Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon had a very rough time at the UK Covid-19 inquiry in Edinburgh yesterday. A sticky moment in particular was when Scottish cabinet minutes were raised showing that the former SNP leader and her senior ministers discussed how to marshal ‘the experience of the coronavirus crisis’ into a fresh campaign for independence, as Isabel Hardman wrote about here. But there was another piece of evidence that was arguably more troubling. This was an email that was sent by the office of John Swinney, the former deputy first minister and second-in-command of the Scottish government during the pandemic.

The definition of madness, commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In all likelihood, Einstein never said this, but the formulation is useful for understanding not only madness but western policy in the Middle East. (Admittedly, there is substantial overlap.) One idea that fixates foreign policy elites, so much so that we must persevere with it despite all evidence, is the creation of a Palestinian state.

Politicians are like bad boys: never fall in love with them, they’ll always hurt you in the end. But try as I might, and I have tried mightily, I can’t fight it anymore. I’ve fallen head over heels for the junior senator from Pennsylvania. Friday night tipped it for me. John Fetterman was at home in Braddock, a rundown Pittsburgh suburb where he lives with his wife and three children, when an anti-Israel mob gathered outside and began chanting: ‘Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide; you’re supporting genocide!’ Another Democrat might have requested a police evacuation or issued a cuckish statement of solidarity with the demonstrators in the hopes they would leave him alone, but Fetterman took a rather different approach.

Sir Simon Clarke’s call to replace Rishi Sunak leans heavily on Tory MPs being in denial about the scale of defeat that could be heading their way. He quotes Alan Clark on the ‘defence mechanism of the psyche’ that allowed Conservatives to disbelieve the landslide thumping forecast ahead of the 1997 election, even though ‘every single device for measuring popular opinion was pointing consistently in the same direction’. Sir Simon points out that Sunak trails Sir Keir Starmer in almost 500 constituencies and warns his colleagues that the price of failing to move against the prime minister will be far greater than the headlines that would come from yet another Tory regicide.

In voting through the government’s Rwanda Bill, Conservative MPs have made a declaration: they want to reduce illegal immigration but they don’t want to take any of the hard choices required to do so. The final version of the Bill is the worst of both worlds, tailored to the sensitivities of the Tory left and yet still wide open to legal challenge. The chances that anything more than a token number of illegal immigrants are transferred to Rwanda between now and the election, whenever that is, are extremely slim. Those who faithfully parrot the Number 10 line will regard the Bill’s passage as a political victory for Rishi Sunak. He has seen off the dastardly right-wing rebels and stuck a thumb in the eye of the open-borders left, all in one fell swoop.

There is not a crumb of comfort for the Conservatives in the YouGov poll splashed across the front of this morning’s Daily Telegraph. It forecasts that the Tories will lose 196 seats in the coming general election, a bigger slump than the party suffered in 1997, 1945 or 1929. This would represent the second-worst defeat in the party’s history, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer would be looking at a majority of around 120. The poll suggests election night, whenever it comes, will serve up a steady stream of Portillo moments, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt all set to lose their seats.

The Sun’s reporting on Sir Keir Starmer’s legal activities is strident and therefore curious. The paper reports, in thunderous terms, on a number of convicted murderers in Commonwealth countries whom Starmer saved from the noose. It notes that, as these cases took place abroad, the former barrister was not bound by the cab rank rule to take on any case for which he was competent and available, without reference to the client or crime. The implication is that Starmer was a do-good lefty lawyer so keen to keep sadistic killers from their appointment with the gallows that he flew all over to do so.  The paper’s angle is all the more intriguing when you consider that the Sun opposes the return of capital punishment in the UK.

What exactly does the Reform party stand for? Helpfully, its leader Richard Tice gave a press conference on Wednesday at which he sketched out some of his party’s principles and policies. The millionaire businessman described the Tories and Labour as ‘two sides of the same socialist coin’, citing in evidence ‘record high taxes’, ‘record high wasteful government spending’, ‘record nanny state regulations’, and ‘mass, uncontrolled immigration on a scale this country has never seen before’.  Sir Keir Starmer, or ‘Starmergeddon’ as he branded the leader of the opposition, was no better than Rishi Sunak. By contrast, Reform had the solutions to the problems bedevilling the country. These solutions were familiar fare.

On Saturday, according to the Daily Telegraph, pro-Palestinian protestors ‘brought Oxford Street to a standstill on one of the busiest shopping days of the Christmas period’. The organisers, Sisters Uncut, declared that ‘Christmas is cancelled’ while placards read ‘no shopping while bombs are dropping’ – a reference to Israel’s military response to the 7 October massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 Jewish men, women and children. The Telegraph recorded that the marchers had ‘walked slowly’ along Oxford Street and ‘forced fashion retailers Zara and Puma to temporarily lock their doors’. They wrote that the demonstrators ‘made their way from Soho Square towards Oxford Circus, holding up buses and taxis’.

For those who still believe in that old-fashioned thing called the British constitution, there has come a glimmer of hope from an unlikely source. Lord Cameron has threatened to withdraw Foreign Office support for overseas visits by Scottish government ministers if the SNP continues to disregard protocol on international jaunts. Humza Yousaf raised eyebrows during COP28 when he shook hands and chatted with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The SNP leader, who was at the event in his capacity as first minister of the Scottish government, tweeted out a photograph of the meeting and said they had discussed the situation in Gaza. In the same tweet, Yousaf called for an ‘immediate and permanent ceasefire’, which is at odds with the UK government’s position.

Kate Forbes has called on the Scottish Government to accept Friday’s judgment on its controversial gender legislation. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill introduces ‘self-identification’, an approach which removes medical experts and other safeguards from the process, and lowers the age at which a person can change their legal sex to 16. It was passed overwhelmingly by the Scottish Parliament last December but blocked from becoming law by Scottish Secretary Alister Jack under a never-before-used power contained in the Scotland Act. Jack had received legal advice that the legislation would not only affect Scotland but equalities law across the UK.

There is no getting around the death of Barbara Rymell. When I read the Telegraph’s story about this 91-year-old who died while care home staff struggled to speak English to a 999 operator, it sounded too tailored to anti-immigrant prejudices. Surely this was nothing more than sensationalist reporting. Then I read the Regulation 28 report issued to the Home Office and the Department for Health and Social Care. The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 requires coroners to report any circumstances which they believe could create ‘a risk of other deaths’. The report in the Rymell case, prepared by the senior coroner for Somerset Samantha Marsh, does indeed raise concerns about the English language skills of care home staff and does so in fairly stark terms.

You know the Tories are worried about their core vote when they start talking tough on the BBC licence fee. Rishi Sunak took time out of his Cop28 jaunt to declare that the Corporation must ‘cut its cloth appropriately’. Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer is against the planned £15 increase in the fee, which comes after a two-year freeze agreed between Auntie and the government. The new hike, set for April, will reflect the 12-month average of inflation, bringing the annual cost to television viewers to £173.30.  Frazer is concerned about any increase being ‘sustainable for families across the country’ and so she reportedly wants to use a different metric for inflation, the consumer price index as of September, which stood at 6.7 per cent.

Alistair Darling was one of the most consequential politicians of the past half-century but he had the misfortune to be a quiet, self-effacing man and so the scale of his contributions has never been recognised. He was not by nature a Westminster man, not someone who lived for briefings and gossip and the soap opera stuff. He courted journalists who had to be courted, met with City figures who had to be met, but it was never about the game for him, and not even the players, but about the results.  There was an austerity about his demeanour – to certain London commentators he was just another dour Scot – but this solemnity was a reflection of the seriousness of the work. In private, he was warm, witty, convivial, and generous with both his time and his claret.

If the NHS is the closest thing we have to a religion, as Nigel Lawson reckoned, then Paul Gray is not just a blasphemer but an apostate. Professor Gray has called the NHS in Scotland ‘unsustainable’ and urged a public conversation about reform, including the use of the private sector. His intervention is significant because professor Gray was between 2013 and 2019 the chief executive of NHS Scotland. He is, to be clear, not proposing privatisation, merely urging a debate about delivery and funding. But even that is scandalous to a political establishment that prides itself on having less private sector involvement than there is south of the border.

There has been much Tory huffing and puffing about the ONS revising 2022 net migration to 745,000, up from its previous estimate of 606,000. James Heale has documented their dismay. Conservative MPs are a journalist’s dream: they don’t do much but they’re always quick off the mark with a statement lamenting all the things they’ve not done.  You will have read this story before. The Conservatives pledge to crack down on immigration, immigration goes up, and the Tories announce that they’re jolly cross about it. Boy, just you wait till they get into government. Oh how things will be different then.  Every election the Conservative party has won in the last 40 years it has done so on a manifesto promising controlled or reduced immigration.

Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, has issued an urgent notification to the justice secretary about HMP Bedford, a category B reception facility. It is the second such notification in five years. In his letter to Alex Chalk, Taylor – whose Spectator writings on prison conditions can be read here – outlines the findings of an unannounced inspection between 30 October and 9 November. The picture he paints is of conditions that are not merely shabby but sordid.  Safety: poor. Respect: poor. Purposeful activity: poor. Preparation for release: ‘not sufficiently good’. The use of force against prisoners was ‘very high’ and inspectors found ‘too many examples of excessive force’ and ‘unprofessional behaviour’ by staff.