Stephen Daisley

The Labour Party’s war on the Jews grows more lunatic by the day. The Daily Telegraph reports that shadow chancellor John McDonnell gave a speech in 2012 in which he accused Israel of attempting a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. According to the journalist responsible for the story, when Labour was contacted for a comment a party spokesman defended McDonnell’s charge as justifiable. The real story here is not that John McDonnell believes the Jewish state is engaged in the destruction of another people but that a Labour Party spokesperson, instead of saying ‘FFS, let me get back to you’, agreed with this assessment. Presented with McDonnell's outrageous position, the Labour Party officially adopted it there and then and spun it to a reporter.

Barely had the ink dried on Stephen Robinson’s imaginative apologia for Boris Johnson — he is compared, courageously, to Churchill — than the former foreign secretary reminded us of his capacity for blunder. In his Telegraph column Johnson assailed the ‘burka’ for leaving Muslim women ‘looking like letter boxes’ and ‘bank robber[s]’. I say 'burka' but 'letter box' suggests he actually meant the niqab. A regular Abu Hanifa is this one. But was it a blunder? Or did Johnson, freed from such responsibilities as he felt bound by in the Foreign Office, consider the renewed vigour of anti-Muslim populism and decide to sound a dogwhistle?

With the Labour Party losing the plot, it’s reassuring to see the Tories holding true to the principles of liberal democracy. On Wednesday, Conservative MEP David Campbell Bannerman tweeted the Telegraph’s splash, ‘Jihadists should be prosecuted for treason’. By way of comment, he added: 'It is about time we brought the Treason Act up to date and made it apply to those seeking to destroy or undermine the British state. That means extreme jihadis. It also means those in future actively working undemocratically against U.K. through extreme EU loyalty.’ Oh.

It is my sombre duty to inform you that Scotland is talking about independence again. It probably seems like we never stopped. Your continued patience is appreciated. This time, it’s the economic case — or lack thereof — for going it alone. In May, the SNP’s Growth Commission produced its long-awaited (not long enough, perhaps) report into the finances of a separate Scotland. The gist? Scotland would be in for an extra decade of austerity but we’d be all right in the end by emulating the growth of similarly situated small nations. All in all, it sounded more plausible than the 2013 White Paper. They had to cut down a lot of magic money trees to print that.  Now, another report has come along and taken the tackety boots to the new draft.

Snap. It was a long time coming but it was always coming. Jeremy Corbyn, who has traded on an image of saintly anti-racism for his entire career, was finally confronted by someone who sees through it. Yesterday, Labour's national executive committee adopted a new policy that rejected the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. Rabbis from across the spectrum had urged Labour to accept this definition; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis warned that failing to do so would send an unprecedented 'message of contempt to the Jewish community'. Of course, that was the point.

There are moments that cut through the din of braggadocio, vindictive utopianism and arrant stupidity surrounding Brexit. Anna Soubry has provided one in an impertinence during yesterday's debate on the cross-border trade bill. She let into Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group (ERG) for coercing ministers to abandon much of the substance of the Chequers Brexit blueprint. Then, standing mere metres from the Treasury benches, she enquired: 'Who is in charge? Who is running Britain? Is it the Prime Minister or is it the Honourable Member for North East Somerset? I know where my money's sitting at the moment.' Before the crazy set in, an MP taunting the Prime Minister as a feckless weakling would bring the full nuclear hellfire of Number 10 raining down upon their head.

David Davis has walked away. It’s what he does best. DDexit was inevitable from the moment he was appointed Brexit secretary. Davis is a quitter, not a fixer; asked to compromise, his preference is always for blowing the whole show up. Reports suggest he was especially irked by the No. 10 briefing about ministers being stuck at Chequers without a working local taxi number. The bloke was in the SAS Reserves and couldn’t figure out how to download the Uber app. It’s no mystery why the Brexit negotiations have been going nowhere.  There isn’t much affection for Davis, even among his fellow Brexit ultras, but some will try to paint this as a principled decision. It is nothing of the sort.

Forgive me if I seem out of sorts but my country has been through a lot this past week. We have been subjected to 'provocation' and our imperial masters in Westminster intend to 'exert a kind of colonial authority' over us. Our parliament has been 'slighted' and we are bearing the 'impact of such condescension on the psyche'. The UK Government has sought to 'lessen the ability of the people of Scotland to govern their own affairs' and in doing so its 'contempt for Scotland was laid bare'.  The amen corner of the Scottish commentariat is once again standing up and bravely telling it like Nicola Sturgeon says it is. The SNP leader has decreed Scotland the victim of a 'power grab' and Westminster the destroyer of the devolution settlement.

The SNP thinks Westminster is an anachronism but boy does it love those anachronisms. The Nationalists’ London leader Ian Blackford got himself thrown out of the Commons for disrupting Prime Minister’s Questions. Blackford attempted to move — inartfully and tagged onto a question rather than as a substantive motion — that the House sit in private. The Speaker showed no little patience in explaining to Blackford that the matter should be raised at the end of PMQs. Of course, that wouldn’t be the optimal time for capturing the attention of political correspondents and TV news producers. Blackford steamed away like an angry little pressure cooker, rumbling for a vote to clear the public gallery.

You can tell a lot about a leader by the diplomats they choose to represent them. Brezhnev had Anatoly Dobrynin, Nixon had Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Netanyahu has Regina George. The queen bitch of North Shore High, fictional setting of the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls, is blunt, conniving and vicious with a mid-hallway putdown. Played by sweetness personified Rachel McAdams but scripted by the acid Tina Fey, Regina is not someone you'd like to encounter in double French -- or at Camp David. That is no doubt why the Israelis selected her as the latest face of digital hasbara. Ayatollah Khamenei -- probably not a connoisseur of high school chick flicks -- had a run-in with Regina on Monday.

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators will gather outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for the annual al-Quds Day march. From there, they will proceed through the capital chanting 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' – which is to say, the State of Israel will be destroyed. Alongside the Palestinian tricolour, many will be waving another flag: the banner of Hezbollah.  In doing so, none of them will be breaking the law. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation with a bloody rap sheet but the UK Government only proscribes its paramilitary wing, not the group as a whole. As such, the Hezbollah flag, which depicts an assault rifle and the legend ‘The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon’, can be freely flown on the streets of London.