Tom Slater

There have been a lot of bad takes about the Sally Rooney controversy after the Irish author withdrew her novels from sale in the United Kingdom due to her decision to pledge her royalties to Palestine Action (PA). (Given PA is now a proscribed terrorist group in Britain, giving money to it is illegal.) But likening her to Salman Rushdie? That really takes the biscotti. If I were Supreme Leader, I’d issue a fatwa against such fatuous comparisons. The New Statesman (NS) has published an open letter railing against the ‘censorship’ of Rooney ‘on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation’.

Illegal migration is a threat to women and girls. That grim fact has gradually dawned on the public, as the newspapers brim each day with horrific cases of male ‘asylum seekers’ sating their depraved appetites at the expense of British citizens. Now Shabana Mahmood has reminded us that this trail of woe begins before the dinghies’ arrival in Blighty, and migrant women are among the first victims. The Home Secretary has told The Rest Is Politics podcast that pretty much all women who come to the UK in small boats will have suffered sexual violence.

It’s been six weeks since the Jason Arday scandal came to its tragic conclusion, when the disgraced Cambridge professor was found dead at a flat in south London, after credible accusations of plagiarism, academic fraud and extensive fabrications about his personal life and achievements brought his career crashing down. Arday was on a pedestal from which he was always, inevitably, going to be knocked off Arday's death triggered a moment of ‘anti-racist’ hysteria the likes of which we hadn’t seen since 2020 and Black Lives Matter.

Jason Arday, I miss you already. The resignation of the Cambridge professor, sporting Adonis, charity-fundraising extraordinaire and credibly accused fantasist has brought to a close the most delicious silly-season story for some time. Cambridge traded academic rigour for phoney virtue. It chose political expediency over the pursuit of truth On Wednesday night, Arday announced he was stepping down from his positions at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College, after a trickle of plagiarism allegations, as well as questions over his extracurricular achievements and his wild claims of violent intimidation, became a flood. That’s not how he put it, mind.

Picture the scene. Nigel Farage unwittingly shares an Instagram snap featuring a grinning man wearing a T-shirt with a noose on it, which jokes about Zack Polanski hanging from a lamppost. Imagine this happened only a few weeks after a Green grandee had been murdered brutally in her home, sparking a terror investigation. The response would be more than ‘outrage’. Farage would almost certainly be arrested. There might even be talk of making Reform UK a proscribed organisation.  Let’s be clear. Polanski was not inciting violence here in any meaningful sense So I certainly understand the mix of horror and righteous indignation with which Reformers are responding to the latest skidmark that Polanski has left on British public life.

Zack Polanski is furious. Not so much with the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green yesterday. So far, he has managed one perfunctory tweet about that horrific attack, which curiously doesn’t feature the words Jews or anti-Semitism. Since then, he and his outriders have been angrily pushing back on any suggestion that, when it comes to the rise in Jew hatred, his Green party might just have something to do with it. No one is suggesting that Polanski, who is himself Jewish, is some frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite. But the charge that his party has become a magnet for anti-Semites – and a key voice in minimising the threat now posed to Britain’s Jews – is hardly unfounded, however many spittle-flecked missives Zack and Co post online.

When Keir Starmer’s Labour was flung into power by the implosion of the Conservatives, the chattering classes were gripped by almost comical levels of delusion. We were assured this assortment of third-rate managerialists were about to usher in a new age of calm, competence and principle. Surely, the Peter Mandelson scandal has finally put paid to all that. Sleaze defined New Labour, and it didn’t just sully the so-called Prince of Darkness Of all the supposed virtues that were projected on to Starmer’s incoming Labour government, the notion it would rid British politics of sleaze was almost adorable in its naivety – not to mention its wilful blindness to not-too-distant history.

So they can control our borders after all. After the government presided over a near-record high for small-boats crossings last year, swinging open the doors of the nation’s hotels to anyone who can buy a spot on a dinghy, the British state has banned a Dutch right-wing activist who pals around with Tommy Robinson. Starmer's government presides over an illegal migration free-for-all while fussing over a few crankish influencers Eva Vlaardingerbroek, 29, has had her electronic travel authorisation (ETA) revoked by the Home Office. ‘Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good', read an email, shared on X by Vlaardingerbroek. 'You cannot appeal this decision.

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Labour has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman.

Publicly mocking a man who has just died from falling off a ladder. This is what the ‘compassionate’ left has been getting up to on social media in recent days, in between retweeting conspiracy theories about the Bondi terror attack. ‘That knucklehead Paul Lumber who died putting up flags looks exactly like u imagined. The Master Race!!’, spat one person Paul Lumber, 60, fell to his death while putting up England and Union flags near his home in south Bristol. He was active in the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which has taken many of Britain’s neglected high streets and dual carriageways by storm. Lumber suffered multiple injuries, including head injuries, following the tragic incident on 23 November.

Would someone please think of the luvvies? While the rest of the nation is furious about our out-of-control borders and the heinous crimes committed by those who should never have been allowed to stay here in the first place, the Great and Good are furious that the government is taking even modest steps to try to clean up this mess. Justice Secretary David Lammy is meeting his fellow European ministers in Strasbourg today to discuss reforms to how the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is being interpreted by the continent’s courts. In response to this, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley and assorted other celebrities have made their disquiet known to Downing Street.

The fash must be bricking it. Paloma Faith, Fontaines D.C. and Lenny Henry are among the musicians, comedians and celebs who have just launched a new alliance, Together Against The Far Right. They’ve got a statement. And a demonstration planned for March next year. Far-right thugs, meet your match. The luvvies are reclaiming the streets. You probably don’t need me to tell you that this new ‘alliance’ isn’t just railing against what anyone could reasonably call the ‘far right’. You know, the pathetic fringe of racist bottomfeeders who can usually be found crying in Zia Yusuf’s mentions or, much graver still, could be seen smashing windows and screaming slurs in minority areas during last year's Southport riots. Everyone hates them.

We’ve become grimly accustomed to people throwing around the phrase ‘far right’. But seeing it flung at Labour home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms has felt particularly barmy – a new low from the liberal-left midwits who we all hoped couldn’t sink any lower. Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, has gone down exactly as you might expect Mahmood’s punchy announcements this week, in which she laid out plans to fix our ‘broken’ asylum system, have gone down exactly as you might expect. The Guardian has accused her of entering into a ‘damaging arms race with the far right’. ‘Straight out of the far-right playbook’, was one anonymous Labour MP’s assessment.

Is Jess Phillips okay? I can’t be the only one wondering. The safeguarding minister’s increasingly erratic, shirty performances at the despatch box would suggest she is crumbling under the scrutiny. Scrutiny that she and her government have brought entirely on themselves. This week, she lashed out at Tory and Reform MPs for daring to criticise Labour’s woeful handling of the grooming-gangs inquiry, which is disintegrating following the resignation of five victims from its liaison panel, some of whom accuse Labour of trying to engineer a ‘cover-up’. She dismissed this as ‘political pointscoring’ and told Lee Anderson to ‘question his own morality’.