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Trump is in a sea of trouble over Iran
Donald Trump is engaged in one of the biggest battles of his career. After spending millions turning the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool ‘flag day blue’, Trump is combatting a tenacious opponent that threatens to mar his upcoming 4 July celebrations. US National Park service workers spent much of yesterday on a desperate mission – dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to eliminate the ghastly green clumps of algae that have colonised it.
Trump is awash in a sea of troubles. His name has been removed by court order from the Kennedy Center. His White House ballroom is facing cost overruns amounting to several hundred million dollars. But his most conspicuous setback has come with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran, which the White House refuses to release but says will be signed on Friday in Switzerland.
Netanyahu’s affections are being spurned by Trump
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney stated yesterday on CNN that the MoU is a ‘game changer’. It certainly represents a change for Trump. After declaring that he was intent on ‘unconditional surrender’, Trump has abandoned his earlier talk about regime change in Tehran. Instead, he is embracing Iran and its leadership. ‘I never cared about regime change,’ he announced yesterday. ‘We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.’
The MoU contains abundant goodies for Iran. A $300 billion (£223 billion) reconstruction fund. The immediate lifting of sanctions on oil sales. No interference in internal affairs. A vague promise not to embark upon nuclear weapons. The only thing missing is the announcement of the return of the American embassy in Tehran and a state visit by Trump. But from a president who claimed that ‘we fell in love’ when referring to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a fresh romance might not seem improbable.
The conservatives who originally exhorted Trump to embark upon regime change are lashing out at him. They are aggrieved that the President has signed onto an agreement that is even less stringent than the dreaded Barack Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which neutralised the Iranian nuclear programme. The conservatives who agitated against Obama’s agreement as a new Munich have been hoist by their own petard.
Now John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, is accusing Trump of ‘chickening out’. Appearing on a podcast with Megyn Kelly, Vice President J.D. Vance retorted that the neocons are ‘proposing an endless conflict. They want this to go on until every bomb has dropped’.
It’s no secret that Vance was never enthusiastic about going to war in the first place. His lack of enthusiasm places him in an older tradition on the American political right, one that views any foreign intervention with more than a pinch of scepticism. What’s more, the GOP has never been that friendly to Israel. Starting in the 1970s, the influx of Christian evangelicals changed that. But the GOP is reverting to form under Trump and Vance. A recent Pew poll revealed that 57 per cent of Republicans under the age of 50 have a negative view of Israel and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When I asked Curt Mills, the executive editor of the American Conservative, whether Trump and Vance were waving hasta la vista to Israel, he stated that:
Podhoretz had his best political day in at least a decade today: the sitting vice president said he vaguely mattered. But there are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want and the other is getting it. We’re seeing the consequences for the Iran hawks of the first scenario.
We are indeed. Netanyahu dissed the Democrats and plighted his troth to Trump and the Republican party. Now his affections are being spurned by Trump. The US President went out of his way to disparage Netanyahu, alleging that he had overdone it in bombing Lebanon on Wednesday. ‘Without the US, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other President was willing to do what I did,’ Trump said.
The only country he seems to admire is Russia. At the G7 summit in France, Trump bragged that America isn’t aiding Ukraine and lamented that Russia had been expelled from the G8. But Ukraine appears as though it does have the cards to prevail against Russia. By contrast, Trump, the self-described ‘very stable genius’, has been forced to fold his hand in the Middle East.
It was inevitable that Prince George would go to Eton
It was, in the end, inevitable. Kensington Palace confirmed yesterday that Prince George will go to Eton in September. There had been talk of him going to his mother’s alma mater, Marlborough. But his father’s old school won out. George had, it turns out, in fact been put down for Eton over four years ago.
It makes sense. Eton is close to Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park, where the Prince and Princess of Wales live. It’s even closer to grandpa’s house, Windsor Castle. When Prince William was at Eton, he often walked across the bridge to see granny in her castle.
But the deciding factor in sending George there now was that Prince William didn’t just go to Eton – he loved it there. He was in ‘Pop’, the self-selecting club of the most popular boys in the school. Many of his closest friends today were made at Eton. Prince Harry, on the other hand, struggled academically at Eton and didn’t enjoy himself so much. Don’t expect his son to be heading there when he turns 13.
Of course, Prince George, as the future King of England, will always stand out in any group
Eton contains an unusually large amount of sons of old boys – even if there are fewer than there used to be, thanks to increasingly stringent entrance exams. Among many Old Etonians, it’s unthinkable that their boys should go anywhere else. Some of them, in a barely ironic way, refer to Eton simply as ‘School’ – i.e., ‘Were you at School?’, implying there is simply no other place worth going to.
It will help George settle in, too, that many of his pals from Lambrook, near Ascot, Berkshire, will be heading to Eton. The rude awakening of boarding in a huge school at 13 is that much easier with a few chums alongside you. There is also another huge advantage. George will be among his own tribe – the super-rich and the super-grand, who attend Eton as an inevitable rite of passage.
King Charles hated Gordonstoun because he was a bookish, shy boy in a school full of muscular, rugby-playing types. He was bullied, too, because he came from a different world – a different planet, even, from the middle-class Scots he was thrown in among. It’s striking that very few of Charles’s friends come from Gordonstoun. After he left Cambridge, he gravitated to the grand, upper-class circles from which he had sprung. It’s striking that Princess Diana’s brother and father both went to Eton.
Of course, Prince George, as the future King of England, will always stand out in any group, however grand it is. But he will move more anonymously and happily among gilded Etonians than any other group of schoolboys.
Prince William’s old friends are often seen joshing him and playfully rubbing his pate – behaving more like equals than courtiers. They will be less craven to him – a very good thing when serial sycophancy in childhood can damage character and stunt the growth of independence.
One Old Etonian contemporary of William’s once told a friend of mine, ‘Well, Wills is OK but he does like to play king sometimes.’ Another said, ‘Oh, I like him, but if he wasn’t who he is, he’d be hard-pressed to get a job at Foxtons.’
That doesn’t amount to the sort of bullying that poor Charles got at Gordonstoun. It’s the kind of friendly banter that keeps a royal ego at bay – a crucial service to the soul.
Many Etonians have alarming levels of confidence. It can be irritating but that sort of confidence is also an effective device for dealing on the level with royalty rather than cowering before it or over-compensating for inner deference by bullying a little prince. A journalist pal once said to me:
Parents don’t send their children to private schools to be educated. They send them there to make sure they end up with a posh voice and the right sort of friends.
My friend was joking but there was a kernel of truth to the line. At Eton, Prince George will be inducted into the world of knowledge lightly held, superhuman confidence offset by an effective patina of self-deprecation, and great wealth and power casually borne and adroitly administered.
This is what was once called the ‘ruling class’ – although, apart from Prince George, not many of his friends will be doing much ruling. The amount of Etonians becoming MPs – and prime ministers – is in decline. Money talks – even, or especially, in the grandest circles – and Etonians are more likely to become hedge funders than politicians these days. Most of them will still develop the born-to-rule carapace, even if they aren’t the next-but-one King of England.
A toff’s guide to Ascot
When I announced to my American neighbour that I was going to Ascot for the first time in 20 years, she grabbed me by the arm as if I had just announced that I was running off with the gardener. Apparently Ascot and the Royal Enclosure have changed beyond recognition since the latest refurb and there is much to learn.
‘Which day are you going?’ she asked wildly, as I muttered something about Ladies Day. She turned around in shock, hand over mouth. If she were Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances, I was her nervous friend Elizabeth who spills her tea all over her saucer, shaking like a leaf. ‘We don’t have much time,’ she cried in no particular direction.
When she learned about my proposed outfit, she went pale. A 20-year-old fascinator from House of Fraser, open-toed sandals that I had bought on Vinted and a dress that was ten years old? Words failed for a moment before she asked: did I not know that a hat – not a fascinator – has to be at least four inches in base diameter?
After studying the ‘Royal’ Ascot website, I was duly instructed to call my sister who co-owns Beulah London and my friend Laura Cathcart who makes stunning hats. Once the outfit was sorted, I casually mentioned that I would potter down to Ascot after the school run around 9.30 a.m. ‘You will do no such thing,’ my neighbour said. Arriving by train was also out – too crowded and very ‘lower class’ on the return journey. ‘The glamour fades in relation to the alcohol consumed,’ I was told. Sounds a bit like me but I kept schtum.
Since the train had been ruled out (my neighbour said I should hire a chauffeur for the day) it was agreed that the children would be flung into the breakfast club at school while we hotfooted it down the M25. My neighbour kept referring to it as ‘As-cottt’ with the emphasis on the second syllable. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that those in the know pronounce this ‘Ascut’.
I was soon sent a plethora of messages about where to book ‘luncheon’. There were still spaces at the Parade Ring or The Panoramic restaurant, but I would have to be quick as ‘availability was low’. When I looked on the website, I nearly spilled my tea all over again: the cost of lunch was as much as £4,158 per person. Of course it cost so much, I was told – what did I expect if I wanted a view of royalty, Moët and Chandon on tap and petit fours for afternoon tea? I tried to explain that we were meeting friends at the White’s tent but this was lost on her. ‘Oh all the tents are white, you have to go to the right one,’ she insisted. If I really couldn’t afford a ‘premium’ lunch of her suggestion, I would have to make do with the Sandringham restaurant, though it is ‘full of American tourists’ and is half the price of the decent restaurants. ‘What do you expect if you are served charcuterie and canapes instead of a five-course meal?’ she huffed.
It was smaller and simpler in the 90s when the White’s tent and the Pimms tent were pretty much the only hospitality on offer
By this point, it was clear that I was dreaming of Ascot 20 years ago. It was smaller and simpler in the 1990s when the White’s tent and the Pimms tent were pretty much the only hospitality on offer. But this nostalgia was clearly lost on my neighbour who thought it all sounded rather tedious to say the least. Oh well, I told her, we had a lovely picnic in Car Park 1 which is still the smart place to park and picnic – though it is said that all the fun happens in Car Park 2 where the jockeys, trainers and media hang out.
When I mentioned Car Park 2, my neighbour shivered. But she perked up when she remembered the notion of a ‘Wheely’, which is the official Ascot chauffeur service that picks you up from your house and delivers you to the action. I was told that I must download the app to book and that I can be fast-tracked into the Royal Enclosure from an exclusive drop-off point. Just as I was about to drop this whole Ascot endeavour altogether, my neighbour announced that she had decided she would come to keep me company and ‘show me the ropes’. A Wheely chauffeur has been booked so that we won’t have to ‘embarrass ourselves on the train or by driving’. The only fly in the ointment is that she has checked herself in for a five-course luncheon so we won’t be dining together after all. Not so sporting after all.
The safety features in my car are downright dangerous
When we needed a new family car, I insisted on the Kia Sportage. My friend Charlotte leant me her Which? website password, I part-exchanged my erratic Volvo XC40 and a lovely Kia Sportage duly arrived. Of course, I immediately whizzed off to one of my favourite places in the world: Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I fantasised about all the things from John Lewis that I was going to toss into the Kia’s spacious boot.
But my daydreams were interrupted by an unexpected cacophony of noises from the car. Bleep… bleep… bleep! Ping! Plink! Plink-plink! Wonnngggg! It was even worse than my old erratic Volvo, which was constantly shrieking at me to mind that car, when there was no car, and occasionally wrenching the steering wheel from my hand.
The Kia Sportage is worse. It’s as if it has been designed by an extremely nervous aunt who had a small prang in 1992 thereby setting her nerves off. What this car-designing aunt would most like is for no one to ever get in a car again. But if they must, it would be best if the car whistled and beeped and went ‘Plink’ every three seconds. ‘Plink!’ said the Kia. ‘Plink! Plink!’
Was it my seatbelt? Was the hatch of the spacious boot open? No, the Kia wanted me to notice a ‘No Entry’ sign. But I could see for myself that there was a ‘No Entry’ sign, because I have eyes!
Worse, there are cameras everywhere on the car. There are cameras on the sides, which neurotically display footage on the dashboard whenever you make a left or right turn. Again, this is unnecessary. I have wing and rear-view mirrors, as well as the eyes, which I have already mentioned.
I drove through the width-restriction at the top of my road and discovered another camera, showing a birds-eye view of my car going through the bollards, which was dizzying and sick-making. Such alarmism is also borderline insulting: I once took my dearly departed 2002 Ford Fiesta Zetec through this restriction at 20mph without so much as clipping the wing mirror and didn’t need a nauseating, top-down camera for that.
What’s more, the Kia has the same alarmist lane-correcting feature as the Volvo, which vibrates the steering wheel and then snatches it out of your hand to adjust your course. Doesn’t this, surely, make drivers less safe? I have been driving for 17 years and I’m pretty sure the trick is simply concentration. If you resist doing your make-up or eating a full English breakfast while at the wheel, you’ll be fine.
So why invent a car that seeks to distract the driver with bleeps and dings? To inform them of such total irrelevances as that No Entry sign over there, to the left – no, not there, there, just by that hedge. The alerts sent me searching the dashboard, thinking, ‘What? What is it?!’ when I would surely have been better off looking at the road.
The Kia has the same alarmist lane-correcting feature as the Volvo, which vibrates the steering wheel and then snatches it out of your hand to adjust your course
My old Ford Fiesta had no alerts or safety features, and I had the same number of accidents in that car as I have had in all the other increasingly safety-featured cars I’ve owned, which is zero. My husband’s accident rate, on the other hand, has declined over the years, from approximately one a week to almost never. But that is because he used to be an impulsive young man and now he is old. It’s nothing to do with the car.
Needless to say, mad safetyism is Europe’s fault. In January this magazine brought to our attention the existence of the European NCAP, the New Car Assessment Programme, which road tests new cars for safety features and awards them a star rating based on their findings.
But mission creep and other unhealthy human behaviour have caused car manufacturers to add totally unnecessary gimmicks to all cars, in order to get a coveted 5-star safety rating from the NCAP. It has the scent of a racket about it but also brute illogic. In January this year, Richard Schram technical director at NCAP explained ‘We want to make sure that the safety systems are not overly-sensitive to small changes in the environment.’ Clearly, he hasn’t sat in a Kia Sportage.
So what’s the answer? I sat in the Kia in the Brent Cross carpark until I worked out that there is a button on the steering wheel that will turn most of the dinging off, which must be pressed every time you start a journey. The vertigo-inducing camerawork must simply be ignored unless I find the button for that, too.
And, I suppose, we must cross our fingers that one day in the future someone, somewhere will grasp the NCAP by the elbow and stop this nonsense. If you can’t spot a No Entry sign for yourself, you really shouldn’t be driving a car at all.
Why do I get stuck with bores at parties?
There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.
Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.
Think about it: so reactive is the software behind your daily scroll that it shrinks your interests almost instantly. Click on a single video of an attractive redhead fly-fishing in Scotland, and you doom yourself to weeks of posts from accounts with names like GlasgowGingerbapsGrabsCod. Such curation seems like a helpful feature of modern life, until you realize it’s the reason all the media you hoover up centres on a tiny handful of topics. Which means, predictably, that’s all you talk about. A depressing thought springs up: our entire personality, all our mortal passions and hopes, can be summarised with a quick scan of one’s Instagram ‘For You’ tab.
Most depressing is how common a certain species of soliloquist has become: the workaholic, passionate about nothing but their 9 to 5. Recently I ran into someone who clung with such ferocity into speaking solely about their career that I changed the topic with a desperate gambit. ‘You’re really into your job, which is super!’ I chuckled, stifling a yawn. ‘But what’s your life goal? What does your dream retirement look like?’
It is my strange curse to be veritable catnip to these people. Conversational one-noters fall on me like flies. Maybe it’s my drama school past, where we were ordered to keep improvisation going with a friendly ‘yes and’ response in every scene, but in a knees-up of 50 people, I inevitably end up with the biggest party downer. It reminds me of the running gag in Airplane, where passenger after passenger would rather immolate themselves than hear the main character blather on about his doomed relationship. I know how they feel.
To those who would dub me a bitter misanthrope, I say — correct. I have few convictions, but I am convinced of this: life is too short to put up with bores. The drain of encountering the human form of a yawn emoji can leave me jaded for days. Being mid-chat with these energy vampires, smiling on the outside and muttering ‘death, where is thy sting’ inside, makes one yearn for caveman days, when dullards were surely brained with a rock for the good of the tribe. At a time when social contact has drowned in a sea of screentime, I want my precious few face-to-face interactions to be vivacious, full of bonhomie and quotes I savour in the cab ride home. I want good banter that feels like the best kind of one-upmanship, when stories carom in the air and everyone leaves buzzing and pleasantly spent, like after a good tennis rally.
At a time when social contact has drowned in a sea of screentime, I want my precious few face-to-face interactions to be vivacious
So, to solutions. Death and taxes being not the only inevitables, we shall all face a bore far more often than we’d like. What should you do if you end up the recipient of a one-man (and sorry lads, but the culprit is rarely a woman) monologue, someone blessed with Olympic levels of aridity and an inability to stray from the topic one iota? At this point, Airplane-style immolation not being an option, I can offer an oddly effective countermeasure: Personally, if fleeing the field of dullness and changing the topic are impossible (damn you, sit-down dinners), I lean into the pain. Instead of vainly trying to change the subject, I see how long I can keep the bore going, fanning the flames with counterfeit interest.
For bonus points, see how little back-chat you can get away with. It’s surprisingly entertaining to find that the most minimal, geisha-like nod will keep conversational drek flowing easily. Just last week, I was trapped next to a monologuing ultra-bore for close to an hour. I spoke for less than 90 seconds. (Yes, I counted.) It was a pointless yet oddly thrilling exercise, like running a four-minute mile — though to misquote King Pyrrhus after he defeated the Romans in battle, ‘another chat like that and I’m done for’. Anyway, I should stop talking your ear off now. It turns out I’ve been babbling about the same thing for minutes on end. Mea culpa.
Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the limits of Labour’s resolve
Labour is moving closer to Europe, at speed – except for one significant topic where it could really learn something from our Continental partners: the ever-thorny subject of how to do counter-extremism. There, the pace of convergence between Britain and the EU is glacial, at best.
The current Government’s approach towards political Islamism is not just light years removed from that of the Trump Administration, which has designated select chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organisations; it is also far less robust than the postures adopted by many distinctly un-Trumpian EU member states.
Britain’s security establishment has effectively decided that non-violent Islamism is not their problem
Both the political classes and the permanent security systems of many Continental countries now treat political Islamists as adversaries to be called out and confronted, both ideologically and at law.
Thus, Sinan Selen – the Istanbul-born Director-General of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s equivalent of MI5) – recently addressed a private breakfast in the Bundestag.
Referring specifically to the Muslim Brotherhood, he warned that Islamists were seeking deliberately to influence Germany’s political parties in order to change both society and the state. Such actors obey Germany’s laws, he cautioned – but only those they judge compatible with the Shari’a. Their long-term aim is the creation of an Islamic society.
Variations of that analysis now issue routinely from interior ministries and intelligence agencies across the Continent. But can anyone imagine MI5’s Director General, Sir Ken McCallum – or any of his recent predecessors – making such a pronouncement about political Islamism per se?
Likewise, in France this week the Administrative Court in Nantes upheld the local Prefecture’s ban on the “Annual Meeting of the Muslims of Western France” – which the state deems to be part of the national branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Again, can anyone imagine the mandarins within the Home Office’s Homeland Security Group even aspiring to do anything remotely like it?
Britain’s security establishment has effectively decided that non-violent Islamism is not their problem. MI5’s public account of its work is revealing: its counter-terrorism pages name Daesh and al-Qaeda but make no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor indeed of non-violent Islamism tout court.
Sections of the security system regards non-violent Islamists as “credible” bulwarks against the violent Islamists of al Qaeda and Isis; the best-known public exponent of this view was Bob Lambert, previously a leading light of the Metropolitan Police’s old Muslim Contact Unit, who was admired in his heyday at the highest levels of Thames House. Certainly, engagement with those non-violent Islamists comes at a price – but many in the Deep State regard that as a price worth paying. In the words of one security official, they constitute a kind of “Islamic Sinn Fein”, who can then persuade the putative hard men and women of violent Islamism not to take a walk on the wild side.
The current crop of Labour ministers are scarcely Corbynites – indeed, the very reverse. But for that reason, they are not much inclined to challenge the long-standing pathologies of the permanent security system. And insofar as they do call out extremism, they are for the most part rather more at ease with addressing the iniquities of right-wing populism.
Thus, last September, the Prime Minister spoke of a “battle for the soul of the country” against Reform UK – condemning its “grievance politics”. Islamist grievance culture is, however, not addressed with anything like the same clarity.
Why can’t Thames House spare a few desk officers to address non-violent Islamist extremism?
Certainly, within Labour, there remains a now-diminished grouping which grasps that non-violent Islamism represents a real threat to liberal democracy. This might still be termed the McSweeney wing and its policy approach reached a high-water mark earlier this year, when the Government launched its new social cohesion and counter-extremism strategy Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive, and resilient United Kingdom.
This retained the previous Conservative government’s definition of extremism as put forward in 2024 during Michael Gove’s tenure at MHCLG (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) – and promised that public bodies would not “confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups.”
It also did not shy away from using the word “Islamist,” though some of the language it employed was tortured. Islamism is described as “a predominant threat” – a curious formulation that edges towards saying “the predominant threat” without quite doing so.
Even so, the strategy made at least one important commitment. It promised “an annual State of Extremism report setting out the nature of the foreign and domestic extremist threat” – thus potentially bringing Britain into line with key Continental partners that already publish such documents.
Yet much of the Home Office machine appears, so far, to be in no hurry to implement this – partly because of what it deems to be a lack of resources, but also because of the lack of appetite for any legal risk in “naming and shaming”. All that is without taking into account the slow, asphyxiating effects of the Government’s new anti-Muslim hostility definition.
In consequence, there remains a very appreciable gap between the UK and many of its most important European allies:
- Austria’s Chancellery, through its in-house integration portfolio, backs a Documentation Centre for Political Islam – explicitly tasked with mapping these networks.
- Belgium’s VSSE state security service devotes pages of its annual report to the Brotherhood’s “attempts to exert covert influence on government policy”.
- Denmark’s approach to wider immigration and cohesion issues is much admired by the present Home Secretary. The official Centre for Terror Analysis (CTA) is a fusion centre comprising staff from four agencies – the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, or (PET), the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Emergency Management Agency. Its reports cover what it calls ‘Militant Islamism’ and includes a section on ‘Insults to Islam’ – namely the legacy of the Muhammad cartoons.
- France’s Interior Ministry produced a weighty report in May 2025 on the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism, and the National Assembly has since voted for the movement’s inclusion on the EU terror list. This flagged two Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent entities in the UK – the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE, now renamed the Muslim Community Association). But there appears to have been no official British response to this so far.
- Germany’s BfV publishes an annual estimate of Muslim Brotherhood adherents in the country. It classifies and monitors Muslim Brotherhood networks and other foreign Islamist influence structures – and treats them as long-term threats to the democratic constitutional order.
- The Netherlands’ AIVD intelligence agency stated Hamas (the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) was involved in organising protests against the war in Gaza, propaganda, and raising funds in Holland.
- Spain’s Annual Security Report 2025, approved by the National Security Council, notes some Islamist organisations have disseminated messages that justify the use of violence. It considered noteworthy two fatwas issued by the International Union of Muslim Scholars, perhaps the most influential Muslim Brotherhood organisation, which is hosted by Qatar.
- Sweden’s then Employment and Integration Minister Mats Persson responded to the French Interior Ministry report by pledging that the government would set up a commission to map “Islamist infiltration.” This is still going ahead.
It is now over twelve years since then-prime minister David Cameron commissioned two senior civil servants, the late Sir Charles Farr and Sir John Jenkins, to review the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities here and abroad – an exercise which was meant to seed lasting expertise within Government to address this challenge. It did not succeed in doing so. That report also recommended a fusion centre based on what is now the Danish model.
The pattern recently repeated itself on antisemitism
When the Government was asked earlier this year on the floor of the House of Lords why Britain had become “an outlier in not giving a proper analysis to the country of what threat this organisation constitutes,” the Home Office Minister Lord Hanson replied simply that “we are not an outlier”.
The pattern recently repeated itself on antisemitism. Pressed by me on the 2015 Farr-Jenkins finding that the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the largest drivers of antisemitism in this country, Hanson stated on the floor of the Upper House that it “undertakes activity that directs antisemitism” – and that this was “not acceptable.” He made a welcome pledge to report back further on this important pronouncement.
However, Hanson swiftly pulled back from this – and in his follow-up letter to me sought refuge in the formulation that the Government “does not routinely comment on specific groups”, though “if a group or individual is acting in the extremist space, action will be taken.” This was followed by the truism that “extremism drives antisemitism”. Extreme what? Extreme Mormons? Extreme Scientologists? Extreme Zoroastrian relatives of the late Freddie Mercury? Such vagueness does not bode well for any future State of Extremism report.
So between the distinct pathologies of the contemporary Labour party and the permanent State, non-violent Islamism tends to be lost in what one No. 10 insider terms “a valley of death” between MI5, the Home Office and the MHCLG – and a plethora of relevant “operationally independent” regulators such as Ofsted and Ofcom. Ministers are frequently told by Mandarins they cannot pre-empt the deliberations of these bodies, which then become part of what one Whitehall veteran called the “learned helplessness of the system”.
Where the State does act, it acts narrowly and on the cheap. For example, there is currently a dedicated police operation directed at Hamas in Britain; but despite the proscription of both the political and the armed wings of Hamas, this operation is accorded a low high priority – a casualty of the security establishment’s settled posture of dealing first with what then-MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans termed the “crocodiles closest to the boat” rather than more “upstream” ideological challenges.
Where the State does act, it acts narrowly and on the cheap
That instinct is understandable. Finite resources should go to the most immediate threats to life. But it is also a false economy. The surging attacks on Jews – as at Heaton Park, or in Golders Green – did not emerge from nowhere. They are the “downstream” consequence of an ideological climate that has been allowed to fester, in which the Muslim Brotherhood and, no less importantly in this country, its sub-Continental cognates incubate the antisemitism that later erupts into violence. To ignore the upstream generation of a threat because it is not yet lapping over the boat is to guarantee a steady supply of further crocodiles.
Nowhere is British timidity clearer than in the simple act of saying out loud who is not welcome. In Denmark, the immigration service publishes a list of overseas clerics banned from the country; fifteen names appear on it, two of them from the UK.
During the Home Secretaryship of Jacqui Smith in the Gordon Brown era, the Home Office named those excluded. However, the Home Office has published no such list since 2009 – for fear of legal challenge. Indeed, in 2014. a Coalition Home Office Minister confirmed to the Commons that the then government would not resume identifying those it had barred.
Why, a dozen years down the line, should the current crop of ministers have their options curtailed in the present very different set of circumstances – by a policy commitment made back in the lifetime of the Coalition?
There is a growing consciousness in Whitehall that sections of insurgent movements, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, have “gone political”
This forms the background to today’s Oral Question in the Upper House from Lord Goodman of Wycombe – a significant voice in the debate – asking the Home Office whether it intends to identify any individuals, groups or organisations in the State of Extremism report it has promised.
Goodman contends that counter-extremism has thus long been the poor and unglamorous relation of counter-terrorism. After all, the Home Office’s Homeland Security Group employs well over a thousand people. Can it really be the case that this behemoth really has no capacity to address these issues? And if not, why not?
Indeed, why can’t Thames House, whose numbers have risen from under 2,000 officers during the Cold War to over 5,500 today, spare a few desk officers to address non-violent Islamist extremism – when in the pre-War, wartime and Cold War eras, tackling both non-violent fascism and non-violent communism (and other far left movements) were its stock-in-trade?
The subject is ripe for re-examination in the light of wider global developments. There is a growing consciousness in Whitehall that sections of insurgent movements, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, have “gone political” in some measure, entering their respective governments; moreover, Afghanistan has a substantial diaspora community here.
So does the “inclusion-moderation” hypothesis apply to Islamists in the UKin this era – and at what price? The key conclusion of the Farr-Jenkins review was that engagement with political Islamists has been tried many times and has never worked; we do not shape their views – rather, they shape ours.
At last, a real debate about the future of conventional and nuclear defence is taking place in this country. It’s now high time we had one on non-violent threats within our borders as well.
Lord Godson is the Director of Policy Exchange. This is the first in a series he is writing for The Spectator on European approaches towards extremism and immigration
J.D. Vance versus The View
Vice President J.D. Vance went on The View Tuesday morning in the vain hope of talking about his new faith-focused book, Communion. Instead, he found himself locked in a debate with a group of ladies who subjected the VP to a show trial.
Vance was questioned on topics including immigration and deportation, President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the release of the files. The most eye-catching exchange was with the show’s moderator, Whoopi Goldberg, concerning race.
“What did black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?” she asked. “And you know how hard it is, you have folks of color in your family. So when you see the Emmett Till stuff coming down and all kinds of removal of information, of black heroes, how does that sit with you?”
In response, Vance asked her to clarify, asking her “what exactly” she was talking about. Immediately, the studio audience began to boo, and two other hosts joined in, citing statistics and speaking of black voters being “dismantled.” VP Vance responded, insisting “everybody is welcome in our political coalition,” and declaring his skepticism for the numbers presented.
There was also notable tension from host Ana Navarro, who attempted to interrupt Vance’s answers, counter with questions and cut in on his statements at every opportunity. Most notably on social media, viewers have pointed out a moment between Goldberg and Navarro.
“I’ve got to, I have to go to break,” Goldberg said, as Navarro kept grilling Vance on an issue related to black history. Navarro then continued speaking to the Vice President, and Goldberg shouted, “Ana, God, please!” as she attempted to cut to a commercial. The escalation ended with Goldberg scolding Navarro, shouting “Don’t do that!”
Through it all, Vance kept his composure, speaking calmly and attempting to answer each point the hosts threw at him. His outlook came across, dare Cockburn say it, presidential. Watch this space, Marco…
Will Janeese Lewis George be the Zohran Mamdani of DC?
Eight months after New York handed City Hall to a democratic socialist, Washington, DC appears ready to follow suit. Janeese Lewis George, a former prosecutor, leads the field, preaching the same message of affordability that carried Zohran Mamdani to power.
DC residents head to the polls today to vote in the mayoral primary after Muriel Bowser decided not to stand for reelection. In the deepest of blue areas, the winner of the Democratic primary race is almost certain to be its next mayor.
The primary has become an ideological tug-of-war between the Democratic party’s socialist wing and its business-aligned establishment. Lewis George runs as the candidate of the progressive coalition. Kenyan McDuffie, who is backed by much of the city’s establishment, runs as the centrist alternative and self-styled fiscal realist. Gary Goodweather, a businessman and Army veteran with a Johns Hopkins finance degree, fills the outsider lane with sweeping ideas, providing what one voter called “comedic relief”.
Lewis George leads McDuffie by 11 points among likely primary voters, holding that double-digit edge even after ranked-choice second and third picks are counted. A quarter of voters remain undecided heading into primary day, though her supporters report firmer commitment and a stronger turnout record.
She is running the Mamdani playbook: cost of living, housing, rent and public schools. It leans on expanded government to deliver universal child care, an aggressive house building plan, free public transportation and from fresh revenue that she says can be drawn from closing business tax loopholes.
Her campaign embraces the comparison. “Mamdani’s win was because he seized the moment of the dissatisfaction and frustration people have, particularly young people. Janice and our slate are no different,” said a campaign insider. “There’s momentum and energy in this country to push for people who aren’t just going to do business as usual. We mobilize the youth, mobilize people of color, mobilize a progressive coalition, including labor, to take power in cities toward building a more progressive landscape”.
On paper, Washington should be an easy city to govern well with 700,000 residents, a budget the size of that of a small country and one of the most educated populations anywhere – nearly two-thirds of adults hold a college degree. Yet every fifth resident relies on food assistance, about 40 percent are on Medicaid and its unemployment and its crime leads the nation. The city spends more per student than almost any school system in the country, but its children still trail the national average in reading and math.
‘We are not going to get ICE off our streets by fearing this president’
The fix on offer from Lewis George and her Democratic comrades is more government and extracting more money from residents and businesses. They don’t question whether the system itself is the problem.
One of the central issues to the election has been a decision taken by local electricity company Pepco in January to raise its rates. Some households have seen their monthly charges double or triple. Cost of living is an acute concern for even DC’s white collar residents.
Elon Musk, or at least his cost-cutting creation Department of Government Efficiency, is also a central issue. The government accounts for about a quarter of all jobs in the city. But under Trump’s slashing of the federal workforce, the district shed 44,600 jobs. DC has entered a recession this year, with output contracting 1.9 percent. Restaurants have emptied and shops and downtown office towers sit vacant. Lewis George condemned the federal worker cuts as a “travesty” and vowed to pour money into reskilling the workforce.
Crime divides the race more than any issue. DC still ranks among the deadliest places in America despite a sharp fall in violence. After a string of teen brawls in nightlife districts, the city moved to impose a curfew on anyone under 18. Lewis George refused to endorse it, saying that it would be tough on black youngsters. She argued that enforcing curfews is risky due to the presence of federal and ICE agents who she says are not trained in de-escalation. Yet, the voters side with toughness: more than seven in ten back the curfew.
What unites the field is Trump. Each candidate stands against the National Guard and ICE deployment. As Washington votes, the soldiers are part of the scenery, roaming around in small clusters downtown and around the monuments in the swampy heat.
And Trump has signaled he will punish DC if they elect the wrong person by cutting off federal money which makes up a quarter of the district’s budget. He said last week he “wouldn’t like it” if Lewis George won. “Maybe we’d take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it. We’re not going to lose our businesses.”
But threatening a federal takeover is only putting the wind in the sails of Lewis George’s sprint to the finish. “We are not going to get ICE off our streets by fearing this president,” she said. “We are not going to protect our rights or Home Rule by obeying in advance. Threatening Home Rule because you do not like how residents vote is an attack on democracy itself.” Yet for all the defiance, how she would actually stand up to the president is vague.
Lewis George is likely to win the primary and then the full election. But her north star in New York, Mayor Mamdani, is discovering how easy it is to make campaign promises and how hard it is to follow through with them. His current tax plans raise a fraction of what he needs to pay for his flagship policies. What will happen in DC when Lewis George’s fine campaign promises also meet the math?
When is a Post Opinion not a Post Opinion?
The Washington Post recently published two op-eds by Scott Greer, “a writer who years ago expressed racist and antisemitic views for an online white-supremacist publication,” according to Politico. For context: Greer wrote for Richard Spencer’s “Radix Journal” under a pseudonym. After Politico reached out for comment, WaPo removed the articles.
That move might come across as a squirrelly act of insecurity in the middle of a turbulent time for Post Opinions. After all, WaPo has been widely criticized for editorial decisions downstream of Jeff Bezos’s new vision for the paper – including his declaration that Opinions would henceforth only publish writing that was in defense of “personal freedoms and free markets” – two values he deemed central to America’s success and underrepresented in American media.
Another core aspect of the Post’s rebrand was its new goal of reaching “all of America.” Supposedly in service of this goal, a mysterious new section lives on the Washington Post’s website called “Ripple.” The page appears to be syndicating articles from various websites. Just under the word “Ripple” reads “Opinions from across America.” However, there is no clear evidence that Ripple is under the control of Post Opinions because it lives at the top of the general website in a list of sections, separate from Opinions, between “WP Intelligence” and “Games.”
In June 2025, the New York Times’s Benjamin Mullin wrote that the Post was planning to expand its lineup to include “many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan.”
Mullin wrote that the Post had just hired an editor to oversee the program, referred to as Ripple. The program was set to include a “final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember” beginning in the fall of 2026. “Human editors would review submissions before publication.”
Greer has a sizable following on X and Substack, where he publishes pieces of cultural criticism that veer into race science and esoteric musings on “real America” and what real America wants. (In real life, Greer is a bit of a puppy. But you wouldn’t know based on his writing).
It would, in fact, be a shock that a Post editor would choose to publish someone with his track record, even under the current masthead. It is also, however, very possible that an automated syndication program partially powered by AI, responding primarily to algorithms, would select an article by him for publication. The program seems to have been pushed by Jeff Bezos himself and lives somewhat separately from the rest of editorial. This would help to explain the immediate removal of Greer’s articles after the slightest acknowledgment of their presence on the website. Politico, it seems, may not have been the only outlet surprised by the news.
On our radar
DOWN BOY During a bilateral meeting with UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed in France, President Trump marveled over an Emirati reporter who asked him a question. “What a nice-looking person,” said the President. “Is he from your country? He has got such a nice way about him. My people are so mean. Look at him, handsome guy. I could put him in a movie right now.”
DRONE PLOT FOILED The FBI announced this morning that it interceded in an alleged plot targeting Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event, which would supposedly have involved explosive drones, snipers and a planned attempt to storm the White House.
DC VOTES TODAY Polls are open in the DC primary until 8 p.m. Voters will select candidates for mayor and the District’s delegate to Congress, among other positions.
Duck soup
Efforts to tidy up the nation’s capital ahead of America’s 250th birthday are well under way. While it’s not clear whether “the Claw” lighting rig from Sunday’s UFC fight will stay up as Trump suggested – God help those who plan to fly through Reagan for the festivities – other aesthetic adjustments are proving more nettlesome.
Trump ordered the National Mall reflecting pool that lies between the World War Two and Lincoln Memorials to be emptied and painted blue at a cost of $14.2 million. Since the pool was refilled, algal blooms have reemerged, turning the water a sickly green. This morning, to address the algae, workers were spotted pouring flagons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool.
A number of people have pointed out that while bleach might be useful in tackling algae, it also could prove harmful to the ducks that regularly occupy the pool. The fowl could end up with a Marilyn Monroe makeover or, likelier, die. Anything in pursuit of beauty…?
Who’s footing the bill for the ballroom?
President Trump’s ballroom has been mired in controversy since its inception, but the President has insisted it is a “gift to the United States of America,” paid for by private donors and “tax-free.” Yet it appears there’s a $307 million price tag to be covered by taxpayer dollars.
The Washington Post obtained a series of contractor estimates showing that the project cost has been on the rise for months. Newest cost estimates from contractor Clark Construction put the price at $600 million. That estimate was made before Trump’s comments on March 31 that the ballroom would only be $400 million.
Although $293 million is still expected to be paid by “private sources,” the remaining $307 million will come from the Secret Service, White House Military Office, (WHMO) and Executive Residence – all groups that rely on taxpayer dollars.
The ballroom, Trump claims, is crucial for national security after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Since the dinner was at a downtown hotel, security was not as stringent as it could have been in a ballroom on the White House premises.
How does a ballroom end up with such an exorbitant price tag? Answer: it’s not just a ballroom. The high-security event venue is only the ground floor: underneath, six more stories of underground operations are in construction, including a military hospital and top-secret meeting and research facilities. Then, of course, there is the drone port planned for the roof, (which retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg wrote about for The Spectator last week).
Hypothetically, it is these security initiatives that will be paid for by the Secret Service and WHMO rather than the event space, but as Stan Soloway at the National Academy of Public Administration pointed out, “you can’t disentangle the entertainment space from all of the other parts that are in here.”
VivekCoin
Vivek Ramaswamy, the 2024 presidential candidate and former deputy to Elon Musk at DoGE, continues his campaign for the Ohio governor’s mansion.
He has won the backing of the cryptocurrency sector. A series of crypto entrepreneurs including Chase Herro, Zak Folkman and Zach Witkoff (son of the President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff) have each contributed $16,615 – as much as Ohio electoral law allows – to Vivek, totaling $116,000.
It’s easy to see why. Ramaswamy has pledged to be the “strongest pro-Bitcoin governor in the nation.” If elected, he has promised to pass the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, which would let the state treasurer invest up to 10 percent of state funds in select cryptocurrencies and appoint a pro-crypto trustee of the state’s public pension system.
Ramaswamy fell somewhat out of favor in MAGAworld in December 2024, when he criticized American workers for showing insufficient gumption and grit. Now he has become the greatest advocate of an entirely passive asset class. The irony is not lost on Cockburn.
Cockburn’s Diary will return on Tuesday June 23. Happy Juneteenth!
Reform poach think tank star
In the battle for the right, all eyes are on who moves where. A handful of Tory MPs made the jump to Reform, prior the 7 May deadline imposed by Nigel Farage. Now it is the turn of backroom talent, as both parties bid to prove which of them had the more credible offer. Under James Orr, Reform’s Head of Policy, the party has made a series of statement signings including James Graham of the Prosperity Institute and Sam Ashworth-Hayes from the Telegraph.
But now Steerpike hears tell of another marquee hire. Karl Williams, the Research Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), will be joining Orr’s team shortly. Williams is best known in ‘wonk world’ for his work on the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of mass migration that has occurred since 2020. A staunch fan of Norman Tebbit, Williams co-authored the 2024 paper with Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien that signalled a sea change in attitudes on the right. Let’s see how he fares in Milbank Tower eh…
Reform’s latest hire comes at a time when they are under pressure from Restore, amid supposed criticisms that Nigel Farage’s party has ‘gone soft’. With hires like Williams, it’s proof that Reform clearly hasn’t lost their pulling power with many of those young, bright and on the right…
The problem with the assisted dying Bill’s return to parliament
The Labour MP Lauren Edwards has confirmed she will reintroduce the assisted dying Bill in the Commons as a Private Member’s Bill (PMB). As a supporter of assisted dying, you might expect that I would be entirely in favour of this initiative. In fact, I have a number of significant concerns.
Edwards indicated that she will be introducing the same Bill (the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill) that had previously been introduced by her colleague Kim Leadbeater in the last parliamentary session. Leadbeater’s Bill would have allowed adults over the age of 18 who were expected to die within six months to be given help to end their own lives, subject to certain safeguards.
That Bill passed the House of Commons, but it subsequently stalled in the House of Lords after a small number of peers tabled an immense number of amendments. Eventually, the Bill ran out of time and fell at the end of the session, as it could not be carried over into the next session.
With the issue of assisted dying, the essential point is to get it right, not to get it done quickly
Edwards argues that she is putting the question to MPs again on two grounds. First, whether mentally competent, terminally ill adults at the very end of their lives should be offered the choice of a dignified, pain-free death with all the protections and safeguards the Bill provides. Second, whether the decision of the elected chamber should be respected and not thwarted by the unelected House of Lords. It all sounds very reasonable, so what is the problem?
There are two interlinked issues in seeking to reintroduce the PMB in this way. The first is that the debate over the Bill in the last session exposed the fact that there were real concerns about the safeguards that had been included. While many of these may have been raised by individuals acting in bad faith (on the basis that they had principled objections to the legislation which could never be addressed by any safeguard), some issues clearly merited debate.
The original was a highly technical Bill; but because the measure was introduced through the PMB process, many of the details were left to be filled in later by the government. This is not appropriate when it is likely that the NHS would have to deliver this service and the taxpayer would have to fund it.
The Institute for Government quite reasonably highlighted the fact that the reliance on the PMB process demonstrated a lack of political leadership from the government. With a contentious and emotive issue such as assisted dying, the essential point is to get it right, not to get it done quickly.
Given that the Prime Minister is in favour of assisted dying, the better approach would have been to offer a free vote on a redrafted government Bill. This would have allowed for government-sponsored consultations and more extensive scrutiny than can be provided through the PMB process. It would also have allowed opponents to probe the government in detail on cost, delivery of the service and safeguards.
The second issue is the fact that, while Edwards has indicated that it is not her intention that the Parliament Acts should apply to the Bill, it is far from clear why she has reintroduced it in this way if this is not at least an implied threat. Notably, in her open letter, Edwards states:
There will be no need for that if peers complete their unfinished business in the normal way, but we cannot allow an unelected minority to frustrate the democratic process for a second time.
In order to benefit from the provisions of the Parliament Acts, a Bill must be passed in identical form by MPs twice in successive sessions. If this happens, and the procedure is invoked, then peers would be unable to block the Bill for a second time.
The weakness of this approach is that MPs would be unable to make any sensible new amendments to the Bill in light of the earlier debate if the Parliament Acts are to remain in play. So we would no doubt expect a lengthy period of scrutiny and debate in the Lords again.
This essentially feels like a game of chicken and, given that the Commons only backed the measure by 314 votes to 291 in June last year (a noticeable drop in the majority from when it was first debated in November 2024, from 55 votes to 23), there is no guarantee that the Bill will be passed this time around. If this happens, the consequences could be significant: it could delay the introduction of assisted dying for a generation.
This is the sort of legislation which needs to be introduced, as far as possible, through pragmatic compromise and consensus-building. It requires government involvement and concrete assurances so that those with legitimate concerns can be separated from those who have ideological objections to the very idea of assisted dying.
There is little point in simply decrying the House of Lords as being undemocratic. The scrutiny and revision of legislation is its primary job. Assisted dying did not feature in the Labour manifesto and the Bill did not benefit from the Salisbury convention (which says that the Lords should not block bills which give effect to government manifesto commitments). There was no constitutional impropriety in the approach it took.
In all likelihood, Sir Keir Starmer will be out of No. 10 before there is a resolution to this debate. But if he is looking for a legacy, he could do worse than trying to convince his Labour colleagues (particularly Andy Burnham) to throw their weight behind a free vote on a government-drafted Bill. It is the only sensible way to take this forward.
Starmer has left Europe in quiet despair
Foreign diplomacy is usually a refuge for Keir Starmer. But as the Prime Minister touched down in Evian-les-Bains, France for this week’s G7 summit, the warm greetings and firm handshakes couldn’t hide the tension that has bubbled up between Starmer and the summit’s other attendees over the past week or so.
With Thursday’s Makerfield by-election hanging over him like an impending political death sentence, Starmer had been hoping to sweep into Evian and talk up Britain’s support for Ukraine, show willing on keeping the peace in the Strait of Hormuz and, generally, demonstrate that he is the right prime minister – and, crucially, ally to Europe – to face the defence and security threats on the continent’s horizon.
Yet former defence secretary John Healey’s resignation on Thursday has turned Starmer’s diplomatic happy place into an extension of his domestic nightmare. Healey’s revelation in his resignation letter that Starmer and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves are planning to raise defence spending to just 2.68 per cent of GDP by 2030, as well as the government’s subsequent failure to publish the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), set the scene for an awkward reunion between Starmer and the other group leaders gathering in France this week.
Britain’s reputation has suffered internationally as a result of Starmer’s failure to publish the DIP
Alongside Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron is hosting his German, Canadian, Japanese, American and EU counterparts for three days of talks. Providing more support for Ukraine is top of the agenda, with the country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky a guest at the summit today. Earlier today, European leaders at the summit urged Donald Trump to once again attempt to bring Putin into face-to-face negotiations with Zelensky over ending the war.
The leaders are also expected to quiz Trump on his newly announced peace deal with Iran, with discussions on AI and the issue of ‘correcting global economic imbalances’ planned too. In an effort to keep Trump from flouncing out of the summit early, Macron has invited him for dinner at Versailles tomorrow night to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence.
Starmer likes to emphasise the importance of Britain’s standing with its European and transatlantic allies on questions of defence and security. Speaking earlier today, the Prime Minister insisted that, on how to further support Ukraine, ‘there was great unity and very, very good conversations in the G7, including with President Trump’. Yesterday, Starmer promised to ‘choke off’ Russian revenue with fresh sanctions on vessels forming part of the Kremlin’s so-called ‘shadow fleet’.
Starmer and Trump, however, have no bilateral meeting scheduled for the course of the summit – perhaps a small mercy in the Prime Minister’s eyes, given the expectation that the President would berate him over the DIP and the government’s heel-dragging on defence spending. Nevertheless, it was a warning sign that Trump thinks there is little value in meeting with Starmer. Somewhat embarrassingly, the Prime Minister was caught on a hot mic asking, ‘Are they having a meeting?’ when Zelensky, Trump and Macron were absent.
It is possible to say with certainty that Britain’s reputation has suffered internationally as a result of Starmer’s failure to publish the DIP. There were already questions among European allies over how seriously to take the commitments the Prime Minister was making on defence at the Munich Security Conference in February. With Starmer embroiled then in the Peter Mandelson scandal, there was speculation about how long he would remain in office. The events of the last week have reinforced the view abroad that the Prime Minister is toast.
One diplomatic source I have spoken with described Starmer’s paltry ambition to raise defence spending to 2.68 per cent of GDP – by which time Germany’s will be at 3.7 per cent and that of even the Netherlands will be at 2.8 per cent – as ‘painful’. With it seeming like Andy Burnham will win the Makerfield by-election and challenge Starmer to the Labour leadership, London’s diplomatic community is turning, with curiosity, to the question of what Burnham’s diplomatic and defence priorities might look like.
Britain will be ‘bypassed’ in the coming months by Europe, this source said, if it can’t demonstrate that it is serious about its defence commitments, including taking on a greater share of security responsibilities on the continent as America recalibrates away from Europe. Chief of the defence staff Sir Richard Knighton’s assessment today that the British armed forces would have to ‘dial back our activities, our exercise, operational activity, if the level of resource funding that is available to us does not increase,’ will only reinforce this view on the continent.
Not helping Starmer’s insistence that Britain remains a credible defence partner was Healey, who stood up in the House of Commons to deliver his resignation statement this afternoon. The former defence secretary referenced Nato’s warning that the alliance must prepare for war with Russia in the next five years, continuing, ‘At this dangerous time. I see the current defence investment plans falling well short of what is required, a rise of 0.08 per cent from next year to 2030.’ In a stinging rebuke to Reeves, Healey added: ‘Our adversaries don’t follow timetables set by the Treasury.’
Neither, it seems, will Britain’s European allies. Reluctantly, they are coming to the realisation that not only is America no longer a predictable defence and security partner, but Britain may not be either.
Wes Streeting: Starmer must resign after Makerfield
Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting today demanded that Sir Keir Starmer quit the top job once the Makerfield by-election concludes. The former Health Secretary called on the Prime Minister to set out a timetable for his departure at a press conference in the City.
He declared:
When the results are in, I hope the Prime Minister will reflect on his own position and set out a timetable. I think that would be a better way forward for everyone and would enable that better culture that we aspire to.
In a lavish conference room overlooking Tower Bridge, Streeting delivered his leadership pitch for ‘progressive capitalism’, whatever that word salad is supposed to mean. The wannabe Prime Minister confirmed he would ‘100 per cent’ stand in a contest rather than afford Andy Burnham a coronation. He also insisted he has the numbers to trigger a challenge.
In a dig at the Manchester mayor, the MP for Ilford North warned fellow Labour leadership candidates against making pricey pledges to ‘win over the party faithful at expense of the British people’. He also made a point of saying that ‘if you treat the bond markets as the enemy, you end up paying very heavy price for political failure’. Streeting, of course, insisted those remarks were aimed only at Zack Polanski – sure thing.
Towards the end of his press conference, Streeting indicated his support for Labour’s ‘Summer of Sex’ campaign. He said: ‘Sex education is important.’ If that does not win over hearts and minds, who knows what will.
Kemi Badenoch: Starmer must stop pony slaughter
Kemi Badenoch today demanded that Sir Keir Starmer step in to stop the ‘mass slaughter’ of Dartmoor ponies by bureaucrats at Natural England. The quango sparked outrage after it emerged that it wants to cut the number of livestock grazing on the moor by a devastating 75 per cent. The unaccountable body insists that a cull is necessary to protect other species, plants and habitats.
Badenoch this morning slammed the secret slaughter plot, posting on X:
This is total madness from another unaccountable quango. The government must overrule Natural England and stop it immediately. Keir Starmer is on his way to making his last acts in office the shameful underfunding of our military and the mass slaughter of Dartmoor ponies.
There are currently fewer than 1,000 Dartmoor ponies, down from 7,000 in 1999. The beautiful creatures have been around for 4,000 years and are perfectly adapted to the moor’s marshy terrain. They form one of England’s last semi-wild herds. More than 130,000 members of the public have already signed a petition to save them.
If ever there were a time for the Prime Minister to get off his high horse and save a beloved animal species, this is surely it. But Mr S won’t hold his breath…
Has America given up on Israel?
On Sunday night, Israelis went to bed expecting to be woken by sirens. The Israeli Air Force had bombed a Hezbollah base in Beirut, and Iranian leaders lined up to promise immediate, dramatic, punishing revenge before dawn. Instead of a barrage of Iranian missiles, the country woke up to what may be worse news: the Trump administration and the Iranian regime had agreed on a deal.
Yesterday morning, the Iranian news channel Mehr shared what it claimed was in the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ and it seemed to be more or less correct: the US agrees that Iran gets control of the Strait of Hormuz in return for Iran agreeing to let ships pass. Iran gets broad sanctions relief, an end to the US naval siege, all their frozen assets back and up to $300 billion (£224 billion) in ‘reconstruction’ money. Iran gets almost everything it wants.
Israel says it’s not a party to any US-Iran business and needs to defend its northern border
The US gets basically nothing. There was nothing in the deal on missiles, nothing on the nuclear programme. When it comes to Iran’s regional proxies, the US gets less than nothing: the deal explicitly protects Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Nobody in Israel is celebrating this agreement. From left to right, words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘surrender’ are being used. Benjamin Netanyahu, unable to defend the deal but unwilling to publicly criticise it, addressed the nation to implausibly claim that he and Trump had stopped some supposedly-imminent Iranian nuclear attack. His implication was that even a bad deal is better than the alternative.
If Israelis are disappointed by Trump, the feeling seems to be mutual. After Israel bombed that building in Beirut on Sunday, President Trump was furious, telling reporter Barak Ravid:
Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgement. I let him know that.
That was just the most recent in a series of Trump’s public expressions of frustration at Netanyahu over Lebanon. When the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran in February, Hezbollah, under Iranian pressure, started firing rockets and drones into northern Israel. Israel responded by invading southern Lebanon and pounding Hezbollah targets across the rest of the country.
Iran is negotiating only with the US but it still insists that any agreements it makes with Trump also bind Israel. Israel says it’s not a party to any US-Iran business and needs to defend its northern border. With the IDF still occupying southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah still launching drones into northern Israel, how long before another incident like Sunday’s?
At the height of the Iran war in early April, I heard an interview on Israeli radio with a supporter of the attacks. He proudly told listeners that the bombings would set Iran’s weapons and nuclear programmes back at least two years. The presenters were taken aback. Only two years? What happens in three years, then, when there may be a Democrat in the White House who wouldn’t join Israel in a new round of bombings in 2029? ‘Don’t worry,’ said the pro-war guest. Marco Rubio will be president and he’s on our side.
Some people claim that American policy supports Israel because of the influence of AIPAC, or the evangelical Christian lobby. Some point to shared strategic interests. But the most important reason why American presidents have been pro-Israel is because the American public is pro-Israel.
Or at least, it was. Over the past few years, Israel’s popularity in the US has nosedived. This drop is particularly pronounced among younger people; according to Pew’s polling, in 2022, Israel’s net popularity among men under 50 was -2. By April this year it had collapsed to -47. Four-fifths of Democratic voters have an unfavourable opinion of Israel, but so do 41 per cent of Republicans, and those numbers are rising.
The shift is already evident in the Democratic party, where there’s a (probably false) perception that Joe Biden’s support for Israel cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Candidates boast that they haven’t accepted money from AIPAC and several progressive insurgents have ousted traditionally pro-Israel Democrats in their primaries.
Among Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2028, California governor Gavin Newsom called Israel an ‘apartheid’ state in March before somewhat walking it back. Polls suggest that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed Israel committed genocide in Gaza, could also be a strong contender for the Democratic nomination.
On the Republican side, Vice President J.D. Vance is the most likely nominee for 2028, but he’s widely seen as ambivalent towards Israel. Vance defended Tucker Carlson when he interviewed a Holocaust revisionist, and the Vice President often interacts on X with openly anti-Semitic white nationalists.
Israeli leaders seem only faintly aware of the issue. Realising that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are uncomfortable with ongoing US military aid to Israel, Netanyahu decided that it’d be a good idea to work to end it. Less aid means less leverage, the theory goes. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have spoken about building up the domestic arms and armaments industry so that Israel is no longer reliant on US exports, but that will take years if it happens at all.
Trump is the latest president to fall out with Benjamin Netanyahu. Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton all ended up at loggerheads with the man who’s been the face of Israel for so long.
Israel must have a general election by October, and Netanyahu is once again planning to lead Likud into that election, despite Trump’s comment that he might choose to retire. The polls suggest that the current governing coalition is going to lose. Perhaps Netanyahu will still be able to cobble together a government, but the opposition parties have a real chance to oust him.
So much of the hostility towards Israel has become attached, rightly or wrongly, to Netanyahu. A new leader could be a chance for a different strategic approach for Israel, but also a new relationship with America.
Currently, the American people seem to have given up on Israel. Whether it takes a new leader, a change in policy or an attempt to change hearts and minds, something has to shift. If not, Israel could find itself standing alone.
Could Thames Water be Andy Burnham’s first test?
It is still a bit of a mystery to most of us – and possibly to the candidate himself – what Andy Burnham actually believes in. Still, amid all the waffle, one point has come through with complete clarity. He thinks utilities such as railways and water should be under public control. When asked about this earlier this month, he said: ‘Public ownership is absolutely an option. I would say for Thames Water, that is what should be done.’
That is all well and good. But it appears that Thames Water is likely to face a cash crunch in the coming months – and, should he become prime minister, Burnham and his administration will face its first big crisis as a result.
The outlook is dire
Keir Starmer’s government today decided to reject a proposed private sector rescue deal, meaning that Thames Water has already moved a step closer to full-scale state ownership. A consortium of investors had agreed to put £10 billion into the company through a mix of equity and loans, but the government has decided the planned deal does not do enough to protect consumers and the environment. If nothing can be agreed, Thames Water may well collapse over the summer.
By then, of course, Starmer may be out of a job. Indeed, with a more left-wing prime minister in No. 10, investors are going to be even less keen than they already are to put money into British infrastructure. The outlook is dire.
Assuming he wins the by-election on Thursday – and the Labour leadership soon afterwards – Prime Minister Burnham may then have to make a tough decision. He has promised so often to take the water companies back into public control that it will be very hard for him to resist calls for full-scale nationalisation.
The trouble is, Thames Water will still need the £10 billion to keep the taps running and start repairing its pipes. And of course, there would presumably need to be some compensation for shareholders and bondholders. Unless the new prime minister wants to go the full Trotsky, the existing owners will have to be paid something, and unless it is a fair price, it will serve as a warning that will make it impossible to attract any investment into Britain. No one wants to put money into a government where it might be seized by the government.
There is some debate about how much nationalising the water industry would cost, but the government itself estimates £100 billion for the country as a whole. So the cost for London would be at least £10 billion. It is hard to see how the Treasury can come up with that kind of money.
Sure, Burnham could make cuts elsewhere, but it is a whole other question entirely as to whether Labour backbenchers would tolerate that. The bond markets won’t be very keen to stump up cash for nationalising assets either, and while the public supports public ownership in focus groups, they probably won’t want a penny on the basic rate of income tax to pay for it.
Thames Water, then, is likely to become Burnham’s first big test – and at the moment, no one seems to have any idea how he will meet it.
Roy Hattersley’s fascination with English Catholicism
When Margaret Thatcher died a joke did the rounds after her funeral that most of her cabinet, by then in their dotage, had turned up to St Paul’s Cathedral looking at last like their Spitting Image puppets. Roy Hattersley, who died on Saturday, aged far better. In later life the chubby-cheeked, clean-shaven splutterer took on something of a stylish, elderly bearded-hipster look as the Labour grandee embraced his calling as an author.
He was fascinated by the motivations of the adherents of the theological system which his father had abandoned
The combination of politics and writing is a well-trodden path, although not all who tread it find fame and fortune. Hattersley excelled: millions of words flowed from his pen, including two-dozen books, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his later works, despite his professed lack of faith, were religious subjects: notably biographies of William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, and of John Wesley.
Perhaps most remarkable of all was The Catholics, a history of post-Reformation Catholicism in the British Isles, published in 2017. Towards the end of his research he looked for someone who might be able to help him fine-tune his manuscript, and through a mutual friend found me. I was duly summoned to an interview over drinks in the bar at the Garrick.
His reputation preceded him, of course. Having grown up in the Welsh valleys I knew he had been deputy leader of the Labour party under Neil Kinnock; being a certain sort of teenager I had watched plenty of Spitting Image, and had been delighted by the infamous episode of Have I Got News For You in which, when he cancelled an appearance at the last minute, he was pointedly replaced by a tub of lard.
I knew, too, about his posturing over what Labour had intended to do to the independent education sector, which is to stay strangle it; he lived just long enough to see a much-changed party take up the same cause, but perhaps on different principles. I recognised that we might agree on very little, but work was work.
Roy met me at the top of the stairs, extending a warm, shaky hand. Despite his considerable frame he was smaller than I expected, but his broad Yorkshire burr was unmistakable. We talked about the project: I had not long before published a book on a related topic, which he was kind and canny enough to have noticed.
In the end the drinks-hour ran out before we could get to the main business of him taking me on. ‘You’d better come for lunch next time,’ he said, ‘at my other club’. By then I had realised that, close-up, he was quite unlike the stentorian foghorn I knew from TV, and strangely likeable. I readily agreed; lunch was lunch.
He stopped me as I rose to leave. ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘I suppose you went to public school.’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Sorry’. ‘Oh, fine,’ he sighed. ‘Fine’.
We agreed terms a couple of weeks later, after which I gave him my arm as we made our way onto Pall Mall while the porter did the same for another elderly peer. ‘This is what people think the Reform is like every day,’ he mused. ‘Members of the House of Lords being helped down the steps after luncheon.’
Roy’s increasing frailty did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the work of the next few months, although he conceded that he had begun to find it difficult to take books down from shelves. We worked together in dusty basement archives, and when we came up for air he often talked about his life in politics. He sometimes bore the weariness of an elder statesman who had seen far fewer of his aspirations realised than he might have liked.
He was phlegmatic about the high offices he might have held, had history been different. He spoke, too, of fluctuating political disillusionment, and how the time had come to retire; he left the House of Lords in May 2017. Once, on Kensington High Street, I flagged down a cab for him to get to the chamber in time for a division. ‘What’s the vote about, Roy?’ I asked, as I helped him in. ‘I’ve no idea,’ came the reply. ‘I’ve just got to vote No.’
Most poignantly, Roy talked of his father: the Catholic priest who fell in love with a woman whose marriage he had solemnised, and with whom he ran away two weeks later. He renounced his orders and lost his faith but never breathed a word of his former life. Roy assumed that Hattersley senior had taught himself flawless Latin merely out of interest and a desire for self-improvement, until letters of condolence began to arrive when he died.
He was fascinated by the motivations of the adherents of the theological system which his father had abandoned, and which he could not bring himself to embrace: he called it ‘belief in the unbelievable’. He cherished his friendship with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, then his neighbour across the street from his flat in Ashley Gardens. He did not much care for John Henry Newman, whom he thought had a ‘petty-minded, pompous and self-loving’ side.
Roy excoriated the Church’s many failings, but in the end thought that post-Reformation Catholics in the British Isles were ‘more sinned against than sinning’. After 600 pages he acknowledged that in a world of compromise, inflexibility has its place: ‘Men and women do not go willingly to the stake or block in defence of common sense, sweet reason and majority opinion. They die for convictions that allow no reservations.’
I wouldn’t dream of speculating about what Roy believes today, now that the fever of life is over and his work is done. But I shall remember him fondly, come what may.
Jerry Seinfeld and the dark truth about ‘Free Palestine’
I see Jerry Seinfeld has got the pompous left sobbing into their keffiyehs. His sin? He refused to buckle to their neo-religious mantra “Free Palestine.” The comedy legend was accosted by a YouTuber outside Madison Square Gardens in NYC last week.
‘Free Palestine’ feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews
“Can we get a ‘Free Palestine’?” the streamer asked as he shoved his mic towards Seinfeld’s mouth. Seinfeld smirked. He held his tongue. No “Free Palestine” passed his lips.
It gets better. He then proceeded to shut down his chirpy interrogator with three words. “It doesn’t exist”, he said. He was talking about Palestine. Cue fury from the Gazaholics. This was “racist rhetoric”, cried the cranks at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Oh keep your burqas on. He wasn’t being racist – he was showing the world that even in an age of crushing conformity it is possible to stand your ground.
There was something heroic in Seinfeld’s smiling refusal to speak on command. By resisting the pressure to parrot the slogans of the self-righteous, he struck a blow for freedom of conscience. He resisted the trap of compelled speech, preferring the company of his own supposedly blasphemous thoughts. What a relief to discover there are celebrities out there who decline to bow to the passing fads of correct-think.
The backlash over his Palestine heresy was fast and furious. Social media is awash with Jerry hate. “Racist,” “apartheid lover,” “psycho” – those barbs and others have been hurled his way. Mehdi Hasan called him a “disgusting and proud racist” and said he will never again watch an episode of Seinfeld. I bet Jerry’s gutted. Perhaps he’ll take comfort in the millions of dollars he still rakes in from Seinfeld every year, courtesy of viewers who aren’t big babies and don’t switch off TV shows in a pique of infantile rage when they discover they disagree with the people who made them.
The intensity of the backlash is proof of what a suffocating orthodoxy “Free Palestine” has become. Fail to genuflect to this catechism and you risk being cast out of polite society. Hence Seinfeld is being treated not as someone who has a different opinion on the Middle East but as a moral deviant deserving of castigation. Five hundred years ago he’d have been in the stocks. Or worse.
The pressure to hate Israel can feel overwhelming at times, especially in the cultural sphere. The keffiyeh people resemble a religious sect, checking the minds of every public figure for any whiff of that most verboten emotion: sympathy for the Jewish State. As the latest report from Freedom in the Arts found, Jewish artists are often subjected to “exceptional scrutiny” and even “suspicion,” especially if they have Zionist leanings.
So good on Seinfeld – who is Jewish – for rebelling against the cruel scrutiny of Jewish creatives and instead staying true to the dictates of his own conscience. That’s another good reason to resist the lure of “Free Palestine” – because it isn’t only the hollow slogan of arrogant activists; it has also become a tool for the taunting of Jews.
Badgering Jews to say “Free Palestine” is the modern equivalent of making them take a loyalty test. It’s a way of measuring whether they’re a “Good Jew” or a “Bad Jew.” Have they dutifully disowned the Jewish homeland, as their tormentors in the activist class demand of them? Or do they still stubbornly cling to their Zionists beliefs? If it’s the latter – if they openly balk at the purity test of saying “Free Palestine” – then they will be denounced as racist, genocidal, a lower species of human. Such a cruel division of Jews into camps of “the moral” and “the immoral” will feel familiar to Jews who know their history.
Worse, Jews have been murdered, assaulted, set on fire and forcibly expelled from public institutions by people barking “Free Palestine.” That baleful slogan was the last thing those two Israeli Embassy staffers heard before they were shot to death on the steps of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC last year. It was bellowed at the elderly Jewish woman who was set on fire in Colorado. Or watch the clip of the American-Jewish woman being expelled from a spa in Barcelona last month after someone spied her Star of David necklace. “Free Palestine,” a member of the mob shouts.
“Free Palestine” feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews with the dystopic vision of the destruction of their homeland. It is hollered at them as a threat, as a warning that, alone among the peoples of the world, they will one day be robbed of their sovereign rights and will see their homeland dismantled, all the way “from the river to the sea.” Listen, if your favored slogan is yelled at Jews as they are mobbed and murdered, then it might not be as virtuous as you think it is. Thank you, Jerry, for helping to expose this dark truth about “Free Palestine.”
How Sadiq Khan could actually improve London’s reputation
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has announced plans for a taxpayer-funded campaign to combat online ‘disinformation’ about the capital. The initiative, due to launch in September, will target audiences across Europe, North America and Asia in an effort to showcase London’s culture, innovation and economic strengths.
The justification is straightforward enough. AI-generated videos depicting dystopian scenes in Croydon have gone viral. False or exaggerated claims about crime, migration and ‘Islamic governance’ circulate widely online. The Greater London Authority says hostile narratives about London have increased dramatically over the past two years.
Khan isn’t imagining things. Artificial intelligence has lowered the cost of producing highly deceptive falsehoods to virtually zero – all you need is a smartphone and internet connection. Social media platforms reward outrage over accuracy, leading to a need to be cautious when seeing posts online.
But this doesn’t mean that it is the job of City Hall to spend millions of pounds policing perceptions. Londoners elect a mayor to run transport, improve policing, oversee housing and drive economic growth. They do not elect a mayor to manage the city’s reputation. And if Khan were doing those things well, one wonders how much reputation management he’d actually have to do.
Improving London’s reputation ultimately requires visible improvements to everyday life
Increasingly, governments of all stripes appear more interested in managing the criticism they receive than addressing its causes. Keir Starmer’s Labour government has spent £350,000 since 2024 hiring 215 influencers in an attempt to reach younger people on platforms such as TikTok for example. Criticism is now being dismissed as a narrative to be challenged, and this is particularly risky because London’s reputation is shaped by far more than just AI-generated videos.
Phone theft, for instance, has become one of the defining experiences of modern life in the capital. Last year, the Metropolitan Police recorded more than 70,000 phone thefts – more than 200 devices stolen every day, or one every seven minutes. Senior officers estimate that London accounts for up to three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts in England and Wales. The problem has become so severe that the Met Commissioner Mark Rowley is now calling on smartphone manufacturers to make stolen devices effectively unusable.
To acknowledge this reality is not to spread disinformation. It is to describe what Londoners and commuters see in their daily lives.
The online narratives that concern City Hall are not solely about violent crime. They draw on a broader sense of urban decline, rising visible disorder, antisocial behaviour, overcrowded housing, litter, graffiti on the tube, retail theft and anxieties about integration and social cohesion in rapidly changing communities.
Much of this is folded into the online language of ‘Yookayification’, ‘Londonistan’ and claims that the capital is becoming ungovernable. Descriptions are frequently exaggerated, often politically motivated and sometimes outright false. But they gain traction because they distort concerns that residents habitually recognise.
And yet, it has to be said that critics frequently overstate London’s problems: the picture is considerably more nuanced than viral posts would suggest. Homicides in the capital fell to their lowest level since modern records began last year: they now stand at a rate of 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other British city and below global cities such as New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2) or Milan (1.6).
Phone thefts, while still unacceptably high, have started to decline following targeted police operations. But they remain too high and the reputational damage will take years to reverse.
London remains one of the world’s greatest cities, which is precisely why the Mayor’s latest initiative appears so unnecessary. If social media narratives are genuinely causing economic harm, where is the evidence?
Despite endless claims that London has become a lawless ‘hellhole’ – including by the President of the United States, Donald Trump – tourism continues to boom. The capital welcomed about 21 million international visitors in 2024. Overseas tourists spent more than £17 billion in London that year alone, while total visitor numbers exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
Although some (mainly Americans) are currently put off by social media, most tourists remain perfectly capable of distinguishing between a fabricated TikTok video and the reality of a city that attracts millions of visitors every year.
The burden of proof should therefore rest with City Hall. Before spending £7 million of Londoners’ hard-earned cash, Khan and his cadre of deputy mayors should demonstrate just how this ‘disinformation’ is causing measurable damage which cannot be addressed through existing channels.
Londoners are being asked to fund a communications campaign at a time when the Mayor’s share of council tax bills continues to rise. The GLA precept for a Band D property has seen a 4.1 per cent increase from £490.38 in 2025-26 to £510.51 in 2026-27. The stated reason for the increase was to help fund policing and crime prevention. One wonders whether the £7 million for rebutting tweets could have gone in a similar direction.
If City Hall is genuinely concerned about misinformation, a better place to start would be with improved transparency. Misinformation thrives when there is an absence of trusted information. When official crime statistics are difficult to access, published disjointedly or disputed by campaigners and journalists through Freedom of Information requests, it becomes much easier for misleading anecdotes to gain traction.
This ought to extend beyond the publication of statistics. The recent cancellation of the Met’s £50 million contract with Palantir is a travesty given the foregone benefits of the company’s data-harnessing powers for policing and the lost opportunity to produce data proving that London is not as bad as its critics make out.
Yet improving London’s reputation ultimately requires visible improvements to everyday life. That means a renewed focus on tackling the low-level disorder that shapes Londoners’ perceptions of safety and civic pride. Rather than rely on reactive responses after incidents occur, the Met should pivot towards more proactive neighbourhood policing and consistent enforcement of basic standards. People judge a city less by its homicide rate than by what they encounter on their morning commute or weekend stroll.
If the Mayor wants to improve London’s reputation, the solution is straightforward: make London safer, cleaner and more affordable. The city’s image will take care of itself.
Will Burnham avoid the Starmer trap?
Voters in Makerfield haven’t even gone to the polling stations, but already the Labour leadership contest is well into a detailed exposition of what Andy Burnham – rather than any of the other contenders – might do.
A few ‘star’ new MPs had been promoted straight into government, but the rest hadn’t had an invite to Downing Street
Defence spending, welfare cuts, social care, immigration and the EU are all matters Burnham has pronounced on – and then changed his stance. The problem with WWAD (What Would Andy Do?), as the bracelets for Labour’s messiah might read, is that the answer really depends on the weather. Like Keir Starmer, Burnham has a habit of saying things that are right for the political climate at the time, rather than settling on policies that he’s prepared to see through to the end, regardless of how difficult it will be to do this.
Starmer quickly gained a reputation for saying whatever would get him what he wanted at the time, before junking it in the name of expediency. His own leadership campaign pledges became notorious, largely because so many of them disappeared after he was elected. Burnham could probably still be forgiven by Labour MPs for that kind of behaviour, though, if he managed to avoid the next pitfalls that really damaged Starmer’s authority.
The first was taking the loyalty of Labour MPs for granted, to the extent that many backbenchers hadn’t properly met Starmer a year after being elected. They were still grateful to their leader for rescuing the party from the depths of Corbynism and for getting Labour back into government, but were starting to feel as though he wasn’t remotely interested in them. A few ‘star’ new MPs had been promoted straight into government, but the rest hadn’t had an invite to Downing Street or a letter congratulating them on the speech they’d given in the Chamber, or all the other things that keep people loyal to their boss.
They’re the sort of thing that Starmer’s operation should have put far more effort into, not least because anyone watching the Tory party in government over the preceding 14 years would have noticed that backbenchers need to feel loved by their leader in order to keep marching through the lobbies in support of difficult policies.
By the time Starmer was asking those MPs to march through the lobbies, he’d already upset them with policies such as the cut to winter fuel payments. But they had also picked up something more damaging than indifference from the Number 10 operation: active derision. When aides and the whips tried to warn figures around Starmer that the parliamentary party was really, really uncomfortable with the welfare cuts proposed by the Treasury and Work and Pensions department (mostly the former), they were given the retort ‘we don’t give a fuck about what the PLP thinks’. So often when a party is in government, those around the leader develop a mentality that most backbench MPs are stupid and incapable of really thinking about the trade-offs that are necessary to get anything done.
Granted, a few MPs in all parties fit that description very well, but the rest are decent and thoughtful types. But even if you have ended up being extraordinarily unlucky and have a huge majority stuffed with numbskulls, the key is not to let them realise you think they’re stupid and not worth listening to. Labour MPs had worked out that they didn’t have sufficient respect from Team Starmer just at the point when the leader really needed them to back him.
Burnham pitches himself as an anti-establishment politician, but given he has really spent all his formative years in the establishment, it’s not yet clear how he would manage the Labour Party differently.
He is more personable than Starmer, and better-versed in the ways of MPs, having been one for far longer than the Prime Minister. But his reputation for flip-flopping suggests that while he might be more of a charmer than Starmer, he could still end up yielding to backbench pressure, rather than trying to persist with the welfare cuts, for instance, that he would have to make in order to fund defence. That last pledge was something he made at the weekend, arguing that getting people back into work would drive the benefits bill down. It’s true that proper welfare reform would have that effect – but only in time and after significant upfront investment, which isn’t going to help with defence spending now. So something will have to give – and unless WWAD turns out to be very different to the way Starmer has managed things, we know what it will be.