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.
On the field, last night’s losers were Maccabi Tel Aviv, beaten 2-0 by Aston Villa in their Europa League match. Off the field, however, the story was rather different. For one thing, the Maccabi Tel Aviv team arrived in and departed from Birmingham with their heads held high. Despite the attempts of hate campaigners to render the match unplayable – the initial focus was on barring the Maccabi supporters, but swiftly moved to attempting to bar the team and then to making it impossible for the match to go ahead – the Jewish, Christian and Muslim players of Maccabi Tel Aviv braved the hate, did their job as footballers, and left unscathed.
Barely a month ago, the received wisdom was that the Javier Milei experiment in Argentina had effectively collapsed. The self-styled 'anarcho-capitalist' president was elected in December 2023 after a campaign in which he waved a chainsaw at rallies, symbolising his promise to slash public spending and destroy the 'political caste'. But with the peso on the slide, unions leading effective campaigns against the spending cuts and corruption allegations around his sister, the wiseacres – and polls – suggested that it was all about to cave in around Milei. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza won 40.8 per cent in the midterm elections, widely seen as a referendum on his term so far They’re not looking so wise today, after Milei’s La Libertad Avanza won 40.
Today is a perfect day. Not just any old great day, but the first truly perfect one for over six months. As I write this, I sit at my desk looking out over the green acres of a north London park. The leaves are that glorious autumnal reddish brown, the weather is crisp and bright, and God is in his English heaven. But those are merely some of the necessary parts of a perfect day. Because what lifts today from being merely wonderful to perfect is that, for the first time in half a year, there is racing at Cheltenham. The first day of the annual two-day October fixture is the moment when we can start to properly enjoy racing again The first day of the annual two-day October fixture is the moment when we can start to properly enjoy racing again.
Last night’s decision by Maccabi Tel Aviv to not take up its allocation of away tickets is deeply depressing. The statements of principle that have come from across the political spectrum, arguing that it is wrong to ban Jewish fans because of the sectarian bigotry of many in that area, are now irrelevant. Castigation of West Midlands police for deciding it was easier to tell Jews to stay away than to protect them is now wasted breath. And the work of ministers to try to facilitate the fans’ attendance has now been shown to be ineffectual.
Two years ago I started wearing a Star of David necklace, for the first time in my life. The regular weekend hate marches had led to many Jews feeling so intimidated that they no longer felt able to be in central London on Saturdays. Added to that, the more general explosion in anti-Semitic incidents was creating an atmosphere in which many were worried about showing their identity as Jews. It has long been clear that the mantra ‘anti-Semitism has no place on the streets of London’ – or anywhere else – is nonsense My reaction to such hate has always been to try to turn it on its head. So I bought a Magen David necklace, as we Jews call the Star of David. I now wear it proudly; it is on me as I write this.
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.
