Gavin Mortimer

The incompetence of MI5 in failing to prevent Salman Abedi detonating his bomb at the Manchester Arena in 2017 beggars belief. According to Sir John Saunders, who chaired the inquiry into the Islamist atrocity which killed 22 people, a better response from MI5 ‘might have prevented the attack’.  In publishing his 226-page report, Sir John did not spare the intelligence service for missing several opportunities to thwart Abedi, who made little attempt to conceal his extremist ideology. MI5’s most calamitous mistake was to sit on a piece of intelligence that they received, information which has not been disclosed for national security reasons.  Has a deadly brew of arrogance and naivety been further addled in recent years by political correctness?

Fifty years ago, one of the most controversial books of the late 20th century was published. Camp of the Saints was written by Jean Raspail, a French travel writer, who explained decades later that the idea for the novel had come to him one day in 1972, as he looked out at the Mediterranean from the Côte d'Azur. ‘I don't know what went through my mind,’ he said. ‘The immigration problem didn't exist yet. The question suddenly arose: ‘What if they came?’ The book is the story of a million migrants from India, who landed on the south coast of France in an armada of boats. They were welcomed by the left, who saw them as fellow citizens of the world, cheering them on their way to Paris with a cry of ‘We’re all from the Ganges now!

UEFA has published its independent review into the chaotic Champions League final last May and it is brutally honest in admitting its own failings. The events in and around the Stade de France as Liverpool played Real Madrid in European football’s showpiece event made global headlines for all the wrong reasons. Television pictures of French police teargassing supporters, including children, were beamed around the world and caused a political furore in Paris. The government, notably the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudea-Castera, initially blamed English fans for the trouble, a position they maintained for weeks until the accumulation of evidence elicited what can best be described as a reluctant and half apology from Darmanin.

The reaction in some quarters to William Shawcross’s review of Prevent, the UK’s counter-extremism programme, has been predictable. The Muslim Council of Britain, Amnesty International, the Guardian and Cage have all criticised the report and the author, with Amnesty launching a particularly unpleasant ad hominem attack on Shawcross, describing him as ‘bigoted’.  None of the above consider that Shawcross was the right man to lead the report because of a remark he made a decade ago stating that Europe’s relationship with Islam ‘is among the greatest, most terrifying problems of our time’.

Life in Europe is becoming increasingly precarious; a case of hoping it’s not your turn to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a Salisbury court on Monday a 21-year-old Afghan with a long history of violence was convicted of the brutal murder of Thomas Roberts; on Wednesday, a Palestinian allegedly stabbed two people to death on a German train. That same day in Spain a Moroccan under a deportation order was arrested after a verger was killed with a machete and a priest badly wounded in two related attacks in the city of Algeciras. Meanwhile in France an Algerian and a Kosovan are in custody after two incidents earlier in the month, one in Paris and the other in Strasbourg, where knives were used to inflict terrible injuries on bystanders.

It sums ups the sorry state of the Socialist party in France that they can’t even elect a new leader. After yesterday’s vote by members, the two contenders are this morning both claiming victory.  To be frank, whether it is the pretender Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, or the incumbent Olivier Faure, who emerges victorious is immaterial; the decline of the Socialists will continue, as I’ve been documenting on Coffee House for a number of years.   Put simply, Le Pen won the vote of men and women for whom identity still matters In 2006 the Socialists boasted a membership of 280,000, a figure that today stands at 41,000. Last week the party’s activists spurned the opportunity to initiate real change by eliminating Hélène Geoffroy in the first round of voting.

The French are falling back in love with nuclear energy, and so is their president. In 2019, only 34 per cent of people polled expressed a positive view of France’s nuclear programme, a figure that had increased to 51 per cent two years later. The most recent survey revealed it to be 60 per cent. If Emmanuel Macron had been polled he would have given nuclear energy the thumbs up, a reversal of his position when he was first elected president in 2017. He came to office promising to reduce the share of nuclear power in the energy mix to 50 per cent by 2025.

Last week the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was confronted at a constituency meeting by a Holocaust survivor called Joan Salter. The 83-year-old courteously took Braverman to task for what she described as her inflammatory comments concerning the 45,000 people who arrived illegally in Britain last year, people Ms Salter called ‘refugees’. She said that words such as ‘invasion’, reminded her of the language ‘used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others.’ Salter, who was awarded an MBE for her work in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Britain from Belgium, via the United States, in 1947.

Suella Braverman sparked a backlash last November when she described the number of small boats crossing the Channel as an ‘invasion’. The chattering classes objected to the ‘inflammatory language’ of the Home Secretary rather than the fact that 45,756 people entered Britain illegally in 2022.  The provocative word this month is ‘infinite’, used by a government source in admitting that even if Britain did stem the flow of Albanians crossing the Channel there are many thousands more migrants desperate to make it to Britain. ‘Their places on the boats would be filled by Somalis, Eritreans or Afghans who can’t afford to pay as much as the Albanians,’ they explained. The source is not wrong.