Stephen Daisley

It seems only fitting, living as we do in the Banter Timeline, that Theresa May won an indecisive vote decisively and Jacob Rees-Mogg refused to accept the will of the electorate. The Prime Minister did not secure the confidence of her party last week; she confirmed their lack of confidence that there is any alternative. Mr Rees-Mogg and 116 of his colleagues know this. I dare say a sight more do too. The net result of last week’s melodrama is that the Prime Minister is both strengthened and weakened and those who want her gone have been defeated and elevated. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad but they are taking the absolute mick now. We are not back to square one because we never left.

It’s the lowest point in British espionage since Pierce Brosnan. A top secret cyber hit squad has been busted trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn through the medium of Twitter. At least that’s the claim from the Sunday Mail, a left-leaning Scottish tabloid, which has exposed the Institute for Statecraft as ‘a secret UK Government-funded infowars unit’.  The Institute is based in a grotty old Victorian mill in Fife and can be distinguished from every other building in Fife in that it’s a mill. It doesn’t look like a place where they knock back shaken-not-stirred martinis in between designing fountain pens that double as rocket launchers but, what with austerity, maybe From Auchtermuchty With Love is the best we can do.

‘Obsessed with Islam and Tommy Robinson.’ This is how Nigel Farage describes a cohort of Ukip activists he encountered at the party’s Birmingham conference earlier this year. Gerard Batten, the tenth leader of Ukip, has openly courted such elements in his calculated lurch to the farther-right. He has recruited as an adviser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson or St Tommy of the Uncollapsed Trials, the free speech martyr vilified by the establishment purely because he keeps imperilling court proceedings against Pakistani grooming gangs. Batten has called Islam a ‘death cult’ in which ‘they believe in propagating their religion by killing other people and martyring themselves and going and getting their 72 virgins’.

It’s been a year since I warned that the Democrats were at risk of replicating the Labour party’s lurch into extremism. As Americans go to the polls in the midterms, let's have a look at some of the rising stars of the Democrat Party. There are some recurrent themes that chime pretty eerily with the radicalisation of Labour.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running in the solidly Democrat 14th congressional district of New York, 'represents the future of our party’ according to Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez. We can only take him at his word.

Amy Schumer won’t be appearing in any Super Bowl ads this year. Not because she’s just announced she’s pregnant (mazel tov!) but because she wants to show solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players standing up — or, more accurately, kneeling down — to racism. Though, as the New York Post points out, it’s not entirely clear if the stand-up comedian had been asked to front any commercials. Still, it’s the Insta likes that count and, as Schumer posted on her page: ‘I know it must sound like a privilege ass sacrifice but it’s all I got.’ Privilege ass celebrities are getting woke all over the shop.

There are many clever people - pollsters, commentators, strategists - who say that Jeremy Corbyn's past does not matter, that the voters do not care about it, and that his critics ought to move on. Recounting every Islamist he shared a platform with, every anti-Semite he rallied beside, every Irish republican he cosied up to is a waste of time. Corbyn has caught the spirit of the moment and his detractors are stuck in the past. They may be right but let me try to explain to them why we care so much about these things. Thirty-four years ago today - at 2.54 a.m. to be precise - a bomb tore through the Grand Brighton Hotel during the Conservative Party conference. Anthony Berry, MP for Enfield Southgate, was killed, along with Muriel Maclean, Eric Taylor, Jeanne Shattock and Roberta Wakeham.

Nicola Sturgeon rides to the rescue. That’s how the more excitable Remainers are billing the SNP leader’s eleventh-hour intervention on Brexit. And it is eleventh-hour, for Sturgeon has been vacillating on the issue for months now. She instinctively believes in EU membership, but independence not Brexit is still the foremost dividing line in Scottish politics. Since 1988 the SNP’s policy has been ‘independence in Europe’. For much of the past thirty years, that position has gone unchallenged, except at the margins and among the old timers for whom sovereignty, rather than the autonomous interdependence of the EU, remained the goal. Among the party membership, now standing at 125,000, Brexiteers are a small minority.

To think they said Brexit would cost us friends. The UK Government has found itself a new chum in Viktor Orbán, Hungarian prime minister and global alt-right pin-up. Last week, the European Parliament voted to initiate Article 7 proceedings against Hungary, citing its lurch towards authoritarianism. Fifteen Tory MEPs voted against while a further two abstained. Scotland’s Baroness Mobarik was the only one to break ranks. Makes you proud to be British. Article 7.

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice. First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade unionists are sometimes busy coming for the Jews themselves. There is a more fundamental objection.

Scots are used to tumult and unpredictability in their politics but this morning they are waking up to something of a different order. Former first minister Alex Salmond has been reported to police following allegations of sexual assault by two female staff members, according to the Daily Record. One of the alleged incidents, the paper claims, took place in Bute House, the official residence of the first minister of Scotland and now home to Nicola Sturgeon. The complaints were reportedly uncovered by an internal Scottish Government investigation and handed to Police Scotland.  Salmond denies all allegations against him and, what’s more, is now taking his own former government to court.