Max Jeffery

‘In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naive and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate,’ William Dalrymple confesses in the Folio Society’s 25-year anniversary edition of his 1989 debut. Xanadu retraces Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to China. The author, an Ampleforth and Cambridge educated 21-year-old, pretends he is Robert Byron. In 2015, books like this needed apologetic preambles. Dalrymple couldn’t let anyone think he sympathised with this younger, lesser man.  No, modern Willie is an enlightened guy. Yesterday, he was in a London Bridge theatre addressing a conference of the Britain Palestine Project. He is its new patron. Dalrymple is a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, but is now going for it with fervour.

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.

Freddie Scappaticci was a thickset man with dark features and a walrus moustache. He was born in Belfast in 1946, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army when the Troubles began and by the 1980s was a senior member of the organisation, whose job was to hunt for British spies. It has been widely believed for years that Scappaticci was himself a spy for the British government, operating under the codename ‘Stakeknife’. The government has always said it could ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND) this suggestion. Today, Operation Kenova, which has spent nine years investigating Stakeknife’s crimes, urged the government to officially reveal the identity of this ruthless undercover operative.

They were John Major’s kind of people, the audience in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre in the Cheng Kin Ku Building at the London School of Economics last night. They filed in quietly, took their seats politely, and waited relaxedly for the ex prime minister. One man slouched, careless blotches of black dye on his thinning cirrus hair, while another sterilised his glasses with an individually wrapped wipe, going in every corner and crevice until it all looked stupidly clean. A third flicked through the Financial Times. It was 6:25 p.m., five minutes before Sir John was due. Only a man with no worries takes the morning’s news in the evening. Sir John would say the audience was ‘at ease with itself’, and that is exactly how he likes his people.

For a few days in Manchester last weekend, there was a utopia. The World Transformed conference of British socialists had taken over Hulme – the once rough but now bohemian part of the city – and in the middle of it all, at the Community Garden Centre, a collectivist’s dream was established. All day comrades sat there in the sun on the edges of flower beds and on picnic benches, having doctrinal debates, eating vegan food, reading homemade pamphlets. The garden centre was the conference’s locus, where attendees mixed joyfully between workshops and discussions away from the horrors of the real world. ‘Comrades have done an awful lot of work to get us to this point,’ said one lounging revolutionary.  And they were right.

On Friday evening in the Windrush Lounge at The World Transformed conference in Manchester, British socialism was autocannibalising. No more comrade this or comrade that. No other little politburo manners. In a storage unit in an industrial estate – this was the lounge – Max Shanly, an influential left-wing activist and former Momentum member, was jabbing his finger in the direction of Alan Gibbons, an independent councillor in Liverpool who is involved in building Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, which is for now confusingly named Your Party. ‘You are one of the select few!’ Max said. ‘You are the Comical Ali of Your Party!

Everyone wanted to get close to the president. For three hours outside the O2 Arena in London, a queue of admirers pawed at and posed with a fifteen-foot-tall billboard of his face. All of the marketing for yesterday’s event, titled ‘An Evening with President Barack Obama’, had used his official presidential portrait from 2012 in the Oval Office. It was a reminder of the good old days – before Trump ever happened. ‘I’m just looking forward to being in the same room as him,’ said a woman called Fran who had taken a photo with the billboard, leaning on it for support. She started crying. ‘I’m looking for a little bit of hope.’ All Obama’s life people have staked their hopes on him. His white mother was the first.

The global military-industrial complex and its outriders were rammed into a giant indoor pigsty. Dealers and manufacturers and military men and politicians and officials from murky agencies and guys in cowboy hats and sunglasses who only really came to have their photos taken with guns – all of them in a crush to use a printer. It was day one of the arms fair, and they had forgotten to print their credentials at home. ‘Someone’s going to faint!’ cried a failing voice. ‘You can’t do this to humans!’ yelped another. ‘Bro,’ said an American on the phone to someone, ‘this is a complete fuckshow.’ As the bundle swirled and groaned, a Royal Marines band marched past. This did not improve the mood.

Who is Ritchie Wellman? He is a father, a boyfriend, an assistant operations manager at a local business and a part-time paedophile hunter. Right now, however, at 7 p.m. in a dusty car park down the road from Bournemouth pier, Ritchie is the commander of his own private policing unit, briefing his officers before their first patrol. He tells them not to assault anybody, not to be provoked, not to drink or smoke on the job, and to reassure the public if they are concerned by this new authority on their streets: ‘This is not a takeover.’ Ritchie is a normal guy, and he and his officers and others in Bournemouth like them believe that their town is falling apart and that the state is not coming to save it.