Stephen Pollard

The coincidence is delicious and telling. Civil servant Kashim Chowdhury was convicted of nine counts of fraud, having held five full-time government jobs at the same time. Today, the Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo is speaking at the LSE on civil service reform, arguing that it must urgently improve productivity, and that it needs to be reimagined in “the most fundamental way” to address the emergence of AI and low public trust in government. Romeo is not wrong. She is said by close observers to have a clear grasp of the problems with the civil service, and the drive and determination to address them. As she puts it in her speech, Whitehall “needs to change” and “the Civil Service of tomorrow must look very different from the Civil Service of today”.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong than when I was booed in a synagogue around twenty years ago. The occasion was a panel on media bias against Israel. One of the audience had asked a question about the BBC’s ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ and I responded – I shudder now to think how wrong I was – that while it was obviously biased against Israel, that reflected the left-liberal mindset of the overwhelming majority of its newsroom rather than anti-Semitism as such. The years since the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 have been an object lesson in how wrong I was. The BBC’s reports have consistently repeated Hamas propaganda as fact, as with its international editor Jeremy Bowen’s coverage of the alleged bombing of a hospital in Gaza on 17 October that year.

The advice on which former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper based her proscription of Palestine Action has never been published. My assumption is that it outlined the organisation’s behaviour and its implications for national security. That’s all well and good. But it turns out that proscribing Palestine Action (PA) has had follow-on benefits which make Cooper’s decision seem even more laudable. Rooney has gone the whole hog and pledged to support Palestine Action financially We’ve all seen the protests, when PA supporters who couldn’t place Palestine on a map sit motionless on the ground with their PA placards.

The yiddish word chutzpah is often defined as when a man who has murdered both his parents pleads for clemency on the grounds that he is an orphan. But there’s now a better definition. On Monday, Ed Miliband posted this on social media: “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.” A minister who treats the Jewish state as a pariah gives Jew haters what they want Give the man his due. Miliband is certainly not troubled by an excess of self-doubt, let alone shame.

As Tali Fraser points out in this week’s magazine, with the Greens on around 11 per cent in the polls and Restore on 4 per cent, around one in seven British voters support a party that is at least comfortable with anti-Semitism. By switching the Greens from ecology to extremism Polanski has unleashed a monster he both cannot and will not control That is salutary enough a statistic. But the result of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is even starker. Opinion polls merely require voters to answer a theoretical question on the phone or online, whereas in a by-election they have to make the effort to go and vote. And yesterday, 33 per cent of voters in Holborn and St Pancras decided to support a party which, just four days ago, enshrined Jew hate in its platform.

It is the third anniversary of the killing of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the worst such massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It is also the day chosen by a group of students calling themselves the University of London Coalition to convene on the streets of London, the latest in the long line of hate marches since that atrocity in Israel on October 7, 2023. The idea that these people should be free to roam the streets, spreading their poison, should be anathema Of course they have chosen October 7. From day one, the so-called Free Palestine or anti-genocide marches have shown what they are really about: Jew hate.

Andy Burnham's pledge to change our voting system – and his vow at last year's Labour conference that 'Proportional Representation's time has come' – will come back to bite Labour, and Britain. There are any number of good reasons why PR would be a disaster, most of them well-rehearsed. But there is one specific issue which, in the context of Britain today, should send a clear warning of the danger in store should Labour change the voting system. Whatever arguments there might be suggesting the ‘fairness’ of a system in which a party’s parliamentary seats represent its share of the vote, it is almost guaranteed that any government formed under PR will be a coalition.

Most voters have no idea they are happening, but party conferences can set the tone for what follows. Last year’s pledge by Kemi Badenoch to abolish stamp duty, for example, led to a change in tone of coverage of the Conservative leader, as observers started to realise that there were indeed signs of political life in the Tory party. It’s easy to forget how close to wipeout the Conservatives were after the July 2024 election In that context, it’s striking to compare the polls this conference season with last year. Back then, Reform UK was averaging around 30 per cent, with Labour on 19 per cent and the Conservatives 17 per cent.

Until the past few days, no one has either known or cared what Ed Sheeran thinks about Israel. More to the point, Sheeran, who is a musician, hasn’t wanted anyone to know or care. He wants to sing his songs and bring pleasure to people. And that’s it. That changed when the support act on his latest tour, a rapper known as Macklemore, decided to use his platform to chant ‘Free Palestine’ at the audience. Macklemore was dropped by the producers from the rest of the tour and Sheeran found himself at the centre of a global firestorm, with the Free Palestine brigade demanding that he, too, express his support. Demonstrators protest outside an Ed Sheeran concert in Philadelphia (Getty Images) Sheeran initially said nothing in response.

When you title your book Win Every Argument, you create the very definition of a hostage to fortune. So it’s especially unfortunate that Mehdi Hasan, the author of said book, is an inveterate poster on social media – and most of his posts seem to demonstrate that he has, indeed, a knack for the very opposite. On Tuesday, Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, raised the issue of Barnet Hill Academy, a newly state-funded Islamic faith school in north London, which requires female pupils to wear hijabs from Year three onwards. Trott said: 'No one should be telling girls to cover their hair, least of all a school. We, the Conservatives, are campaigning to make sure that this (policy), which we believe breaches various rules and possibly the law, is overturned.

I get on well with my sister. We speak most days, although I’ve noticed a certain froideur recently. It took me a while to work out what was wrong. The issue, I realised, was my penchant for offending against one of the most bizarre of all middle-class shibboleths. I’ve committed just such an offence twice in the past few days. I’ve walked out of two plays because I hated one and was bored by the other. (I left at the first interval, I should point out; I’m not so uncouth as to leave while it’s going on.) It did take me a while to realise I could leave these things early, and the middle class guilt that made me stay was pointless It seems to me entirely obvious that if I’m not enjoying something I’ve paid for then I should want to leave.

I’ve been a member of the National Union of Journalists for decades. Every month, as the £32 direct debit slips out of my bank account, I wonder why on earth I am paying to support an organisation that, as well as backing every hard left cause around, seems more concerned with restricting the ability of journalists to do their job than protecting it. The NUJ has long backed de facto state regulation and in February 2017 supported a parliamentary plan for Leveson-style regulation. But for reasons which, I shamefully admit, have been based mainly on inertia I’ve carried on as a member. Today that inertia – and my membership – ends.

First it was Nigel versus the establishment. Now it’s Nigel versus the police (although perhaps they’re part of the same establishment lambasted by Farage throughout the Clacton by-election – indeed, throughout his political career). Did Essex police warn Farage not to attend the Clacton count? Did they say only that they thought there would be disruption? Does anyone actually care? Clacton was, as it always would be, a clear win for Farage. But when a man wearing a large bin on his head can win 27 per cent of the vote against the leader of the party topping the polls, one has to ask: who was the real satire candidate? I’d say it was, rather, the supposed man of the people who called a by-election to deflect from coverage of the £5 million he had been gifted.

Zia Yusuf is a man of remarkable and rare gifts. His parents are immigrants from Sri Lanka who worked in the NHS. Yusuf himself has had a hugely successful business career, becoming an executive director at Goldman Sachs and then founding a luxury concierge company, Velocity Black, which was sold for a reported £233 million.  Basic common courtesy appears to Yusuf to be a sign of depravity – a stance which he might be wealthy enough to pull-off in his private life, but which marks him down as a liability in public life But Yusuf is also the latest example of the truism that business success is no indicator of political acumen, let alone political success. Having been chair of Reform for 11 months, he is now the party’s home affairs spokesman.