Ameer Kotecha

Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has said that every woman travelling illegally to the UK will probably have been raped on the journey. It is a startling statement. Firstly, for what is implied. The trafficking operation bringing dinghies to our south coast is, the Home Secretary now admits, not merely facilitating illegal migration, it is also exposing women to the most appalling sexual violence. Her comment, made in a Leading podcast interview with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, was also a whisker away from admitting that very many of the small boats arriving here may contain rapists. Second, it is remarkable that she was able to say it. You can only imagine the hysteria from much of the political establishment if someone on the right had made the same observation.

Britain as a place of “warm ale, (with) a black Labrador by your feet in a pub” is a “far-right fantasy that never really existed”. That is the verdict of Labour's nature minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter. At a fringe event at Labour conference in Liverpool, Riddell-Carpenter warned attendees that the so-called "far-right" will try to weaponise rural Britain at the next election. The MP for Suffolk Coastal – that’s right, rural Suffolk – said she lies "awake at night" at what "nostalgic vision" of the countryside will be used in the supposed battle. “This is one of the things I do stay awake at night about, and think about, and fear.

Such is the level of rot in our public institutions, and so accustomed have we become to daily stories of inexplicable and indeed unforgivable asylum decisions, that it takes a lot nowadays for a story to come along that is genuinely jaw-dropping. The Refugee Convention, the general right of asylum and our entire approach have been proven to be utterly broken But a story in this week’s Sunday Times is just that, and should be a genuine line-in-the-sand moment. The UK granted asylum protection, and then British citizenship, to a former bodyguard of a leader of Hamas.

‘Britain is back,’ Burnham declared in his big speech to the UN yesterday. We have been laid low by ten years of Brexit disruption, he told the world. We’ve heard this before: just last year Starmer was announcing ‘Britain is back on the world stage’. Heck, Cameron was insisting Britain was ‘back’ even before that fateful referendum had taken place. There is something unpatriotic about cementing this narrative of a lost decade. UN functionaries lap it up but it doesn’t do our soft power, which Burnham is so keen to make a national priority, any good. And curiously, having informed the General Assembly that Britain had returned to the world, Burnham then spent several minutes listing all the institutions and alliances from which we have never departed.

More than half of Labour MPs have a greater number of disability benefit claimants in their constituency than the size of their electoral majority. Some 58 per cent of Labour’s 366 seats in England and Wales have more people claiming personal independence payments (Pip) than Labour’s majority, according to a report in the Times. Pat McFadden – Secretary of State for Work and pensions – is one of those MPs. And, more than 100 Labour MPs have more individuals specifically claiming Pip for mental health conditions (e.g. anxiety, ADHD and autism) than their majorities. Is it any wonder that Labour MPs are expected to again revolt over plans to reform – however modestly – disability benefits? The spiralling welfare bill risks bankrupting the country.

Angela Rayner has used a big speech to the TUC to brand Reform’s biggest donors ‘a couple of off-shore billionaires trying to buy our democracy’. Labour, she went on, would defend that democracy against any ‘fascist oligarch’ who ‘seeks to divide our country and buy our politics.’ That demagoguery is not quite the sort of thing she was preaching ten years ago. Addressing the same TUC Congress in September 2016, in the aftermath of Jo Cox's murder, Rayner urged delegates to honour Cox through ‘the example we set’, reminding them that ‘we have more in common than what divides us’. What happened Ange?

Thirty Six is clearly the magic number. A record-breaking £36 million donation to Reform announced last night from Ben Delo, the British-born and bred cryptocurrency billionaire, has been matched today by another donation for the same amount by Christopher Harborne, the British businessman and tech investor. The donations will be a massive shot in the arm for Farage’s party. It’s worth taking a moment to consider just what lengths Labour have gone to to try to stop this happening. They’re introducing a £100,000 annual cap on donations from people living overseas and a one-year waiting period before returnees can escape the cap, not to mention a moratorium on all political donations in cryptoassets.

You get two impressions of Britain at the moment. First, that nothing works. Second, that the state is not on the side of those who try to work for a living and generally do the right thing, but on the side of those who intend to ride on the backs of others and generally take the mick. Keir Starmer today leaves the country in a worse place on both counts. Let us take them in turn. People are understandably coming to the conclusion that they might as well not bother, and instead take the dole from the outstretched hand of the state Starmer did not cause the broken state but, as one of the bureaucracy’s chief princelings, he has done nothing to fix it.

It is hard not to grin. Our lawyerly soon-to-be-former Prime Minister, Mr Process, stands accused of, er, failing to follow the proper process. Olly Robbins was chief mandarin at the Foreign Office until he was unceremoniously thrown under the bus by Starmer in a panicked attempt to find a scapegoat for his disastrous decision to appoint Peter Mandelson to the country’s most senior ambassadorial role. Robbins has now applied to the High Court for a judicial review of Starmer’s decision to dismiss him. The sight of Sir Keir being hoisted by his own petard in his final week in office when he wants to be left alone to focus on booking his tickets to the World Cup final and unscrewing the lightbulbs from the Downing Street flat, is undeniably rather funny.

At the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks memorial lecture at the LSE this week, David Miliband ‘broke his silence’ after days of intense speculation that he will soon be announced as Andy Burnham’s Foreign Secretary. Unfortunately, I think Miliband as foreign secretary would represent at best stale continuity and at worst a disaster We shall have to wait and see whether he gets the call-up. But his speech will have further convinced his admirers that he has both the intellectual heft and unusually extensive experience to make a great success of the role.

The revelation in The Spectator last week that the Treasury is more concerned with boosting its DEI outcomes than hiring people who can count, was – for those who have served in our blessed civil service – shocking but not surprising. But the truth is that this numeracy story is not a wacky aberration or an isolated case. It is, to quote Dominic Cummings, ‘the system working as intended’. Let me explain. The dominance of DEI ideology in recruitment to some of the most powerful roles in the state has long roots, going back to the Blair era. As I’ve reported before, the main graduate internship scheme for the civil service excluded middle-class white applicants until very recently. But BLM further deranged the mandarin mind.

At the entrance to the hangar-like Olympia conference centre is a huge, framed drawing, showing a design for an imagined triumphal arch. It depicts the intellectual, scientific and cultural contributions to the world made by Western civilisation, from the abolition of slavery to shipbuilding and the caravel. ‘Civilisation’ – and how to defend it – was the primary concern of those attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference this week. Over three days, 4,000 attendees pondered the ‘civilisational moment’ at which we stand. Down one fork in the road lies freedom, prosperity and flourishing. Down the other: stagnation, division and managed decline.

There were lots of contested takeaways from the Makerfield by-election this week. But the one thing that seems incontrovertible is that almost everyone wanted to get rid of Keir Starmer. Some of those people voted for Reform, more did so for Burnham – in large part because that was the quickest way to change PM. Starmer appears to have a deeply-held superiority complex – of morals as well as talents – that explains his habit of telling everyone else that they are irresponsible and incompetent This is effectively the end of Starmer’s premiership, with reports today that he may step down as soon as Monday. I have spoken previously of Sir Keir as a Beadlet anemone – a red jelly-like blob – that sticks stubbornly in place until forcibly dislodged.