Hamas

Earlier this summer, my son and I biked over to fashionable east Hackney where it’s normal to pay £4.20 for a coffee and £3 for a croissant and everybody complains about the cost of living. The croissants, by the way, must come from the Dusty Knuckle bakery. I don’t know if it’s the same in other parts of London, but here in the north-east we have our standards. ‘Israel is literally a fascist state. Literally criminal. Soon it won’t exist at all and that’s great’ We’d biked a fair distance, so we found a café that sold Dusty Knuckle croissants and settled in. My son read his book while I eavesdropped on the conversation between three interesting-looking youngish people at the next table. Interesting because they all looked so very typical it was almost surprising.

When it was recently announced that 40,000 people, the great majority civilians, have been killed in the Gaza conflict, I checked the media coverage. Almost all – Sky, CNN, the Guardian etc – correctly reported that the figure came from the Hamas health ministry. All, however, implied acceptance of the figure’s accuracy by the prominence they gave it (except for the Guardian, preposterously plus royaliste que le roi, which said the Hamas figure ‘does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses’). The classic example was the BBC. The story led the six o’clock news on Radio 4, the serious programme with the bongs of Big Ben, always considered the gold standard.

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said she had found a £21.9 billion hole, and a black one at that, ‘covered up’ by the Tories in the finances Labour inherited. ‘The biggest single cause of the £22 billion fiscal hole was Reeves’s decision to give inflation-busting pay rises to public sector workers,’ the Financial Times reported. Junior doctors were offered an average rise of 22 per cent over two years. The Chancellor told the Commons that the government was cancelling: the universal winter fuel payment; the cap on the amount people must spend on funding their social care; A-level reforms; and a tunnel near Stonehenge. Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, noted that estimates had been ‘signed off by senior civil servant accounting officers’.

On Tuesday night I was body double/understudy for the brave, brainy, beautiful Rachel Riley, at a packed ‘support Israel’ evening. The keynote speaker was the brave, brainy, beautiful lawyer Natasha Hausdorff. I was slightly out of my depth but I hope I provided some light relief. Natasha was dazzling in defence of beleaguered democracy, but the facts are sombre and the audience went home a little more concerned about our future in the diaspora. Anti-Semitism is known to be a light sleeper. I fear it may become insomniac. I’ve been arguing vehemently with my brother Geoff about everything and nothing for 75 years. Inevitably, these days, our arguments are about Israel.

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

Soft left Sir: I read with a certain wry amusement in Yascha Mounk’s piece that ‘activists’ occupying Columbia were demanding the university administrators should supply them with food and water (‘Preach first’, 11 May). How times have changed. In winter 1976 I was the president of the student body at Edinburgh University. A group of ultra-left activists occupied a building of the social science faculty. The administration sent two members of staff to speak to me in the hope that I might be able to dislodge them. I explained very patiently to them that given my own unashamed Conservatism, there was unlikely to be any meeting of minds on this matter.