Stephen Pollard

I’m usually resistant to the sentiment behind one of the oldest political jokes: How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips move. In my experience – I’ve been in and around Westminster for nearly four decades – most politicians might have large egos but they are genuinely trying to do their best for their country. The idea that all politicians lie with impunity is corrosive and wrong. But it’s not always easy to make that case. And the wilful, brazen smearing of Kemi Badenoch by Reform over her reaction to the murder of Henry Nowak is one such example of that difficulty.

I am aware that there is limited interest in my domestic arrangements, but there is a reason why I’m telling you that for much of my adult life I lived in central London. First in Bayswater, then in Fitzrovia. I loved the bustle, the grime, the noise and all the things which are part of – indeed the point of – living in a city centre. The Soho Society doesn’t like the idea of the area buzzing after bedtime – or even in daytime And then I stopped loving them. As I got older, I decided that I no longer wanted my sleep to be interrupted by fights in the street outside my bedroom window (Cleveland Street, since you asked) and that I actually liked the idea of having some space. So I moved to suburbia, a path taken by many before and after me.

There’s an old joke about Andy Burnham that has been recycled since he started making eyes at No. 10. A Blairite, a Brownite, a Milibandite, a Starmerite, an insider and an outsider walk into a bar. The barman asks: ‘What are you having, Andy?’ It might not be that funny but it’s a direct hit as a piece of political analysis, because there have been few more transparent examples of political shape-shifters than the current mayor of Greater Manchester.

Sir Keir Starmer remains dug in as Prime Minister, having told the cabinet: ‘Bring it on if you think you’re hard enough’. Most observers have concluded that someone will indeed bring it on, and Sir Keir’s days are numbered. But there is an almighty irony in Sir Keir’s desperate pleas to stay in the job. He might be useless. He might be clueless. He might be inept. But he is also right in suggesting, as per Louis XV, après moi le deluge. Dire as Starmer is, he is the dam holding off economic meltdown Liz Truss has, rightly, become a byword for chaos and for economic disaster. Every time Kemi Badenoch opens her mouth, Sir Keir references Truss as if that alone is enough to destroy any credibility the Conservative leader might claim to have.

It’s now been two days since the Golders Green terror attack, so if the response to previous such incidents is anything to go by, it’s time for the political class to forget about it and move on to something else. In recent weeks we’ve had – as well as the low level ‘ambient anti-Semitism’ of shouts of ‘dirty Jew’ and such like – arson attacks on synagogues, ambulances firebombed, a video of a Jewish building inspector being harangued and threatened with assault and, last October, two deaths at Heaton Park synagogue over Yom Kippur. The response is always the same: cliches about solidarity and standing together, and sometimes – as after the Golders Green attack and before that the Yom Kippur deaths – the promise of more money for security.

It’s always the newspeak that lacerates. The Royal Academy of Music (RAM) has, admirably, set up a new foundation year for 'talented young musicians who have previously faced significant obstacles', specifically the decline in music education in so many secondary schools – and indeed, the total absence in some. The foundation course will start in July with five students. They will also get accommodation in University of London halls of residence, financial assistance to buy an instrument and a bursary to cover living costs. It’s an excellent plan, in theory, to try to ensure that one of our best conservatoires doesn’t miss out on untapped young talent and, perhaps even more so, vice versa.  But here’s the newspeak.

Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential and popular podcasters in the world. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a podcasting sensation, a master of one of the most important of all modern broadcast mediums. Millions of followers hang on his utterances and appearances. Carlson has 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, 13.3 million followers on X, and 3.9 million on Instagram. But for all the popularity, there's a problem. Like Carlson, who was originally a mainstream Republican, Coughlin started out as a mainstream figure Nearly a century separates Carlson from Charles Coughlin, yet the parallels are so striking as to be eerie.

Would you share a house with someone black? Even to pose the question, let alone to say no, is to invite – quite rightly – the accusation of racism. But it’s a different matter when it comes to Jews. The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has today published a report on campus anti-Semitism in Britiain. Of all the statistics that show the sheer scale of the hate that Jewish students face, the most chilling is that one in five students (20 per cent) say they wouldn’t share a house with a Jew.  Campus anti-Semitism has been a problem for decades. It was a perennial when I was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, between 2008 and 2021. But it has transformed in recent years from a worrying issue that needed to be dealt with to a critical problem that is out of control.

In 1997 the doyen of Democrat political columnists in the US, E.J. Dionne, published They Only Look Dead. He argued that while the received wisdom was that the Republicans were set to dominate politics for a generation, there were underlying factors which pointed to a Democrat revival. Dionne was both completely wrong but also completely right. George W. Bush won the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. But the 2000 election turned, famously, on a Supreme Court ruling, and could easily have gone to Al Gore. And in 2008 and 2012 the Democrats did indeed dominate. They Only Look Dead would be the perfect title for a book about the Conservatives today. They certainly look near-dead.

The latest set of antisemitism figures from the Community Security Trust covering 2025 are depressingly predictable. Last year, saw 3,700 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK, the second highest annual total ever reported – second only to the 4,298 antisemitic incidents in 2023. The figures have rightly been described as appalling by ministers. But this is hypocrisy of the most grotesque kind The figures conform to a pattern. The worst year on record, 2023, saw the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jews on 7 October. Last year, the second worst year on record, saw the murders at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.

The political focus is, quite rightly, now on Sir Keir Starmer. You hardly need me to point out how tenuous his hold on office now is, or why. But there is one key aspect to that ‘why’ which has been relatively unremarked on. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch scored a direct hit on the Prime Minister when she asked him at PMQs, repeatedly, if he knew when he appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the US about his ongoing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile’s initial conviction. Starmer twice evaded the question; it was only when Badenoch came back with it for a third time that he made the admission that has turned a disastrous crisis for him into a likely fatal crisis. His attempt today to say he meant something else looks exactly as risible as it is.