David Shipley

On Sunday we learned that a former bodyguard to the leader of Hamas was granted citizenship in Britain before allegedly ‘plotting’ a terrorist attack against Jews in Europe. This has shown just how dangerous our migration and borders policies are, and how unsafe they have made us. The country is full of people who wish us ill and more arrive every week. Even Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, has described mass migration as a national security threat. Last week we also learned that some illegal crossings were not being intercepted, meaning illegal migrants might well be bringing weapons with them.

A new MRP poll has predicted that were an election held tomorrow, Nigel Farage’s Reform party would be the third biggest in the Commons, on 123 seats, against 130 for the Tories and 241 for Labour. The poll shows that Reform have been particularly hit by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, who would take over three percentage points from Farage’s party and cost them marginal seats across the country. On the face of it this might all seem to be grim news for Nigel Farage, and cause for celebration by Kemi Badenoch, but there are good reasons to challenge this narrative.

Yesterday, in America, Andy Burnham announced a new policy which has already been met with concern within the US government. Our PM promised to ‘stem’ the ‘poisonous tide’ of ‘industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK’ by establishing a new ‘National Centre for Information Defence’ (NCID). This is necessary, the PM explained, because ‘Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people’s fears’, in order to enact ‘an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community – creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain status, first announced almost a year ago, are still to be implemented, and have been facing increasing opposition from within the parliamentary Labour party and the wider left. The latest challenge is from the Trades Union Congress (TUC), where delegates have voted to exempt any workers already in the UK from changes which would see them wait 15 years for settlement, rather than five years.

HMP Millsike, the country’s newest jail which opened in March 2025, has been criticised in the strongest terms by its Independent Monitoring Board (IMB). According to the IMB, the jail’s opening ‘was chaotic, with basic processes, like drawing keys, locking doors and counting prisoners, not yet established’, and that the jail suffers from serious ‘design faults’ which have been found in ‘other new prisons’ including ‘blind spots for officers on landings’, meaning that prisoners can be violent or pass contraband unobserved. This is despite the prison, which cost £400 million to build, having more than 1,500 CCTV cameras.

After weeks of pressure, the Prime Minister has announced that the men who killed on-duty policeman Andrew Harper will not be released early. The Sentencing Act’s early release scheme will now be amended to exclude a series of offences. In fairness to the government, their plans go much further than I expected. Those who have committed, or attempted murder, manslaughter, cruelty to children, a wide range of sexual offences (even including ‘possession of an indecent photograph of a child’ which is often, appallingly, treated as less serious by our system), causing or allowing the death of a child and causing death by driving will no longer be eligible for early release. This is a good decision.

After two years in office, Labour may have begun to realise the Tories were right. One of Keir Starmer’s earliest acts as Prime Minister was to scrap what he called a ‘gimmick’ – the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, under which illegal arrivals were to be deported to the African country. At the time some 52,000 migrants had been identified for deportation, but Starmer said it had ‘never been a deterrent’, and instead promised to ‘smash’ the people smuggling gangs. Now, with Starmer gone, and after two years of ‘smash the gangs’ around 80,000illegal migrants have crossed the Channel, representing almost 40 per cent of all small boat arrivals since records began in 2018.

A decade after the Brexit vote, YouGov has conducted a large-scale survey of the nation’s attitudes towards migration. Their work shows that the British people are significantly more negative about the subject than they were in 2016. On each occasion, people were asked ‘do you think the level of immigration over the past ten years has been good or bad for Britain?’ In 2016, a third of us thought it had been ‘mostly bad’, and 38 per cent said it was ‘both good and bad’. Now, 43 per cent of us said ‘mostly bad’, and just 29 per cent said ‘both good and bad’. Notably, the opinions of 2016 Remain voters have shifted the most: almost twice as many of them now say that migration has been bad for Britain. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, really.

Andy Burnham wants ‘all parts of the country…to play their part’. Not because we’re at war, or another pandemic is sweeping across the world. No. What the Prime Minister wants is for every town and village in the land to house ‘refugees and asylum seekers’– he believes it wouldn’t be fair if we ‘have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers’.

Two days is a very long time in British politics. On Saturday, it was reported that Andy Burnham might block the early release of two men who killed policeman Andrew Harper. No doubt the PM was motivated in part by a petition making that demand, which now has almost 900,000 signatures. On Monday, Downing Street was briefing that it ‘cannot stop’ the killers' early releases, claiming it is ‘not possible’ to exempt just these two men from the scheme. By Tuesday morning, the story had changed again. Now we were being told the PM has asked the Justice Secretary to find a way. Angela Rayner, the Communities Secretary, has said that plans will be announced in September to block early releases for those who killed police officers.

Just over a week ago Andy Burnham came under attack over the impending early releases from prison. His critics included the widow of Andrew Harper, a policeman killed on duty in 2019 by being dragged behind a car for a mile. Andrew’s widow, Lissie, described the possible early release of two of his killers as ‘deplorable’. Burnham insisted that ‘keeping the public safe will be my top priority’ and said of the early release policy that he would ‘look at in detail before we go further forward’. Clearly Burnham wanted to do anything to avoid being the PM who released rapists early. But he will still be releasing men who have done very awful things Now, having presumably done all the detailed looking, the PM has a plan, just in time for the start of his holiday.

Andy Burnham coasted into No. 10 via an uncontested leadership election in which he was never forced to share his views on the great and grave issues facing Britain. As a result, when he became Prime Minister we knew little to nothing about how he planned to address the migration crisis, the energy crisis, the worklessness crisis or the prisons crisis. But to govern is to be confronted with events and forced to choose and so we are fast learning who Burnham is. Last week’s scenes from Ceuta, as 60,000 Moroccans swarmed across the Spanish border, seemed to represent the gulf between the rich, soft West, and the people who come here because they want the wealth we are all too eager to give them.

Forty years ago today Suzy Lamplugh, a 25-year-old estate agent, left her office in Fulham. Colleagues believed she was meeting a client named ‘Mr Kipper’. Despite decades of police investigations, her body has never been found. Indeed, according to Mike Barley, a former police officer who spent many years trying to find Suzy’s body, and her killer, all we know for certain now is the same three things we knew on the evening of her disappearance.  I spoke with Mike, who has written a book: Suzy Lamplugh: The Inside Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Missing Person Investigation. He explained to me that the only things we know for sure are that Suzy left her office around 12:40 p.m. on Monday 28 July 1986, her car was found on Stevenage Road at 10:01 p.m.

In 2019, a police officer, Andrew Harper, was killed while on duty. After responding to a burglary he chased after a car, and was caught in a strap attached to it. The car was driven away, and Harper was dragged for a mile behind it, at an average speed of 42.5 miles per hour. His body was found by colleagues, and a later post-mortem showed he had died of multiple injuries, suggesting he had been caught between the car and the road. He was 28 when he died and had been married less than a month. The car was driven by 18-year-old Henry Long. With him in the car were 17-year-olds Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole. All three were charged, and, in 2020, acquitted of murder. Long pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years.

Just before the second anniversary of his horrific murders, it has emerged that Southport killer Axel Rudakabana has been transferred from Belmarsh prison to Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital. Although this does not change the fact that he is serving a prison sentence, Broadmoor is a more comfortable and safer environment than a jail like Belmarsh. It’s also far more expensive. Instead of the approximately £100,000 per year Rudakubana cost us as a prisoner, he will now cost over £300,000 per year. He will remain in Broadmoor until psychiatrists decide he’s well enough to return to prison. Rudakubana has previously been described by a senior mental health clinician as having a ‘lack of empathy’ and a ‘fascination with violence’.

Louise Haigh is back in government. The former transport secretary resigned in November 2024 following news reports that she had a conviction for an offence of fraud by misrepresentation, which she committed in 2013. The conviction was the result of Haigh pleading guilty to having lied about the loss of her company Blackberry so that her employer would replace it with an iPhone. She had reported a ‘terrifying’ mugging in London to police, claiming that her work mobile had been stolen. Her sentence was a ‘conditional discharge’ – essentially, she was set free with the promise to not do it again. Such a conviction did not bar her from standing for parliament, although it does not appear that she disclosed it during the 2015 election campaign which saw her elected as an MP.

On his last day as Justice Secretary, David Lammy was accused of ‘fighting to cover up foreigners’ crimes’. This is because the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which he led is taking legal action against the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), seeking to overturn a ruling which instructed them to publish conviction data by nationality and offence type for the past seven years. This ICO ruling followed a Freedom of Information request by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC). Why are they so determined to avoid publishing the data?

Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has often been criticised during his two years in the role. For his decision to authorise Lucy Connolly’s prosecution, his angry denials that two-tier justice exists, his ‘fanatical devotion to international law’, being ‘dangerously wrong about the ECHR’, an apparent dislike for the British state and its soldiers, and for ludicrous hyperbole such as when he claimed that critics of the ECHR want migrants to drown. It’s been easy to picture him as a sinister figure, using domestic and international law to serve his politics rather than the interests of his people.