Stephen Pollard

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.

It’s a toss-up as to which is the least surprising: today’s new Community Security Trust figures showing another surge in antisemitic incidents, or the inane (to put it charitably) government response to those figures. Antisemitism is no longer something that rears its head and then falls in a repeating pattern. It is now part of life in the UK In the first six months of this year, CST recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents: the second-highest six-month total ever reported and a 21 per cent increase on the same period last year. Indeed, there were more incidents in the first six months of 2026 than in all of 2022 (the last year before the October 7, 2023 massacre). No month so far in 2026 has had fewer than 200 incidents, with over 350 in March, April and May.

Last month, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, was suspended after an investigation into a series of sexual harassment allegations. A leaked copy of that investigation reveals that the woman behind the allegations, who went public last week in an interview with CNN, says that Khan repeatedly subjected her to non-consensual sexual acts including groping, attempted kissing and digital and genital penetration. Khan has denied all her claims. Today, a committee of diplomats from 21 of the ICC’s 125 member states will vote on whether to make Khan’s suspension permanent and what, if any, disciplinary action to take.  This piece is not about the allegations; the only people who know what actually happened are Khan, the complainant and any witnesses.

In my four decades in and around Westminster, I have met plenty of wrong ’uns and seen lots of scandals and disastrous appointments. But I can say with utter certainty that the appointment of Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary by Andy Burnham is, by a very long way, the most nauseating appointment of my lifetime. It is genuinely sickening. The appointment presents two possibilities, both of which are worrying Miliband is the man who, as Labour leader in 2013, effectively vetoed British military action against Syria's dictator president al-Assad by whipping the Labour party against it. It was the single most amoral decision of any mainstream party leader in living memory. It had emerged in August 2013 that al-Assad had murdered over 1,400 people, using sarin nerve gas to kill them.

As Andy Burnham prepares to take over as Prime Minister, we still have no idea who will be the next Home Secretary. It might even still be Shabana Mahmood, if the new PM decides to make someone else Chancellor. But whoever it is, there’s a strong case that Mahmood is the first Home Secretary since Theresa May in 2016 to leave the job with their reputation enhanced. Mahmood had an important job before, as Justice Secretary but if you’d asked 100 people in the street to identify her, I doubt if more than 99 would have been able to. The role of Home Secretary is far more high profile; one can confidently assert that at least 98 would be able to name her now.

It looks like it’s going to be a straight fight between Nigel Farage and Count Binface to be the next MP for Clacton. That may be the most bizarre sentence I have ever written. Although this one may be even more so: it’s possible that some fringe candidates will also run, but to all intents and purposes it’s a two-way fight. (Imagine just 24 hours ago living in a world in which Count Binface is seen as a mainstream voting choice.) This is all a giant hissy fit by a man who is rattled by the scrutiny his financial affairs are now receiving According to Farage, the by-election will be “a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go".

There’s been much comment on the appointment of James Purnell as Andy Burnham’s chief of staff. Along with the widely touted return of David Miliband, it’s a sign of how the near-certain next Prime Minister is going back to the future, recruiting fellow cabinet ministers from the last time Burnham was in government, under Gordon Brown. There are plenty within the Labour party who have grave doubts about his suitability for the job of PM But Purnell’s appointment has another resonance, one which should be less to Burham’s liking. In the context of Burnham’s ascent to the premiership, Purnell’s most relevant contribution to British politics was not his time as Work of Pensions Secretary but, rather, his resignation.

As a good Labour man, I’m sure Andy Burnham will have read his Marx (even if he is by no stretch a Marxist). And he’ll likely be aware of Marx’s maxim, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce". It’s far from always true, of course. But it’s true often enough that when we fail to learn from history we really should know better. Johnson and Burnham are very different and have different political outlooks. But the parallels are real Which brings us to Boris Johnson. After eight years as a mayor, he returned to the Commons in a by-election. His party then turned to him to replace the stolid, wooden prime minister who was sending its MPs into paroxysms of despair.

If you want to understand why the traditional mainstream parties struggle to gain support, and why Reform is leading the polls, one name will suffice: Shabir Ahmed. Ahmed will reportedly be released from prison this week, having served 14 years of a 19-year sentence for multiple counts of rape and sexual offences against girls. Ahmed is a Pakistani national (he was formerly a dual British-Pakistani citizen but his British citizenship was removed after his conviction). There will, of course, be anger that the leader of a Rochdale rape gang – who made his victims call him ‘Daddy’ – has been released five years early. But that anger is as nothing in the context of what will happen to Ahmed after his release, which is said to be happening tomorrow: nothing.

When it became obvious that Andy Burnham would be the next prime minister if he won in Makerfield, it seemed obligatory for any piece about him to include the recycled joke about a Blairite, a Brownite, a Milibandite and a Starmerite walking into a bar. The punchline: “The barman asks: ‘What are you having, Andy?’”. Burnham's speech on Monday was the first time he has given any specific steer. But even that was full of generalities The joke was certainly over-used but it served a purpose. There has been very little that anyone knows for certain about what Burnham actually stands for.