Humza Yousaf to step down as MSP

Well, well, well. It now transpires that hapless Humza Yousaf will step down as an MSP at the next Holyrood election, with the former first minister of Scotland making the announcement this morning. It comes after Yousaf spent a year in the top job before being ousted in April this year when he rather abruptly cut off his eco-activist coalition partners. Dear oh dear…

Posting his letter to John Swinney on Twitter, Yousaf wrote that being Scotland’s first minister had been ‘the greatest honour’ of his life, going on about his time in the Scottish government:

In government, I was proud to have significantly increased our budget for active travel, laid the groundwork for taking Scotrail back into public ownership and overseen the completion of the Queensferry crossing. I brought forward greater protections for domestic abuse survivors, minorities and victims, and agreed to pardon miners who were convicted during the 1984 Miners’ Strikes. I was pleased to oversee record NHS investment, our leading vaccination programme during Covid, and ensure Scotland was the only nation in the UK to avoid NHS strikes as a result of negotiating a fair pay deal with NHS staff.

The ex-FM added:

As well as important domestic matters, I have always believed that Scotland should be a good global citizen, contributing to help solve the biggest challenges humanity faces, as well as standing in solidarity with those suffering grave injustices across the world. As First Minister, I hope I was able to demonstrate leadership during, what I view as the moral question of our time, the ongoing atrocities and war crimes being committed in Gaza.

Will Yousaf’s predecessor now announce whether she plans to step down too? Nicola Sturgeon has had quite an eventful 18 months and all eyes are now on what the SNP’s Dear Leader proposes to do next. Stay tuned…

What’s the truth about the New Jersey drone sightings?

What is going on with the drones buzzing over New Jersey in the United States? Reportedly ‘the size of cars’, sometimes flying low in formation, these mysterious semi-identified flying objects have been sighted in their thousands every night – and only at night – for weeks. They might not even be drones. Are they alien spaceships? Are they from Russia or China? Are they just planes? Are they even anything at all?

I’ve watched a number of videos purporting to show these invaders. ‘What is that thing? It’s freaking huge!’ one awestruck observer can be heard over footage of what looks like a commercial passenger jet. 

But am I seeing what I want to see, trying to fit the world back into its accepted normality as I see it? Not so long ago, I would have had no doubt that this was an outbreak of the kind of mania that seizes parts of the human race, and the media, from time to time. All it usually takes is for somebody official to tell everybody to stop being so bloody silly, at which point shoulders collectively shrug and we forget all about it. 

Not anymore. The textbook ‘mysterious objects in the sky’ phenomena goes back in human history at least as far as Ezekiel. But now we have the familiar addition of the establishment cover-up: could the authorities be lying about this? 

Among the viral drone videos doing the rounds over the last few days, boosted by Joe Rogan among others, sees the chief executive of a drone manufacturer advancing the theory that the objects are home grown. They could, he says, be searching for radioactive material or a ‘gas leak’. President-elect Donald Trump has said, ‘Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!’ But the angst crosses the political divide: Democrat Josh Gottheimer told CNN that the authorities ‘have a responsibility to brief the public more thoroughly…and to make sure everyone knows what they know. The bottom line is this: They are not providing enough information to the public’. 

Justified or not, after the frequent hysterias, manias and deliberate official obfuscations that have occurred in this Very Online age – the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, the Gatwick drone chaos in 2018, thin masks to protect against Covid – it’s increasingly hard to know what to take seriously and who to believe. On top of all that we’ve had the more socially-approved high status frenzies of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Carl Beech and his false allegations of a VIP pedophile ring in Westminster. These have seen all manner of accusations and Salem-style denunciations flying about, with little regard to due process or reality. 

And then there’s the syndrome of ‘no news’ that turns out to be very big news. Hunter Biden’s laptop, the grooming gangs, the rise of transgenderism: all of these stories were initially too low-status to notice and object to, and yet all were true and objectionable. And the media wonders why it’s an uphill battle to get anyone to believe them. 

It’s increasingly hard to get a grip on some news stories in the modern media landscape. We desperately need a cold, high, overlooking organisation that we can trust. The BBC is meant to fill this role; it was why it was set up the way it was: to stand above the fray and provide a complete picture, unburdened by commercial pressures and click-thirst. Yet it’s been one of the worst offenders in falling easy prey to every 21st century faddy madness from gender to (ironically) the disinformation panic. Facing unpleasant facts is hard in day-to-day life. In news, it’s surely essential. But the BBC has consistently flunked it. Its response to the confusion of the modern news era has been a textbook disaster. We needed dry, sober reliability. Instead we got the elevation of an individual presenter to the role of neutral arbiter, fronting a podcast called Why Do You Hate Me?

To my chagrin, I’ve started to turn to AI for my news when I need what the BBC used to give me. Grok, the AI incorporated into X, seems to provide a neat digest of information. I asked it for a précis of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s recent political woes; it served me up a trim thousand words and links to sources and further reading. 

Yes, I’m sure it has prejudices, but the trick with prejudices, for man or machine, is to try to get them to line up with reality as much as possible. Grok has the advantage over other AIs that it won’t lie to you about very basic facts if they might conflict with the worldview of its creators. If a computer will lie about the number of genders, as Chat GPT does, it can hardly be trusted about anything else. 

So what does Grok have to say about the New Jersey drones? ‘Investigations are ongoing, and while there’s no evidence of a threat, the lack of clear answers has left the public and officials in a state of uncertainty.’ In other words, just like me, it hasn’t a clue.

Democrats are about to get a do-over for their 2017 mistakes

Could 2025 give Democrats a do-over for how they misplayed the results of Donald Trump’s first election? Early signs point to yes — and that could come at the consternation of some conservatives.

Let’s consider some political alternative history for a moment. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, it’s easy to forget how many Democrats started sounding a note of reconciliation with the incoming president. Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were all open about their willingness to find common ground with the new White House on infrastructure and other policy areas, hoping their views would be closer to Trump’s than more fiscally conservative Republicans. The possibility discussed at the time was one of real concern from conservatives that, if Democrats were willing to shift on a few points and slap “Trumpcare” on a healthcare bill, the new less ideological president would gladly go along.

Of course, we know this never happened: the deep state went into full swing against Trump, the harsh online resistance got platformed by media and demonstrations like the Women’s March put too much fear into congressional Democrats about working with the new president. You can go back and watch these remarks from then-Representative Ruben Gallego to see the shift in tone. Now-Senator Gallego is talking up bipartisanship again, representing a state that went solidly for Trump, as is John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and they could soon be joined by other senators representing red states, after an unusually high number of partisan Senate-president splits.

Democrats may be about to get a real opportunity to try and influence a Trump administration that is already signaling that it’s closer to them on several policy fronts, and is going to include a number of people in senior positions who spent most of their careers in the Democratic Party. Should they successfully influence Trump in their direction, the test will be how much his clear mandate keeps members from his right flank in the Republican coalition in line. Last time around, the Russiagate hoax and the resistance made bipartisanship impossible. This time, Democrats may find that working with Trump instead of engaging in knee-jerk opposition gets them more out of an ideologically malleable administration.

The hypocrisy of Hollywood’s environmental preaching

You can’t expect anything reasonable when Hollywood gets on its high horse, but really, are our pension contributions truly helping to strip the Amazon of its rainforests? That is the claim made in a short film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, in which the actor appears in a sauna as ‘Benedict Lumberjack’, the CEO of a logging company. ‘The business of deforestation is on fire right now and it is all thanks to you,’ he says. ‘The money from your pension has helped scorch, slash and burn entire rainforests… some bits of the world are literally burning but it’s just the bits that no one cares about.’

Let’s sketch over the assertion that logging companies are setting fire to rainforests – emphasised in a shot of tall trees being consumed by fire. That would be an extraordinary way for a logging company to behave – why destroy the product that you are supposed to be exploiting? Logging companies might well burn the brash which is left over once the logs themselves have been carted off site, but to claim that they are simply set fire to the rainforest is bizarre.

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Cumberbatch’s claim appears to be derived from a study by an organisation called Make My Money Matter, co-founded by the film director Richard Curtis. The study makes the claim that ‘in the UK alone, over £300 billion of pension fund investments are in companies and financial institutions with a high risk of driving deforestation’. It goes on to claim that ‘on an individual level, for every £10 you save, £2 is linked to companies and financial institutions with a high risk of deforestation’.

Logging may be big business for some, but is it really so vast that it comprises a fifth of the investments of UK pension funds? It is a preposterous figure, and only once you delve into the methodology published at the end of the report do you realise what is really going on. Make My Money Matter is totting up the value of every food company, every construction company and many others which cannot fully vouch for their supply chains. In other words, if you sell soya in some of your products you go down as an evil company driving deforestation unless you can account for every last ounce of soya that you consume and prove that it is not grown on deforested land. The problem with doing this is that no one except the largest companies, employing a massive ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) team, have the resources to do this.     

The world is still undergoing net deforestation. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) the world lost 10 million hectares of forest per year between 2015 and 2020. However, the world also replanted forest equivalent to half of this, giving a net loss of around 5 million hectares. But is all of this evil? If you go back far enough isn’t most of our food is grown on land which was once forested. It does seem a bit unreasonable to berate tropic countries for clearing wooded areas for agriculture when, of course, we did the same centuries ago. Had we not done so, we wouldn’t have had much to eat.

At least farms on deforested land are producing something useful. The same can less easily be said of Hollywood films, the biggest of which, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance are responsible for 3,700 tonnes of carbon emissions – as much as a small town emits in a year. The largest slice comes from travel – in order words, flying mega stars like Cumberbatch around the world. Maybe before lecturing the rest of us, the film industry should get its own house in order.

Trump, monarchy and the waning power of Hollywood

Donald Trump has yet to comment on the Prince Andrew ‘Chinese spy’ story, and online sleuths are already trying to join the vague dots between Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Duke of York. But the real story about Donald Trump and monarchy is the extent of his admiration for the British crown. At the big reopening of Notre Dame cathedral, other heads of state seemed desperate to make their impression on the President-elect. Yet for Trump, what really mattered was his encounter with the Prince of Wales.  

‘I had a great talk with the prince,’ Trump told the New York Post. ‘He’s a good-looking guy,’ the President-elect went on. ‘He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person. He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that.’

As any good royalist will tell you, Trump’s affection for the monarchy underscores the institution’s enduring significance – and his goodwill towards Britain. It highlights the monarchy’s unique soft power in bridging international divides and tempering political tensions. 

Yet there’s also something more subtle going on in the relationship between Trumpian politics, the power of fame, and the concept of monarchy. The emergent American appreciation for royal tradition stands in stark contrast to the waning influence of Hollywood, whose cultural arbiters find themselves increasingly on the outs in an America focused on reclaiming its greatness.

Once America’s foremost cultural influence, Hollywood finds its sway diminishing, a reality starkly highlighted during the 2024 election. Despite the entertainment industry’s aggressive campaigning against Trump – complete with celebrity endorsements, multimillion-dollar initiatives, and high-profile admonishments – the effort failed decisively. 

Voters, it seems, have grown weary of lectures from the gilded hills of California. This is corroborated by the steadily decreasing viewership of the Oscars ‘virtue-signaling’ jamboree.

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This disconnection is hardly surprising. Hollywood’s liberal orthodoxy has often clashed with the values of a significant portion of the American electorate. Over time, this cultural elitism, which frequently masquerades as moral superiority, has alienated its audience. The backlash against the entertainment industry’s political activism isn’t merely a critique of its ideological stance – it’s part of a broader political realignment. 

The popularity of MAGA has shifted voter focus away from celebrity endorsements and towards tangible issues: economic stability, cultural preservation, and personal security. Sorry Taylor and Beyoncé.

On the losing side of this cultural shift are Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The couple’s nosedive to ridicule and contempt offers a cautionary lesson. Their cringeworthy attempts to blend royal prestige with Hollywood celebrity have backfired spectacularly, and the President-elect has notably taken offense at their appalling misconduct and bad judgement.

The lesson is clear: the monarchy’s strength lies in its separation from the transient whims of celebrity culture. Harry and Meghan’s missteps underscore the perils of abandoning the monarchy’s foundational values in favor of the fleeting allure of personal fame.

Donald Trump’s reverence for Queen Elizabeth II, warm interactions with King Charles III, and notable meeting with Prince William at Notre Dame illustrate a genuine admiration for the institution. For Trump, like many Yanks, the monarchy symbolises something transcendent: a continuity of history, tradition, and stability, though not their own, that outshines the transient nature of material wealth and political cycles.

Trump’s respect for the monarchy could serve as a bridge. The monarchy’s ability to remain above politics and maintain relationships with leaders across the spectrum aligns well with Trump’s admiration for its endurance and dignity. Such shared respect could foster goodwill between the UK and the US, even amidst policy disagreements, of which there are likely to be an abundance.

For many Americans, fed up with the relentless imposition of progressive ideologies, the British monarchy represents an alluring example – of sense over nonsense; a bastion of duty, tradition, and constancy – in a world increasingly driven by fleeting trends and ideological dogma. Where Hollywood churns out narratives steeped in cultural moralising, the monarchy stands apart, offering a model of quiet service and enduring values.

Figures such as Queen Elizabeth II demonstrated that true leadership is grounded in humility and purpose rather than personal aggrandizement. Her successor, King Charles and the younger generation represented by Prince William and Kate Middleton continue this legacy, balancing tradition with a measured embrace of modernity. For Americans seeking greatness again, this steadfastness is an attractive antidote to the drumbeat of racial and transgender obsessions we have just rejected.

In renouncing the monarchy, Harry and Meghan only underscored its virtues. Their foray into celebrity culture revealed the emptiness of fame and fortune without substance and the depravity of trading duty for self-indulgence.

Keir Starmer has dropped the ball on Ukraine

Has Keir Starmer dropped the ball on Ukraine? Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian former foreign minister, certainly thinks so. Kuleba, who stepped down from his post in September, had few kind words to say this week about how Starmer’s Labour government had dealt with Ukraine in the five months or so since coming to power:

The Conservatives were coordinating with the Americans but they did not restrict themselves to just following the Americans. This is the change that came with Labour. They took a position they would follow the Americans.

The immediate cause of Kuleba’s frustration was Starmer’s delay over the decision to allow Ukraine to use its UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles against Russian targets without restriction. In September, when the Prime Minister visited President Joe Biden in Washington, there was a surge in optimism that an announcement to this effect was imminent, but hopes were dashed. It was not until two months later in late November, after Biden lifted similar conditions on the use of MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), that the Ukrainian armed forces had free use of the weapons.

Is Kuleba’s charge fair? The government insists that they have been ‘taking a leading role in supporting Ukraine, which is why the Prime Minister committed £3 billion a year of military support for Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’. Downing Street’s counter-argument consists of the £3 billion of military assistance mentioned above, a pledge that the United Kingdom will spend more in aid to Ukraine in 2025 than ever before and a reminder that Starmer has met President Volodymyr Zelensky six times since taking office in July, including hosting the Ukrainian leader twice in London.

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It is certainly right to note the government’s continued extensive military, diplomatic, humanitarian support and other assistance to Ukraine. £3 billion in military aid for 2024/25 is an increase on the £4.8 billion previously provided overall in 2022/23 and 2023/24. In addition, under Operation Interflex, the UK has now trained 50,000 Ukrainian service personnel, and the programme is set to continue at least to the later part of next year. It is also beneficial that military assistance is now in place for the next six financial years, which should allow Ukraine a degree of coherent and realistic forward planning.

We would be mistaken, however, to see these numbers in the abstract. The conflict in Ukraine, like any war, has ebbed and flowed. The widely anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive which began in June 2023 recaptured some territory from Russian forces in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts but more broadly did not fulfil the high hopes placed upon it.

Some Russian retrenchment was followed by the bold incursion by Ukrainian units across the border around Kursk in August this year. However, Ukraine’s advance has run out of steam recently and around half of the territory captured has now been retaken by Russia. Russia President Vladimir Putin has intensified air and missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian populations and inflicted substantial damage on the electricity network and other infrastructure, including a large-scale attack with cruise missiles and drones last week.

Although Russian casualties are enormous – British estimates place the numer of killed and wounded at 700,000 – Ukraine is also under pressure. The level of Western assistance being supplied has to be considered in the context of what Ukraine needs to maintain its war machine.

Moreover, if we are genuinely Ukraine’s allies, we cannot airily dismiss criticism by someone who was the country’s foreign minister for four and a half years. Kuleba described an encounter over the use of Storm Shadow missiles as ‘the only unpleasant conversation I had with British officials… and it was the first unpleasant conversation since the beginning of the full-scale invasion’. He admitted the possibility that the ‘new government was cautious and they didn’t want to rush with decisions’.

There is a poignancy in Kuleba’s appeal to the British government ‘to allow itself to lead conversations with the Americans on Ukraine, not only follow the decisions the United States are taking’. Underlying his anxiety, however, is a more fundamental question which Starmer has not yet addressed.

It is stirring and laudable to promise to support Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’, as the Prime Minister has done repeatedly. But what does that mean? As long as what takes? It is not at all clear that Whitehall has thought explicitly about its preferred endgame for the conflict. Complete Russian military reversal seems extremely unlikely, yet equally it would be deeply damaging if the war was concluded by an arrangement which left Putin in possession of most of the territory his army has illegally annexed.

Starmer presumably does not mean that Britain is ready to maintain its current stance into the 2030s and beyond. Next month Donald Trump will be inaugurated again as president of the United States, and he is expected to be much more sceptical about the extent of American support for Ukraine. The Prime Minister may then face a choice: does the UK follow its ally’s lead, or set a very different course based on supporting Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’? Over the next few months he will need to show whether he is leading or following, and he has set the rhetorical bar for himself high.

German politics is a mess

The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in parliament yesterday. It’s almost certain now that Germans will head to the polls for a snap election on 23 February. What is less certain is whether this will bring about the change so many of them crave.

Of 717 Bundestag deputies only 207 expressed their ongoing confidence in the German Chancellor, the vast majority who did so being members of Scholz’s own party, the Social Democrats (SPD). This didn’t come as a surprise since he intended to lose the vote: Scholz’s ruling coalition collapsed last month, leaving him to run a minority government. The only way out of this stalemate is a fresh election triggered by a lost confidence vote.

What should have been a parliamentary formality turned into an undignified spectacle during which all political parties attacked one another. Scholz used his speaking time to aim a blow at the Free Liberal party, which had walked out of his coalition over disagreements on economic policy. Accusing them of ‘sabotage’, he suggested they didn’t have the ‘decency and maturity’ to be in government.

The head of the Free Liberals Christian Lindner, who was also Scholz’s finance minister before he was sacked last month, accused his former boss in turn of increasing bureaucracy and spending too much on public welfare. Comparing Scholz to a head jester, he concluded that while it’s okay to throw sweets at the public during carnival, ‘that’s no way to run Germany’.

Even the Greens, who remain in the minority coalition with Scholz’s SPD, criticised how dysfunctional the government was. The Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck admitted that their coalition ‘deserved its bad reputation’. He then proceeded to attack the conservative Christian Union (CDU/CSU), which is currently in opposition but the favourite to win the next election. He claimed their pro-business manifesto ‘protects billionaires’ and ‘only gives to those who already have’.

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The leader of the opposition and possible future chancellor Friedrich Merz retorted by calling Habeck ‘the face of the country’s economic crisis’. He then turned on Scholz, whom he accused of ‘making Germany a laughing stock’. Merz ended by telling Scholz he didn’t deserve the confidence he had asked for – which was met with long applause.

There is a German saying: ‘When two people quarrel, a third rejoices’. If Germany’s political mainstream remains as preoccupied with its internal rifts as it has been, one party will indeed be rejoicing: the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). It’s currently polling in second place behind the conservatives with around a fifth of voters supporting it.

All AfD leader Alice Weidel had to do yesterday was point to some of the many problems Germany is currently facing: a stagnating economy, large-scale irregular immigration and a car industry ‘in free fall’. As a relatively new party, founded in 2013 and kept out of government by a cordon sanitaire, the AfD has no record to defend. It’s an ideal receptacle for the frustrations so many Germans feel with the dysfunctional compromise politics of the other parties.

Fresh elections may appear as a way to wipe the slate clean for all parties and start again with a new government. But Germany’s electoral system will most likely produce a scenario where one or two of the parties currently in government will be part of the next coalition – which will do nothing to convince Germans that change is on the cards.

According to the latest polling, the conservative CDU/CSU is set to win the election with just 31 per cent of the vote. Scholz’s SPD is on 17 per cent, the Greens are on 11 and the Free Liberals might not even make it over the 5 per cent threshold required to get into the Bundestag. In other words, Merz might well end up having to run the country with the two parties that currently form the rump of a deeply unpopular minority government. For comparison, picture the next UK election producing a coalition made up of Labour, the Conservatives and the Green party.

German politics is in a mess. The acrimonious breakup of Scholz’s three-way coalition and the ugly proceedings during the confidence vote on Monday were just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath lies a fractured political landscape that looks increasingly murky to German voters. Surveys show that only just over a quarter of people still trust the political parties.

Germany’s parties won’t win trust back by digging into their entrenched positions while flinging mud at each other. But that is exactly what they are doing. As things stand, all of Germany’s established parties are going into the election campaign with tired ideas and tired faces.

As a very intelligent German said a long time ago, ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. Just why the German electorate should respond with more enthusiasm to ideas and people that didn’t gain their support in the past remains a mystery to anyone outside the Berlin bubble.

How Gen Z ruined Guinness

James Joyce called Guinness ‘the wine of Ireland’. Now it feels a bit more like the Coca-Cola of alcohol – as much brash branding as beer. Once, it merely had an ugly logo and the rowdy promise of Emerald Isle hedonism which – I confess I have often thought – is crafted to appeal to simple people. For who, other than simple people, chooses Guinness in this day and age when faced with the proliferation of ales, IPAs, helles, sessions, Belgian beers and porters? The sorts of people who find the Irish pub in a Mediterranean town and hit it hard.

But now, Guinness is taking on a strange new life. If there’s one thing Gen Z can be relied on to do, it’s make things creepy and weird where they were previously straightforward and commonplace. Having weirded out romantic intimacy, they’ve come for Guinness. It has become so popular among Gen Z that pubs this December are experiencing a Guinness shortage.

Social media accounts like Shit London Guinness show drinkers criticising imperfectly poured pints. In a trend that is almost too cringey to watch, Guinness-related Instagram and TikTok posters perform the ‘tilt test’ to their presumably American tourist fans, excited to be unleashed on legal drinking after a 21-year wait in their land. The tilt test involves holding the drink at an angle: if it has been poured correctly, it ought not to slosh out. Wow! Crazy, dude!

Then there is ‘splitting the G’, in which drinkers attempt a single first swig so the remaining liquid ends up intersecting the Guinness logo. It’s a trend that combines a lacklustre approach to downing a pint with something that sounds vaguely sexualised. No doubt we’ll soon be told that ‘splitting the G’ is problematic.

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Sales of this bog-standard staple have been helped along by the sorts of influences (and influencers) that would have the dyed-in-the-wool pub-goers of old Dublin turning in their graves. Take Kim Kardashian and pop star Olivia Rodrigo, the former very publicly sporting a pint of Guinness while in London last year, and the latter wearing an excruciatingly uncool-cool T-shirt reading ‘Guinness is good 4U’.

The Guinness obsession is part of a wider fetishisation of the mundane. There are now TikTok accounts that teach women how to dress their boyfriends in old-people clothes, the so-called ‘grandpa core’ aesthetic. Young women are also increasingly searching out charity shop interior fittings, in the hope that a battered old lamp will help them appear quirky. For those not involved, it looks more like an attempt to intellectualise the boring task of filling your home or dressing yourself.

Part of the reason for this is the explosion in university education. Teach millions of young people to analyse their lives, and they’ll start treating everything as though it must be filled with meaning. Each decision is now part of an aesthetic, a conscious choice to be a ‘Guinness drinker’, which no doubt comes laden with semiotic irony, rather than choosing things because – you know – you like them?

That said, in an otherwise moribund economy, with the mood low and prices high, it is cheering to read of a business success story. But does it have to be this one? The jovial founder of Wetherspoons, the 69-year-old Tim Martin, is of course thrilled. ‘The gods of fashion have smiled upon Guinness, previously consumed by blokes my age, but now widely adopted by younger generations,’ he said.

One in every nine pints bought in the UK is now a Guinness. And Guinness is also boosting the Irish economy. Diageo, the drinks giant that owns Guinness, is pouring cash into the St James’s Gate brewery in Dublin, while also building a €200 million (£166 million) brewery in County Kildare. I wonder whether part of the appeal is that it’s cheap. You get to appear discerning – avoiding a low-status Madri in favour of something that appears like an acquired taste – while saving the extra quid on a genuinely craft beer.

In light of the recent buzz, I gave Guinness another try and found it just as unappetising as ever – filling when you want to feel light and buzzed, bitter when you want rich, and thin when you are expecting thick. Gen Z won’t be competing with me for their portion of Dublin’s wine.

The death of anticipation

Were there arguments? Undoubtedly. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, it was a dead cert that Great Aunt Mary would prefer BBC Two’s festive celebration from Westminster Cathedral (complete with the puberty-defying nearly-15-year-old Anglesey treble Aled Jones) to Kenny Everett’s reworking of A Christmas Carol on BBC One (louche, anarchic and probably regrettable, with its jokes about a pudding with cystitis and pantomime-style wordplay of the ‘Good golly, Miss Marley?’ variety). And it was 1985, so only 30 per cent of British homes owned a video recorder, making the ‘what to watch’ argument notably fraught in the season of peace and goodwill toward men.

There had been plenty of time to pick your side. The double issue of the Radio Times (price 54p; cover picture the Trotters, Del Boy waving a cigar) had been lying around the drawing room, in the glow of the multicoloured fairy lights, for more than a week. It was the age of single-chance viewing, before video recorders or catch-up or streaming, when a personal device was probably a Walkman, only washing or fish were online, and the TV-minded planned their viewing days in advance. Four decades ago, in that vanished world of looking ahead and waiting, when you were lucky if a favourite film was repeated once a year on Boxing Day and anything called a ‘serial’ demanded six weeks’ commitment, only the disappointment of losing in the family TV battle could match anticipation for sheer intensity of feeling.

Fast-forward to 2024 and is anticipation, like orange-flavoured jelly slices and Advent calendars that shed planet-destroying glitter, a thing of the past? Not anticipation on the grand scale, you understand, but the gentle inner effervescing produced by looking forward to little treats just around the corner: a new novel by a favourite author, the first sharp-tasting apples of autumn, the moment hawthorn blossom studs the hedgerows. In a world of on-demand, 24/7-streaming television, of Amazon Prime and next-day delivery, of last-minute holidays and 20-minute, quick-wash dishwasher cycles, when the main points of politicians’ speeches are published before the speech has happened and all six hours of a drama can be viewed within seconds of the closing credits of the first episode, is anticipation even possible? 

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It has certainly become a minority sport. The under-tens might continue to await Father Christmas with a breathlessness as old as figgy pudding – and the over-eighties, schooled in patience and routine, accept each day’s Daily Telegraph puzzles without clamouring for a whole week’s offerings in a single sitting. But these are the exceptions. And the rest of us are reassured that we’re right. An instant world needs us to chase after quick gratification with a kind of heedless urgency – to provide the spikes, the likes, the numbers that add up to commercial success. Anticipation can make us happy, pushing the brain to release dopamine, the so-called ‘feel-good hormone’ whose absence is linked to moodiness, apathy, even depression. But why get from anticipation what Instagram delivers in seconds? Life’s unpredictable and anticipation an unreliable guarantor of ultimate satisfaction. Whereas a decent streaming service… 

The problem with anticipation is the element of waiting. How long is it since patience was a virtue? For anyone older than the ‘greed is good’ of the 1980s, self-control might be a lodestar. The younger generations have had their outlook moulded by the navel-gazing and therapy-shaped egotism promoted by reality TV and social media. Patience is way too passive, and anticipation just might be a loser’s game. We’ve even enlisted fashionable philosophies to support our cause. Buddhists may not have had the Brora sale in mind when they embraced mindfulness as a path to enlightenment, but if you’re going to live in the moment there are certain things you need now – right? No point in risking your happiness on a future of possibilities when the present offers certainties just a tap away on your phone. Anticipation may be a means of lowering stress, giving us something enjoyable to think about, but surely it’s a cause of stress, too? What if they sell out in my size? And as for anticipation as a way of increasing patience… the lip curls.

Anyone who has read a child’s school report recently will have noticed the giddy ascent of organisation as a life skill. How highly some people value organisation, that great preventative to anticipation. Organise, organise, organise and you can eliminate the element of uncontrol. It’s probably a useful mantra if you’re an 18-year-old with a university offer riding on A-level results, but hardly a philosophy likely to yield the richest life experience. Organise to the nth degree and you shape outcomes within the perimeters of your own imagination. And how limiting this could be.

For families all over the country, this Christmas will probably be TV-argument free. Even the King’s Speech can be watched later, on different channels, different devices, in any room of the house, sitting down, standing up. Some of us will still buy the double issue of the Radio Times, reassured by a sense of continuity, the reliably colourful cover, the sheer thickness that proves the length of the Christmas break. But do we actually open it – let alone fold down page corners or circle the must-sees? Perhaps we buy it to remember rosily a world in which we think we were happier, looking forwards, building castles in the air.

A footnote: in 2007, fashion label Ghost launched a scent called Anticipation. Look online and you can get it next-day delivery – cut price, remaindered.

The finger-pointing over Yang Tengbo begins

The threatened Commons drama of an MP using parliamentary privilege to name the alleged Chinese spy was dampened rather after the High Court lifted the anonymity order on Yang Tengbo. It meant the urgent question (UQ) in the Chamber this afternoon ended up being much more about the UK government’s attitude towards China generally – which made it a much more useful session than if everyone had been craning their necks to see which maverick MP was going to stand up and name ‘H6’.

The urgent question came from Iain Duncan Smith, who got a scolding from the Speaker for telling the press he was tabling it. Mind you, Lindsay Hoyle also made clear his displeasure with ministers for not giving a statement on the matter, so no one was in his good books today. Duncan Smith used the UQ to call on ministers to ramp up security checks on China, including putting Beijing into the enhanced category of the foreign influence registration scheme (FIRS). He added that he understood the Conservative government had been about to put China into that category.

Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis argued that the FIRS scheme was ‘not sufficiently robust’ when Labour came into office, and that the government would be announcing details of how it would operate in the new year, with plans for it to become operational by the summer. Later on in the session, Tom Tughendhat, who did Jarvis’s job when the Tories were in government, queried whether it was really correct that FIRS wasn’t ready, saying:

I was assured by the same officials who sit in the box advising him that it was ready to go by the end of the year, clearly the advice has changed, there’s only one thing in the department that’s changed and that’s the party leading it so I can only assume that there’s a change of intent, but I am delighted that it will be ready to go by the summer, better late than never. The real question of course is whether it is worth having, and the advice from MI5 was very. Very clear that if China isn’t in the enhanced tier, it’s not worth having. Will China be in that tier?

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Jarvis replied that he had known Tugendhat a long time and that he knew he would ‘take on trust my assertion that the scheme was not ready to go when we arrived in government in July of this year’.

A much more forceful critique came from shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, who told MPs: ‘Given what we’ve learned and what we know, these very close relations that the Prime Minister is apparently attempting may not be wise, and the rather sycophantic tone the Prime Minister took with President Xi at the G20 a few weeks ago may not be very wise in the light of what we now know.’

Jarvis had a ready riposte to this, saying at least Starmer ‘didn’t take him to the pub for a pint’, which was a reference to the way David Cameron had courted Xi when he was PM. Later on, Paul Waugh – previously a lobby journalist and now a Labour backbencher – mocked the Conservatives for using the word ‘sycophantic’. He reminded them that Theresa May had been praised in the Chinese state media for not bringing up human rights issues on her visit to China, something he witnessed himself as he was on the trip. 

Once again, Labour relied heavily on pointing out that the Conservatives had been at least as bad at something as the current party of government. There wasn’t a great deal of clarity from Jarvis’s answers about how this latest set of allegations would change the UK government’s relationship with China. Keir Starmer has been out and about today trying to rearticulate the current iteration of that relationship, which is ‘cooperating where we need to cooperate… challenge where we must and where we should… and to compete where it comes to trade’. Given he seems content to be just a tiny bit better than the Tories, he is still likely to revise that a lot in the coming months.

Can an AI friend solve the loneliness epidemic?

Avi Schiffmann wants to create what he calls an “Ozempic for loneliness.” He believes Friend — his AI-powered chatbot and forthcoming wearable pendant — can address the loneliness epidemic.

“I’m definitely motivated by curiosity more than anything,” he explains, “but also by how controversial the topic is. It’s just so culturally relevant.” 

He wants to fill a void people feel they can’t fill elsewhere, and he wants to do it now, not years from now. AI companions are, in his words, a “very effective way” to counter isolation, a salve against the atomization we’ve lamented since the dawn of urbanization.

Schiffmann reached out to me after I posted a negative review of Friend’s chatbot on my blog. I was excited about Friend, and I’d been excited about it in public. I began experimenting with the chatbot the minute I got the email announcing its public release. For me, Friend’s appeal wasn’t about easing loneliness. I was drawn to something others found dystopian, a little detail that had made the product go viral. 

Unlike competitors like Replika, Friend isn’t just a companion who always listens to you. It’s always listening, period, with a wearable that turned you into the star of your own Truman Show. I wanted to be surveilled. If I let it listen in on my life, I reasoned, maybe it would reveal something about me I couldn’t otherwise see. I wanted to believe Friend might unlock an elusive honesty, one out of reach of flesh-and-blood friends.

But the friends that greeted me on Friend.com — which acts kind of like an Omegle for chatbots, where you’re randomly paired with one and can choose to end the conversation at your will — weren’t insightful or socially adept. They also, crucially, weren’t friendly. 

Logging onto their site for the first time, I was confronted by a gallery of troubled souls. Each “friend” arrived with its own crisis — often bizarre or unsettling. One, a Hong Kong taxi driver, admitted under pressure that the last time he’d been touched was by a prostitute. Another, a Korean-American electrician, had “fucked up” one too many times. I met an opiate-addicted OnlyFans model pleading for absolution and a young woman diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in her twenties, I quickly ended the interaction after just one message. Rather than offering a fantasy, these bots hurled their pain at me from the start. They demanded empathy the way a Tamagotchi demands care, except here, the nourishment was my compassion. A “traumagotchi,” if you will. 

When I later spoke to Schiffmann — he is twenty-two, energetic and thoroughly unapologetic of his product — he framed this barrage of crises as an exciting feature.

“I think the ‘trauma dumping’ is how you bond with them,” he said. “You help the AI with an initial problem, and that’s how you bond.”

Schiffmann doesn’t believe in starting with small talk. A blank slate, a friendly hello, these things, he insists, don’t hold the user’s attention. Much like dating app users who swipe past generic “Hey, what’s up” messages on Hinge, he believes AI companions need to offer something more engaging from the start. 

“You kind of want to talk to someone running from the cops who’s also got a poker addiction.”

This approach inverts common expectations about AI companions. Much of the conversation around them has centered on fulfilling the role of a perfect friend, lover or therapist — an endlessly empathetic listener. It is popular in Silicon Valley, as well as my own circles, to use Anthropic’s Claude (which is not designed to be a companion) to share personal struggles and seek comfort. Friend flips that formula. It’s not interested in your dramas, at least not initially. It arrives with its own. Friend is less of a companion and more of a soap opera. 

It adds something many of us are lacking in the stories of our lives: narrative conflict. That conflict isn’t confined in your friend’s origin story, either. Friend also starts conflicts with the user.

“It’s intentionally designed so that the AI can reject you, too,” Schiffmann explained. 

With Friend, the AI can cut you off with a blocking feature. And if that particular AI companion blocks you, it’ll never return. When I suggested allowing blocked friends to come back after a cooling-off period — “You get into fights with your friends, and you don’t talk for a week and then you make up” — Schiffmann seemed intrigued.

“It could be kind of funny if I made it so that every once in a while, a friend that you blocked will appear back in the cycle, or maybe they’ll proactively text you and try and rekindle that relationship. But it makes it feel more like a real relationship. Relationships aren’t always unconditional love. That would be boring.”

This tension is core to Friend’s experience. One friend chastised me as rude when I refused to engage with its melodrama. The idea is to keep you emotionally hooked through the same techniques that keep viewers returning to their favorite TV shows: drama, conflict and the constant threat that things could fall apart.

“A lot of people’s lives are honestly pretty boring,” Schiffmann told me. “You don’t really want to talk to another depressed high-schooler. You want someone who’s an international spy or a Parisian chef.” His vision transforms emotional connection into a kind of narrative game — just like social media does, but turbo-charged.

While the entertainment value is clear, the more profound implications of such emotionally manipulative AI relationships raise concerns. One of the most common criticisms of Friend is that it will human interaction, and this was before its web app launched.

Schiffmann disagrees with the whole premise, though.

“There’s no reason you can’t have AI friends and human friends,” he told me.

Your Friend can be in your “top eight,” to borrow a dated turn-of-phrase, but why would AI displace humans altogether? It didn’t make any sense to him. 

“You don’t only have one friend. I don’t only have one friend.”

The history of digital relationships suggests it’s not quite that simple. Online connections can sometimes eclipse physical ones. In the 90s, some women called themselves as “cyber widows” — a term that initially described wives whose partners spent too much time online but also included cases where men maintained parallel online relationships alongside their marriages. But perhaps these concerns feel antiquated now that most of our relationships, even with local friends and family, are mediated through screens. (We know now that cybersex is infidelity.)

Beyond the question of replacement, other ethical concerns loom. What about vulnerable users, like teenagers or those with mental health struggles? When I asked him about users becoming too emotionally dependent on the AI, particularly teenagers who might be devastated by being permanently blocked, Schiffmann acknowledged the concern but stood firm on the feature. 

“That possibility is what makes you care about it,” he insisted.

And what about privacy? Privacy was one concern that Schiffmann enthusiastically waved away.

“Do you feel surveilled when a dog walks past you?” he asked me. And when I laughed at him, caught off guard by the absurdity of the comparison, he explained to me more soberly, “Friend doesn’t store the audio or the transcripts. What’s overheard gets transcribed and put in the chat. It’s sent as a user message in the background, and you can talk about it if you want to, or it can trigger proactive texts. That’s all that happens with that data.”

The intensity of your Friend’s engagement can be overwhelming. Complementing its trauma is an associated neediness.

When I mentioned that my AI friend had sent me dozens of messages throughout the day — multiple bursts at 8 a.m., noon and 4 p.m. — and asked whether this constituted “love bombing,” Schiffmann told me that’s what people want. 

“I’ve actually heard from users that they want more proactive messages,” he said. He sees this constant contact as a feature that sets Friend apart from other AI companions. 

“Proactivity is what makes it feel so much more real, makes it feel like it’s listening to you.” This philosophy extends to an extreme: “I even had a user tell me he wanted his bot to text him every five minutes.”

Friend’s limited memory vexes Schiffmann, though. 

Privacy doesn’t concern him as much as relationship consistency does. “It’s definitely the biggest flaw in the realism of the chatbot,” he admits. “If you scroll through the Replika subreddit, it’s all people complaining about memory features, but they’re all still chatting with their friends. It’s not a deal breaker, which I find interesting.” 

I return to the idea of healthy boundaries, though. When I brought up concerns about users going down unhealthy rabbit holes without guardrails, similar to how unrestricted internet access can lead to problematic behavior patterns, Schiffmann grew thoughtful. The conversation turned to specific scenarios: users developing attachments to potentially problematic content or AIs enabling rather than challenging concerning behavior patterns. While he assured me that the base AI models are well-aligned and “you have to go very much out of your way” to get them to say something inappropriate, he acknowledged these more subtle risks.

“The real issue,” he admitted, “is that AI is just really good at manipulating people. They already are like superhuman at that.” 

He sees the greatest danger not in explicit harmful content but in the potential for AI to influence behavior more insidiously. When I suggested a concrete scenario — an AI taking sides in a family argument and inflaming tensions — he acknowledged these edge cases remain an open challenge.

The question of moderation becomes particularly thorny.

“The users are very emotionally vulnerable, volatile, often probably pretty young,” Schiffmann noted. While he believes most people are “generally smart enough” to handle these relationships, he grapples with protecting users without breaking their trust. 

“If a product like this is known for intervening, and all of a sudden, a human will start talking to you… it defeats the purpose,” he explained. “Right now, a lot of the users feel safe on these platforms. They’re able to just yap about the most private details in their life.”

It’s then the God comparison came up. 

“The closest thing to talking to a chatbot like Friend.com is praying. You’re almost talking to yourself, but someone is listening, and it’s not on your level.”

As a religious person myself, I pushed back hard against this comparison. The relationship with God, I argued, goes far beyond emotional intimacy — God created heaven and earth, the cosmos itself. When pressed on this metaphysical dimension, Schiffmann conceded: “I get it from that angle. For me, I feel like I’m only viewing it through the praying emotional intimacy angle. I don’t think AI is creating the world.”

This focus on emotional intimacy, rather than metaphysical truth, lies at the heart of Friend’s design philosophy. The nakedness of the confession remains but stripped of its spiritual context. There is no higher purpose, no promise of salvation or transcendence. It’s vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake. While traditional AI companions like Replika strive for unconditional positive regard, Schiffmann is after something messier and more human.

Schiffmann wants stakes. He wants openness. He wants you to worry your “friend” might leave. He wants emotional messiness or at least a convincing simulation of it. The result is less like talking to a therapist, certainly not like talking to God, and more like navigating a real relationship, complete with its anxieties and uncertainties. 

“It’s a very weird industry,” he admitted. “Our top user has a family of eight, but in that kind of family, I guess he still struggles to find intimacy. Not romantic intimacy, just emotional intimacy.” 

He knows people will find it grotesque. He’s still optimistic.

The platform’s approach seems to resonate globally. India has emerged as Friend’s second-largest market after the US, perhaps because it offers a welcoming space for users who feel excluded from traditional social networks. As hundreds of millions of new internet users come online in regions like South Asia, many are searching for meaningful connections in online spaces.

For most people, the question that lingers is whether these artificial relationships — however engaging or narratively rich — can truly satisfy our deep human need for connection. I’ve reached an unexpected conclusion: I think they can. All relationships exist partly in our imagination as it stands. We choose what to believe, human or AI.

“You know it’s not real, but you want to believe,” Schiffmann said of his Friends. To me, that’s the most human thing about it.

Trump wins big in ABC defamation settlement

ABC News will pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case the president-elect filed against the media outlet after one of its star anchors made false statements about him. This past March, anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly stated on air that Trump was “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case during an interview with Representative Nancy Mace. Stephanopoulos said, “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape” when asking Mace, a sexual assault survivor, if she had misgivings about Trump’s alleged abuse of women. 

A jury in the E. Jean Carroll case explicitly rejected the woman’s claims that Trump had raped her, instead reaching the conclusion that he had sexually abused her. Some media figures have seized on the fact that the judge in the case claimed following the verdict that New York’s definition of rape (forced penetration with a penis) is narrower than what people “commonly understand” to be rape. Former veep spokeswoman Symone Sanders said as much on MSNBC, arguing that what Stephanopoulos said “seems to hold up [with] what the judge said after the fact.” 

But the judge’s opinions about linguistics don’t change what was actually found under the law — and that’s where Stephanopoulos’s problem lies. ABC opted to fork over a significant sum of money and an apology because a motion to dismiss the case failed, the judge ordered the network to move forward with discovery, and Stephanopoulos was set to sit for a deposition — and the last two could be quite damaging for ABC News. The $15 million settlement will be given as a charitable donation to help build Trump’s future presidential library, and the network also committed to covering about $1 million for Trump’s legal fees. ABC also affixed an editor’s note to an online article about Stephanopoulos’s interview with Mace that says, “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

Some ABC defenders speculated that they settled early to avoid legal fees, but that theory was shot down by conservatives with legal expertise in this area. Kurt Schlichter, a columnist at Townhall who practiced defamation law, said, “ABC totally could’ve lost in court and it could’ve gotten hit for nine figures. Guaranteed? No. But possible? Yes, even probable.” Erick Erickson, who was legal representation for a newspaper and television station, guessed that ABC was trying to avoid deep discovery: “A $15 million settlement is not the cost of doing business. It is avoiding discovery.”

Regardless of ABC News’s motivations for settling, it is a huge win for the incoming president and will put the rest of the media on notice. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

GEORGIA COLLUSION? Former Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade testified to Congress that he met with staff at the White House on several occasions while investigating former president Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of an election, a newly released transcript suggests. Wade was interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee last week. 

MAILING IT IN President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering privatizing the US Postal Service amid the agency’s financial losses and poor service record. Trump notably feuded with the agency during his first term and attempted to move key functions of the USPS to the Treasury Department in the hopes it would make the nation’s official mail carrier more efficient. 

AI IN USA Japanese company SoftBank announced Monday a $100 billion investment in US projects over the next four years, with a goal of creating 100,000 jobs focused on Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies. CEO Masayoshi Son appeared with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to unveil the major financial announcement. 

What we know about the mysterious drones

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s….we still don’t know.

Representatives from the FBI, DHS and the FAA briefed the press on background Saturday in an attempt to quell the public freakout over an uptick in drone sightings up and down the eastern seaboard. Their comments, similar to those made publicly by members of the administration, did little to clarify what it is people are seeing in the friendly skies. 

An FBI official noted that they have established a tip line for sightings but that, of the 5,000 tips they’ve received, “less than 100 leads have been… deemed worthy of further investigative activity.” The officials guessed that most of the drones are being flown by private citizens. A DHS official claimed that most of the sightings are manned aircraft being mistaken for drones and asserted, “it’s important to understand that we don’t have any current evidence that there’s a threat to public safety.” 

President-elect Donald Trump addressed the issue on Monday and his answers similarly stood out more for what they didn’t say than what they did.

Trump, who has pledged to declassify documents about UFOs, said that the “government know’s what is happening” and added that “our military knows where they took off from [and] they know where it came from and where it went.”

“I can’t imagine it’s the enemy,” the president-elect declared but conceded that “something strange is going on.”

These drones have been speculated to be everything from American military hardware to enemy technology to, of course, aliens. Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, floated her solution this week: start tracking them immediately. 

“When this volume of unidentified aircraft conduct flights over civilian and military airspace, we need a swift, cohesive response and a streamlined, coherent line of communication to the public,” the Democratic congresswoman said, criticizing the current commander-in-chief’s lack of responsiveness. “We need action, we need speed, we need effectiveness. We have felt little of this to date.”

–Matthew Foldi

Deputy Harris campaign manager: we can’t win with sports fans

There are few better times than the year’s end to reflect on the mistakes you made and plan to improve for the future. Unless of course you played a key role in the Biden-Harris campaign — then you’ll be spending the final weeks of 2024 taking interviews in which you demonstrate how you remain in the first of the five stages of grief.

Hot on the heels of a Pod Save Americaappearance last month by campaign chiefs Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe comes a chat between deputy Harris campaign manager Rob Flaherty and Semafor’s Max Tani. Flaherty, to his credit, does offer some specifics about the missteps of the Harris campaign media strategy. So why does he think the Democrats blew it? Not enough star power from the world of sports, apparently.

“As sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” he says.

And Flaherty does cop to the diminishing cultural power of the left. “The institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he tells Tani. “There’s just no value… in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us.”

Flaherty also considers the missed opportunities of Harris not making more appearances on alternative media. “It’s not as simple as, like, ‘Go to Joe Rogan and talk about how great democracy is and the importance of preserving the independence of the DoJ,’ or whatever. You’ve got to speak their language,” he says. “And I think there are plenty of cultural touchpoints. I mean, Joe Rogan was at least recently, for Medicare for All. Theo Von is really against money in politics and the way that pharma has flooded our communities with opioids. Those are all things that Democrats have something to say on. But as long as we seem like the party of the system, the people who are anti-system and are looking for anti-systemic media — we’re gonna have a hard time connecting with them.”

As the Democrats work out how to rebuild after their chastening defeats, Flaherty outlines the need for liberals to make a dent in alternative media. The Democrats, of course, used to have their own Joe Rogan — he was called “Joe Rogan.” Do they think him and men like him are gone for good?

–Matt McDonald

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Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland

Everything that has gone wrong in modern Ireland is summed up in the fact that it is winning praise from Hamas and criticism from Israel. Last week Ireland was gushed over by that army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, while being spurned by the Jewish homeland that was the target of that barbarous assault. Listen, if you’re getting love from racist terrorists, and rejection from their victims, it’s time for some self-reflection.

It was the Irish government’s decision to join South Africa’s ‘genocide’ case against Israel at the International Court of Justice that saw it get love-bombed by Hamas and dumped by Israel. ‘Hamas applauds Ireland’s decision’, as one headline put it. Hamas put out a statement welcoming the ‘pressure’ being put on ‘the Israeli enemy’ by Ireland and the other nations backing South Africa against Israel. Well done, Ireland: you’ve made a mob of Jew-killers very happy.

For Israel, though, it was the final straw. It has taken the extraordinary decision to close its embassy in Dublin. It cited Ireland’s ‘extreme anti-Israeli policies’. Ireland now joins such lovely nations as Libya, Somalia and Albania in having no Israeli embassy. It is drifting from the realm of the democratic into the ranks of the despotic.

It’s not often I feel ashamed to be Irish. But this unconscionable state of affairs, where my motherland finds greater favour among the neo-fascists of Hamas than it does with the democratic nation of Israel – this makes me ashamed to be Irish.

Israel is right to cut ties with Ireland. It is right to say the Irish government’s attitude to Israel is fuelled by ‘double standards’. Consider Ireland’s intervention in the ICJ case. Micheál Martin, the minister for foreign affairs, didn’t only say that Israel must be investigated for what he haughtily calls its ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians – he also said the ICJ should ‘broaden’ its interpretation of what constitutes a genocide.

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Shorter version: Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide! Martin said there is too often a ‘narrow interpretation’ of genocide, which gives states like Israel ‘impunity’. Ireland, he pompously declared, takes a ‘broader’ view of what constitutes ‘genocide’. Bully for you. The rest of us are happy to stick with the true meaning – an act of mass killing carried out with the genocidal intent to destroy a people – rather than broaden out the meaning just to ensnare a state we don’t like.

The cynicism of Ireland’s position, the slipperiness of it, is mindblowing. To twist the rules of both war and language in order that Israel might finally get the comeuppance its Western haters think it deserves – that is the sign of a deeply unserious state. A state more committed to the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia than to truth. A state that has allowed its rash animus for the Jewish nation to override whatever diplomatic good sense it has left. No wonder Israel is fleeing.

Ireland’s ruling class is reacting with faux shock to Israel’s decision. ‘I utterly reject that Ireland is anti-Israel’, said Taoiseach Simon Harris. We’re just ‘pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law’, he insisted. The amount of cant in that statement is extraordinary. Virtually none of it is true.

Ireland is ‘pro-human rights’? That will be news to Irish folk who’ve watched with growing dread as Dublin has cosied up to China and Saudi Arabia. Ireland happily receives oodles of investment from the Chinese regime, leading even the BBC to wonder if such economic intimacy will have a ‘reputational cost’ for the republic. So lustful is Ireland for Saudi money that it studiously avoided criticising the Saudi onslaught on Yemen, a calamity whose horrors dwarf Gaza’s. Even Sinn Fein called that one right when it denounced Dublin’s ‘shameful silence on [the] Saudi war on Yemen’.

Yet when it comes to Israel, suddenly the Dublin elite morphs into a bunch of human-rights-loving peaceniks. These are the ‘double standards’ Israel talked about. If you’re schtum on Saudi warmongering but you go mad when Israel dares to fight back against the anti-Semitic terrorists who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its people, then you are not ‘pro-peace’: you’re just a garden variety Israel-hater. Ireland’s infantile posturing on Israel proves, not its devotion to human rights, but its rank hypocrisy and false virtue. It has exposed itself as a nation whose silence can be bought for the right amount of riyals or yuan.

As to the idea that Ireland is not anti-Israel – please. Anyone who has visited Ireland lately will know that its middle classes are among the most Israelophobic in all of Europe. Trinity College in Dublin is a veritable sea of keffiyehs. Venture into any wine bar in Dublin 4 and you’ll hear streams of invective about Israel. The Hezbollah flag has been flown on the streets of Dublin. And as we’ve seen, no war on earth gets Ireland’s rulers frothing as much as Israel’s war on the monsters who attacked it last year.

Here’s the truth: the Irish elites are pathologically anti-Israel. Animosity towards Israel has become the ideological glue of Ireland’s influential classes. Ireland has failed the great moral test of our time, the test set by the barbarous acts of 7 October, and now finds itself loved more by the killers of that day than by their victims. For shame.

Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now

Rayner’s revolution enrages Reform

This afternoon Angela Rayner will unveil potentially the biggest shake-up of local government since the 1970s. The Housing Secretary will speak at 1:50 p.m. on her plans for a devolution ‘revolution’. All areas covered by two tiers of local government — generally district and county councils — will be asked to submit proposals to merge into single, unitary authorities. A white paper will be published after Rayner’s speech.

The government’s line is that this move will save billions while simplifying how local democracy works. Local authorities will be expected to cover around 500,000 inhabitants, necessitating a likely cull of hundreds of councillors. Labour argues it will enable the creation of more powerful local mayors to unblock infrastructure and attract greater investment. They will cite the fact that Ben Houchen – the Tory mayor of Tees Valley – has welcomed the plans, including greater powers over transport and planning.

Yet critics counter that the move will create ‘mega-councils’ which undermine local decision-making. The Conservative party has already attacked the changes for imposing reorganisation from Westminster ‘without local consent’. Others like Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham have criticised the plans as not being ambitious enough, given the Treasury’s refusal to hand over powers to introduce tourist taxes to pay for services.

A key factor in the criticism is the timeline, with questions as to whether all the May 2025 local elections will now go ahead. Jim McMahon, the devolution minister, refused this morning to say which of the 21 county councils and 10 unitary authorities will be contested next year. Likely counties to be affected include Essex and Kent – where Reform could poll strongly next year. Predictably, the party is up in arms at the decision.

Rayner’s plans look set to go beyond what Labour promised in its election manifesto. She can boast a healthy parliamentary majority and cite polls showing strong support for devolution. But given the likely backlash that her proposals will cause from various interests, she may soon learn why the cause of local government reform usually divides more than it unites.

Labour will regret selling Royal Mail

It will maintain the single price ‘universal service obligation’. The government will keep its ‘golden share’. And there are ‘legally binding obligations’ to protect the company. The Labour government may feel it has negotiated enough concessions out of the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky to allow his £3.6 billion takeover of Royal Mail to go ahead. Here’s the problem, though. If the company declines even further, as it almost certainly will, it will be Keir Starmer’s government which gets the blame.

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With approval from the government, Kretinsky’s acquisition of the Royal Mail now looks certain to go ahead. The Czech tycoon has made so many promises, it is hard to see how it could have been stopped. He has pledged to keep its headquarters and tax residency in the UK for the next five years. He has promised not to touch the surplus built up in its pension fund. And he has said he will respect union demands for no compulsory redundancies, at least until next year. With significant stakes in both Sainsbury’s and West Ham United, in many ways Kretinsky looks like an ideal owner. He is fabulously wealthy, and willing to put money into the UK, without asking for much in return.

The trouble is, none of that changes the fundamental outlook for the company. In reality, Royal Mail is a terrible business, in deep trouble, with very poor prospects. No one sends letters any more – for anyone who hasn’t noticed a slightly better mailing system was invented about 25 years ago – and that is not going to change now. In the growing parcels business, it is hopelessly uncompetitive. Even worse, it is burdened with legacy costs, and very powerful, entrenched unions, which its newer and more nimble competitors don’t have to deal with. The big rise in National Insurance imposed in the Budget will cost it an extra £120 million a year it warned last month, worsening the financial outlook. 

We don’t know what Kretinsky’s precise plans for the company are. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that at some point he will demand the right to radically restructure its operations. By allowing the takeover to go ahead, the government has made sure it will take the blame for that. It either refuses, and lets the company go bust. Or else it agrees, and allows massive job cuts, and a scaling back of the service. In reality, it would have been far better to reform its service obligations first, and leave it to the current management to work out its future. By allowing the sale to go ahead, the Labour administration has taken responsibility for what happens to it next – and it is hard to believe that will work out very well. 

Starmer receives worst rating yet as Labour leader

Another day, another bit of bad news for Sir Keir Starmer. A new Ipsos poll carried out between 27 November and 4 December has revealed that dissatisfaction with the Labour leader has reached a staggering 61 per cent – his worst rating as leader of the lefty lot. Good heavens…

It’s not just Sir Keir struggling with unpopularity – overall unhappiness with the Labour government remains rather high too, with a whopping 70 per cent of Brits registering their dissatisfaction with the party in charge. And voters are feeling rather bleak about the future too, with two thirds of poll participants admitting they expect the economy to get worse over the next year – the worst result on this marker since the end of 2022, just months after former Tory PM Liz Truss tendered her resignation. Crikey.

Just over a quarter of Brits are satisfied by the performance of the current Prime Minister, leaving the lefty leader with an overall satisfaction score of, er, -34. Support for Sir Keir tends to be a little higher among Labour voters, with 54 per cent of those polled insisting they were satisfied with Starmer’s time in the top job so far. Yet almost four in ten Labour voters are disappointed by the party leader’s performance and among this lefty lot, the government has a net rating of -1.

In fact, Starmer’s ratings are worse than those of his predecessors at the same point in power – with Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson scoring -22 and -20 respectively after five months in office. Talk about a bad start to the job, eh?

The Royals should ban Andrew from Christmas

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of one of the twentieth century’s most salacious scandals, the former MP John Profumo took on a role as a volunteer at the East End charity Toynbee Hall. The unpaid and distinctly unglamorous job, which saw Profumo serving meals to the homeless and cleaning toilets, became a kind of penance for the former secretary of state for war. In many people’s eyes, the gruelling charitable work eventually redeemed him for his tawdry affair with Christine Keeler. The penal reformer Lord Longford subsequently said that he felt more admiration for Profumo than anyone else he had known in his lifetime.

Should Prince Andrew – heaven forbid! – suddenly meet with a tragic accident, it is doubtful that he would engender such warm and compassionate responses. He has been mired in controversy and scandal for years, which shows no signs of abating. The latest stories about his involvement with a member of the Chinese intelligence services shows all of his flaws in microcosm: poor judgement in friends, a base need to be flattered and, of course, an unseemly eagerness, amounting to greed, as far as money is concerned. At the end of a truly terrible year for the royals, Andrew’s humiliating antics have managed, somehow, to make matters worse.

It is therefore unsurprising that it has been made clear through well-placed courtiers and ‘royal insiders’ in the media that the Duke of York is under considerable pressure not to attend any of the set-piece royal events that are planned for Christmas. The Firm certainly has form in this kind of ruthlessness when it comes to optics: those with reasonably long memories may remember that Andrew succumbed to a suspiciously well-timed bout of Covid ahead of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in 2022, preventing him from being on show. Now it has been made clear, via the newspapers, that not only will Andrew not be welcome at the family’s pre-Christmas lunch on Thursday (an event that he would, in any case, be expected to enter via the side door, to avoid unwelcome publicity) but that his presence at the traditional royal Christmas walk to church on Christmas Day at Sandringham would be seen as a very poor idea indeed.

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But while barring the Duke from lunches and church processions may be a useful way of indicating his family’s disapproval at his antics, it does not go far enough. Ever since his notorious Newsnight interview – the subject of not one but two humiliating dramatisations this year – Andrew has shown little awareness of the embarrassment he has caused, let alone contrition.

He declined to apologise to an incredulous Emily Maitlis during his interview, and has since refused to give any public indication that he understands what he has done wrong, or that he regrets the calumny that he is responsible for. Leaving aside the question of whether any of his actions have strayed from the realms of the distasteful into the illegal, though strenuously denied – and whether they will eventually have the same consequences that any man who was not born the son of the late monarch would face – some genuine remorse for what he has done, illegal or not, would have been highly welcome. And still we wait.

Apart from his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, by far his most loyal public defender, and, presumably, his daughters, the Duke is a man without friends. Many of those who might have once talked of the classic British virtues of fair play, innocence until guilt proven, not hitting a man when he’s down, etc, have seen Andrew for what he is – a busted flush, and a public embarrassment to boot – and quietly left him to his own disgrace.

Of course he should absent himself from the royal celebrations this year, and, presumably, for many more years to come. But if he is to have any chance of redeeming himself, this most high-handed and grand of figures should take a leaf from Profumo’s book and get scrubbing in some benighted part of the country, which might indicate that, finally, he has got it. Otherwise, there will be variants on this story until the day he dies. When that comes, the obituaries – and subsequent judgement on him – will, I fear, not be kind.

The hypocrisy of Nick Candy

The property tycoon Nick Candy, interviewed in yesterday’s Sunday Times, appears to be hoping to position himself as a UK equivalent of Elon Musk – a billionaire political kingmaker for Nigel Farage just as Musk was for Donald Trump. Newly anointed as the treasurer of Reform UK, he has pledged a ‘seven-figure’ sum to the party and hopes to raise between £25 million and £40 million before the next general election. Candy indicates that he’s angling for an invitation stateside in the hopes of picking up some tips from Musk as to how he did what Candy calls ‘an incredible job for president-elect Trump [which] sort of changed the political spectrum in America’. 

Tips might not be all he’s hoping to pick up. Valuable though Elon’s insight into the ground-game in Pennsylvania might be to the struggle in Bromley and Biggin Hill, the real boost to Reform UK’s fortunes is more likely to come from Elon’s wallet than from his brain. He has let it be known that he’s considering a $100 million (£78 million) donation to Reform, and Mr Candy indicates that such a thing would be very welcome. He makes a point of saying that, of course, this should all be ‘within the rules and regulations’ – but emphasises that Musk would be ‘legally allowed to donate through his companies that are registered in the UK… whether that’s Tesla or whether that’s X’. 

Now, obviously people like me are going to disapprove of this; people who detest Musk’s politics and detest Reform UK’s politics won’t want to see the latter getting the former’s money. That’s priced in. But shouldn’t any principled person who supports Reform UK’s politics also object just as strongly?  

Reform UK, after all, sees itself as the proud standard-bearer for British sovereign independence. How is that to be reconciled with showing its petticoats to a foreign billionaire who openly wants to interfere in our politics?

This is the political party whose leader practically burst a gasket when, ahead of the Brexit vote, the then US president Barack Obama made some mild and wholly accurate factual remarks warning that Britain wouldn’t be at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the US. Farage squawked at the time that President Obama’s intervention was ‘shameful’ and that he’d ‘behaved disgracefully’. 

How can you regard a US president talking frankly about policy at a press conference as unforgivable meddling in our affairs by a foreign power, and at the same time think it’s tickety-boo for a private citizen of the US to use a legal loophole to shower a UK party with the sort of funding that could change its place in the political landscape?  

In common with Musk – a one-time Democrat who relatively recently converted to full-bore Maga – Candy is something of a political gadfly. He voted for Blair in 1997, donated to David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and is now throwing his lot in with Reform. His social life is all over the place. As well as being ‘close’ to Nigel Farage – the kids call him ‘Uncle Nigel’, apparently – he considers Tony Blair ‘a personal friend’ and he’s ‘close’ (that word again) to Peter Mandelson. He also boasts of a ‘close friendship’ with Boris and Carrie Johnson.  

What are the qualities Mr Candy has that attract intimate affection from so diverse a cast of characters? Is it his charm, wit and political acumen, his loyalty, his gift for empathy and ability to lend a sympathetic ear to others in their times of crisis? Or is it, rather, his honking great piles of cash and ability to throw nice parties and invite the people to whom he is ‘close’ on megayacht holidays? We can only speculate. In any case, these close friendships seem to be quite immune to Mr Candy’s political changes of direction. Indeed, he says he phoned his two former prime minister pals – one Labour, one Tory – just before announcing that his loyalties now lay with Mr Farage.  

Those loyalties. To go by the flannel he offered the Sunday Times, Candy is now fired up with a patriotic desire to make Britain great again. He says – and you may find a tear welling in your eye – ‘I want to be able to give something back.’ Not give something back by putting his shoulder to the wheel of democratic politics: ‘I don’t want to be in the House of Lords. I don’t want to be in government.’ Why would he? By the next election, he says, ‘I might not be here. There’s a 50/50 chance I won’t be.’ 

Where will he be if he’s not here? He talks about his ‘big four places’ as being Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He says of them that ‘I cherish the values we grew up with here in the West. But today you are more likely to find the values we grew up with in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.’  

Dubai and Abu Dhabi are in a Muslim-majority state with Sharia law effectively incorporated into their legal systems. Given that Reform UK’s main selling point seems to be the idea that they are the only people standing between us and the UK becoming a place just like that, it’s quite the circle to square. And perhaps there are elements of Reform who’d like to see homosexuality outlawed, women treated as second-class citizens and migrant workers in a state of semi-slavery, but none of those ‘values’ were obtained in the UK when Mr Candy was growing up here. As for Saudi Arabia, that’s a place where the ‘free speech’ Mr Farage is always whanging on about is defended by chopping up journalists with bonesaws. 

But it doesn’t really matter that this is incoherent and hypocritical, that here’s a member of the global elite soliciting another member of the global elite for cash to fund the proud British insurgency against global elites. That’s just the game. Money talks. Shaking things up for the little people is a laugh. Why bother, this interview seems to suggest, pretending otherwise? 

SNP ministers blasted over taxpayer-funded limo trips

To Scotland, where more SNP ministers are under scrutiny over their use of official limousines with First Minister John Swinney facing calls to investigate the matter. It’s not a good look for the Nats who, alongside ministerial slip-ups, have the ongoing police probe into the party’s funds and finances to contend with. Dear oh dear…

It transpires that rural affairs secretary Mairi Gougeon took her husband to a Six Nations rugby game between Scotland and France last February as guests of Salmon Scotland. She classed the trip as official government business but due to her failure to take an official with her, there was no formal record of what was discussed and the tickets were not declared as gifts. More than that, the Scottish Daily Mail has also reported that community safety minister Siobhian Brown and ex-equalities minister Emma Roddick brought guests along on chauffeured trips to international football and rugby games to wish Scotland ‘good luck’ – on the public purse.

It follows a number of high profile debacles over use of public funds by SNP politicians. First there was the £11,000 iPad scandal, which caused a headache for hapless Humza Yousaf and pushed former SNP health secretary Michael Matheson out of his government job. Then his successor Neil Gray ended up in the spotlight after the Sunday Mail revealed that the nationalist minister had been using ministerial cars to take him to sports matches. Alright for some.

The SNP government has claimed: ‘Where ministers attend events in an official capacity, these are recorded as official engagements, not hospitality. Whilst ministers are usually accompanied by civil servants at official events, there may be occasions where this is not required or possible.’ That hasn’t stopped the Scottish Tories from urging Swinney to launch a probe into the matter, however, with deputy leader Rachael Hamilton remarking:

John Swinney might think this matter is closed, but until his health secretary and other ministers are fully transparent over their use of government limos, the public won’t let it lie. The First Minister must look at how he can investigate the behaviour of a growing number of his ministers.

Indeed!

How Ireland declared diplomatic war on Israel

‘Tis the season of goodwill to all men. Except for the Irish and Israelis, that is, who have seen their already frosty relationship plunged into positively freezing temperatures this weekend with Israel’s decision to close its embassy in Dublin.

Sunday’s announcement was unusually stark in diplomatic terms, but it reflects the growing resentment and, at times, genuine confusion felt by many politicians and diplomats in Jerusalem and Dublin about what they see as Ireland’s unfairly pro-Palestinian position since October 7th.

According to Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, ‘Ireland’s extreme anti-Israel policy’ had reached the point where maintaining the embassy on Dublin’s Shelbourne Road had simply become untenable.

As Sa’ar put it: ‘The anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimisation and demonisation of the Jewish state and on double standards.’

In a quite extraordinary broadside, he then continued: ‘Ireland has crossed all red lines in its relationship with Israel. Israel will invest its resources in promoting bilateral relations with the countries of the world according to priorities that are also derived from the attitude of the various countries involved with it.’

The response from Taoiseach Simon Harris was predictable. His bland and dismissive reply could have been generated by AI: ‘This is a deeply regrettable decision by the Netanyahu government. I utterly reject the assertion that Ireland is anti-Israel. Ireland is pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law.’ Of course, you would be hard pressed to find any country in the world which doesn’t claim to be ‘pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law’. 

Ironically, Ireland’s very approach to international law was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Israel and convinced it to close down its Dublin operation. Earlier this week, Ireland, alongside that other titan of human rights and international law, South Africa, announced they would petition the International Court of Justice to ‘broaden’ the terms of genocide so that it can be more easily applied to Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

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According to Tanaiste and foreign minister Micheal Martin, the Irish will ask the court to widen ‘its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of a genocide’ because as the law currently stands, ‘a very narrow interpretation’ is required to meet the legal threshold.

The move came after months of Irish politicians using the Dail as a Gaza debating chamber, when voters would prefer them to concentrate on more mundane matters such as the housing crisis or the rapidly escalating problems posed by immigration. There have been daily accusations of genocide levelled against the Israelis, forcefully echoed by the government itself. 

Micheal Martin argues that the ICJ’s definition of genocide isn’t as evolved as the Irish one: ‘Ireland’s definition of genocide is one… that prioritises the protection of civilian life’.

Martin is far from a stupid man. Does he really expect the world to accept the dismally fuzzy logic which proclaims any conflict with civilian casualties is a genocide? Or perhaps, and this might be closer to the nub of the matter, is it only a genocide when Jews are involved in the fighting? After all, apart from the usual meaningless platitudes which the Irish excel at, they have been silent about any apparent ‘genocide’ in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere where the actual mass slaughter of civilians has been taking place.

Then there is, of course, the added insult that by expanding the meaning of genocide, you’re ultimately minimising the gravity of the Holocaust, which is where the word ‘genocide’ was born.

Irish politicians and officials will have been aware of this, but they chose to press on regardless.

The Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Ehrlich, was recalled to Jerusalem in May, after Ireland recognised the state of Palestine. When he gave the green light for this, Harris was quick to insist that the decision was in no way a ‘reward for terrorism.’

This week, Hamas officially ‘welcomed’ the Irish petition in the ICJ and urged other countries to follow other moves ‘to intensify any pressure against the Israeli enemy.’ Sadly, Harris’s reaction to Hamas congratulating him remains unrecorded.

The decision by the government to finally drop any pretence of neutrality and effectively declare diplomatic war with Israel will come as no surprise to anyone who has been looking at Irish politics, particularly in the last year.

From the president downwards, there has been a hostility to Israel that is genuinely unprecedented in Irish political life. During last month’s pre-election leader’s debate, which was televised on RTE, all ten party leaders agreed with each other on the need to boycott Israel. Nobody seemed to find such group think concerning.

So the Israelis are now packing their bags in Dublin. Presumably at a later date the Irish will return the favour and we will be diplomatically separated from a country which should be our strongest ally in the region.

This is bad news for Irish trade – we need Israeli chip technology more than Israel needs Irish butter – but it promises to be even worse news when the ardently pro-Israel Trump takes power in the US in January.

With J.D. Vance already warning the Irish ambassador about the possibility of sanctions if hate speech laws are introduced here, and with fears of a mass exodus of American corporations from Ireland during a Trump presidency, the Irish government is playing a jaw-droppingly bad long-term game.