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Why won’t the Met Police deal with Palestine protestors blocking parliament?
Does the Metropolitan Police have more respect for the rights of aggressive protestors than it does for Parliament itself? That’s the unavoidable question after the Met handled the latest demonstrations outside the Palace of Westminster with the usual kid gloves.
If the police were not aware of the protestors’ plans, how could such a failure of open-source intelligence occur?
For several hours last Wednesday, many hundreds of Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters gathered on the perimeter of the Palace of Westminster, effectively surrounding the Parliamentary Estate. As has become the norm at such events, the police appeared to be unwilling to enforce free and unobstructed access to Parliament so long as protest groups are able to mass sufficient numbers of individuals. It is an approach which compromises the Constitutional rights of Parliamentarians to make their way unimpeded to and from Parliament.
The culture of impunity which the various authorities – principally the Met – have created for disruptive protestors and criminals in the area around Parliament has been well documented by Policy Exchange in its report Tarnished Jewel. Lord Walney, the government’s former Independent Adviser on Political Violence and Extremism, has written to the Lord Speaker along with fifty-three members of the House of Lords, to express concern with how the Met are failing to prevent the intimidation, obstruction and harassment of Parliamentarians near to the Parliamentary Estate. But still the police fail to act.
As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Met, I know that Parliament has passed an abundance of legislation – particularly in relation to the area around the Parliamentary Estate – which protects the public and Parliamentarians from obstructive or intimidatory protestors. The current generation of senior police officers are certainly not ignorant of the law; so why are they so unwilling to enforce it?
There are a number of laws the police could use to crack down on these protests:
Section 241 Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 states it is an offence to use violence or intimidate a person with a view to “compelling another person to abstain from doing or to do any act which that person has a legal right to do or abstain from doing”.
Section 7 Public Order Act 2023 protects parts of the “roads infrastructure” adjacent to the Palace of Westminster as part of the “key national infrastructure” – similarly Westminster Underground Station which is frequently used by protestors as a staging post to intercept Parliamentarians.
Section 143 Police Reform & Social Responsibility Act 2011 prohibits the obstruction of the passage of vehicles into or out of entrances into or exits from the Parliamentary Estate.
Section 137 Highways Act 1980 makes it an offence deliberately to obstruct the highway – which includes every road adjacent to the Palace of Westminster. The Supreme Court’s judgment in DPP v Ziegler [2021] UKSC 23 provides that the exercise of rights to assemble and speak may provide a lawful excuse for obstructing the highway, but only if there is no “serious disruption” to the rights of others.
Section 14 Public Order Act 1986 enables the police to apply conditions to a “public assembly” if the people organising the protest have a purpose to intimidate others “with a view to compelling them not to do an act they have a right to do”.
Given the police are well aware of the vast array of legal powers at their disposal why are they so unwilling to act? What and who are they afraid of?
The plans for this week’s protest were published on social media at 5pm on Saturday 31st May. In other words, more than eighty hours before the start of the demonstration. If the police were not aware of the protestors’ plans, how could such a failure of open-source intelligence occur?
If the police were aware, then to paraphrase US Senator Howard Baker on Watergate – what did Sir Mark Rowley and the Metropolitan Police know, and when did they know it?
The police regularly hold meetings with protest groups in advance of any disruption – but the nature of those discussions and the terms of any deal struck between them are rarely revealed. What was agreed that the protestors would and wouldn’t do? What did the Met, if only by omission, concede to the aggressive protestors?
That these cosy discussions are shrouded in secrecy is an approach which cannot be sustained. Is it any surprise that the public’s confidence in the police remains close to historic lows?
This week’s events represent but the latest episode in the police’s failure to deal with obstructive protestors in Parliament’s environs.
As activists continue their campaigns of disruption, police forces, prosecutors and the courts engage in a ‘balancing of rights’ exercise to adjudge whose rights, and which, are to be prioritised.
On one side are the rights of protestors to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly – neither of which are absolute but are subject to limitations “as necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security and public safety”. On the other side the right of the ordinary person, or indeed the Parliamentarian on our behalf, to go about their daily lives and work.
The Met Commissioner has previously acknowledged that in the policing of past protests near Parliament the police have allowed demonstrators to get too close to the security perimeter. Yet this week’s episode shows that those lessons appear not to have been learned.
The interim report of the Speaker’s Conference on the security of candidates, MPs and elections, published this week, recognised that there is “at best inconsistent” understanding and awareness among police officers of the criminal offences related to preventing the harassment, abuse and intimidation of politicians.
The Defending Democracy Task Force, chaired by the Security Minister, Dan Jarvis MP, should examine as part of its current review what further steps the Government can take to protect Parliamentarians going about their duties in and about Westminster.
The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper MP, must ensure the Metropolitan Police protects Parliament and Parliamentarians from this kind of disruption and obstruction. This is a national responsibility, well within her remit and where she should now take the lead.
She should direct His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to conduct an inspection under section 54 (2B) Police Act 1996 into how the Met are managing protest in the proximity of Parliament.
The Home Secretary should also consider invoking the rarely used section 40 Police Act 1996 which enables her to direct the local policing body – in this case the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime – to take specific action to remedy the police’s failure. Given British policing’s traditional “operational independence”, this is considered by many insiders to be the “nuclear option”; but now that these protests are all too regularly impeding Parliamentarians going about their duties, it may well be that its time has come.
David Spencer is the Head of Crime and Justice at Policy Exchange and is a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police
The truth about the 1984 miners’ strike
On 6 March 1984, I found myself smack-bang in the middle of the largest industrial dispute in post-war history. As the son of a fifth-generation miner whose bedroom window looked out onto Pye Hill Pit in Selston – the remote Nottinghamshire mining village I called home – I couldn’t help but be caught up in the miners’ strike. And over its 363 days, I watched with bemused anger as a series of nods, winks, slights of hand and outright lies were fashioned into a hard and fast history.
So much of what Selston stood for was lost in the strike and its malicious aftermath
On one side we had the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) principled president Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, fighting to save British mining. On the other side, Nottinghamshire’s moneygrubbing scabs, intent on murdering Old King Coal – aided by Margaret Thatcher and the rozzers. Admittedly, the media didn’t spell it out quite so plainly, but there were enough headlines and emotion-heavy images to make sure we all got the message. ‘THATCHER PUTS THE BOOT IN.’ ‘COAL NOT DOLE.’ All those bands – New Order, Style Council, even Wham! – playing striking miners’ benefit gigs. Endless news footage of food banks and men warming their hands around rusty oil barrel braziers.
We were being read a simple bedtime story: goodies vs. baddies. And that story became gospel. Look at almost anything written about the strike over the last 40 years; no grey, just black and white. Watch any of last year’s 40th anniversary documentaries; all those former striking miners gulping through their tears and insisting that, ‘Thatcher an’ t’ Notts miners killed t’ pits. Wenn t’ union sezz yuh cumm aht, yuh cumm aht’. The BBC recently ran a story about Bruce Springsteen donating $20,000 to the families of striking miners in 1985. ‘My parents were working-class people and I watched them struggle their whole lives,’ he explained. ‘I’d been reading about it [the strike] in the newspapers and so it was just something that felt it would be a good thing to do.’ Even The Boss had it in for the Nottinghamshire miners!
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. might be a fine album, Bruce, but mining was in trouble way before the strike. And none of it had anything to do with Nottinghamshire, Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher or the walkout at Yorkshire’s Cortonwood Colliery, the strike’s trigger point. From a solid figure of 750,000 in the 1950s, the number of men employed by British mines had fallen to 250,000 by the early 70s. There were other factors, too, like the dwindling post-war need for coal and the introduction of mechanisation – just over 5 per cent of coal output was mechanised in the 1950s, rising to over 90 per cent in the 1970s. Over 250 pits had closed during Harold Wilson’s two terms in office – compared with Thatcher’s 115 – and even the left’s favourite MP Tony Benn had been arguing for the closure of uneconomical pits in the early 70s.
Dad and his mates might not have donated $20,000, but they still felt sorry for the families surviving on food bank handouts. They felt sorry for the communities that couldn’t survive without coal; Selston was one of them. But our sympathy was tempered by the bricks thrown through front room windows and dog mess shoved through letter boxes. Tempered, too, by the bloodstain on the pavement where a Nottinghamshire miner’s wife was attacked as she walked her kids to school. Tempered by the death of David Wilkie, a Mid Glamorgan taxi driver who was taking a non-striking miner to work when two striking miners dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto his car. Wilkie’s fiancée gave birth to their fourth child just six weeks later.
I was beaten up by striking miners even though I wasn’t a miner – working or otherwise. I’d been all set to start as a fitter at nearby Bentinck Colliery in 1982, but with closures on the horizon, apprenticeships were on hold and I took a job at a local engineering firm. Riding to work one morning, I was stopped by a bunch of men who spotted my gloves – distinctive, yellow National Coal Board gloves that Dad had nicked from work. Assuming I was on the wrong side of history, they trashed my motorbike. And me.
All the Nottinghamshire miners – along with men from Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Scotland, North Wales and Lancashire – wanted was a ballot to decide their future. Yes, they supported the union’s overtime ban announced in October 1983 but a decision on national strike action had to be taken by the men, not simply ordered by the union president. Unfortunately for Arthur Scargill, the men knew that change was inevitable and pits would close – indeed, many miners over 50 were already keen to leave the industry. The men were given three national ballots for strike action during 1982-83 and each time they voted ‘No’. And if they’d gone to a ballot in 1984, Scargill knew what the result would be. So, he simply bypassed the ‘working class people’ who’d struggled ‘their whole lives’; the vote was not taken by the men… but by the top brass. That’s not a union, that’s an army – a dictatorship, a fiefdom. It’s what would happen if Donald Trump was president of the NUM.
When I became a very late first-time father in 2020 – aged 55 and a journalist for more than 30 years – I thought about the story I would tell my son. About me and him, who he was and where he came from. That’s when I started writing a book about Selston, coal and our family. About my dad, who died a few short years after retirement, his lungs stuffed with 40 years’ worth of coal dust. About distant relatives, some as young as five years old, who had worked and were killed underground. About the 1970s Saturday nights at the Tin Hat, our local working men’s club, where spruced-up mining families would drink Mackeson, whisky ‘n’ pep and cherryade, dream of the 10 quid bingo jackpot and try to forget last week’s pitfall. About a handsome, unsophisticated landscape that became a welcome home for wheat fields, headstocks, Peak District horizons and prefab council estates. About how coal’s exacting 700-year reign over Selston had somehow convinced my blind mother she could see and allowed imaginative schoolboys to conquer gravity.
Unfortunately, so much of what Selston stood for – so much of the magic – was lost in the strike and its malicious aftermath. It has simply become another deceitful Nottinghamshire mining village, hauled out for a dose of contempt and humiliation every time a strike anniversary rolls around. So what if child poverty in Selston and the surrounding villages sits at around 30 per cent and slightly more than that for working-age economic inactivity. We broke the strike! We deserve it!
Let’s just imagine that, instead of the strike, the Nottinghamshire miners won the argument and a national ballot had taken place. Arthur Scargill, having lost, retreated to his grace-and-favour flat in London’s Barbican, leaving a united NUM to fashion a smaller but still viable British mining industry. Maybe. Possibly. Looking back, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but it would have been a far more dignified legacy than the poisonous tripe we’ve ended up with.
Yes, somebody did cheat the country and British mining in 1984, but contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t Selston, it wasn’t my dad, his mates or Nottinghamshire. Does anyone remember the motto that adorned those NUM banners flittering in Cortonwood’s summer breeze? ‘The past we inherit, the future we build.’
This is your future, Arthur… unfortunately, Selston still has to live in it.
How Britain can borrow America’s top scientists
From the time of Newton, Britain led the world in science. That began to change in 1940, when, with the Battle of Britain raging, Winston Churchill sent the scientist Henry Tizard on a secret mission to America. His objective was to secure financial and industrial help in the fight against Hitler. His currency was British military technology, in particular the cavity magnetron, a device that made it possible to locate the enemy with radar. This wowed the Americans and achieved his objective. According to one historian, it was ‘the most valuable cargo ever brought to [America’s] shores.’
The last ten foreign scientists we brought to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, where I work, cost us £3 million
While this was a hand-over of scientific power, it catalysed the Anglo-American scientific alliance, which has seen a flow of talent ever since between our two nations. At times there have been concerns that this might be one-way traffic: from us to them. Yet now that Donald Trump looks set to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, it will most likely be the reverse. The jobs website of the journal Nature suggests that the number of American scientists looking to get out of Dodge has risen by a third.
Scientific talent is on the move, so what are we doing about it? Last month, Chi Onwurah MP, who heads the government’s Science and Technology Committee, wrote to the Science Minister Lord Patrick Vallance posing this very question. She suggested we create ‘a special visa…to reduce the costs of attracting top talent leaving the US.’
Onwurah is right that we need to act, but visas aren’t the key. While they are more expensive in Britain than in France or Germany, they represent only a small fraction of the real price of recruiting talent, which is dominated by salary and support costs. I know this from personal experience. The last ten foreign scientists we brought to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, where I work, cost us £3 million, of which £30,000 was spent on Global Talent visas and related charges. High visa costs may send out the wrong signal to candidates, but a 1 per cent change to the bottom line won’t make much difference.
What we need is a dedicated recruitment campaign to bring this ‘most valuable cargo’ to our shores. The world’s best scientific talent rarely comes up for grabs, but now it has.
We have to find the money, fast, to create new posts that are ring-fenced for American scientists. The EU says it is spending €500 million on posts that are open to foreigners. Big deal. Most scientific posts are open to anyone. Britain must create new posts that are set aside for Americans only. If this is hard for the government, then agile institutions like the London Institute will have to step into the breach.
If you learned that Albert Einstein was considering leaving the Institute for Advanced Study, would you create a post for foreigners, then say: ‘We’ve done what we can’? Of course not. You’d get on a plane to Princeton and have coffee with the man. When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the London Institute didn’t just create jobs for foreigners. We raised £3 million for fellowships that were ring-fenced not only for Ukrainian talent, but also for world-class Russians looking to leave their country. We flew to Paris, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Tel Aviv and Beijing to talk émigré Russian scientists into making their home in London. Our programme is the largest of its kind in the world.
That £3 million in funding didn’t come from the government. We raised it from philanthropic organisations that have a special concern for Russian talent, such as the Khodorkovsky Foundation, and smaller contributions from individuals.
It’s going to be the same story when it comes to creating posts for Americans. This year so far, we have raised £2 million – a quarter of the £8 million target we’ve set ourselves – and used it to bring American-based talent to Britain. This money, too, hasn’t come from Westminster. Instead it is thanks to the generosity of the likes of Ben Delo, the British entrepreneur who funded a new fellowship at the London Institute so we could recruit a physicist from Harvard.
If you want someone to join you, you must tell them you want them. At a party, you must cross the room. To win over Americans, you must cross the Atlantic, as Tizard did in 1940.
Britain has a headstart in this race, which is that moving to Britain is already an attractive prospect for American scientists. I know this myself, as a Texan physicist who crossed the Atlantic to do my PhD and never went back. Why did I stay? It was partly because this is the country of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Roger Penrose, of the Cavendish Laboratory and the cavity magnetron. Partly, too, it was because of the Special Relationship between our nations, which since the Tizard Mission has never been more special than in science.
We should look at the coming wave of talent not as a prospective win for Britain but as part of the long-term scientific alliance between our two countries. That is a century old and will continue for a century to come. The talent will flow one way now and the other later. In the circumstances, the curious thing is that more places aren’t creating posts set aside for Americans. Let Britain lead the way.
What happened to Piers Morgan?
There was great fanfare when Piers Morgan re-entered the world of television three years ago to front a new prime-time show on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV. Morgan framed the move as a fightback against cancel culture, a return to free speech, and a declaration of independence from the constraints of legacy media.
Piers Morgan asks for the truth but refuses to hear it. pic.twitter.com/2LtEgoMJ5h
— Natasha Hausdorff (@HausdorffMedia) June 3, 2025
‘I’m delighted to now be returning to live television,’ he announced in the show’s trailer, promising to ‘cancel the cancel culture’ and to bring ‘lively, vigorous debate’ and even, in his words, the increasingly taboo three-letter word: fun.
What began as an ambitious, if characteristically self-aggrandising, venture has since devolved into something much darker and altogether more degraded. TalkTV itself has folded as a linear broadcast channel, unable to match the traction of rival GB News. Morgan was given advance leave to migrate his programme to his own YouTube channel, an arrangement that let him present the move as an embrace of the future, aligning himself with the likes of Joe Rogan or the post-Fox Tucker Carlson. But while Morgan did indeed gain the potential for more lucrative direct monetisation through ads and sponsored segments – which now punctuate his shows in the form of old-school American-style radio pitches for VPNs, cat food, fermented teas and creatine health supplements – one suspects the shift was driven more by financial necessity than creative vision.
The man who made his name as a tabloid editor has returned to form
More crucially, the tone and structure of Morgan’s show have undergone a dismal transformation. In its early phase, Piers Morgan Uncensored occasionally lived up to its promise: it brought together voices seldom heard elsewhere in the mainstream, especially on the Middle East, and offered space for extended, sometimes illuminating, exchanges. However one felt about the guests, the discussions often yielded genuine insight. That now feels like another era.
Today, the format resembles a political version of The Jerry Springer Show: split screens filled with talking heads shouting over one another, curated more for their social media followings than their intellectual substance. The thumbnails for these videos – angry faces, flailing arms, and the word ‘VS’ emblazoned across the frame – are textbook clickbait. This isn’t accidental. In the ruthless economy of digital engagement, rage sells. Ever the tabloid operator, Morgan has leant into this with relish.
Morgan’s interview this week with the barrister Natasha Hausdorff is a case study in what has gone wrong. His interruptions, disdain, and personal insults – not merely abrasive, but often sneering – feel fundamentally un-British in their tone and tenor. There is no regard for decorum, nor for the kind of civility traditionally prized in serious public discourse.
Hausdorff, articulate and composed, attempted to provide a legal and reason-based perspective on the war in Gaza. Instead of engaging with her arguments, Morgan drowned her out with interruptions, shouted “bullshit” repeatedly, and accused her of being disingenuous when she questioned the veracity of certain widely-circulated reports. Her crime was not denial – she did not deny Palestinian deaths as he alleged – but hesitation to endorse statistics and claims that lacked verification. One need not agree with Hausdorff to treat her with respect and good manners. In a cruel irony, a show called Uncensored effectively censored a guest through aggression and derision.
At times, Morgan’s show feels like the famous Monty Python ‘Argument Clinic’ sketch: a customer enters an office expecting a reasoned debate, only to be met with a man who contradicts every statement without providing any rationale. The customer grows increasingly exasperated, eventually pleading: ‘An argument’s not the same as contradiction,’ only to be met with the reply, ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘No, it isn’t!’ he continues. ‘Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction’s just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.’ – ‘No, it isn’t.’ – ‘Yes, it is.’
For too many of Morgan’s guests, the attempt to offer coherent argument is met with precisely this kind of juvenile gainsaying, but ruder.
The descent into polemical theatre is especially tragic because Morgan’s show once promised a corrective to mainstream media’s superficiality. Instead, it has become a hyperactive clone of the very culture it set out to challenge. Now, rather than challenge conventional narratives or explore uncomfortable truths, Morgan spends his airtime orchestrating viral spats and inviting predictable provocateurs whose value lies in their ability to generate ‘engagement’ rather than enlightenment.
The answer why is, I suspect, not mysterious: money and visibility (neither one inherently a bad thing). In a digital ecosystem governed by algorithms that reward emotion over substance, rage over nuance, and spectacle over sincerity, Morgan has simply adapted to survive. But in doing so, he has helped debase the very discourse he once claimed to defend. The incentive structures of YouTube prioritise viewer retention, comment activity, and shares. Anger sustains attention; complexity does not. Morgan’s show now insults its viewers’ intelligence, rather than serving their curiosity.
The sad part is that Morgan knows how to be an excellent interviewer. But his appetite for attention is well known, even sometimes at the expense of accuracy. In 2004, as editor of the Daily Mirror, he was sacked after publishing doctored photographs purporting to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. The fake images were condemned by the Ministry of Defence and traced to a Territorial Army base in the UK. Morgan refused to apologise, later saying that he had put the photos to the MoD, who didn’t raise the issue before publication. He insisted the photos symbolised real abuses. Morgan also said he would apologise if ‘firm evidence ever materialises that they were 100 per cent fake’. That episode, and Morgan’s refusal to concede error, bear a haunting resemblance to his treatment of Hausdorff. When she raised concerns about manipulated imagery in the context of the Gaza war, she was shouted down, accused of denial, and mocked with contempt.
The tragedy is not simply Morgan’s transformation. It is that amid all this – amid the noise, the posturing, the monetised outrage – the only person who seems to emerge enriched is Morgan himself. He gains the visibility, the platform and the advertising revenue. While guests are demeaned, audiences are infantilised, and public discourse is coarsened, Morgan reaps the algorithmic rewards. He is the sole winner of a game that cheapens everyone else involved. It is the definition of failing upwards: every firing, every walkout, every controversy becomes a springboard to greater notoriety.
There is something almost admirable in the audaciousness with which Morgan turns personal and professional setbacks into further spectacle. But it is equally, and more consequentially, reprehensible in its effect on the wider public sphere. It is what that transformation reveals about the current media environment. Outrage is monetised, dissent is theatricalised, and good faith argument is overrun by partisan brawling. Piers Morgan once promised to widen the conversation. Today, he narrows it to the crudest dimensions of the culture war.
So what has happened to Piers Morgan? Nothing all that surprising. The man who made his name as a tabloid editor has returned to form – this time on a new platform, but with the same old instincts. The only difference is that now, the damage is global, instantaneous, and algorithmically amplified.
What being kidnapped taught me about the struggle for Kurdish independence
Twenty-one years ago, I was opportunistically kidnapped by supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In light of the PKK declaring last month its intention to discontinue its armed struggle against Turkey, I’ve been reflecting back on my involuntary run-in with the struggle for Kurdish self-governance.
As with my kidnapping, the Kurdish cause had always been riven by amateurism, not to mention the petty feuds of the rival Kurdish organisations in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Truces, mass casualty events, kidnappings, and negotiations followed each other haphazardly. The struggle was filled with freelancers, bandits, and entrepreneurs. It embodied contradictory approaches to Americans and Western power in the region.
Steve had come to the Levant for a taste of the exotic. The year was 2004. We were both Fulbright Scholars. After a week in Syria, we were tired of ruins and banquets. We were headed to Beirut for the pleasures of real civilisation – the rooftop bar at the Virgin Mega Store, Haagen-Dazs, and the much-missed company of western women.
I had previously taken a shared taxi from Aleppo to Beirut and thought I knew the drill; cabs would depart after all six seats were sold. We arrived hungover at 9am to the Beirut destination section at the mahatat – a dusty pit filled with large antique yellow Cadillacs. Hours passed and no other passengers showed up.
At 2pm, I negotiated to pay for the four back seats if we would leave post-haste. On the way out, the driver pulled over and a moustachioed man named Soran put a metal pipe in the trunk and then hopped in. My complaints about sharing the taxi we had paid for fell on deaf ears.
I noticed the two men were not speaking in Arabic. Kiyan’s language seemed close to Persian, but less melodic and with more Arabic loan words. Soran explained that they were speaking Kurdish. As we drove, we heard their life stories. Their extended families had risen up after the Liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and suffered Saddam Hussein’s Anfal gassing campaign. They had forgiven the Americans for not supporting them; they backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and believed that a greater Kurdistan would emerge under an American security umbrella. For years they had driven the Erbil-Aleppo-Beirut route and transported goods to help ‘the Cause’: the salvation of the Kurdish people.
By about 5pm, we reached the Aboudieh Crossing. The Syrian guard demanded Kiyan open the trunk. Then the guard jumped in the front seat and we sped away into the neutral zone. I heard the words ‘illegal pipe’. Numbers were discussed, hands were shaken. The border guard started walking back to the Syrian side. When we got to the Lebanese checkpoint, they looked at our American passports, and waved us straight through. A half-hour later, we saw the Mediterranean glistening below a grey-pinkish sunset.
We sped through Tripoli, but rather than hugging the coast road, we took a sharp left turn and started ascending uphill south-eastward. The sun had just set and streetlights feebly lit the road.
I looked at my phone; there was no signal. We pulled off the road on to gravel tracks. It became pitch black. In the distance, I could see poorly lit primitive drilling rigs. As we drew closer, men with AK-47s came towards us. The car came to a stop. We all got out.
I told Steve it was time to be as docile as possible. The men with the guns came and took away the pipe. Kiyan looked me straight in the eye and told me: ‘You and Steve are kidnapped. Just relax, we are not going to kill you. You are not Turks. You are Americans and you support the Cause.’
It was 9pm and I was somewhere southeast of Lebanese Tripoli on a rocky escarpment surrounded by illicit drilling equipment. I didn’t think the PKK had operations in Lebanon, but I guess it made sense that they did. The PKK was given sanctuary in Syria, but could never get away with illicit mining there. Whereas in Lebanon, anything was fair game as long as you gave a cut to the right people.
The obligatory hyper sweet tea was served by moustachioed insurgents in leather jackets with AK-47s slung over their shoulders.
‘We are sorry about all this fuss,’ Kiyan told us. ‘We know you are Americans on a prestigious Congressional scholarship. We are expecting at least a thousand dollars each.’
I instructed Steve to make a clear gesture turning his pockets inside out, then handing over his wallet. Soran searched the booty. He was disappointed to learn we had under $80 in Syrian Lira and a few hundred dollars in cash.
The Kurdish cause had always been riven by amateurism
Kiyan said we must have more money. I signalled that I had an oration to make:
‘Steve and I have always supported the Kurds. We are only graduate students and we tend not to carry around much cash. These days, Lebanon has one ATM, in the Place des Etoiles in Central Beirut, to the right of the Haagen Daz store. Steve and I each have ATM cards and credit cards. If we can get to this machine, we can use each card to take out $500 per card.’
ATMs were new in Syria with only two in Damascus and none in Aleppo. The word also had a mystical ring to it in colloquial Arabic, jihaz felusiyya – literally the money machine. I banked on the fact that they might not know that Tripoli likely had ATMs and that the fancier areas of Beirut were full of international banks.
More tea was made. Conversation broke out in Kurdish. Kiyan eventually made a gesture bringing the debate to a close. Shockingly, they announced that they agreed to our plan. We were told to get back in the car.
Upon arrival in Beirut, Kiyan parked and Soran followed us towards the Haagen-Dazs store with its prominently placed cash machine to its right. As we approached it, the entrance to the parliament was visible, flanked by armed guards in sentry boxes. I started screaming ‘Help!’ and Steve reluctantly joined in. Five armed men were rapidly running towards us. Soran fled back to the car. We were rescued.
With hindsight, the PKK’s military campaign against Turkey achieved about as much for the Kurdish cause as Kiyan’s kidnapping did for the group’s finances. Kurdish self-government has come about less through armed struggle and more through the geopolitical shifts of the post-Cold War period: the post-1991 No-Fly Zone creating de facto Federalism for Northern Iraq; the US overthrow of Saddam rendering the KRG semi-autonomous after 2003; and Syria’s implosion post-2011 facilitating a period of micro-statehood in Northeastern Syria. Autonomy for Kurds has been achieved by capitalising on external events and forging alliances, not by armed struggle.
So in mid-2025 with the PKK disappearing and the autonomous Kurdish areas of Northeastern Syria returning to the yoke of Damascus, I feel a bit deflated with a pang of nostalgia for the Cause. Or maybe it’s just Stockholm syndrome?
Tesco’s ‘VAR’-style self-checkout cameras are the final straw
Tesco has followed Sainsbury’s lead by installing cameras above self-checkouts to identify when shoppers fail to scan an item properly, using the footage to provide a live-action replay of their misdeed. Predictably, it’s not gone down well: a video posted on Instagram involving a can of tuna got more than 3.5 million views. When will the supermarkets learn to stop treating their shoppers like criminals?
Tesco’s track record with customer data is not encouraging
Much of the reaction to Tesco’s VAR (Video Assistant Referee) cameras has focused on Britons’ humorous responses: ‘VAR Decision – Tuna Disallowed,’ joked one person. ‘Clearly off side,’ riffed another. But the growing surveillance in our supermarkets is no laughing matter.
Everyone needs to buy food and, with a 28 per cent share of the UK supermarket sector, Tesco is the UK’s biggest grocery chain. Shoppers who don’t want to be spied on are running out of options.
One customer, noticing the new systems in his local store in south-east London, has taken the matter seriously. Gaming developer John O’Reilly wonders how anyone can consent to ‘such deeply invasive technology. ‘Are children even kept out of the dataset?’ he asks. ‘Who can access this data? Is it shared with police? Is my data being sold?’ We need answers to these questions!’
Tesco’s track record with customer data is not encouraging. Amid repeated claims that its Clubcard loyalty scheme is not clear or fair in its pricing, the chain has earned itself huge revenues by selling customers’ (albeit unidentifiable) data. For its part, Tesco has said: ‘We do not sell or share any individual customer data and we take our responsibilities regarding the use of customer data extremely seriously.’
But the use of VAR and facial recognition technology in supermarkets ups the stakes considerably. This is not just anonymised data about preferences and shopping habits ‘for marketing purposes’. The biometrics involved feed a little-understood and potentially vast system with intimate information about individuals, from their physical characteristics to emotion-based behaviour.
The purpose of such technology is to identify people; hence the attraction for retailers wanting to combat rising theft. Asda is the first UK-wide supermarket to trial live facial recognition in five of its stores (the Southern Co-op have been using it for a while). Staff are able to add individuals to a watchlist, marking them as a ‘person of interest’. But rather worryingly, shoppers aren’t necessarily informed if their biometric data is being stored. The civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has filed a legal complaint about Asda with the Information Commissioner, arguing that its use of live facial recognition cameras is ‘unlawful’.
The concrete risks – there are plenty of examples of misidentification in this early use of a new technology – are real. But the greater danger can’t be resolved by its users tweaking the tech to make fewer mistakes.
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo captures what we should have learnt from the mass surveillance regimes of other times and places: ‘When mundane aspects of everyday life like food shopping become opportunities for the powerful to cast a biometric surveillance net over the public we lose more everyday freedom. It’s not just the political impact – but psychological.’
Most people have an instinctual sense of the harms of going about their daily business under surveillance. But as we rush into the age of AI, many are allowing that sense to be overridden by the twin elements of a narrative suggesting our feelings are unimportant and that it is pointless to protest. These, the concepts of ‘convenience’ and ‘inevitability’ so elegantly unpacked by Brett Scott in his book about digital payments Cloudmoney, also apply to surveillance. While they come from the organisations set to benefit from the changes, the messages appeal to people’s desire for an easy life. So many supermarket customers console themselves with the idea that ‘cameras are everywhere’ or ‘they already have our data’.
Naturally, Tesco has made much of the narrative of convenience. ‘We have recently installed a new system at some stores which helps customers using self-service checkouts identify if an item has not been scanned properly, making the checkout process quicker and easier,’ a Tesco spokesperson said following the unveiling of its VAR checkout tills.
Note how the phrasing cloaks the imposition in positive terms, presenting something self-evidently unpalatable as ‘helpful’. It’s a misleading use of language that has somehow slipped into public discourse in recent years: Tony Blair uses it when he argues that digital ID will make accessing public services ‘easier’. Councils use it when claiming that roadblocks will ‘encourage’ drivers to walk or cycle. But we don’t have to fall for it. As consumers, we can decide where to take our custom.
Since returning to the UK after a couple of years abroad to find supermarkets becoming distinctly dystopian, I’ve changed my shopping habits radically. Tesco, which has been the subject of criticism for its treatment of farmers and suppliers since the early 2000s, was an easy shop to drop. Sainsbury’s, the supermarket of my childhood, was less easy to give up. But my local Sainsbury’s and the Co-op in the market town where I used to live have become unrecognisable. Once charming, they are now silent places where grim-looking staff oversee customers operating machines under banks of screens.
I can’t ignore how Britain’s supermarkets are becoming something entirely different from places where people buy their groceries. As well as being uncomfortable shops to visit, they’re eroding our long-established, hard won right to privacy. And, unlike John O’Reilly, our politicians aren’t asking the necessary questions about how our personal data will be used or considering policies to protect us.
So it seems that it’s down to us, the supermarket customers, to look out for ourselves. That’s why I’m amazed when I see endless posts online by people complaining about the automation and surveillance in the stores they continue to patronise. It’s time to recognise that an arrangement in which we’re expected to exchange our biometrics as well as our money for food is a Faustian pact that won’t end well. Tesco’s VAR cameras are the final straw for me; they should be for you too.
Walking, not working out, is the best exercise
These days almost everyone you meet is a member of a gym, and instead of attending church every week – as they did in days gone by – they make regular visits to these temples of the body beautiful: the new religion of our times. Yet despite these obligatory bouts of body worship, the general health of the nation – physical and mental – does not appear to be improving. The evidence tells us that obscene levels of obesity are at an all-time high, and everyone has heard stories of those struck down in the prime of life by strokes, coronaries or – most common of all – cancer, the plague of our age.
Last week, for example, I heard of an acquaintance, thought super-fit by his friends, who wearied his girlfriend with constant demands for vigorous sex, and who suddenly dropped dead in the stairwell of his home – felled by a heart attack that apparently came from nowhere. And who of us has not heard of someone visiting a doctor with a mysterious pain, only to be given a deadly diagnosis of some fell disease and told they had just a few months more to live?
Instead of ruinously expensive sessions in a gym, I would recommend a form of exercise that requires no membership fees, no purchase of expensive equipment, and no regular attendance at a given location. I mean the gentle practice of merely putting one foot in front of the other – and just walking.
Walking – either alone, with a like-minded companion, or in one of many organised groups – is a safer, cheaper and more beneficial way of staying fit than going to gyms. And you get to see the superb sites of our gorgeous countryside, which you don’t when lifting weights.
It is the simplest form of exercise known to humankind, and makes no dangerous demands on the cardiovascular system, which gym visits, jogging, cycling or running a marathon entail. Moreover, walking slowly releases endorphins as well as leaving one with pleasantly aching parts of the body at its conclusion.
Unless you can afford to keep a horse, walking is by far the nicest and easiest way of viewing our green and pleasant land. Last weekend, for instance, I visited a hill fort that inspired William Blake to pen that famous phrase when he wrote ‘Jerusalem’ while looking out towards the Trundle, a Bronze Age settlement on St Roche’s hill near Goodwood in West Sussex.
It is certainly not the north face of the Eiger, but ascending the 676ft Trundle still requires a steady half-hour climb. And it is not as demanding as two other beauty spots in the same area: Kingley Vale, whose grove of yew trees are reputedly older than nearby Chichester Cathedral; and Harting Down, a National Trust-owned area of the South Downs that really does take it out of the calf muscles.
It is the simplest form of exercise known to humankind, and makes no dangerous demands on the cardiovascular system
Even in overcrowded south-east England, it is still possible to explore hills, woods, fields and forests where you will meet few fellow walkers. And if panting your way up to a hill fort is not your idea of fun, how about a sandy stroll around the beautiful beaches of West Wittering, where only a yapping hound is likely to disturb your peaceful contemplation of the coast
I have walked several of the maintained long-distance paths that cater to the more dedicated strollers. The South Downs Way between Eastbourne and Winchester is popular with both walkers and – annoyingly – mountain bikers. The Cotswold Way takes you past some of England’s most beautiful towns and villages.
More demanding is the South West coastal path around the Cornish peninsula between Poole on the English Channel and Minehead on the Bristol Channel. It features in the current film The Salt Path, about a couple who counter the double whammy of a terminal illness diagnosis and homelessness by simply setting out to walk the 600-mile path. As the poet Thom Gunn wrote in his signature verses ‘On the Move’: ‘Reaching no absolute in which to rest/ One is always nearer by not keeping still.’
It has been calculated that completing the South West coastal path is equivalent to ascending Everest three times, but you don’t have to be a Hillary or a Tenzing to walk. A stout pair of boots and a map is all that is required. Whether in company or alone, it will certainly make you feel good – and it may even save your life.
How an international community of do-gooders made the US lose the plot in Yemen
As British Ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017, and later in counterterrorism roles at the UN, I watched with growing frustration as Washington, despite its early clarity, lost the plot in Yemen – with consequences that are now rippling across the Red Sea and into Israel.
In 2014, the international community got it right. UN Security Council Resolution 2140 blamed the right culprits: former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthi leadership. The Houthis, a small sectarian militia allied with Saleh, were trying to hijack Yemen’s democratic transition – and the world recognized that. When President Hadi, the internationally recognized leader, was forced to flee Sanaa, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention at Hadi’s request, justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
There was no question who the good guys and bad guys in this conflict were; we were on the side of Hadi and the Saudis. We understood the stakes: the Houthis, backed by Iran, were a violent minority trying to impose their rule on Yemen’s majority Sunni population.
So what went wrong? Essentially the international community was swayed by a number of prejudices and misconceptions, including about the moral sanctity of humanitarian activity.
Unless you are a Saudi or an Omani, Yemen can seem a long way away, a marginal concern to the West compared with more politically and strategically pressing conflict zones like Iraq, Syria, even Libya. In those circumstances, and particularly before Donald Trump challenged the thinking, Western countries would default to seeing crises like that in Yemen through an almost exclusively humanitarian lens.
The Department for International Development had more resource and more influence to bring to bear on the UK’s Yemen policy than the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Anything that interfered with humanitarian delivery was by definition a bad thing and the Saudi and Emirati-backed efforts of the IRG to retake its territory from the Houthis fell into that category.
The international community of do-gooders is more cohesive and effective at lobbying than many people realise. It is a community that has a number of overwhelming prejudices which are broadly anti-Western and specifically hostile to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Pressure groups like Oxfam and Amnesty teamed up with the human rights community and reinforced the humanitarian lobby, which was led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Every time the Houthis succeeded in drawing Saudi airstrikes onto a civilian target (much like Hamas in Gaza now), Western officials like me were subjected to ever shriller lobbying about the iniquities of the Saudis. None of these groups seemed to care about the Houthis arresting, torturing and murdering ordinary Yemenis (any more than they do about Hamas doing the same to ordinary Palestinians).
This potent mix of humanitarian absolutism and anti-Saudi sentiment in Western Europe made it harder and harder for the US and the UK to hold their original line on why we should back the Saudis and the IRG. This ultimately led to US Secretary of State John Kerry, heavily influenced by Oman, taking an increasingly anti-Saudi line and seeking peace at any price. By the time of the Kuwait peace talks in 2016, only just over a year after the Saudis entered the war, the international consensus was that the Houthis should be given whatever they demanded to stop the war.
The result? The talks collapsed because the emboldened Houthis demanded total victory.
Worse still was the Stockholm Agreement of December 2018. The Saudis were on the brink of taking Hodeida, the key Red Sea port supplying the Houthis. But the murder of Jamal Khashoggi caused international outrage, playing into existing Western hostility and making it impossible for President Trump to shield the Saudis from international opposition to their campaign in Yemen.
The UN, backed by humanitarian lobbies, led demands that nothing be done that might interrupt the passage of humanitarian supplies through Hodeida. In theory, the Stockholm Agreement was supposed to ensure that the Houthis did not control Hodeida, but no attempt was made to monitor or enforce it, and the Houthis ignored it from day one.
Houthi recklessness and aggression in the Red Sea throughout 2024 show how foolish it was to imagine that they could ever be trusted to settle into a responsible, governing role in Yemen.
Now, even the UN has lost its appetite for defending the Houthis, whose arrogance and brutality is such that they have been kidnapping and abusing humanitarians, including UN staff, as well as making the Red Sea unsafe for humanitarian delivery operations.
But there appears to be uncertainty in the Trump administration about how to harmonize the various strands of Middle East policy: is it possible to be pro-Israeli and pro-Qatari at the same time? Can it contain the Houthis while courting Iran for a new nuclear deal?
The surest guarantee of an end to the Houthi threat to freedom of navigation in international waters is to drive them back from the Red Sea coast altogether. In other words, to tear up the Stockholm Agreement and take Hodeida and the coast between there and the Saudi border as should have been done in 2019.
What is unclear is whether the Saudis have the appetite for this, given their desire to extricate themselves from the Yemeni civil war. Only the US, and specifically President Trump, can reassure them of the reliability of support for them against the Houthis. Only the US can assemble the necessary international coalition to underpin this overhaul of international policy towards the Houthis.
This is a unique opportunity to coerce a change in Iran. If not regime change (which is possible given the current weakness of the Islamic Republic), then the abandoning or destruction of all of Iran’s aggressive programs: nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile development, asymmetric warfare via the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iraqi proxy militias and the other components of the Axis.
This will require determination and probably force. We must be prepared to confront both Iran and the Houthis, with the Houthis only likely to give up their aggressive agenda if they face defeat in the Yemeni civil war.
The US cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of Stockholm. The longer it waits to confront Iran and its proxies, the higher the price will be – not just for the Middle East, but for global security.
Biden’s FBI targeted ‘radical traditionalist’ Catholics
Most Catholics were well aware of Joe Biden’s, at best, tepid observation of Catholic teachings as president.
But even they will be aghast after a new report from the Senate Judiciary Committee uncovered the true breadth of a crackdown by the FBI – during the Biden administration – on “radical traditionalist” Catholics.
In 2023, an FBI memo called for sources to be developed within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” At the time, the FBI retracted the memo after an outcry and said it was an isolated incident out of one field office.
Now Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has discovered new evidence that casts serious doubt on that narrative. He has even gone so far as to accuse former FBI Director Christopher Wray of lying to the Committee.
Grassley has found that the 2023 memo was not isolated to the Richmond, VA, field office: it was disseminated across at least 13 FBI documents and sent to over 1,000 employees nationwide. It is thought that the Richmond office coordinated with other field offices, including those in Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee.
In fact, their collaboration extended to analysts linking Catholic beliefs with “Islamist theology.” Such inane comparisons were apparently enough to spark a nationwide intervention into these menacing church-goers.
A second memo, still under wraps, was drafted by the Richmond FBI but was never published after the outcry from the first. This draft echoed the same concerns about “radical traditionalist” Catholics but – unlike the first memo – it omitted any reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), likely to avoid further controversy.
The initial memo – specifically targeting Traditional Latin Mass parishes and online Catholic communities – was based largely on designations from the SPLC.
The SPLC, a far-left organization, asserts that “anti-semitism is an inextricable part” of traditional Catholic theology. In its own examples of problematic statements from “radical traditionalists,” nowhere do any of them call for violence. The cited passages bellyaching about “the Jew” are edgy, sure. But to believe these fringe writings (some of which date back 20 years) are worthy of FBI scrutiny is laughable.
FBI officials from several field offices raised concerns about the memo, questioning why the agency was relying on spurious SPLC designations. Despite this, the FBI continued to pursue this line of inquiry.
Grassley is now demanding that the FBI produce all documents related to the use of SPLC and other partisan sources in linking Catholics to extremism. If Republicans follow through with this, Director Wray may just get his due.
This targeting of Catholics by the FBI all happened under supposedly Catholic president Joe Biden, who at every turn sought to undermine the faith he claimed adherence to. The pro-abortion, pro-gender ideology, pro-same sex marriage Catholic president not only presided over an FBI baselessly targeting the faithful, but also sought no punishment for agency leadership once the initial scandal came to light.
Careful observers may have noticed a glaring lack of “radical traditionalist” Catholic violence in the United States, yet the FBI under President Biden involved over 1,000 employees to tackle this non-issue.
More pressing items for the Bureau to tackle, for example, would be anti-Jewish terrorism committed at the hands of “radical traditionalist” Muslims. Mohamed Soliman, who just scorched one dozen Jewish demonstrators with a homemade flamethrower in Boulder, CO, had Facebook posts dating back to 2013 supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Soliman’s nation of origin.
Soliman entered the US in 2022, overstayed his visa, and was rewarded by the Biden administration with a work permit in 2023. Not only did the previous administration open the US southern border to hundreds of individuals on the terror watchlist, but they also somehow approved a work authorization for an Islamist terrorist despite clear red flags. Where was the FBI?
Before the Boulder attack, a radical Palestine supporter murdered a young couple in cold blood just for associating with Israel. The killer, Elias Rodriguez, was involved with several far-left organizations, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Perhaps the FBI should infiltrate radical Marxist groups to prevent anti-Jewish terrorism.
And just in the past year, Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts. While the first shooter was supposedly not on the FBI’s radar, the second suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, certainly was. In 2019, Routh was the subject of an FBI investigation after a tip claimed he was in possession of a firearm as a felon. In total, the man had over 100 police complaints against him. In case that’s not enough for the FBI to flag him, Routh was radicalized to the point of traveling to Ukraine to play soldier, before returning to the US, determined to kill Trump. Routh was even interviewed by major news outlets, including The New York Times and Newsweek – he was not some unknown entity hiding in the shadows. Still, no FBI involvement.
This is not to portray the FBI as feckless or ineffective; in the past year, they have thwarted a number of planned terror attacks. The agency’s leadership, however, lost the plot under the Biden administration. If anybody in the top ranks of the Bureau knew the first thing about Latin Mass-going Catholics, they would realize how absurd it is to spend even a penny of taxpayer funds cracking down on them.
Why the Kerch bridge must fall
Vladimir Putin has hit back against Ukraine’s ‘Spiderweb’ operation, which recently destroyed or damaged at least two dozen Russian bombers. Overnight, Russia fired 45 missiles and more than 400 drones at Ukrainian cities and apartment blocks. At least six people were killed, including three rescuers searching for survivors in Kyiv. More than a hundred civilians were injured across the country. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed the mass attack on ‘military targets’ was a response to the ‘terrorist acts of the Kyiv regime’. But Ukraine is far from done; the Kerch bridge, which links the occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland, is high on the hit list.
This week, the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, once again targeted the Kerch bridge
This week, the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, once again targeted the Kerch bridge. Ukrainian agents, most likely using a ‘Marichka’ underwater drone, detonated explosives planted on the bridge’s underwater supports. More homemade sea drones then attempted to breach the Russian defensive structures, trying to clear a path to reach the bridge itself. The sea battle raged for nearly three hours, but the bridge turned out to have better defences than Russia’s airfields. For now, it remains standing.
Ukraine has made at least three attempts to take it down. In October 2022, a truck exploded on the bridge a day after Putin’s 70th birthday. In July 2023, after several months of intensive repair works, the bridge was hit again, this time by naval drones. This latest attack came from underwater. Lieutenant General Vasyl Maliuk, head of the SBU, claimed the bridge is now in ‘critical condition’ after the underwater explosion ‘severely damaged’ its support base. ‘God loves the Trinity,’ he said, ‘and the SBU always brings what it has conceived to the end and never repeats itself.’ Russia denied there was any significant damage. It quickly reopened passenger traffic after the attack ended.
The 12-mile bridge holds both symbolic and strategic significance for Putin. Its rapid construction, at the cost of £3 billion, sealed Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2018. The Russian president attended its opening in person, driving a KAMAZ truck at the head of a convoy of lorries. The bridge served as a vital supply route for the Russian military during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin did everything to protect it, amassing anti-aircraft systems, smoke generators, radar reflecting barges, floating booms and nets and warships; but the constant Ukrainian strikes forced Russian troops to rely on supply routes via the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions instead.
Since then, Crimea has become a graveyard for Russian air defences, with more systems pulled from the front to protect Putin’s precious bridge. That’s exactly why Ukraine must keep targeting it. With Moscow’s eye fixed on the peninsula, more operations like ‘Spiderweb’ can succeed deep inside Russia. After all, Putin will continue massacring Ukrainian civilians no matter what Kyiv does – whether it strikes Russian bombers and oil refineries or not. With Russian advances gathering pace on the front line, Ukraine’s secret services are the country’s best shot to turn the tables in this war.
The strange futility of the Musk-Trump feud
The Trump-Musk spat is not the sign of a new split between oligarchs and populists, as some have claimed – but of the growing pains involved in reassembling this old coalition.
Keeping capitalism going under mass suffrage is no small feat, and capitalists used to be much shrewder in how they went about it. Electorates wouldn’t reliably go for laissez-faire – except after a crisis – and so the only option for the capitalists was to hitch themselves to the wider lower-middle-class coalition for law and order, low taxes and national swagger.
Musk’s attacks on Trump yesterday, which included a pitch for a new party “that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle,” represent something drawing to a close rather than being born. This was the idea that enterprise no longer needed popular backing, and could now go it alone. At some point in the mid-2010s corporate America decided that it could get better terms by forcing the two major parties to bid for its loyalty. Part of this was naiveté, part of it was down to new cultural ideas that made the old sponsorship of the right feel icky. Part of it was globalization – always more slogan than reality – which wrongly persuaded corporate America that it’d always have exit options. Add to this some of the messianism and poptimism of Silicon Valley, and the result was a foolhardy go at independence.
From 2015 to 2024 there was even a hubbub about the DNC becoming the natural party of enterprise, because of its greater respect for “institutions” – whatever that means.
By the end of the Biden administration all was going sideways. Despite donating more to the DNC in 2016 and 2020, corporate America entered the mid-20s razzle-dazzled with equity shakedowns; Wokery encamped in the boardrooms; the looming threat of price controls and a tax on unrealized capital gains. Silicon Valley was especially badly hit – its ecosystem relies on a constant churn of startups, and so it, perhaps uniquely in corporate America, did not benefit from the new Bidenist regulations that served to freeze out new entrants. American enterprise had forgotten what their more hardboiled 19th-century predecessors had learnt the hard way: that under universal suffrage capitalism is forever dancing on a knife edge, and that the votes of the lower-middle classes is the only thing that keeps it from being regulated out of existence.
Burned once, twice shy. Traumatized by the events of 2021-24, corporate America now clings to Trump in trembling, giving him a latitude that any other class in society might sensibly withhold. There’s almost no price it’s unwilling to pay – in tariffs or in less access to foreign labor – to keep together the political coalition that delivered it from Bidenomics. The rolling over of entitlement spending in the Big, Beautiful Bill is only the latest example.
The one person who doesn’t seem to have fully grasped the implicit bargain is Elon Musk – himself the symbol of corporate America’s defection. Like the President he is a rare bird. We would no more expect him to be able to coexist for long with Trump under the same roof than we would Howard Hughes.
What this personal drama obscures is that the pact has already been made, and that no one individual can unmake it. For every Musk there are a hundred Bill Ackmans: those who are keenly aware just how close to the edge they came during the Biden years. Musk is restless and reluctant to be tied down in this way, but this same self-interest will force him to recant sooner rather than later – just as he recanted his outburst over H-1B visas last December. The greatest of modern American capitalists, Musk is learning – in fits and starts – that his existence will forever depend on a few thousand voters in Pennsylvania.
To Pride or not to Pride?
How are you marking Pride Month? This weekend in the DC area, there are really only two ways to go about it.
First, despite concern that the second Trump administration would scythe wholesale through gay rights, America’s capital is hosting World Pride, a two-week-long festival of rainbow-patterned frivolity.
Though there may be fewer corporate sponsors than in the Biden era, DC remains as gay as it ever was. In Northwest, 15th St is painted in rainbow colors and the gay bars are packed to the rafters. In Northeast, a two-day music festival kicks off tonight at the RFK Festival Grounds, headlined by Jennifer Lopez and a nice young man called Troye Sivan. “Most men are gay in DC – either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats ore Republicans,” Natalie Winters told the Times of London recently. Cockburn is still working out where he fits on her Kinsey scale.
In Trump 2.0, there are gay icons everywhere for those with eyes to see. Consider Ric Grenell. Fresh off getting six American hostages in Venezuela freed, the first openly gay man to hold a cabinet-level position is now reshaping the Kennedy Center in Trump’s image – by putting on musicals, as the Donald demands. Then there’s Lord Mandelson: Britain was the first country to secure a trade deal post-Liberation Day, thanks in no small part to their ambassador. Mandelson was honored with a plaque at Butterworth’s yesterday, about which he said he was “very chuffed.”
And of course there’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: one of the deftest performers in media through the chaotic first few months.
Awkwardly pit against these Pride options is the LIV Golf at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course in Gainesville, under an hour’s drive from the White House. There’s nothing very Prideful about watching Bryson DeChambeau drive a ball 350 yards while the Saudis stuff his mouth with gold. President Trump will not be attending though: after a few days queening out online with ex-bestie Elon Musk, he’s heading to UFC 316 in Newark, New Jersey.
If you are looking to steer clear of Pride, Cockburn has a hot tip: there’s an app you can get that shows you your distance from queer folk – and what they look like. It’s called Grindr and it’ll help you stay away. Cockburn considers this a must-download for LIV.
On our radar
‘THE MAN WHO HAS LOST HIS MIND’ This morning President Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that he was “not particularly” interested in speaking to Elon Musk.
AFRIKABURN Steve Bannon has called for a formal investigation of Musk’s immigration status as he is “of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”
TUCK-TOK Vice President J.D. Vance put Tucker Carlson and Andreessen Horowitz on a potential list of US TikTok investors.
KJP goes it alone
Karine Jean-Pierre, President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, is apparently no longer a Democrat. Is her change in affiliation sincere, an attempt to sell her new book, Independent, or both?
Previous press secretaries have departed public service and headed into cushy roles in cable news: look at Fox News’s Ari Fleischer, Kayleigh McEnany and Dana Perino, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos or Jen Psaki at MSNBC.
But the media environment is changing, and TV news isn’t as safe as it once was. Its fading stars are now heading for Substack, like Jim Acosta, Chuck Todd, Joy Reid and Chris Cillizza. Or they’re making a point of demonstrating how contrarian and “independent-minded” they are, like Chris Cuomo on News Nation or like Jake Tapper who co-authored the bombshell book reporting about Joe Biden’s decline. This last path appears to be the one Jean-Pierre has chosen.
For years, Republicans bashed KJP as an in-over-her-head replacement for Psaki, Biden’s first press secretary. Even while KJP was behind the podium, her colleagues had knives out for her, often being sharpened by Biden’s national security communications advisor John Kirby.
Now some Biden alumni have, briefly, gone on the record to savage their former colleague. Tim Wu, a former Biden economic advisor, tweeted, “from a WH policy staff perspective, the real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb. No interest in understanding harder topics. Just gave random incoherent answers on policy.” His tweet was deleted almost instantly. At ease, soldier.
At least Wu, unlike most of KJP’s former colleagues, had the courage to briefly put his name on his criticisms on the record. Several others went on background to Axios to lambast her. “Today Karine lost the only constituency that ever supported her – party-line Democrats,” one said.
Cockburn felt it was only fair to ask another veteran political strategist to assess KJP’s situation, and to grant them equal levels of anonymity. They said: “The space between ‘historic first’ and ‘kinda dumb’ is: Are you serving at all times the one true faith of the Democratic Party?”
Check, please
Democrats are ratcheting up their activism – against popular DC restaurants.
In an attempt to win back union support, over 50 House and Senate Democrats signed onto the Unite Here Local 25 pledge to boycott six eateries for unfair labor practices. The restaurants include Bombay Club and Michelle Obama’s favorite, Le Diplomate.
“If a bunch of workers are organizing across multiple restaurants here in DC, it will get attention,” Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio told Axios.
A couple of the restaurants – Osteria Mozza and the Occidental – are owned by Democratic megadonor Stephen Starr.
Alternatives such as Cafe Milano or RPM Italian are likely to beneficiaries of the boycott.
A Spectator book launch in NYC
Cockburn briefly departed the swampy humidity of DC and headed north to the concrete heat of NYC to attend The Spectator’s inaugural live event in the US. The toast of the evening was Rachel Cockerell who has written a fascinating book called Melting Point, about the Galveston plan and the Jewish experience in 1900s America.
The night started off strong with great cocktails and conversation with Speccie subscribers. With guests sipping white wine, beer and sake, graciously provided by the event sponsor Soto Sake, it was standing room only for the conversation between New York editor Orson Fry and Cockerell. The pair dove into the book, and Cockerell shared details about the Galveston Plan and her grandfather’s experience as a cofounder of the movement.
Afterward the party spilled out of the Palo Gallery and onto the cobblestoned sidewalks of Bond Street. Cockburn enjoyed mingling with his readers and notable guests including Ted Lasso’s Keeley Hazell, Charly Sturm, Aurora Messel, Jasper and Octavia Greig, Freya Jones, Karen Lehrman Bloch, Thomas Straker, Danny Moynihan, Robert Novogratz, Palo Gallery owner Paul Henkel, Breaker Media’s Lachlan Cartwright, Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin, Chadwick Moore, Airmail’s Harrison Vail, Spectator editors Ben Clerkin and Kate Andrews and publisher Zack Christenson.
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The Tories are edging towards ECHR exit
Following last month’s local elections disaster, Kemi Badenoch’s team promised a ‘step change’. So just 24 hours after Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride offered a ‘mea culpa’ for the mini-Budget, Badenoch has followed up by suggesting that the UK ‘will likely need to leave’ the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It comes amid a hardening of internal Tory opinion on the subject, following both a number of high-profile rulings by British courts and a surge in illegal migration.
‘I do believe that we will likely need to leave’, Badenoch said
Badenoch’s argument is as follows: foreign criminals, convicted of horrific abuse, currently cannot be deported. The ECHR is now being used in ways never intended by its original authors. Various nations are seeking reform of the Convention, but, alas, the Strasbourg institutions show no interest in permitting such an exercise. Given the urgent need to deter illegal migrants, it is therefore necessary to seriously consider leaving the ECHR. However, it must be done so with a clear plan.
This is much the same argument that she made during the leadership race last summer. However, she has now signalled her operating assumption. Withdrawing from the ECHR was previously one option; now it is viewed as her most likely outcome for the UK.
‘I do believe that we will likely need to leave’, she told the RUSI think tank today. This operating assumption will shape the outcome of the ongoing commission into this subject, due to report at the autumn Tory conference. It will be led by Lord Wolfson, the Shadow Attorney General, who has signalled his support of the ECHR.
Within the Conservative party, there is now a growing expectation that Badenoch will formally back departure from the ECHR when that commission finally reports. It follows a similar speech on Net Zero which she gave in March, in which she shifted her party to a more critical stance from that adopted by Boris Johnson. Badenoch’s Net Zero speech went down well with much of her party, with little in the way of public pushback from her own MPs.
On the thornier question of ECHR membership, she clearly judges that her party is now in a similar mood to reconsider shibboleths of old. The likes of some vocal supporters of the Convention – such as former Attorney General Victoria Prentis and ex-Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk – were cleared out from the Commons at the last election. Yet sceptics certainly remain. Some, like Jesse Norman, have previously backed the principles of the Convention; others are worried about the practicalities.
One major influence is likely to be Alex Burghart, the Tory spokesman on Northern Ireland. He is as close to Badenoch as any on the Tory frontbench and will be deeply concerned about what withdrawing from the ECHR means for the Good Friday Agreement. If he and Wolfson can find a politically sellable way to square that particular circle, expect to see Badenoch formally endorse withdrawal from the Convention, come October this year.
Trump and Musk was never going to work
Trump’s public breakup with Elon Musk is symptomatic of his failure to hold together the broad coalition to which he owes his re-election.
The ‘HUGEst’ political alliance of the century is breaking apart before the eyes of the world in suitably spectacular fashion.
For the last few months, the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, were a political item. Musk donated large sums to Trump’s campaign, lavished the newly re-elected president with praise on his social network, and neglected his companies to pursue his side quest at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In return, Trump gave Musk unprecedented powers over the federal bureaucracy, staged joint press conferences in the Oval Office, and allowed him to lecture the assembled cabinet before rolling cameras. Nothing better symbolised the supposed ‘vibe shift’ in America than the fact that Trump, practically a social pariah when first elected to the White House, could upon his return count on the outspoken support of the world’s most famous entrepreneur – and many other leading figures in Silicon Valley.
But it was also clear from the start that the match between Musk and Trump might prove stormy. The egos of both men are evidently outsized, their temperaments famously volatile. It did not take a genius to predict that their supposedly perfect match might prove short-lived – or even end in acrimony. And yet, the speed with which their epic bromance has turned into an explosive feud is astonishing.
A week ago, Musk announced his departure from Washington, with the pair giving a final press conference from the Oval Office. A few days later, a story in the New York Times, apparently drawing on sources in Trump’s circle, chronicled the extent of Musk’s alleged drug use. Then, on Tuesday, Musk publicly came out against Trump’s ‘big and beautiful’ budget bill, which would lead both to a large tax cut and a massive increase in public debt.
But it was yesterday that the fight truly escalated. At a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump responded to Musk’s criticisms of his budget bill, suggesting that ‘Elon is upset because we took [away] the EV mandate, which is a lot of money for electric vehicles… I know that disturbed him.’
Musk’s ire grew by the hour. First, he told his 220 million followers on X that America could choose between a ‘big and ugly bill’ and a ‘slim and beautiful bill’, urging Republican legislators to break ranks with Trump in pursuit of the latter. As the day wore on, Musk started to draw attention to Trump’s alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that these were the real reasons why files about Epstein’s misdeeds hadn’t yet been released. At present, his pinned post is a poll that asks users whether it is time for a ‘new political party in America that actually represents the 80 per cent in the middle’.
The breakup is likely to prove costly to both sides. Trump will lose his biggest financial backer (though both are billionaires, Musk is estimated to be over 50 times richer than him). He may find that X – which remains the most politically influential social media platform despite being much less central to the political conversation than it once was – suddenly becomes more hostile terrain. And the passage of his crucial budget bill is now in serious doubt.
Musk, whose approval ratings already lag behind those of his former boss, is now politically homeless. Having alienated much of the liberal customer base of Tesla, his most valuable company, he is now likely to alienate MAGA, his most fervent fanbase in politics. While a majority of Americans may indeed be unhappy with the choices currently on offer, the idea that somebody who is this unpopular can found a successful third party is highly unrealistic.
But the big, beautiful break between Trump and Musk is more significant for what it reveals about failed aspirations now consigned to the past than for what it predicts about events yet to come. When romances fail, it is often because each partner projected their hopes onto the other, only to discover belatedly that these had all along been misplaced. That is the true meaning lurking behind the political breakup of the century.
Musk thought that he could use Trump as a vehicle for refashioning the federal government in keeping with the values and ethos of the Silicon Valley elite. Trump thought that he could use his alliance with Musk to broaden his appeal beyond his traditional pitch. Both of these hopes were destined to be disappointed before the wedding vows had even been pronounced.
The Silicon Vision of Politics
Over recent years, some leading figures in Silicon Valley grew convinced that the federal government was so badly broken that they could no longer afford to ignore it – and coalesced around a particular set of views about how to fix it.
The kings of Silicon Valley succeeded by ‘moving fast and breaking shit’. The VC firms they lead don’t mind if many of the start-ups they support fail, so long as some go on to have outsized returns. They have grown accustomed to the idea that taking huge risks (as Musk did in founding Tesla and SpaceX) can simultaneously be personally rewarding and socially beneficial. If all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail; it is perhaps inevitable that a set of phenomenally successful people who transformed the world by these methods would come to believe that they can – to the mutual benefit of themselves and their country – apply the same playbook to the federal government.
There was also an ideological element to this. The leaders of Silicon Valley grew deeply frustrated with the left’s instinctive hostility to technological progress, taking particular umbrage at the way mainstream outlets such as the New York Times often covered significant innovations like breakthrough rocket launches by focusing on minor environmental impacts. They came to loathe the way in which woke ideology undermined meritocracy, worrying that it would make it harder to find the talent they needed to succeed. And they started to worry about the ballooning federal budget, which might sap the competitiveness of American companies in the near future.
Musk’s alliance with Trump was based on a bet: that the president’s destructive force would prove unstoppable, and his substantive views sufficiently thin, that he could become a political vehicle for putting the Silicon vision into practice. For the first hundred or so days of Trump’s presidency, some of Silicon Valley’s leaders retained the hope that their bet was paying off. In his inaugural address, Trump promised a new age of American innovation. The White House went on a full-frontal attack against everything it considered woke. Republicans were still talking a big game about shrinking the budget deficit. Musk and his band of young, inexperienced, high-agency recruits were given enormous power to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
DOGE failed because of the structural differences between tech and government
But the truth was always going to prove disappointing. Republicans are less likely than Democrats to oppose technological innovation on environmental or social justice grounds. But they are just as likely to oppose it on the basis that it threatens the jobs of key constituencies, could lead to lower property prices, or requires attracting the best and brightest from countries such as India and China. The tragedy of the ‘abundance agenda’ is that it has no natural home in either of the big political parties.
Similarly, Musk evidently hoped that the war against woke would unleash America’s productive powers, refocusing leading universities on impactful research and giving tech companies a freer hand in recruitment. Instead, the Trump administration made universities a prime enemy – weakening them by any means possible and significantly curtailing the inflow of talented students from around the world. In the debate over whether to expand or restrict H-1B visas, the restrictionists in the White House increasingly look to have the upper hand.
But perhaps surprisingly, it is Republican hypocrisy on the national debt that seems most to have alienated Musk. Mercurial and self-serving though he may be, Musk does appear to be a man of conviction. (After all, he was willing to lose friends and spend enormous sums purchasing a social media platform to advance his political beliefs.) It seems he believed Republicans when they spent years warning about the dangers of trillion-dollar deficits and promising to balance public finances. And so it was his revulsion at a budget bill that would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion which occasioned his public split from Trump.
Musk has understandable reason to feel bitter. But if he retains the ability to be honest with himself, he should also recognise that the roots of his vision’s failure lie closer to home: in his unrealistic hope that DOGE could radically remake the country like a start-up pivoting from recognising hot dogs to powering artificial intelligence.
When Mr Musk went to Washington, he clearly believed he would find waste and fraud on a monumental scale. But while bureaucracies have a reputation for inefficiency, the kind of obvious failures Musk envisaged turned out, for the most part, to be figments of his imagination. In his first days on the job, he posted a number of ‘big wins’ – which amounted to a tiny fraction of the federal budget. In the following weeks, even these announcements slowed to a trickle, and then ceased altogether. Musk’s frustration with Trump’s budget stemmed in part from his recognition that DOGE’s savings are rounding errors compared to the giveaways championed by the president he helped elect.
Most fundamentally, DOGE failed because of the structural differences between tech and government. When a start-up fails, few people suffer and the public doesn’t care. But if you inadvertently cut key public services, the consequences for people’s lives are immediate. Moving fast and breaking shit works in tech; it does not work in government.
The American government could probably be improved by people who combine the ethos of the tech world with real political experience. But the idea that a tech leader could fix Washington by breaking stuff without even bothering to learn what it actually does – an idea not limited to conservative tech billionaires – was always naïve.
The End of the Vibe Shift
Over the last year, Musk let his vocal support for MAGA redefine him in the public eye. That makes this split perilous for his image. Trump knows better than to make himself too dependent on any one ally – and it is telling that he has so far responded to Musk’s barrage of social posts in a relatively restrained fashion. Yet the breakup with Musk also signifies the failure of the most ambitious vision for Trump’s second term.
Trump has again proven unwilling to do what it takes to consolidate a broad, forward-looking coalition
When Trump was first elected, he was widely seen as a man of the past – partly due to his reliance on a supposedly declining electoral base. But also because his economic policies harkened back to a lost golden age of coal mines and steel mills.
The much-hyped vibe shift behind his return was in part due to the expansion of that demographic coalition – including younger and more diverse voters – and in part due to Musk. For a brief moment, MAGA was as associated with colonising Mars as with reopening coal mines.
The tensions in this coalition were easy to see. Many MAGA supporters always viewed Musk with suspicion. Most would cheer a crackdown on universities, the end of H-1B visas, and don’t care about space exploration. But the alliance didn’t fail because their interests were irreconcilable – after all, Trump’s voters seem fine with handouts in the pending budget bill.
It failed because Trump has again proven unwilling to do what it takes to consolidate a broad, forward-looking coalition.
Most Americans wanted border enforcement – not deporting gay hairdressers to El Salvador. They wanted domestic manufacturing – not chaotic tariffs that risk global recession. And they wanted to curb woke excesses – not an all-out culture war backed by the force of the federal government.
Trump’s inability to sustain his alliance with Musk is merely the most visible sign of a broader failure: to turn his presidency into a more expansive, future-facing project. From here on, the White House is once again run by the MAGA faithful. The vibe shift – to the extent it ever existed – is over.
This article was originally published on Yascha Mounk’s Substack
After Elon Musk, America is never going to be the same
Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as will the day the Constitution was ratified. So will the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, VE Day, the moon landing and a small handful of others.
Yesterday, June 5, 2025, will join that select company, because yesterday was the day that the world’s richest man, on a media platform that he owns, accused the President of the United States of Jeffrey Epstein kinds of behavior. As I looked at my phone blowing up, I realized that America was never going to be the same.
Elon Musk, as we all watched in real time over the last few months, made one of history’s most tragic miscalculations. It’s hard for ordinary mortals to know exactly what Donald Trump cares about, but we can make a few guesses. He wants to deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, clearing the decks for native-born workers to do Heaven knows what in imaginary factories, to remove all aspects of elite liberal culture from federal institutions and to enrich his family and friends through questionable cryptocurrency schemes. Add to that a seemingly sincere desire to bring about world peace, and you have the essential motivating basis for a second Trump term.
Musk, who doesn’t explicitly traffic in the arms trade, was fine with the peace, good with the deporting except for certain “high-value” workers on special visas, utterly down to destroy woke culture and more or less indifferent to the crypto stuff. What does he care about Ponzi memes? But Musk’s mistake came in thinking that Donald Trump cares about fiscal responsibility. Trump is a man who bankrupted casinos, who has more lawyers on retainer than he has bodyguards. He’s about a lot of things, but he’s not about balancing the books.
For Trump, DoGE was never about government efficiency. It was about owning the libs. Musk was his prize pig, rooting out truffles of corrupt liberal largesse. The earliest days of the administration were filled with scenes of sobbing bureaucrats carrying their desk plants in boxes as USAID hit the skids. No longer would we fund Peruvian opera companies, send “condoms to Gaza,” or spend federal dollars running experiments on “transgender mice.” “Big Balls” and a team of Monster Energy-charged whiz kids took a chainsaw to government while Musk supervised them 24-7, reportedly mainlining ketamine and sleeping on cots in federal buildings. This was his plan to streamline America. But all Trump really wanted to do was shoot DEI programs out the airlock.
In many ways, Musk and Trump were always at cross-purposes. Musk hates certain aspects of liberal culture: its censoriousness, its priggishness, its intolerance for dissent. But he also advocates for solar power and for a kind of 1950s boy’s Popular Science vision of the future, populated by self-flying electric cars and a multiplanetary human race. Trump is OK with all of that if his name gets to be on the rocketship, but his main concern, as always, is real-estate development. For Musk, the goal is Mars. For the President, it’s Trump Gaza Number One.
Musk thought that DoGE was the ultimate tool for reducing government, for getting rid of the national debt, for saving the US economy before it flies headlong into the abyss. But in reality, Musk was Trump’s tool, or fool, a useful genius to distract the Democratic party and to make its supporters look like clueless, terrified, violent idiots. Trump never sincerely promised to make America small again.
There’s an old adage that Hollywood executives think they’re big stuff until they go to Washington and run up against people with actual power. Musk may not be from Hollywood. (He might be from Mars, or maybe Venus.) But he’s learned the same lesson regardless. He was just a boy standing in front of his President, asking him to love him. But the Falcon flew too close to the sun, and now he must return to his home planet, or at least to Starbase, Texas, never to influence policy in the same way again.
Cut the Border Force budget
Whatever happened to the great promise to ‘smash’ the smuggling gangs? When it came to power just under a year ago the Starmer government promised to pour resources into securing Britain’s borders. There was going to be a new Border Security Command – which was actually set up with £150 million of funding, although if anyone can tell me what it has done or what it has achieved, I am all ears. However, it now seems that the UK Border Force is one of the areas which Rachel Reeves has earmarked for spending cuts. The agency has an annual budget of £1.2 billion and employs 11,400 staff, who enjoy extremely generous overtime – an ‘annualised hours allowance’ to compensate staff for working unsociable hours can add between 20 to 43 percent to their earnings.
Naturally, the unions are incensed, and claiming cuts will threaten us all. According to the Immigration Service Union, cuts would present a ‘real threat to national security’. Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union, says that any reduction in budget ‘will inevitably have a direct impact on staff numbers and therefore border security’. To which the obvious reply is: they would say that, wouldn’t they.
Obviously, the Border Force requires staff to do its job – even if the use of e-gates at ports and airports has somewhat reduced the numbers of officers required. But you have to wonder: what is the point of chucking ever more money at officials supposedly to police our borders when their rules of engagement seem to forbid them from actually stopping people entering the country? Given that the Border Force seems increasingly to be acting as a taxi service for boatloads of migrants, perhaps cutting back its resources might actually help to slow down arrivals.
There is another obvious area for cuts: the £480 million we are paying the French government to beef up their own border control. Under a deal signed by Rishi Sunak in 2023, the French promised to double the number of border staff employed to stop migrant boats setting off from the French coast from 400 to 800. The result? The number of migrants arriving in Britain is at record levels and the proportion of migrants being intercepted has fallen from 47 per cent in 2023 to 38 per cent so far this year. That doesn’t pass any value-for-money test. We saw last week how all these extra French border staff are spending their time – a photograph was published of several of them standing and watching as boats were launched, apparently under instructions that they must not enter the water to prevent the crossings.
The farce over small boat arrivals is a classic example of how, in some instances, state spending can actually make a problem worse. We are being fobbed off by being told that the Border Force is keeping us safe when in fact it is aiding the conveyor belt of illegal migrants travelling from France to claim asylum in Britain. The Border Force should not consider itself to be immune from the desperate need to get the public finances under control.
Bets for the Derby and Oaks
The unsettled weather forecast coupled with the number of leading horses who are untried at the distance of tomorrow’s Betfred Derby (3.30 p.m.) have increased the chances of a surprise result.
The form of Ruling Court is rock solid but his victory in the Betfred 2000 Guineas at Newmarket came on good ground and over a trip of just a mile. Tomorrow’s contest over Epsom’s twists and turns will be over a mile and a half and it will be on much softer going than at racing’s headquarters more than a month ago.
Ruling Court’s style of running and his breeding give every indication that he will stay 10 furlongs but 12 furlongs on ground with some cut could be another matter so odds of no bigger than 9-2 do not appeal. This morning the going description was “good to soft, good in places” but there are always certainly more heavy showers to come before the off.
Delacroix and The Lion in Winter have been the most heavily backed of Irish maestro Aidan O’Brien’s trio and, after becoming the choice of stable jockey Ryan Moore, the former looks likely to go off favourite in an ultra-competitive 19-runner race worth more than £900,000 to winning connections.
Ralph Beckett’s pair of runners are of interest. Pride of Arras, who won the Al Basti Equiworld Dubai Dante Stakes on just his second run, and Stanhope Gardens, who could improve significantly for the step up in trip, both have chances, but draws of 2 and 16 respectively are far from ideal.
Despite the Derby being run over a middle distance, the draw has proved important in many runnings of the race since starting stalls were first introduced in 1967. No horse has won from stall 2, 11 or 16 yet, quite remarkably, no less than 11 horses have won from stall 10. Generally, it has paid to have a draw of stall 10 or lower.
The outsider of O’Brien’s three runners, LAMBOURN, is drawn in stall 10 tomorrow and it is not only because of his favourable berth that I think he is worth backing. This lightly-raced horse is one of the few guaranteed stayers in the race having won the Boodles Chester Vase over a trip just in excess of the Derby distance.
Not only did he win going away that day, but he has winning form in France on very soft ground from last season. He might just lack the speed needed to win a modern-day Derby but he will not be found wanting in stamina.
O’Brien’s outsiders have won the Derby before, most noticeably when Wings of Eagles caused a major shock when winning at 40-1 in 2017. So back Lambourn 1 point each way at 10-1 with bet365, offering four places not three like many of its rivals.
Today’s Betfred Oaks (4 p.m.) has attracted a much smaller field than for the Derby. In fact, just nine three-year-old fillies are due go to post for this classic worth more than £325,000 to the winner.
Trainer Charlie Appleby’s Desert Flower is quite rightly favourite for the race after being unbeaten in her five starts, most recently winning the Betfred 1000 Guineas on her first run of the season. Like Ruling Court in the Derby, she is almost certain to be able to stay further than a mile but one mile 4 furlongs on softish ground could stretch her stamina to the limit.
Appleby rates Desert Flower as the best filly he has ever trained which is praise indeed coming from such a successful trainer. However, with doubts over her stamina, then odds of 6-4 are skinny.
That old saying “fourth in the 2000 Guineas, first in the Derby” can also be applied to the Oaks too. Its origin is that if a horse bred to stay further than a mile is good enough to be fourth in the Guineas, he/she might well win the Derby/Oaks over a more suitable, longer trip.
ELWATEEN was fourth in the 1000 Guineas at Newmarket last month on only her second-ever start, having won a modest race at Kempton back in August last year on the all-weather.
Although this filly also has to prove her stamina over the Oaks trip, the comments of her trainer, Saeed bin Suroor, immediately after the 1000 Guineas certainly gave every encouragement for today’s contest.
He told journalists: “Elwateen needs further and we could now look at the Oaks as an option…The further she goes, it will be better for her…I think she would go straight to Epsom as the Musidora [at York] would be too close. A bit more give in the ground would suit her.”
So the longer trip and the softer ground should be ideal today in the Oaks. Back Elwateen 1 point each way at 12-1 with Ladbrokes, Coral or BetVictor, all paying three places. That looks an attractive each way bet to me.
Of her many classy rivals, Aidan O’Brien’s Minnie Hauk, who will stay this trip and has Ryan Moore in the saddle, and Revoir, a lightly-raced improver from the Ralph Beckett yard, are both likely to run well. Significantly, one of O’Brien’s two other Oaks runners, Giselle, has attracted market support overnight and she could well outrun her odds.
I had been tempted to put up Botanical in the today’s Betfred Nifty 50 Handicap (3.15 p.m.) as this five-year-old gelding will have been aimed at this pot for some time. The booking of Ryan Moore and the overnight rain are pluses too.
However, this is a hot 13-runner handicap and the likes of Defiance and Mutaawid have strong chances too so, at no bigger than 4-1, it is easy to refrain from backing Botanical today.
Last weekend: – 2 points
1 point each way Chillingham at 14-1 for the Betfred “Play Fred’s £5 Million” Handicap, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. Non runner, stake returned.
1 point each way Luther at 12-1 for the “French Derby”, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
Pending:
1 point each way Elwateen at 12-1 for the Oaks, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Lambourn at 10-1 for the Derby, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Native Warrior at 50-1 for the Royal Hunt Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Trawlerman at 8-1 for the Ascot Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Duke of Oxford at 33-1 for the Northumberland Plate, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places
2025 flat season running total – 13.8 points.
2024-5 jump season: – 47.61 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Why did it take so long to give David Beckham his knighthood?
Arise, Sir Goldenballs. Next week, David Beckham will finally become Sir David in the King’s birthday honours, which in turn will mean that his wife will become Lady Victoria Beckham. Once, when she was best known for being the pop songstress Posh Spice – and he was most famous for being an unusually petulant Manchester United footballer – this would have seemed like a ridiculous state of affairs; the monarchy pandering to celebrity at its most naked and obvious. It may be a sign of how Britain, rather than the Beckhams, has changed over the intervening decades that the only observation that many might have about the award is why it has taken so long to be bestowed.
Despite his fame, wealth and good looks, there has always been a faint ridiculousness to him
Beckham has certainly put the hours in. Not since Mohamed al-Fayed’s (doomed) attempts to obtain a British passport has anyone so assiduously cultivated a friendship with the royal family in order to achieve their desires. While al-Fayed angrily distanced himself from the royals after the death of his son and Princess Diana, Beckham has been almost inseparable from the King over the past couple of years. His first public demonstration of monarchical feeling came in 2022, when he was spotted queuing to pay tribute to the late Queen, and since then he has been a consistent, even dogged proponent of all things royal.
Beckham is a high-profile supporter of the King’s Foundation, the monarch’s own charity, and has been named an ambassador for it. Beckham is also a frequent guest at banquets and soirees at Charles’s homes; just last month, he released a statement saying that:
It was inspiring to hear from the King about the work of His Majesty’s foundation during my recent visit to Highgrove Gardens – and compare beekeeping tips.
There is a clear rapport between the footballer and monarch that can be seen in their appearances together – Buckingham Palace has let it be known that they have ‘become friends’ – so the suggested announcement of the award is not a surprise.
The only real wonder is that it has taken well over a decade for Beckham to be knighted. However, he has not always been his own greatest advocate. Despite his fame, wealth and good looks, there has always been a faint ridiculousness to him, as if Frank Spencer had inhabited the body of Brad Pitt. He was first considered for a KBE in 2011, but his complex tax affairs – while legal – were thought to be not quite the thing, and then his leaked, angry remarks about Katherine Jenkins, in which he suggested that she had received her OBE ‘[for] singing at the rugby and going to see the troops’ and called it a ‘fucking joke’ did not help either his reputation or his cause. One can only imagine that the twice-annual announcement of knighthoods may have been known as Passover in Beckingham Palace.
Now he has finally, belatedly, been given what many millions of football fans would see as his due. It will come as a blessed relief amidst rumoured personal troubles involving his eldest son Brooklyn, from whom it is suggested his father has become estranged. The supposed reasons for this, involving Instagram-led feuds and Brooklyn supposedly thinking that he is not sufficiently respected by his famous father, need not concern us.
But amidst the celebrations, the soon-to-be Sir David may pause at the news that his son has been taken up by the other branch of the British royal family. It has been reported that:
Harry and Meghan were very empathetic and very kind to them both. Harry was fully aware of the situation and offered Brooklyn his unwavering support as someone who has been through similar.
Even at what should be the zenith of his personal life, Beckham, clearly a supporter of the King rather than his own estranged younger son, will find that the side that he has so publicly taken will not come without consequences. Should Brooklyn be persuaded to take up residence in Montecito, then this saga might yet be a case of history repeating itself in the strangest of ways.
Kemi Badenoch is walking into her own ECHR trap
If you think Keir Starmer is rattled by Reform’s awkward-squad views on human rights, spare a thought for Kemi Badenoch. In a speech today obviously aimed at Conservative voters thinking of defecting to Nigel Farage with his unapologetic call to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), she will announce that the Tories too are indeed deeply unsatisfied with the convention, and are determined to do something about it.
So far so good. Listen further, however, and you see not so much as a position taken as an exercise in bet-hedging. Rather than going full-on for withdrawal, she is – you guessed it – setting up a committee, albeit one embodying the ‘sharpest legal minds’. One can see why she has chosen a non-committal managerialist solution like this. Unfortunately, there is every indication that Kemi’s scheme will turn out to be a damp squib.
On the ECHR, Kemi is caught between a rock and hard place
The first difficulty is that, while many issues lend themselves to committee-style compromise, ECHR membership is not one of them. The tension is inescapable between applying the ECHR on the one hand and, on the other, preventing human rights encroaching in an undemocratic way on everything from border control to legal attacks on Northern Ireland veterans and climate change. The rights to life – to humane treatment and privacy – see to that. In no way restricted, as they ought to be, to genuinely outrageous state action, they have been expansively interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights to control even entirely incidental and unintended effects of government policy. The ECHR now amounts to a serious quasi-constitutional obstacle to the ability of an elected parliament to do what its voters want. Today, you can have faithful adherence to the rules promoted by Strasbourg, or a democratically responsive administration, but not both.
Secondly, although the ECHR is part of our law, its interpretation and development lie not with Westminster, but with Strasbourg. And Strasbourg, for better or worse, has reached a position which makes efficient immigration control and other law enforcement very difficult in the face of those determined to flout it.
This immediately puts Kemi’s committee in a bind. A recommendation to do nothing and preserve the effect of the ECHR in UK law will lead to the Tories looking weak and ineffectual and the electorate seeing them as Labour lite. Short of withdrawal, however, any measures that had any worthwhile effect in curbing ECHR excesses in our courts would sooner or later end up in Strasbourg anyway, thus returning the party to the unenviable choice between staying in the Strasbourg system and submitting to its controls, or upping sticks. Only a full-blooded recommendation to leave, echoing the similar promise from Reform, would solve the Tories’ problems.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that this will happen, or if it does, that it will be followed through. True, the committee is to be headed by Lord Wolfson, who is both very sharp and encouragingly ECHR-sceptic. True also that several Tory big beasts, such as Robert Jenrick, have made their position absolutely clear.
But the shadow cabinet do not all share this uncompromising stance. Kemi herself, despite sharing (one suspects) Jenrick’s exasperation with Strasbourg’s antics, has been too cautious to commit irrevocably to any such thing. For that matter, even some rightists such as James Cleverly have at times sat on the fence. If push comes to shove, is the enthusiasm there to back full-fat Leave? One rather doubts it.
Furthermore, there are political shoal waters here. Admittedly most right-leaning voters, especially those in the just-about-managing class, see little attraction in the ECHR and the smug progressives behind it, and would not be unhappy to see us leave. But the Tory party in parliament is another matter.
As any lobby correspondent will tell you, parliamentary conservatives remain seriously fissured on the ECHR issue: not as badly as over Brexit, but still divided. Surprising numbers embrace the patrician position that the international human rights system is generally beneficial and that it would look bad for the UK to leave it. And they think strongly about it. It was reported in March that a group of them had discreetly made it known that they would actually leave the party if it plumped for ECHR exit. The Tories cannot afford this, and they know it.
Kemi’s committee will be only too well aware of all this and of the equal undesirability of sparking a new Tory civil war. The betting must be that any report, while not quite as drearily anodyne as the 2021 report from the committee appointed by the previous government under Lord Justice Gross, will end up with a slightly mushy fudge which will do no good to Tory chances or morale.
On the ECHR, Kemi is caught between a rock and hard place. She will need all her considerable sagacity to find a way out of this bind. For the sake of the Conservative party, we can only hope she does.
Why don’t all farmers love Clarkson’s Farm?
Clarkson’s Farm is back – with the finale of season four out on Prime Video today – but not everyone is happy about it. It’s not the anti-farming brigade I’m talking about – or even the specific anti-Clarkson brigade, who’ve disliked him since his Top Gear days. No, it’s the people within the rural and farming communities that I’m talking about.
When the programme launched, it was heralded by many as something of a miracle for British agriculture. Clarkson’s programme showed the people at home all the ups and downs of farming life in its brutal reality: the sheaves of inane paperwork; the incentives to actually not farm at all; the masochism of the British weather and the brutal acceptance that with life, comes death. As farmers always say, ‘where there’s livestock, there’s deadstock’, and Clarkson’s Farm didn’t shy away from showing viewers this truth. It might not all be entirely genuine, but it was far closer to the truth of life in the countryside than the likes of your average Countryfile episode.
I wouldn’t necessarily have put Clarkson down as a Gen Z icon
In fact, author and sheep farmer James Rebanks went so far as to say that Jeremy Clarkson had done more for farmers in one TV series than Countryfile managed in 30 years. ‘There’s an episode where he says, “I didn’t make any money – what’s everyone else doing?’”, said Rebanks, speaking at the 2021 Cheltenham Literature Festival. ‘I know what everyone else is doing, which is that they’re working for nothing or going broke.’
It isn’t just farmers who are fans of Clarkson. A recent poll of various Gen Z members of the public concluded that he was one of the best celebrity representatives of the British countryside – after David Attenborough.
That might come as a surprise; I wouldn’t necessarily have put Clarkson down as a Gen Z icon. But it just goes to show the reach that Clarkson’s Farm has achieved, which can only help to showcase the often thankless job that being a farmer is. The popularity of Clarkson’s Farm has almost certainly swayed more members of the public to support farmers in their inheritance tax row.
What surprises me even more, however, is the fact that many farming groups are trying to distance themselves from Clarkson and his agricultural endeavours. After Clarkson appeared at the Farmers’ March in November, he wrote about how he was given the heave-ho from the rally by the National Farmers Union (NFU). The NFU chairman Tom Bradshaw was quizzed by Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight, ‘Does it help that Jeremy Clarkson is turning up?’ ‘Probably not on this one,’ he replied.
It’s not just the NFU. I’ve heard plenty of other farmers bickering about Clarkson. The fact that so many news stories about farming focus on Clarkson frustrates some of them. While he has shown that farming is a struggle, they think he’s disconnected with the land and the local community, his ongoing battles with the local council being a prime example.
Others moan that he doesn’t go deep enough into the issues in agriculture: just skimming the edges of the real problems and then brushing them away with humour.
But do you know what? Of course we will never find a programme that unites everyone, whether that programme’s focus is farming, feminism or faith. Clarkson’s Farm is hugely popular and, whether you like the man or not, he has shone a light into some of the hidden crevices of the farming world and brought them onto mainstream TV. The show might not be perfect, but I’d argue that it has given farming communities a better platform than any other programme that’s out there. As someone else put it: ‘If Clarkson’s ego is what is needed to help people understand that farming is in a mess, then so be it.’