword to the latest edition of the Scottish Ministerial Code, published in July.  

Just a couple of months later and Yousaf appears to have potentially broken the Code, which stipulates ministers must ‘give accurate and truthful information to the Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity’.  

As revealed in an investigation by These Islands, Yousaf made a false statement in relation to Scotland’s renewables energy capacity back in June. At First Minister’s Questions (FMQs) on June 22, in response to a question from Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Yousaf said that Scotland had ‘the majority of the renewables and natural resources’ in the UK. The correct figure for 2022 was 26 per cent, according to UK government figures.   

Instead of quickly rectifying the error with the true figure as soon as it became known, as he is required to do, Yousaf’s office instead appears to have engaged in a bizarre effort to engineer a correction aimed at avoiding embarrassment for the first minister.  

At the end of that FMQs, Conservative MSP Liam Kerr raised a point of order on the matter. Several weeks later, on August 29th, the first minister wrote to Kerr, as well as Sarwar and the presiding officer, to inform them of his correction.  

‘To be clear, in a UK context we do have the majority of renewables per capita and natural resources, here in Scotland. I had intended to say “per capita”, and I hope that clarifies the matter you raised at FMQs on 22nd June 2023,’ he wrote.  

There are two problems with this. One is that it is nonsensical because it is not possible to have a majority of a per capita number. You can have a higher per capita or lower per capita figure compared to another per capita number, but ‘a majority’ in this context is meaningless. In trying to maintain the line that Scotland has more resources, Yousaf has spun the wording of his statement to the point of gibberish. And remember, this is official wording presented to his colleagues in the Scottish parliament.  

The second and more serious issue is how the Scottish government, with the help of supposedly politically neutral civil servants, spent several weeks conspiring to come up with the ‘per capita’ line before Yousaf issued his correction. A freedom of information (FOI) response has revealed lengthy discussions and planning amongst civil servants that aimed to come up with a ‘line to take’, as the internal emails are headed.  

The first email came on June 22, just after FMQs, when one government official emailed a number of colleagues (most names are redacted) to state that they had worked out Scotland’s share of UK renewable capacity and that it is 26 per cent. A quick correction at this point would have ended the matter with little public notice.  

Instead, there followed many days of further discussion and research as the officials tried to come up with a number that suited the narrative Yousaf was trying to spin.   

However, the FOI shows that it was not until July 3 that the ‘per capita’ figure began to appear in the internal correspondence. How, then, could the first minister have ‘intended to say “per capita”‘ in parliament two weeks beforehand? Did he intend to use these words but keep this to himself as his team of civil servants got to work producing an accurate correction – which then just happened to be the wording he had intended to use all along? This stretches credulity.  

It seems like the correction was reverse engineered by civil servants to maintain the first minister’s preferred spin on the situation. There are now calls on Yousaf to refer himself to the independent adviser on the Scottish ministerial code. In theory, it is a resignation matter. ‘Ministers who knowingly mislead the Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the First Minister,’ says the ministerial code.   

If the first minister respects Scottish democracy then he should refer himself to the independent adjudicator. As for those who helped put together the spin effort, the evidence is mounting that the impartiality of at least part of Scotland’s civil service has been compromised. At some point there will have to be a reckoning.   

The Senate dress code is not the issue

Last October, after several questions arose about the severity of then-candidate John Fetterman’s stroke, his campaign released a health update — not a medical record, mind you. We have yet to see any medical records from John Fetterman. We had to rely on several nonsensical answers he provided during a debate that revealed the nature of his condition.

In October of last year, Fetterman’s doctor — and campaign donor — assured the public that the would-be senator was “recovering well from his stroke” and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.”

So why is it then that protocol for the United States Senate must be upended to accommodate the senator from Pennsylvania? Shortly after being sworn-in, Fetterman was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC and reportedly diagnosed with severe, crippling depression, due to his workload and schedule. He was under weight, not eating, and we were once again told, not functioning. His stay at Walter Reed lasted an extended six weeks, during which time he was not present in the Senate.

We never heard from his doctors inside Walter Reed. They never held a press conference on the nature of his condition and the media was simply fed progress reports from his staff, who were allowed to visit him behind closed doors. During this period, his staff took it upon themselves to co-sponsor and introduce legislation. All of this was overlooked by the media who continue to behave as a coconspirators in the cover-up of Fetterman’s actual condition. Anyone who questioned the legality of these procedures was blocked by Fetterman’s staff, and the media were oddly incurious about all of this.

Now we’re being told that if John Fetterman is not allowed to wear whatever clothes he chooses, it could trigger a remission of his depression and hamper any further recovery from his stroke — a health incident about which the public was deceived, almost from the beginning, as National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted.

Much like how an entire kindergarten class must accommodate one problem child who refuses to do his work unless his own special conditions are met, we are being misled once again under the guise of a dress code. The Senatorial dress code is not the issue. The issue is the ongoing deception by John Fetterman, his family, his office and the media who will go to the lengths of bullying their own colleagues should they dare report on the accurate nature of Fetterman’s abilities. NBC reporter Dasha Burns interviewed Fetterman during his campaign and was labeled an “ableist” by Fetterman’s wife Gisele, who said Burns’s truthful representation of John Fetterman was “appalling.”

The question is simple: can John Fetterman perform basic tasks, such as showing up to vote (he shouts his vote through a doorway) or putting on a suit like a healthy, functioning adult, without work restrictions, as his campaign promised back in October? If he can’t do these things, then why did his campaign, aided by a willing media, tell the voters of Pennsylvania that he could? Does John Fetterman require in-home assistance to perform even basic tasks, like feeding or dressing himself? Is he able to tie a tie?

Fetterman made demands for himself to be able to debate. Then he made demands while hospitalized for several weeks. Now the special demand is that the entire Senate accommodate him. When do we stop accommodating John Fetterman’s lies about the severity of his condition, all while being told by medical staff that he requires no special treatment?

The media and Fetterman allies are counting on continued blackout coverage of these basic questions, which they write off as silly and pointless. But time after time, special conditions must be met for John Fetterman, and we are not supposed to notice that this cycle continues.

Sunak’s new strategy: hard truths

The last time Tory activists and MPs gathered for their annual party conference, it didn’t end well. Liz Truss had barely checked in to her hotel before she faced a full-on attack from Michael Gove, who started a rebellion against her proposed tax cuts live on air. Truss U-turned on her mini-Budget and cabinet discipline quickly collapsed. ‘It was the worst four days of my life,’ recalls a former Truss aide.

Rishi Sunak hopes to improve on this admittedly rather low mark. He sees the conference in Manchester as a potential moment of catharsis that could lead a Tory recovery. A wider reshuffle was delayed until later this year to avoid unhappy MPs venting on the fringes ahead of next week’s events. Downing Street is in bunker mode as the team finesse their plans.

Government aides complain that No. 10’s control freakery extends to the teleprompter – which means no minister can give a speech that hasn’t been word-for-word approved. To the dismay of Downing Street, Truss plans to attend – with a single intervention planned from the fringes. ‘She loves conference and hasn’t missed one for years,’ says an ally. Just her appearance is too much for some in her party: ‘It seems tone deaf,’ says one Tory. ‘It’s highly unhelpful and will be a big distraction.’

No. 10 knows the challenge the Conservative party faces. This week two polls put Labour’s lead at a seemingly unbeatable 20-point lead or more. Some Tory supporters are talking about a wipeout. The strange thing is that a lot of the time this isn’t said with dread but as a necessary prelude to clearing the decks. ‘The party needs to change – maybe they need to learn that the hard way,’ says one former backer.

Yet Sunak is finding cause for optimism. Aides say there has been a change in mood in the past few weeks. ‘He’s realised that he said what he thought in the leadership contest, he told truths and he still got to Downing Street,’ explains a confidant – even if he did lose the initial leadership contest. No. 10 thinks there is a chance more straight-talking could keep him there next year.

Why should we believe we’re about to see a new Sunak? Here’s the theory. First, we haven’t seen much of him yet: as chancellor he kept a relatively low profile, and he has been in No. 10 for less than a year. He has always been firefighting, not least with the long aftershock of Covid lockdowns. He entered Downing Street as the crisis PM, to hose down the antics of his two more colourful predecessors. It’s telling that the only factor that Sunak and Keir Starmer tie on in the latest Ipso political monitor is ‘has got a lot of personality’. Hardly anyone thinks this can be said for either of them.

After 11 months in the role, Sunak feels able to move out of crisis mode. I understand the conference theme and slogan will be ‘long-term decisions for a brighter future’. For a politician who, in the words of one of his backers, has two modes, ‘extreme caution and caution’, what does that mean?

The first of these ‘long-term’ decisions is on net zero. The Prime Minister is going to scale back two climate commitments. He will delay the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. He will also slow down the phasing out of gas boilers. Sunak is adamant that the general 2050 net-zero target enshrined in law will remain – but thinks other countries should go further on achieving their targets before UK voters suffer the costs. His new Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho – a former special adviser in the Whip’s Office – has been tasked with finding a more pragmatic approach to net zero while keeping the party on side.

Both changes, ministers believe, can be achieved without legislation. That’s just as well given the division in the Tory party on the issue. MPs in southern seats worry that anything that looks as though the party is diluting its environment commitments could mean swing voters move to the Liberal Democrats. Labour claims Sunak’s net-zero shift is bad for the economy, arguing the change in policy will deter investment.

While Sunak’s changes will inevitably be seen as a response to the Uxbridge by-election – the Tories narrowly hung on to the seat through strong campaigning against Labour’s ultra-low emission zones – work has been under way since before the summer. ‘We wouldn’t make such a big decision based on holding on to a seat by 400 votes,’ says a No. 10 aide. As chancellor, Sunak had long been sceptical of the costs of the transition. He sees it as a prime example of politicians nodding policies through without proper scrutiny.

The problems of short-term decision making will be a key theme of Sunak’s conference speech. He will pitch himself as the politician best suited to the crises facing the country. ‘There are no easy solutions,’ says a senior government figure. ‘We need to be honest – and it is very fitting with everything he has said and done before.’ Sunak’s supporters believe he is best placed to do this. He has made decisions before that were not fashionable at the time, such as raising corporation tax or showing restraint over -public-sector pay.

So Sunak becomes the Minister for Hard Truths, asking you not to heed Starmer’s fairy tales – just as he warned people not to accept those proffered by Truss. Will his plan work? Theresa May – advised by Nick Timothy – learned through the 2017 election manifesto that voters don’t always want hard medicine. There are limits to how straight-talking Sunak wants to be. I gather he’s unlikely to ditch the triple-lock pensions pledge in the next Tory manifesto, even though many in his party see it as an unaffordable bribe. Sunak will also attempt to offer some hope in his speech, offering a glimpse of what he would do were he to win the election. The focus will be on education.

Even if conference goes Sunak’s way, the Tories need Labour to make mistakes. The decision by Starmer to unveil a migration policy that he has admitted would involve a push for some type of returns agreement with the EU is viewed as one such error. ‘The only time I think we have a chance of winning is when I hear Starmer talk about immigration,’ says a minister.

‘Everyone is writing us off. Wrongly,’ insists a member of the cabinet. ‘We’re getting ready to fight.’ It’s why, despite the pile of problems, next month’s conference could be a turning point, if Sunak is able to pull it off.

Rishi Sunak is right to reconsider his green pledges

The old carmakers were slow to realise the potential of electric cars and didn’t innovate. So Elon Musk, an internet tycoon, bought Tesla and stole a march on an entire industry. The internal combustion cohort then rushed to catch up: Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo and Ford all committed to go electric-only by 2030. The problem is that electric cars are expensive, so most drivers still prefer cheaper petrol ones. Ministers came up with a plan to deny people the choice, to pass laws that would ban the sale of new petrol-based cars.

This always was a conspiracy against the public, justified on very thin environmental arguments. For the average taxpaying driver, facing an unprecedented crunch in living standards, it threatened to make life more difficult still. Gary Smith, leader of the GMB trade union, spoke last week about how the old environmental agenda has ‘decimated’ working-class communities. The promised ‘green jobs’ have not yet materialised. As ‘net zero’ deadlines approach, country after country has realised they cannot carry public consent. A new pragmatism is needed.

Rishi Sunak this week laid out a different, moderate and credible path. His decision to scrap the 2030 petrol car ban – which was never properly thought-out – comes after similar moves in European countries. The pain it would have inflicted on lower-income households was not worth the environmental gain. That such a calculation is being made at all will enrage certain lobbyists and corporate interests. The chief executives at Ford are furious: they will face greater competition. But a prime minister’s job is to serve the public – and this is not done by clinging to unworkable targets.

Until now, the debate about green targets has had a depressingly shrill tone: even university professors would end up saying that either we do this ‘or we fry’. In fact, whatever Britain does on carbon emissions is unlikely to move the dial on global warming. We contribute less than 1 per cent of global emissions. As Sunak points out, Britain has led the developed world in decarbonising its economy. No other G20 country has done more. And it’s been done without forcing the poor off the roads or making air travel prohibitively expensive.

Look at air pollution: sulphur dioxide is down 98 per cent from 1970 levels. Nitrogen oxides are down 77 per cent. The average UK household uses 25 per cent less energy than a generation ago thanks to more efficient methods of heating and cooking. Renewables generate more of our national electricity than fossil fuels. Overall UK carbon emissions are down to levels last seen in the 1850s. This is a stunning result – made possible by capitalism, competition and innovation.

Sunak can reject the false choice between climate change denialism and unworkable net-zero targets. There is a third path here, one which would align the Prime Minister far more closely with British public opinion. Sunak can say that in aligning the UK petrol car deadline with that of the EU, he is taking the climate more seriously than Boris Johnson and Theresa May, who both made huge promises which they had no idea how to keep. While Britain may be a negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, we have a big role to play. All voters ask is for that to be done in a way that’s credible and affordable.

When the motor industry has produced an electric vehicle which can travel 500 miles between charges and requires no more than a quarter of an hour to recharge, petrol and diesel cars will die out. It is sometimes asserted that the way to achieve such technological breakthroughs is to set deadlines. But you cannot force technology into existence through willpower or mandates.

Labour will rightly mock the Tories’ confused messaging on green commitments. But Keir Starmer is himself on a journey away from the extremes, having recently shelved his plan to spend £28 billion a year on green investment. Politicians of all hues made such promises when they were not really thinking. Now that an election is approaching, a more pragmatic and common sense approach is prevailing. This tendency can be seen the world over. Sweden’s young environment minister has moderated several green commitments. At Germany and Italy’s behest, the EU has watered down its 2035 ban on the sale of petrol cars.

In government, Sunak has already survived one ill-thought-out policy imposed on the country: the Covid lockdowns, which came about in a mass panic and trampled over existing pandemic planning. The costs are still becoming apparent, especially in terms of the calamitous effect on children’s education. Net-zero policies have the potential to wreak even greater havoc in coming decades if they are pursued in ignorance of the costs and against public consent.

Sunak will soon seek to present himself as a leader who can be trusted, who does not promise what he cannot deliver, who offers the best long-term solutions to problems. Yet his problem is that so many of the current messes were created by other Tories. Saying, in essence, that only the Conservatives can solve their own problems will be a tough message. He is starting to differentiate himself from his predecessors and present a more plausible agenda. Moderating his policy on net zero is an important step.

The enormity of the migrant crisis will upend European politics

When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer centre in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane. The repeated attempts to escape were inevitable.

On the island of Lampedusa, 11,000 migrants had arrived in the space of five days. There were 6,000 migrants in a facility meant for 600. The Sub-Saharan Africans were fighting with the North Africans. ‘To get food is a problem,’ one migrant told a television interviewer. ‘If you don’t fight, you don’t have food.’ Public transport was at a standstill as authorities commandeered buses to shift the migrants. Locals – and an increasing number of Italian politicians – refer to what is going on as an invasion. Migrant arrivals have doubled this year to 130,000 and the enormity of the crisis is about to shake European politics to its core.

However overwhelming the situation in southern Italy may look now, it is only the merest foretaste of the troubles that await. Europe’s population is shrinking, and fast. In countries where childbearing has been out of fashion for quite some time – Italy among them – each native generation is only about two-thirds the size of the last. Since Europe is rich and peaceful, migrants would be rushing to fill the void in any case, but Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is now growing at a rate never witnessed on any continent. Sub-Saharan Africa passed the one-billion population mark in 2015, but it is going to more than double, to 2.12 billion, by 2050. By then the population will be ten times what it was in 1950.

Italian politics already looks different to how it did a week ago. Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, a fiery orator from the most Mussolini-sympathetic precincts of the country’s right, came to office promising a tough stance on immigration. But she has defected from the politics that brought her to power, ruling as a pro-EU moderate, even on immigration matters.

Meloni’s guest in Lampedusa over the weekend was the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The two of them urge streamlining the policies of the EU ‘migration pact’ passed in June. They envision better cooperation with Tunisia and a more efficient distribution of asylum seekers to all the 27 European Union countries. ‘We will decide who comes to the European Union and under what circumstances, not the smugglers and traffickers,’ von der Leyen said, adding: ‘The most effective measures to counter the smugglers’ lies are legal pathways and humanitarian corridors.’

Italian voters, of course, worry less that traffickers are lying to migrants than that they’re bringing migrants. Voters don’t want legal pathways and humanitarian corridors. They want a blocco navale.

The blocco navale is the system that Italian politicians settled on after a huge wave of migrants from the war in Syria drove the world’s politics in a rightward direction. Remember? Pakistanis, Afghans, Iraqis and others joined the refugees fleeing the Middle East, and soon millions were converging on the EU. ‘Wir schaffen das,’ proclaimed German chancellor Angela Merkel, meaning Europe could accommodate them.

She was only half-right. In Germany, the first national right-wing party in the country’s post-second world war history entered state parliaments. In Britain, discontent with the EU mounted. In the United States, Donald Trump rose in the Republican primaries. And in Italy in 2018, a coalition of right-wing and left-wing populists took power. Interior minister Matteo Salvini pursued a policy of eliminating the immigrant traffic altogether, collaborating with unsavoury elements of the Libyan coastguard and battling pro-immigration foundations and quangos in Italy’s courts. This briefly made Salvini one of the most popular Italian politicians of modern times.

Salvini is still on the scene, serving in Meloni’s coalition as infrastructure minister. If there is a road back to Italian voters’ hearts for him, this is it. ‘I do not rule out any kind of intervention,’ he said, including the navy.

Complicating matters for Meloni is the matter of Roberto Vannacci, a clear-headed and intransigent general, who this summer published Il Mondo al Contrario (The World Turned Upside-Down), a defence of ‘normal’ (his word) Italians against migration, gay rights and political correctness. It moved into the no. 1 spot on Amazon early last month and has not been dislodged since. As the migrant traffic has increased, Vannacci has been ever more present on TV.

The problem with von der Leyen’s orderly bureaucratic approach is that it is not logical. There are really only two ways that Brussels can help a country in Italy’s position. One is to provide the resources to block the migrant traffic before it reaches Italy. But the EU is not made for that: it doesn’t have its own navy. Decisions on such external matters require a unanimous vote in the European Council, and migrants picked up in transit get brought to the closest port, which is often an Italian one.

A second way is to enforce a fair distribution of the migrants who arrive on Italy’s shores. But there are half a dozen European countries – Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia – that rule out taking any migrants at all. Italy has been less than enthusiastic about offering such solidarity itself. Italian officials barely bothered to conceal that their laissez-faire attitude towards freedom of movement was to permit French-speaking migrants to find their way to countries where they could understand the language, and welfare-seeking ones to countries with more to offer.

A good deal of the problem revolves around a long-standing issue with the EU’s ‘Dublin Regulation’, which has proved to be unworkable year-in, year-out. To prevent migrants from converging on Germany, Scandinavia and other well-provisioned states, responsibility for feeding and housing them is supposed to fall on the country where they first arrive. But this merely gives a free pass to the northern countries, leaving the Mediterranean ones holding the bag. In November, Italy refused to grant landing rights to a ship called the Ocean Viking. The 230 migrants on board disembarked in Toulon and disappeared, to the fury of a certain part of French public opinion.

Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, has called on President Emmanuel Macron to pledge that ‘France will not accept one single migrant from the joint operation in Lampedusa.’ There is a logic to this: designating a whole continent as the catchment area for migrants rather than two or three unfortunately situated neighbouring countries would mean a larger number overall. It’s a pull factor. That is why Éric Ciotti, of the more ‘bourgeois’ Républicains, speaks in terms that are not much different: ‘If France embraces the logic of sharing migrants,’ he said recently, ‘it opens the door to even more massive arrivals.’

Everyone seems to feel this way. The 2015 Syrian crisis arose in a region, the Middle East, where population growth had long ago passed its peak. Africa, demographically speaking, is a bottomless well. The potential for radical disruption is consequently higher. So Austria has heightened surveillance of its border with Italy. Germany, which gets vastly more migrants than other states, has recently pulled out of an agreement to accept migrants from Italy – 400,000 new arrivals will have applied for political asylum before the end of this year, and patience with migration is running thin. Last weekend, mobs of anti-regime Eritrean exiles attacked a pro-regime event and the two groups battled it out in the streets of Stuttgart with iron bars, planks and pieces of concrete.

Alternative für Deutschland, the radical party that began focusing on immigration matters in 2015, has risen above 20 per cent in polls nationwide. German voters tell pollsters that immigration is ‘Problem no. 1’ for their country. Bavarian minister-president Markus Söder has called for an ‘integration limit’ of 200,000.

The number of migrants who arrived in the UK in boats last year – 46,000 – looks like small potatoes in comparison with refugee flows in the Mediterranean. What is going on in Lampedusa now is a civilisational rather than a conjunctural problem. It is tied up in the West’s misplaced priorities and warped threat assessments.

Lampedusa was once an imperial frontier, a place where the free world and the third world were in communication. It used to be an asset for the free world; now that is less certain. Viewed by posterity, the invasion of Libya launched by Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron in 2011, which opened a corridor for the large-scale trafficking of migrants, will probably be seen to have posed a larger threat to the ‘European way of life’ than the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin last year.

In the long, withdrawing roar, European immigration policy will determine the politics of the next generation. There will be those (like the Salvini supporter who last weekend carried a sign reading ‘Give Lampedusa back to Africa’) who worry that there is little defence against the coming wave of immigrants. There will be those who propose (like the late French novelist Jean Raspail, author of The Camp of the Saints) that we fight them on the beaches. As the former French president Nicholas Sarkozy said last month: ‘The migration crisis has not even started.’

Watch: Richard Madeley clashes with Guyana’s president over reparations

The president of Guyana will take centre stage at the United Nations today – but before doing so he had to take on ITV’s Richard Madeley. President Irfaan Ali, who has said descendants of European slave traders should offer to pay reparations to right historical wrongs, came to blows with the Good Morning Britain host during a debate on slavery.

Ali said that Britain needed to realise it ‘still benefits from the greatest indignity to the human being’. But his comments went down badly with Madeley, who questioned why ‘someone who maybe had an ancestor seven or eight generations ago should have to pay for what an ancient ancestor did’.

Ali hit back, saying:

‘Not only did you benefit during the slave trade, and your country develop, but look at what it cost the developing world. During slavery, resources were used to build your country, build up your capacity. You were able to then become competitive, able to invest in mechanisation and developing countries like ours were left behind. So you should be very concerned, because you are prime beneficiaries of exploits of slavery.’

Elizabeth Hurley deserves a damehood

With the boiling, broiling summer here in Provence now at an end, it’s time to start thinking about rehearsing for the tour of my one-woman show based on my new book, Behind the Shoulder Pads. The show opens in Newcastle next week. I’m looking forward to revisiting some of the places that I was evacuated to during the war. Cheltenham, for instance, where as a terrified six-year-old I had to start a strange new school all those years ago. In Brighton, I remember standing at the balustrade with my aunts, seeing the pebbled beach covered with barbed wire and wishing I could go swimming.

It’s always fascinating to interact with audience members during the shows and the most fun part of the evening for me is when the audience ask me questions. Live audience interaction can, on occasion, be tricky to handle. A new season of Strictly Come Dancing has begun so it feels like the right time to recall the day a very drunk Craig Revel Horwood insisted on coming on to the stage during my show. He kneeled at my feet and directed a torrent of praise at me. It was most flattering, but after about five minutes the audience started yelling: ‘Get ’im orf!!’ Craig, a tip for the future: brevity is the soul of wit.

Travelling the length and breadth of the UK really opens one’s eyes not only to the beauty of the countryside, but also the sad side effects of all the road regulations, the cycle lanes, one-way systems, Ulez and mystifying traffic signs that make our cities a nightmare to drive in. I travel by train when I can, but that has its own irritations. I don’t relish being stuck in Whatstandwell or Wait-A-Bit.

Christopher Biggins, the most amusing of house guests, came to stay with us at the same time as lovely Elizabeth Hurley. Great fun and laughter ensued, but I was particularly impressed by Elizabeth’s handiness. At breakfast one day, while I was bemoaning the fact that our French gardener had thrown me the old Gallic shrug when I asked him to trim the leaves off an overgrown palm tree, Elizabeth said she would do it…and she did! I was amazed to watch her and Percy chopping away until the palm triumphantly emerged, divested of its overgrown foliage. When I’m asked what I would take with me to a desert island, I’ve always in the past said Percy. Henceforth I will say Elizabeth too. During her sojourn, she gave us more invaluable gardening tips, taught Biggins how to do various things on Instagram, and even managed to detangle some backcombed knots from my hair.

I can’t understand why Christopher Biggins, who has done more for charity than anyone I can think of (royals aside), has not been awarded a gong. The man has travelled the length and breadth of Britain supporting, among hundreds of others, Barnardo’s, Comic Relief, Childline, Make-A-Wish Foundation UK and Heart Research UK. Come, on King Charles! And if you’re feeling munificent you can add Elizabeth Hurley for services to this Dame.

Party season in Saint-Tropez was a bit of a washout this year because of the intense heat and the mistrals. However, we did visit the trendy nightclub restaurant L’Opéra, where contortionists, trapeze artists, opera singers and tap dancers strut their stuff while the diners eat fine food and quaff jeroboams of rosé. Unfortunately, the night we went, the stage lights failed and the performers were left in the dark. We asked our waiter what the problem was, and he told us ruefully that the lighting director had gone for the night and no one could access the main panel to repair the fault. ‘Do we get a refund?’ joked one of our guests. ‘No,’ he snapped, ‘the show is still going on.’ At that very instant, he dropped a tray of tequila shots which spilled all over three of our guests.

So many memories flooded back about my dear friend Nolan Miller, the costume designer of Dynasty, while I was writing my book. He had a wicked sense of humour. One day while fitting me for a lavish gown, his assistant came in and whispered in his ear. ‘Help,’ he exclaimed, ‘My wife’s ovulating. I’ll have to go make love to her.’

‘But what about my fitting?’ I wailed.

‘I’m sorry, it’ll have to wait. She’s desperate for a child.’

‘And you?’ I asked.

He sighed. ‘Guess I’ll have to lash it to a toothbrush!’

Why wasn’t Russell Brand cancelled in his prime?

In 2014, Rolf Harris was convicted of sexual offences against girls. I wrote in this space that this would have represented more of a cultural change in the treatment of celebrities if he had been unmasked at the height of his fame. Current stars, I suggested, are much more rarely denounced: ‘I would not dream of suggesting that Russell Brand is a sex criminal, but we know, from his own account, that he has slept with a great many women.’ He had even, on his infamous Radio 2 show, boasted of sleeping with Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter, yet ‘the BBC broadcast this as comedy’. ‘If the celebrity wheel of fortune ever went against Brand,’ I went on, ‘would it be surprising if some of the women decided to accuse him of “inappropriate” acts? Would the BBC then find the whole thing less funny?’ Nine years on, young Russell Brand is now 48. Has he been ‘called out’ because the culture has finally turned against the exploitation of young women by powerful men, or because he is now, by the cruel judgment of showbiz, a has-been?

This provokes reflection on the fate of Bernard Looney, the chief executive of BP, who has resigned. The formal reason, which presumably is genuine, is that Mr Looney had failed to be ‘fully transparent’ with the board about the full extent of his ‘personal relationships’ with staff members. Was another factor also in play? Mr Looney had won many plaudits for moving BP away from fossil fuels and into renewables. That trend was all the rage in the early days of net zero. But it was perilous to expose BP, a company made rich by oil and gas, to the intermittent power of wind. In February 2020, announcing his ‘new purpose and ambition for the company’, Mr Looney said, ‘We all want energy that is reliable and affordable, but that is no longer enough. It must also be cleaner. To deliver that, trillions of dollars will need to be invested in replumbing and rewiring the world’s energy system. It will require nothing short of reimagining energy as we know it.’ His reimagination began to get the better of him. Although BP had investments in Russia, he did not imagine the war in Ukraine. He also refused to imagine that reliable and affordable energy for all, and his company’s profits, might be badly damaged by the repudiation of fossil fuels. As reality supervened, the Looney tune began to sound less attractive. Therefore, fewer people were willing to catch him if he slipped. We shall see more such falls, because many of the business propositions net zero involves are not, to use a word its adherents love, sustainable. This week, Rishi Sunak has at last recognised the political version of this truth.

After the alleged infiltration of the China Research Group in parliament, it is being suggested that parliamentary visitor passes should be issued only after security background checks. Apparently, one suspect sometimes got in on a visitor pass. For practical reasons, however, this is a mad idea. All visitors to parliament already undergo bag and coat checks. If they had to wait for background checks as well, the system would grind to a halt. Besides, there is an objection of principle. The clue is in the name ‘House of Commons’. The ‘Commons’ mean everybody. Everyone has a right to visit. It would be extraordinary if the people were barred from the parliament that governs in their name, or even if a parliamentary authority, such as the Speaker, were to select who could enter. The public can seek out MPs in the Central Lobby (hence the right to ‘lobby’) and queue for seats in the public gallery. If the Commons had a central list of all the visitors it admitted, this would be information which could be hacked or abused. Imagine, for example, if you were an exiled Hong Kong dissident wanting to see an MP. If you thought the organs of the Chinese Communist party could follow your movements, you would not come.

There seems no overwhelming reason why the doctors’ strikes – resuming as I write with what the ever-festive NHS calls ‘Christmas Day cover’ – should not go on indefinitely, now that the taboo has been broken and therefore professional standards have failed. My friend the frontline doctor writes, ‘A fair few docs are getting quite rich out of the strikes. Consultants can extract rates of up to £200 an hour to cover striking junior doctors.’ (This is possible because consultants’ and junior doctors’ strikes usually take place at different times.) He continues, ‘Those of us who are scabs sometimes get scab fatigue. I haven’t yet given in, but when you’re on a chaotic ward or two on your own and being abused by managers who know nothing about clinical priority, it is tempting not to turn up for the next day, just for a rest.’ 

Those British organisations trying to help Ukraine continue to get a dusty answer from the Charity Commission. These, they tell me, are some of the obstacles thrown in their way: 1) That the Foreign Office says no British passport holders should be in Ukraine, and that the Commission thinks small charities cannot keep their volunteers safe there. 2) That everything should be handled only by the big charities combined in the Disasters Emergency Committee. 3) That by taking vehicles (mostly field ambulances) and medical supplies to frontline areas, the volunteers become a ‘political’ organisation and not a charity because they are helping only one side in the war. 4) That by taking vehicles painted green, they are ‘military’ and thus political. Not all these objections are individually idiotic, but collectively they fail to recognise the reality of need and of war. One example: the Russians target white vehicles. Another: Ukraine is under martial law and so, in a sense, everything is run by the military. Surely the Charity Commission should accept that volunteers are happy to act at their own risk. Besides, some of those involved are charities it has recognised. Why is it trying to block others?

Portrait of the week: Met misconduct, Starmer in Paris and Spanish football in turmoil

Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, proposed reaching net zero in 2050 ‘in a better, more proportionate way’ such as by delaying a ban on the sales of new petrol and diesel cars and delaying the phasing out of gas boilers. Ford the car makers told him it would undermine the three things it needed from the government: ‘ambition, commitment and consistency’. Inflation decreased from 6.8 per cent annually in July to 6.7 per cent in August despite a rise in oil prices. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, appointed commissioners to run Birmingham, which had run out of money. A man was killed by two dogs, said to be Bully XLs, in Staffordshire. Mr Sunak said he would ban the breed by the end of the year under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. Christine Middlemiss, the chief veterinary officer, said there would be an ‘amnesty’, saving the dogs from death, perhaps referring to exemptions under the Act. The Federation of Independent Retailers called on the government for help over shoplifting; the police refused to come if called. In the past year 100 officers in the Metropolitan Police had been sacked for gross misconduct; more than 1,000 were currently suspended or on restricted duties, the force said. The British Medical Association organised a strike by consultants for two days, overlapping with a strike by junior doctors for three.

The cost of housing migrants in hotels rose to £8 million a day, according to the Home Office, from nearly £7 million in March. People-smuggling gangs cut the price for crossing the Channel by small boat to £1,500 from £3,500. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, visited the Hague and suggested that when he was prime minister he would negotiate the return of migrants in small boats in exchange for Britain taking a quota of asylum-seekers from the EU. Sir Keir visited Paris as an hors d’oeuvre to the state visit by the King and Queen, and met President Emmanuel Macron, who gave him a pair of cufflinks. Sir Keir said he wanted a ‘much better deal for the UK’ in a review of post-Brexit trade with the EU. Avanti West Coast and CrossCountry were both awarded new contracts by the Department for Transport. The government stonewalled any inquiries on the future of the HS2 railway project.

A woman accused Russell Brand, the television presenter and comedian, of rape and three others accused him of sexual assault; he denied the accusations, which formed part of an investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, ordered a review of any complaints against Brand, what was known, and what was done. Roger Whittaker, the singer-songwriter who had a hit in 1970 with ‘Durham Town’, despite placing the city on the river Tyne, died aged 87.

Abroad

More than 7,000 migrants arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in two days, taking the number who have arrived in Italy this year to 130,000. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, visited Lampedusa. France and Germany proposed a four-tier EU, perhaps with Britain as an associate member. The numbers killed by the flood that breached two dams at Derna in Libya remained uncertain: perhaps about 4,000 were dead and 10,000 missing. Protestors burnt down the house of the mayor of Derna. Li Shangfu, China’s defence minister, was not seen for a fortnight and the Wall Street Journal reported that he was being replaced.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited New York to address the General Assembly of the UN: ‘Russia is pushing the world to the final war,’ he said. In an attack on naval facilities in Sevastopol, Ukraine had ‘almost certainly’ functionally destroyed a large amphibious landing ship, the Minsk, and the submarine Rostov-on-Don, according to the British Ministry of Defence. The price of Brent crude rose above $95 a barrel as Saudi Arabia and Russia cut production.

Azerbaijan attacked the ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and demanded surrender. Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, told the House of Commons in Ottawa that there were credible links between India and the shooting dead of a Canadian Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia in June. A Spanish investigating judge imposed a 200m limit on Luis Rubiales, the deposed president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, approaching Jenni Hermoso, the footballer player he kissed, pending resolution of a criminal complaint of sexual assault.        CSH

The inequality of sex

As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations, a few thoughts occur.

The first and most obvious is (once again) the presumption of guilt on the part of the entertainment industry, a business entirely devoid of morals and managed largely by coked-up hypocrites. Obviously, for most human beings our repulsion at the immediacy with which Brand has been cancelled by these dreadful people is challenged by our collective detestation of the man himself – yet another of those ‘comedians’ who never ever said anything funny and whose shtick was simply to reflect the zeitgeist of the age by showing off. But still. The allegation of rape and sexual assault is of course very serious – but before a man’s career is destroyed, a little more evidence wouldn’t go amiss. That is, unless we do what we are enjoined to do and believe that the woman – whatever woman, every woman – is always incapable of lying, or dissembling, or exaggerating or misconstruing.

I am not saying this happened in Brand’s case, because obviously I have no idea. Nor do the TV bosses. Brand denies the allegations – but then, he would, so we have an impasse. I have to say I prefer the notion that someone is innocent until proven guilty – but those days seem a very long way distant, don’t they? 

And then the inevitable pile-on, with more women coming forward, mostly alleging that Brand – gasp – wasn’t hugely chivalrous and seemed a bit manipulative. As ever, we are in the realm of liberal overreach. The #MeToo movement was motivated by genuinely wicked behaviour on the part of powerful men, such as Harvey Weinstein – but has subsequently deliquesced into a litany of gripes about questionable sexual etiquette. It may be irritating if your date, after a consensual and energetic scut, gets out of bed and skedaddles home – and then fails to send round a bunch of chrysanths the next day. A bit caddish, I suppose – but not yet against the law, so far as I am aware, and not necessarily immoral either. I will return to this particular issue later.

Then there is the propensity of left-leaning, liberal men to behave in the most grotesque manner towards the opposite sex. It is almost always the lefties who are outed for this sort of predatory behaviour – beginning with the great liberal Democrat Harvey Weinstein, of course.

The Daily Mail reports that another ten or so British comedians have been guilty of the same sort of behaviour as Brand, and I bet all of them would rather swallow acid than vote Conservative. When there is a predatory male-on-female sex scandal in the House of Commons, or the White House for that matter, it is usually the lefties in the dock. Why should this be? Is it because they are so puffed up and smug, replete with their impeccably pro-feminist credentials, that they expect all women to drop their drawers out of sheer gratitude? 

I don’t wish to mansplain, but might I suggest to any women reading this that the more right-on a bloke assures you he is, the closer you should keep to hand your spray of mace – because within the hour he’ll be reciting Simone de Beauvoir while clawing at your tights with a very menacing expression on his mug. If you wear tights, obvs.

Or is it perhaps because left-wing men tend to date left-wing women, for whom almost every male action is the basis for some sort of embittered grievance and possible lawsuit? Hard to tell, isn’t it? Perhaps it is rather more the case that men who are socially conservative never really bought into the current paradigm which argues that when it comes to sex, men and women have precisely the same appetites and aspirations and so they instead behave in a way which respects the essential and eternal differences between the sexes. That is largely the point, I think – and it brings me back to that earlier paragraph about the #MeToo phenomenon and the degree to which it has become quite often a protest about men behaving in a rather, y’know, male manner.

The third wave of feminism would argue that there is no male manner. Women were just as gagging for sex – and especially no-ties spur-of-the-moment sex (the famous ‘Zipless Fuck’, as described by Erica Wrong, or Jung, I forget which) – as were men. Women thus had every right to be as predatory and libidinous and promiscuous as men, which is why, if you were a man, the 1990s were a magnificent time to be alive, like Christmas every day that God sends.

The ladette culture meant that, for the first time, women were no longer the ‘gatekeepers’ of sex. The gate was instead wide open and gaily flapping in the breeze, allowing in an untold number of chaps who, frankly, could not believe their luck. But it was always a lie and a delusion and is recognised as such by our legal system today: that it is men who are the predators, not women. That it is men who will get a woman drunk and then perhaps take advantage of her. That it is men who are in pursuit of sex and women who are charged with the duty of allowing or denying consent. And yet at the same time that our legal system recognises reality – a reality which has pertained in every civilisation since the dawn of time – we are expected, culturally, to believe the opposite: that the wishes of men and women, when it comes to sex, are the same.

They were never the same. Find me a bloke moaning about predatory women. ‘She demanded I have sex with her, m’lud! And she wouldn’t stop!’ It never happens. It was always a lie.  

Democrats bring a CCP-tied witness to education hearing

A hearing about the Chinese Communist Party’s funding of American K-12 education took a surprising turn when the Democrats’ witness — and several members of the House Education and Workforce Committee — took pains to conflate opposing foreign investments in public schools with Asian-American hatred.

Gisela Perez Kusakawa, the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), kicked off her remarks by linking concern over the Chinese Communist Party’s investments in public schools to America’s incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. Warning the Asian-American youth could end up as “collateral damage,” Kusakawa repeatedly conflated opposing the CCP with anti-Asian-American racism.

Cockburn found this peculiar and nonsensical, so decided to take a closer look at Kusakawa’s organization and its partners. Your intrepid reporter required a fainting couch, because to Cockburn’s great surprise, the CCP has its fingerprints all over AASF. Several organizations it partners with are Chinese universities, like Tsinghua University and Peking University — two organizations that China watchdog groups view as massive red flags.

The China Defence Universities Tracker labels Tsinghua, the alma mater of Xi Jinping, as “very high risk for its high level of defence research and alleged involvement in cyber attacks.” Peking is designated as “high risk for its involvement in defence research and links to China’s nuclear weapons program.” Beyond the universities it partners with, some of AASF’s scholars have taught at these high-risk defense universities. Princeton professor Yu Xie, for example, is also a visiting chair professor of the Center for Social Research at Peking University.

Democrats spent much of the hearing accusing the opposition of “divisive, anti-Asian politics and conspiracy theories.” Nicki Neily, a Republican-called witness and the head of Parents Defending Education, said that the bigger instance of systemic racism against Asian-Americans has been how schools like Harvard denied qualified Asian applicants for years under the guise of diversity. 

One of the most amusing comments came from Democratic representative Suzanne Bonamici, who expressed concern that without the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes that are littered across the university landscape, Americans wouldn’t be able to learn Chinese! Cockburn would happily provide the esteemed Oregonian with a link to download Duolingo, and even provide directions to her local library.

Some good China news though — Cockburn notes that the hearing coincided with bipartisan legislation being introduced that would directly tackle the problems the hearing spotlighted. Republicans Dave Joyce and Elise Stefanik, along with Democratic Representative Ed Case, unveiled the CLASS Act to prohibit K-12 schools from accepting any money from or entering into contracts with the Chinese Government or the Chinese Communist Party. 

By Cockburn’s notes, this marks the first time legislation has been introduced to explicitly prohibit American schools from accepting Beijing yuan. While Cockburn doesn’t control universities curriculum, Cockburn can make assurances to Representative Bonamici that she’ll still be able to learn Chinese.

Where did ‘push-bike’ come from?

Books that one often used to see in secondhand bookshops, when there were such things, were the World’s Classics editions of the novels of Constance Holme. Humphrey Milford, publisher to the University of Oxford 1913-45, put all of them into the handy blue-bound format. The Spectator gave her second novel, The Lonely Plough (1914), a short but respectful review, declaring the book to be about Lancashire farmers, even though it repeatedly makes clear that the setting is Westmorland, the county where the author lived all her life. The anonymous reviewer also said that ‘she contrives to use admirable English’.

I found it interesting that Holme used aquascutum, as people did (John Buchan for one) to mean ‘raincoat’, but she spelt it aquascutem, and then abbreviated it as ’scutem. It was surprising that OUP, or her original publishers Mills & Boon, perfectly respectable in those days, didn’t correct it. She also pictures two of her characters when ‘strenuous figures with bare knees and flapping overcoats push-biked past them’. This immediately reminded me of Orwell’s ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. John Major, when quoting the remark, had them bicycling, but biking it was.

As a verb, bike was first noticed in 1885 by Notes & Queries, the periodical that from its first issue in 1849 bore on its first page the motto: ‘When found, make a note of. – Captain Cuttle’ (a reference to Dombey and Son, published the year before). Biking is hardly used today, and push-biking never. The noun push-bike remains. I bridled when I heard it on a BBC item about that escaped prisoner from Wandsworth. It sounds demotic. If bike had been thought ambiguous, since it might mean ‘motorbike’ (as it has since 1903), then why not bicycle? At least we have not adopted the Australian pushie. The suffix –ie has been productive in Antipodean slang. From them we caught uni in the 1980s, and I was surprised that Veronica and other students adopted it. About 20 years ago someone in Australia came up with the selfie, and it has stuck.

Dear Mary: how do I get talking to a pretty woman on WhatsApp?

Q. Scrolling through my WhatsApp contacts, I have found a name I don’t recognise but when I click on the profile I can see it is a very pretty girl. I suspect I may have met her on a night out when I might have had too much to drink which would account for me not remembering who she is. Because I don’t know how long ago this meeting was, or even where it was, I’m not sure if I can now send her a message and start a conversation. What do you think, Mary?

– E.L., London SW11

A. Send a lunchtime WhatsApp saying, ‘I’m standing outside the Wolseley [or similar desirable hotspot]. Where are you?’ This will prompt an urgent confused response. Text back, ‘So sorry. I meant to send that message to someone else. He’s just arrived. But how nice to hear from you. What have you been up to?’ Her answer will give you a clue as to where you met and pave the way for you to take things further.

Q. We have a daily woman who comes once a week to our London flat. We tend to leave very early in the morning so we rarely overlap with her. Our problem is that neither of us knows what her name is – we pay in cash which we just leave on the kitchen table – and since she has been coming for at least six months, we feel we cannot now ask her. What should we do?

– Name and address withheld

A. Invite a friend to stay the night in your flat and make him- or herself at home there the following day. That person can be the one to elicit the name when they have to introduce themselves since you will be out.

Q. I recently attended a colleague’s wedding. At dinner, the man who was supposed to be sitting on my left had messaged that he would be late, so there was a gap left. The man on my other side was the MC, who therefore barely sat down. As it happened, the latecomer did not arrive until we were at the cheese course. The round tables seated ten and were so broad in diameter that it was impossible to talk to anyone unless they were actually sitting right beside you. I felt I was attracting pitying glances from other tables as I sat there on my own. I wonder what you would have done, Mary?

– A. H-S., East Sussex

A. This was not a matter for self-pity. It was your hosts who would have been mortified to see you marooned. Out of consideration for them, you should have had no compunction in sliding into the place of the expected latecomer. As soon as he arrived, you could have moved back – or indeed let him occupy your intended seat next to the absent MC.

Why driving above the speed limit is a mug’s game 

Imagine you are choosing between two proposed road-improvement plans, but have the budget for only one. Both of the roads mooted for improvement are 20 miles long, and your sole aim is to reduce average journey time by as much as possible. Which would you choose?

1) Improving Road A, which increases the average speed from 20 to 25mph (i.e. 25 per cent faster).

or

2) Improving Road B, which increases the average speed from 40 to 65mph (62.5 per cent faster).

The majority of people, including many experts, instinctively plump for B. Unfortunately they are wrong. They needn’t feel bad about it, however, as a similar version of this conundrum, posed by Max Wertheimer, briefly bamboozled Einstein.

Improving Road A cuts 12 minutes off the journey time, while improving Road B saves only 11 minutes and 32 seconds. Weird, no? Well, only until you remember that someone travelling slowly to begin with has more time on the road to profit from any gain in speed. For instance, increasing the average speed on a 20-mile road from 100mph to the speed of light would save you slightly less than 12 minutes, whereas increasing the speed from 1mph to 5mph would save you the better part of a day. So, to anyone bemoaning the loss of Concorde, I say buy a scooter. Over the course of your life, it will save far more time.

I thank my former colleague Pete Dyson for alerting me to this seeming paradox, which of course isn’t a paradox at all. It is a problem in perception (or perhaps a failure to apply insights from the work of Gerd Gigerenzer to the comparative presentation of statistics). We assume relationships between time, speed and distance are proportionate, when in reality they are curvilinear. My original question is adapted from O. Svenson, 2008. ‘Decisions among time-saving options: when intuition is strong and wrong’ (Acta Psychologica 127, 501-509).

Several implications emerge from this bias. It suggests gains from making fast things faster may be a lot less significant than they seem, while we tend to underestimate gains from creating or improving slower forms of transit (the Heathrow Pods, for instance). Such ‘proportionality bias’ needs to be factored into decision-making even before we include many other costs incurred by making fast things faster – air resistance, energy costs, safety and the fact that slower roads carry a higher density of traffic. And that’s even before you consider my beloved psychological hacks: for instance, improving wifi on trains and allowing passengers to board sooner could reduce wasted journey time by 90 per cent, the equivalent of travelling from London to Manchester at Mach 2. Unfortunately, engineers get more aroused by the prospect of solving engineering challenges than by solving human problems (I am willing to bet that when HS2 finally leaves the buffers, the onboard wifi will be rubbish and there will be very few tables).

Two other things to take on board here. Firstly, driving much above the speed limit on motorways is a mug’s game. The best way to reduce journey time on long motorway journeys is to make your family perform pelvic floor exercises to strengthen their bladders. At the other end of the scale, we need to think harder before reducing speed limits from 30 to 20mph. In time lost per ten miles, this is equivalent to reducing motorway speed limits from 70 to 33mph. As a consequence, it will increase congestion by increasing the time each vehicle spends on the road.

And if this is a science-led decision, why must speed limits be a multiple of ten, when 25mph might be sensible? I suspect this is not evidence-based policy-making at all. It is policy–based evidence-making. Typically forged by Londoners who (yet another bias) don’t own cars.