James Kirkup

As inflation rips into living standards, everyone is feeling the pinch and many are looking for help. Some people are asking for more from the state. That really means help from their fellow taxpayers, because sooner or later, that’s where public money comes from. We all have our own views about which groups merit that help: working-age parents in the lowest income bracket are at the top of my list. Readers will doubtless have their own thoughts on which marginalised and disadvantaged people are most deserving. Amid the tumultuous national conversation about the cost of living, there’s always a danger that some unfortunate souls might be overlooked.

Friday 29 June 2012 isn’t a famous date in British history, but it deserves at least a footnote. Because I reckon it’s the day the Brexit referendum became inevitable – largely thanks to David Cameron’s inability to stop talking. What follows is my argument, based on personal involvement, that Cameron set the referendum process in motion at least partly by accident. It’s a bit long and possibly even self-indulgent, but I hope it might also be useful to people writing the second draft of history. A decade ago today, Cameron was prime minister and attending an EU summit in Brussels. Unlike some summits of the period, this one had ended in reasonable time, allowing leaders to do their post-match press-conferences and fly home late on Friday night.

Yesterday’s Times carried a report that will only add to Sir Keir Starmer’s troubles. It quoted several members of the shadow ministerial team suggesting that Starmer is dull and unimpressive.That will only sharpen the perception, held by quite a few Westminster people, that the Labour leader isn’t doing as well as he should be, given the government’s weaknesses and failings. ‘Keir Starmer is not dragging his party down but he's not transforming its fortunes either’. That was the conclusion of a New Statesman analysis a few weeks ago, and probably a fair one. The problem for Starmer is the fact that Labour needs that transformation. One of the most overlooked facts of political life is just how badly Labour did in 2019.

I’ve been writing about sex and gender for a few years now, largely because it’s a subject that needs to be better understood. Far too much about this issue is shrouded in misinformation and dishonesty, not least because some of the people and groups interested in the issue have made considerable efforts to keep this stuff out of the public gaze. Slowly, the veil is being lifted and questions of sex and gender more freely discussed. It’s not yet getting the media coverage it deserves, but the employment tribunal case of Allison Bailey is helping.

It’s a helicopter day at Westminster. I’m writing this at my desk, which is about 200 metres from the House of Lords. My office is full of the racket made by a chopper flitting about over the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall, providing aerial camera shots of politicians – mainly the PM – moving around the place. The reason today is the Sue Gray report, but helicopter days are relatively common at Westminster. The drone of the rotors is the easiest way to tell that this is a Big News day, when journalists spend more than the usual amount of time talking about extraordinary events and major developments. As with so many things, there’s a mundane reason helicopter days seem to come around so often.

Would it be good for the Conservatives to lose power at the next election? Should smart young Tories with an eye on the future want to lose? Those are questions I’ve heard discussed in Conservative circles recently. And those questions arise from a Tory reading of politics that goes something like this: Boris is leading conservatism into a dead end. Lacking principles and consistency of ideas, he has left the Conservatives without any long-term strategy or even purpose. He’s squandered an 80-seat majority and will achieve no significant domestic policy change in this parliament. Woeful at governing, his Tories are now good only for wedge-issue PR campaigns and attacking Labour.

Wandsworth, London I’m writing this in Labour-controlled Wandsworth, my leafy bit of south London. More precisely, I’m writing it sitting outside the sort of coffee shop where the drinks come in jam jars and everyone has a beard. I’d also bet that every one of the 30-odd people here – staff and customers – has at least one university degree. In the 20 or so years I’ve lived in London, Wandsworth has gone from being a slightly drab place to the sort of area where bright young (and middle-aged) things with high incomes come to live and play. The two (bearded) twenty-something men on the table next to me are a case in point.

This is a short story about Mark Harper MP, who is making headlines. These days Harper is probably best known as a backbench critic of Covid restrictions, but he once had a promising career as a minister, including a spell in David Cameron’s cabinet between 2015 to 2016. But that career hit a bump in early 2014 when he quit his post as immigration minister. I was running the Telegraph’s political team at the time. Many ministerial resignations are unmemorable, but Harper’s sticks in the memory. He quit because he learned that a cleaner he paid to look after his London flat did not have legal permission to live and work in the UK.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want to talk about penises. He’s going to have to do it anyway, and he’s not going to be alone. The Labour leader was interviewed by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Monday, becoming the latest journalist to test Starmer on questions of sex and gender. Ferrari asked, can a woman have a penis? Starmer’s verbatim response, offered with a pained expression and sorrowful intonation: Nick, I’m not… I don’t think we can conduct this debate with… you know… I just... I don’t think, erm, discussing this issue in this issue helps anyone in the long run. What I want to see is a reform of the law as it is, but I am also an advocate of safe spaces for women.

In the latest installment from the idiot age of Twitter, #ungratefulcow has been trending. The reason? Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had expressed, mildly and politely, some unhappiness that it had taken Her Britannic Majesty’s Government six years to free her from Iranian captivity. Cue a handful of shallow trolls slagging her off, and a lot of other people slagging them off. I say ‘mildy and politely’ because to my mind, the salient characteristic of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s comments was its restraint. Most people, I submit, would be furious beyond words to miss most of their only child’s first years of life.

Immigration used to be the most-discussed issue in British politics. It gets less attention these days, for reasons too varied to go into here. But even though some voters have been focused on other things, there have been significant changes. Some have been good. Others bad. And the bad ones are about to collide with the Ukrainian crisis. The positive bits of the immigration story have mainly been around regulated, economically-driven migration. Britain’s post-EU migration regime is, well, not as bad as it could have been. It’s not as easy as it was for EU nationals to come here to work, but it’s a bit easier for non-EU nationals to enter. The overall effect has been less a tightening of entry rules than a rebalancing.

Recently, a friend forwarded me a letter he’d received from his children’s school, an independent secondary in London, to mark National Apprenticeships Week. The letter set out to parents everything the school was doing to provide children with information, options and contacts to explore apprenticeships, either in combination with or as an alternative to a university degree. The school isn’t household-name famous, but it’s still prestigious, exclusive and, yes, expensive: a year’s fees cost something close to the national average full-time salary.

It’s been an angry, tense few days around parliament. The Sue Gray report saw Boris Johnson accused of lying, and starting another fight about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile that led to more allegations of dishonesty and bad faith. Anyone glancing at news from the Commons might get confirmation that MPs are a worthless sack of rats who spend all their time scratching and biting at each other. Which is why it’s important to draw attention to the other side of the Commons, which tends to get less attention: the human, collegiate side that was on display when MPs said goodbye to Jack Dromey who was the member for Birmingham Erdington until his death last month.