How fake news thrived in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings

It has fallen to Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation, to say the obvious in pointing out that the recent riots following the attacks in Southport show ‘why the public must be told more’ when such attacks happen.

Hall, speaking at a conference organised by the Counter Extremism Group, highlighted the dangers posed by the ‘information vacuum’ in the immediate aftermath of the stabbings. He said:

‘I think we are at a point in time where trust in public institutions should not be taken for granted and when matters of high importance in the public mind happen that, as far as is possible, the police, the government and the media should level with them.’

Hall went on to warn that trust will quickly dissipate if people sense that things are being hidden, and that is ‘exactly what the conspiracy theorists and grievance merchants depend upon’. That is certainly what appears to have happened in Southport on the day of the attack in July, when three children lost their lives.

Hall is perhaps too diplomatic to point out that trust in many public institutions is already quite low. Far too many people – not just conspiracy theorists – suspect the authorities of being less than forthcoming with information, except when it suits them. The aftermath of the Southport attacks will have done nothing to allay such suspicions. Hall points out that there was a ‘huge, huge interest’ in the identity of the Southport attacker and that people ‘quite reasonably wanted to know as much as possible about a massacre of children’. He is right.

That thirst for information was met by social media accounts spreading fake news, some of it with the deliberate aim of fostering anger and inciting trouble. The most egregious disinformation was the claim that the Southport suspect was a Muslim asylum-seeker newly arrived in Britain. He was, in fact, a 17-year-old male who was born in Cardiff. That information was released in a statement on the evening of the attacks by Serena Kennedy, chief constable of Merseyside Police, in an attempt to quell the growing speculation online. Yet, in the hours before, there was precious little from the police or anyone else in authority. Why? 

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The silence came down to the contempt of court laws, which mean that once a suspect is in custody very little can be published in order not to ‘substantially’ prejudice future legal proceedings. Yet the laws are in danger of being used as a blanket excuse to publish no information at all, rather than that which is strictly necessary to abide by the legal rules.

Hall is not being unreasonable in suggesting that critical facts don’t necessarily prejudice a fair trial until much further down the line. There is often a long time before the case comes to court and many of the details will have faded by then. Judges themselves are experienced at ensuring that juries disregard potentially prejudicial information they may have come across.

The authorities are floundering in another important way. They appear determined to live in an alternative universe in which social media simply doesn’t exist. This has led to a ridiculous situation in which official sources of reassurance, such as the police, are forced into a vow of silence while every kind of untruth is promulgated online and on social media. This is not a sensible or realistic strategy.

Hall ends with a plea for those in authority to be as ‘level and straight’ as possible with the public. He is right to do so. There is a vital public interest in transparency in the aftermath of tragedies like the Southport stabbings. Lessons must be learnt to ensure there is no repeat of the same mistakes next time.

The Treasury holds the key to fixing the NHS

The most interesting thing about Lord Ara Darzi’s report on the health service, expected to be published this Thursday, is how ministers decide to use it. The former health minister from the last Labour government was commissioned to carry out a rapid review of how well the NHS is functioning. He is expected to conclude that it really isn’t: yesterday, Keir Starmer said that Darzi was ‘really clear that the NHS is broken but not beaten’. 

A lot of the pre-briefing so far has been that Darzi will say that the NHS is going backwards for the first time in 50 years on waiting times and deaths from heart disease. His report is also expected to state that the previous government left the service particularly poorly prepared for the pandemic. Ministers will certainly use that as part of their narrative that ‘the Tories broke everything’, but there is another finding that is more potent. The renowned surgeon is also expected to point out that the NHS is ‘undercapitalised’ and that Britain spends a considerably lower amount of money on buildings and equipment than other developed countries.

This is an indisputable point: the NHS lags behind other European countries on capital spend by around £3 billion, and is consistently below the OECD average for capital investment. What this means in equipment terms is that we have fewer CT and MRI scanners, and that NHS trusts have famously poor IT systems. The health service has an estates maintenance backlog of about £10 billion. ‘Estates maintenance’ sounds very boring until you realise that this covers the hospitals propped up with stilts or sections of the estate closed because they are not safe to operate in – meaning fewer operations taking place and fewer patients admitted.

Before the election, Wes Streeting liked to say that he was always trying to take Rachel Reeves around crumbling hospitals to make the case for higher investment in NHS infrastructure. He will be waving this report in the Chancellor’s face as part of that case, not least because there is currently a plan to take £800 million out of NHS capital spend and ‘redistribute’ it to day-to-day pressures arising from strike action and higher costs. That reallocation, incidentally, was one made under the Conservatives, so at least Labour has someone to blame for that – but the government still has to decide what its own priorities are over the next few years.

The Health Secretary is more likely to use the report to call for higher capital funding in the next spending review. Capital has long been something chancellors have felt they can afford to ignore: Darzi is trying to change that. The greatest reform coming from his report might not be to the NHS, but the Treasury.

Why does Scholz want to speed up peace talks for Ukraine?

Is German chancellor Olaf Scholz giving in to pressure to reduce support for Ukraine and improve relations with Russia? Scholz declared during a televised interview with the German network ZDF broadcast last night that any fresh peace talks to bring an end to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine should also include Russia. 

‘I believe that now is the time to discuss how we can arrive at a peaceful resolution from this war, at a faster pace than currently appears to be the case,’ Scholz said. ‘The [Ukrainian] president and I are in agreement that any talks should include Russia.’

Scholz’s comments come after a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Frankfurt on Friday, during which the pair discussed ‘joint efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace for Ukraine’. Both the German and Ukrainian government read-outs on the meeting are vague, but confirmed that the two leaders discussed ‘possible next steps’ for another round of peace talks.

This wouldn’t be the first time that peace in Ukraine has officially been discussed. Allies of Kyiv first met in Switzerland for a ‘summit on peace in Ukraine’ in June. The purpose of the summit was to get a better understanding of Zelensky’s stipulations in any future peace negotiations with Russia. Representatives from over 90 countries came together to discuss nuclear safety, food security and humanitarian issues such as the exchange of prisoners and return of illegally deported Ukrainian children. 

Crucially, however, Russia wasn’t involved in those discussions – despite Switzerland’s apparent ‘openness to extending an invitation’ to Moscow. The Kremlin dismissed the outcome of the Swiss summit at the time as ‘amounting to zero’. 

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Neither Scholz nor Zelensky gave any indication on Friday as to when this second round of peace negotiations might take place. Speaking in July, however, Zelensky spoke of his hope to have everything in place for peace talks by November and that ‘representatives of Russia should be at the second summit’. According to sources close to the Ukrainian government, Zelensky wants to convene a second peace meeting before the American presidential election takes place on 5 November. Many in Kyiv fear that the realistic prospect of a second Trump presidency could jeopardise an outcome of the war that would be fair to Ukraine.

Securing Russia’s attendance at future peace negotiations is, of course, another matter. While Putin and his officials have paid lip service to the idea of peace discussions and insisted several times that they are ‘open to dialogue’, there is little evidence to suggest that the Russian president is serious about the prospect of sitting down at the negotiating table with Zelensky. 

Back in Germany, Scholz’s endorsement of including Putin in any future rounds of discussions over Ukraine’s future is not entirely selfless. A bruising set of state election results in Thuringia and Saxony at the start of the month indicated that support for the Chancellor’s SPD party, as well as his FDP and Green coalition partners, was on its knees. In a new survey published by ZDF on Friday, 72 per cent of Germans believe that Scholz’s government is ‘doing a bad job’.

The two parties that performed best in the state elections were the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Both had made an end to Germany’s support for Ukraine and an improvement in relations with Moscow central campaign pledges – proving particularly popular with voters. Polling by Focus magazine in June revealed that over 80 per cent of AfD supporters were in favour of a ‘diplomatic solution’ to the conflict.

Germany’s next federal election is just over a year away now. With the CDU projected to take power and Scholz’s SPD polling several below the AfD, the Chancellor will be under pressure to mitigate the predicted disastrous result for his party. While twelve months leaves too little time for Scholz to address many of the factors driving voters away from the traffic light coalition and into the AfD and BSW’s arms, a change of tack on Ukraine could staunch the flow – at least a little. 

MPs swap booze for soft drinks

Whither the future of parliament’s pubs? It was less than three months ago that Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray reportedly wanted to close permanently all of Westminster’s watering holes – including the famous Strangers’ Bar – to stop novice MPs falling prey to the House of Commons’ historic drinking culture. But eight weeks after Labour’s stonking election, Mr S hears that the new boys and girls are demonstrating something of a puritanical streak themselves.

Among long-time veterans of the Strangers’ Bar, there is consternation and surprise at the new-found popularity of alcohol-free replacements in place of old favourites. Pints of Estrella Galicia 0.0 per cent and Guinness 0 are among the favoured tipples among certain new members, amid talk of a new puritanical fervour sweeping parliament. Steerpike has done some digging and it transpires that a quarter of all the 689 orders at Strangers’ in the first month of the new parliament for were non-alcoholic drinks. And that’s even with Nigel Farage now knocking back the pints…

Such teetotal beverages typically cost less than their alcoholic equivalents. This means that just over one in five of the sum total of drinks purchased between July and August were non-alcoholic, according to a Freedom of Information request by The Spectator. Still, with the winter fuel vote looming, don’t be surprised to see Labour whips ordering something stiffer come tomorrow night…

How to score the Trump-Harris debate

This Tuesday’s debate is the most consequential moment of the “second” campaign, just as Trump’s debate with Biden was the most consequential of the “first” campaign. Biden’s self-immolation ultimately forced his withdrawal.

His withdrawal sets the stage for the current debate, and not just because it produced a new Democratic candidate. It produced her so quickly, with so little discussion or opposition, that Kamala Harris was not forced to persuade the party’s progressive voter base.

A “primary” campaign would have damaged Harris, and the powers behind the Democratic throne, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, saved her from it. How would it have hurt her? Because Harris would have needed to win over the progressive Democratic base, which would have forced her to restate her leftist positions on fracking, off-shore drilling and immigration — and to do it as the November election approaches. Harris had taken those positions in her failed 2019-2020 campaign and is now trying to wriggle out of them. Her escape is difficult, and it would have been even harder if she had restated those leftist positions in August and tried to change them in September.

Pinning Harris to those unpopular positions will be Trump’s main goal in the Tuesday debate. To do it, though, the former president will have to avoid the personal attacks and rambling fulminations that have characterized all his campaigns and nearly all of his interviews. Harris will, of course, try her best to provoke Trump into making those mistakes.

Beyond tripping Trump, Harris needs to accomplish some positive goals. She needs to lay out her policy positions, explain why so many have changed so dramatically and handle follow-up questions (if the moderators ask them) without lapsing into word salads.

Ultimately, Harris has two overriding goals: she needs to show that she has the judgment, policies, record and gravitas to ascend to the presidency and that Trump, by contrast, does not, that he is an angry narcissist, willing to commit crimes to help himself even if he endangers our democracy in the process. She has to paint him as a dictator in waiting.

Those are the central differences, but they aren’t the only ones. We need a scorecard to follow what the candidates and moderators need to accomplish in this debate and what they need to avoid.

What Trump must do

• Emphasize the key question: ‘Are you better off now than you were during the Trump administration?’
• Focus on policies (immigration, crime, inflation) since polls show he has an advantage on most policy issues, except reproductive rights and healthcare
• Show discipline
• Link Harris to bad outcomes of Biden administration
• Highlight Harris’s absence of any positive achievements for past decade
• Explain that her flip-flops and absence of policy statements mean voters don’t know what she would actually try to do as president
• Contrast his policy achievements with those of the Biden-Harris administration

What Trump must not do

• Look like a bully
• Emphasize his long list of ‘sour grapes’
• Highlight personal issues, either for him or against Harris
• Ramble. He needs to be sharp, clear and the near-impossible: succinct
• Look backwards, especially to the 2020 election and lawfare
• ‘Take the bait’ since Harris will try to provoke him and have canned responses

What Harris must do

• Show that she is actually qualified to lead the country
• Articulate policy positions that differentiate her from Biden without attacking the administration of which she is a key part
• Focus on reproductive rights (abortion) and healthcare, where polls show she has an advantage
• Explain why Trump’s position (‘states should decide’) is not acceptable to her and many voters
• Avoid responsibility for the massive influx of illegal immigration, nearly all of which occurred before the proposed compromise bill that Trump rejected
• Look like an agent of change, a difficult task since she is the second-ranking official of the current administration)
• Reconcile her new policy positions with her old, far-left ones
• Try to avoid explaining why she changed unless pressed by Trump or the moderators
• Underscore the danger of ‘Trump as dictator’

What Harris must not do

• Toss up a word salad
• Look vague or ill-prepared on specific issues

What the ABC moderators must do

• Appear fair and neutral, whatever their personal opinions
• Ask follow-up questions to get beyond canned, pre-arranged answers
• Press both candidates on their most vulnerable issues

What the ABC moderators must not do

• Show bias
• Let initial questions and incomplete answers dangle, unchallenged

That’s the scorecard. Batter up!

‘Trump is still Trump,’ says Piers Morgan

It’s less than sixty days to go until Election Day and the race could not be closer. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are due to debate tomorrow night in what could be one of the most consequential clashes of modern times. So, with all eyes on the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, who better to ask about Trump’s mindset than the Brit who knows him best?

Step forward Piers Morgan, who appears on today’s Americano podcast with Andrew Neil and Freddy Gray. After the shocking assassination attempt in July, Gray asked, has the Donald now softened and changed? Not a bit of it says Morgan, who says that after he praised Trump’s courage on Fox News a week after he was shot, the former president then called him up:

I got back to my hotel, he rang me and we had a fifteen-minute chat. He was exactly the same Donald Trump he’s always been. He hadn’t changed one iota. He spent five minutes talking about how much his ears have bled and how he discovered that ears bleed more than any other body part. And his ears, of course, bled more than most people’s ears. He then spent another five minutes talking about what it’s like to be shot. Gripping. Fascinating. how he said he was saved by his immigration chart, that he had a chart in the teleprompter about immigration, which made him turn his head almost imperceptibly by an inch.

And at that moment that he did that, the bullet whistled past and missed him by the inch, that he would have been in direct hit from. So he should have been dead. It was a miraculous escape. But the idea that Trump has somehow been neutered, or tamed or becalmed, or had some great out of body experience has changed his outlook on life. I just didn’t get any of that from that conversation with him.

You can watch or listen to the full episode on Americano here:

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

Labour is in denial about our bad universities

Our universities are in a mess. Too many degrees lack intellectual quality and utility, and leave those doing them with little but disappointment and debt. Nor is the debt limited to students. Foreign student numbers, on which many institutions rely, are drastically down, and it is an open secret that three big names (Cardiff, York, and Goldsmiths) and at least three less prestigious institutions (notably Lincoln, Kingston, and Middlesex) are making cuts or haemorrhaging money.

We clearly need to think radically, both about the purpose of university education and how many institutions a government with limited funds should support. Unfortunately the government intends nothing of the sort, and has instead opted for a comfortable life.

At last week’s annual conference in Reading of Universities UK, the trade body for academic top brass, science minister Peter Kyle airily denied that that there might be too many universities. He went on to scold the Conservatives, who to their credit had before the election been asking some very awkward questions about the sector, for having ‘called into question’ the value of a degree. A couple of days earlier, universities minister Baroness Smith (ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith under Blair) hinted at some kind of financial rescue for hard-hit institutions. Cuts might be required, but largely it was going to be business as usual. A big university sector is, as she put it, ‘vital to delivering the skills that we need’, and does research ‘vital to shaping the economy of tomorrow.’

These indications of governmental intentions are depressing, for several reasons. One is their sheer superficiality. Peter Kyle’s speech included the line that universities were no more in excess than sandwich shops: 

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‘I don’t think the [university] sector is too big at the moment. This is the problem… You wouldn’t say that about any other sector. You can’t walk down the street without passing ten sandwich shops. Well is the UK sandwich sector too big? It’s seeped into the narrative in the last decade about higher education.’

This rather ignores the fact that most branches of Greggs or Gails aren’t propped up by the taxpayer on the pretext of being a public good. 

The speech also confirmed Kyle as someone who – casually combining blasé philistinism with intellectual myopia – sees higher education in terms of colleges selling goods in much the same way that baristas peddle black coffee. 

Baroness Smith for her part neatly glossed over the fact that many of the skills that Britain has in short supply aren’t provided for, or aren’t best provided, by university degrees. Or that many publicly-funded research programmes, in such things as ‘Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism’ (a genuine example, unfortunately not that untypical) are, to say the least, problematic when it comes to either intellectual advancement or the promotion of the technological revolution.

Secondly, while a programme of bailing out failing universities no doubt sounds good to an audience of those who manage and teach in them, not to mention giving useful help to MPs in these constituencies, its benefits for higher education as a whole are less obvious. For one thing, one might have thought that allowing some of the less successful institutions to fail and distributing at least some of the public monies saved among the rest was a fairly obvious way of raising standards as a whole. By contrast, ruling out such closures while demanding savings in the hardest-hit institutions is a sure-fire recipe for making a mediocre sector yet more mediocre. 

It would also incidentally endanger the very international student income which the government wishes to encourage. The international student market may be lucrative, but it is also fiercely competitive. If Britain insists on spreading funding thinly in order to save mediocre institutions, there are plenty of other universities in Australia, Canada and elsewhere prepared to take up the slack.

It is all very well for Baroness Smith to talk of preserving a large university sector as necessary for giving as many young people as possible a chance to succeed. The reality may be rather different. Increasing numbers of young people regret that they have been pushed into university by schools and careers advisers insisting that it is necessary to get on in life. If they find that their degree gives them no particular advantage, they may well wish that they had saved a good deal of the time involved, and most of the debt, and found some other way into their chosen career.

In higher education, as in many other things, Labour is showing itself not as the party of change but as a deeply reactionary force. Rather than asking difficult questions and being prepared to embrace uncomfortable answers, it has taken the easy way out by placating the Blob and perpetuating an outdated view of university study as a rite of passage and entree to middle-class life that needs to be spread as widely as possible. 

Voters will in time cotton on to the fact, perhaps sooner than Labour hopes, that this retreat into platitudes and comfortable words is not benefiting young people, nor universities, nor the country as a whole.

Kamala has more to lose in the debate than Trump

The Kamala Harris campaign team apparently based their debate strategy assuming that ABC News would prove as pliable and willing as the rest of the media toward their efforts, expecting that the rules requiring muted mics between answers would be thrown out. They assumed wrong, and now they are reportedly “scrambling” for a new plan, describing Kamala’s position as “handcuffed” by the rules agreed to when Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate:

Trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.

That the vice president was counting on a rule change as essential for her debate strategy is like expecting a professor to cancel the final exam — which is never a good approach. What we’ve learned about Kamala Harris to this point on the debate stage is that she is easily knocked off her game, even with basic frontal lines of attack. She lost her debate to Mike Pence in 2020, which is why all that anyone remembers about it is that at one point a fly landed on his hair. And the Tulsi Gabbard effect which led to the Harris presidential campaign’s collapse is still very much in her head.

All this sets up a debate where Harris will have to accomplish a lot more than Donald Trump, who really just needs to run it back for a repeat performance from June. Trump has momentum on his side after a polling reset that saw Harris’s post-coup bump disappear, troubling the readers of the New York Times and reframing the storyline around the trajectory of this election from joy to anxiety, Inside Out 2-style.

The Trump team shouldn’t change anything about its approach. Letting the moderators and Kamala go back and forth on key questions about the economy, the border and foreign policy should be the plan, and if the moderators don’t ask those questions, bring them up yourself. Discipline has benefited Trump, and focusing on policy — avoiding the temptation to personally attack Kamala’s personal inauthenticity or her life story — helps define her as the candidate of the past four years and reiterating yourself in the minds of voters as the candidate of change.

This is likely to be the only debate this cycle, and the stakes are extremely high. The last debate was devastating for the administration and the Democratic Party, and this one could be damning as well if Republicans can get the best version of Trump. Expect a massive number of people to tune in. Let’s get ready to rumble.

Michel Barnier puts the French left to shame

The French left took to the streets on Saturday to protest against the appointment of Michel Barnier as prime minister. The 73-year conservative was nominated by Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, sixty days after the left-wing New Popular Front coalition won the most seats in the parliamentary election.

There were dozens of demonstrations across France. The one I attended in Paris was the largest: the organisers, the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) claimed that 160,000 people descended on the Place de la Bastille. The police put the figure at 26,000. I’d say the police had it right.

Among those present were some of the leading lights of the LFI, including the party’s founder, Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the controversial MEP, Rima Hassan, who has been accused of making pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic statements in recent months. Palestine and not Barnier seemed to be the preoccupation of many protesters, who had gathered in a side street just off the square. They waved Palestinian flags, sported keffiyehs and sang on a loop: ‘Israel assassin, Macron complice’.

In the Place itself, at the foot of the July column erected to honour the revolution of 1830, a brass band was entertaining protestors with a selection of tunes. The most popular had everyone singing along:

I have two passions

The fanfare and the revolution

Long live the blockade, the sabotage

And the wild demos.

It was all very jolly. That may have been because it was a day out for the Paris bourgeoisie. Most of the demonstrators were middle-class students with dyed hair or ageing lefties pining for the leftist student revolts of May ’68 when they’d been at university. There is something rather pathetic about a grandmother draped in a Palestinian flag or a man with a grey ponytail wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.

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I mingled with the crowd but identified few people who looked like they toiled in factories, fields or on building sites. But the blue-collar workers had long since gave up on the left. They now vote massively for Marine Le Pen.

In his first speech as PM on Thursday, Barnier spoke of his respect for all political parties and for all voters. ‘I have many examples in my head of progress, big or small, that has been achieved thanks to ideas, good ideas, good solutions brought by people from below,’ he said outside Matignon, the premier’s residence.

The left seized on Barnier’s reference to ‘people from below’ as evidence of his elitist snobbery. On the contrary, it is they who are guilty of such prejudice. They refuse to shake the hands of Le Pen’s MPs and accuse her voters of being fascists and racists.

Barnier and Melenchon were both born in 1951. But while the latter still talks and acts like a student of the late 1960s (Melenchon organised a homage for Fidel Castro upon his death in 2016), Barnier has matured. Throughout his fifty years in politics, he has respected every party who received votes at the ballot box.

Barnier talked to Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1990s when the leader of the National Front was an MEP and he was Jacques Chirac’s Minister for European Affairs. Barnier was opposed to Le Pen’s politics but he respected the fact he had been elected by the people. In 2002, Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in a vote that shocked France. Chirac refused to engage him in the traditional television debate. ‘Faced with intolerance and hatred, no debate is possible,’ he said. It was a childish and counter-productive decision, an insult to the nearly five million people who had voted for Le Pen in the first round.

This cordon sanitaire has been held in place ever since by the left, the centre and the centre-right. And what good has it done? In 2002, the National Front didn’t have a single seat in parliament; in 2012 they had two, and today they have 126, the most of any single party.

Unlike recent presidents and prime ministers, Barnier understands that insulting or ignoring Marine Le Pen won’t magically make her voters disappear. Quite the opposite. Their disdain only increases Le Pen’s appeal, legitimatising her claim that the elite hate her because she speaks for the people.

Since taking office, Barnier has pledged to tackle mass immigration and the rampant lawlessness in France – declarations that had the left spluttering with indignation. The new prime minister is now in the same basket of deplorables as Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. ‘Xenophobia and far-right ideas come to power’,screamed the headline in the left-wing newspaper l’Humanité.

But this is what the French left has become, an ideology characterised by its immaturity and its intolerance. It’s time they stopped singing about revolution and stopped wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. Instead they should think about how they can broaden their appeal beyond students, civil servants and old timers who haven’t moved on from May 68

The chameleonic life of Claire Clairmont

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized.

A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Fortunately, Lesley McDowell doesn’t let her impeccable feminist credentials get in the way of a sensitive fictional recreation of Claire’s life and loves, one that’s generous to sexual fallibility, male and female.

Claire had seduced Byron in London in March 1816, and, crucially for literature, engineered the introduction of the two poets in Switzerland a few months later. Shelley would drown in 1822 and Byron would die two years later, but Claire lived until 1879. McDowell interleaves the better known passages of life in the Shelley ménage with a lively recreation of Claire’s later incarnations as a governess in Russia in 1825 and a free spirit living in Paris in 1843. Claire’s chameleonic character is underlined by her name changes. Pre-Shelley, she is Jane; she becomes Clairy in Geneva; Mam’selle Claire in Russia; and the respectable but still desirable Madame Clairmont in Paris.

Here it’s Mary Shelley who comes across as the demanding genius, whose moods are feared even as her talent is venerated. The portrait of Percy is especially nuanced. A novelist can step in where biographers hesitate, due to lack of evidence, but McDowell’s intuition about his physical relationship with Claire doesn’t jar. And Claire’s tempestuous liaison with Byron is well fleshed-out, his lust and misogyny crashing against her determination not to be cowed. Byron was never likely to come out well in a narrative voiced by Claire, so he spikes drinks and stages sadistic tableaux. But the most harrowing passages are securely based on fact.

Wherever she flees, Claire can’t outrun tragedy. A death in Russia reawakens painful memories, and her disreputable past stalks her in Paris, always threatening to destroy what little security she has established. It’s a nice touch that in Clairmont, Lesley McDowell has Claire lay claim to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, as the inspiration of her life as a rule-breaker. While not the forgotten figure the novel’s publicity likes to pretend, Claire Clairmont hasn’t often been given her due and McDowell restores her to thrilling, palpitating life.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

Will Rachel Reeves hold her nerve over the winter fuel cut?

Will Rachel Reeves hold her nerve over the winter fuel payment? That’s the suggestion inside government ahead of a Commons vote tomorrow on the proposed cut that will see only pensioners eligible for benefits receive the £300 payment. Already this morning, government sources have had to play down the idea that there could be a change in course after a Home Office minister appeared to imply the plans could be watered down. Addressing MPs on Monday evening at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party, Reeves urged her colleagues to get behind her: ‘There are more difficult decisions to come. I don’t say that because I relish it. I don’t – but it is a reflection of the inheritance that we face’.

However, the party’s wider backers are voicing their concerns over the move. Today union leaders gather in Brighton for the Trade Union Congress, their annual meet. Already Starmer is coming under pressure from the unions to act. Speaking in a morning broadcast round ahead of the conference, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said he had ‘real concerns’ about the move: ‘I don’t want any pensioner going into the winter worried about putting the heating up’. Unite’s Sharon Graham – who is one of the more critical union leaders when it comes to Labour – has said Starmer ought to ‘do a U-turn’ as the policy is akin to ‘picking the pockets of pensioners’.

Given Starmer is due to appear at the conference on Tuesday, he will come face-to-face with critics of the policy. It means the row over the winter fuel allowance is turning into a test on both party management and how in hock Labour is to the unions, which of course help fund the party. When it comes to the size of rebellion expected, no one in government seriously thinks that Starmer could lose the vote. However, rebellions can still be damaging in their own right and the expectation is there could be up to 50 rebels.

There is widespread concern in the party about the move to cut the £300 payment for all pensions bar the poorest in a bid to make savings of over £1 billion. Labour MPs new to parliament have been taken aback by the level of criticism and communication from their constituents about it. There’s also a concern that this vote will not put the issue to bed – it will become more politically sensitive as winter approaches, particularly if there are pensioner deaths that are then linked to a lack of heating. Ed Balls, the former Labour politician and husband of the Home Secretary, said last week that Reeves needs an ‘escape route’. He told George Osborne on their Political Currency podcast: ‘I don’t think you can do a U-turn, but what they need is an escape route. However, this does not appear to be kite-flying – and instead to be a not entirely helpful intervention.

Last time Labour MPs rebelled – over the two child benefit cap – Starmer stripped the whip of all seven of the rebels. Starmer is yet to confirm whether this will be the case in this instance – losing 50 MPs would be a much bigger problem than just a handful. It means the government whips and the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall have spent the past few days trying to dissuade potential rebels – the smaller the size of the rebellion, the more options they have in responding to it.

The comments from the trade union leaders today, however, show how the debate over winter fuel and other ‘difficult’ decisions expected on spending will run for some time to come. On Sunday, Keir Starmer warned that his party would have to be unpopular on a few things – such as the winter fuel payment. Were Reeves to significantly change course, it would be very damaging to her standing as Chancellor – suggesting she will not stick to decisions or provide stability and certainty.

What’s more, this is likely just the first in a series of difficult decisions – with next month’s ‘painful’ budget and then the comprehensive spending review due next spring. Both will see the Labour party have to take positions that in opposition they would have opposed. Starmer may say he’s fine being unpopular in the short term – he now needs to convince his new MPs that they should be too.

Hear more from Katy Balls on Coffee House Shots, The Spectator’s daily politics podcast:

This could be far worse than axing the winter fuel payment

You won’t find me mounting the barricades in defence of the winter fuel payment, though I’ll miss the pleasant surprise when it landed in my bank account sometime before Christmas. I do, though, have a bit of a bone to pick with those well-heeled and often still lucratively-employed pensioners who dusted off their metaphorical loud-hailers (in the form of letters to newspapers and social media posts) every autumn to protest that they didn’t need it, that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money, and that they a) gave it to charity, b) spent it on Christmas presents or c) ordered another case of good wine. 

These individuals may be more responsible than they know for the Labour government’s decision to abolish the payment. This won’t just affect the more than comfortably-off like themselves, but the vast majority of the ten million or so who used to receive it, including those just above the threshold for other help. Their interventions reinforced the cliche that your average pensioner is a feather-bedded ‘boomer’ sponging off ‘hard-pressed’ working-age families. 

To be sure, there were many who, strictly speaking, didn’t need the winter fuel payment. But universality reduced administrative costs and meant that no one had to plead for it, claim special need, or otherwise put themselves forward, which is why – along with the obligatory form-filling – so many miss out on pension credit. That is why I regret that, barring an unlikely rethink, the universal winter fuel payment is dead and gone – along, in time perhaps, with some elderly people of a proud and self-reliant disposition who decide not to risk using their heating.  

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But, as I say, I won’t be on the barricades for the winter fuel payment. There is one change being floated, however, which could see me deploying not just all the metaphorical loud-hailers at my disposal, but asking to borrow someone else’s real megaphone for some serious business in Parliament Square. This is the suggestion, not denied by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, that the government could bow to pressure from impecunious local councils and allow them to discontinue the single occupier discount for council tax. In objecting, I would be motivated at least as much by a basic sense of fairness as by parsimony (though paying less council tax is always welcome, too). 

The sole occupier discount reduces council tax by 25 per cent for households with just one adult. This still means that single occupiers are paying way over the odds. Given that full council tax is payable by two adults living in one house or flat, and in many properties several more, 25 per cent is at the mean end of the spectrum – 50 per cent would be more like it. But there is no point in jeopardising the principle by demanding too much, so let’s stick with the 25 per cent. 

Abolish that, though, and Labour – along with its insolvent proxies in local government – could find itself with a full-scale revolt on its hands. A revolt, what is more, that won’t be halted by clapping us all in jail, as per the ‘tiny minority of far-right thugs’ who are currently being fast-tracked through the courts. We won’t be rioting (probably), but we could use our vote to evict local councils, or maybe take them to court on grounds of elementary justice. After all, if the women of Next can win an equal pay claim on the basis of equivalent work, then we who live expensively alone could surely mount a successful challenge on grounds of proportionality. 

A single existence is considerably more expensive, as I soon noted as a widow after happy decades of coupledom. The old adage that two live as cheaply as one is wrong, but shared expenses make it a lot cheaper than living alone. From travel of all kinds to supermarket food, where bigger equals cheaper – to the detriment of the nation’s health – there is a singles penalty, and it is very hard to escape. You can maybe zone the heating in your home to reduce usage, but you can do that as a family, too. And you can’t keep the place cooler or the water less hot just because you are the sole user. A water meter might cut your bills, but that isn’t available to everyone.

Ending the single occupier discount could cause more problems for the government than means-testing the winter fuel payment. This is because the council tax discount as it currently works applies not just to older people, but to all those who occupy a home alone. And so it should, given our inevitably lower demand on council services. We produce far less rubbish for collection than families. Most of us don’t have children who use the schools or other children’s services. There is just one of us to use the libraries and other council services, compared with two or more in many other homes. Let me say it again, a 25 per cent discount is still ripping us off. 

Along with peaceful protests and court challenges, however, there is another response that abolition of the council tax discount could provoke. It is one that most Labour councils, if not all Labour voters would find deeply uncomfortable. It could spur support for revisiting Margaret Thatcher’s doomed community charge, otherwise known as the poll tax. 

The principle was that council tax should be levied according to the number of people in a household, much like state income tax does in the United States. Its critics saw the switch from a property-based tax as the distillation of free-market Thatcherism. But the principle surely has merit: that the amount you pay to the local council for its services should be in proportion to the services you use. It is not an income tax, which is redistributive. It is a contribution to local services. 

A change of government tends to revive calls for a reform of the outdated council tax system, which is based on the rentable value of the property way back when, and the same is true this time around. But any mooted abolition of the single occupier discount could make a new poll tax the least bad option for many, especially as the number of single occupier households has been rising. Opposition would also be broader than with the winter fuel payment, as those affected would include younger people and single parents, as well as lone pensioners. 

The aborted introduction of the poll tax is now widely seen as a symptom and a cause of Thatcher’s political demise. It prompted protests on the streets and a mass refusal to pay. Could an end to the discount for sole occupiers do the same for this Labour government?

Thousands of prisoners are about to be released early. Is probation ready?

I met Anthony by the gates of Thameside prison in south-east London. A skinny, gaunt-looking man in his 40s, he’d spent much of his adult life in and out of jail for offences linked to his mental health problems and addiction to drugs. His latest spell inside had lasted eight months. He was hugely relieved to be out and vowed, like so many other newly-released prisoners, never to go back.

Over the next few hours I joined Anthony and a support worker from a charity on a car journey across London as they raced against the clock to find him a bed for the night, register with a GP, so he could get the medication he needed, visit a benefits office and attend a probation appointment. It was a crazy few hours – complicated by the fact that Anthony’s identification documents were stuck in another prison and there’d been little time to organise things in advance of his release.

That encounter with Anthony, for a radio feature a few years ago, came to mind as the government prepares to free some 2,000 prisoners on Tuesday – double the number they usually let out in a week. It’s the first stage of a scheme which will see 5,000 prisoners let out early in September and October to create space in jails across England and Wales, where the population has reached a record high of 88,521. Inmates will serve 40 per cent of their sentence in custody instead of the standard 50 per cent.

However much planning has taken place, many of those released will face the same mad dash as Anthony did to access the services that will help them re-settle in the community. Key to it all will be the probation staff charged with their supervision. Since 2015, every offender, no matter how short their sentence, must be monitored by probation for at least 12 months after they leave jail. It’s a huge burden on a service which is overstretched and under-performing.

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Only two out of 12 probation regions are operating satisfactorily, according to the latest ‘scorecard’ from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Three areas – East Midlands; London; Kent, Surrey and Sussex – are rated ‘inadequate’, seven are said to require improvement. In his final report after four years as chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell said his ‘greatest’ concerns were around public protection with staff unable to accurately assess and robustly manage the potential risk of serious harm posed by some offenders. Russell highlighted poor supervision and unmanageable workloads, with some officers dealing with 40 or more cases each. 

A large part of the problem is that there aren’t enough staff. The MoJ wants there to be 7,339 fully-qualified probation officers, yet there’s currently a shortfall of 2,179.  Leaving rates are up and most alarmingly, every year up to 20 per cent of trainees drop out before they even qualify. 

To address the staffing crisis Martin Jones, the new chief inspector, has suggested reducing the burden on existing probation officers by removing the requirement to supervise prisoners who’ve served short sentences.  It would cut the caseload by around 40,000, 17 per cent of the current total, and give staff more time to do meaningful rehabilitation work with offenders who pose a greater public threat.  It’s an attractive idea but politically deadly: an unsupervised prisoner will inevitably commit a ghastly crime and ministers will get the blame.

A better option would be to tackle the bureaucracy surrounding probation work so staff have more one-on-one time with offenders. Russell highlighted Civil Service rules that meant it could take weeks to order equipment and fill posts. ‘Multiple layers of approvals and standardised and centralised commissioning processes stifle innovation and can feel disempowering for local leaders,’ he wrote. Officers also complain about legislative demands and data management requirements that they have to fulfil but which aren’t part of their core duties, as well as clunky IT systems that make every task take longer. If workloads are to be made manageable, this is an area the MoJ must urgently focus on.

The department appears to be pinning its hopes on a campaign to hire an extra 1,000 trainee probation officers. That will undoubtedly ease some of the pressures, but it would be a mistake to think that simply boosting numbers will improve performance. A theme of recent reviews into murders committed by offenders on probation is a lack of ‘professional curiosity’ on the part of officers entrusted with their supervision – they’re too willing to accept what they’re told at face value and don’t inquire deeply enough into what’s going on in the background. Much of this is down to inexperience: one-third of probation staff have been in the service for less than five years. A recruitment drive is unlikely to address that problem unless it’s targeted at older people who can bring skills from different walks of life.

Indeed, that was the recommendation from a report carried out for the Conservative government which said the probation service needed to hire more ‘career changers’ in their 30s, 40s and 50s. The findings of the review, which wasn’t published, also called for the service to bring in more men. Seventy-five per cent of probation staff are women but 91 per cent of those they supervise are male. The chief probation officer, Kim Thornden-Edwards, has agreed that the gender mix needs to change to give senior staff more options when allocating cases. ‘It might be really good for a woman to be leading on a domestic abuse case – but also, it might be good for a man to be challenging those kind of issues around masculinity and power from a male perspective,’ she told the BBC.

Thornden-Edwards made those remarks 18 months ago, but the gender balance in probation hasn’t shifted.  If the service is to be more effective at keeping the public safe and helping offenders with rehabilitation the workforce needs to be more diverse, particularly in terms of age, life experience and gender.  That is not to denigrate those who currently work there, they are doing a valuable and challenging job. But we should acknowledge that they need more support so that former prisoners like Anthony and the thousands exiting jail this week get the best chance to turn their lives around. 

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Britain could learn from Switzerland’s tough stance on migration

The UK is currently struggling with balancing migrant rights and public safety. Record numbers of foreign national offenders are currently still living in the country, unable to be deported. While the case of Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai – an Afghan asylum seeker who had previously murdered two migrants before entering the country, and who went on to murder a 21-year-old in the UK – has thrown into sharp relief the Home Office’s failings in removing dangerous individuals from the country.

As the Labour government sets a goal of deporting 14,000 illegal migrants and foreign criminals by the end of the year, perhaps it could learn from one of our European neighbours when it comes to migrant policy. 

In Switzerland, the message to migrants is clear: you are welcome to live and build a life here, but you must contribute to society and abide by its rules. Failing to do so, whether through criminal behaviour or long-term dependency on the state, carries serious consequences, even if you’ve spent most of your life in the country. 

Switzerland has taken a firm stand: migrants who pose a danger to society or drain public resources are sent back, regardless of their ties to the country.

Switzerland’s strict stance on migration has recently come into sharp focus. A young man from Kosovo, who had spent almost his entire life in Switzerland, was expelled after a violent attack in Zurich and for committing other criminal offences. The 22-year-old attacked a Serbian man at a bus stop in what was described as a vicious assault. His upbringing in Switzerland – his schooling, friends, and almost two decades of living in the country – was not enough to save him from been expelled. The Federal Supreme Court upheld his expulsion in August, ruling that the safety of the public came first.

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Despite being raised in Switzerland, the court ruled that his behaviour showed a failure to integrate into Swiss society, and his deep ties to the country were outweighed by the threat he posed to public safety. The expulsion came with a five-year ban from Switzerland. This decision reflects Switzerland’s firm approach to balancing migrant rights with the need to protect society. Even though Switzerland is a member of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), when it comes to serious criminal behaviour, its courts emphasise that the protection of society must come first.

It is a debate that has simmered for years in Switzerland. In 2016, the country voted down a proposal by the nationalist Swiss People’s party (SVP) to automatically expel foreigners for even minor crimes, such as threatening officials or giving false testimony. While voters rejected that measure, they reaffirmed that stricter laws for serious crimes were necessary. The result was a middle ground: Switzerland would not expel migrants for minor infractions, but the courts are still able to remove those who pose a clear threat to public safety, or even those who lack financial stability​.  

Another recent case highlights the Swiss courts’ no-nonsense approach. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that a Kosovan family who had lived in Switzerland for over two decades should be expelled due to their long-term dependence on welfare. Between 2008 and 2022, the family received approximately £500,000 in social benefits. Although they had recently found employment, the court found that the family’s long-term reliance on welfare, coupled with their insufficient integration into Swiss society, was reason enough for their expulsion.

In Switzerland, economic self-sufficiency is not merely a goal – it’s a requirement to live in the country. The family’s failure to integrate, poor language skills, and long-term reliance on welfare painted a picture of individuals who had taken more from the country than they had contributed. In the end, the court decided that their recent employment wasn’t enough to offset the long-term burden they had placed on the public purse. The family was ordered to leave Switzerland, showing that even decades of residency and family ties don’t guarantee the right to stay if you become too dependent on the state.

These cases illustrate Switzerland’s broader philosophy when it comes to migration. Public interest and societal safety take precedence over individual ties. In contrast to countries like the UK, where long-term residency often protects individuals from deportation even after committing serious crimes or relying on welfare for years, Switzerland’s courts consistently prioritise the collective good.

The fact that both cases involved Kosovans also highlights a key factor in Switzerland’s ability to enforce expulsion orders. Kosovo is a stable country, and returning migrants there does not violate the ECHR. Switzerland distinguishes between deporting individuals to safe countries, like Kosovo, and the more complex situation of returning individuals to conflict zones or regions deemed unsafe. This allows the courts to act decisively when dealing with criminal offenders or long-term welfare recipients from stable regions. In contrast, many European countries are hamstrung by human rights concerns when dealing with unsafe countries.

While these rulings may seem harsh, they reflect a societal consensus that public safety and resource management are paramount. Switzerland’s model of balancing migrant rights with the protection of society is deeply ingrained in its political and legal systems.

Switzerland’s legal system is unapologetic in its priorities. Migrants are welcome to stay and build their lives in the country, but they must contribute to society, respect the law, and remain self-sufficient. Those who do not meet these expectations are removed, regardless of their ties to the country. The UK could learn a lot from its approach.

Will David Lammy apologise to the Grenfell judge?

In the fall-out from last week’s devastating report on the Grenfell report, it seems one question has not been asked of the various Labour spokesmen out on the airwaves. In a 1,700-page report that apportioned blame for the 2017 tragedy widely, retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick spared no one in his excoriating judgements. Ministers, officials and the cladding companies were all lacerated for the disaster which claimed the lives of 72 people.

Such findings must have come as a surprise to the man who is now our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy. As Dominic Lawson notes in today’s Daily Mail, Lammy’s reaction to the appointment of this distinguished judge in July 2017 was to trash his integrity. Sir Martin Moore-Bick is an ex-grammar school boy and the son of a dairyman: hardly a scion of the establishment. But that didn’t stop Lammy from suggesting that this ‘white, upper-middle class man’ should not have been trusted with the job, declaring that:

I think the victims will also say to themselves: when push comes to shove, there are some powerful people here – contractors, sub-contractors, local authorities, ­governments – and they look like this judge. Whose side will he be on?’

The side of the truth, it transpires. Moore-Bick’s work of six years has been commended and accepted by all sides across the political spectrum: including from HM Government in which Lammy now serves. Yet from our Foreign Secretary there has not been a word of regret or apology to the long-serving lawyer. As Lawson says:

This is, of course, a trivial matter compared with the corporate depravity and dishonesty laid bare by Moore-Bick’s report, and the pain of the families still seeking justice. But if the Foreign Secretary were capable of ­feeling shame, he would publicly acknowledge his own deplorable misjudgment.

Will he now do so? Don’t hold your breath.

We should hunt down the companies responsible for Grenfell

I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure, mind. It is all too easy to imagine how failures of regulation, of maintenance, of oversight, contributed to the Grenfell catastrophe. It’s easy to see how, here and there, and without malice, but with disastrous consequences, amid fraying budgets and overworked bureaucracies, the people and systems which should have ensured that the tenants of Grenfell Tower were safe did not. A cascading series of small failures, missed opportunities and rules honoured in the breach. That, we can all picture. 

What is nearly impossible to imagine is how, in pursuit of still more profit, the companies contracted at handsome fees to supply supposedly flame-retardant cladding draped that high tower with what might as well have been firelighters. That they did so knowingly; that they did so in defiance of regulations – simply lying about the materials they were using and cheating the safety tests; and that they laughed about it amongst themselves as they did so. 

The inquiry heard, for instance, that Kingspan’s employees – having got their insulation assessed as suitable for use on buildings more than 18 metres high by the simple expedient of submitting a different material for the test than they were actually selling – giggled over email: ‘LOL’; ‘We lied?’ ‘All lies mate. Alls we do is lie here’. A named executive, Philip Heath, when a contractor queried whether the material was fit for purpose, told a friend: ‘I think they are getting me confused with someone who gives a dam [sic].’  

Two other companies – Arconic and Celotex – also supplied unsafe materials; and while their executives did not apparently leave so incontinent and grotesquely goonish an email trail, the inquiry found that both companies had cheated the tests too. The former ‘deliberately and dishonestly’ misled regulators; the latter had a ‘dishonest scheme to mislead customers’. Arconic didn’t even bother to give oral evidence to the inquiry. 

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I say ‘nearly impossible to imagine’. Still, we’re on ‘nearly’: the world is full of crooks and shysters and greedy, boastful cheats (and they seem from this to be over-represented in the commercial cladding industry). That they will have revelled in their behaviour, while suffering a failure of imagination themselves – the failure to imagine that a few years on their cheating could have cost 72 human lives – is not outside the bounds of our experience.  

Nope. What seems to me quite impossible to conceive is what Michael Gove set out in a mortifying article in yesterday’s Sunday Times: which is that not only are these three companies yet to acknowledge fault or make amends, but that Treasury pragmatism and international realpolitik is thwarting attempts to make them do so. Kingspan is based in Ireland; Arconic and Celotex in France. As Mr Gove writes, ‘I pressed the Irish government to act against Kingspan without success. From France only haughty froideur‘, while ‘efforts on my part to restrict the import of these companies’ products ran up against the commercial purism of Treasury Mandarin Brain’. 

Mr Gove says that he fears that people within Whitehall – who will, no doubt, pride themselves on their cool-headed sophistication – are likely to block the pursuit of justice under the new government: 

In Whitehall I know there will be voices opposed to robust action. Those saying these companies can be partners in combating climate change. Those arguing that we shouldn’t pick fights with EU neighbours when we want a closer commercial relationship. Those claiming that pursuing individual companies abroad will send a negative signal on foreign investment when the priority is growth. 

Cool heads and sophistication and commercial purism be damned. Are we – having supposedly asserted our sovereign identity with the Brexit vote – really so weak and abject that, for fear of rocking the boat with our neighbours, we daren’t pursue justice from people whose greed and dishonesty cost 72 British lives? Can those neighbours, come to that, be so low and venal as to wish to protect those crooks?  

It seems to me – as it apparently does to Mr Gove – that this shouldn’t be a matter of jurisdictional wrangling, ‘Treasury brain’, or so-called realpolitik of any sort. This wasn’t a regrettable misjudgement: it was deliberate and systematic dishonesty. Wherever they are quartered, these companies should be going to the wall, and the executives responsible for deliberately cheating the regulators should be going to jail. They should be pariahs in the money markets, and pariahs as far as contracts to clad so much as a garden shed from now on go.  

In the context of the 2008 financial crisis we heard a lot about the concept of ‘moral hazard’: the idea that if banks were allowed to take dangerous risks with impunity they would be incentivised to take those dangerous risks. Same argument here – with ‘moral’ in that phrase taking on a special pungency. It’s both pragmatic and the right thing to do to ensure that companies which take that sort of cynical risk with human life, and what’s more do so in direct and knowing breach of the law, suffer the very gravest consequences. I’m with Mr Gove.  

Keir Starmer is falling into the same trap as Francois Hollande

There has been no honeymoon for Keir Starmer after his election victory in July. That is hardly a surprise as it was a ‘loveless landslide’ that Labour achieved, winning just 34 per cent of the popular vote. In the two months since the general election, Starmer’s approval rating has dropped still further, with two-thirds of Brits sceptical that he is a force for the good.

Yet Starmer appears to be deluded about his popularity. The same delusion afflicted Francois Hollande when he was elected president of France in 2012. Like Starmer, he didn’t understand that his victory owed more to the failings of the opposition than his own star quality.

Nicolas Sarkozy had been elected president in 2007 on a pledge to crack down on crime and reinvigorate the economy; instead he became ‘president bling-bling’, a leader obsessed with the trappings of power.

French conservatives took their revenge in 2012, either staying at home or reluctantly casting their ballot for Hollande in the second round run-off. The geekiness of the Socialist was seen as a welcome change after the brashness of Sarkozy.

It didn’t take long for the public to realise they’d made a terrible mistake. Hollande’s approval rating soon sank to just 20 per cent, the lowest in the history of the Fifth Republic, as France became the butt of British jokes.

No one relished the ‘French bashing’ more than prime minister David Cameron; a month after Hollande’s election, he announced he was ready to ‘roll out the red carpet’ to business leaders fleeing the 75 per cent tax rate on earnings above €1 million (£780,000) that Hollande had swiftly implemented.

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He was also quick to go green, passing an energy transition bill that committed France to cutting its nuclear power by 50 per cent in favour of renewable energy.

It was part of his progressive agenda, and Hollande didn’t care if it alienated millions of working-class voters. Hollande was following the advice of the dominant left-wing think-tank, Terra Nova, which in a 2011 report had outlined the future strategy for the Socialist party: ‘The France of tomorrow is above all united by cultural and progressive values,’ the report concluded. ‘It wants change. It is tolerant, open, optimistic and inclusive…it is opposed to an electorate that defends the present and the past against change.’

Hollande’s government passed the controversial gay marriage and adoption bill, which provoked huge protest rallies across the country. The Socialists regarded protestors as intolerant bigots, as they did those who objected to mass immigration.

Legal and illegal immigration exploded under Hollande; in 2011 8.6 per cent of the population were immigrants, a figure that had risen to 9.9 per cent by the end of the decade. Of these 6.6 million people, nearly half had been born in Africa.

Then there was the rise of Islamic extremism, first seen in March 2012 when a terrorist murdered three Jewish children in Toulouse. Hollande allowed Islamism to rise unchecked until, in 2015, a wave of barbaric attacks swept France, resulting in nearly 250 deaths in 18 months.

Marine Le Pen, leader of what was then called the National Front, accused Hollande and his government of being ‘out of its depth, lost, as stunned as a rabbit in the headlights of a car’. Le Pen charged Hollande with ignoring Islamism and instead obsessing about identity politics, which was ‘provoking additional tensions’ and ‘pitting the French against each other’.

The one demographic with whom Hollande never engaged was the white working-class, once the bedrock of the Socialist party. They had become an embarrassment; in private, Hollande allegedly mocked them as the ‘sans-dents’ (without teeth). This insult – which Hollande denied using in a derogatory way – was exposed by Valérie Trierweiler, Hollande’s companion when he came to power but who was subsequently ditched for a young actress. Trierweiler took her revenge in her 2014 memoir.  ‘He presented himself as the man who doesn’t like the rich,’ she wrote. ‘In reality, the president doesn’t like the poor.’

The revelation was seized on by Le Pen, who said: ‘Hollande despises the ‘sans-dents‘, the Front National defends them.’

By the time of the 2017 presidential election, Hollande knew he was so despised there was no point standing for re-election. The man who did represent the Socialist Party, Benoit Hamon, received just 6.3 per cent of the vote; Le Pen’s share was 21.3 per cent.

The majority of her voters were the white working-class, men and women who had once voted for the left. But realising they didn’t fit Hollande’s ‘France of tomorrow’ they switched allegiance.

In his victory speech in May 2012, Hollande proclaimed: ‘Tonight, there are not two Frances, there is only one France, only one nation that is united with the same destiny… we have to repair, recover, unite.’

Hollande never had any intention of presiding over one nation; he came to power contemptuous of the ‘sans-dents’ and his government demonstrated this disdain from the outset.

In his victory speech two months ago, Starmer spoke of an ‘age of national renewal’ in which Labour would ‘rebuild our country’. Does this reconstruction entail banning smoking in pub gardens, cutting winter fuel payments for the elderly and bringing in millions more migrants? Is this how Starmer wants to build his ‘Britain of tomorrow’, while labelling those who object ‘far-right’ and ‘populist’?

Starmer should use Francois Hollande’s presidency as a case study in hubristic failure. If he doesn’t, the PM will soon discover that the vast majority of the British are as resistant to change as the French were a decade ago.

The Greens are turning on the SNP

The SNP hasn’t wanted for its woes lately but now there is fresh trouble on the way. Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, tells the BBC it is ‘unlikely’ that her party will vote for the next Scottish government budget after the Nationalists unveiled £500 million in cuts aimed at balancing Holyrood’s books. Many of the services reduced or scrapped in SNP finance minister Shona Robison’s announcement last week were originally put in place by the Greens when they were in coalition between 2021 and 2024. Humza Yousaf’s decision in April to end the governing pact brought a vote of no confidence and the announcement of his resignation four days later.

Appearing on the Sunday Show, Slater said her party had ‘worked really hard within government’ to get funding for ‘things like Zero Waste Scotland, all the net zero, transportation, active travel’. Among the Robison cuts which the Greens are opposing are the scrapping of an all-off-peak rail fares pilot, reductions in the budgets for nature restoration and active travel, abandoning a £2 million scheme to provide free bus travel to asylum seekers, and a £460 million raid on the ScotWind wealth fund. Slater told the BBC: ‘The SNP have now rolled back on all of that, so it doesn’t look like they’re wanting our votes, so they need to get the votes from another party in the chamber.’

Her appearance follows a number of terse criticisms of the SNP government in the Holyrood chamber last week. Replying to the programme for government, the Scottish parliament equivalent of the King’s Speech, Slater accused First Minister John Swinney of ‘selling out the future of our young people’ by cutting net zero funding and said his government’s ‘cowardice’ meant it had ‘given up’ on creating a fairer, greener Scotland for future generations. She branded as ‘delusional’ the idea that the Scottish government could ‘deliver all the same things while spending less money’ and characterised the withdrawal of the ScotWind cash as ‘emptying the pot… while slashing net zero investment and continuing to give handouts to big business’.

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Slater also raised the absence of a bill banning conversion practices from the programme. Under the SNP-Green coalition, ministers promised sweeping legislation that would have criminalised both ‘gay conversion therapy’ and attempts by parents to talk their children out of undergoing gender transition, which would also have been classed as conversion. Gender identity ideology and associated policies and legislation are central planks of the Scottish Green platform. Slater warned Swinney not to ‘cower to the reactionary forces of the right’. The following day, she used first minister’s question time, the first since Holyrood returned from summer recess, to attack him for backtracking on a promise to provide free school meals to all primary-aged pupils in Scotland. The free meals pledge was another coalition-era policy and breaking it was a ‘betrayal’ that showed all the work done by the Greens in government was being ‘undone, slashed, watered down or shelved’.

This new outbreak of Nat-bashing is not limited to Slater. Earlier in the week, her colleague Ross Greer, responding to Robison’s pre-budget fiscal update, pointed out that the finance minister had not turned her efficiency drive to small-business tax relief, saying she was ‘handing public cash to big business and elite landowners while slashing critical spending to tackle the climate emergency’. It appears from these interventions, and Slater’s comments to the BBC, that the Greens have settled on their strategy for the 2026 Scottish parliament elections. Where they were previously a reliable sidekick to the Nationalists, they seem to be reinventing themselves as the progressive alternative to the SNP.

High tax, big spending, climate-focused, proudly woke and pro-independence, the Greens have always been well positioned to peel off the left-wing of the SNP vote. But in working cooperatively with the Nationalists, in and out of government, and teaming up with them to campaign for Scottish independence, the Greens limited their appeal. Labour and Lib Dem voters were suspicious of their closeness to the SNP and SNP-leaning leftists didn’t feel the need to vote Green when their party under Nicola Sturgeon was speaking the language of the left anyway.

Of all the rhetoric Lorna Slater has directed at the SNP this past week, one sentence will have stood out from all the others in the minds of John Swinney and those around him: ‘The message of this week’s programme for government is that, if people want progressive green policies, they need to vote to have Greens in the room.’

That sounds very much like a declaration of intention. A Green strategy of compare and contrast with the SNP, of highlighting how progressive the Scottish government was when they were helping shape its agenda and how centrist and cuts-happy it is now they are out in the cold, could pay dividends at the next Holyrood election. The SNP lost 39 of its 48 Commons seats in the general election, most of them to Labour, which is hopeful of wresting control of the Scottish government from the Nationalists in 2026. Badgering the SNP from the left could help the Greens up their seat tally on the regional list (eight at the last election) and while a constituency victory is probably still a long shot outside of student-heavy Glasgow Kelvin if the party stands candidates in every constituency it could take big bites out of the Nationalist vote.

When Nicola Sturgeon brought the Greens into government in 2021, many of her opponents said publicly, and some of her supporters privately, that it was a mistake to collaborate with such a fringe party. But Sturgeon made decisions from a focus group of one and once she decided that she needed the majority the Greens could provide, the matter was settled and everyone else had to fall in line. Yet in elevating them she gave them the prominence and platform from which they now look likely to attack the Nationalists. Sturgeon’s dazzling blend of political vanity and ineptitude strikes again, and for the SNP it could prove to be a devastating strike.

Keir Starmer: ‘We are going to have to be unpopular’

In his first major interview in Downing Street, the Prime Minister told Laura Kuenssberg that his government had to do ‘difficult things now’ in order to bring about change. Starmer’s plan to take away winter fuel allowances from most pensioners has drawn criticism, and he faces a potential rebellion in parliament next week over the decision. Starmer claimed the Tories had ‘run away from difficult decisions’, and said he was ‘determined’ to deliver change. The Prime Minister admitted he was ‘worried’ about the rise of the far right, and said ‘delivery in government’ was the only way to tackle the ‘snake oil of the easy answer’.

Starmer: The US ‘understands the decision we’ve taken’

Asked about his upcoming visit to the White House, Keir Starmer said Kuenssberg was ‘wrong’ to suggest that the UK’s decision to suspend some arms exports to Israel has not ‘gone down well’ with US officials. He said the US understands that the UK has a different legal system, and said the purpose of his visit was to have a more strategic discussion about the next few months in relation to Ukraine and the Middle East, hinting that the UK may further increase support for Ukraine.

Victoria Atkins: ‘I don’t think this is a matter of left or right’

Shadow Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Trevor Phillips on Sky News that she had decided to back Robert Jenrick in the Tory leadership race. With the second round of voting taking place next week, Atkins claimed it was Jenrick’s ability to connect with younger people that made him the best candidate. When Trevor Phillips asked about rumours that Jenrick’s camp are using ‘dirty tricks’ to eliminate rivals, Atkins pivoted to criticising Labour over their winter fuel payments decision, and the ‘cronyism scandal’ she claimed has ‘engulfed’ the Department of Health, after former health secretary Alan Milburn was given access to department documents. 

Tom Tugendhat: ‘Not just shouting at foreigners from the white cliffs’

Laura Kuenssberg asked Conservative leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat about his ideas for the party. Tugendhat said the Conservatives needed to actually deliver ‘a higher wage, lower migration economy’, not just ‘pretending you can fix migration by withdrawing from a single treaty or changing a single bill’. Tugendhat said he wanted to leave parts of the European Convention on Human Rights and reform it, and we should be ‘prepared to leave’ if reforms couldn’t be achieved.

Wes Streeting: current rate of NHS waiting list improvement is ‘not tolerable’

Trevor Phillips pointed out to Health Secretary Wes Streeting that at the current rate of decline, NHS waiting lists wouldn’t return to pre-pandemic levels until 2039. He asked whether Labour would commit to reaching pre-pandemic levels by the end of this parliamentary term. Streeting said he would ‘certainly like to see them come down faster’, and that he had committed to returning to some ‘constitutional standards’ such as being seen within four hours in A&E. The Health Secretary said the agreement reached with junior doctors was a crucial part of bringing waiting lists down.

The remarkable success of the Allied occupation of Germany

‘We came as adversaries, we stayed as allies, and we leave as friends,’ British prime minister John Major told crowds in Berlin on 8 September 1994, thirty years ago today. The last 200 British, American and French soldiers withdrew from Berlin that day, leaving the city without a foreign military presence for the first time since the Second World War. This was supposed to be the end of history. In reality, a new chapter had already begun.

The presence of the Western Allies in post-war Germany is still remembered fondly today. There are events marking the 30th anniversary of their departure, and many traces of their occupation remain. Take the former airbase RAF Gatow in southwest Berlin, which played a key role in supplying West Berliners with food and resources during the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. It’s now a military museum with aeroplanes from its time as an RAF base.

British occupation even left a much-loved culinary legacy, the currywurst. The German Chef Herta Heuwer is usually credited with the idea of covering grilled pork sausages with ketchup and curry powder, but she procured those ingredients from British service personnel stationed in Berlin.

The humble currywurst has its own memorial plaque, dating its birth to 4 September 1949. Germans have never looked back. Last year, VW employees alone ate over 8 million portions of currywurst. Earlier this week, it got a shoutout for its 75th birthday from the German Embassy in London.

Even beyond greasy pork covered in ketchup and curry powder, the Allied occupation of West Germany and Berlin is a remarkable success story. As one of the first Britons to set foot in the former capital of the Reich after the war, Joan Bright saw the awful state it was in first-hand.

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The 35-year-old administrative officer had once dated Ian Fleming and is said to have been his inspiration for Miss Moneypenny. But there was nothing glamorous about the scenes that awaited her when she arrived in Berlin in June 1945, charged with the task of preparing a major conference as Winston Churchill’s trusted assistant. The German capital was a mess, from the burnt-out shell of the Reichstag – the parliament building for which Hitler had found so little use – to the battered Brandenburg Gate and the furtive German civilians who scurried in and out of ruined houses.

At the Potsdam Conference that Miss Bright helped organise, a formal military government was established for Germany. This Allied Control Council, run jointly by Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union, was supposed to act as a temporary government for Germany. But for practical reasons, each victorious power had its own zone of occupation to run. The same applied to Berlin, which was also split four ways, even though the former German capital sat within the Soviet Zone.

Emerging Cold War hostilities soon changed the nature of this arrangement. With an ideological fault line running right through the defeated Germany, the question of what to do with the people who had aided their Führer in a genocidal quest to conquer all of Europe suddenly became secondary. The bigger question now was how each side could tilt Germany’s enormous geopolitical and economic weight in their favour.

The Soviet Union and the Western Allies found two different answers to this. Moscow needed resources. They took what they could from their zone and, after 1949, from the newly founded East Germany. The West needed a strong Germany as a bulwark against communism. So the US poured $1.4 billion of Marshall Plan aid into their zones and from 1949 into West Germany. The East paid over 90 per cent of German war reparations. The West had an ‘economic miracle’.

Two very different occupation experiences emerged. West Germans largely saw well-disciplined soldiers arrive and quickly turn from enemies to providers and then to protectors and partners. East Germans suffered the blunt fury of the Red Army with an estimated 2 million rapes and other atrocities. Neither the Soviets nor their German stalwarts had much time for pity in light of what the Wehrmacht had done on the Eastern Front. An official narrative of liberation from fascism was established but many East Germans found it hard to feel liberated, especially when soon after their 1953 uprising was brutally crushed by the Red Army.

The relationship between East Germans and their occupiers changed somewhat over time. While the Soviet Union continued to station up to half a million soldiers in East Germany at any time during the Cold War, they tended to be segregated in their barracks.

Meanwhile, East Germans learnt Russian at school, watched Soviet fairytale films at Christmas and some were sent to Moscow to study. When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms in the USSR in the late eighties, many intellectuals felt inspired. When he visited Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the GDR in 1989, crowds chanted ‘Gorby, help us!’ In the end, even the Soviets appeared as a largely benevolent force to many of their former enemies.

When the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed the horrors of the 20th century were finally over. It seemed there would be no more wars, and the Russians wanted this reflected in the leaving ceremony in Berlin. They too wanted to go as friends and asked to march out of Berlin shoulder to shoulder with the Western Allies.

But Cold War animosity was not so easily forgotten. American, British and French troops planned their last military parade in Berlin on 18 June 1994 alone. When Russia asked to join with an honorary unit and an orchestra, this was denied. The date was deemed too close to 17 June, the day on which day the Red Army had crushed the East German uprising in 1953.

The Russians were also excluded from the farewell ceremony on 8 September 1994. They ended up staging their own a week earlier. On 31 August, thousands of their soldiers marched through Berlin singing in accented German, ‘Germany, to you we reach out our hand as we return to our fatherland’. Chancellor Helmut Kohl looked on, but Russia marched alone. Hans Jung, an East German translator involved in the event, remembered that ‘the Russians were not amused’.

Despite this snub, the summer of 1994 was jubilant. It may have been naive, recalled Jung, but when the Russian troops left, many thought that peace would last forever. The optimistic end-of-history mood would soon drive Western democracies towards some of the lowest military expenditures in modern history and Germany into Russian energy dependence.

As the former Cold War enemies marched out of Berlin on different dates and in different directions, the moment could not have been more symbolic. Russia and the West were to remain at odds on the eastern fringe of Europe – even if their worlds no longer collided in Berlin.