Max Jeffery

Please, one last indulgence, implored Alastair Campbell. The previous two hours had been bad enough, sitting through Campbell being ‘interviewed’ by former Today host Mishal Husain about his godawful new self-help book. And the hours before had also been painful, trying to read that book, Persevilience, which is somehow both superficial and incomprehensible. Yet, as the launch event inched to a close, Tony Blair’s old spin doctor wanted still more attention. In fact, no, he wanted more than still more attention. He wanted to masturbate. Would you mind, he asked, standing in front of a giant projection of his own face, if I played ‘Ode to Joy’ on the bagpipes? It was precisely 9:34 p.m.

In swoops Danny Kruger. He is a late replacement for Zia Yusuf, who has pulled out due to diary commitments, but he is received in the Spectator lounge at Reform’s conference in Birmingham like he was always on the billing. The room is full. The man who wrote David Cameron’s ‘hug a hoodie’ speech and served as Boris Johnson’s political secretary is accepted by Reformers. No Conservative gambled as much as Kruger in leaving the party. He was the first proper Tory (one whose career was on the up) to switch sides. Reform members appreciate that. It is almost a year since Kruger left the Conservative party, and he has spent the last 12 months making preparations for what Reform will do in power. Michael Gove begins a live recording of the Quite Right!

The phrase ‘Starmer’s Britain’ was first articulated three years before he got power. At 6:28 p.m. on 9 May 2021, a figure named ‘scrambled egg localist [rose emoji] [Union Jack emoji] [stars emoji]’ tweeted: ‘In Starmer’s Britain there will be no rich people or trains, leopard print will be abolished, and every woman will be pregnant and barefoot’. Recent events had shown Starmer at his most gormless. On 6 May, Labour was mauled by the Conservatives in the Hartlepool by-election, and on 9 May, Starmer tried to respond. He replaced ‘Anneliese Dodds’ with ‘Rachel Reeves’ as shadow chancellor, and attempted to sack Angela Rayner (wearer of the leopard print) but ended up making her ‘shadow first secretary of state’.

On Ardoyne Road on Wednesday afternoon, the original conflict resumed. Two loyalists passed a couple of nationalists, and they exchanged hostilities. ‘Go on then, come here and do something!’ said one of the nationalist kids. The young loyalists – recognisable in black tracksuits and balaclavas – continued up the hill as a third nationalist wheelied past them on a motorbike. On Tuesday, the first night of the disorder in Belfast, Ardoyne seemed to be taken by a providential Christian comradeship. In one of the city’s harshest ‘interface areas’, Catholics and Protestants came together in protest against the knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Less than 24 hours later, however, things had returned to normal. Night one of rioting was won by the most extreme participants.

‘In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naive and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate,’ William Dalrymple confesses in the Folio Society’s 25-year anniversary edition of his 1989 debut. Xanadu retraces Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to China. The author, an Ampleforth and Cambridge educated 21-year-old, pretends he is Robert Byron. In 2015, books like this needed apologetic preambles. Dalrymple couldn’t let anyone think he sympathised with this younger, lesser man.  No, modern Willie is an enlightened guy. Yesterday, he was in a London Bridge theatre addressing a conference of the Britain Palestine Project. He is its new patron. Dalrymple is a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, but is now going for it with fervour.

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.

Freddie Scappaticci was a thickset man with dark features and a walrus moustache. He was born in Belfast in 1946, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army when the Troubles began and by the 1980s was a senior member of the organisation, whose job was to hunt for British spies. It has been widely believed for years that Scappaticci was himself a spy for the British government, operating under the codename ‘Stakeknife’. The government has always said it could ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND) this suggestion. Today, Operation Kenova, which has spent nine years investigating Stakeknife’s crimes, urged the government to officially reveal the identity of this ruthless undercover operative.

They were John Major’s kind of people, the audience in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre in the Cheng Kin Ku Building at the London School of Economics last night. They filed in quietly, took their seats politely, and waited relaxedly for the ex prime minister. One man slouched, careless blotches of black dye on his thinning cirrus hair, while another sterilised his glasses with an individually wrapped wipe, going in every corner and crevice until it all looked stupidly clean. A third flicked through the Financial Times. It was 6:25 p.m., five minutes before Sir John was due. Only a man with no worries takes the morning’s news in the evening. Sir John would say the audience was ‘at ease with itself’, and that is exactly how he likes his people.