Stephen Pollard

It’s always the newspeak that lacerates. The Royal Academy of Music (RAM) has, admirably, set up a new foundation year for 'talented young musicians who have previously faced significant obstacles', specifically the decline in music education in so many secondary schools – and indeed, the total absence in some. The foundation course will start in July with five students. They will also get accommodation in University of London halls of residence, financial assistance to buy an instrument and a bursary to cover living costs. It’s an excellent plan, in theory, to try to ensure that one of our best conservatoires doesn’t miss out on untapped young talent and, perhaps even more so, vice versa.  But here’s the newspeak.

Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential and popular podcasters in the world. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a podcasting sensation, a master of one of the most important of all modern broadcast mediums. Millions of followers hang on his utterances and appearances. Carlson has 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, 13.3 million followers on X, and 3.9 million on Instagram. But for all the popularity, there's a problem. Like Carlson, who was originally a mainstream Republican, Coughlin started out as a mainstream figure Nearly a century separates Carlson from Charles Coughlin, yet the parallels are so striking as to be eerie.

Would you share a house with someone black? Even to pose the question, let alone to say no, is to invite – quite rightly – the accusation of racism. But it’s a different matter when it comes to Jews. The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has today published a report on campus anti-Semitism in Britiain. Of all the statistics that show the sheer scale of the hate that Jewish students face, the most chilling is that one in five students (20 per cent) say they wouldn’t share a house with a Jew.  Campus anti-Semitism has been a problem for decades. It was a perennial when I was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, between 2008 and 2021. But it has transformed in recent years from a worrying issue that needed to be dealt with to a critical problem that is out of control.

In 1997 the doyen of Democrat political columnists in the US, E.J. Dionne, published They Only Look Dead. He argued that while the received wisdom was that the Republicans were set to dominate politics for a generation, there were underlying factors which pointed to a Democrat revival. Dionne was both completely wrong but also completely right. George W. Bush won the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. But the 2000 election turned, famously, on a Supreme Court ruling, and could easily have gone to Al Gore. And in 2008 and 2012 the Democrats did indeed dominate. They Only Look Dead would be the perfect title for a book about the Conservatives today. They certainly look near-dead.

The latest set of antisemitism figures from the Community Security Trust covering 2025 are depressingly predictable. Last year, saw 3,700 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK, the second highest annual total ever reported – second only to the 4,298 antisemitic incidents in 2023. The figures have rightly been described as appalling by ministers. But this is hypocrisy of the most grotesque kind The figures conform to a pattern. The worst year on record, 2023, saw the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jews on 7 October. Last year, the second worst year on record, saw the murders at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.

The political focus is, quite rightly, now on Sir Keir Starmer. You hardly need me to point out how tenuous his hold on office now is, or why. But there is one key aspect to that ‘why’ which has been relatively unremarked on. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch scored a direct hit on the Prime Minister when she asked him at PMQs, repeatedly, if he knew when he appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the US about his ongoing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile’s initial conviction. Starmer twice evaded the question; it was only when Badenoch came back with it for a third time that he made the admission that has turned a disastrous crisis for him into a likely fatal crisis. His attempt today to say he meant something else looks exactly as risible as it is.

It’s the fag end of January, so that means it’s time for Davos – the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in the Swiss mountains, when the world’s smuggest men and the occasional woman come together to play dinner companion one-upmanship. Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now the MAGA crowd and their allies elsewhere – for whom the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘globalist’ respectively are rant catnip. I have always just found the whole thing more amusing than worrying or even important. Not this year, however: Davos 2026 is a shameful event, and those organising it deserve not just to be pilloried but to be covered in verbal red paint.

Robert Jenrick isn't often compared to Groucho Marx, but there’s something apposite about the latter’s line, 'I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member'. Clearly Jenrick, who was sacked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday before being unveiled as Reform's latest recruit, does want to be a member of Reform. He began talks with Tim Montgomerie and then Nigel Farage last September, we learned yesterday – and, equally clearly, Reform is happy to have him as a member. But in both cases, only sort of.

The most important thing about Robert Jenrick’s sacking isn’t Robert Jenrick. It’s that it is yet another demonstration of Kemi Badenoch’s increasing stature as Tory leader. The Tory leader was presented with a gift – a sacking that was both necessary, obvious and politically useful to her, further cementing her standing as leader For most of her first year – Badenoch Mark I, as it were – the mood music was all about when she would be deposed. The assumption was that her replacement would be Jenrick. That changed pretty much overnight at last year’s Tory conference, when Badenoch Mark II emerged. She made a stomper of a speech that was clear and convincing and told a story about her party, while Jenrick’s speech was a damp squib.

What is it going to take for the British government – any British government, of any party – to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood?  It was revealed today that the UAE is now limiting the number of students it will enrol at British universities because of the prevalence of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) influence on campuses. The UAE pays for most of the higher education of its citizens, and until now many UAE students have come to Britain.

Hugh, meet Claire. Claire, meet Hugh. Claire has some guidance that might prove useful for you, Hugh. Should, that is, you not want to come across as any more of an ignorant buffoon than you do already. The problem for Bonneville is that details do matter. And there is a big issue with the detail of his rant To explain: over the weekend, Claire Foy – Queen Elizabeth in the first series of The Crown – had a message that some of her peers could do with taking note of: stick to reading scripts. The fact you might play the role of someone with insights worth listening to doesn’t mean that you actually have insights worth listening to, only that someone handed you a good script with some words to read out.

Call me an old cynic, but I knew from the moment that the Alaa Abd el-Fattah affair blew up what the next stage would be. The single most predictable thing in the entire farce – a Whitehall farce indeed, albeit very much not in the old Brian Rix mould – was that when el-Fattah made his first comment, it would be that far from hating Jews, he was in fact deeply, passionately, preternaturally opposed to anti-Semitism in all its forms. Lo and behold, it came to pass: I take accusations of anti-Semitism very seriously. I have always believed that sectarianism and racism are the most sinister and dangerous of forces, and I did my part and paid the price for standing up for the rights of religious minorities in Egypt.

Everyone is familiar with the old insult that you can tell when a politician is not telling the truth because his lips move. Be that as it may, a variation of this has emerged, but this time when someone from West Midlands Police is giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. Did West Midlands Police simply make stuff up?

I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people who take the film’s plot not as a brilliant comic device but as a ‘how to’ guide to running a political party. Despite a meagre 2,000 people attending the conference, they have still managed to find ways to split into a multitude of factions The Producers is about a Broadway impresario who comes up with the ruse of luring investors to back a guaranteed flop which will close after one night, so he will get to keep the over-inflated investment money.

It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly fulsome in their regard for her. As Keynes once put it: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ But if there is one nagging doubt, it is that Mahmood appears to have swung dramatically from her earlier stance in opposition as an identikit Labour politician – when she embraced most of the usual left causes and demonstrated none of the independence of mind which now seems to be one of her most compelling traits.