Patrick West

The Labour government’s u-turn on freebies, its disclosure last night that it will no longer accept donations for clothes, is an admission that it has got it wrong. But ‘wrong’ in which sense of the word? Wrong in that they admit that they committed an error, or wrong in that they have behaved immorally? Their language would suggest very much the former. Nearly two-thirds of all voters say Starmer’s decision to accept freebies for his wife was unacceptable Keir Starmer’s allies concede that there was a ‘perception’ issue after the Prime Minister accepted clothing worth and spectacles together worth more than £18,000. This has been accompanied by similar gifts accepted by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister.

Is it possible to change your class? Not just superficially – in moving up and down the hierarchy of social standing – but change it inwardly so that you transform your very sense of self? Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch seems to think so. Speaking on Chopper’s Political Podcast this week, the shadow housing secretary said that although she grew up in a middle-class family, she became working class when she took a job at McDonald’s while studying for her A-levels. Explaining her conversion, she put it baldly: ‘I grew up in a middle-class family, but I became working class when I was 16 working in McDonald’s.’ She elaborates:  Just understanding how many people there were single parents, and they were working there to make ends meet.

To some people, the culture wars don’t matter. They are an irrelevance, an indulgence. A distraction from the material, bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, like paying the bills or finding an affordable place to live. This sentiment was echoed by Robert Jenrick, the Conservative leadership contender. As reported in the Times yesterday, Jenrick told a meeting of young activists that he didn’t want his party to ‘go down a rabbit hole of culture wars’, and that the public were more concerned about the cost of living and public services than gender issues. The culture war is not an idle luxury.

On Times Radio this morning Lucy Powell, Leader of the House of Commons, said that she wanted the government to ‘tackle the scourge of vaping’. Of course she does. This is the next natural step for a government intent on stopping people enjoying themselves, or exercising individual freedom. Never mind that vaping, according to Public Health England, is 95 per cent safer than smoking and that it is recommended by the NHS for smokers looking to quit. Government ministers just can’t help themselves.  There’s nothing more morally intoxicating than stopping others deriving pleasure from something you regard as sinful Labour are drunk on power.

It has been widely observed that we live in a society marked by cancellation, censorship and cowardice in the face of mob rule. To this we might add a fourth ‘c’: capitulation. The decision announced yesterday by Rachel Reeves to offer junior doctors an average pay rise of a 22.3 per cent in an effort to end the strikes is the most glaring example, being all-too-reminiscent of the catastrophic efforts by the craven Labour governments of the 1970s to placate the unions with inflation-accelerating pay-deals. Whether this announcement, and the decision to give six million public sector workers including nurses, teachers and police officers rises of about 5 per cent, will satisfy today’s disgruntled is not yet clear. But the signs are already ominous.

The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of nature and the climate, and was attended by charities, businesses and direct action groups. Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot During the march, the national treasure, millionaire and jet-setter Thompson was asked if she supported Just Stop Oil, days after the group had vandalised Stonehenge. 'I think I support anyone who fights this extraordinary battle,’ she replied. 'We cannot take any more oil out of the ground. I mean, there's much argument about it.

You may laugh. You may have gasped in disbelief. But yes, it’s true, we now have a new socio-economic classification, known collectively as the ‘working class, benefit class, criminal class, and/or underclass’. This, is at least, is the latest addition to the list of ‘traditionally disadvantaged groups’ especially welcomed by The Camden People’s Theatre, North London, in a job advert – alongside the more familiar(-ish) categories of ‘D/deaf and/or disabled’, ‘neurodiverse’, ‘LGBTQ+’ and that other newby for our times: ‘global majority’. This new umbrella category was made known on X by charity worker Anne-Marie Canning on Monday, and the advert has since gone viral, attracting much derision, not least for its anachronistic and confused taxonomy.

Much has been made in recent weeks, and especially in recent days, about the degrees of ignorance often displayed by those protesting for the people of Gaza and Palestine. To put it pithily, many don’t seem to know from which river and to which sea they chant about with such passion. Such ignorance has prompted some to conclude that these protests are less about showing solidarity with beleaguered Palestinians and more an excuse to vent incoherent anti-Western sentiment, or, more sinisterly, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Some of the protestors have been replicating what they believe to be the conditions in Gaza Similarly, the cosplay in evidence at university campuses in the USA has also cast doubt on the authenticity of these demonstrations.

The battle over sexism and equality at the Garrick Club continues to rumble on. It was revealed yesterday that several of its members, including Stephen Fry, Sting, and Dire Straits frontman, Mark Knopfler, had put their name to a letter threatening to quit the Garrick unless members vote to admit women. They have been joined by luminaries from the world of theatre, film and television, who had been warned that they were in an untenable position because of a ‘very public controversy’ over the issue. The broadcaster John Simpson pronounced on X yesterday that he and many others ‘would also find it impossible to stay’ if the club didn’t open its doors to women. This is the luvvie-spat that just won’t go away.

As a conservative non-smoker who in his youth was a libertarian twenty-a-day man, I can see both sides of the argument over the government’s recent anti-smoking legislation. Sure, cigarettes can be delicious, and it’s entirely up to the adult individual, not the state, whether he or she decides to light up. But as I finally came to accept eleven years ago, smoking is also a profoundly stupid habit, and if government interference can prevent people ever taking it up, then so be it. I was fervently against the 2007 smoking ban in pubs, but came to acknowledge that it greatly helped in the process of de-normalising smoking. And de-normalised smoking has thoroughly become. History has no guiding spirit, direction or end goal.

Foreign wars have the unfortunate side-effect of bringing out the self-regarding narcissist in people. This is made all the more pronounced in our era of social media, in which some types appear to think that mere tweets can stop wars, and that an appropriately-altered Facebook profile might bring about world peace. The latest casualty in this regard has been local government. And I don’t just mean the Scottish government and the Scottish National party, who have had delusions of grandeur long before the Israel-Gaza conflagration begun. I mean local, provincial councils.