Stephen Daisley

Everyone else is thinking it, so I’m just going to say it: we need Tony Blair back in Downing Street. I don’t know by what mechanism and I don’t especially care. A by-election would be ideal, I suppose. They’re all the rage these days. Sedgefield is now known as Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (ugh) and Alan Strickland should do the decent thing and step down in the national interest. If for some reason this didn’t work out, there’s always the Lords. I’ve never been keen on this modern convention that prime ministers cannot lead from the upper house. The last PM who did so was, of course, the Marquess of Salisbury. He left office for the third and final time in 1902, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

Peter Murrell’s £400,000 spending spree is the biggest, and certainly the most entertaining, political scandal to hit Scotland in years. The former SNP chief executive pleaded guilty to embezzlement at Edinburgh’s High Court on Monday after more than a decade of dipping into party funds to bankroll his fondness for the finer things.  Headline purchases included a succession of vehicles (Niesmann and Bischoff motorhome at £124,550; Jaguar I-Pace at £57,500; Volkswagen Golf at £16,489), coffee machines (Jura GIGA 5 at £3,232; Jura Z8 at £2,595; Jura Bean to Coffee Machine at £1,866), and luxury watches (Bremont Alt-1 in black at £4,795; Bremont Alt-1 in white at £4,555).

Can Andy Burnham define ‘a woman’? The correct answer is ‘an adult human female’, though I would also accept ‘someone with no chance of being elected leader of the Labour party’. Burnham’s position on gender is under scrutiny after the resurfacing of an exchange from 2022 in which he was asked about men who self-identify as women using female toilets. Ordinarily, I dislike this kind of journalism. The formulation ‘after past comments resurfaced’ is usually a dead giveaway that a news story isn’t news. The journalist who wrote it, or the editor who commissioned it, wants it to be news, often because they have an axe to grind. I make an exception in this case because Burnham’s answer undercuts his fatuous branding as a salt-of-the-earth, plain-speaking northerner.

Mind your language if you want to speak in the Scottish Parliament. Newly elected presiding officer Kenny Gibson has told an interviewer that MSPs must refer to other members using their preferred gender pronouns. Scotland’s devolved elections, held on 7 May alongside England’s local elections, returned two MSPs who express a gender identity at odds with their male sex. Iris Duane considers himself a woman and says his pronouns are she/her. Q Manivannan identifies as ‘non-binary’ and says his pronouns are they/them.

If you believe as I do that political stupidity deserves to be punished, you might take satisfaction from the election results in Scotland. But first, a little history. Almost three decades ago Labour set up the Scottish parliament, promising voters that ‘the Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’. Just eight years into the devolution experiment, the once seemingly invincible Scottish Labour lost control of its parliament to the SNP. That was in 2007 and the Nationalists have been in power ever since, relegating Labour to the fringes of Scottish politics.  Then, in 2010, the Conservatives came to power.

A telling exchange from Tuesday night’s televised debate for the Scottish Parliament elections.  Malcolm Offord, businessman and Tory peer turned Reform’s leader north of the border, confronted Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and quite possibly the next deputy first minister of the devolved government. Reform is promising to cut voters’ taxes while the Greens are practically giddy at the prospect of raising them on ‘the super rich’, which would include Offord himself.  After detailing his background (Greenock tenement, local grammar, Edinburgh Uni) and his rocky entrepreneurial beginnings (he arrived in London 40 years ago, two grand in the red), Offord said: ‘Today, I own six houses, five cars, and six boats.

Here is a lesson in power. One year ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in For Women Scotland v. the Scottish Ministers, concluding that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 ‘sex’ referred to biological sex and not ‘certificated’ sex. That is, a woman is someone who was born a woman and legal rights and protections specific to women (e.g. single-sex spaces) cannot be opted into by men who ‘identify’ as women. The judgment was, I wrote on Coffee House that day, ‘a victory for women’. But was it? One year on, policy and practice have yet to catch up with the law. True, there has been progress, such as Girlguiding remembering the first syllable in its name, but these victories stand out because they are uncommon.

The Scottish Greens’ manifesto for Holyrood 2026 proposes the most far-reaching overhaul of the economy north of the border. I’ve been urging the party’s critics, of which I am one, to understand its growing support in the opinion polls as a reflection of Generation Rent, educated professionals and semi-professionals under the age of 40 who are stuck renting in the private sector. The Green manifesto, unveiled on Tuesday, is an unapologetic pitch to these voters, with pledges on housing, health, childcare, and workers’ rights to address their key concerns. Tenants would get the right to withhold rent where landlords fail to keep up with repairs and safety standards and would be entitled to four months’ notice before eviction.

In putting an attack on Israel front and centre of his party’s local election launch, you would think Zack Polanski was campaigning abroad. Traditionally, English town hall elections were about nothing more exotic than bin collection schedules, the scourge of dog muck and the height of your neighbours’ leylandii. All of a sudden, international trade is on the agenda. Well, trade with one country specifically. Quite why Polanski’s call to tear up the UK-Israel trade agreement would appeal to an electorate that has never shown any municipal interest in the matter before now is a mystery. Truly, the English are a fickle lot. If demagoguing about Israel worked in the by-election, it’s worth trying it again for the locals Of course, everyone knows what Polanski is up to.

A cardinal error in politics is hating your opponents so much you cannot understand them. If you know no one who supports Reform or the Greens, you have a limited social circle. If you cannot conceive of a reasonable person who might do so, you have a limited political imagination. A useful reminder comes in the form of a new poll from Ipsos that suggests the Greens will be the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament after May’s devolved elections. Cue much horror and disbelief from the party’s detractors.

Liberals don’t realise it yet, and perhaps they never will, but Reform has just done them a massive favour. Nigel Farage’s party has announced that a Reform government would deny visas to nationals of any country seeking slavery reparations from the UK. The party’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, says those countries which try to ‘use history as a weapon to drain our treasury’ will find ‘the bank is closed and the door is locked’.

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre yesterday, which was Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

Leaving aside those who have parted with a right old wodge of dosh over the years, there are mainly two kinds of life peer: those who are no longer a threat to their party’s leader, and those who still are. For the former, the House of Lords is a retirement home; for the latter, the most ornate gulag in all the world. Sadiq Khan is being lined up for this gulag, with reports that No. 10 has considered offering him a life peerage. Khan is becoming a problem for Sir Keir Starmer, of whose leadership he grows more critical by the day. In particular, the mayor laments Labour’s failure to get bold on Europe by applying to rejoin the customs union and single market, positions that play well in London and among Labour’s core vote.

At this point there is only one way to salvage Reform’s Scottish Parliament election campaign. Granted it’s unorthodox and, well, illegal, but hear me out: arrange to have Malcolm Offord kidnapped. Not long-term or anything, just until 7 May and the Holyrood elections in which Reform Scotland is set to make sizeable gains. Or at least it was until mid-January, when the party was hit by a leadership crisis, that crisis being Offord’s appointment to the leadership. Offord has broken the cardinal rule of elections: don’t hand your opponents free ammunition Without a leader, Reform was climbing up the polls. With Offord as leader, it’s going back down again. I might be in some very small way to blame for this.

Have we just witnessed an Iranian attack on British soil? Overnight, four ambulances were burned on the premises of Hatzola, a Jewish charity in Golders Green that operates a fleet of medical response vehicles in north London. The vans were parked beside Machzike Hadath synagogue on Highfield Road. The Metropolitan Police are said to be investigating the incident as an anti-Semitic hate crime. It might well be yet another example of the post-October 7 globalisation of the intifada and Britain’s domestic anti-Semitism problem. Research from the Community Security Trust records more than 300 anti-Semitic incidents every month in the UK, including attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, vandalism at synagogues and even desecration of Jewish cemeteries.

The Scottish Parliament is on the brink of passing a bill that would see Catholic hospitals and care homes shut down. The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland says it is ‘deeply disappointed’ by the rejection of an amendment to the Assisted Dying Bill that would have given institutions a right of conscientious objection. If the bill becomes law, it will mean that a Catholic hospice or care home would have no right to exempt itself from participation in the assisted suicide of one of its residents. The bishops state that assisted suicide is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with the ‘guiding values’ of Catholic institutions, and raise the prospect of hospices and nursing homes having to ‘decide between acting contrary to their foundational values or closing’.

Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it. When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded only two months before the Scottish Parliament elections. And that was Alba’s only real purpose: to contribute to a pro-independence majority at Holyrood which, so the notion went, would then notify Westminster that Scotland was leaving. This was the plan set out by the late Alex Salmond in which he would have played the part of Moses, Keir Starmer Pharaoh, and the Scots the Israelites: ‘Let ma people go!