Henry Hill

It was widely expected that Reform were going to do well in yesterday’s elections – but perhaps not this well. So far, its performance has been at the very top of pollsters’ expectations, a fact made all the more remarkable by the fact that several of its most promising races have been postponed to next year. If you think the major parties are panicking now, imagine how much worse it would be if Nigel Farage’s party had also just swept to victory in the Welsh Senedd, or posted a stupendous result in the Greater Lincolnshire mayoral race. Even allowing for that, these results are extraordinary. When I spoke to pollsters yesterday, they didn’t think it was probable that Reform would win control of a council, with the possible exception of Doncaster district council.

Kemi Badenoch, pressed on the Today programme about the leisurely pace of her policy agenda, and the looming council elections, insisted on Tuesday morning that ‘welfare is not a local government issue’. On the ballot instead, she suggested, were such issues as ‘who’s fixing the roads, potholes, [and] adult social care’. This answer seems plausible, and that tells us much about what has gone so wrong with local government, and the increasingly huge democratic deficit in our local politics. For adult social care is a welfare issue. It is true that town halls do not govern capital-W Welfare, narrowly conceived in terms of Universal Credit, Pension Credit, et al.

When Kemi Badenoch’s leadership got off to a less-than-inspiring start, her defenders made a reasonable case that she needed more time. The Conservative and Unionist party had just suffered one of the most catastrophic routs in its long history; it would take more than a few months to right the ship. But as month has followed month, disquiet has been growing in Tory circles. The latest reports about Badenoch’s showdown with Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) do not inspire confidence either. This is telling, because to an audience of Tory activists, CCHQ ought to be an easy target.

Do you remember when, last December, the Irish government took the United Kingdom to court over proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles? They, and many domestic critics in the UK, said that plans to establish a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission – in which individuals could receive an amnesty in exchange for honest testimony – amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for people who may have committed terrible crimes.  'Yes, I blew him up,' Michael Hayes said Well, nothing quite puts that story in perspective like this week's report that Michael Hayes, a former IRA commander now living in the Republic of Ireland, has openly boasted about being the mastermind who planned the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten.  'Yes, I blew him up.

‘Mad’. ‘Disgusting.’ These are the words Rory Stewart, the great centrist king over the water, uses to describe Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to expel Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party. He goes on: ‘Jeremy Corbyn, whatever you think of him, is a major figure who represents a very significant part of Labour history and heritage.’  Well, it’s a view. And perhaps it is not surprising, since Stewart was one of the Conservative MPs Boris Johnson expelled for collaborating with the opposition against the government’s Brexit policy in 2019.   It’s still an odd association for Stewart to make.

Whoever wins the Conservative leadership next week, one can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for them. Even if it’s Boris Johnson. Liz Truss fulfilled her inadvertent promise to ‘hit the ground from day one’, and her successor might do the same. One of first points of impact could be the Medium-Term Fiscal Statement due on October 31, when Hunt or his successor try to sell a divided party and an unhappy nation on a course of bitter public spending medicine that none of them want. Another is Northern Ireland. Even as the would-be candidates struggle for nominations, Labour is taking the chance to go on the offensive.

Last night’s spat between the Foreign Office and the Treasury was hardly reassuring for Unionists. If you missed it, a Treasury amendment proposed a change to customs regulations where ‘UK’ was replaced with ‘Great Britain’. What’s so bad about that, you might ask. The answer is that it would have codified the carving-out of Northern Ireland as a separate legal entity. This is something that the protocol establishes: Northern Ireland continues to follow EU customs rules while Great Britain is able to diverge. But this breaking off of Northern Ireland is something the government was supposed to be trying to prevent.

When was the last time the Home Office produced some good news? Even in the middle of a crisis that most will concede the government has handled quite well, the department has managed to generate the usual abysmal headlines. Even the Foreign Office, slow as it was in cracking down on Russian oligarchs, couldn’t steal the limelight. There may perhaps be a narrow defence to be made over particular policies. Sources in the department point out that the Ukrainian government would prefer refugees to remain in neighbouring countries than come all the way to Britain. But take a step back and such arguments start to look ridiculous. Britain wouldn’t have to take millions of refugees to create an easier pathway for the few fleeing war with family here.

Ideas, as a fictitious terrorist once said, are bulletproof. This might be stretching the truth a little, but at the very least they are not easily slain. So long as they appeal to someone’s sentiments or self-interest, no amount of logical dismemberment is enough to put them down for good. The zombie stalking the discourse today is the suggestion that the Scottish Conservatives should split away from the national party. This zombie has grown no less horrible since Tory members put it in the ground by electing Ruth Davidson ten years ago. So, let’s break out the gasoline and the matches and see if we can’t see it off for good this time. Boris Johnson has never been popular with the Scottish Conservatives.

In his resignation letter, the Brexit minister Lord Frost justified his decision to quit by pointing to tax rises and Covid restrictions. But there is another potential reason given the timing. Late last week, the UK conceded that the European Court of Justice could have the final say over the Brexit settlement in Northern Ireland. Frost is a negotiator. It might be that he didn't want to undermine his successor by over-emphasising the scale of the British retreat. Or it could be that he is holding back dissatisfaction with the negotiations for a second broadside at the Prime Minister. But it is a critical development. ECJ oversight was always a red line for Brexiteers. Sovereignty demands that the final arbiter of British law resides in the United Kingdom.

The British commentariat has not covered itself in glory in its reaction to Dominic Raab's proposed reforms to judicial review. The Times reported yesterday that the government is planning to introduce a novel legislative tactic, the ‘Interpretation Bill’, to try to shift the balance of power back towards parliament. To be clear: there is no prospect of ministers being given the power to strike down court judgments they dislike. In fact, the core of the proposal is perfectly orthodox. The proper way for parliament to change the law is through legislation, and an Interpretation Bill is legislation. It would need to be passed in the normal way, and MPs would have to vote it through. No despotism involved.

What are the armed forces for? This is the question that hangs over every defence review, and one that recent governments have been averse to answering. The problem is this: since the end of the Cold War, defence has gradually slipped further and further down the political priority list. At the same time, ministers and senior officers have been reluctant to publicly scale back their ambitions for what the military should do. As a result, instead of making decisive cuts to certain capacities in order to maintain others, we have gradually shrunk all the services to the point where they face serious operational difficulties. Britain boasts two aircraft carriers, for example, yet lacks the support ships to put two (or perhaps even one) full carrier groups to sea.

One of the worst features of devolution is the tendency of devocrats to insist on doing their own thing in all circumstances and at whatever cost. The idea that decentralisation would lead to experimentation and the sharing of best practice now seems hopelessly naive. Instead, politicians in Edinburgh and Cardiff try to use nationalism to earth criticism, treating an attack on their records as an insult to the Scottish or Welsh people. Perhaps the most abject example was when a Welsh minister accused Michael Gove of harbouring ‘colonial attitudes’ when the then-education secretary penned an article comparing English and Welsh school outcomes.

Sinn Fein is not a normal party. It sometimes feels impolite to point it out in the era of the Belfast Agreement. But the legal amnesty from criminal charges offered to IRA terrorists as part of the peace process does not oblige individuals to abstain from moral judgement of their political wing. Especially when it continues to venerate those terrorists. The past year offered a grim reminder of this when the party’s leadership turned out in force, in the middle of lockdown, for a show of strength at the funeral of Bobby Storey, a Provisional IRA ‘volunteer’ who spent 20 years in prison for various offences.