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Yvette Cooper: ‘We are closing care recruitment from abroad’
Under pressure from the success of Reform, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced new measures designed to reduce net migration. The government will consider deporting any foreign criminals, and introduce new restrictions on visas for low-skilled jobs, including scrapping the care worker visa. On the BBC this morning, Laura Kuenssberg asked the home secretary how care homes would recruit enough staff. Cooper said that care companies should recruit from a ‘pool of people’ who are already here on care worker visas, but did not get jobs. The home secretary resisted giving a target number for immigration, but did say she expected these new measures to ‘lead to a reduction of up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled visas over the course of the next year.’
Chris Philp: ‘For Keir Starmer to claim [US trade deal] is some kind of huge success is absurd’
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp why Kemi Badenoch was ‘grumbling’ about the new US trade deal when she had failed to reach any agreement with the White House. Philp argued that the Conservatives had been trying to negotiate a ‘proper, comprehensive trade deal’, and that Starmer’s new deal is ‘very narrow… talking mainly about tariffs.’ He said that although ‘terrible, punitive tariffs… have been eased’, tariffs on UK exports to the US are ‘higher under this deal… than they were at the beginning of the year’, and accused Starmer of ‘obscene obsequiousness’ in his dealings with Trump. Phillips asked whether the Conservatives were simply ‘cross’ that Labour were achieving things they were unable to. Philp claimed that his party had left the economy in a good place, and that Labour’s ‘appalling’ budget meant the country was ‘stagnating’.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz: ‘Any agreement with Trump isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’
Speaking to Trevor Phillips, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out that Trump had signed a trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his first term, but had ‘ripped it up’ and imposed tariffs on both countries after returning to power. Stiglitz suggested that Starmer’s deal with the US was no ‘great achievement’, and was ‘playing into Trump’s strategy’, which is to divide and conquer. Phillips asked if Starmer’s policy with Trump looked like ‘appeasement’, and Stiglitz agreed that it did, saying that ‘in the way that Trump evaluates things’, it looks like the US ‘won’. He then clarified that he believes the trade war is causing the US to lose ‘global respect… soft power’ and that the uncertainty in global markets is impacting the US in a ‘very negative way’.
Richard Tice: ‘Maybe a bit of discipline… is good for all of us’
As Reform prepare legal challenges against asylum hotels in local areas they now control, deputy leader Richard Tice was asked on GB News whether he would be in favour of asylum seekers being housed in tents. Tice told Camilla Tominey, ‘if smart, organised tents are suitable for the British army… why aren’t they good enough for people who come here illegally?’ Tominey asked Tice if he was saying asylum seekers would be put through ‘some kind of military camp’. Tice said his ‘real point’ was that the country should ‘process people quickly, and remove them’, and that the British people were ‘raging furious’ about the numbers of people crossing the channel.
Jo White: Connection between Westminster and constituents of the North ‘completely broken’
Camilla Tominey also interviewed Jo White, who is the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, an area where Reform had great success in the local elections. Tominey asked White what her constituents thought about Keir Starmer. White argued that people had voted for Brexit ‘hoping for change’, and had done so also when voting for Labour, but that hope had been ‘broken’ by the winter fuel payments cuts. White said that people ‘don’t listen anymore’ to the government, and urged Starmer to come out to places like Bassetlaw and talk to voters.
The police have lost it
When hyper-liberal identity politics went into overdrive in that year of madness, 2020, one of the greatest casualties in this country was to be our police forces. This wasn’t obvious at the time, although officers ‘taking the knee’ at the foot of Black Lives Matters protestors hinted at things to come, as did their growing inclination to attend Pride events and adorn their vehicles in LGBT+ colours. Only in recent months, however, has there emerged the extent to which our police have become contaminated and compromised by this ideology.
As today’s Sunday Telegraph reveals, in November 2023 officers from Kent Police arrested and detained an old man for a social media post he made warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain. Julian Foulkes, 71, a retired special constable from Gillingham, had challenged a pro-Palestinian supporter on X. The consequent exchange ultimately resulted in the police arriving at Foulkes’s house, seizing his electronic devices and locking him in a police cell for eight hours. Following interrogation on suspicion of malicious communication, he accepted a caution, despite having committed no offence.
In a rational country, a pensioner and a former policeman should rank low among those likely to pose a threat. But we don’t live in a country governed by reason, or, it would seem, have policemen who take seriously the principle of impartiality. Police body-worn camera footage of the event showed officers rifling through Foulkes’s books and magazines, including works by Douglas Murray and copies of the Spectator, pointing to what they described as ‘very Brexity things’.
This is but the most egregious example in what is turning into a long and alarming rollcall of police overreach, one that betrays a deep and wide capture by woke ideology, a mindset that is unduly preoccupied with matters of gender and race and a related desire to reprimand and censor those who might cause offence or hurt the feelings of others.
This capture was on show in March, when it emerged that Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails and ‘disparaging’ comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. In November last year, Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was visited by Essex Police for alleged incitement to racial hatred.
We used to talk of ‘bad apples’ in the police, in reference to racism or financial corruption within its ranks. These days the term might better apply to chief constables who are infatuated by woke ‘anti-racism’ and who have been morally corrupted by it. Yet even the term ‘bad apples’ no longer seems sufficient when beholding this nationwide contagion. It’s a whole rotten, festering orchard.
While the Macpherson Inquiry of 1999 had an ultimately baleful effect, in which by overstating the prevalence of ‘institutional racism’ in the police, they reacted in turn with overcompensation, the influence of the ‘Great Awokening‘ of 2015-16 cannot be underestimated.
We are witnessing the perversion of the judiciary and the creeping ideological capture of the police
Suspicions were first aroused to its knock-on effect in matters related to law in January 2019 when Harry Miller, also a former police officer, was investigated by Humberside Police for poems he had posted on Twitter mocking the trans movement. A ‘cohesion officer’ from the force telephoned Miller telling him that while his tweets had not broken any laws, he should not engage in public political debate ‘because some people don’t like it’. The feminist writer Julie Bindel was also visited by police in 2019 after a ‘transgender man’ in the Netherlands reported one of her tweets to the police.
In concluding the Miller affair in December, the judge at the court of appeal ruled that Humberside’s actions were ‘disproportionate interference’ with the man’s right to freedom of expression. But that was not the end of matters. It merely marked the beginning of a new era, one in which many police forces had started to become enforcement officers of an emergent and unforgiving ideology, officers whose presumed remit was now to ask people if they’d had too much to think.
This activism in the police is disturbing in itself, but that it should be taking place now in tandem with the endless reports regarding the lenient verdicts of activist judges, particularly on asylum-seekers of dubious merit, makes this development doubly-concerning. We are witnessing the simultaneous perversion of the judiciary and the creeping ideological capture of the police, both arms of the state which now seem intent in enforcing a worldview sanctioned by the last Conservative government and endorsed by our Labour politicians today.
Watch: grooming gang victim criticises Lucy Powell
The row over Lucy Powell’s outrageous comments are not going away anytime soon. It was on Any Questions last week that the Leader of the House of Commons suggested that discussing the subject of grooming gangs effectively amounted to a ‘dog whistle.’ She has now been forced to issue a grovelling apology in the House, having, er, conspicuously failed to do so in her original post on X.
But among the victims of those disgusting gangs, there is anger and dismay at the attitudes of politicians like Powell. This morning one of them was interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg on her flagship BBC show. Steph, who was abused when she was 12, was asked on what it is like to hear the political conversation about grooming gangs. She replied: ‘It makes me angry, especially the comment of the dog whistler and stuff like that. It’s not very nice to us as victims.’ When asked about Ms Powell’s comments, she said:
She’s not been through nothing herself, has she? She doesn’t know how we actually feel. We’ve got a constant reminder of it every day and it’s still going on.
You can say that again.
How scuzzy is your neighbourhood?
Voters turned to Reform in the recent local elections for many reasons, but one theme resonated more than most: the state of our streets, neighbourhoods and communities.
Across Britain – as Gus Carter writes for the cover of this week’s magazine – the same pattern repeats. Whether it’s car thieves smashing windows in London, shops being looted in daylight, or fly-tippers trashing local parks, anti-social behaviour is rife, and no one seems to do anything about it. Councils fob you off. Police don’t turn up. Victims give up reporting crimes because nothing happens.
This, as Gus put it, is Scuzz Nation. It’s a country where taxes are high, services are broken, and the social contract has frayed. It’s a place where empty high streets and rising knife crime exist alongside financially improbable barbershops and zombie knife attacks in schools. It’s not just grime and graffiti, it’s the deep sense that the rules no longer apply and no one in charge cares.
So how bad is it where you live?
Use our tool above to find out just how scuzzy your local authority really is. Compare fly-tipping rates, crime stats, bin collection performance, and more. See whether your council is quietly sliding into chaos, or still holding the line.
Could the death penalty return?
The attack on a prison officer by Axel Rudakubana, the killer of the three girls at a dance class in Southport in 2024, has revived calls for a restoration of capital punishment, as many ask why he is serving a 52-year jail term at huge public expense, rather than have been put to death at the time for his heinous crime.
Rudakubana is reported to have thrown boiling water from a kettle over an officer from his cell at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London. Although at the time he made his murderous attacks on the children, he was 17 and was therefore just under the age when killers could legally be hanged when Britain still retained the death penalty, there have been calls for an exception to be made in his exceptionally awful case.
Only last month, in a similar incident, Hashem Abedi, Jihadi brother of Salman Abedi, the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber, inflicted life changing injuries on three prison officers at HMP Frankland in County Durham when he threw hot cooking oil over them and stabbed them with a home-made knife. Abedi is serving life for helping his brother prepare Britain’s most lethal single Islamist attack, in which 22 young people died while attending an Ariana Grande concert. After the Frankland attack, he too was moved to Belmarsh to serve out his sentence – again at the expense of the taxpayer.
The calls for a return of the rope or some more humane form of capital punishment, such as a lethal injection, resonate strongly within the ranks of Reform, which is currently topping the polls and takes a tough line on crime and punishment.
One Reform MP, Lee Anderson, has called for Rudakubana to be executed despite his youth, while former party leader Richard Tice has demanded that there should at least be a ‘national debate’ on the issue. However, the party’s latest MP, Sarah Pochin, who took Runcorn & Helsby from Labour earlier this month in a sensational by election win, has said that she strongly opposes the death penalty.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that Labour has ‘no plans’ to reintroduce the penalty, while Reform’s founder and current leader Nigel Farage – whose voice may be decisive in the party’s internal law and order debates – says that he too is against capital punishment, but believes that the issue should be freely debated both in parliament and by the public.
As recently as 2010, 74 per cent of people favoured the death penalty in certain cases
Britain suspended hanging in 1965, and finally abolished it in 1969, though there were debates in Westminster up to the 1980s on whether to restore it for particularly sadistic killings, or the murder of children. At the time of abolition, liberal parliamentary opinion was out of step with the public, who strongly supported the retention of the death penalty, and even as recently as 2010, 74 per cent of people still favoured it in polls for some categories of murder.
Lately, however, there has been a sharp decline in support, with only 40 per cent now saying that they back the supreme penalty. A major impetus behind the campaign for abolishing hanging was public revulsion over the cases of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, who were both posthumously pardoned after they were hanged for murders that they did not commit, and the 1955 execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, for shooting her lover at the instigation of a jealous rival.
If there are more cases of callous mass murder such as those committed by Rudakubana and Abedi though, they are bound to lead to renewed demands for a restoration of lethal punishment for lethal crimes, and if Reform wins enough seats at the next election, the hitherto taboo issue will again return to the forefront of debate.
Has war healed Ukraine’s great divide?
The phrase divide et impera has echoed through history, its power as relevant today as it was in ancient Rome. Divide and conquer; rule through division. Rulers, then and now, have wielded this principle like a double-edged sword – deepening rifts to maintain control, ensuring that wounds never fully heal. At best, they turn into scars, waiting to be torn open again at the slightest provocation.
War is a terrible thing. And yet, even a tragedy of this scale has taught us something
In my own country, Ukraine, I’ve witnessed the devastating impact of this strategy for many years. While Western Ukrainians once called for the Donbas to be fenced off with barbed wire, people in the East labeled them neo-Nazis and Banderites. At times, political tensions led to “Orange Revolutions.” At others, backlash brought pro-Russian figures like Viktor Yanukovych to power.
For decades, Ukrainian politicians have manipulated linguistic and cultural divisions for their own gain, exploiting the country’s bilingual character – Ukrainian and Russian are both widely spoken. A society split down the middle becomes easy prey. The powerful need not invent divisions; they need only exploit the ones already there. Ukraine proved more vulnerable than many realised. We saw this clearly in 2014, when Vladimir Putin seized the moment – using ideological, linguistic, and religious rifts to annex Crimea and destabilise the Donbas, where a largely Russian-speaking, pro-Russian population lived.
But did Ukrainians learn from that trauma? Did the experience make us more tolerant of one another? Sadly, the East and West of Ukraine remained locked in a cold ideological standoff. The collective consciousness of the nation stayed divided.
In psychology, split consciousness is called schizophrenia. In political science and sociology, we use gentler terms: polarisation, social discord, conflict of interests. But the question remains: can a polarised society function in a healthy and rational way? Only as much as a person with split consciousness can.
The hard truth is that this division is not just the fault of leaders we love to blame. The deeper root lies within society itself. Power, however difficult this may be to accept, is a reflection of the people. We create the demand, and the system delivers the supply.
Imagine an anthill divided into “us” and “them,” or a beehive turned against itself. How long would it survive? How could it sustain itself?
Where there is division, confrontation is inevitable. And where confrontation exists, conflict follows. In such moments, the state may be responsible for inflicting the wound – but the people are responsible for what happens next. Do we tend to the damage? Or do we let it fester, even deepen it – for personal gain, out of fear, or sheer habit?
Take Stalin’s repressions. Millions of Ukrainians perished. But these atrocities weren’t carried out by distant officials alone – they were often driven by ordinary citizens who denounced their neighbours out of envy, revenge, greed, or simple dislike.
I remember talking with my grandmother, who survived the Holodomor, the man-made famine that devastated Ukraine. She told me how the grain-requisition squads that came to seize food were sometimes led by local villagers. These weren’t faceless agents of the regime – they were neighbours, moved by personal motives, turning against one another.
A nation isn’t just a crowd of individuals. A crowd may be loud or restless – but a nation is bound by something deeper. It becomes a people only when united by shared purpose.
That is exactly what happened in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Putin expected a demoralised, divided country – one that wouldn’t be able to resist. He miscalculated.
Many in the West feared Ukraine would collapse into internal strife. But those fears proved unfounded. Not only did Ukraine withstand the onslaught; it pushed back. It launched a counter-offensive that astonished the world. Because in the face of a common enemy, the nation united like never before.
As the old saying goes: There is no evil so great that some good cannot come of it.
Ukraine is not immune to internal conflict; no country is. How could it be, after serving as a battleground for Nazi and Soviet regimes, as Timothy Snyder describes in Bloodlands? For centuries, Ukraine was marched over by Mongol-Tatars, Poles, Russians, and Germans. Each came with fire and sword, leaving generations scarred by loss: conquest, repression, war, famine. The trauma became embedded in our memory. Genetic, almost.
Centuries under Russian rule left much of Ukraine “Russified,” repopulated with settlers from the East. Putin believed this made us easy prey. He imagined a quick victory – a parade in Kyiv two weeks after launching his “Special Military Operation.”
More than three years later, his army is still slogging through blood, bogged down roughly where it began in 2022.
Of course, war has introduced new tensions. Some fight. Some flee. Some call for total resistance. Others, exhausted, plead for peace, at any cost. Ukrainians have argued over the president, over military strategy, over ceasefire terms and resource deals. In wartime, there are dozens – maybe hundreds – of flashpoints.
But “war-torn” has often turned out to be a metaphor. Because behind the pain, there has also been fusion. Where there were tears, there is now stitching. What formed was not just a scar – but a healed fracture, a joining of what was once divided.
War is a terrible thing. Its toll is often immeasurable. And yet, even a tragedy of this scale has taught us something.
I learned my lesson one early morning at a Kyiv sports ground. I had come to warm up and saw a man standing near the horizontal bar. I greeted him. “Why on earth are you speaking Russian?” I asked, half-joking, but wincing.
“Why not, man?” he replied, and began to do pull-ups.
He had a prosthetic leg. I soon learned he had lost it in battle near my hometown. He had fought. I had not. He spoke Russian. I spoke Ukrainian. And yet we understood each other perfectly. So much separated us – age, background, even language – but something more important bound us together: love for Ukraine.
This war will end, as all wars eventually do. Peace will return. Elections will be held. It may be Zelensky. It may be Zaluzhny. It may be someone else entirely. But what matters most is not who leads Ukraine next – it’s how they lead.
We need a leader not with a “divide and rule” mindset, but with a “unite and serve” one. Integrity, not fragmentation. Unity, not division. That is the path to rebuilding. That is how we move forward – not just as a state, but as a people.
That is the transformation that has already begun. And that is the key to Ukraine’s future: strong, resilient, and whole.
What is the Tate Modern for?
Twenty-five years ago today, the Tate Modern first opened its doors to the public. The main attraction: a nine metre-high steel sculpture of a female spider which towered over visitors to the Turbine Hall. In its first year, the Tate Modern saw twice its projected number of visitors. London’s first museum of modern art was an unmitigated success.
Say what you will about contemporary art, but it is undeniably true that the Tate Modern succeeded where others failed. While Manchester’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and Centre Georges Pompido struggled, the Tate Modern thrived. Riding the wave of Blairism, Britpop and pre-crash confidence, the thematically organised gallery, housed inside a derelict site on the banks of the Thames, attracted five million visitors in the millennium year – doubling the numbers of the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco combined.
As the Tate Modern marks its 25th anniversary, those running the gallery must ask themselves: what is it for?
Today, that story could not be more different. While the British and Natural History Museums have recovered after the pandemic, the Tate Modern has not. In 2024, a million fewer people entered the gallery once hailed a ‘cathedral for art’ than before the pandemic. The dire performances of their venues has forced the Tate Group to slash 7 per cent of its workforce to reduce costs – just five years after they offered 167 voluntary redundancies.
Have the public simply tired of art? It seems not. The National Gallery has seen visitor numbers grow by 14 per cent since 2022. But while they have undergone a rehang and rebuild, the Tate Modern has committed to the same increasingly tired tropes for a quarter of a century. Visitors are exhausted.
The Tate Modern’s avant-garde aspirations have driven it, sleepwalking, towards decline. Art that was once new and exciting has been replaced by the monotonous and constant banging of the social justice drum.
In celebration of Women’s History Month in 2022, the Tate Modern organised a screening of Marin Håskjoldand’s film What is a Woman? The 15-minute show platformed a heated debate between actors over the question of who should be permitted to enter a municipal swimming pool changing room. Whatever your answer to the question, is this really the sort of thing that will attract new and excited audiences? Is it even art at all?
The truth is the gallery has drifted as far as possible away from its radical intentions. Perhaps Toni Morrison is right that ‘all good art is political’, but at the Tate, only one kind of politics is allowed. Migration is always good; colonialism is always bad. The climate is always in a state of crisis; the West is always responsible. Gender will always be a construct; notions of the immutability of sex will always be condemned.
The winner of the Tate Modern’s prestigious Turbine Hall commission this year is Máret Ánne Sara. Her art seeks to preserve Sámi ancestral knowledge and values to protect the environment for future generations. Karin Hindsbo, the gallery’s director, waxes lyrical about her work, claiming that ‘by addressing the major social, ecological and political concerns of her community, Sara hopes not only to increase interest and awareness, but also to effect real change.’ Is this sort of agit-prop really the programming that will bring in audiences? The visitor numbers speak for themselves.
Curators now exist in a state of terror at the prospect of any criticism from their audiences. It took the gallery three years to pluck up the courage to display Philip Guston Now, due to concerns some of the artist’s work might offend. Guston’s work, much of which focuses on the Ku Klux Klan, offers a critique of racism, antisemitism and fascism. But at the Tate, where staff fear that visitors could be offended by even a negative depiction of white supremacy, a decision was taken to postpone ‘until a time we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted’.
Difficult topics are always avoided – in favour of projects like Embassy, ‘a space for activism and dialogue in support of Aboriginal land rights in Australia’, focusing on ‘challenges that Bankside communities are facing, particularly questions around gentrification, social justice, and community organising’. The Tate Modern has no faith in their visitors. In turn, visitors have lost all faith in the gallery, and they are voting with their feet.
As the Tate Modern marks its 25th anniversary, those running the gallery must ask themselves: what is it for? If curators cannot find it in themselves to put on the sort of art that attracts visitors, then why should they be allowed to continue, propped up by taxpayers’ money?
The North Korean saboteurs funding Pyongyang’s nuclear programme
If you think that it is only Chinese infiltrators roaming across the West, including on our very shores, then think again. For all the ever-expanding scope of ballistic missiles, frigates, and drones in North Korea’s arsenal, the hermit kingdom has been adding another body of weaponry to its toolkit: cyberwarfare capabilities.
It is yet another example of the North Korean regime denying its people one thing but providing its confidantes with another. Whilst the North Korean people are forbidden from accessing the worldwide web, the Kim regime has long been cultivating a network of state-sponsored computer scientists and hackers to fulfil one of the country’s core goals, namely, making money to fund its nuclear programme.
The North Korean regime earns around $500 million per year from its overseas workers
Between 3,000 and 10,000 North Korean information technology workers are based abroad (with the majority in Russia, China, and Southeast Asia, such as Laos); a further 1,000 remain within North Korea. These workers have gained notoriety for using stolen or fabricated identities – often multiple – in claiming to be Western software engineers seeking employment in Western firms. In reality, they seek to access and disrupt a company’s systems (and, if they are lucky, gain access to international financial systems) and reap the financial rewards. In December 2024, a federal court in St. Louis, Missouri, indicted fourteen North Korean nationals working for companies in China and Russia for extorting funds from US firms over a six-year period. The income they generated amounted to a not insignificant sum of $88 million (£66 million).
Many of these North Korean workers collaborate with facilitators in host countries, who knowingly provide them with remote access to the networks of overseas companies. The actions of one such facilitator in the United States, who stole more than 60 identities between 2020 and 2023, led to the North Koreans earning nearly $7 million (£5.3 million) in revenue. At the same time, many other North Korean ‘workers’ are hired inadvertently, albeit legally, by overseas firms, with no idea about these individuals’ true identities. The fact that thousands of North Koreans have been employed by Fortune 500 companies is a damning testament to the success of Pyongyang’s operations.
Akin to any other type of North Korean earning money overseas –whether construction worker or footballer – the vast majority of their earnings will be sent back to the Kim regime’s coffers in Pyongyang. After all, this is the ultimate reason why the regime sends North Korean workers abroad. A UN Panel of Experts report from 2024 deemed the North Korean regime to earn around $500 million (£380 million) per year from its overseas workers.
Now that this panel has ceased to exist – thanks to Russia’s veto on extending its mandate in March 2024 – the sums that will be heading in the Kim regime’s direction look like they will only increase. It is then no surprise that nearly 50 per cent – if not more – of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction programme is funded from illicit cyber activities. The rise of cryptocurrency has only offered yet another realm for Pyongyang to exploit. In March this year, North Korean hackers stole a gargantuan $1.5 billion (£1.2 billion) in cryptocurrency from the Dubai-based firm ByBit, in what was the largest cryptocurrency heist in history.
In addition to stealing the identities of US software developers, North Korean cyber criminals have also gained a penchant for impersonating academics, journalists, and foreign embassy staff as part of concerted spear phishing campaigns. The logic of these criminals is simple: first, pretend to be a South Korean academic, journalist, or government official – often one who exists; next, e-mail a Western target, such as an academic or journalist, to ask them to review an article or answer questions about Korea-related issues. Having established a rapport through regular communication, the social engineers then send any relevant ‘documents’ to review, which can only be accessed through clicking malicious links or attachments.
Here, it is a win-win for the North Korean identity thieves. Not only do they gain information from their Western adversaries about how other states view North Korea – information which can be transferred to the ruling regime – but phishers may even be courteous enough to thank the recipient for their time by compensating them financially. And once the recipient has entered their bank details, the rest is history.
For a country that has long been seen as technologically backward, its state-sanctioned cyber soldiers are anything but. Their sophistication does not look likely to plateau anytime soon, a bleak fact that also applies to the country’s nuclear and missile capabilities. This is a country that has no desire either to improve its criminal human rights record or abandon its nuclear weapons, the latter of which it continues to fund through these lucrative acts of cyberwarfare. We must, therefore, resist the delusional calls by so-called ‘peace activists’ for a treaty between the two Koreas, as doing so would give the Kim regime a carte blanche to continue its bad behaviour across all realms and move us even further away from addressing the North Korea problem.
Why would anyone think that now is the right time for a ‘peace treaty’ between the North and South, the latter of which has long been a victim of Pyongyang’s cyberwarfare? Cries for such an agreement are merely a chimera by those who bear no shame in collaborating with the North Korean regime under the euphemism of ‘engagement’. And as history tells us, siding with the enemy never ends well.
The assisted suicide bill has shown parliament at its worst
Kim Leadbeater has earned plenty of praise for her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life), or assisted suicide, Bill. The Labour MP even won a gong for Political Speech of the Year award for her opening contribution to the parliamentary debate.
If we cannot trust Parliament to debate life-and-death decisions responsibly, how can we trust it to implement them?
“We saw Parliament at its best because the tone, the compassion, and the understanding that was shown was something we can all be proud of,” says Leadbeater, who has also described the bill as “Parliament at its best”. If only this were true. The reality is that the bill – which enters the Report Stage this week – shames parliament. Its distortions, rushed judgments, and procedural failures should embarrass those who are responsible.
The failings go back to when the bill was published last year, barely two weeks before an initial vote. This was scarcely enough time for proper debate. The scrutiny committee – made up of a group of MPs in Parliament that examine and debate each part of the bill – was stacked with supporters; those who opposed assisted dying were sidelined. The committee initially excluded the Royal College of Psychiatrists from giving oral evidence. When the hearings started, many witnesses were pro-assisted suicide, including Australian and American doctors who actively practise and campaign for it.
Among the most egregious moment was Australian politician Alex Greenwich’s claim that assisted suicide is a form of “suicide prevention”. Meanwhile, the committee called no opposing witnesses from Canada, where assisted suicide laws have spiralled far beyond their original scope (which was not dissimilar to what Leadbeater is proposing), nor from any other jurisdiction, such as the Netherlands or Belgium, that has decades of experience with ‘assisted dying’. Some committee members were regularly disengaged, even seen scrolling through their devices during sessions, or only participating to call an adjournment.
When MPs were paying attention, their contributions were not always helpful. Tory MP Kit Malthouse, who supports assisted dying, repeatedly interrupted Sarah Olney as she raised concerns about financial incentives for doctors, dismissing her warnings about profit-driven pressures in assisted suicide provision. Malthouse also attempted to persuade the Chair to silence opponents, arguing that their critiques, even when directly relevant, were “misrepresentations” of the committee’s work. This extended to policing Danny Kruger’s contributions, with Malthouse pushing to curtail his scrutiny of gaps in safeguards. Malthouse controversially appeared to seek to suppress criticism from Down syndrome advocates after the committee rejected protections for vulnerable patients, arguing that dissenting voices were misrepresenting the debate and should be “corrected”. His apparent attempts to control the narrative suggest a pattern of stifling legitimate debate while fast-tracking a flawed bill.
Concerns about depression, anorexia, and financial pressures were brushed aside by committee members. Neil Shastri-Hurst suggested that depression shouldn’t disqualify applicants who wanted to end their lives. When Kruger asked if we should allow someone to die to spare their family medical costs, Leadbeater hesitated, then fell back on a familiar catchphrase: “autonomy”.
Naz Shah, a committee member with hearing difficulties, had to leave early after sessions were extended late into the evening, despite Shah’s warnings that her hearing aid batteries would not last long enough. In April, Leadbeater reversed her stance on scheduling. Initially, she had insisted that the Report Stage of the bill should proceed as planned, but she later delayed it, announcing this change the day before the Easter recess began.
This pattern of making changes while MPs are likely to be distracted has been repeated. Last week, the impact assessment of the bill, that was widely believed to have been initially planned for release in April, was slipped out while Westminster was distracted by the fallout from the May elections. Did Number 10 hope no one would notice it? It certainly felt that way.
Assisted suicide opponent Meg Hillier said that publishing the assessment while MPs were distracted was “another example of the failure of this process to live up to the promises made to MPs at second reading.” She’s right: MPs are already halfway through the fortnight between its publication and the Report Stage. This simply isn’t long enough to thoroughly examine a 149-page document on such an important issue.
Despite the plaudits that Leadbetter has received, the assisted dying bill has been nothing short of shambolic. Rushed scrutiny, biased hearings, rejected safeguards, and questionable claims have defined this bill’s journey. If we cannot trust Parliament to debate life-and-death decisions responsibly, how can we trust it to implement them?
Far from a triumph of compassion or democratic rigour, the assisted dying bill has shown Parliament at its worst. Unless MPs recognise this swiftly and step back from the brink, the consequences will be deadly.
The quiet frustrations of Puerto Rico
If you like piña coladas – and I do – Puerto Rico will suit you just fine. The cocktail was born on the island in 1954, though debate lingers over exactly where it was first dreamt up. A bartender at the Caribe Hilton is credited with blending coconut cream, pineapple and rum into its original form, but some claim it was at Barrachina that the drink evolved into the slushier, icier version we know today. But does it really matter? What’s important is that in Puerto Rico, you’re never far from a piña colada.
Spring break was in full flow when I arrived on this tropical US territory. The college kids were easy to spot. The girls paraded around in string bikinis, which barely held everything in. Some of the boys, meanwhile, bore fresh hickeys, badges of honour. At Mar Chiquita beach, a food truck painted with the Puerto Rican flag served piña coladas in hollowed-out pineapples.
‘These spring-breakers just don’t know how to drink,’ said Pablo, my guide through Old San Juan. ‘It’s quite sweet, really.’ Pablo, himself in his early twenties and studying history, drank coffee from the age of ten – a common practice in Puerto Rico, though his grandmother swore it would stunt his growth. It would be fair to say Pablo is not a tall man.
What he lacked in height, he more than made up for with his knowledge of Puerto Rican history. As we walked through the streets of Old San Juan, he painted a picture of the island’s colonial past – first Spanish, then American, with African influences – and how it has shaped Puerto Rican cuisine. The latter half of the 19th century was the golden age of Puerto Rican coffee, when Spain incentivised its cultivation, but the island still produces a substantial amount today. The Pope, I was told more than once, prefers a cup of coffee from the island.
American influence, meanwhile, is impossible to miss. Rice and red beans – a staple from the Great Depression era – still forms the heart of the local diet. Hotels such as O:Live in San Juan brim with cheerful, sun-seeking Americans, while the radio plays an endless loop of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. In the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap brought US industry to Puerto Rico, leaving behind a legacy of pharmaceutical plants that still dot the landscape. ‘There’s a renaissance stirring in Puerto Rico,’ proclaimed a 1956 advertisement, trumpeting this new industrial age.
But in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which devastated much of the island in 2017, many Puerto Ricans are looking to distance themselves – culturally, if not politically – from the US. Everything is now measured in two eras: ‘before Maria and after Maria’. And after the storm, it became clear that relying on American aid was no longer an option.
As such, an independent spirit simmers just beneath the surface. At Atelier Cocina Abierta, a cooking school and online food market at the heart of Puerto Rico’s culinary revival, a waitress lamented the island’s reliance on imported juice. ‘We have such incredible fresh juice here, but people still buy imported apple, pear and Welch’s grape juice from the US. We’re trying to change that.’ The fresh passion-fruit juice I tried was certainly far superior to Minute Maid. At Frutos del Guacabo, a farm outside San Juan, the focus is on cultivating produce for local chefs. Beneath the shade of a mango tree, I sampled custard apples before being put to work milking a goat called Ursula. She seemed entirely unfazed by my inexperience. I was then invited to taste everything growing on the farm: peppery nasturtiums, lemon-drop flowers that fizzed on my tongue and butterfly oxalis peas. One specimen of note was the blue Thai pea flower. ‘Bartenders love it,’ said Efrén David Robles, the farm’s owner. ‘It turns from blue to pink when you add lime.’
At Hacienda Tres Ángeles, in the mountains of Adjuntas, I met Naomi Gómez, a former phlebotomist from the Bronx who returned to Puerto Rico 12 years ago to start a coffee plantation. ‘It was an act of madness – and faith,’ she said. ‘But the Puerto Rican dream is to own land and farm it.’
When Hurricane Maria struck, her family farm was left without electricity for nine months. The trauma of that time still lingers, fuelling a renewed commitment to farming – and less reliance on American imports.
At Tres Ángeles (the three angels are Naomi’s daughters) nature dictates the rhythm of life. Naomi pointed out a yagrumo tree. ‘If the white undersides of the leaves turn skyward, it means rain is coming.’ As we walked, the leaves began to tilt, and an hour later, the skies opened. ‘And if an avocado tree produces too much fruit,’ she added, ‘a hurricane is coming.’ This year, the trees have been heavy with blossoms – not a good omen.
Puerto Ricans are infectiously enthusiastic about their home-grown produce. ‘Guava is having a moment,’ Pablo said. ‘It’s in everything right now.’ Once used by the Taíno people (the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands) as a remedy for dysentery, guava has a new reputation as the ultimate hangover cure. ‘Banana and guava,’ Pablo advised. ‘That’s the trick.’ A tip the spring-breakers would do well to heed.
Rum, of course, is the culprit for many of those hangovers. Puerto Rico proudly calls itself the rum capital of the world, and it flows freely everywhere. My taxi driver raved about the local speciality, ‘drunk cookies’. Across the bay from Old San Juan sits the Bacardi distillery, its art deco headquarters a pilgrimage site for bachelorette parties. The national dish, meanwhile, is mofongo – a comforting mash of fried plantains, shaped into a cup in a wooden pilon and filled with a variety of savoury toppings. ‘Sometimes you just crave a mofongo,’ said Laura Ortiz-Villamil, a PhD candidate in Puerto Rican studies, who also runs Sofrito Tours, offering cultural trips focused on the island’s cuisine.
Everything is now measured in two eras: ‘before Maria and after Maria’
At El Burén de Lula, a sixth-generation family-run food stand open only on Sundays, I met Vilma, the 90-year-old matriarch. Locals queued patiently for empanadillas stuffed with crab and ground beef, and coconut or cinnamon arepas with a mochi-like texture. Around the corner, El Sazón de Sylvia drew crowds for its deep-fried crab cakes, crab rice, and conch stew. ‘We don’t like to talk about dieting in Puerto Rico,’ Laura joked. Given the abundance of fried food, I could see why.
Then on Luquillo Beach, locals and tourists alike gathered around smoking grills, feasting on chicken and shark pinchos. Music boomed from the speakers and every so often, couples broke into dance – be it salsa or bomba. The latter style, when performed with musicians, sees the drummer follow the woman’s movements, not the other way round, as one might expect.
Music drives life in Puerto Rico, with famous names such as Daddy Yankee and Jennifer Lopez frequently woven into conversation. At her plantation, Naomi had named a chicken after J.Lo. ‘The roosters loved her. But sadly, she didn’t survive Maria,’ Naomi explained.
No Puerto Rican star shines brighter than Bad Bunny, though. The reggaeton icon will soon be the first artist to have a residency on the island, and his face is everywhere, from Calvin Klein billboards along the highway to murals featuring his interpretation of the island’s mascot, the coquí frog. He owns a bar in Old San Juan, sponsors a basketball team, and donates to underprivileged children on Three Kings Day, one of the island’s main holidays. Whether he really does roam the city disguised as a woman, as a local gossip suggests, is anyone’s guess. But he is undeniably responsible for the island’s latest trend: men painting their nails.
Chocolate Cortés, another beloved institution (known for its cheddar and chocolate dish) has long been a quiet force of resistance. For years, its chocolate bars came with illustrated storybooks tucked inside the wrapper, reinforcing Spanish at a time when US authorities tried to make English the dominant language. A letter is displayed on the wall of the Cortés café in San Juan from a woman called Ana Méndez, dated June 2007. Ana writes: ‘Where I lived, there were no books… these stories taught me to read and love reading.’
The resistance takes many forms. In Lares, the heart of Puerto Rico’s brief but passionate independence movement, I was handed the flag of independence to wave in the town square. But real revolution seemed a distant concern. Here, the air smelled of frying oil, ice cream flavours ranged from garlic and coriander to sausage and beans, little girls ate snow cones and an elderly woman danced salsa alone. As night fell, I ordered yet another piña colada, which arrived crowned with a bright pink cherry. ¡Viva Puerto Rico!
Justice by skin color resurrects Jim Crow
In America, we are told justice is blind. Hennepin County wants her to peek.
Last week, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney’s Office after prosecutors were instructed to consider race and age during plea negotiations.
County Attorney Mary Moriarty defended the policy as an effort to address “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system. But good intentions don’t excuse bad policy – and this one sends a dangerous message: that some people are less accountable for their actions because of the color of their skin.
As a black conservative, I am fully in favor of thoughtful criminal justice reform. I support second chances, alternatives to incarceration and interventions that account for the circumstances that shape a person’s life. But I draw the line at using race as a factor in legal outcomes. That’s not justice. That’s identity politics wrapped in a courtroom robe.
Let’s be clear: racial disparities do exist. Black Americans are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. That fact should concern anyone who believes in equal opportunity and fair treatment. But disparities are not the same as discrimination. And more importantly, they don’t justify codifying racial exceptionalism into prosecutorial discretion.
We have to be honest about what drives crime and incarceration. It’s not race – it’s broken homes, broken schools, and broken communities. These are the real roots of criminal behavior, and they cut across racial lines. Decades of research show that family structure, access to quality education, and socioeconomic status are far more predictive of criminal outcomes than race alone.
A young man raised in a two-parent household with a stable support system – regardless of skin color – is statistically far less likely to wind up in handcuffs than one raised in instability and poverty.
But Hennepin County’s policy ignores that nuance. It turns race into a moral variable. If you’re black or latino, your background is seen as a mitigating factor. If you’re white or asian, the same circumstances may not apply. That is not equal justice – it’s a race-based sliding scale of accountability.
Some defenders of the policy argue that considering race merely provides “context.” But context is not the problem. I fully support factoring in a defendant’s age, life circumstances, and potential for rehabilitation. There’s a meaningful difference between a seventeen-year-old first-time offender and a hardened thirty-year-old repeat criminal. Age can be a morally and legally relevant consideration, especially if there are signs that a person was acting under duress or immaturity.
But race? That sends a very different message.
It says: “You did it, but we understand – because people like you have suffered.” It replaces the principle of equal justice with a kind of moral patronization. And it reinforces a toxic narrative already gaining traction in American culture: that black and brown people cannot be held to the same standards because the system is rigged against them.
That’s not just false – it’s destructive. It undercuts the very communities it claims to help.
Because if we tell a generation of young black men that they’re not fully responsible for their actions, we rob them of agency. We don’t lift them up – we lock them in. We reinforce the lie that their fate is determined by racism, not by choices. And we subtly discourage the one thing every successful society requires: personal accountability.
This isn’t compassion. It’s surrender.
Real justice must take the whole person into account. Not just their skin color. Not just their zip code. We need policies that are race-neutral but socially aware – ones that understand the influence of poverty, trauma, and lack of opportunity without falling into the trap of racial determinism.
There’s a better path forward than what Hennepin County is offering. If prosecutors want to create fairer outcomes, they should focus on expanding diversion programs, community-based mentorship, job training, and early intervention. They should build partnerships with churches, nonprofits and families to steer young people away from crime before it starts.
They should look at a person’s full life story – not just their racial identity.
The irony here is painful. In the name of fairness, we are resurrecting a race-conscious legal system. The last time America went down that road, it was called Jim Crow. The faces have changed, the motives have changed – but the moral failure is the same: unequal treatment under the law.
We cannot fix injustice by creating new forms of it.
Justice must be firm, compassionate, and colorblind. The people most affected by crime – especially in black and brown neighborhoods – deserve a system that holds offenders accountable and deters future harm. Victims deserve to know that the scales haven’t been tipped because of skin color. And defendants deserve to be treated as individuals, not as representatives of a racial group.
Equal justice isn’t easy. It requires nuance, judgment, and moral clarity. But it’s still the only justice worth fighting for.
And if we abandon that ideal in favor of racial balancing acts, we will have lost not just our principles – but our legitimacy.
The Trump administration is not pro-life. Why?
President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks.
Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions. Yet at a time when he seems more than willing to shoot for the moon on pretty much every other policy, his administration is pumping the brakes on a pro-life measure that seeks to restrict the use of abortion pills from up to 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks, and would once again require a woman to acquire the pills from a doctor; currently, mifepristone can be bought online and delivered through the mail.
Fox News reports Idaho, Kansas and Missouri “are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021.” In its brief, the DoJ asserts the case should be thrown out because these states “have no connection to the Northern District of Texas.”
Several outlets have pointed out that though the Trump administration is continuing President Joe Biden’s legacy of safeguarding access to mifepristone, at least for now, the DoJ “did not debate the legality of the pill or defend its use,” per USA Today.
Trump said recently that this second term will be his last, but interfering in the mifepristone battle has to make you wonder. This is a president who, after all, appointed many pro-life judges and took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, saying, “Without me the pro-life movement would have just kept losing.” Within the first weeks of his second term in office, Trump also signed an executive order “to end the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.”
Politico posits Trump’s action in this and other cases is “about preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions.” But in its filing on the mifepristone case, the DoJ went above and beyond questioning the states’ proper proceedings by stating their complaint “fails for additional threshold reasons,” because “they failed to exhaust their claims; and their challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is outside the six-year statute of limitations.”
In his December 2024 TIME Person of the Year interview, Trump committed to “making sure that the FDA does not strip [women’s] ability to access abortion pills.” Yet stripping a woman of her ability to access abortion pills and putting back into place commonsense restrictions to discourage abortions and protect mothers’ lives are two different things.
Perhaps Trump is fine with mifepristone because popping a pill to end a pregnancy presents a less grisly picture than a surgical abortion. Or perhaps he’s unaware of how dangerous the abortion pill is. The mainstream media certainly isn’t publicizing it. Yet, as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told The Spectator last week, adverse events caused by mifepristone are “22 times higher than what the FDA label says.
“These are astounding numbers,” Hawley said. “And… we’re not talking about a stomach ache. We’re talking here about hemorrhaging. We’re talking about life-threatening complications because of this drug… The reason that all of these safety procedures and guardrails were in place was because of just how dangerous chemical abortions are. So my message to the administration is: those safety regulations need to go back into effect.”
Then again, it’s hard to believe the Trump and his administration are simply ignorant of mifepristone’s effects. As the drug now accounts for 63 percent of abortions, it’s more likely he’s afraid of losing the support of voters who elected him for his “moderate” stance on abortion.
The India-Pakistan ceasefire is a triumph for Trump
After more than four days of clashes since the early hours of Wednesday morning, India and Pakistan have agreed to a full ceasefire. President Donald Trump announced it on his Truth Social Platform, confirming that the ceasefire had come ‘after a long night of talks mediated by the United States’.
The announcement was made hours after Pakistan launched Operation Banyan al-Marsous with both Islamabad and New Delhi claiming to have struck each other’s military bases with heavy missiles. Pakistan’s strikes were a response to India’s Operation Sindoor that had been aimed at jihadist sites in Pakistan, following the April 22 militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. While claims of both sides will be dissected in the coming days, Trump’s announcement brings weeks of tension between the two nuclear-armed rivals to a halt.
The leadership of both countries can present themselves as victors to their domestic audience in the coming days
Marco Rubio, the US Secretary if State, played a critical role in the de-escalation, having been in touch with the leadership of both countries over the past two days. In a statement released moments after the ceasefire announcement, Rubio commended Indian and Pakistani prime ministers ‘on their wisdom, prudence, and statesmanship in choosing the path of peace’.
The language of the official statement, similar to the messaging on Rubio’s earlier conversations with both the Pakistani and Indian leadership, reflected an equilibrium critical to both Islamabad and New Delhi accepting the ceasefire. The leadership of both countries can present themselves as victors to their domestic audience in the coming days. Even so, Rubio still underlined American commitment to working with India in ‘the fight against terrorism‘, while urging Pakistan to ‘end any support for terrorist groups‘, in turn reaffirming the Trump regime’s global position on jihadist outfits.
Even though the US in recent years has drawn closer to India, as a counterbalance to China, Trump in his first presidential term also suggested an openness to rebuilding the relationship with Pakistan. As Pakistan in recent months has sought to bring the US back into the region following the deaprture of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021, India has been eyeing financial benefits, with this week’s deal with UK inevitably influencing the ongoing trade negotiations between Washington and New Delhi. Promises on the security and economic fronts for both the countries are more than conceivable, allowing the US to posture as the guarantor of peace, and signal a major diplomatic triumph for Trump.
This triumph was made all the more critical by China’s success in the clashes between India and Pakistan, with Chinese J-10C jets along with PL-15 air-to-air missiles helping Pakistan bring at least two Indian fighter aircraft down, including at least one Rafale jet, signaling the first ever loss for the French fighter aircraft in war. Pakistan’s successful hits on Indian jets has seen the Chinese defence stocks surge this week with Beijing’s military equipment now proving itself in the most high stakes battlefield in the world. By spearheading the battle’s curtain call, Trump seems to have acknowledged China’s challenge, and signaled a bid to reassert America’s supremacy in Beijing’s neighborhood.
The India-Pakistan ceasefire has overlapped with calls for the same in Ukraine with European leaders calling on Trump to push for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia. The Trump administration is also finalising the peace plan for Gaza with an announcement expected in the coming days. While Ukraine and Gaza wars linger, any agreement on those fronts would mean Trump claiming diplomatic success in three of the most turbulent regions of the world – quite possibly within the same year.
While Trump has much to gain with the ceasefire agreed in South Asia, both India and Pakistan too will celebrate their respective victories. India will likely claim to have responded with might to the April 22 attack and signal elimination of terror camps in Pakistan. Meanwhile, in addition to the global recognition of its downing of aircraft, Pakistan will likely assert a successful defence against Indian aggression.
However, while Trump might have guaranteed temporary peace in the region, the roots of war will remain as long as jihadist infrastructure exists in Pakistan, and a leadership baying for Pakistan’s demise continues to helm the affairs in India.
Reform take over its first Conservative club
It seems that Reform are not content to just take the Tories’ seats. After coming for their MPs, councillors and members, now Nigel Farage’s party is turning its guns on one of the most visible remaining bastions of conservatism in the north of England: working men’s Conservative clubs. This morning, a new sign appeared above the Talbot pub in Blackpool, a onetime Tory club. It now reads thus: ‘The Talbot: Reform UK Club.’
Members and supporters will mix with locals there, as Reform aims to go after the Blackpool South constituency where they finished second last July. A senior party source confirmed to Mr S that the new Reform UK Club was the first of many, saying:
First we replaced the Tories last week at the local elections, now we are replacing their clubs too. Reform UK is more than just a political party, it’s a movement and this is just the beginning.
There were more than 1,000 members of the Association of Conservative Clubs at the last count. How many will switch to Reform by the next election?
Why the First Sea Lord stepping down is so shocking
The news that First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Ben Key, the head of the Royal Navy, has stepped down from his job while claims of an alleged affair with a junior female officer are investigated, have come as a shock. The armed forces have been relatively free of the sex scandals that have become so common in politics since the Second World War.
Sir Ben, a 59-year -old married father of three, has made no comment on the subject , and his duties have been taken over by Vice Admiral Sir Martin Connell, his deputy. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that he has stood aside for ‘private reasons’. It is the first time in the Navy’s five centuries of existence that its first sea lord has faced a misconduct inquiry.
The armed forces have been relatively free of the sex scandals that have become so common in politics since the Second World War
Despite Winston Churchill’s jibe that the only traditions of the Navy are ‘rum, sodomy, and the lash’ discipline in the senior service is so tight, and life in close quarters at sea so open to observation, that affairs or even brief encounters would soon be impossible to keep secret. Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty in charge of the Navy at the beginning of both world wars and should have known whereof he spoke, but he couldn’t resist a clever witticism overriding the truth.
Human nature being what it is, occasional breaches of discipline will occur. If they are between a senior officer and other ranks, these are taken very seriously and treated with great severity as they can undermine the trust between all ranks and lead to favouritism and jealousy which would destroy the flawless efficiency so essential to the smooth running of ships at sea.
The Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) first formed in 1917, became a vital part of the Navy onshore in both world wars, but for fairly obvious reasons, the idea of young women serving on board ships was strongly resisted among the more traditionally minded upper ranks of the Navy, and only came about as recently as 1993 during John Major’s otherwise inglorious premiership.
Superstitious tradition held that women aboard warships brought bad luck. Although such a superstition is obviously nonsense, there are still some recaltricent male sailors who remain uncomfortable with the idea of women at sea.
Allegations of affairs between officers and lower ranking women have been much more frequent in the Army, and have led to several tragic cases of young female soldiers taking their lives after alleged abuse and bullying by men holding the power of rank over them.
Even so, cases of abuse by very senior ranks have been an almost unknown rarity since Major General Sir Hector MacDonald , a humbly born Scottish hero of the Boer War, known as ‘Fighting Mac’, was accused in 1903 of having group sex in a railway carriage with Sinhalese teenage youths while he was posted in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. MacDonald was summoned home, where he was reportedly advised by King Edward VII to shoot himself.
En route back to Ceylon to face a court martial while staying at the Hotel Regina in Paris, the General did just that.
Why was Axel Rudakubana given a kettle?
Late last night, news broke of another attack by a high-profile prisoner at what should be one of our most secure jails. This time it seems that Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, has thrown boiling water in the face of an officer at HMP Belmarsh, the London jail which Hashem Abedi was moved to after his brutal attack on staff at HMP Frankland last month. Rudakubana is reported to have committed this attack on Thursday afternoon.
Thankfully the member of staff has already been released from hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. The Ministry of Justice have insisted that ‘violence in prison will not be tolerated and we will always push for the strongest possible punishment for attacks on our hardworking staff’. Frankly, it isn’t good enough.
When the death penalty was scrapped the expectation was that innocent people would be kept safe from those spared the noose.
Prisoners like Axel Rudakubana and Hashem Abedi are not like most inmates. They’re not even like most murderers. During my time as a prisoner I met many men serving long sentences for murder. In most cases as young men they killed another young man in a dispute over status, money or a woman. Their crimes have an entirely different character to the sadistic murder of children committed by the Southport and Manchester Arena killers.
These ‘typical’ murderers may have the potential for change, and the hope of release, if they demonstrate that they have changed, and that they no longer pose a risk. This means there are powerful incentives encouraging them to work with the system rather than attacking staff. Our long-term and high-security prison estate is built around housing men like this. What is becoming clear is that it is entirely unsuited to terrorists like Abedi and sadistic monsters like Rudakubana.
These prisoners have no realistic prospect of release, no plausible chance of even being moved to a lower security jail, and often glory in the notoriety they receive for attacking staff. In the case of jihadists like Abedi they also believe themselves to be soldiers, fighting an eternal war against our society, meaning prison officers and other staff will always be at risk from them.
This is wrong. When the death penalty was scrapped the expectation was that innocent people would be kept safe from those spared the noose. Rudakubana will never again be able to attack innocent children, but prison staff should not have to risk assault, maiming and death in the course of their work.
It’s only a matter of luck that last month’s attacks by Abedi at Frankland didn’t leave an officer dead. This time Rudakubana did little harm. But he has half a century to plan, to practice and to keep trying. Unless something changes then eventually Rudakubana, Abedi, or another very dangerous prisoner will succeed in killing a prison officer. Something needs to change.
Firstly we must consider practical access to weapons. Kettles are present in almost every prison cell in the country. The vast majority of prisoners can be trusted with them, but it is clear that some can never be allowed to have anything which they might use as a weapon.
As a society we chose to end capital punishment sixty years ago. That means we have created a system where we have to somehow contain for decades a small number of men who will only stop being dangerous when they no longer have the capacity.
At the very least men like Abedi and Rudakubana need to be held in a prison like a US ‘Supermax’, served their meals in very sparse cells, shackled for solitary exercise, and never again allowed to harm another person. Anything else is a betrayal of their victims and of the officers who must work alongside these killers each day.
Why the Germans don’t do it better
When I was a girl – shortly after the repeal of the Corn Laws – a common rhetorical question was ‘Who won the bloody war anyway?’ whenever the Germans came up in conversation. We were The Sick Man Of Europe; they were My Perfect Cousin. Not any longer: German politics now looks rather chaotic compared to ours. Their chancellor Friedrich Merz stumbled into office this week on the second go. So terrified is the paternalistic, pompous German establishment that they are considering banning the AfD: that notorious fascist party led by a lesbian in a relationship with a Sri Lankan woman. Where did it all go so wrong for our German cousins?
No one blames the Germans for wanting to stay in the EU. They co-own it, for a start
You have to go back to the the 1966 World Cup, when England beat West Germany in the final, for the last time that the natural post-War order between the two nations was intact; back then, the echoes of World War Two were nourished with England football fan chants of ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ to the tune of Camptown Races, and ‘Stand up if you won the war’ to the tune of Go West. In more recent years, the attempts to quell this healthy and humorous patriotism on the part of the globalist establishment became comical in their pomposity, as when the Foreign and Commonwealth Office earnestly attempted – and failed – to dissuade England fans from singing these charming and harmless ditties while attending the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.
I can’t even think of Britain’s behaviour during WW2, its boldness and braveness, so David and Goliath, without coming over all emosh. Our determination to defeat the Nazi war machine was even more impressive when you discover that Hitler had quite the crush on us. He was said to have complained when we declared war on Germany that Britain was not Germany’s natural enemy, and was keen to court us into an alliance by praising our ‘Aryan’ character, whatever that means. But from the moment we stepped up to defend Poland, that all changed.
In the decades after the war, Britain had an uneasy relationship with Germany. But after the EU referendum, the great and the good seemed desperate to suck up to Germany. When the Brexit vote came in, a sickening series of pieces appeared in the Guardian – where else? – almost audibly smirking about the crowds of Britons applying for German citizenship: ‘The number of Britons who gained German citizenship last year was up by approximately 2,300 per cent compared with the year before the Brexit referendum, driving up the number of naturalisations in the country to a 16-year high,’ they smarmed in 2020.
Even stranger for me to comprehend was the small number of British Jews who were seeking to move there: ‘Descendants of the tens of thousands of German Jews who fled the Nazis and found refuge in Britain are making use of their legal right to become German citizens following the Brexit vote,’ the Guardian panted in 2016.
Thank goodness for the likes of Harry Heber, 85, who was born in Austria but came to Britain at the age of seven in December 1938. He was appalled at the suggestion that he might apply for the restoration of his Austrian passport. ‘I think people who are doing that need their brains examined,’ said Heber, who has vivid memories of German troops marching into Austria when it was annexed to Germany in March 1938. ‘The proposition of seeking sanctuary in the very place that murdered my relatives absolutely appals me, and not least because for the last 78 years, my loyalties have been to Britain.’
No such qualms for Natasha Walter: ‘My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust but now I want German citizenship’ went the Guardian headline to her surprising confession.
Of course, it would have to be a Guardian writer – one John Kampfner – who went the whole hog and wrote a book in 2020 called Why The Germans Do It Better. Reviewed in the Guardian, naturally, the headline smugged: ‘Notes from a grown-up country…in praise of a rich, cultured and often progressive nation that makes Brexit Britain look bad and sad.’
All of the review is a horrible brown-nosing, but some of it is just plain weird: ‘Kampfner tells us that in an interview shortly before becoming chancellor, Angela Merkel was asked what Germany meant to her. She replied: “I am thinking of airtight windows. No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.” German windows are indeed something to be proud of.’
I finally went to Germany in 2019, when I visited Berlin for a travel piece. I adored it: ‘We love the English,’ one waitress told me. ‘Always you’re drinking, laughing and making fun!’
‘I’m so ignorant – I didn’t even try to learn another language until I was 50,’ I confessed to the charming man from the Berlin tourist board. He laughed; ‘But you’re English – you don’t need to!’
A beggar twinkled at me: ‘You have beautiful eyes and I accept all major currencies!’ But as Berliners never tired of reminding me, Berlin is not Germany.
One thing struck me as odd during my trip; whenever I mentioned the word ‘Brexit’ a look of physical pain swept over their faces, like I’d actually struck them. No one blames the Germans for wanting to stay in the EU. They co-own it, for a start, with their French friends. Without it, as we were sometimes oddly warned by Remainers during the campaign, they might get an overwhelming desire to start a third world war. But for a Briton to grovel to Germany, as best summed up by Kampfner’s book – after all we went through due to their twentieth century antics – is truly shameful.
Kampfner’s book, which is only five years old, now looks dated and deluded, considering that Germany – such a ‘grown-up’ country! – is going through exactly the same populist revolution/peasants revolt that the UK is, only more so.
As I wrote in The Spectator last year, one can only imagine what these poor befuddled Remainers are going through now, with the right (which these days pretty much refers to anyone who doesn’t believe in literally limitless immigration) on the up throughout mainland Europe. In extreme cases, Brits suffering from the terminal stage of Brexit Derangement Syndrome have even left these sceptered isles in order to seek ‘refuge’ in France and Germany from the alleged crypto-fascism of Brexit Britain. I can’t imagine anything more delicious than hearing these hysterics now trying to justify why they’re living in countries which (by their definition, not mine) are, or are about to be, ‘right-wing’ while back here in deplorable old Blighty a Labour government is in charge. An octopus playing Twister would look straightforward compared to this lot: idiots whose fealty to the EU is so hopelessly devoted that I honestly believe that if a united European army of fascists crossed the Channel on u-boats and goose-stepped from Land’s End to John o’ Groats – flying the EU flag – Remainers would still be bleating ‘O, why can’t we rejoin the EU? It’s so civilised!’
For all the tension that exists between Britain and Germany, I’ve never met an actual German who wasn’t charming. But that doesn’t mean that, after all those years of being told how much better than us they are, we wouldn’t be human if, surveying the current uproar over there, we didn’t enjoy their confusion of their political class just a little bit.
Is there an off-ramp for India and Pakistan?
‘What happens next?’ is the worried question I keep getting from Indian and Pakistani friends as military exchanges between the two countries continue.
The current crisis was eminently predictable – in nature, if not in timing – as terrorist incidents persisted, albeit at lower levels, in Kashmir and given relations between India and Pakistan were so poor. Both countries had long signalled their approach and rehearsed it during crises in 2016 and 2019. India had made clear that it would respond to significant terrorist incidents with kinetic actions at a time and in a manner of their choosing. Pakistan’s military and political leadership were equally forthright: if India did so, Pakistan would respond in kind – and then some. The question wasn’t whether the next major incident would see a crisis, but what form any de-escalation or off-ramp might take.
The trigger this time was a brutal terrorist attack in the Pahalgam in the Kashmir Valley that killed 26, primarily Indian tourists. The attacks were captured on social media providing haunting, visceral content of holidaymakers being gunned down. The location had a poignant echo of past attacks, including a terrorist abduction and killing of five foreign tourists in July 1995, which included two Britons.
The latest attacks have left India horrified, furious, and frustrated. It blames Pakistan for continuing to harbour and support a terrorist infrastructure that it argues is used to support attacks against India. Coming on top of numerous past incidents, including the notorious 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, Indian public opinion wants to put an end to this. India says Pakistan-based terrorist networks were responsible for the attack, with reports suggesting two of the attackers were Pashtu-speaking. One may even be a former Pakistani commando.
Outrage was amplified by social media. Distressing video emerged of the moment terrorists started shooting tourists from all across India. On 7 May came India’s response: Operation Sindoor, named after the vermillion mark Hindu women use when married. The name reflected an iconic image from the attack showing Himanshi Narwal sitting by the body of her husband, Lt Vinay Narwal, an Indian Navy officer and one of those killed. India launched military strikes against targets it identified as terrorist sites: in Muzaffarabad and Kotli in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
The strikes came after an intense diplomatic barrage: aimed primarily at Pakistan and signalling the seriousness with which Delhi viewed the attack. The international goal was not to seek endorsement or permission, but to position India’s responses. Bilaterally, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement brokered by the World Bank that governs water-sharing between the two countries.
Pakistan, highly dependent on the water flow from upstream rivers, has long argued that upending the treaty would be tantamount to an act of war. India suspended trade, visas and overflights by Pakistani airlines. It expelled Pakistan’s military diplomats from New Delhi and withdrew its own from Islamabad. Both High Commissions are currently led by Chargé d’Affaires since an earlier deterioration in 2019 over a change India made to Kashmir’s political status. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that ‘every terrorist and their backers’ would be punished.
The Line of Control in Kashmir dividing the Indian and Pakistani-administered zones of the contested state lit up with small arms exchanges. However, neither side has formally renounced the Line of Control Ceasefire, a key confidence-building measure first agreed in 2003 and renewed in 2021. Both states have nuclear weapons and good reason to maintain strategic stability. But here lies the paradox: nuclear weapons, some argue, has also empowered higher risk activities under the nuclear umbrella.
The key decision-makers on what happens next are Modi in India, his National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Doval, a security official with deep counter-terrorism experience, is applying his thinking on defensive offence to Indian security policy. His goal is to increase the costs for those involved in major terrorist incidents. In Pakistan, General Asim Munir, Chief of Army Staff since 2022, is in the hot-seat. Shebaz Sharif, Pakistan’s democratically elected Prime Minister, is not the main mover on security policy. General Munir has reprised Pakistan’s historic stance on Kashmir, describing it as the ‘jugular vein’ of Pakistan. His rhetoric is a departure from the nuanced language of his predecessor.
Nearly eight decades since 1947, instability appears to be a feature, not a bug, of Pakistan’s relations with India
The two countries have differing trajectories and interests. There is no meeting of minds on their dispute over Kashmir (unfinished business, according to Pakistan; not so, says India) or on many other issues. India’s growing status and strength underpins some of its frustration with Pakistan. India’s economy is so far beyond that of Pakistan – still reliant on regular IMF bailouts – that it is now over ten times larger than Pakistan’s. In New Delhi, China, not Pakistan, is the priority. When there in December, the prevailing dinner party chatter was about technology, China-US relations and the international role of India. Pakistan was ghosted.
And Pakistan has fewer cards to play. It is less strategically important than before the fall of Kabul. A close partner of China, it remains dependent on economic support from outside. Nuclear weapons may provide a degree of power-matching, but emerging technologies and India’s massive military advantage risk degrading Pakistan’s command and control. This has Pakistani generals worrying, including about a potential Indian strike to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Nuclear experts run this down. Being able to do so with high-confidence is most unlikely – a deterrent for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent.
The big question now is what an off-ramp might be. Both sides need to claim victory – or at least maintain face – in a testy social media environment. A return to managed hostility may be the best that can be hoped for, but the challenge is how. No sudden-onset breakthrough seems likely. The relationship is low on trust, with Pakistan also claiming that India is interfering in the restive province of Balochistan. While Pakistan expressed condolences for those affected by the Pahalgam attack, the initial mood in Islamabad had an air of belligerent denial – with accusations rife online that terror attack was a ‘false flag operation’.
International partners are engaging to encourage de-escalation – but notably most have not commented adversely (or at all) on India’s choice to respond militarily. China is likely quietly engaged. While close to Pakistan, they have no interest in hot conflict between India and Pakistan. Perhaps most interesting is Saudi Arabian engagement, including the visit of their Foreign Minister to Delhi on 8 May. Riyadh enjoys good relations with both Delhi and Islamabad. But whatever external discussions take place, decisions to deescalate will be Pakistan and India’s to make.
Nearly eight decades since 1947, instability appears to be a feature, not a bug, of Pakistan’s relations with India. There is an opportunity to derisk the relationship by eliminating the networks that sustain attacks. While not the only agenda item, it carries the greatest potential for violent escalation. And it blocks the possibility of a more stable and viable modus vivendi between two nuclear states. A serious bilateral discussion on that feels remote. The immediate question: when and how will the current round of military action stop?
Alexander Evans is a Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics
Why Ramzan Kadyrov doesn’t really want to resign
Once again, the ruler of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, is making headlines. And once again, he has announced his intention to step down from his position. But is it for real this time?
Kadyrov has hinted at resigning on at least five separate occasions. Each time, the official explanation as to why he hasn’t stepped down has been that President Vladimir Putin refused to accept his resignation. As Kadyrov, who likes to call himself Putin’s loyal infantryman, dutifully points out, he is always willing to serve his patron – and so he remains in power. These announcements are often accompanied by choreographed public outcries from Chechnya, where citizens, as reported by local media, plead with him to stay.
Real succession in Chechnya remains far from certain
However, analysts and journalists interpret these proclamations differently. For instance, political commentator Nadezhda Yurova sees them as a tactic designed to extract more power, money, or privileges from the Kremlin. With his significant influence in the Middle East, Kadyrov is seen as useful to the Kremlin and is in a position to even negotiate business-related matters within Russia.
Others suggest these announcements serve to reaffirm his perceived irreplaceability or to test the Kremlin’s current willingness to support him. Being widely regarded as a guarantor of stability and peace in Chechnya, Kadyrov enjoys a degree of leverage other regional leaders don’t – even when it comes to dealing with Putin. Political theater such as this also serves to reinforce his authority in the eyes of the Chechen population.
As with previous instances, Kadyrov’s latest ‘resignation’ appears to be little more than a scripted performance aimed at highlighting his loyalty to, and reliance upon, the Russian President. In his later clarification, Kadyrov once again stated that only Putin can decide whether he remains in power or not.
Kadyrov is one of Russia’s longest-serving governors and, due to legal loopholes and legislative changes, is not bound by term limits. In fact, not long ago, he expressed his desire to lead Chechnya ‘forever’, a far more likely scenario than his actual resignation. Yet, in a democratic system, his deteriorating health would be a legitimate reason to step down.
Kadyrov’s unofficial rule began on 9 May 2004, the day his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, was killed in a bombing during the Victory Day parade in Grozny. That same day, Ramzan Kadyrov – dressed in a tracksuit – appeared in the Kremlin to receive condolences from President Putin, who assured him that ‘everything will be okay’. Shortly afterward, Kadyrov was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya with control over law enforcement agencies. This solidified his grip on power, allowing him to eliminate political rivals, such as the influential Yamadayev brothers.
Putin kept his promise: the 48-year-old Kadyrov remained ‘okay’ until 2023, when his health suddenly became a serious concern. A lengthy investigation by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta even speculated that Kadyrov was dying and that the Kremlin had begun the search for a successor. However, Ramzan survived.
In an authoritarian system where neither personal security nor preservation of wealth can be guaranteed after relinquishing power or dying, Kadyrov’s health issues triggered serious concerns about his children’s future. Since 2023, Kadyrov has reportedly realised that stepping down or dying without securing his family’s position could endanger their safety and wealth.
Following what was described as lengthy, secretive, and potentially life-threatening treatment in 2023, Kadyrov’s return to government meetings was greeted with prolonged applause by his entourage – many of whom are his close relatives. But whether those smiles and cheers reflected genuine relief is anyone’s guess.
Like many authoritarian leaders, Kadyrov suffers from a lack of accurate information about what’s really occurring in his republic. A more pressing concern for him is trust – especially within his inner circle. History shows that many dictators fall victim to betrayal from their closest associates, and Kadyrov has not been immune. In 2017, there was allegedly a plot against him involving several of his own relatives. Others considered loyal also turned out to be unreliable. His close associate Apti Alaudinov losing his influential position in Chechnya due to a breach of loyalty is one such example. To prove his continued allegiance, Alaudinov was later dispatched to fight in Ukraine in 2022.
In short, neither Kadyrov’s underaged children nor his untrustworthy associates can currently guarantee the safety and prosperity of his family. His sons are too young to assume power, and Putin is unlikely to jeopardise stability in Chechnya by babysitting Kadyrov’s legacy. Appointing a regent from among his loyalists wouldn’t solve the problem either – they would likely consolidate power for themselves rather than return it to the Kadyrov family in the future. Faced with these realities, Kadyrov has started preparing for the uncertainties that would follow his death.
To secure his family’s future, Kadyrov is pursuing a two-pronged exit strategy: ensuring a transfer of power to his children within Chechnya, and building a financial safety net abroad. The preferred scenario for Kadyrov involves maintaining power within the family. To that end, he elevated several of his children into prominent government roles. His eldest daughter, Aishat Kadyrova, rose rapidly – from Deputy Minister of Culture to Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya. Her sister Khadizha, two years younger, went from overseeing preschool education to becoming First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration.
It initially appeared as though either daughter might serve as a transitional figurehead, ruling unofficially until reaching the minimum qualifying age of 30 for running Chechnya officially. However, in late February 2024, both daughters abruptly resigned from their positions. The reasons for their departure remain unclear, but not long afterward, both were registered as owners of major local companies – hinting at a shift from political to economic power.
Meanwhile, Kadyrov’s sons were also promoted. His eldest son, 19-year-old Akhmat, became Minister of Sports. More notably, his 17-year-old son Adam was appointed head of Chechnya’s Security Council. In this role, Adam holds significant influence, especially over the security apparatus – a powerful tool for maintaining control.
Parallel to these domestic manoeuvres, Kadyrov has been investing heavily in foreign real estate, particularly in Dubai. Media reports and rumours suggest that he may also have interests in Turkish resorts and hotels. These investments, primarily in the Gulf region and the broader Middle East, provide a hedge against political instability in Russia and offer a fallback option for his family should things deteriorate at home.
Despite these efforts, Kadyrov’s exit from power does not appear imminent. His sons remain too young to fully take the reins, his daughters have apparently stepped away from politics, and he cannot depend on his inner circle to safeguard his legacy. Most importantly, President Putin is unlikely to prioritise the interests of Kadyrov’s family over broader concerns about regional stability.
So, while Kadyrov’s public declarations of resignation may continue to make headlines, they should not be taken at face value. They are better understood as political tactics. Real succession in Chechnya remains far from certain – and the Kadyrov family’s fate after Ramzan’s rule is, at best, precarious.
Why the Tories must bring back Boris
The British people adore Boris Johnson. That is unarguable. It’s why he doesn’t lose elections. It is therefore very funny – the way idiocy so often is – that the Conservative party even in this, its moment of greatest existential crisis, is not right now prostrating itself before the great man to beg for his return.
Boris used his farewell speech in Downing Street to liken himself to the ancient Roman statesman Cincinnatus
‘We are profoundly sorry that we thought we knew better than you, and accept that all evidence since we deposed you has proved us entirely and unforgivably wrong,’ it should be snivelling. ‘Please come back and save us, like you did when, not six years ago against all odds, you delivered the biggest parliamentary majority we’ve had since 1987.’
But no. Instead, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch – even after last week presiding over the loss of 674 Conservative council seats and control of 16 local authorities – continues to speak vaguely about the policies she will one day, presumably when she thinks we can handle them, set before the idiot voters.
‘This is not about winning elections, this is about fixing our country,’ she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday. Errr. ‘Yes, of course, you need to win elections to do that, but you also need a credible plan.’
Meanwhile, the latest YouGov poll puts the Tories on their joint-lowest ever rating of 17 – one point ahead of the Liberal Democrats, and twelve points behind leaders Reform. Let us know when you’re ready, Kemi.
For what it’s worth, YouGov data also shows Boris remains the joint third most popular politician in the land – tied with Laura Trott on 34 per cent popularity behind David Frost (40) and Nigel Farage (36). By contrast, Kemi’s popularity is 22 per cent, the same as Sir Keir Starmer’s. Robert Jenrick’s – 17 per cent – puts him just behind Jeremy Corbyn (18).
I’ve argued in these pages before that the reason the British like Boris so much is, chiefly, because he is very funny, a quality he apparently shares with no other British politician, and also because he’s fantastically intelligent – which is why he was able so regularly at PMQs to wipe the floor with Starmer (A-level results: B, B and C).
We sense, too, that he is genuinely interested in people, in a way that typical members of our droidish career political class are not. It’s why he reaches parts – the Red Wall, for starters – they do not.
It’s no surprise a More In Common poll this week showed that were Boris to be reinstalled as Tory leader, the party would immediately overtake Reform.
Yes, there is a section of the country that will never forgive him for Brexit, but that is sour grapes and ultimately cannot be helped. It is also a tragedy that this most libertarian – and freedom-loving – of leaders was in power when the pandemic struck. You need only to read his autobiography to understand how much he hated imposing lockdowns.
It is also true that under his leadership, the United Kingdom underwent an extraordinary – and inexcusable – spike in legal and illegal immigration. Were he ever to return, he would have to address this rapidly, and – given today’s political currents – make rectifying it a clear priority. Likewise, he would benefit from toning down the net zero rhetoric he surprisingly became so zealous about.
The British metropolitan elite will always – is it jealousy? – loathe Boris. That is its prerogative. However, for the Conservative party now to steadfastly ignore his very obvious appeal to the wider nation, even as the craggy mountain of doom looms ever closer and all dashboard indicators urgently flash red, seems perverse in the extreme. There is only so long a political party can go on taking for granted that it knows better than its own voters, especially with the rise of Reform.
When he was pushed out in 2022, Boris used his farewell speech in Downing Street to liken himself to the ancient Roman statesman Cincinnatus – ‘like Cincinnatus, I am returning to my plough’ – who after saving the republic gave up power and returned to his farm, only to be called back when Rome needed him again. Very clearly, the Conservative party now needs saving.
Whether they like it or not, the time has come for the Tories to put up the Boris signal. It’s their only hope.