Stephen Pollard

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.

Back in the day – in 1992 – the think tank I worked for commissioned a series of focus groups of swing voters in marginal seats. They had all voted Conservative in that year’s election, having toyed with and then deciding not to vote Labour. I thought of those voters yesterday, when the Prime Minister decided to tell potential Reform voters that they’re a bunch of racists. (I know he didn’t put it like that, and that he says he doesn’t think that, but bear with me.) One constant of those 1992 focus groups was the popularity of the Lib Dems’ manifesto idea of ‘a penny on income tax for education’. Almost everyone thought it a great idea. It was only when the pollsters really looked that it emerged just why it was so popular.

It’s been widely – and rightly – said that Danny Kruger’s defection to Reform is a highly significant moment, both for his new party and for the Conservatives. But perhaps the most interesting contention he has made in explaining his move is that the Conservative Party “is over”. A more likely outcome is that while the Tories are unable to recover, they also refuse to collapse so completely that they become irrelevant It certainly seems inconceivable, as Kruger said, that the Tories could win the next election (although the last few years should have taught us that nothing is inconceivable in politics: Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, anyone?).

What do Ireland and Spain have in common? This week, the answer is Jews. On Monday, Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, came out with a truly bonkers – bonkers shocking, that is, rather than bonkers amusing – statement while announcing sanctions against Israel. Sánchez was angry that he couldn’t nuke the Jews (sorry, Israel): “Spain, as you know, doesn’t have nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, or large oil reserves. We alone can’t stop the Israeli offensive. But that doesn’t mean we won’t stop trying. Because there are causes worth fighting for, even if winning them isn’t in our sole power.” Such a shame. If only Spain had nuclear weapons, then it could have done even better than Hitler and wiped out the 7.4 million Israeli Jews.

If you’re a Brit who doesn’t hate Jews – a smaller number than you might think – then you may be surprised by a poll published over the weekend by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, to coincide with its protest march through London. The CAA’s YouGov poll found that the number of people who admitted – perhaps a better word is boasted – they hate Jews has doubled since 2021. The reaction to the Holocaust did not destroy Jew hate. It merely buried it They didn’t put it like that, of course, but it’s what they meant. Respondents were shown a dozen different statements, as prescribed in the ‘Generalised Antisemitism Scale’, half of which were straightforward examples of “Judeophobic antisemitism” and half “anti-Zionist antisemitism”.

It’s a strange feeling finding out that you have been part of a revolutionary group that secretly controls Britain and, er…didn’t realise it. For four years in the 1990s, I was the Research Director of the Fabian Society. It was a wonderful job, at a time when Labour under Tony Blair was open to new ideas and policies. As a Labour-affiliated, mildly left-of-centre organisation, the Fabians were very well placed. Earnest thinkers, networkers and youngsters finding their feet in politics all had a space in which they could come together and think about and discuss politics and ideas in an environment where questioning the received wisdom was the point, rather than a political crime.

The hoo-ha over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated. I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think – especially when that’s controversial or offends large numbers of people. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up, his arrest will have served our country well I am, of course, well aware that some people have had a very different experience – such as the comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, who has robustly pointed out that biology means that men who identify as women are, nonetheless, still men. For that, his career was effectively ended in an industry that has long been in thrall to trans and other ideologies.

It’s rare that any government – not least Keir Starmer's – does something to which there can be no even vaguely arguable objection. Today’s announcement that the NHS will begin vaccinating all babies against chickenpox next year is a rare exception. The vaccine rollout should be welcomed by everyone. The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox. The vaccine is 98 per cent effective and, if taken up sufficiently, chickenpox will simply no longer happen in Britain.

If, like me, you spend too much time on social media you’ll have noticed a recurring theme in recent days: horror at the phenomenon of flags with the cross of St George starting to appear across much of the country. That’s hardly a surprise; social media has always been awash with left-wing types, for whom patriotism is racism under a different name, and who seem to do nothing but parrot all the usual dull cliches. But today’s version of those cliches turns out to be interesting – because it reveals a double standard so jarring as to be off the scale.

When I learned that the Royal Opera House had booked Russian soprano Anna Netrebko to sing Tosca in the new production which opens its 2025/26 season next month (and, later in the season, Turandot), I felt a surge of anger. How could they be so callous, so blasé, about the boycott of Russian artists with close ties to the Kremlin. How shameful for Britain that our internationally renowned opera company should treat Ukraine with such contempt. And how damning that its decision to hire Netrebko should be subject to an open letter organised by Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, and signed by hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists, British MPs and the likes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual.

According to the National – a worrying phrase, I admit, given the Scottish newspaper’s obsessive adulation of anyone pro-Scottish independence and its obsessive hostility to anyone who opposes it – this weekend saw a Scottish Reform councillor share a platform with a member of a far-right group at a protest outside a Falkirk hotel housing asylum seekers. While Cllr Mackie-Brown may have been out of her depth and blindsided by what she heard, one might expect that Reform itself would have a ready-made response to such issues What is most interesting about this story is not the protest itself, or even the Reform councillor’s presence. It is the response of Reform to one of its councillors sharing a platform with this person and saying or doing nothing about it.