Politics

Sir David Amess was killed in the line of duty. He was doing one of the most important – and vulnerable – parts of an MP’s job, and he was killed while doing it. Most of the week, MPs go to work in a palace under armed guard. They live in houses with CCTV, panic alarms and rapid police response mechanisms in case of trouble. These measures have gradually been added to their lives as the perceived threat has increased. But in just over a decade, three serious attacks against MPs have taken place in the one place where they lack such security: their constituency surgeries. Stephen Timms was stabbed at his surgery in 2010. Jo Cox was murdered leaving hers five years ago. Today, Amess was killed at his.

The theme of Priti Patel's party conference speech this afternoon was very much 'large and in charge'. She devoted much of her address to talking about the immigration system, as you'd expect, promising stronger crackdowns on people being smuggled across the Channel in boats. Patel focused on the Vote Leave favourite: taking back control Whereas Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have talked about Britain 'voting for change' in 2016, Patel focused on the Vote Leave favourite: taking back control. She told the conference hall this was the key theme of her reforms to immigration, saying: 'My new plan for immigration is already making its way through parliament. At the heart of this plan is a simple principle. Control. That is not unreasonable.

Keir Starmer gave a very long speech on the final day of Labour conference. It lasted an hour and a half, and had 17 standing ovations. But it will largely be remembered as the speech in which the Labour leader was repeatedly heckled by the hard left. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s3sTVv6cNA These heckles worked hugely in his favour and made the speech all the better. Those shouting from the conference floor largely chose to do so at very inappropriate moments, including when he was talking about his mother being seriously ill in intensive care.  The heckles worked hugely in his favour and made the speech all the better Many other delegates turned on the woman who repeatedly shouted about the need for a £15-an-hour minimum wage, shouting ‘shhh!

Keir Starmer is a keen amateur footballer. It’s one of the few facts anyone knows about the Labour leader. He enjoys a game on his spare time, and on the campaign trail too. One person who played with him recently told me: ‘You can tell he plays a lot and takes it very seriously.’ What they couldn’t say was that he was very good at it. Starmer is currently trying to play a political game by changing the rules for Labour’s leadership elections. It’s a big and serious move as it would make it harder for the party to go left when it picks his successor. It is therefore a confrontation with the left that some in his camp see as Starmer’s Kinnock moment (more on this from Katy in this week’s magazine).

It didn’t take long for the open-borders brigade to try and politicise the magnificent feat of British teenager Emma Raducanu in winning the US Open women’s singles. Rather than just revelling in the general outbreak of joy in the country, or praising the astonishing maturity of Emma’s performance, the usual blue-tick suspects piled onto Twitter within minutes of her victory to argue, or imply, that the fact Emma was born in another country (she moved here from Canada aged two) proved that immigration in all its guises is always a good thing. Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera stated the case plainly: ‘Half Romanian, half Chinese. Born in Canada, brought up in the UK. Immigration enriches us, and always has done.

Today was the first PMQs clash between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer in a packed Commons chamber. Starmer tried to pin down Johnson on whether he could guarantee that no one would have to pay their home to fund their care. Johnson dodged the question. But Starmer was limited by the fact that Labour can’t say how it would raise funds for the NHS backlog and social care, allowing Johnson to claim that Labour has no plan. Starmer is a naturally cautious politician, but his caution is leaving the field clear for Johnson on social care. Things would have been more difficult for the Prime Minister today if Labour was explicitly backing a tax on assets.

This afternoon, the JCVI has essentially passed the buck on vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds. It has declared that the health benefits of a vaccine for this age group are ‘marginally greater' than the risks of Covid. But it has left the decision on whether to actually vaccinate them to the chief medical officers. It would surely have been better for the committee to have made a decision one way or the other In the past few weeks, tensions between ministers and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have been rising. Ministers are keen to get on with an autumn booster shots campaign for the elderly and to vaccinate more school children. Yet the JCVI has only approved boosters for those with weaker immune systems.

Nietzsche would have been great at Twitter. He excelled at epigrams, which are to philosophy as the fortune-cookie motto is to Chinese takeout, and he loved to hate. Scholars divide as to whether his epigrammatic excellence came from using a typewriter — he was the earliest philosophical adopter of this technology — or because he was no good at joined-up thinking but very good at vituperating about the news. It was Nietzsche who spotted that the emerging theme of democratic society was not the reign of reason and universal brotherhood, but the ‘stupidification of the world’ and resentment. He called it ressentiment. Philosophy goes better in French, and Nietzsche had lately turned against Wagner, anti-Semitism and German nationalism.

J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential nomination five years ago. He has a lot of the traits conservatives liked about Trump: Vance, too, is a political outsider with proven appeal to an audience beyond politics, thanks to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Like Trump, Vance offers himself as an avatar for the people who have been discarded by globalization and demonized by a left-wing media and education establishment. And he is as radical as Trump — maybe more so — in his willingness to reject the merely liberal side of American conservatism. Trump defied elite orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Vance adds proposals to curb the tech companies and tax Ivy League endowments. But if J.D.

John Bercow – ‘I do not identify with the Conservative party’ Last night, it was revealed that the former Commons Speaker John Bercow had not merely distanced himself from his former party, but had disowned it altogether. Interviewed by the Observer, he castigated the Conservative party as ‘reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic’. Bercow’s jump across the divide may come as no surprise to some, but in doing so he has become the first ex-Speaker to ever make such a move back into the political arena. Trevor Phillips spoke to Bercow, once an enthusiastic figure on the Tory right, about the reasons for his change of allegiance: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1406523980979355655?