European church news: questionable conversions to Christianity from 2016 to 2021

Over the past 20 years, clandestine migrants to Europe have not been strangers to converting to Christianity.

The same holds true in the United Kingdom, which I will get to in a moment.

Recent history

In 2005, a few British tabloids ran several front page articles on marriages of convenience between Britons and non-EU migrants. In 2016, I wrote about that phenomenon and what happened in the years that followed. Our courts ruled that the Church of England had special privileges, therefore, a Home Office Certificate of Approval was not required for this kind of wedding in an Anglican church. By 2008, it was estimated that the number of bogus weddings had increased by 400 per cent. London’s Diocese of Southwark found that applications for migrant-Briton wedding ceremonies rose from 90 in 2004 to 493 in 2015.

That same post then discussed the numbers of migrant conversions going on in the Lutheran Church in Germany with few questions asked. However, Catholic bishops in Austria took a dim view of migrants seeking to convert. In the Archdiocese of Vienna, priests were encouraged to interview potential converts during their year of spiritual and catechetical preparation prior to baptism. The Archdiocese’s figures showed that between 5 and 10 per cent of candidates dropped out afterwards. That was back in 2016.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, I wrote (emphases mine):

In England, however, Anglican clergy are eager to not only ask no questions but to combine the conversion process with helping to ease the refugee application process.

The Guardian interviewed the Revd Mohammad Eghtedarian, an Iranian refugee and convert who was later ordained. He is a curate at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. Eghtedarian says that refugee status and religious affiliation are intertwined.

Liverpool Cathedral has a process which involves registering refugee attendance, which helps their asylum applications. A candidate for Baptism must attend the five preparatory classes. A baptised refugee seeking Confirmation must attend a dozen courses.

Hmm. It sounds very minimal.

The Guardian asked Eghtedarian about the sincerity of those candidates. Even he acknowledged that ‘plenty of people’ were converting for convenience!

In large part, only a cursory examination exists. The Cathedral will also provide a ‘letter of attendance’ to immigration authorities, if requested.

The article said that the Church of England does not record conversions, regardless of background, because it could be a ‘sensitive’ issue.

It seems the Austrian Catholic bishops have approached the conversions of convenience issue more sensibly than the German Lutherans, who resent that immigration court judges ask refugees to discuss their newly-found beliefs in detail in order to assess their sincerity.

It is the responsibility of clergy to do a thorough examination of heart and mind during the conversion process rather than let false converts through the doors for Baptism and Confirmation.

2021 Liverpool hospital bomber, a high-profile convert

On Remembrance Sunday 2021, Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen, a Jordanian who failed to have his request for asylum granted, set off a bomb at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Interestingly, he was a convert to Christianity, a process he went through at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.

On the day, he jumped into a taxi and asked to be taken to Liverpool Cathedral, where the Remembrance Sunday parade ended. However, with so many road closures, the taxi could not get through, so Al-Swealmeen asked the driver, Dave Perry, to take him to the hospital instead.

Perry got Al-Swealmeen to the hospital entrance three minutes before 11 a.m., at which time Liverpudlians, along with the rest of the nation, observed a two-minute silence.

A bomb went off in the taxi. Dave Perry, thankfully, was able to escape — in six seconds. Al-Swealmeen died in the blaze. Fortunately, no one at the hospital, which, given its name, has a maternity unit, was harmed.

Police arrived at the scene at 11:04.

The Sun carried a report on the incident on November 14, excerpted below:

Brave Dave Perry leapt from the car and locked the doors as the device exploded at Liverpool Women’s Hospital yesterday – killing only the male passenger who carried the bomb.

Last night, David was stable in hospital with burns and shrapnel injuries, including damage to his ear.

Cops believe the device was a homemade bomb, “built by the passenger” who died, head of North West terror policing Russ Jackson said …

… cabbie Kev Cuthbertson posted: “It’s my mate who got blown up. He’s in a bad, bad way.

“He’s a fellow driver on delta. He’s had his ear sewn back on, got burns and shrapnel wounds and other pretty serious injuries. He is a hero. When he noticed the bomb, he locked the scumbag in the car. But took the brunt of the blast.”

Last night, an online fundraising page was set up to help David.

The organiser wrote: “His quick-thinking possibly saved a lot of lives.”

The car blew up in Liverpool at 10.59am, killing its “suspicious-looking” passenger as the country prepared to mark the Fallen at 11am.

Pals of the injured taxi driver, who was in a stable condition last night, said he acted courageously to thwart a bombing of the hospital, where 30 babies are born each day.

Three men aged 21, 26 and 29 were later arrested elsewhere in the city under the Terrorism Act.

Police in the region confirmed they were treating the incident as a terror incident.

The blast occurred close to the ­Liverpool Cathedral which was hosting one of the country’s largest Remembrance Sunday services with more than 2,000 people. It is less than a mile from the hospital.

One source said Mr Perry grew suspicious after the passenger asked him to drive to the cathedral but then changed his mind …

The following day, November 15, The Sun told us more about Al-Swealmeen, who also went by the name Enzo Almeni:

POPPY Day bomber Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen struck after his asylum bids were repeatedly turned down, it emerged last night.

The Jordanian, 32, also had mental health problems and was once arrested with a knife.

He blew himself up in a taxi at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Cabbie David Perry, 43, survived by a “miracle”.

Emad Jamil Al-Swealmeen, who had no known connections with any terrorist groups, blew himself to bits with a home-made ball-bearing device …

It remained unclear when exactly the bomber entered the UK but it was understood he had been in a long-term dispute with the Home Office over his application for UK residential status.

And he had not been granted leave to remain here permanently.

A source said: “One of the issues being looked at is whether this unresolved grievance pushed him over the edge and prompted him to carry out the attack.”

Here’s the conversion bit. Don’t miss the photo of the chap who took him in:

Following his arrival in the UK, Al-Swealmeen lived mostly in Liverpool, where he was supported by Christian ­volunteers from a network of churches helping asylum seekers.

According to friends, he earlier spent a large part of his life in Iraq, where his mother came from.

It was claimed that Al-Swealmeen had told friends he came from Syria — but The Sun understands he was a Jordanian national.

It was also claimed that motor-racing enthusiast Al-Swealmeen had changed his first name to Enzo in honour of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari — and to sound less Muslim in a bid to help his asylum ­application.

He was also said to have converted to Christianity at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral in 2017.

Al-Swealmeen spent eight months living with devoted Christians Malcolm and Elizabeth Hitchott at their home in the Aigburth district of Liverpool.

Former solider Mr Hitchott said: “He first came to the cathedral in August 2015 and wanted to convert to Christianity.

“He took an Alpha Course, which explains the Christian faith, and completed it in November of that year.

“That enabled him to come to an informed decision and he changed from Islam to Christianity and was confirmed as a Christian just before he came to live with us.

“He was destitute at that time and we took him in. The UK asylum people were never convinced he was Syrian and he was refused asylum in 2014.

“He had his case rejected because he has been sectioned due to some mental health incident where he was waving a knife at people from an overpass.”

Mr Hitchott explained: “He was going to put in a fresh asylum claim. Once he had done that, it was possible for him to be housed again by the Home Office and get £35 a week.

“He didn’t want to stay here any more. So he could get the accommodation, I gave him notice to leave. He never talked about Islam, terrorism, nothing.”

Mrs Hitchott said: “I bumped into him in a street, he was doing cake decoration at an educational class, a formal course somewhere, he was very enthusiastic. He showed me the designs he had done and what he was hoping to do in an upcoming exam. He was quite artistic.

“I gave him a sketchbook and pencils. He drew hills, flowers, everything around him.”

The couple said he loved motor racing and would often do go-karting at Brunswick in Liverpool.

The bomb factory where Al-Swealmeen constructed his deadly ball bearing device was yesterday revealed as a bedsit.

Police carried out a controlled explosion at the studio room in a Victorian property in Rutland Avenue in the city’s upmarket Sefton Park district.

Meanwhile, Dave Perry’s wife told the paper how grateful she was that her husband survived the blast.

That incident disgusted many Britons, to put it mildly: not only the act but also when and where it happened.

They were even more disgusted when politicians offered their condolences to the bomber. Guido Fawkes had the gaffes and the videos.

First out of the gate on November 15 was Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth:

Guido posted Ashworth’s subsequent apology:

This is obviously embarrassing I misread the news ticker in an interview and thought a member of the public had now died. My deepest apologies for this mistake.

The next day, it was the turn of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden and another Labour MP Charlotte Nichols:

Guido wrote (red emphases his):

On Sky News yesterday morning, Oliver Dowden expressed his “deep sympathy for the person that’s lost their life”, and claimed that he was joining the Prime Minister in doing so. Although Boris only tweeted his support for “all those affected”, rather than towards anyone specific…

Later, Labour MP Charlotte Nichols posted a tweet claiming she was “sending love to the family and friends of the person who was killed in the incident”. The tweet has since been deleted.

To top it all off, the Mirror then posted a Facebook status saying “…police have now named the man who sadly died. RIP 💔”. The statement was swiftly edited to remove the heartbreak, although it’s still visible in the post history…

Guido also has screengrabs of the Mirror‘s posts, a sight to behold. Ugh. And they call themselves journalists.

More followed on the bomber, his motives — and the conversion.

On November 16, the Mail‘s erstwhile columnist Dan Wootton wrote:

I can’t get out of my head how close we came to a tragedy of unimaginable proportions in Liverpool on Sunday – and how little most of the media and our leaders seem to want to talk about it.

If terrorist Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen had been able to emerge from hero cabbie Dave Perry’s car and enter Liverpool Women’s Hospital and if he’d been a better bomb-maker the loss of life to mums, their newborn and NHS staff would likely have been catastrophic.

Or, if he’d got just around the corner to Liverpool Cathedral, where he had previously converted to Christianity – perhaps in a bid to fool us all – as veterans and their families were marking Remembrance Day, the carnage would have been equally devastating.

But he didn’t.

The moronic monster, who arrived in the UK from the Middle East seven years ago, became the latest terrorist on British shores to kill himself and no one else, meaning our woke, well-meaning Establishment can avoid the politically incorrect but completely necessary conversations our country must have.

Meanwhile, as familiar pictures of dozens of migrants crammed into inflatables show today, up to a thousand more illegal and undocumented migrants – the vast majority young men from who knows where – stream across the Channel every day to join our asylum system and, in most cases, never leave again …

More than 22,000 illegals have entered the country this year – many destroy their passports, throw their phone into the sea and tear up any other paperwork, meaning we have no idea of who we are letting in from France …

The horrifying reality is that some of the people on these boats may already be operating within terror cells. At least, they are ripe for radicalisation when their dream life in the UK turns out to be less than idyllic.

The government wants us to turn a blind eye to this problem because they cannot seem to solve it, no matter how much tough talk comes from the mouths of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel …

… the only heartless thing is to continue to ignore policy failures that are resulting in the threat of deadly terrorism on our shores.

It’s our responsibility to have these uncomfortable conversations and refuse to look away.

Don’t miss the photo of a smiling Al-Swealmeen in a Swan Vestas (!!) apron and chef’s toque, holding a glass of wine and cooking. There’s another photo of him in the same apron proudly displaying a pizza. Then there are photos of him standing near a front door which sports a heart wreath.

The next day, the Mail had more about the bomb and other raids the police had made in Liverpool since the incident. There was also this gem, along with a photo of the Hitchotts, the couple from the Cathedral who put him up for eight months in 2017:

Friends said they were astounded that the ‘quiet and bashful’ young man, who was also a big fan of country singer Johnny Cash, was behind the Poppy Day bomb.

On November 19, The Express reported:

Emad Al Swealmeen is believed to have been plotting the explosion for at least seven months.

Detectives have since traced the purchase of bomb making material to April 2021, around the time he was renting a flat on Rutland Avenue.

Merseyside Police also confirmed he booked and got the taxi he would go on to blow up and die in on Sunday.

On November 20, the paper provided an update:

Emad Al Swealmeen, 32, died when his bomb blew up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Sunday. Experts have now revealed it may have exploded prematurely when his taxi suddenly jolted to a stop.

The blast left taxi driver David Perry, 43, lucky to escape with just minor wounds before the vehicle was engulfed in flames.

Mr Perry may have put his brakes on suddenly at the hospital drop-off point, causing the explosion, it was said.

Russ Jackson, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North West, said the fact it detonated inside the taxi meant only the bomber was killed.

Experts believe had the bomb functioned as intended, metal fragments would have been flung in all directions, shredding the car and cutting down passers-by.

Mr Perry is thought to have escaped serious injury because the blast was largely confined to the back seat before the vehicle erupted in flames.

Mr Jackson added that they had found no links to the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.

Church of England denies responsibility

On November 17, two articles about Al-Swealmeen notional conversion appeared in the press.

The Express interviewed the Hitchcotts:

The bomber met Elizabeth Hitchcott and her lay preacher husband Malcolm after being baptised in 2015 and confirmed as a Christian at the Liverpool Cathedral in 2017. Days later the couple, both 77, of Aigburth, Merseyside, took him in for eight months. Mrs Hitchcott said: “The one thing I suppose to be thankful for is that he did not kill anyone else. “We are just so sad. We loved him. We were shocked when we heard what he had done.”

Ex-soldier Mr Hitchcott said Al Swealmeen claimed he converted to Christianity after becoming disillusioned with Islam.

He said: “He took an Alpha course, which explains the Christian faith. He was confirmed as a Christian just before he came to live with us.

Al Swealmeen first contacted the Hitchcotts after his asylum appeal was dismissed and he was “desperate” for somewhere to stay.

Mr Hitchcott said: “He arrived here on April 1 2017. He was with us then for eight months and during that time we saw him really blossoming in regards to his Christian faith.

“He really had a passion about Jesus that I wish many Christians had and he was ready to learn.

“He was keen on reading his Bible and every night we used to pray. We prayed for half an hour or so and studied the scriptures. We had a great time together. He was absolutely genuine, as far as I could tell.

“I was in no doubt by the time that he left us that he was a Christian.”

Mr Hitchcott said Al Swealmeen changed his name to Enzo Almeni to shorten it and make it more European, “not for any ulterior motive”.

He admitted however that he had not spoken to Al Swealmeen in four years and there may have been “changes in his personality and his beliefs” during that time. Al Swealmeen’s confirmation at Liverpool Cathedral was conducted by Bishop Cyril Ashton.

Bishop Ashton said: “It seems that sadly, despite this grounding, the bomber chose a different path for his life.”

Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the bomber, described as “artistic”, had taken a cake decorating course at the City of Liverpool College three years before the attack.

The college said it was “dismayed to hear of his involvement in the tragic events” on Sunday.

The Mail focused on the Church of England and migrant conversions. The article also has Al-Swealmeen’s Confirmation photos. One caption reads:

He was not seen by the church soon after he was confirmed amid claims the Church of England is aiding an abuse of the immigration system

The article says:

The Church of England today denied there is any link between their vicars converting Muslim migrants and systemic abuse of the asylum system after it was revealed the Liverpool suicide bomber had found Jesus and then appealed his own case.

Emad Al Swealmeen lost his first bid to stay in Britain in 2014 but appealed again in 2017 after he was confirmed at Liverpool Cathedral and his case was still outstanding when he blew himself up in a taxi on Sunday.

Vicars have been accused of aiding asylum seekers to ‘game’ the immigration system by helping hundreds to convert from Islam and ‘pray to stay’ in the UK as it emerged people smugglers are using Instagram to urge migrants to follow Jesus to help them gain British citizenship.

But in a statement the CofE said: ‘We are not aware of any evidence to suggest a widespread correlation between conversion to Christianity, or any other faith, and abuse of the asylum system’.

And in a barbed response to Home Office source claims that changing from Islam to Christianity is now ‘standard practice’ among asylum seekers ‘to game the system’, a spokesman said: ‘It is not the role of clergy to establish the legitimacy of asylum claims and to assess security implications’.

MPs are to demand a ­formal Parliamentary probe into whether fake Christian converts are duping the Church of England to avoid being deported back to strict Muslim countries they came from. If the inquiry goes ahead Priti Patel would likely be hauled in to give evidence after the Home Secretary said Al Swealmeen, who changed his name to Enzo Almeni shortly after finding Jesus, had exploited the UK’s asylum ‘merry-go-round’.

Tim Loughton, a senior Tory MP on the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: ‘There is a worrying new development where it appears certain asylum seekers are playing the religious card to avoid deportation to certain countries. This is gaming the system and something we must look into’.

Rev Mohammad Eghtedarian, then a clergyman at Liverpool Cathedral, admitted in 2016 that ‘plenty of people’ were lying about their intentions after it emerged that the Church of England had christened hundreds of asylum seekers under a scheme dubbed ‘pray to stay’. He said: ‘There are many people abusing the system… I’m not ashamed of saying that. But is it the person’s fault or the system’s fault? And who are they deceiving? The Home Office, me as a pastor, or God?’

It came as new statistics revealed that between January 2020 and June this year, 29% of all migrants arriving by boat say they are from Iran and 20% say they are from Iraq. 91% of all migrants came from just 10 countries – including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea and Yemen. These are also nations named in the top 20 countries where Christians are the most persecuted for following Jesus …

Today it emerged that people traffickers have used social media sites such as Instagram to advertise crossings from France to the UK – and urge customers to consider conversion to Christianity to bolster their cases. Because the largest number of UK asylum seekers come from Muslim countries, they can also argue that their new faith would put their lives at risk if they returned to the home country.

One such advert, in Arabic, has a picture of Jesus and says finding God will lead to more successful asylum claims ‘in the shortest possible time with the lowest cost’.  

The Home Office has previously said converting to Christianity does not automatically result in a successful asylum claim. The Church of England has said baptism is ‘open to all’ and that it is up to the Government to vet asylum seekers, not them.

But Sam Ashworth-Hayes, of the counter-extremist Henry Jackson Society, said: ‘We know that people are willing to lie to win asylum up to and including faking religious conversions. This is incentivised by the asylum system, which does not do enough to root out fakes.’

Now back to Al-Swealmeen and Liverpool Cathedral:

Poppy Day bomber Emad Al Swealmeen was baptised in 2015 at Liverpool Cathedral and went on to be confirmed in 2017 after his claim for asylum was rejected in 2014. But the cathedral ‘lost contact’ with him the following year – with the bishop who carried out his confirmation service saying yesterday he had ‘no specific recollection’ of Al Swealmeen.

It emerged yesterday that Al Swealmeen was baptised as a Christian at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral in 2015, one of around 200 asylum seekers to adopt the faith there over a four-year period.

It is understood this did not play a role in his asylum claims. But conversions are ‘standard practice’ among some asylum seekers, in particular those from Iran and Iraq, who seek to ‘game the system’, Home Office sources said. 

A counter-extremism think-tank last night called for an investigation into the ‘Liverpool Cathedral convert cluster’.

Oddly enough, in 2015, even Mr Hitchcott said that some asylum seekers were converting for convenience:

a lay minister at the cathedral – who would later take in Al Swealmeen [in 2017] – also warned that some asylum seekers ‘attend church with the sole purpose of advancing their asylum claims’.

The article looks at the Cathedral’s motives:

At the time of Al-Swealmeen’s baptism, Liverpool Cathedral was in the midst of a successful drive to both boost its congregation and embrace prospective converts.

More than 130 new converts of Iranian origin alone were baptised, with a total of 200 asylum seekers converting there between 2012 and 2016.

Liverpool was then a dispersal centre for asylum seekers, with volunteers helping to mentor new arrivals and help them access charity facilities and food banks.

In 2016 the Very Rev Peter Wilcox, then Dean of Liverpool and now Bishop of Sheffield, admitted some had ‘mixed motives’, adding: ‘Once you are a baptised Christian it is really not conceivable that you would be deported to a Muslim country.’ At the end of that year, Church Commissioners agreed £1million of funding to roll out the Anglican cathedral’s ‘multiplying congregations’ scheme across the diocese. And Liverpool Cathedral’s weekly average aggregate attendance had also risen to 702, from 438 in 2013.

Insiders stressed that the two-year ‘examination process’ of Christian conversion was ‘rigorous’ and designed to weed out opportunists.

Those applying for asylum go on to be challenged ‘strongly’ on their faith by the Home Office to check it is genuine …

The current Dean of Liverpool Cathedral last night suggested Al Swealmeen’s faith had been genuine, saying two years was a ‘long time’ to attend church for asylum reasons alone. The Very Rev Sue Jones added: ‘We can’t have responsibility for everyone. What we offer here is a safe space for asylum seekers.’

Bishop Cyril Ashton, who conducted Al Swealmeen’s confirmation service, said: ‘The church takes confirmation seriously… It seems that, sadly, the bomber chose a different path for his life’ …

Al Swealmeen is understood to have moved legally to the UK in 2014 from Dubai, where he spent his teenage years after allegedly being abused by his Syrian father.

Later that year his initial asylum application was turned down. It is understood his claim was ‘not compliant’ with Home Office rules. Al Swealmeen, who changed his name to Enzo Almeni after becoming a Christian, made a fresh asylum application in 2017 but this was rejected two years later.

His legal challenges were still under way when he died in the failed bomb attack.

Strangely enough, with all of those helpful conversions to those in need:

The cathedral is being treated as a potential target by counter-terror police. Its Remembrance Day service was taking place a mile from Liverpool Women’s Hospital at 11am on Sunday.

Al-Swealmeen is not the only failed asylum-seeker-convert to have committed an atrocity:

Khairi Saadallah, who killed three men in a rampage in a Reading park in June last year [2020], converted to Christianity more than a year before the attack. He twice failed to win asylum in 2012.

On November 22, one week after the attack, GB News’s Patrick Christys’s editorial was about the attack and the fact that politicians and media were sweeping it under the carpet. He rightly wondered what was going through the mind of cabbie Dave Perry and his grateful wife:

I very much doubt that Liverpudlian taxi driver David Perry and his family have moved on from the fact that he’s so lucky to be alive after a man blew himself up in the back of his car. I doubt they’ve stopped thinking about whether or not the Anglican church is actually complicit in a great big asylum swindle that sees people fraudulently convert to Christianity in a bid to remain in this country.

Tomorrow I will have a 2024 update: the latest horrific episode involving a convenient Christian convert and the finger-pointing between Church and state.

Britain’s high speed rail dream is in doubt: the sad — and expensive — story of HS2

Several days ago someone in Downing Street leaked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s news that the extension from Birmingham to Manchester of HS2, Britain’s massive high speed rail project, was to be binned.

The news leak appeared in the media just days before the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, held between October 1 and 4, 2023.

The Guardian‘s live coverage from Wednesday, October 4, said (bold in the original):

Sunak confirms Manchester leg of HS2 being scrapped, with ‘every single penny’ from £36bn going on other transport projects

Sunak confirms he is scrapping the Manchester leg of HS2.

When the facts change, it is important to change policy.

He says this will free up £36bn – and every single penny will be spent on “hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands and across the country”.

The main reason is the outrageous cost overrun, but the Government has also claimed railway travel has changed since the pandemic.

Grant Shapps, the new Defence Secretary, said on Wednesday, October 4 that people were no longer taking the train that often because they were working from home.

However, statistics show that Britain’s rail travel is currently returning to pre-pandemic levels:

Grant Shapps' suggestion that the pandemic somehow fundamentally shifted people away from using the railways, and so it's fine to cancel HS2, is deeply disingenuous.

Here's what the latest rail usage statistics show. #CPC23 pic.twitter.com/RCO9o1YNdc

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) October 4, 2023

On Thursday, October 5, The Guardian reported that Labour would not be able to revive the project (purple emphases mine):

A future Labour government would not be able to easily reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 as he has “spitefully” authorised the sale of properties that were subject to compulsory purchase orders on part of the route.

Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, said the move killed HS2 “stone dead” and would “tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible”.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, on Thursday refused to commit to building HS2, telling ITV News Meridian: “What I can’t do is stand here now they have taken a wrecking ball to this project, and say that we will simply reverse it.

“What I will say is we will work with leaders across the country to make sure that we have the transport we need between our cities and within our cities and projects that can actually be delivered.”

Then there is the question of whether the line would begin at Euston Station in the centre of London rather than Old Oak Common on the outskirts of the capital:

The government failed to deny that HS2 would not be extended to Euston unless enough private investment was secured to pay for the new station.

“There is already support and interest from the private sector. Ministers have had discussions with key partners since the announcement,” a government spokesperson said.

Mark Harper, the transport secretary, also conceded on Thursday that paying off contracts previously awarded for the cancelled HS2 sections would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

He told BBC Breakfast that the cost of pulling out of the agreements would “broadly balance out” with money recovered from selling land and property acquired for the high-speed railway.

The Government is planning to sell off the land that would have been part of the HS2 continuation:

National Labour proponents of HS2 were blindsided on Wednesday when the prime minister not only cancelled the Manchester leg but made it extremely difficult for the project to be restarted. “We expected him to kick it into the long grass,” said one party source. “We are now trying to understand where this leaves us. Selling off the land was unexpected.”

Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer, said the decision to sell off the land was motivated by “spite” and was, in effect, “salting the earth” to make it extremely difficult for Labour to restart the project.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said that within “weeks” it would lift the so-called “safeguarding” order on phase 2a of the route, which would have run from Birmingham to Crewe in Cheshire. Safeguarding is the process HS2 Ltd and the government use to buy up land needed for the railway.

As of last week, HS2 Ltd had bought up 239 properties on phase 2a at a cost of £219.3m. “Any property that is no longer required for HS2 will be sold and a programme is being developed to do this,” said the DfT in its Network North prospectus, released on Wednesday.

“Phase 2a safeguarding will be formally lifted in weeks,” said the document.

However, the DfT confirmed on Thursday that safeguarding would remain for now on the Crewe to Manchester leg (phase 2b west) as well as the Birmingham to Leeds spur (phase 2b east), which was paused by the government in November 2021. “Phase 2b safeguarding will be amended by summer next year”, said the government, to retain any land needed for Northern Powerhouse Rail, a new east-west line across the Pennines.

Dennis said: … “What will happen now is essentially a fire sale. The land is not going to be returned to nature. It’s going to be developed on. That will make it much more expensive and much more complex should any future government want to build it.”

Rotheram said: “After weeks of uncertainty and confusion, Rishi Sunak’s lifting of the HS2 safeguarding order means that he has not only cancelled HS2 but he’s killed it stone dead. The consequences of this decision will tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible.

“The Liverpool city region was set to benefit from a £15bn economic boost from the delivery of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in full. Almost overnight, the prime minister has robbed us of that chance to grow and develop our economy. He has turned the northern powerhouse into the northern powerless with this latest act of a long line of pronouncements that are holding the north down, not levelling us up.”

On Friday, October 6, The Guardian interviewed a farmer from Staffordshire who had sold his land to HS2 just days before Sunak’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference:

You might expect the farmer whose farm was going to be split in two by the second leg of HS2 to be jumping with joy at the news of its cancellation.

But Edward Cavenagh-Mainwaring’s land was bought through compulsory purchase by HS2 Ltd five days before Rishi Sunak’s announcement to scrap phase 2 of the high-speed line. He has lost a quarter of his Staffordshire dairy farm and fears he will never be able to buy it back.

“Am I jumping up and down? No I’m not,” said Cavenagh-Mainwaring. “I’ve gone through bereavement. I worked the land for the last time the day before they took it. I shed tears for it.

“I’ve lived in the shadow of HS2 for nearly 10 years. My time and mental health has been squandered on this project. I feel sorry for all the people who have suffered – selling their houses, watching woods being felled.”

Resigned to the arrival of bulldozers, and unable to witness the land his family had farmed for food and wildlife for decades trashed, Cavenagh-Mainwaring had made plans to move away, selling his dairy herd and renting out the remainder of his divided farm.

When plans were first revealed for the second leg from the West Midlands to Crewe and on to Manchester, Cavenagh-Mainwaring said he found HS2 “constructive”. They listened to his concerns and adjusted the height of a farm access tunnel under the planned embankment so it would fit farm machinery, for instance. “In the last two years, they’ve been a different animal … [They say] ‘This is what we’re doing.’”

Cavenagh-Mainwaring described his heartbreak, one of many stories about HS2’s destruction of nature and history:

When protesters took up residence in a nearby wood – which was not actually in the line of HS2 – HS2 sent in security. “It wasn’t just 10 or 20, but 200 security who looked like paramilitaries. They fenced in the protesters, and ambulances and climbing crews and diggers sat there waiting outside for about 30 days.”

HS2 also put security with dogs in Whitmore Wood, an ancient woodland that he owns, “and completely failed to ask us if this was OK,” he said.

Although construction work had not begun on the 2a section from the West Midlands to Crewe, HS2 had been undertaking advanced environmental mitigation works.

According to Cavenagh-Mainwaring, they took one of his best wildflower meadows, told him it was of low environmental value and sprayed swaths of it with weedkiller so they could build two ponds for great-crested newts. The meadow was on sandstone, one of the drier areas of the farm, and they had to bring in articulated lorry-loads of water on to the site to fill the ponds.

“I could have showed them where to put newt ponds – where there is low-lying land with water – but they never asked,” he said. “I find it extraordinary that I don’t think I’ve ever been asked for advice by them when I’ve spent my life farming the land here.

“I can’t describe the amount of wasted money that locals have to watch,” he said …

Cavenagh-Mainwaring received the first tranche of payment from HS2 last Friday for 105 hectares (260 acres), which it bought for the line and construction works. He is fighting for more, arguing that HS2 has valued the land too low and he would not be able to buy comparable acres in the area with the money.

If HS2 decides to sell the land again, he will be given first option to buy it back but that will be a struggle because he has to pay capital gains tax on the money he has received.

Cavenagh-Mainwaring also fears he will never be given that opportunity. “If we have this conversation in 10 years’ time, I think they will still own the land. This is one government shelving it – another may decide to build it again. I will be amazed if we get offered our land back. My legacy was soil and wildlife. HS2 own it now.”

HS2 was an EU project begun when the UK was still part of it. The EU’s objective was to have all member nations linked up for high speed rail travel. It has also been said that the EU wanted these rail networks built for national security reasons, i.e. rapid transport in case of war.

Costs out of control years ago

On January 31, 2020, after Boris Johnson won the December 2019 general election, he was interviewed by a schoolboy who asked him about the railway, the costs of which were already out of control at that stage.

Guido Fawkes has the story and the video (red emphases his):

The journalist who has managed to squeeze the biggest clue towards uncovering the Government’s HS2 decision is ten years-old Braydon Brent. In a sit down interview with the schoolboy, Boris said “in a hole the size of HS2, the only thing to do is keep digging.” Which isn’t quite the phrase…

The boy asked Boris to explain what HS2 is. Boris answered:

It’s a colossal railway line. Now the truth is, the people who did it spent far too much money, they were profligate with the way they did it. Do you know what I mean by profligate? They just wasted money. And the whole way it was managed was hopeless. So we’re in a hole. We’re in a mess. But we’ve got to get out of it and we need a way forward, so we’re thinking about how to sort it out now.

The boy asked whether it was a deep hole or a small one. Boris said:

It’s a … in a hole the size of HS2, the only thing to do is keep digging.

That’s what you’ve got to do. It’s a big hole.

Days later, on February 5, Guido reported on the Taxpayers’ Alliance list of 50 transport projects, most of which involved rail, that would be more useful and more cost-effective. Guido’s post listed half of them:

Many of the entries required only relatively small sums of money to achieve vast benefits for local communities with the potential for dramatically transforming the transport infrastructure nationally, not only in the Midlands.

On February 11, Boris confirmed that HS2 would go ahead. Guido posted the video and remarked:

In the House of Commons, Boris has formally what was revealed last night: HS2 has been given the go-ahead by Cabinet, despite the explosion in costs.

Protests and campaigns against wanton destruction

Nearly one year later, on January 27, 2021, the Mail reported that eco-protesters were at London’s Euston station. One of them was Swampy, a veteran tree preservation activist from the 1990s. I remember him well:

Bailiffs today began evicting anti-HS2 protesters who secretly dug a 100ft tunnel network under a makeshift camp near London’s Euston Station with the help of veteran activist Swampy.

The HS2 Rebellion activists scaled cranes and clambered onto wooden platforms in the trees in Euston Square Gardens early this morning as enforcement officers moved in to remove the eco-warriors from the Tree Protection Camp, which was set up in September in protest against the £100billion project.

But as the operation to remove the activists stalled on Wednesday evening, a handful of activists were preparing to spend the night in the tunnels, saying they are prepared to stay underground indefinitely.

Protesters including Swampy, real name Daniel Hooper, have barricaded themselves in two tunnels codenamed ‘Kelvin’ and Kristal’ as they brace for a ‘length siege’ for potentially weeks as police arrested six people – including three for breaches of Covid regulations. 

One HS2 activist sang as he was brought down from a tree by National Eviction Team bailiffs using aerial platforms, while another protester could be heard shouting as he was dragged from the camp by enforcement agents. 

The group, which is protesting HS2 plans to destroy the gardens by building a temporary taxi rank for Euston Station, claims an ‘illegal eviction’ began shortly before 5am today when enforcement officers ‘entered the camp under cover of darkness’. 

They accused HS2 of ‘breaking the law by attempting an eviction without a court order and during the national coronavirus lockdown’. An HS2 spokeswoman blasted the ‘illegal’ occupation and said it presented a ‘danger’ to HS2 staff and High Court enforcement officers.  

Later that year, Swampy and his pals walked free from court for their Euston occupation. On October 7, the Mail reported:

A group of HS2 protesters who cost developers millions after they dug a series of tunnels close to London‘s Euston Station have walked free from court.

A judge yesterday threw out charges against the group, including the veteran eco-activist Swampy, over the month-long underground protest.

The demonstrators, part of a group called HS2 Rebellion, were arrested in February after using the 100-foot tunnel system and several treehouses to play a cat-and-mouse game with authorities over the rail link.

The protest is reported to have cost developers £3.5million – with £2.8million spent on enforcement officers to remove the activists from the site.

The trial against Daniel Hooper, 48 – known as ‘Swampy’ – Dr Larch Maxey, 49, Isla Sandford, 18, Lachlan Sandford, 20, Juliett Stevenson-Clarke, 22 and Scott Breen, 47, started on Tuesday at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court.

But district judge Susan Williams yesterday dismissed the charges of aggravated trespass, saying that at the time of the protest HS2 was not engaged in construction work on the site. A separate charge against Dr Maxey of damage to a mobile phone was also dismissed.

After leaving court, Swampy told The Guardian: ‘We shouldn’t have been in court in the first place because HS2 shouldn’t have been happening. 

‘Our plan is to stop HS2. Aggravated trespass charges were completely the wrong ones to level against us.’ 

On October 29 that year, The Independent reported on claims that HS2 were bulldozing over archaeological sites along the route:

HS2 bosses have revealed the discovery of “astonishing” Roman statues dug up along the route – to the anger of environmentalists who claim that historic sites are being destroyed.

Archaeologists dug up two complete figures of what appear to be a man and a woman, along with the head of a child, at an abandoned medieval church in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire.

The find, described as a “once in a lifetime” discovery, also includes a hexagonal glass Roman jug, large pieces of which were still intact despite its having been in the ground for what is thought to be more than 1,000 years.

But opponents of the £106bn high-speed railway, which when completed will run from London to Crewe and Manchester, have accused the company of public-relations spin, or “greywashing”, in announcing the discoveries as other finds are “bulldozed over”.

They pointed out that a 2013 HS2 environmental survey had identified 969 archaeological sites on the route of phase one alone – the London to Birmingham leg – but that the company had decided to investigate only 60 of them …

Joe Rukin, of the Stop HS2 campaign group, told The Independent: “It was inevitable there would be archaeological finds, but the crime is the number of sites known to exist that are not being properly investigated and are being bulldozed over without proper investigations, even in areas where it’s known there are lost villages or Roman settlements.

“Due to the sheer scale of HS2 there simply aren’t enough archaeologists in the country to properly investigate every site of interest.”

The article included Joe Rukin’s tweet:

Todays #HS2 spin is that their archaeological work will reveal the 'Story of a Nation' & other such hyperbole. But with only 60 digs against around 1000 identified sites, all they're showing is they've not the time or resources to do it properly. #StopHS2 https://t.co/faSdxgGUDH pic.twitter.com/puMIMAVAZH

— Joe Rukin (@joerukin) October 26, 2018

Property owners’ heartbreak

On January 29, 2023, The Sunday Times had an in-depth report on the costs thus far for the rail project, ‘How did HS2 become a £100 billion money pit?’

I will return to this article below with regard to cost, but this is a summary of the heartbreak that property owners experienced in selling to HS2, beginning in 2012 when David Cameron was Prime Minister:

The line has been extensively chopped and changed since the route was first agreed. The “eastern leg” of the original Y-shaped route was expected to link Birmingham with Leeds. Thousands of homes were compulsorily purchased along the route — including the Shimmer estate, a modern housing estate in Mexborough, near Doncaster, where building began in 2012.

In July 2016, residents received handwritten letters informing them that the government would need to acquire “some or all” of their land. With their properties effectively valued at nothing on the open market, most residents sold up to HS2.

In November 2021, however, it was announced that HS2 would not reach South Yorkshire after all, stopping 50 miles south of the Shimmer estate. In total, some £146 million has been spent by HS2 on properties along the now-abandoned route.

Further west is the Golborne Link, a short 13-mile section of track that would have let HS2 trains speed on to Scotland. This was scrapped in April 2022, probably knocking about £2 billion off the eventual cost — but at least £52 million had already been spent on development.

While I can somewhat accept that these properties were worth ‘nothing’ on the open market, I do wonder if that is true in most cases. It would be interesting to know what happened to those families and where they are living now.

Spiralling costs

Independent reports allege that the Government knew HS2 costs were spiralling out of control years ago, yet did not admit to it.

On August 26, 2021, the left-leaning The Canary posted the follwing (bold in the original):

The latest in the #FollowTheMoney series has found that the Cabinet Office ignored a request by a member of the House of Lords to investigate a minister, a civil servant, and the chair of HS2 LTD over allegations they misled parliament and broke codes of civil service.

The Cabinet Office has told The Canary it isn’t investigating allegations that ministers broke the ministerial code through misleading parliament over the budget of HS2, which could cost as much a £142.02bn …

Documents seen by The Canary state that Nusrat Ghani, a junior minister employed by Department for Transport (DfT) ‘misled’ parliament on five occasions:

Ms Ghani has broken the Ministerial Code regarding openness, honesty & leadership.

Ms Ghani mislead select committees & parliament 5 times for the sole reason that MPs would not become aware of the £20bn cost increase & the 5 year delay before & during the HS2 phase 2a debate …

Included in documents sent to the Cabinet Office is a detailed timeline indicating that ministers and civil servants actively misled parliament about the cost of HS2.

Oct 2018 – The National Audit Office (NAO) published the HS2 progress report. It found that HS2 contractors estimated that the main construction costs were 83% above the budgeted price. HS2 Ltd formally notified the DfT that there were “significant challenges to the affordability of the programme”.

Jun 2019 – The now former chair of HS2, Allan Cook informed the DfT there was ‘no prospect’ of HS2 Ltd delivering phase 1 in budget.

Jun 2019 – The Infrastructure and Projects Authority undertakes a review and concludes that successful delivery is unachievable.

July 2019 – In early July, officials provide the accounting officer and HS2 Ltd chief executive with updated advice, which concludes that Phase One is unaffordable.

15 July 2019 – At a debate in the House of Commons, Nusrat Ghani, a junior minister employed by DfT ‘misled’ parliament. When asked about the HS2 budget, she failed to inform ministers of a £20bn increase in cost. A cost increase that the DfT knew about.

The NAO HS2 report shows that by the time of the debate (15 July 2019) the DfT knew that HS2 could not be completed within its budget …

Now it’s thought that the true cost could be up to £142.02bn.

One of the biggest issues with the DfT’s response is that even if you take the two highest figures the numbers don’t add up. According to its own justification, the total cost would have reached £52bn …

Three months later, on November 18, 2021, the BBC reported that the HS2 leg to Leeds would be scrapped in favour of local transport improvements:

Local service upgrades, bringing faster journeys, will happen up to 10 years earlier than planned, ministers say.

The plan will cost £96bn, but only half of that is thought to be new money.

It comes as businesses reacted angrily to reports the East Midlands-Leeds HS2 high-speed line would not be built.

However, campaigners against the HS2 have said they are “elated” by the reports …

There has been outcry from some politicians and businesses in the north of England at reports that there will not be an entire new fast line between Leeds and Manchester, via Bradford. The improvements to the NPR east-west connections are likely to involve upgrades to existing infrastructure …

However, earlier this week, Sandra Haith, from an anti-HS2 campaign group in Bramley, Rotherham, said she was “absolutely elated”, saying the proposed route would have brought “untold devastation” and “heartbreak” to communities along the line.

The following day, Guido pointed out that Labour’s outrage at the cancelling of the leg to Leeds was somewhat false. Guido pointed out that Sir Keir Starmer was against HS2 from the beginning. So were other Labour MPs. Something to remember as Labour’s party conference begins on Sunday, October 8, 2023:

Now the HS2 rail extension to Leeds has been scrapped, Labour’s immediately called the announcement “a great train robbery” and insisted the north is being “sold out“. Sir Keir even claimed “the north of England has been betrayed“. The only problem is Starmer himself openly opposed HS2 for years, both as a candidate and later as an MP …

Guido’s post has a full report on Starmer’s opposition to the project.

In December 2022, Guido posted a list of topics about which Parliament appeared to be less than honest. One of them involved the cost of HS2:

Michael Byng, a quantity surveyor, believes the true cost of HS2 should be £158 billion not £102 billion and that the true costs are being withheld from parliament for fear of cancellation of the project. Tony Gueterbock (Lord Berkeley)

2023’s burning question: where is the London start point?

This year, another burning HS2 question was where the line should begin in London. Is it Old Oak Common in Ealing (west London) or is it the proper place, Euston?

The answers vary.

As an example, on March 26, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove cast doubt on Euston.

On March 28, Rishi confirmed it would be Euston.

It still is not clear.

Why European high speed rail costs less

Returning to the aforementioned Sunday Times article from January 2023, it explains why EU rail projects cost less.

Few will be surprised to know that British costs, unlike those of our Continental cousins, are based on the worst-case scenario:

A crucial reason why HS2’s costs grew so dramatically is down to how its contracts were awarded. In February 2020, a government-commissioned independent review suggested that “considerable over-specification and ‘gold-plating’” of HS2 contracts — with many designed around a “worst-case, risk-averse scenario,” was a key driver behind the inflated prices.

Had the government accepted more risk on things like the slopes of embankments and railway foundations, where “those who are able to manage risk should carry risk”, the project could have been delivered more cheaply.

The article has a chart showing how much cheaper high speed railway links cost in EU countries. The contrast is astounding.

We discover why. This part also has more about Euston and Old Oak Common:

France, Germany and Spain were able to build high-speed rail networks at a cost of tens of millions per mile. But even if HS2’s 140-mile phase one link is completed within budget, it will cost about £300 million per mile. Why?

One factor is the extensive tunnelling. Britain does not have a monopoly on Nimbyism, as France and Italy are well aware: the €25 billion (£22 billion) Turin-Lyon high-speed rail link beneath the Alps has attracted angry protests for decades. But HS2 has been the subject of substantial petitioning by MPs and residents about the plans for the Chilterns.

A six-mile tunnel was initially mooted for the area, but after petitioning in the early 2010s, a far longer ten-mile option has been chosen, to protect the countryside …

The most expensive parts of the whole scheme have been the stations. And here, the endless chopping and changing may have cost the government heavily.

Euston station — the proposed start of the line — involves heavy construction work in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It would help to get it right the first time.

On Friday, The Sun reported that the entire extension to Euston could be scrapped, with trains stopping at Old Oak Common in Ealing. Doing so could have saved £4 billion, but would have required completely redesigning the west London station, on which construction is well under way, to allow trains to stop there.

For the government, though, Old Oak Common was one chop and change too far. Mere hours later, Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the line would indeed carry passengers to Euston.

The original plan for Euston was for an 11-platform station that would open when phase one finished — but in 2021 HS2 said it would scale the project back to ten platforms. Last October, though, it admitted that “significant elements” of the £100 million designs “can no longer be used”.

Some believe the true figure is even higher. “It can take up to five years to redesign a station,” says Gareth Dennis, a rail engineer and chairman of the North Eastern Railway Engineers’ Forum. “That £100 million figure is probably an underestimate. You’d expect design to be around 20 per cent of the total spend — so for a multibillion-pound station like Euston that could be hundreds of millions.”

While the original plans allowed for Euston to be finished in two stages — one for the initial leg of HS2, and another when the later legs were added — the new plans envisage the station being constructed all in one go.

There is a problem, says William Barter, a railway consultant: “With uncertainty over the rest of the line, we don’t actually know what kind of railway we’re building a terminus for.”

A ten-platform option at Euston could end up unfit for purpose by the time it opens because it assumes the eastern leg will never be built. “It made the classic British mistake of assuming that on paper, this minimum viable product will deliver — and with no extra capacity baked into the system,” Dennis says. “Having more capacity than you need is a good thing, but we’re basically allergic to it.” Drivers will recall a similar problem when the M25 motorway opened in 1986: the route was already below capacity from the start.

The Labour peer Lord Berkeley was a dissenting voice on the review panel which persuaded Boris Johnson to press ahead with HS2 in February 2020. He concedes that changing the route and design of HS2 after work had begun inevitably piled up extra costs, but said that thanks to poor forward planning, there was no alternative.

“You should have a workable design with a reasonable cost estimate and not too much contingency before you go ahead, and they didn’t do that,” he said. “So it’s not particularly surprising when people come along with changes after construction has started — and they will come along with others. For example, people are thinking about how to connect it to HS1 [the high-speed line from London to the Channel Tunnel].”

Each chop and change requires consultants and engineers to be moved around the country. This “stop start” approach is pushing up the cost of our railways …

The rail minister, Huw Merriman MP, said:

… you can learn lessons from previous projects and get the price of delivery right down. We need to get to a system like they have in Germany.

However, the article goes on to state that European countries normally have the expensive parts in place already:

… the reason high-speed rail is so cheap now in European countries is because they’ve already built the difficult bits — the stations in dense cities and expensive tunnels.

The HS2 controversy rolls on, so to speak.

Where it begins and ends, we’re still not quite sure — 11 years on.

Short takes on Queen Elizabeth II — part 1

It is difficult to know where to begin, continue and end with Queen Elizabeth II after her 70+ year reign.

So many anecdotes remain.

Here are but a few of them.

Brexit referendum

I wrote yesterday about where we are with the ‘bonfire of EU regulations’ — not as far as Leave voters had hoped. Brexit was also on Her Majesty’s mind at one stage.

On June 21, 2016, two days before the referendum, The Sun reported that the Queen wanted dinner guests to give valid reasons for remaining in the European Union (emphases mine):

THE Queen asked VIP guests at a private dinner: “Give me three good reasons why Britain should be part of Europe.”

Royal biographer Robert Lacey revealed she asked close friends and family their views on whether we should be in or out of the EU.

He said yesterday: “The Queen has no vote but I think she may feel we should be Out.

“That’s only my guess as to her thoughts — but she does like robust debate.

“She likes a debate around the table like all of us round the country and she’s been debating Brexit with close friends and family.

“But from what I’ve heard, she’s been very careful to be scrupulously neutral.”

Mr Lacey said the Queen was questioning dinner guests, thought to include Prince Andrew and Princess Anne, at a private dinner a few weeks ago …

Lacey explained that she would not have asked the question of guests outside of her closely-knit private circle.

This caused MPs on both sides of the Brexit divide to opine.

In the end, we never really knew what she thought on the subject. This was part of the Queen’s seemingly magic aura. Everyone could privately impress his beliefs upon her, believing she was on their side. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Her opinions died with her, never to be revealed.

On being Prime Minister

Having reigned through 16 Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill through to Liz Truss, the Queen was accustomed to political change, which she surely had throughout her reign.

When Boris Johnson was elected Conservative Party leader in 2019, The Star reported that Her Majesty admitted her perplexity about such high political ambition:

Allegedly, Her Majesty told him: “I don’t know why anyone would want the job.”

The source of the quote was none other than Boris himself, who should have known that no one discusses what the Queen says in private conversation.

His staff certainly knew:

His staff then reportedly chastised him, and said “not to repeat those things so loudly”.

His predecessor but one, David Cameron, made a similar gaffe in saying that, in 2014, the Queen purred a sigh of relief when the Scots voted ‘No’ to independence. He, too, was severely criticised at the time, albeit not by Her Majesty, who remained silent.

Honours medals ‘Made in France’

Over the past several years, in France, much has been made of the fine products produced there and not overseas.

To date — admittedly, I might have missed it — I have not read or heard one news item that says that some of the monarch’s medals to Britons are currently made in France.

This started early in 2016, to the consternation of British military veterans and more than one Conservative MP.

On March 1 that year, The Telegraph reported:

A decision to award the contract to manufacture 20 British honours to a foreign firm for the first time has provoked anger among veterans.

A French company is set to soon make a host of honours that are presented to military heroes or distinguished citizens, including the Distinguished Service Order, the star of the Knights of the Order of the Bath and the badge of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Arthus Bertrand, which makes France’s Légion d’honneur medal, has been named in Cabinet Office papers as among a group of “successful suppliers” …

However, it sparked criticism from Colonel Bob Stewart, the Conservative MP and a holder of the DSO for his service during the Bosnian conflict, who described it as “plain wrong”.

“My argument is rather emotive but I think that a medal awarded to a UK citizen should be made in the UK – personally I’m very glad that my DSO [Distinguished Service Order] was made in Britain,” he told the newspaper.

“Can you imagine the French allowing the Légion d’honneur to be made in Germany? When this country awards medals to its soldiers, sailors, airmen and citizens they should be made in the UK.”

Julian Lewis, Conservative chairman of the defence select committee, also told The Times: “One is used to seeing ‘made in Hong Kong’ on souvenirs from great British institutions, but the foreign manufacture of medals and honours might be a step too far, no matter what the value-for-money logic.”

The French-manufactured medals are for the following honours: the Order of the Bath, the badge and star of the Order of St Michael and St George,the medal of the Distinguished Service Order and the Citizens of the British Empire.

Margaret Rhodes, the Queen’s first cousin

Margaret Rhodes was the Queen’s first cousin and one of her best friends.

When she died in 2016, The Telegraph posted this obituary:

Margaret Rhodes, who has died aged 91, was a first cousin of the Queen and a goddaughter of George VI; in 1947 she had been a bridesmaid at the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Philip Mountbatten, and for 11 years she was a lady-in-waiting to her aunt, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Late in life Margaret Rhodes enjoyed runaway success with her memoirs, The Final Curtsey, written with the help of the journalist Tom Corby and published in 2011. Although these were slight and haphazard, and not without factual inaccuracies, they caught the public imagination and shot to No 1 in the bestseller lists …

The book gave a light, sometimes hearty, description of her life as a young Scottish aristocrat, with insights into the character and personality of the Queen, and charted her own far from trouble-free course through life. It was altogether an exceptional publishing triumph, especially since numerous publishing houses had turned it down over several years.

Margaret Rhodes was born in London as the Hon Margaret Elphinstone on June 9 1925. She was the youngest daughter of the 16th Lord Elphinstone and his wife, Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, second daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Thus she was a first cousin of the Queen and Princess Margaret, and she was so much a part of their lives that the Queen Mother sometimes referred to her as her “third daughter”.

Margaret had two older brothers, John Elphinstone (the 17th Lord), who was imprisoned in Colditz during the war, Andrew Elphinstone (who just predeceased his brother), Elizabeth, who was unmarried, and Jean, who married John Wills and served for many years as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. So close to the Royal family was Jean that the family found it appropriate that she collapsed at lunch at Clarence House, dying in hospital soon afterwards.

Margaret was raised at Carberry Tower, the Elphinstone seat near Edinburgh, frequently visited by royalty. In her early life she was placed under the care of Clara Knight, who later became nanny to the two princesses. There were many holidays at Glamis and at Birkhall (where the then Duke and Duchess of York spent their summers). She was a childhood playmate of Princess Elizabeth. As Margaret revealed: “When we were very small, it was mostly playing at being horses. It involved a lot of neighing and cantering and galloping.” In her book she wrote: “I seemed then to live in a very safe world.” When the Second World War broke out and the two princesses were kept at Birkhall for safety, Margaret was sent over to keep them company.

During the war she lived first in Chelsea and later at Buckingham Palace, spending time with the princesses at Windsor Castle and holidays at Balmoral.

When Margaret reached majority age during the Second World War:

She joined the WRNS, but was moved to MI6. Only 18 years old, she worked at an office euphemistically called Passport Control near St James’s Underground Station. Her department coordinated the work of secret agents in the Near East.

After the war Margaret was one of eight bridesmaids at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth in November 1947. Soon afterwards she met Denys Rhodes when they worked together for the European Movement set up by Duncan Sandys, which founded the Council of Europe. Since 1945 he had been married to the actress Rachel Gurney, with whom he had a daughter. They sought a divorce but ran into numerous complications. Eventually an annulment was granted and Margaret was able to marry him at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on July 31 1950, in the presence of the King and Queen and with Princess Margaret as her bridesmaid.

Margaret Rhodes described her husband in her book as “an attractive pauper”. She commented: “I suppose, in my parents’ view, he was not the most suitable bridegroom”, and he was never as popular with the Royal family as she was. The Rhodeses settled in Devon, creating a fine garden.

Her husband was a novelist. When his health took a turn for the worse, the couple moved near the Queen, to:

the Garden House in Windsor Great Park in April 1981 in response to the Queen’s invitation: “Could you bear to live in suburbia?”, but Denys Rhodes died the following October.

Margaret Rhodes lived near her first cousin for the rest of her life:

Margaret Rhodes lived in the house the rest of her life and in 1991 was appointed a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother, undertaking fortnightly duties. She served for 11 years until the Queen Mother’s death, after which it became the Queen’s habit to go to the Garden House after church on Sundays instead of to Royal Lodge.

Margaret was the close companion of the Queen Mother during the last three weeks of her life …

Finally, on March 30, Margaret was present when her aunt died at 3.15 in the afternoon. Hardly was this over than Peter Sissons of the BBC telephoned her to ask for details. His interview was generally deemed to be too intrusive …

The sadness of the next days was briefly alleviated when she was assigned the job of registering her aunt’s death. “Right, what was the husband’s occupation?” asked a fierce lady registrar. “King”, she replied, feeling that the Queen Mother might have enjoyed that. Later she spent some time sorting the Queen Mother’s papers on behalf of the Queen and deciding what should be placed in the Royal Archives.

Margaret Rhodes spoke as she found:

In recorded television tributes to the Queen Mother, she expressed her dislike of Caithness, with its trees blown almost horizontal, and just before the Queen turned 80, she declared: “I’m perfectly certain she will never retire as such. It’s not like a normal job and, to the Queen, the vows that she made on Coronation Day are something so deep and so special that she wouldn’t consider not continuing to fulfil those vows until she dies.”

Of Princess Margaret she wrote: “It was hard to resist her, but she did have the most awful bad luck with men. However, the Almighty usually gets the right person to be born first.”

She was survived by her two daughters and two sons.

As I’ve said before and will say again, truly, we have seen the end of an era.

More tomorrow.

Boris Johnson’s downfall — part 3

Those who missed the first two instalments of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s downfall can read them here and here.

Today’s post will focus on Michael Gove.

Yesterday, I left off with Boris firing Gove in a telephone call.

Gove must have been stunned.

Yet, even he cannot deny that he and Boris got on well. Apparently, they knew each other at Oxford and were hardly best friends then.

2016 betrayal

As for more recent events, author and journalist Douglas Murray gives us a précis of Gove’s parliamentary career in an article for UnHerd: ‘Michael Gove’s faultless prophecy’.

Unlike me, Murray is a Gove fan, but there are a few excerpts from his article worth exploring.

Gove has been in various Cabinet and ministerial positions since 2010, when we had a coalition government under David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat).

Under Cameron in those years, Gove was in the Department for Education.

After Cameron’s re-election in 2015 which gave the Conservatives a clear majority without the need for another coalition, Gove continued receiving appointments to various departments:

After the 2015 election, he became known in Whitehall for his mastery of his brief. Most ministers who go from portfolio-to-portfolio struggle to understand the complexities of just one of their jobs, let alone each of them in turn. Yet this is exactly what Gove did at Justice — even though he was there for less than a year — and in each of the cabinet positions he subsequently held.

He knew what way the wind was blowing with the 2016 Brexit referendum:

Before Gove chose to vote for “Leave”, there were concerns that the Brexit campaign would suffer from being led by too few senior politicians: an operation with Chris Grayling and Bernard Jenkin as its figureheads was unlikely to inspire a democratic revolt. Gove recognised this — and while campaigning to leave the EU was entirely in keeping with the principles that defined his political career and the years in journalism that preceded it, it still took bravery for him to step up. It alienated Gove from much of his friendship group (not least the Camerons), and could have cost him dearly politically.

Cameron resigned as Party leader the morning after the referendum result, as if suffering from sour grapes because things didn’t go his way. It was around 9:30 a.m., if I remember rightly.

A Conservative leadership contest resulted, which Theresa May won.

However, Boris and Gove were in the mix, too.

Murray describes the atmosphere not only in Parliament but in the country as well from June 24, the day of Cameron’s resignation, throughout much of the summer. This period also turned Conservative voters against Gove (emphases mine):

The thing, though, that Gove was most right about, and for which he has been praised for the least, is the act which made him most infamous. It gave him a reputation for snakery. This was, of course, his decision in the immediate aftermath of the referendum to turn on Boris Johnson.

It is not easy to forget the febrile atmosphere of June 2016; every hour turned up enough news to last a month in normal times. But it was also a perilous time: people were genuinely afraid. Basic questions remained unanswered. Would EU citizens be allowed to remain in the UK? Who is running the country? Once David Cameron left office and his Chancellor, George Osborne, decided to punish the country further by disappearing completely, only the Governor of the Bank of England emerged to say anything on behalf of the nation. “We are all prepared for this,” Mark Carney reassured the country. Yet it was a moment of maximal instability.

The Leave campaign “victory” press conference the morning after the referendum was like a funeral. Perhaps the news of David Cameron’s political demise, and the looming Tory chaos that would follow, cast a pall over proceedings. Or perhaps it was the realisation of the task that lay ahead. In those uncertain hours, the one thing that seemed clear was that to the victor most go the spoils. Boris Johnson had led the Leave campaign and it seemed inevitable that he should become the leader of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister …

But Michael Gove put a stop to all that. Over the weekend after Brexit, something changed. Some people claim that Gove suddenly had visions of his own ascent to a higher office … Or was it that, in the aftermath of the referendum, Gove watched Boris Johnson and saw a man who was fundamentally unfit for the role of Prime Minister?

Murray would disagree with my assessment, but Michael Gove really did stab Boris in the back that summer:

When Gove held a press conference in which he announced that he would not be leading Johnson’s campaign for the leadership, he immediately assumed a new role in the public imagination. Suddenly, he was Gove the turncoat, Gove the assassin, Gove the backstabber. The Gríma Wormtongue of British politics. The party swiftly showed its disapproval.

Murray has left out a few details here. Gove ran for Party leader that year along with Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May.

Gove despatched Boris quickly. The referendum was held on June 23, and one week later, on July 1, this was the state of play, as Isabel Hardman reported in The Spectator:

As Michael Gove finished speaking, the bookmakers have reported that Andrea Leadsom has overtaken the Justice Secretary when it comes to betting on who will be the next Tory leader. Theresa May remains the favourite at 1/3, with Leadsom at 7/2 and Gove at 12/1.

Now of course the bookies are not clairvoyants and can get elections—and referendums—very wrong indeed. But these odds reflect the mood in the Tory party, which is currently registering a sense of disbelief that Michael Gove could do something like this. Many senior figures believe that the way he has turned on Boris Johnson is beyond the pale, and are preparing to back Andrea Leadsom, while I understand that a group of former Boris backers are considering declaring their support as a block for Leadsom on Monday too.

Leadsom had a good referendum campaign, performing well for the Leave side. Her key disadvantage is that she has never held a Cabinet role – though this is not down to lack of ability so much as it is down to George Osborne’s personal dislike of her following criticisms she made of the Chancellor in 2012. He bears grudges, and exacts revenge by slowing down the careers of people who have angered him. Leadsom took much longer to make it into government than she should have done. But this disadvantage may be a little easier to shrug off now Gove has such a trust problem with his own party.

Boris’s sister Rachel had much more to say in the Daily Mail on July 2: ‘Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine “detonated the Boris Johnson bomb” claims RACHEL JOHNSON’. Sarah Vine was, and still is, a Mail columnist.

Rachel tells us how Gove’s candidacy unfolded with his wife’s help:

It was funny ha-ha at first when she wrote in her column that she and her hubby Michael Gove would be running the country on a joint mandate.

‘Given Michael’s high-profile in the Leave campaign,’ she wrote, ‘that means he – we – are now charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people. And that is an awesome responsibility.’

That royal ‘we’ between dashes was borderline bonkers enough, but it was followed by a leaked private email that ended up on the front pages because in it, Vine urged Gove to be his ‘stubborn best’, as he deployed his ‘leverage’ with his Brexit buddy Boris …

Nobody knew whether it had been leaked, or had misfired, but it was a bit whiffy and rum.

Even at that stage only the most crackpot conspiracy theorists could have guessed what was to come next in this multi-act, rolling, live-blogged Shakespearean tragedy.

Michael Gove knifed Boris Johnson in the back and in the front, pushed him under a bus, ran over him several times (thank you Piers Morgan for this image) and then declared he was running for the leadership himself.

This, coupled with the new arithmetic in terms of supportive MPs, meant that Gove’s co-skipper was holed below the waterline and forced to abandon ship at his own launch.

Now we are where we are, as everyone keeps saying, and we know a bit more about where that is. 

Rachel gave us more insights into the real Michael Gove:

Brexit means Brexit. At some point Article 50 will be invoked. And never again listen to what a politician says. Watch what he or she does.

Gove was well known to be an ideological ninja, with his posters of Che Guevara and Chairman Mao on his wall, but when it came to the top job he was an avowed cleanskin. 

He had no leadership ambitions. After all, he’d said so many times: ‘If anyone wants me to sign a piece of parchment in my own blood saying I don’t want to be PM I’m happy to do that.’

‘I’m not equipped to be PM. I don’t want to be PM.’

‘I am an inconceivable choice. I don’t want to do it. I wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t matter how many people asked me to do it,’ etc, etc…

And then, on Thursday, he executed the most egregious reverse ferret and act of treachery in modern political history since… well, let’s just say since Michael Gove backed Brexit against the wishes of his good friend David Cameron.

He did a lap of honour of the studios, saying to interviewers that friends had been begging him to do it and telling him: ‘Michael, you’d be marvellous.’

‘I’ll explain to anyone who asks why I think I am the right person to be PM,’ he said.

Then on Friday he delivered a substantial 5,000-word manifesto that he’d obviously prepared earlier, to be acclaimed on his new home, Twitter (he has come aboard with the handle @gove2016, so far following no one).

She went on to tell us that Gove had as his adviser Dominic Cummings, who was also part of the Leave campaign, masterminding proceedings in the background. However, the Goves and the Osbornes were closer:

OK, I accept that it was more likely detonated by the combined agency of his wife; his former adviser, Dominic Cummings; and also of course George Osborne, with whom the Goves maintain close contact. 

They are, indeed, due to go on family holiday ensemble this summer.

So of course it was inevitable, given this domestic scenario, for the Goves to dump a chap who is very much not numero uno assoluto with the Osbornes either. 

Think of the pressure from the wives to stick the knife in, get the job done, before the two families had to break bread over the prosecco and antipasti in Italy.

Rachel cited two longstanding Conservative MPs’ reservations about Gove:

As it happens, Westminster suicide bomber is not a good look for anybody, which explains why many former Govistas – even one of the newspaper barons who supported him as recently as last week – are leaping on to the TM4PM (Theresa May for PM) bandwagon so fast.

As Michael Heseltine warned: ‘I personally would keep an eye open for Gove. First he abandoned his friend David Cameron now Johnson has felt the blade.’

Ken Clarke has told Gove to fall on his sword and fast. The classical quotation that comes to mind in all this is not so much ‘Et tu, Brute’ but ‘Those whom the Gods want to destroy, first they make mad.’

However much Gove tries to remind us what a nice, caring guy he is in his long leadership pitch, the ‘signalling’ around this personable and civilised candidate is, I’m afraid, that he’s acted like a political psychopath run by his wife (Vine), an acknowledged sociopath (Cummings) and a lame duck Chancellor. 

And this Machiavelli still wants us to want him to be Prime Minister …

At his leadership launch, Michael denied his wife had urged him to run, denied he was giving Dom Cummings a job, but I don’t necessarily take everything the most polite man in Parliament says on trust any more.

Rachel was and is a Remainer. And political people, whatever their stripe, often mix in the same circles, as she acknowledges of the Goves:

I like them. They are both lively company and huge fun. 

Indeed, we sometimes say that we must have supper soon, and perhaps we will, when the bleeding bodies of the fallen are removed from the smoking battlefield of this campaign.

Murray makes no mention of this intrigue but says that Gove might have been dismayed with Boris’s seeming lack of gravitas:

… perhaps there really were things in the immediate aftermath of the referendum that persuaded him that Johnson was fundamentally unfit to lead the country; the weekend after the vote, as the country desperately looked around for a leader, Johnson decided it was the perfect time to host a “boozy barbecue” and a cricket match.

And why not celebrate? No one but no one in the media or politics on the Remainer side thought that 52% of the nation would vote Leave in the largest plebescite in British history.

In the end, Gove lost Conservative MPs’ votes to Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May.

Afterwards, Leadsom said she could not understand why May did not want children. Leadsom got a lot of Party backlash for that. She stood down, leaving May as the last candidate standing.

As such, Conservative Party members did not have a vote that year.

Murray admits that no one ever forgot his hero’s betrayal but says that Gove appeared to be a loyalist — on the surface, anyway, as far as I am concerned:

This cloud, by and large, has not left him. Only yesterday, one embittered newspaper columnist saw fit to describe Gove as “a conniving, reptilian politician”. Is this really true? He did, after all, survive through Theresa May’s premiership, and stuck loyally beside her when other people would not. He even entered Johnson’s own cabinet, and excelled in the roles he held in that short-lived administration. And not only is he the only politician who has remained at cabinet level through this tumultuous decade and a half, but he is also one of the few people from Cameron’s cabinet who is still in the House of Commons. Some lost out on the top prize and huffed off. Others whose abilities could have been of use to the country decided that the country did not deserve them — though various investment funds, as chance would have it, did.

A few days ago, Gove announced that he did not expect another role in the high echelons of government.

But did he really mean that?

It seems unlikely that Gove will actually remove himself from frontline politics. I read his announcement at the weekend as an act of cynical self-deprecation. Or perhaps a hint that he needs to simply “step back” for a bit.

Murray’s conclusion is interesting:

In 2016, Gove didn’t simply backstab Johnson; he issued a warning. It took the rest of the Parliamentary party and much of Britain another six years to decipher his warning: that when Johnson finally lumbers out of No 10, he will leave defeated and humiliated. Don’t say we weren’t warned.

The Goves’ break-up

In June 2021, The Sun published photos of Matt Hancock and his female adviser in a tight clinch in his office at a time when social distancing was still in force. Hancock abruptly left his wife when the photos were published.

On July 2, the Goves announced they, too, would be divorcing, although for different reasons:

STATEMENTS FROM GOVE ET AL. A joint spokesperson for Michael Gove and Sarah Vine said: https://t.co/t87jWy7MqU pic.twitter.com/45N8cF6T6P

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) July 2, 2021

Guido Fawkes’s post referenced Sarah Vine’s Mail on Sunday column a week earlier on June 26:

This official announcement to the Press Association will surprise no one in SW1 where rumours have been rife for months. At one point Lobby hacks were asking the PM’s spokesman under what roof was Michael Gove sleeping. Sarah Vine’s article this week in the Mail on Sunday was not subtle.

While she did not mention her husband at all, she did write that politics can alter home life irrevocably, as in the case of the Hancocks:

The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade.

She knows your fears and your insecurities. She knows that, deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe you purport to be. And some people don’t like to be reminded of that …

In the end, there are two types of politicians. Those who can walk away from power – and those who can’t. And who will compromise everything for the sake of it.

How the Gove family found out about his sacking

On July 7, 2022, Sarah Vine wrote an article for The Mail about how she and the children found out that Boris sacked Michael.

Note that she is still friends with Rachel Johnson.

The news came via text messages as Sarah and the children were watching Love Island:

The teenagers and I were watching Love Island when the news broke — a text, to my son, from a mate: ‘Is it true that Boris has fired ur dad?!’

A split second later, my phone also pinged. It was my friend Rachel (Johnson, Boris’s sister): ‘My bro has just fired your ex!!’ Blimey, I thought. Even I wasn’t expecting that.

They turned off the television to find out more:

‘Get him on speakerphone, get him on speakerphone!’ squealed my daughter. So we got him on speakerphone (Michael, not Boris). What on earth happened?

‘Well,’ he explained, ‘The Prime Minister rang me a few minutes ago and told me it was time for me to step back. I said, respectfully, ‘Prime Minister, if anyone should be stepping back, it is you.’

‘Go on!’ said my son, leaping off the sofa and punching the air.

‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked. ‘Have a glass of wine and a slice of salami and see what tomorrow brings,’ he replied.

What tomorrow brought, of course, was the Prime Minister’s resignation, following the resignations of pretty much anyone of any consequence.

Vine was generous in her assessment of Boris’s premiership but she, too, agreed with her husband that he just wasn’t serious enough:

I still don’t quite see what is to be gained, politically, from getting rid of him. There isn’t a brilliant replacement waiting in the wings, and the country could really do without the disruption of a whole summer of rudderless government, or worse, a snap general election.

Especially since, as prime ministers go, he was not by a long shot the worst this country has seen.

He delivered Brexit, albeit imperfectly — but then after the horlicks Theresa May made of it, it was a miracle he managed it at all.

Like every other leader on the planet, he was blindsided by Covid — but handled the pandemic with bravery and vision, rolling out the vaccination programme at record speed, pulling the country out of lockdown as quickly as possible.

He was spot-on with the war in Ukraine, moving quickly to offer Britain’s support against Russia.

On the big stuff, as the cliche goes, he was good. Better than good, actually. But in politics, that’s not enough any more …

It’s not enough to be a serious politician; you also have to be a serious human being. And the problem with Johnson is that he just isn’t. That, ultimately, has been his downfall.

Everything that has gone wrong for him — the lockdown parties, the questionable donations, the dinners with oligarchs, the misguided loyalties, the tenuous grasp of the facts — it all stems from that.

Vine then tells us how angry Gove got with Boris when he was running for Mayor of London, a post he held for two terms, from May 2008 to May 2016:

At the time Boris was running for mayor of London, doing a round of fundraisers. My (now) ex-husband and I had been to one the night before, a dinner somewhere or other, where Boris was speaking.

It was a disaster. I remember he arrived late, delivered a thoroughly lackadaisical performance and left early, underwhelming the assembled, many of whom were astonished that such a man could even contemplate a life in politics. He seemed incapable of buttering a bread roll, let alone a room of donors.

The next day, Michael rang Boris and gave him both barrels. How dare he waste everyone’s time and effort like that; didn’t Boris realise how many people had put themselves out to organise that evening, for his benefit? It was embarrassing, it was rude — and, worst of all, it was irresponsible.

Boris was suitably contrite. ‘Sorry, Gover, I hear you Gover,’ was his response, deploying his customary bashful charm. It didn’t wash. Michael hung up.

Despite being almost two decades ago, the incident sticks in my mind because a) I had never seen Michael so angry and b) it is emblematic of Johnson’s biggest problem, one that lies at the root of all his troubles: he just can’t take anything seriously.

She brought up Boris’s childhood ambition of being ‘king of the world’, which I covered in Part 1.

Then she told us about his 2016 candidacy for leader of the Conservative Party:

Everyone was exhausted, but they threw themselves into it. Meetings, phone calls, speeches, media rounds — it was relentless. Boris was running to replace Cameron, Michael having decided — largely at my behest — not to.

There was support to be garnered, deals to be brokered — all the usual stuff that goes on in a leadership contest.

Everyone was going all out to get Boris elected. Except, it seemed, for one person: Boris. While the rest of the team were busting several guts, he appeared to have taken a leaf out of Cameron’s book — and seemed to be mostly chillaxing.

He was supposed to meet so-and-so; he didn’t. He was supposed to draft a letter; he didn’t. Make a phone call; didn’t happen. Oh, I’ll do it in the morning, oh I left it at home. Not quite the dog ate my homework, but not far off. Sometimes he would just go AWOL, leaving the team scrabbling for excuses.

Everyone was taking things deadly seriously; Boris, meanwhile, seemed to think it was all just one big joke. 

Things finally came to a head when the team found him holed up at home in the countryside, flipping burgers, drinking rosé and playing cricket with his mates while the fate of Brexit — this thing that he had supposedly been so passionate about, that had brought down a government, that had overturned everyone’s world order — hung in the balance.

That night, Michael walked through the front door ashen-faced. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ he said. ‘Boris is a disaster.’ And the rest, as they say, is history.

Michael paid a very heavy price — both politically and personally — for that judgment call. As we saw from this week’s events, Boris never quite forgave him — and who can blame him. 

She left out the part where Gove then decided to throw his hat into the ring!

She still stands by her man in this respect:

It’s hard to hear the truth about yourself at the best of times, even harder when it’s from an old friend. As it was again this week when Michael told him the game was up.

In closing, Tim Loughton MP described Boris’s sacking of Gove the best, even if he makes it sound as if it were done in person:

I think it was Michael Gove who went to Number 10 with the metaphorical bottle of whisky and the revolver – well, clearly Boris has downed the whisky and turned the revolver on Michael Gove.

Finally.

I do hope that Liz — or Rishi (we still have nine days to go) — forgets about Gove and moves ahead with fresher, newer talent in Cabinet: people who are actually in tune with what Britons are thinking.

Tomorrow’s post will highlight other resignations from early July. I’ll never forget keeping track of Guido’s Twitter feed during that time.

UK general elections: how the metropolitan elite unwittingly enabled Conservative victories in 2015 and 2019 — part 2

Yesterday’s post examined Britain’s metropolitan elite and the unwitting effect they had on the 2015 general election, handing the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron another term with a clear majority of seats, surpassing the magic number of 326 to end up with 331!

At that point, Cameron no longer needed the Liberal Democrats in coalition. The Conservatives were fully in charge.

David Cameron

Cameron fulfilled two Conservative pledges:

1/ To resolve the 1977 West Lothian Question and EVEL — English Votes for English Laws — the Government made a change to a standing order in Parliament so that:

a new law could no longer be imposed only on England by a majority of all MPs if a majority of English MPs were opposed. However, a proposed new law could still be vetoed by a majority of all MPs even if a majority of English MPs were in favour. 

This was abolished in 2021, a move with which I disagreed and instigated by a Scot, Levelling Up Minister Michael Gove, whom I do not trust at all. His reasoning was that the measures:

had “added complexity and delay to the legislative process” and that their removal would allow all MPs to be represented equally.^[9]

I watched that debate. Why should another nation have its MPs ‘represented equally’ where English laws are concerned? English MPs cannot vote on another nation’s laws.

That said, so far, Scotland’s SNP MPs are careful to leave their benches when laws for England and Wales are debated.

2/ A referendum on leaving the European Union was scheduled for June 23, 2016. Fifty-two per cent of British voters opted for Brexit.

Although he said that he would abide by the referendum result, David Cameron resigned on Friday, June 24, that year at 9:30 a.m.

He and his wife Samantha honestly did not think the British would vote to leave. According to some news reports, Samantha spent much of the night in tears while watching the returns come in.

Theresa May

Theresa May became Conservative leader and Prime Minister in the summer of 2016.

Having previously branded the Conservatives ‘the nasty party’ at an annual party conference a few years before, she had big plans to improve opportunities for everyone living in Britain.

Although she was a Remainer, she pledged to abide by the referendum result. She appointed good Conservative MPs to her Brexit team, and Boris Johnson became Foreign Secretary.

The Opposition benches said that she had no mandate, so she held a general election in June 2017. Two trusted aides told her that polling showed that the Conservatives would do well. Furthermore, the controversial Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. It sounded as if May and her party were shoo-ins. In the end, there was a hung Parliament and May brokered a confidence and supply arrangement with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by Arlene Foster at the time.

Things began to unravel further in the summer of 2018. May’s Brexit team had come up with a sensible, considered plan to leave the EU. May held a meeting at Chequers, the prime ministerial weekend estate, to discuss the plan. Unbeknownst to her colleagues, she had a compromise plan ready to discuss which superseded the Brexit team’s plan. She told her ministers that if they did not agree to her compromise plan, later rumoured to have been developed with German input from someone working for Angela Merkel, they were free to leave the country estate at their own expense. It was shocking and resulted in several resignations from the Brexit team. Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary.

By January 2019, May could get nowhere in Parliament with Brexit votes, even with her compromise. I began watching BBC Parliament in earnest at that time and haven’t stopped. We really do have a load of virtue-signalling troughers from the metropolitan elite in both Houses. But I digress.

On May 24, 2019, Theresa May announced that she would resign as Conservative Party leader on June 7. That triggered a leadership election by the party members. May stayed on as PM until July 24, the day after Boris Johnson became the new leader of the Conservatives. Today, May serves on the backbenches, representing the constituency of Maidenhead, a delightful Home Counties town bordering the Thames.

Boris Johnson

Boris gave his first speech at the despatch box, all guns blazing. I watched it on television. He had a go at Labour, alleging that one of their MPs had been involved in corruption while serving on the Greater London Assembly many years before. A PM couldn’t get better than this.

However, Brexit was the major issue, and he was presiding over the hung Parliament from the 2017 election, with Arlene Foster’s DUP providing confidence and supply to Conservative policies. Try as he might, Boris could get nowhere with the Opposition benches.

Brexit negotiations with the EU resumed on August 28, 2019, the same day that Boris attempted to prorogue (adjourn) Parliament from September 10 to October 14. He claimed that the prorogation would cover all the party conferences normally held during that time. However, court cases arose in the Supreme Court in England, presided over by Baroness Hale, she of the spider brooch (Guido’s story involves a later controversy, unrelated to the prorogation):

Baroness Hale’s Law-Breaking Hypocrisy https://t.co/XyCuuBoPMf pic.twitter.com/MQe4Alj7DH

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) September 21, 2020

‘Spiderwoman’ Hale’s decision forced Parliament to reconvene on September 3. It will come as no surprise that attempting to get Brexit votes through the House of Commons became even more difficult. On September 4, the Benn Act, a bill to block a no-deal Brexit passed. At that point, Boris proposed a motion to hold a general election on October 15. It failed to command two-thirds approval from MPs.

In addition, several Remainer Conservative MPs had the party whip removed at that time, which made matters worse. Although some had the whip restored, the Conservatives no longer had a working majority.

As a result, Parliament was dissolved in October 2019, with an election called for December 12 that year.

What voters thought

Whether Leavers or Remainers, more people began paying close attention to the goings-on in Parliament.

Leavers knew that, while Boris was flawed, he was on their side with regard to getting Brexit done. After delay upon delay in Parliament from June 2016 to October 2019, that was all that mattered.

Remainers wanted a second referendum to confirm (ahem) the first vote. In other words, they wanted to overturn the 2016 vote.

Leavers felt increasingly betrayed by Parliamentarians. However, Brexit was also beginning to have an effect on their personal lives: relationships broke down, family feuds began and working life became strained.

England was becoming a highly divided and divisive place, exacerbated by print and broadcast media alike. Leavers felt alienated and betrayed.

The fallout between 2015 and 2019

I’m returning briefly to the comments left on the 2015 Guardian article I cited yesterday: ‘The metropolitan elite: Britain’s new pariah class’, which appeared on May 22, two weeks after the general election.

What people felt about the metropolitan elite did not change in the four years that followed. Voters were disappointed.

One Guardian commenter remembered the unity during the Thatcher era as the Iron Lady began closing mines (emphases mine):

We have a situation amongst the majority of the “lower classes” which is this:
If you dare to offer a “lefty” opinion you are automatically assumed to be a rich metro elite type, with no experience of the real world.
If you dare to offer a “right” opinion you are immediately branded a racist, ignoramus.

Does no one else see the division this has caused?

Remember when the gay rights groups went to help the miners? Can you imagine that happening today? – They’d be sniping at each other over these perceived differences, instead of recognising their similarities and fighting together against a common enemy.

We are all exactly where they want us, and until we recognise that- the real elite have won and will carry on winning- regardless of what colour they pin to their (old boys) ties.

Another went back further in time, putting forward post-war Prime Minister Clement Attlee as a man of duty:

… the most effective Labour Prime Minister by far was Clement Attlee: the son of a well-off London solicitor, educated at Haileybury and Oxford, served with distinction as a junior officer in WW1 and reached the rank of Major. Though not a patrician, you’d hardly have called him a man of the people, and I suspect that he would have felt under no obligation to put on glottal stops or pretend that he liked football (though he had actually played it in his youth).

The point is that perhaps aided by attending Haileybury – the public school that specialised in training boys up for the Indian Civil Service – he had an intense, deeply ingrained sense of his duty to the nation and particularly to the less well-off part of it, which carried him through all the vicissitudes of setting up the Welfare State in a bankrupt, exhausted country with an empire to get rid of. He knew what had to be done, and he was determined to do it, and what focus groups or the media thought about it was of no consequence to him.

… where there is no vision the people perish. Without a thoroughgoing analysis of the state we’re in and a thought-through programme for putting it right, such as it had in 1945, Labour is simply wasting its own time and everyone else’s and might as well shut up shop now.

People dislike when MPs are not local, especially when a well-heeled Londoner represents a disadvantaged Northern constituency:

It’s ridiculous that these parachuted-in pillocks can hold office in northern constituencies when many of them will secretly smirk about it being “grim up north” every time they’re sat in some trendy London wine-bar.

Someone had a solution to candidate selection:

We need to stop north-London PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics] graduates from pretty much automatically getting into Westminster. Anyone who’s interested in being a politician does that PPE degree, then works for a think-tank or as a political advisor then a junior minister and so on.

Candidates should be elected from people who live in individual constituencies, who have done proper jobs and who genuinely wish to fight for their communities. In this system George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband would not be able to stand in northern constituencies; they’d have to run in the cities and towns where they actually lived. Generally speaking, that would mean a borough of London – Oh, wait Chukka Umunna and Ed Miliband live in the same borough? Tough! Only one of them can stand for Labour. What’s that; several of the Tory cabinet live in the same town in rural Oxfordshire? Oh dear, only one of them can stand. And in order to prevent parachuting candidates in, they’d have to live there for at least five years prior to being selected.

The whole political system in this country lacks any legitimacy. The people who are affected the most by politics are the people who are the least engaged in it …

This issue also affects London. One person wrote about Labour’s David Lammy:

Lammy is my MP and I like him, but I do have a slight problem: according to the Tory leaflet through the door pre-election, he doesn’t live in Tottenham, his constituency, he lives in Crouch End, which is rather met-elity itself. Not to mention giving the option of a state secondary school you’d actually want your kids to go to.

If the Tories were lying I apologise.

One reader understood why people resented the metropolitan elite:

I totally get the hatred of the “metropolitan elite”. The assumption that you, as someone who is not a member of that class, will have no idea what they are talking about whether it is art, literature, politics, whatever and, by extension, you are an idiot. It’s bloody infuriating!!

It’s essential for the media not to leave London:

Aside from John Harris I know of no other Guardian columnist that sets foot out of London – or even North London.

Tell a lie – Polly [Toynbee] is in Brighton for her Arts Festival.

That’s the nature of metropolitan elites – write about those less well-off but be sure never to meet any.

Also:

Metropolitan elite means people living in London who are unnatural and out of touch with the rest of the country. This is nothing new. The medieval word for a Londoner was “cock’s egg”‘ (cockney) which also described something unnatural and out of touch.

I did not know that!

Other readers noted the petty, controlling interference that the metropolitan elite display:

Different people will have different reasons for disliking the ME. One of these must surely be the neopuritanism they espouse, which means you’re always looking over your shoulder worrying whether you’ve exhibited the wrong attitude, e.g. insufficient enthusiasm about gay marriage or a penchant for Top Gear.

On that topic:

Metropolitan elite who work in media, government, academia, charities, and NGOs from the National Trust to Oxfam and the Royal Society. These tend to coalesce on gay marriage, “safe” places, “islamophobia” issues, pro-EU sentiment, pro-Obama and catastrophic climate change. Just watch the BBC for any length of time.

Another said:

I personally feel this miring of everything in semantics does little to describe the current rot in UK politics. It would be better to use a historical example – I personally think referring to these people as “The Marie Antoinette Class” is more appropriate. It illustrates just how out of touch they really are with the current reality of life for British working people.

Even worse, they don’t really seem to be British at heart:

What has happened (maybe?) is that the elite in the UK (England specifically) has become more like other countries – urban and bourgeois, rather than rural and aristocratic – and without the aspiration to ennoble themselves that the previous industrial bourgeois had (by marrying their wealth into the old order’s titles). What we have now is a class of educated professional people who share urban liberal-middle-class values that are much more like those of their equivalents in other European countries than they are many of their own compatriots.

Another reader also noticed the lack of Britishness:

One explanation could be that many young educated people in Europe were brought up to feel European (or even global) than from a particular country or region. Programs like ERASMUS and the increasing cheapness and availability of travel have opened up the horizons of many smart and educated individuals. This is definitely causing a class divide with those who remain rooted and patriotic. Combine that with the growing phenomenon of elitism in all societal institutions (you need a degree to do anything these days), then you inevitably get more of group A in all positions of power.

I can’t tell whether this is a good thing (or even inevitable) or not. The “metropolitan elite” would probably find themselves thinking that they are better than group B, who are quagmired in small mindedness and petty issues. Then you have group B, made up largely of working class people, who are feeling disenfranchised and silenced (the elite would probably condescendingly refer to it as “feeling left behind”). It’s like a soft Russian revolution, and look what happened that time when they let their “betters” look after them. I think a healthy society needs to always listen to both sides, whenever you start thinking “you know best” and ignore the plebs who “don’t know any better”, well, then you get the Star Wars prequels.

Globalism alienates:

There is hardly any difference in the political parties communications, only semantics. The nation state is dying and Universalism is taking over through the multinational corporations & global organisations.

One reader gave us the education profiles of the main political players of 2015 and the Labour years:

They are all cut from the same cloth…a ll that differentiates them is how they divvy up and pork barrel the the trolls tax contributions.

Cameron: Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Brasenose College, Oxford

Miliband: Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, and the London School of Economics

Clegg: University of Cambridge, the University of Minnesota, College of Europe

Farage: Dulwich College, a public school (private), and stockbroker….

Mandelson: Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford

Blair: St John’s College, Oxford…and various private schools

Brown: University of Edinburgh, History (as the son of CoS [Church of Scotland] Minister he is definitely middle class)

The list is not exclusive…….but the stench is unmistakable……

At least voters know where they stand with the Conservatives:

This is why the Tories won the election. So the PM is posh and privileged. He knows it and we know it.

Someone complimented Cameron’s approach to EVEL:

What people object to, at a gut level, is getting a clever-dick, hypocritical answer to their concerns.

For example, Labour’s position on EVEL is transparently self-serving and relies on a lot of chin-scratching about complicated constitutional niceties. In contrast Cameron’s proposition, that it is only fair for England to have self-determination on the same issues which Scotland does, is an uncomplicated statement of a simple principle, even if it is of course equally self-serving.

So people see Labour as putting self-interest first and talking down to them about constitutions, on the one hand, and on the other they see Cameron espousing a simple principle which they see as being on their side.

It’s no surprise Labour end up on the wrong side of so many arguments.

Interestingly, someone brought up Boris:

Londoners are not much interested in the politics of power, influence, wealth and class envy. For many, social justice might mean the mortgage paid off so they can fund their care home one day. Love him or hate him, Boris Johnson recognised and tapped into this and that’s why they voted Boris Johnson Mayor. Twice. London actually gave an early indicator for the national mood.

Labour, on the other hand, cannot relate to most people. The second sentence gave me a chuckle:

I am still angry that Ed wasn’t able to put his view across more forcefully.
He is very fond of the third chapter of The Working Classes And Their Struggle For A Cohesive Understanding Of Dialectical Materialism Within A Framework Of Sonambulant Artifice And Prolapsed Thinking and yet people still didn’t think he understood what life is like on a Council estate or in a factory.
It beats me.

Someone else agreed, saying that Labour were interested only in themselves:

Labour’s metropolitan political class – and believe me, they are ABSOLUTELY the worst, an utter ideological and moral vacuum compared to, say, the Lib Dems or the centrist strain of the Tory Party – are utterly without allegiance to anyone but their own caste.

What voters want(ed)

One reader provided a profile of the ideal MP:

Here’s what we require of our politicians:

(1) honesty
(2) probity
(3) the ability to listen to their constituents
(4) the ability to put the needs of their constituents before the interests of big business, the aristocracy or the establishment.

Tick all four boxes and I don’t care where you were born, where you were schooled or where you live. The problem is finding anybody who’ll tick those boxes.

Little did that person know that a bevy of Conservative candidates could tick those boxes in 2019.

To be continued next week.

Boris and the Downing Street lockdown parties: can he survive?

When Boris Johnson won the December 2019 general election, the Conservative theme of which was ‘Get Brexit Done’, he said that he was grateful for the votes from former Labour constituencies, noting that those votes were ‘on loan’ to his party.

How true and how wise of him to recognise that, a gift which gave him a stonking majority of 80, the highest for the Conservatives in 33 years.

Boris was Prime Minister prior to that election, having been elected as Conservative Party leader in July that year after Theresa May’s resignation.

He should have known the knives would be out for him. He had unsuccessfully tried to prorogue Parliament that September. He ended up having to apologise to the Queen after Baroness Hale, she of the spider brooch and a Remainer, ruled against it.

With all that in mind, one would have thought that Boris could be more aware of the optics surrounding his premiership moving forward. Remainers — the Left and the media — have had a beady eye on him and Downing Street.

Boris’s majority is now 74: whip withdrawn from three MPs, two by-election losses to the Liberal Democrats (Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire), one win from Labour in Hartlepool last year and one defection (Christian Wakeford).

Furthermore, it is worth noting that Boris’s resounding popularity with the public (until recently) is not reflected in the parliamentary Conservative Party.

Unlike Labour, the Conservatives do not hesitate to depose their leader. They got rid of Margaret Thatcher in the autumn of 1990. The ‘wets’ she so roundly criticised for their lack of political backbone proved they had spines after all.

Therefore, a Conservative Prime Minister faces threats from without and within.

The Opposition and the media want the UK to re-enter the European Union. The Conservatives have disgruntled candidates, past and present, who want to lead the party in a more conventional, less maverick, style. None of these groups is friendly to Boris Johnson’s premiership and would love nothing more than to see it brought down.

On Friday, January 14, 2022, the veteran journalist and author Charles Moore wrote a perceptive column for The Telegraph on Boris’s travails with lockdown parties: ‘For all his faults, there is no other Tory politician who has Boris Johnson’s political reach’.

Moore’s editorial appeared two days after Boris apologised at the beginning of PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions). He said (emphases mine):

Mr Speaker, I want to apologise. I know that millions of people across this country have made extraordinary sacrifices over the last 18 months. I know the anguish that they have been through, unable to mourn their relatives and unable to live their lives as they want or to do the things they love. I know the rage they feel with me and with the Government I lead when they think that in Downing Street itself the rules are not being properly followed by the people who make the rules.

Though I cannot anticipate the conclusions of the current inquiry, I have learned enough to know that there were things that we simply did not get right, and I must take responsibility. No. 10 is a big department, with the garden as an extension of the office, which has been in constant use because of the role of fresh air in stopping the virus. When I went into that garden just after 6 o’clock on 20 May 2020, to thank groups of staff before going back into my office 25 minutes later to continue working, I believed implicitly that this was a work event, but with hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside. I should have found some other way to thank them, and I should have recognised that even if it could be said technically to fall within the guidance, there would be millions and millions of people who simply would not see it that way—people who suffered terribly, people who were forbidden from meeting loved ones at all, inside or outside—and to them, and to this House, I offer my heartfelt apologies. All I ask is that Sue Gray be allowed to complete her inquiry into that day and several others, so that the full facts can be established. I will of course come back to this House and make a statement.

Sue Gray, an eminent civil servant, is still investigating the May 20, 2020 gathering and several others held in Downing Street during the lockdown periods in England. She could be some time.

On January 12, Opposition leaders and MPs piled on Boris. To an extent, I agree with them. Boris set the rules. Boris gave us the rules, either by himself or through his ministers, on television during the coronavirus briefings. Now he says he was unaware of them or should have been more mindful of them?

However, Downing Street is also a Crown property, meaning that it is exempt from certain laws that apply elsewhere across the country.

That said, the Queen scrupulously abided by the coronavirus restrictions during her husband’s funeral in April 2021. She sat alone. She was masked. It was tragic to see.

Yet, the overall design of the demands for Boris to resign over the parties — remember, he is still innocent until proven guilty — is to banjax Brexit and get rid of his attempts to make Britain a better place to live. This includes the expiry of most of the remaining Plan B coronavirus restrictions, on schedule for January 26, 2022. Their expiry puts the UK on course to be the freest Western nation in this regard.

Moving on to Charles Moore’s editorial on the parties, the eminent journalist asks:

… I wonder, once the righteous anger had passed, how good it would feel for the country if the head of government had been ejected on this issue.

We may now be moving nearer to normality in relation to Covid-19. The Government, which was too draconian earlier on, now seems broadly on the right track, pushing back against scientists and social engineers in love with semi-permanent lockdown. Isn’t it better to stick to this course, without the self-indulgence of political convulsion? The international comparisons are quite favourable to Britain. We are not facing the collapse of the Government’s main policy. If anything, we are beginning to see its success.

Then there is the question as to how the news about these parties leaked from No. 10 or elsewhere. Boris’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, is behaving like a vengeful jilted lover, referring to the Prime Minister as ‘the trolley’, careering all around the place. Does he bear any responsibility for these leaks? We should be told.

Of Cummings, Moore says:

I have a lot of sympathy with Dominic Cummings’s frustrations with Boris when he worked for him in Downing Street, but none with his attempt to prove him unfit for office by waging a continuous media campaign. 

If the two fell out, there will be fault on both sides, but the benefit of the doubt must go to the executive who is elected, not to the adviser who no longer advises.

As for sitting MPs railing against Boris, Moore says they represented the party when they ran for office; in most cases, they were not elected on their personal merit.

Moore was not to know of Christian Wakeford’s crossing the aisle just before PMQs on Wednesday, January 19. Wakeford sat right behind Keir Starmer, in full view of Boris.

Bury South, Wakeford’s Red Wall constituency, now has a Labour MP, with no say from his voters about this.

Moore says:

In the age of Twitter, many MPs seem to think they are in Parliament because of their own sturdy independent-mindedness and bear no responsibility to the collective.

Actually, no. Almost all of them are there because of the party label they hold – the regiment, if you like, in which they have chosen to serve. They need to understand that the regiment will come under constant attack, and they cannot survive individually if they crumple under each bombardment.

Until Wakeford’s defection, which is a serious matter in the House of Commons, a growing group of Conservative MPs were moving actively against Boris, especially through writing letters to Sir Graham Brady, head of the 1922 Committee. If he receives 54 letters against Boris, he can hold a vote of no confidence. Fortunately, Wakeford’s perfidious crossing the aisle was so shocking that those MPs have settled down, deciding to lie low for the time being. It is rumoured that some have since withdrawn their letters to the 1922 Committee.

Moore recaps Boris’s political history from the time he served two terms as Mayor of London, a job he performed admirably. Boris has had similar successes since then, including being the face of the Brexit referendum in 2016:

For all Boris’s evident faults – so evident that Conservative MPs knew most of them when they chose him – his record of advancing his party is almost unspotted. Twice managing to become Mayor of London – a very unTory city – he then won the EU referendum, thus accumulating the electoral capital to lead his party when Mrs May failed. He won a commanding majority at the ensuing general election on the proposition that he would get Brexit done and crush Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The May era proved that no one else could do that.

I realise that gratitude is not a strong emotion in politics, and the polls are bad now, but Tory MPs should at least recognise that such skills are not easily replicated. The leading contenders if Boris falls – Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Michael Gove – are all able politicians, but none has exhibited anything like Boris’s reach. This man has come close to political death before – when Michael Gove denounced him after the referendum and when he failed as Foreign Secretary.

He has also come close to actual death – when he got Covid in the early days of the plague. But he has a way of surviving and reviving. These skills deserve respect from the party he leads. If they try to kick him out, they create a definite split for an indefinite benefit, possibly provoking the third general election in five years. Who needs that?

Precisely. There is no other leader who has the reach with the general public like Boris Johnson.

It will take some time for Boris to recover. This will be as difficult for him as recovering from coronavirus was in the Spring of 2020. It seemed to take him several months, even if he said otherwise that year. He looked and sounded tired and worn down for a long time.

The same will hold true now. The public didn’t mind when Boris tried to unconventionally foil opposition to Brexit, because we knew he was fighting on our behalf.

However, these parties took place at a time when we could not see other family members outside of our homes. We could not visit relatives in care homes. We could not be with them in hospital for any reason. We could not even get into some Accident & Emergency wards for urgent care. We were deprived of Christmas and other religious celebrations. We could not get married. We could not bury with the comfort of family around us. We could not sit on the grass in the park to soak up warm sunshine in May 2020. We couldn’t even sit on a park bench. Nor could we speak out against these restrictions or the ‘science’ behind them. We were ordered to stay at home and stay away from the workplace in order to save lives. We were constantly warned about ‘killing Granny’, a disgusting proposition and accusation.

The Government and advisers took us for fools, as if we were brainless. It is therefore amazing that we have the ability to hold down jobs and pay their overly inflated salaries and pensions. Then, at the end of last year, we found out that some of those advisers received New Year’s Honours for stopping us from living life in the way God intended, in a free society. It all stinks to high heaven.

Therefore, it is appalling to discover that, while we were cooped up at home, Downing Street was holding these parties.

Boris has betrayed the public the way he betrayed his wives. It was callous and cruel, in the same way that marital infidelity is.

That is what angers the public. Boris turned against us. How does a betrayed wife ever trust her husband again? This is what Boris will have to work on with us, ‘straining every sinew’, to borrow a favourite, albeit silly, Conservative turn of phrase.

Still, with all that in mind, we must keep in mind Charles Moore’s warning. If Boris goes, Brexit could be in trouble. Don’t believe Labour when they say that Brexit is a ‘done deal’ and they won’t try to reverse it:

One must ask who stands to benefit from the blond defenestration being talked of. Lord Adonis, the Remainer whose frankness is so helpful to the other side, tweeted this week: “If Boris goes, Brexit goes.” That is the idea. That is the constant motivation of a minority of unreconciled Tory MPs and a majority of the Great and the Good in the Civil Service, academia, the law, the House of Lords and the BBC, which is carefully managing this current story for the political effect it has always wanted.

Christian Wakeford is sure he’s done the right thing by moving to the Opposition benches, sidling up to Labour without a by-election. It will be interesting to see what his Jewish constituents make of his new alliance with an anti-Semitic party, supposedly cleaned up now. It will be just as interesting to see who the Labour candidate for Bury South is at the next general election. I won’t be putting any money on Wakeford’s selection.

What we need now is patience, watching Boris like a hawk in the coming months — especially with local elections this May — but giving him the space to repent through his actions by returning to One Nation Conservativism.

Tony Blair’s controversial knighthood of the Most Noble Order of the Garter

It is safe to say that the two most controversial British Prime Ministers of living memory are Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) and Tony Blair (Labour).

Baroness Thatcher has gone to her rest, so we are left with Tony Blair.

Blair’s knighthood of the Most Noble Order of the Garter made the news at the end of 2021. On Saturday, January 1, 2022, The Guardian reported (emphases mine below):

Appointments to this ceremonial order are made without prime ministerial advice and are usually announced on St George’s Day, on 23 April. Founded in 1348 by Edward III, it is the oldest and most senior British Order of Chivalry and a recognition of significant public service. Sir John Major [Conservative], Blair’s predecessor, was the last to receive the honour.

The monarch makes this appointment, supposedly independently, but one wonders.

Only a year ago, the media reported that the Queen had refused to appoint him to the Garter. Incidentally, Blair has been sticking his nose in everywhere, especially Brexit. From this, we can deduce that he dislikes the average Briton:

Then why did he learn to simper? pic.twitter.com/Efvxlj5NcX

— Jatroa 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@jatroa) January 3, 2021

Over the weekend, Angus Scott launched a petition on Change.org to have Blair’s knighthood rescinded. By Tuesday, January 4, the petition had 500,000 signatures. Unfortunately, as the petition was not created on the parliamentary website, it is likely to be ignored. More importantly, as this appointment is the Queen’s, Parliament cannot do anything about it.

The petition reads:

Tony Blair caused irreparable damage to both the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society. He was personally responsible for causing the death of countless innocent, civilian lives and servicemen in various conflicts. For this alone he should be held accountable for war crimes.

The Government rejected the petition:

pic.twitter.com/WEqzYuWfWr

— The Rt miserable Malc Peters (@Malcolm02792388) January 3, 2022

The aforementioned Guardian article says that the Iraq war is still an issue with many members of the public. Speaker of the House Sir Lindsay Hoyle stepped in to defend his fellow Labourite. Not only that, he poured more oil on the flames by saying that every Prime Minister should be knighted, by virtue of their position. No, just no:

Sir Tony, rather than Sir Anthony, as he is now known, has been made a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, 14 years after leaving Downing Street. But the honour has been criticised by Blair’s political opponents and those who argue the legacy of his invasion of Iraq in 2003 makes him unsuitable.

Speaking on Saturday morning Hoyle said he felt the honour, the oldest and most senior British order of chivalry, was “a fitting tribute” for a former prime minister, although he felt it was not a political decision.

“Whatever people might think, it is one of the toughest jobs in the world,” the Speaker said, “and I think it is respectful and it is the right thing to do, whether it is Sir David Cameron. They should all be offered that knighthood when they finish as prime minister.”

Hoyle was talking to Today programme presenter Martha Kearney on BBC Radio 4 when he was asked if he believed all recent former prime ministers should now be knighted.

“If you have been prime minister of this country, I do believe the country should recognise the service given. Absolutely. You finish in the office and when you’ve finished it is the respect that we give to those prime ministers,” he replied.

I’m going off Lindsay Hoyle rather rapidly.

Other new appointees to the Garter include Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and to the former Labour cabinet member Lady Amos, the first black person to be honoured this way.

On Tuesday, January 4, The Guardian reported that Sir Keir Starmer, Labour Party leader, defended the knighthood on Good Morning Britain:

The Labour leader said Blair was a worthy recipient of the Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, received in the new year honour’s list.

“I don’t think it’s thorny at all. I think he deserves the honour. Obviously I respect the fact that people have different views,” Starmer told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.

“I understand there are strong views on the Iraq war. There were back at the time and there still are, but that does not detract from the fact that Tony Blair was a very successful prime minister of this country and made a huge difference to the lives of millions of people in this country.”

Blair, who led Labour to three election victories, was prime minister during the allied military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Monday, January 3, Christine Hamilton, whose husband was a Conservative MP then a member of the Welsh Senedd (‘Senate’, Assembly), told Dan Wootton of GB News that there are reasons why Blair should not receive this honour: Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit. She surmises that if Prince Philip were still alive, this appointment never would have happened:

‘Do you associate most noble with Tony Blair? No’

Author Christine Hamilton discusses Tony Blair being honoured with a Knighthood on the New Year's Honours list with Dan Wootton.

📺: Freeview 236, Sky 515, Virgin 626 pic.twitter.com/Dy5Y039ksp

— GB News (@GBNEWS) January 3, 2022

Several years ago, The Telegraph had an article entitled ‘Tony Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor’. Unfortunately, it has since been withdrawn from their website.

Another Telegraph gem that no longer exists is the former Conservative MP Norman Tebbit’s blog post, ‘Gordon Brown is not as vain or greedy as Tony Blair but he is in deep denial and must be removed from office’.

Money, money, money

Blair watchers know that he loves his money.

Unfortunately, this Telegraph article is also gone: ‘Tony Blair earned £680,000 for his foundation for 50 hours’ work’. That was about The Tony Blair Faith Foundation. You could not make this up.

In March 2010, the Daily Mail reported that Tony Blair needed £5 million a year just to get by. How many properties did he own by then? Six? How many properties does he own now? Eight?

The Mail says:

Tony Blair has told friends he needs to earn at least £5million a year just to break even.

The former prime minister has been heavily criticised for cashing in on his contacts for personal gain and is thought to have made around £20million since leaving office.

But last night his former election agent John Burton claimed Mr Blair needed the astonishing annual income – and possibly much more – to pay spiralling wage bills at his growing list of companies and charities.

The revelation about his finances came as the former premier returned to the political fray with a lukewarm televised endorsement of Gordon Brown.

Mr Burton, one of Mr Blair’s most loyal political friends, said: ‘What I asked him was, you know he gets this criticism about what he earns. I said how many people do you employ? And he said 130.

‘I mean it was 25 about two years ago and he said to me I have got to earn £5million a year to pay the wages, so God knows what he has got to earn now to pay the wages.’

2010 saw the Conservatives regain Government in May thanks to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. David Cameron, mentioned below, became Prime Minister. The Mail‘s article appeared during the campaign:

The former prime minister was making a controversial intervention in the election campaign yesterday as he addressed the Labour Club in his old constituency.

It followed a warning from a former defence minister that his appearance could trigger a public backlash against Labour from those angry over the Iraq War as well as Mr Blair’s business dealings.

Sporting a bizarre orange tan, Mr Blair spoke in support of his long-time rival Gordon Brown and attacked the ‘ vacuous’ Tories – but stopped short of personally criticising David Cameron.

The Tories were relaxed about the appearance, with Mr Cameron taking a dig at the former premier’s lecture circuit earnings, joking: ‘It is nice to see him making a speech that no one is paying for.’

Security was tight as Iraq War protesters demonstrated outside the Trimdon Labour Club, in the Sedgefield constituency in County Durham …

But many senior Labour figures fear his involvement could harm the party. Chief among critics was former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle, who warned that Mr Blair was now a ‘negative factor’.

He said: ‘He evokes a strong antagonism, particularly because of the Iraq War, but not only that.

‘Also the kind of things going on with allegedly Blairite former ministers and their apparently venal approach to life. He epitomises everything people think is wrong about New Labour.

‘It is a mistake by the so-called strategists. It may seem a good idea to them, but to many people at the grassroots level it is not.’

Kilfoyle was not wrong.

On May 25, 2010, a few weeks after David Cameron became PM, The Telegraph reported, ‘Tony Blair hired by US billionaire Vinod Khosla for climate change advice’. What does Tony Blair know about climate change?

The billionaire thought Blair was an expert, apparently:

The agreement will see Tony Blair Associates give strategic advice to Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies pursuing green technologies. Mr Khosla, who made his fortune as co-founder of computing giant Sun Microsystems, is hoping that Mr Blair’s decade on the global stage helps unlock doors for the companies that California-based Khosla Ventures invests in …

Mr Khosla said that “with Tony’s advice and influence’ we will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to devise practical solutions that can solve today’s most pressing problems.”

It wasn’t disclosed how much Mr Blair will be paid for the advice he gives to Khosla. He already has a £2m lobbying post with JP Morgan Chase and a £500,000 job with Zurich Financial.

Mr Blair also charges tens of thousands of pounds for public speaking, received a £4.5m advance for his memoirs and set up Tony Blair Associates to advise foreign countries including Kuwait. In total, he is estimated to have earned at least £15 million since leaving office two and a half years ago.

Good grief.

Let’s go back to Blair’s properties. Most of them are stately homes or properties out of the reach of most people in the UK.

Less than a year after Blair left office as Prime Minister, he was somehow able to buy his sixth property. How can that happen on a PM’s salary?

On May 4, 2008, the Mail reported (and included must-see photos):

Tony and Cherie Blair have added a £4million stately home once owned by Sir John Gielgud to their property portfolio.

The seven-bedroom mansion in Buckinghamshire is a few miles from Chequers, the prime ministerial retreat the Blairs gave up to Gordon Brown when he took over at No 10.

Mrs Blair was said to have longed for another historic home in the same area.

A source said: “It ticked all of Cherie’s boxes. She wanted a small stately home within a 20-mile radius of Chequers.”

The Grade I listed South Pavilion, in Wotton Underwood, brings to six the number of properties the couple now own.

They have two houses in London, two flats in Bristol and Mr Blair’s former constituency home in Durham …

Since he left office last June Mr Blair is estimated to have signed deals worth nearly £10million.

Last month the former Prime Minister reportedly earned up to £240,000 for making a 90-minute speech to businessmen in Spain.

Theoretically Mr Blair could have written a cheque for £4million to buy the property outright, but it seems more likely the couple have taken out another mortgage.

If so it would double their mortgage debt to around £8million and push their payments to more than £30,000 a month, experts estimate.

Iraq War: Dr David Kelly’s death and apologies

On June 26, 2010, the Mail alleged a cover up in the death of Dr David Kelly, said to have been unmasked as the source of the claim that the Blair government had ‘sexed up’ claims for a war in Iraq. Dr Kelly’s case is still a mystery.

The Mail article says, in part:

The official story of Dr David Kelly is that he took his own life in an Oxfordshire wood by overdosing on painkillers and cutting his left wrist with a pruning knife …

A subsequent official inquiry led by Lord Hutton into the circumstances leading to the death came to the unequivocal conclusion that Kelly committed suicide.

Yet suspicions of foul play still hang heavy over the death of the weapons expert whose body was found seven years ago next month in one of the most notorious episodes of Tony Blair’s premiership.

Many believe the truth about the manner of Dr Kelly’s death has never been established properly. Some even fear that the 59-year-old, the world’s leading expert in biological and chemical weapons, was murdered …

The blanket of secrecy thrown over the case by the last Labour Government has only fuelled the sense of mystery.

In January this year, it emerged that unpublished medical and scientific records relating to Dr Kelly’s death – including the post-mortem report and photographs of his body – had been secretly classified so as not to be made public for 70 years.

Lord Hutton, who had been appointed by Blair, was responsible for this extraordinary gagging order, yet its legal basis has baffled experts accustomed to such matters.

Against this shadowy background, we have conducted a rigorous and thorough investigation into the mystery that surrounds the death of David Kelly. And our investigation has turned up evidence which raises still more disturbing questions.

Our new revelations include the ambiguous nature of the wording on Dr Kelly’s death certificate; the existence of an anonymous letter which says his colleagues were warned to stay away from his funeral; and an extraordinary claim that the wallpaper at Dr Kelly’s home was stripped by police in the hours after he was reported missing – but before his body was found.

Until now, details of Dr Kelly’s death certificate have never been made public.

But the certificate was obtained by a group of leading doctors who have spent almost seven years investigating the case; doctors who believe it is medically implausible that he died in the manner Hutton concluded and are alarmed at the unorthodox way the death certificate was completed.

Near the top of all British death certificates is a box headed ‘Date and place of death’, in which a doctor or coroner should declare the exact location of a death, if it has been established.

Dr Kelly’s certificate gives his date of death as July 18, 2003. It then states in reference to place of death: ‘Found dead at Harrowdown Hill, Longworth, Oxon’.

Why was the word ‘found’ used? Why was the crucial question of ‘place of death’ not answered? The death certificate should be precise about the time, cause and location of death.

The doctors who have investigated the case believe the failure to answer this question leaves open the possibility that Dr Kelly died somewhere other than Harrowdown Hill, the wood where his body was discovered. If this was the case, they are concerned the law may have been subverted over Dr Kelly’s death …

A full coroner’s inquest, which, by law, must be held following any sudden, unexpected or violent death, would have addressed these discrepancies.

But no full inquest was ever held.

Oxfordshire Coroner Nicholas Gardiner opened an inquest on July 21. But on August 13 the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, Tony Blair’s former flatmate, ordered it to be adjourned indefinitely.

Falconer used an obscure law to suspend proceedings, and for the first time in English legal history he replaced an inquest with a non-statutory public inquiry to examine a single death, seemingly without any public explanation.

On October 24, 2015, The Telegraph reported that Blair gave an interview to CNN in which he partially apologised for the war in Iraq:

Tony Blair has apologised for some of the mistakes that were made during the Iraq War, and says he recognises “elements of truth” behind opinion that the invasion caused the rise of Isil.

In a candid interview with CNN, the former prime minister was challenged by US political broadcaster Fareed Zakar who accused Blair of being George Bush’s ‘poodle’ over the conflict.

During the exchange, which will air on CNN Europe at 11am and 7pm on Sunday, Mr Blair says: “I apologise for the fact that the intelligence was wrong. I also apologise, by the way, for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime. But I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.”

When asked whether he thought the invasion led to the rise of Isil, he says: “I think there are elements of truth in that. Of course you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

… Blair’s acknowledgement of responsibility, if not apology, for the rise of Islamic extremism, is aptly timed. 

In 2004, he told MPs: “I will not apologise for the conflict. I believe it was right” and in 2007, he repeated this sentiment, saying: “I don’t think we should be apologising at all for what we are doing in Iraq.”

Last week, The Telegraph reported the inquiry was facing more chaotic delays after a leaked memo signalled Blair had signed up to the war in Iraq a year before it started.

It has also been reported that former David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has revealed that he challenged Blair before the war about how to avoid any chaos after Saddam’s downfall.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Mr Blair made a secret trip to the White House to broker a deal on behalf of Muammar Gaddafi that deprived British victims of Libyan terrorism of millions of pounds in compensation.

Mr Blair acted as a go-between in negotiations between Gaddafi and President George Bush over payments to terror victims, according to a senior source.

The disclosure was made as Mr Blair ignored a deadline to explain his role to a parliamentary committee investigating the deal. He was invited to respond by Friday but instead sent a letter at 6pm on the day of the deadline, asking when the deadline was.

The source said Mr Blair travelled to Washington to intervene on behalf of Gaddafi in February 2008, after first meeting the dictator in Libya.

The new evidence suggests Mr Blair, who had quit as prime minister less than a year earlier, had played an important role in negotiations between President Bush and Gaddafi.

At the time, Libya was being sued through the US courts for committing terror atrocities, and billions of pounds of Gaddafi’s assets were at risk of being frozen as part of the lawsuits.

The deal struck by President Bush and Gaddafi led to US victims receiving £1  billion in compensation , but in exchange all court cases were dropped under an act of Congress.

But British victims, who had brought cases in the US, including almost 200 families of victims of IRA terrorist attacks, were not included in the deal. Mr Blair has always insisted he had “nothing whatever to do with any compensation legislation signed by President Bush”.

See? He does not like his own people.

On July 2, 2016, The Telegraph reported that Blair would not be investigated for war crimes in Iraq, although British soldiers could be:

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court will examine the Chilcot report for evidence of abuse and torture by British soldiers but have already ruled out putting Tony Blair on trial for war crimes, The Telegraph can disclose.

The decision has outraged families of troops killed in Iraq who blame Mr Blair for engineering the war.

Sir John Chilcot’s report will finally be published on Wednesday and is expected to strongly criticise Mr Blair’s role in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But in an official statement to the Telegraph, the International Criminal Court (ICC) said its prosecutors would comb through the 2.3 million word report for evidence of war crimes committed by British troops but that decision to go to war remained outside its remit.

It means individual soldiers could be prosecuted for war crimes but not Mr Blair.

The ICC, based in the Hague, has begun a ‘preliminary examination’ of claims of torture and abuse by British soldiers, after receiving a dossier from human rights lawyers acting for alleged Iraqi victims.

Brexit

In 1983, a young Tony Blair, running for MP in his first election standing in Sedgefield, pledged to support leaving the EU.

A campaign leaflet of his from that year surfaced, as a regional paper for the North East of England, The Chronicle, discovered:

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair hasn’t half changed his tune on Brexit since the heady days of 1983.

A campaign leaflet from Mr Blair’s first election standing in Sedgefield in 1983 has resurfaced online.

In the Labour literature, the bouffanted Oxford University graduate declares he wants to leave the European Economic Community, which later became the EU.

The pamphlet said: “We’ll negotiate a withdrawal from the E.E.C. which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs.”

On June 26, 2016, three days after the Brexit referendum, Blair pledged to seek a second referendum. Obviously, the British people are too stupid to handle such issues via the ballot box.

The Evening Standard reported:

When asked on the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme about the possibility of another vote, he said: “As I’m looking at it here, I can’t see how we can do that.

“But, you know, the point is, why rule anything out right now? As I say, you are going to have a reality to test yourself against.”

Blair said the nation needs to “see the consequences” of Brexit as they play out in the coming weeks and months.

“I can’t see how you would go through all of the mechanics of another referendum now,” he continued. I just can’t see it.

“But on the other hand I also think there will be a lot of people in the country who will say ‘well, let’s have a look at this and see what we are going to do’ and Parliament will want to look at it.”

Blair was still at it a year later, asking for a delay to Brexit negotiations:

The 1930s again. That’s right, we’re all Nazis. All credit to Tony Blair. Now head and shoulders above everyone as the most hated person in British politics. I presume that’s what he was aiming for. If it isn’t, he’s insane. https://t.co/dOwuKGMhPw

— Pat Condell (@patcondell) June 27, 2018

In 2019, Blair asked for a second referendum, claiming it would be ‘healing’. Oh, my:

He also said Iraq had WMD.

— BWright #GBNews (@bwright1951) April 29, 2019

A month later, this Brexit poll appeared, which the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conducted:

Polls that the powers that be don't want you to see are also hidden. Tony Blair hates this POLL of 91100 thousands people being shown and retweeted. pic.twitter.com/aqfLNYru5b

— David Stanley (@davidericstan) May 31, 2019

Hilarious!

It should be noted that Blair did not offer British voters a referendum on the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice during his time in office:

It's interesting that John Major (who signed the Treaty of Maastricht without a referendum), Tony Blair (who signed the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice without a referendum) and Gordon Brown (who signed the Treaty of Lisbon without a referendum) do not want the UK to leave the EU!

— Robert Kimbell (@Rob_Kimbell) September 3, 2019

Do we need any further proof that Blair dislikes the British people? Perhaps we do.

Migration to UK unexpected

Then there was the issue of migration to the UK, which Blair facilitated during his time as PM.

On March 19, 2017, Tony Blair said he did not anticipate the number of migrants who would come to the UK when he opened the borders to European workers.

The Telegraph reported:

The former Labour leader relaxed immigration controls in 2004 after 10 new nations including Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, were admitted to the EU.

He tried to play down the significance of opening Britain’s borders, arguing that most EU migrants came to the UK after 2008.

However, official figures show that the number of EU migrants who came to Britain rose from just 15,000 in 2003 to 87,000 the following year. That figure increased to 104,000 in 2006 and 127,000 in 2007.

Mr Blair also made a factual error by suggesting that he could only have imposed transitional controls, temporarily barring migrants for four years.

In fact other EU nations including Germany introduced the measures for up to seven years.

Those numbers, which continued to increase through subsequent years, represent one small city per year in the UK.

——————————————————–

What has Tony Blair done to deserve the Order of the Garter? Nothing whatsoever.

Afghanistan: a global geo-political disaster area

How could Joe Biden end US involvement in Afghanistan so disastrously?

He made the decision unilaterally, leaving the nation in peril over the weekend, with horrific images unfolding across world media.

That said, by the time the US and UK entered Afghanistan in 2001 to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and terror, everyone knew that any operation there would be futile. The Soviets even pulled out in 1989.

In fact, Afghanistan was always an intractable place, a law unto itself throughout history.

Alexander the Great’s tenuous hold

Military historian Jamie Hayes wrote a gripping history of an ancient and weak conquest of Afghanistan, ‘Unwilling To Stop And Unwilling To Go On: Alexander the Great’s Afghan Campaign’.

Until his invasion of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great believed himself invincible (emphases mine):

Alexander the Great was undeniably the greatest military commander in history. He took over his father’s throne at just 20 years old and immediately began a campaign the likes of which the world has never seen. He fought battle after battle, forging the largest empire on earth—all without losing even once. As he rampaged across Western and Central Asia, he founded countless cities that stand to this day. Millennia after his death, military geniuses like Napoleon painstakingly studied his battles to learn from his success. He unquestionably earned his moniker—Alexander was Great.

With such a spotless military record, Alexander’s conquests seem almost like they were…easy. With his elite troops and unmatched tactical genius, he started from the unassuming Macedon in Northern Greece and wrought the largest empire the world had ever seen, spanning from Greece in the West all the way to India in the East. But while his remarkable conquests in Persia and his far-reaching campaign to India take center stage in the history books, there’s an often-forgotten chapter of Alexander’s legacy that was anything but easy.

Alexander’s campaign in Afghanistan has become a mere footnote in his legacy—perhaps because it was the region where the great warlord saw the least success. Like many other military superpowers would after him, from the British Empire to Russia to NATO, Alexander waltzed into Afghanistan with all the confidence in the world, but he left battered and bruised, with very little to show for it. The region chewed him up and spat him out, and while he never explicitly “lost” any battles in his time there, it’s hard to so he won much of anything either. In fact, historians have claimed that the brutal Afghan campaign marked a shift in Alexander—from infallible Golden Boy to a cruel, paranoid shell of what he once was.

Alexander the Great wanted to topple a man named Bessus, the only obstacle preventing the military commander from becoming king of the Persian Empire. Bessus had toppled Darius III (Darius the Great), the self-styled King of Kings of the Persian Empire. Bessus gave himself a new name, Artaxerxes V.

Incensed, Alexander believed that Artaxarxes V was a usurper and set about to right that perceived wrong. For that, he had to follow the new king into Bactria, which is part of modern-day Afghanistan.

Bactria proved to be highly difficult with regard to the terrain and the men who lived there:

… the conflict here was slow and brutal—guerrilla warfare and sieges that left Alexander and his men exhausted and disillusioned. The frozen mountains and blazing deserts of the region were a far cry from the battlefields they were used to, and “glorious battle” seemed to be a thing of the past.

Alexander spent two agonizing years in Afghanistan, a major chunk of his historic campaign across western and central Asia. Granted, he didn’t leave the brutal landscape empty-handed: His primary goal in Bactria was to capture the traitorous Bessus, and he accomplished that. The rival claimant to the throne of the Persian Empire was dealt with, and Alexander could rightfully call himself the King of Kings. But the price he paid for that luxury was extreme.

Alexander’s most successful enemy in Afghanistan was the land itself. He lost far more men to the frigid peaks of the Hindu Kush or the scorching Northern Afghan desert than to any military resistance he faced. And when he did try to engage enemy forces, he found himself playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.

Once he left, his victory was short-lived:

Fighting in Afghanistan was a Sisyphean task, and Alexander’s grip on the region started slipping the moment that he left. While it was considered a part of the enormous Empire that he left after his death, control of the territory was tenuous at best. Revolts began almost the moment that Alexander dropped dead, and they seemingly never truly stopped. Rebellion was simply a reality for any foreign state that attempted to claim sovereignty over the unforgiving landscape.

Nonetheless, he left a legacy with the foundation of several cities, including Kandahar. He also found a wife there:

He founded many cities as he chased Bessus across the region, some of which still exist today. The most notable is the city of Kandahar, which he named Alexandria Arachosia (in fact, it’s believed that the name Kandahar itself is derived from the Persian name for Alexander, Iskandar). He also found his famous bride, the beautiful Roxana, whom he loved above all others, in the region. But while Alexander left his mark on Afghanistan, Afghanistan also left its mark on him.

Centuries later, the British tried to control the country as did the Soviets. Both failed.

That would not stop another British foray nor did it stop the Americans.

The Americans tried their best

I have only a few bookmarks on the Americans’ long-term mission in Afghanistan.

In October 2009, Michelle Malkin found two reports about a deadly attack on US troops. She wrote (emphasis in the original):

An incredible account from ABC News reporter Karen Russo, who notes that wounded troops refused to leave the battlefield this weekend during the deadly siege at Kamdeysh:

Flying into the besieged Afghan base during a nighttime firefight this weekend is a harrowing mix of overwhelming noise, stomach dropping maneuvers and shadows hurrying through the gloom.

When the chopper lifted off moments later with three wounded soldiers, it left behind others who were wounded but refused to be MEDEVACED out of the combat zone so they could return to fight with their buddies.

As fighting at two U.S. outposts raged on the ground this weekend, the MEDEVAC team at a nearby base waited – with both patience and frustration.

Eight soldiers, all from Fort Carson, were killed that night. Malkin cited another report (emphases mine):

In the deadliest day for Fort Carson since Vietnam, eight soldiers from the post’s 4th Brigade Combat Team died in Afghanistan on Saturday when insurgents attacked a pair of remote outposts in Nuristan province …

“My heart goes out to the families of those we have lost and to their fellow Soldiers who remained to finish this fight,” Col. Randy George, the brigade’s commander, said in a statement late Saturday. “This was a complex attack in a difficult area. Both the U.S. and Afghan Soldiers fought bravely together; I am extremely proud of their professionalism and bravery.”

Later that month, when Obama had been in the White House for less than a year, Global Research published ‘America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan’, which posited that the real reasons for being in Afghanistan were far removed from terror. Controlling the opium supply there was one real objective. The second was to maintain a bulwark against Russia and China.

Excerpts follow:

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.

It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.

The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they did in the 1980’s against the Russians.

The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it …

Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end of the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.

As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.

Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.

Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.

Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.

By the time the article was posted, there was allegedly little terrorism threat left:

… the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…

If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, terror remained a by-product of the American presence in Afghanistan. One Afghan-American visitor was so affected by his time there that he returned to launch terror attacks of his own in the Chelsea district of Manhattan as well as in a shore town in New Jersey. He was from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

On September 19, 2016, the Boston Herald reported that a friend of the suspect said that the visit to Afghanistan was ‘life-changing’:

A man who described himself as a childhood friend of the 28-year-old busted today in connection with this weekend’s New York-area bombings told the Herald the suspect made a life-changing trip to Afghanistan two years ago. 

“At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious,” friend Flee Jones, 27, said of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. “And it was shocking. I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve never seen him like this.”

Police this morning released a photo of Rahami, an Afghan immigrant and U.S. citizen, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. Rahami was taken into custody after a gunfight in nearby Linden today at 11:20 a.m. (See that story here…)

The terror suspect’s arrest came after investigators this morning swarmed a chicken restaurant and apartment here in connection with the hunt for Rahami, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage told the Herald …

Bollwage told the Herald the search began after five people were pulled over on the Belt Parkway last night in connection with the bombing in Chelsea. That led to the search of First American Fried Chicken and the apartment above it in Elizabeth, Bollwage said, but it was unclear how the people detained were connected to the restaurant.

In addition to the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday that injured dozens, a pipe bomb exploded in a New Jersey shore town before a charity 5K race and an unexploded pressure cooker device was found blocks away from the explosion site in Chelsea. Yesterday, five explosive devices were discovered at an Elizabeth train station.

FBI agents as well as state and local police were in the eatery and the apartment upstairs, which are cordoned off by yellow crime tape. Investigators towed a black Toyota sedan away from the street in front of the restaurant this morning …

According to an Elizabeth resident, Rahami worked the register at the restaurant and was in charge when his father was gone.

A few months earlier, in June, the father of mass shooter Omar Raheem allegedly supported the Taliban and wanted to become president of Afghanistan. The Daily Mail reported:

Mass shooter Omar Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen recently visited Congress, the State Department and met political leaders during a trip to Washington, DC.

Mateen, who made the trip in April, is seen in social media posts posing in front of the State Department and Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices.

The Afghanistan native, who also regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, has expressed gratitude [to the] Afghan Taliban who hosts the Durand Jirga Show on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California … 

Dozens of videos are posted under Mateen’s name on YouTube, where he speaks on a range of political subjects in the Dari language.

One video shows him declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency.

Posts include topics such as ‘Rise Afghan people against Pakistan’ and ‘Intelligent service and Military of Pakistan real Enemy of the USA (sic)’.

In one video the elder Mateen holds up a sign that reads: ‘ISI Pakistan and Military is Destroying 14 years of US work in Afghanistan to cut AID to killers’.

Meanwhile, the Taliban were still terrorising children, revealing the fact that local government was superior to that from the nation’s capital, Kabul. On June 12, 2010, the Taliban hanged a seven-year-old boy in order to punish his family. The Telegraph reported:

Del Awar, aged seven, was taken at sunset and found hanging in an orchard at sunrise the following day.

Bruises and scratches around the young boy’s neck suggested his murder had been neither quick, nor easy, according to those who saw his slight body after it was cut down.

His death is widely believed to have been punishment for the stand taken by his family against the Taliban in their remote Helmand village.

Reports from the village of Heratiyan in Sangin district said Del Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, and grandfather, Abdel Satar, had grown tired of Taliban intimidation and the violence the militants attracted.

The family had either demanded rebel fighters stop using village compounds to stage ambushes or had refused a demand of £400 for machine guns, villagers reported.

The two men had been angrily denounced as Nato or US spies and unknown to them, Del Awar’s cruel fate was sealed.

The Taliban have denied the killing, but in Heratiyan where villagers must live under the reality of complete militant control, many privately doubt their protestations.

Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, was a poor man who could not send his children to school and did not have a feud with anyone, explained Maulawi Shamsullah Sahrai, a 50-year-old elder from the village …

For those accused of collaboration with the Nato-led forces or with Mr Karzai’s weak government, Taliban control often means rapid summary execution.

Afghanistan brought other peculiarities involving alliances through sexual relations. In 2014, an American couple sued the United States Marines for allegedly covering up the circumstances of their son’s death in 2012. The New York Post reported:

The shattered family of a Long Island Marine murdered by an Afghan rebel on an American military base in 2012 is suing the corps and top brass for allegedly covering up details of the incident, The Post has learned.

Relatives of Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr., 21, of Oceanside, say his killer served as a “tea boy” for an infamous Afghan police chief who was allowed to operate out of the Helmand province compound despite his perverse reputation, according to the Brooklyn federal suit filed Wednesday.

Ainuddin Khudairaham walked into a gym on the base and shot dead Buckley, Cpl. Richard Rivera and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson. He proclaimed himself a jihadist before being arrested.

Khudairaham was employed on the base by Sarwar Jan, a notorious Afghan police chief with a taste for young boys, drug dealing, and trading arms with the Taliban, the suit states.

He had already been ejected from another village for his unsavory activities and the US military compiled a dossier of his ugly exploits long before he arrived at Buckley’s base, court papers state.

Afghan women continued to be terrorised, as the Daily Mail reported on December 28, 2016, after Donald Trump had been elected president:

A woman has reportedly been beheaded by a group of armed men in Afghanistan after she entered a city without her husband.

The horrific act took place in the remote village of Latti in Sar-e-Pul province, which is under Taliban control.

Provincial Governor spokesman Zabiullah Amani told the Nation that the 30-year-old woman was targeted because she went out alone without her husband, who is in Iran.

The Middle East Press reported the woman had gone to the market to shop.

Under Taliban rule women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative.

They are also banned from working or education and are forced to wear the burqa.

The Taliban have rejected any involvement in this latest incident …

Gateway Pundit carried the story and said that Trump would bring better days:

There is hope, however because Donald Trump has publicly stated that ‘things will be different after January 20th’.

Terrorism persisted in Afghanistan. On April 13, 2017, Trump retaliated with a MOAB, Mother of All Bombs:

MORE: Weapon used is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, which was nicknamed the "Mother of All Bombs" and had never been used before

— BNO News (@BNONews) April 13, 2017

Here is a video of the MOAB:

A Fox News article from that time stated that the MOAB had been tested for deployment as early as 2003:

It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used in combat before Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan “some time ago” for potential use. The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.

“As [ISIS’] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS].”

President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that “this was another successful mission” and he gave the military total authorization.

Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.

“North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of,” said Trump.

It was thought that the MOAB was launched in retaliation for the death of a Green Beret soldier. The Daily Mail reported that the Pentagon denied any revenge:

The blast killed 36 militants as it destroyed three underground tunnels as well as weapons and ammunition, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense said.

No civilians were hurt, he added.

U.S. forces used a 30-foot long, GPS-guided GBU-43 bomb, at around 7.30pm local time in the Nangarhar Province …

A crater left by the blast is believed to be more than 300 meters (1,000 feet) wide after it exploded six feet above the ground. Anyone at the blast site was vaporized …

The Pentagon is denying that the attack was a revenge strike despite the fact that it came in the same area of Afghanistan where a Green Beret soldier was killed on Saturday.

Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar of the 7th Special Forces Group was cut down by enemy small arms fire while his unit was conducting counter-ISIS operations. 

A WikiLeaks document, quoting a New York Times article, says that the CIA had built those tunnels with the help of their then-ally, Osama bin Laden, who had a degree in civil engineering. He tapped into his family’s construction equipment. They owned the Saudi Binladin Group:

Those tunnels the U.S is bombing in Afghanistan? They were built by the CIA https://t.co/u66ScoiNpX (via @GabiElenaDohm) pic.twitter.com/mAaUrQ0yLk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 14, 2017

From the White House, Sean Spicer confirmed the MOAB hit. Nearly two-thirds of registered American voters approved.

Weeks later, on May 7, the US confirmed they had taken out Afghanistan’s head of ISIS at the end of April. Reuters reported:

The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdul Hasib, was killed in an operation on April 27 conducted jointly by Afghan and U.S. Special Forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, U.S. and Afghan officials said on Sunday.

Hasib, appointed last year after his predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a U.S. drone strike, is believed to have ordered a series of high profile attacks including one in March 8 on the main military hospital in Kabul, a statement said.

Last month, a Pentagon spokesman said Hasib had probably been killed during the raid by U.S. and Afghan special forces in Nangarhar during which two U.S. army Rangers were killed, but prior to Sunday’s announcement there had been no confirmation.

“This successful joint operation is another important step in our relentless campaign to defeat ISIS-K in 2017,” the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson said in a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul.

Late that summer, on August 21, Trump gave a speech on the future of Afghanistan, stating that he was weary of the American presence. He said that the country would need to sort its own governance out. He told the terrorists that America was keeping a close eye on them. He threatened to withdraw funding for Pakistan if they continued to support terrorists. He requested help and support from India. The short version is here, but beware of the language from the person summarising it.

The full transcript of Trump’s speech is here. It is too long to excerpt. He delivered it before the first lady, Mike Pence and a group of American troops.

By October 13, Pakistan was helping the United States. That day, Trump tweeted:

Starting to develop a much better relationship with Pakistan and its leaders. I want to thank them for their cooperation on many fronts.

Nearly one year later, on September 3, 2018 — Labor Day — an American soldier serving in Operation Resolute Support was killed in an attack on NATO forces. He was the sixth American to fall in Afghanistan that year.

Two days earlier, news emerged that China was encroaching on Afghanistan, specifically into the Wakhan Corridor, which connects China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan. This is a thin tongue-shaped area of land, which you can see in a map here.

On September 1, Lawrence Sellin, a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve, wrote an article for the Indian Center for Diplomatic Studies, ‘China Moves into Afghanistan As Part of Its Global Expansion Mission’.

He wrote that China was seeking to end the Afghan conflict and enhance their own strategic standing:

For many, it was a stunning development. China will build a brigade-size military training facility in the strategic Wakhan Corridor, the land bridge between Tajikistan and Pakistan, which is located in Afghanistan’s northeast Badakhshan province and borders China.

Although Beijing denied the claim that hundreds of Chinese soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, a source close to the Chinese military stated, “Construction of the base has started, and China will send at least one battalion of troops, along with weapons and equipment, to be stationed there and provide training to their Afghan counterparts.”

For those who have been closely following growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, the above report comes as no surprise.

A year earlier on August 14, 2017, Spogmai radio quoted the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense (translation): “A brigade base will be built to maintain the security of Badakhshan, which will be funded by China.”

The spokesman stated that China has steadily increased its military cooperation with Afghanistan and had, at that point, already provided $73 million in military aid.

Beyond the enormous geopolitical implications of a Chinese military base inside Afghanistan, the Badakhshan installation is the final security link between Tajikistan, vital to China’s commercial interests in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China’s “all-weather” ally in South Asia.

It was largely unreported that China financed border outposts and deployed troops to Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which borders Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province and is part of the Wakhan Corridor.

Consolidating a Chinese presence in Badakhshan province, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Technology has discussed signing a contract with China Telecom for a fiber optic network connecting China to the Wakhan Corridor. No doubt, the intention is to couple that system to the larger network linking China with Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.

China is already Afghanistan’s biggest investor. In 2007 it took a $3 billion, 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine. China and Pakistan have offered to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan. Some have concluded that the CPEC invitation is a prelude to positioning China as a mediator to end the Afghan conflict.

I will stop there and continue tomorrow.

Involvement in Afghanistan is an unholy mess, aided and abetted by China and its allies.

June 23, 2021: five years after the Brexit referendum, how wrong Project Fear was

On Wednesday, June 23, 2021 — the five year anniversary of the Brexit referendum — The Spectator had a good article about how wrong Project Fear’s predictions were.

Excerpts from ‘Five of the worst Remain predictions five years on’ follow (emphases mine).

The sources for these are then-Chancellor George Osborne, the banks, an international accounting firm, then-Prime Minister David Cameron and the EU’s Donald Tusk.

George Osborne

George Osborne and the Treasury peddled three Project Fear disasters: impoverished households, huge job losses and what The Spectator calls a ‘punishment budget’.

On households, using Treasury figures, he predicted that each household in Britain would be poorer by £4,300 in 2030. Even the Remainer BBC had a problem with that. Their fact check said that the figure was:

questionable and probably not particularly helpful.

In reality, the opposite has happened:

records from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show in the five years since that real disposable income per head has risen from £5,177 in the second quarter of 2016 to £5,354 at the end of 2020. 

On the jobs front, Treasury figures predicted 500,000 job losses across Britain.

In reality, early in 2020, before coronavirus hit, the employment rate was at a record high:

a million jobs were added by the time Covid hit, with the employment rate for those aged between 16 to 64 rising from 74.5 per cent in June 2016 to 76.6 per cent in January 2020 – the highest level since 1971.

Before the 2016 referendum, Osborne told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK would leave the EU with no economic plan, therefore, a punishment budget of higher taxes and public spending cuts would have to be implemented.

In reality, after Cameron resigned at 9:30 a.m. on June 24, 2016, Osborne left his post as Chancellor. Philip Hammond, his successor, said that no such budget would be implemented.

As a result:

Hammond’s first budget was described as a ‘low-key package’ that increased national insurance contributions for the self-employed and enjoyed stronger-than-expected tax receipts since the EU referendum. Britain even finished the year as one of the fastest growing economies in the G7.

The banks

Goldman Sachs predicted a British recession by early 2017.

Nomura and Credit Suisse predicted falls in GDP: 1.3% and 1%, respectively.

JP Morgan predicted that Scotland would leave the Union and create their own currency.

In reality, Scotland is still yearning to break free with no plan on how to do it:

with the British economy growing up until the first quarter of 2020 when Covid struck with 1.7 per cent annual GDP growth in both 2016 and 2017 followed by 1.3 per cent in 2018 and 1.4 per cent in 2019.

Big accounting firm

PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted a loss of up to 100,000 financial services jobs.

EY (Ernst & Young) came closer to the true figure:

Rivals EY estimated last month that PWC’s figure had overestimated such losses by a factor of nine, with just 7,600 going overseas as of March 2021.

Donald Tusk and David Cameron

The EU’s Donald Tusk predicted the loss of:

Western political civilization in its entirety.

David Cameron predicted a Third World War.

In reality:

it appears that the greater threat to the EU is in fact its own leaders, given the ongoing debacle of the vaccine rollout in the face of public dismay. Western political civilisation meanwhile has somehow remained intact.

Ordinary citizens — the 52% who voted to Leave — can discern the situation on the ground better than the experts — our notional betters — can.

Thanks again to all Britons who voted Leave on that rainy, miserable day five years ago.

We’re out and, together as a Union, we are putting the ‘Great’ back into Britain. Our coronavirus vaccine rollout has been spectacular, surpassing the EU’s by a country mile. More great accomplishments for us lie ahead.

When it comes to the EU, better out than in.

Nigel Farage leaves politics, but he’s not going away

On Saturday, March 6, 2021, Nigel Farage announced that, after nearly 30 years, he is leaving the world of politics:

Farage Announces he’s Quitting Politics https://t.co/wfaESK9dzN pic.twitter.com/K9KtL8UjiU

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 6, 2021

That photo was taken in the EU Parliament on the last day in that British MEPs participated in proceedings.

Guido Fawkes points out how extraordinary Nigel Farage is:

Tonight @Nigel_Farage formally steps down from party politics. The most influential politician of the modern era, without ever entering Parliament.

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 6, 2021

Granted, Farage was an MEP for South East England for just over a decade — 1999-2020 — and his was probably the only MEP’s name anyone in Britain knew. Yes, we voted for them, but it was all a bit of a forgettable side show. I could never remember who our regional MEP was.

1994 by-election

Nigel Farage did run for Parliament, however, and only once. That was in 1994, in Eastleigh, which is in Hampshire.

Eastleigh’s Conservative MP, Stephen Milligan, had died suddenly at the age of 45. It transpired that the cause of his death was autoerotic asphyxiation. The story made the papers and LBC (the only talk radio station in England at the time). People talked about it for days: ‘Is this really a thing?’ Apparently so, among some people back then. We were bemused and astonished.

Milligan’s secretary found his body.

From Wikipedia (emphases mine):

Milligan was found dead in his house at 64 Black Lion Lane, Hammersmith, London, by his secretary Vera Taggart on 7 February 1994. Milligan had failed to appear in the House of Commons as expected, and so Taggart went to look for him.^[4] Milligan’s corpse was found naked except for a pair of stockings and suspenders, with an electrical flex tied around his neck, a black bin liner over his head and an orange in his mouth.^[5][4] The coroner concluded that he had died in the early hours of 7 February.^[4] The pathology report into Milligan’s death discounted the possibility of murder, lending weight to the belief that he died accidentally as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation. No drugs or alcohol were found in his blood, and no substances were found to have contributed to his death.^[4][6]

Farage was one of the candidates in the by-election, which was held on June 8 that year. Farage represented UKIP at the time. David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat, won the by-election. Farage came fourth. Chidgey had come in second to Milligan in the prior election. Chidgey is now in the House of Lords and holds a life peerage. His full title is Baron Chidgey of Hamble-le-Rice in the County of Hampshire.

Eastleigh currently has a Conservative MP, Paul Holmes.

European Parliament

In 1999, Farage was elected as an MEP for the South East England region. He was re-elected three subsequent times, until the UK left the EU. We were no longer allowed to participate once we began our Brexit transition period.

On Thursday, June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU in the biggest plebiscite in our history. People who hadn’t voted for years went to polling stations across the land, especially in England and in Wales, to vote Leave. I remember the day well. It poured buckets all day long. Glastonbury, our biggest music festival, was the next day. Between the weather and Glasto, a lot of young adults who would have voted Remain either stayed home or were on their way to the festival. Leave won by 52% to 48%.

On Tuesday, June 28, 2016, Farage spoke in the EU Parliament, satisfied that, after having been trying since 1992, his life’s work was being realised:

You all laughed at me. You’re not laughing now, are you?

This short clip of his speech is worth watching. Many Britons have seen it, and it’s always great viewing it again. Guy Verhofstadt and Jean-Claude Juncker appear in it, too:

In October 2019, Guy Verhofstadt objected to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s deal, calling it a ‘virtual’ withdrawal agreement and a ‘blame game’ against the EU. He then called Boris ‘a traitor’. By then, the UKIP MEPs were representing the Brexit Party, Farage’s new party incarnation.

In addition to Verhofstadt, this 15-minute video shows a left-wing British MEP denouncing Boris as a ‘toe-rag’, to which a Conservative MEP objected, Brexit Party MEPs Richard Tice and Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox in the House of Lords) as well as, of course, Farage himself (at the 13-minute point). Farage struck out at Michel Barnier, who was our negotiator for the EU, and a Remainer MEP (14-minute point). He called her a ‘patronising stuck up snob’.

I saw this when it happened — a must-watch:

In 2019, with our departure from the EU becoming a reality, the Brexit Party became the Reform Party, devoted to reforming British institutions.

This brings us to the present day.

March 2021

On Saturday, Nigel Farage announced that, having worked for 30 years on getting Britain out of the EU, his work in the political sphere has been fulfilled. He added that it is more than most MPs can say about their parliamentary careers. He is right.

In his 10-minute video, he runs through his struggle for Brexit, expresses his hope that the current teething problems will be worked out and says that he will now devote himself to special personal ‘projects’ of his, which include shining a light on China and the British education system as well as planting trees to improve the environment:

This is why I’m standing down as leader of Reform UK.

I will continue to play my part through the media, social media and new projects.

My thanks go out to the many millions that helped change the course of history forever. pic.twitter.com/F9m0sCAW57

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 6, 2021

Richard Tice, a successful businessman, will now head the Reform Party.

On Sunday, March 7, Farage reposted his video and added that he will become Honorary President of Reform UK:

I am delighted to take up a position as Honorary President of Reform UK and will leave the party in the capable hands of Richard Tice.

pic.twitter.com/F9m0sCAW57

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 7, 2021

He said that, if asked, he would help Richard Tice in campaigning in the run up to our May 2021 local elections.

Nigel Farage says that we have not heard the last from him and that he will continue to have a strong social media presence, including on YouTube.

He’s done fantastic work for the nation.

I was delighted to have heard him speak in person several years ago as well as chat one-on-one with him briefly at that event. During intermission, members of the audience submitted written questions anonymously. I submitted three, and he kindly answered all of them! Thank you, Nigel!