Stephen Pollard

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.

The most apposite comment on Shabana Mahmood’s proposed reforms to the asylum system came from Kemi Badenoch during yesterday’s Commons statement on the plans: ‘The Home Secretary has done more in 70 days than her predecessor managed in a year.’ On one level that was damning with faint praise, given that Yvette Cooper’s tenure in the Home Office produced nothing of any consequence. But the Conservative leader clearly – and correctly – did not mean it as an insult to Mahmood. Whatever one’s view of the reforms themselves, one thing has been obvious since the day Mahmood became home secretary: she is a serious politician with her own ideas and her own style. Tony Benn famously divided politicians into Signposts and Weathercocks.

I’m not going to rehash here the details of the memorandum by Michael Prescott, the former independent editorial standards adviser to the BBC, which has now led to the resignations of both Tim Davie, director-general, and Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News. You’d have to have been in a cave for the past week – or, perhaps, watching BBC News – not to know about the story. The issue now is, rather, what, or specifically who, comes next. If the BBC wants to secure its future and regain trust, it should make Trevor Phillips director-general One of the problems which holed Davie below the waterline from the start was that he had no editorial or journalistic experience, but was nonetheless the BBC’s editor-in-chief.

Donald Trump is a bully. He is a braggart. He is venal. But, as this week's ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas shows, he is also capable of acts of uniquely brilliant statecraft. The US president is a master at using the hard power of his office to force changes that make the world a better place. Trump and LBJ both demonstrate how loathsome people can do good things Fascinatingly, because it shows how we tend to look at politicians through a two-dimensional prism, those words could also be applied to another, relatively recent, US president: Lyndon B Johnson. Trump and LBJ both demonstrate how loathsome people can nonetheless do good things.

It is doubtless apocryphal, but it’s said that when Ernest Bevin heard someone say that Aneurin Bevan was his own worst enemy, he replied, ‘Not while I'm alive 'e ain't.’ Sometimes Israel behaves as if it is its own, and the diaspora’s, worst enemy That came into my mind when it emerged that the Israeli minister for Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli and Amir Ohana, the Speaker of the Knesset, have invited Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, more widely known as Tommy Robinson, to Israel. I am, as regular readers will know, a strong supporter of Israel. That’s not just because I am Jewish (although writing a history of Jewish migration, my latest book, brings home to me how different my people’s history would have been had we had our own state before 1948).

As so often, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis hit the nail on the head over yesterday’s terror attack in Manchester. It was, he said, the result of 'a tidal wave of Jew hated'. Jews have spent the past two years highlighting the danger posed by the authorities’ refusal to take more than perfunctory action against the regular hate marches and gatherings. We have warned what was coming – and yesterday it came. It will, I dread to write, not be the last terror attack. Palestinian statehood is a decent and worthy cause. It is no more intrinsically poisonous than the push for a Scottish, Welsh or Catalan state, or indeed Irish unification.