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Political stories abound this week, both north and south of the English border.
Scotland: a postscript
Following up on my May 7 post on Scotland’s new First Minister John Swinney, he has given past and future leadership rival Kate Forbes MSP a prominent role in the Holyrood government.
Yet, in reality, how prominent is that role?
The casual follower of politics would think that it was an important one.
On Wednesday, May 8, Guido Fawkes reported (purple emphases mine):
Initial terms of the Swinney-Forbes deal have been carried out. John Swinney has been sworn in as First Minister today and has just appointed Forbes to replace Shona Robison as deputy First Minister. Forbes says:
I am deeply honoured to accept John’s invitation to be his deputy first minister. This is a moment of extraordinary privilege for me. I look forward to working with John and cabinet colleagues to deliver for the people of Scotland and build a better country.
Interestingly, Guido says that Swinney is scrapping the Holyrood post of Minister for Independence.
Hmm! Independence is the SNP’s raison d’être.
Wings Over Scotland had more, with a screenshot of a Holyrood document that says:
Kate Forbes, the youngest-ever Deputy First Minister, will take on the Economy portfolio and responsibility for Gaelic
In a debate that day, the House of Lords made much of Forbes’s responsibility for preserving the Gaelic language and enhancing its use across Scotland, but, overall, the Wings Over Scotland post told us that Forbes’s appointments were not that important in the grand scheme of things:
All he’s done is give Kate Forbes the smallest possible sliver of Shona Robison’s [Finance Minister’s] job and everything else has stayed the same.
As anyone remotely familiar with the Scottish Parliament will know, the economy is almost entirely reserved to Westminster.
Holyrood was never intended to exercise any significant control over it, so shaving it away from the Finance Secretary’s brief is a token gesture …
(It will however allow Forbes to oversee the creation of the unpopular, undemocratic “Green Freeports”, which were no part of the SNP’s 2021 manifesto.)
Furthermore:
… the office of Deputy First Minister is ceremonial – it’s very much the exception rather than the rule if the DFM ever becomes the actual FM.
Therefore:
So all we learned today is that Kate Forbes was pretty cheaply bought (like the other supposed contender for the SNP leadership), and that business will continue as usual. The appointment of Forbes will do nothing other than antagonise the Scottish Greens, and while we’re all in favour of that, it can only make the job of getting anything done in the next two years harder …
As we told you last week, then, get ready for two incredibly boring years of nothing much happening, which is exactly what Swinney was manoeuvered into place for.
One of the two Alba Party MPs in Westminster, Kenny MacAskill (a former SNP MP), analysed Swinney’s appointment as SNP leader and First Minister:
It was a coronation not a challenge for John Swinney, thus avoiding what he’d previously faced when leading the SNP. But even though he won comfortably then and would have done so again, it’s indicative of a malaise surrounding him.
For whilst he commands widespread respect, he neither enthuses the wider membership, let alone activists … Moreover, whilst experienced, stepping back and being intent on stepping down, that along with recent ministerial portfolio performances have taken much of the sheen off his political persona.
He’s not the continuity candidate, more the “circling the wagons” candidate. After Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation the task was to continue it and Humza Yousaf was the one chosen to do that, albeit only just sneaking in ahead of Kate Forbes. With his fall it became obvious that Sturgeonism was over.
But her legacy had to be protected, reputations defended and even positions maintained. Kate Forbes would have been a reset of the Party. Changes at HQ as well as in Government would have followed. A new direction would have been taken. That has all been cast asunder.
The New SNP oligarchy in a panic that Forbes might win dragooned John Swinney from his retirement. Hence why senior figures were out pleading for it or at home phoning to achieve it.
His victory will see them sleep easier, even if decline will continue. But as I used to say about Labour and it now applies to the SNP, those in charge don’t really care so long as they remain in situ. They’ll even take defeat before removal from control …
Plus ça change as they say.
Labour boast of two new MPs
Wednesday, May 8, was also a notable day in the House of Commons as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer could display a further bounty of new MPs at PMQs.
One was the newly-elected Labour MP for Blackpool South. He replaces the Conservative MP Scott Benton, who had to stand down in the constituency, thereby triggering a by-election.
The second came as a shock: Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover. As I watched PMQs and listened to Starmer make the announcement, I thought, ‘Surely, some mistake’, but, no.
The Telegraph shared my bemusement:
It is hardly surprising that a Conservative MP for Dover would take issue with the Government’s failure to get to grips with the cross-Channel migrant crossings, which affect the Kent port perhaps more than anywhere else. But for Natalie Elphicke to cross the floor of the Commons and join Labour is positively bizarre.
Rishi Sunak may be struggling to “stop the boats” as he has promised – indeed 1,300 asylum seekers have made the journey since April 30 – but at least he is trying to arrest the flow. Labour pays lip service to tougher border controls but only because it knows voters are concerned about what is happening. The Opposition has no realistic or workable plan to deter the influx. We know this, not least because Mrs Elphicke has said so on a number of occasions.
She wrote in one newspaper: “Not only have Labour got no plan of their own to tackle illegal immigration, they simply do not want to.” She described the party leader as Sir Keir Softie because of his approach to the problem. “In trying to sound tough, [Labour] have revealed that they are anything but,” she added.
Elphicke never struck me as a wet Conservative. Furthermore, she is not standing as a candidate in the upcoming general election, still to be announced.
The Telegraph went through the same process as I did:
If she felt compelled to leave the Conservatives, she could have sat as an independent or joined Reform. Since she is not proposing to defend the seat at the next election there is speculation (which has been denied) that she may have been offered a peerage.
Whatever the case, Starmer made Rishi Sunak look weak, as this is not the first time in recent weeks that a Conservative MP has crossed the aisle. Dan Poulter, an NHS mental health physician, was another whose presence on the Labour benches made PMQs at the end of April:
Certainly her defection was timed to cause maximum damage to her erstwhile party, when she popped up behind Sir Keir just before Prime Minister’s Questions. Has there been some grubby deal? We should be told.
Guido posted Elphicke’s full statement as to why she joined Labour: their housing policy, although there is her dislike of Rishi Sunak, too. Most of us did not know that one of her main interests is social housing. Apparently, she grew up in a council house. Rumour has it that she will become a housing adviser to Labour.
Note that most of the following is likely to be Labour boilerplate:
Today I announce that I have decided to join the Labour Party and that I will sit in Parliament as a Labour MP.
When I was elected in 2019, the Conservative Party occupied the centre ground of British politics. The party was about building the future and making the most of the opportunities that lay ahead for our country.
Since then, many things have changed. The elected Prime Minister was ousted in a coup led by the unelected Rishi Sunak. Under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives have become a byword for incompetence and division. The centre ground has been abandoned and key pledges of the 2019 manifesto have been ditched.
On housing, Rishi Sunak’s Government is now failing to build the homes we need. Last year saw the largest fall of new housing starts in England in a single year since the credit crunch. The manifesto committed to 300,000 homes next year – but only around half that number are now set to be built. Renters and leaseholders have been betrayed as manifesto pledges to end no fault evictions and abolish ground rents have not been delivered as promised.
The last couple of years have also seen a huge rise in homelessness, in temporary accommodation and rough sleeping with record numbers of children now in temporary accommodation, without a secure roof over their head.
Meanwhile Labour plan to build the homes we need, help young people onto the housing ladder and care about the vulnerable and homeless. That’s why I’m honoured to have been asked to work with Keir and the team to help deliver the homes we need.
We need to move on from the broken promises of Rishi Sunak’s tired and chaotic Government. Britain needs a Government that will build a future of hope, optimism, opportunity and fairness. A Britain everyone can be part of, that will make the most of the opportunities that lie ahead. That’s why it’s time for change. Time for a Labour Government led by Keir Starmer. The General Election cannot come soon enough.
Guido reminded us of how she got elected as MP in 2019 (red emphases his):
Eyebrows went very high when Elphicke was spotted sat on the opposition benches. It has now been confirmed. A PMQs stunt executed well…
Elphicke was elected Tory MP for Dover in 2019 after her MP husband Charlie was charged with three counts of sexual harassment. Her statement focusses on housing and Tory failures to deliver on housing manifesto promises. Who will it be next week?
Guido also posted a laundry list of the times Elphicke criticised Labour, including Sir Keir Starmer. Excerpts follow. This is the Natalie Elphicke I remember, the one who wanted action taken on the Channel crossings:
- Said Labour’s “latest relaunch completely ignored the small boats crisis“ …
- Wrote an op-ed for the Express titled: “Don’t trust Labour on immigration they really want open borders“…
- Said that “Labour back fewer and weaker border controls when it comes to illegal arrivals on our shores.“
- Attacked Labour for planning to force taxpayers to “pay asylum seekers nearly £20,000 a year“.
Housing came up only once in the list:
- Attacked Labour for achieving 100 times fewer council homes than the Tories.
Guido concluded:
Should make for a fun first meeting with her local Labour colleagues…
He posted about that very topic on May 9 and included the audio of the soundbite:
The internal fallout over Natalie Elphicke’s defection continues, with the Labour leader of Dover District Council, Kevin Mills, saying he had reacted with “horror” when he heard she was crossing the floor. Mills said on BBC Radio 5 Live that she should have stood down as an MP instead:
Well, I had to check yesterday wasn’t April 1st when I was told by officers…. [I was in] complete shock…I have to say to some degree of horror… Extremely concerned, I would say.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the leader of Elphicke’s local authority …
It did not seem as if Elphicke’s new fellow MPs thought much of her defection to their side, either.
Guido told us that, in 2022, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves had expressed something off-colour to Elphicke, a two-word imperative ending in ‘off’. Meanwhile, on May 8, 2024:
Guido isn’t sure every Labour MP is the biggest fan of defector Natalie Elphicke. Florence Eshalomi and Lloyd Russell-Moyle have got busy tweeting about how great the current Labour candidate for Dover is. Just in case Natalie tried to stand for Dover at the election…
UPDATE: A Labour source gets in touch over the defection: “What’s the point?“
Like the editorial writers at The Telegraph, veteran Guardian columnists were also at pains to understand the defection.
Polly Toynbee wrote that it was ‘a one-day-wonder’:
No, no, this is an uncharacteristic mistake. Keir Starmer’s welcoming hand on Natalie Elphicke’s shoulder is a picture his enemies will relish as proof he was never really a Labour man. Where was the steadying hand of a Pat McFadden or Sue Gray to make him stop and think: just say no?
It is easy to see how, in the hectic frenzy of 24-hour Westminster, the astonishing gift of the most comically unlikely MP crossing the floor at PMQs looked irresistible. The wow factor was a great theatrical coup, a sugar-rush of triumph. God knows what’s in it for her; some revenge for an unknown slight? Or a last-minute bid to dissociate herself from her nasty party? Maybe she’s just part of the great chicken run of “gissa job” Tory MPs clambering off before the Tory ship goes under.
The notion that she’s defecting because Rishi Sunak has abandoned the centre ground, as she claimed, is laughable. She belonged to the Common Sense faction of Conservative MPs, one of the most rightwing cabals of culture warriors, chaired by Suella Braverman’s svengali, John Hayes, who would topple over if he moved any further right: fellow members include Jonathan Gullis, Edward Leigh, Andrew Rosindell, Danny Kruger and, formerly, Lee Anderson, until he scarpered to Reform. If she’d brought that whole crew over to crash his party, would Starmer have embraced them too?
Policy discipline has been the hallmark of Starmer’s phenomenal revival of the party: ejecting anyone off-message, imprinting his brand on all candidates duly paraded, word-perfect, in recent byelection victories. Neil Kinnock, who expunged Militant, knows a thing or two about defining a party: “We’ve got to be choosy,” he told The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4. “It’s a very broad church but churches have walls and there are limits.”
Glee over Elphicke plainly abandoned any intellectual definition of what it is to be “Labour”. Where was Elphicke’s line-by-line recantation of all her past atrocious sayings? Kate Osamor was given back the whip super-fast on the same day: she had long apologised for linking Gaza with the Holocaust …
This is a one-day-wonder: Elphicke is not standing again and will be as forgotten as Christian Wakeford (if the name escapes you, he defected to Labour in 2022). Dr Dan Poulter’s hop across the floor last month drew a loud raspberry from inside the NHS. He said he could no longer look his NHS colleagues in the eye, after years, even as a health minister, of voting through the most brutal NHS funding cuts ever. But he’s the kind of Tory penitent Labour can accept, while Elphicke is off the scale …
This is a one-day stumble for Keir Starmer. Elphicke will vanish into pub-quiz land. But, as rumours abound, other jumpers may follow: her admission to the party has set the lowest bar: if not her, can anyone be turned away?
In the flutter of excitement, Labour high command momentarily forgot they are the masters now (almost). They need no defectors: all that matters is defecting voters, and I doubt Elphicke brings many. Dignity matters, and it devalues Labour membership to accept the dregs of the defeated party opposite. Starmer may regret this precedent in tough times ahead when trying to impose policy discipline on any future Labour mavericks.
However, John Crace was less sure about this being a ‘one-day-wonder’ event but agrees that this could come back to haunt Starmer:
Defections tend to be one-day wonders. An awkward photo op with your new party leader. Thirty minutes in the limelight at prime minister’s questions. And then oblivion. Seldom to be seen or heard of again.
… Dan Poulter. He was barely seen in the Commons when he was a Tory MP. Don’t expect that to change much as he serves out his time as an opposition backbencher before stepping down at the coming election.
Labour must have been hoping that Natalie Elphicke would follow a similar trajectory. Another embarrassing day for the government. Tories wondering if the game is up if Rishi Sunak can’t even keep the rightwing headbangers in his party on side. It hasn’t quite panned out like this. The reverberations of Nat’s defection have continued into a second day. And the embarrassment is almost all Labour’s …
Normally it’s the Tories who crash and burn on these occasions. Today it was Labour’s turn.
A totally self-inflicted wound. Starmer could have told Elphicke: “Thanks, but no thanks. We appreciate your offer but don’t think you’re quite the right fit. Why don’t you sit as an independent for a while to process your feelings about the Tories properly? Maybe join Labour in six months’ time when you’re ready.” Then the party might have claimed the moral high ground and still banked the win. Instead, it got greedy.
Crace ended by pointing out how tired Conservative MPs and the Government look these days:
Meanwhile, almost nothing was happening in the Commons. It seldom does these days. The government has almost given up doing anything. Just wasting time before the election. Even Penny Mordaunt [Leader of the House] looks washed up. She used to use her weekly Thursday session at business questions as her personal leadership campaign. To remind Tory MPs what they could have had. Might have yet. But today, even she looked beaten. Flat. Her jokes died on her lips. Her heart wasn’t in it. This must be the end of days.
He is not wrong. The debate schedules have been appalling light over the past six months, as if MPs had solved every issue and could go home early.
When MPs from all parties point this out to Penny Mordaunt, she claims she is under constraints when it comes to scheduling debates. Hmm.
But I digress.
ConservativeHome‘s Henry Hill wrote an opinion piece for The Telegraph in which he says Natalie Elphicke is under a misapprehension if she thinks Labour will solve the housing crisis:
… she has previously written for ConservativeHome in support of rent freezes, and said that the only good types of occupancy are owner-occupation and social housing – not the “private renting experiment”.
Now I’m a fanatic on housing. But it’s important to note that none of these proposals address the fundamental need to actually build millions of houses. It’s all more state-assisted borrowing, which will only inflate prices further, with state tenantry as the increasingly-necessary alternative.
It has always been an open question whether Labour will actually live up to its big talk on the housing crisis. If Starmer is drafting Tory Nimby’s to work on his policy, that isn’t a good sign.
It seems that only Elphicke’s constituents did not mind that she had switched parties. She’s local and they like her. The Guardian reported:
The news spread quickly in Dover, with most people who spoke to the Guardian already aware that their MP had defected. Voters from across the political spectrum shared their surprise at the move, yet many were positive about Elphicke, whom they consider a linchpin of the community.
Mae Montenegro, 50, said she would vote for Elphicke regardless of her party affiliation as she is an active member of the community, including attending her local church, St Paul’s, where she recently organised an anniversary celebration for the priest. “It’s her decision,” she said. “I want a person who represents the community, not the party.”
Robert Hewer, 74, had voted for Elphicke previously and would vote for her again, as her hardline views on immigration reflect his perception that “immigration is eroding our culture”.
“She’s a people person, she supports the local community,” he said. “She’s anti-uncontrolled immigration, which is a big issue in Dover and the UK. I can understand her move because the Conservatives haven’t done what they promised. They’ve let her down and she’s making a point.”
A former miner, Hewer was brought up to vote Labour, but switched to the Conservatives a decade ago in support of Brexit. He would consider returning to Labour in future, though he considers Keir Starmer “too woke”.
This would not deter him for voting for Elphicke again, however. “I would vote for her, because I know her,” he said. “Know the devil you’re getting into bed with.”
Alwyn Conway, 80, agreed that Elphicke had done “good work” in the area, and shared Hewer’s apprehension about a Labour government. While he felt it was a matter of “the devil and the deep blue sea”, he added that “with the Conservatives you know where you are. It might be out of the frying pan and into the fire”.
But Conway said he may still vote for Elphicke in the general election: “If Natalie’s changed over and she’s of the opinion of stopping boats, that could swing me in her favour. I vote for the person, not the party.”
Of course, that is a moot point, because she will not be running for re-election.
Let’s end with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Elphicke’s defection clearly rattled him on Wednesday, as evidenced at the opening of PMQs.
Guido provided a video clip and a brief commentary:
Fresh off the news that Tory MP Natalie Elphicke defected to Labour, PMQs got off to a testy start. Rishi Sunak hit out at the “virtue signalling lawyer from North London“, to which Starmer fired back with an even more scathing attack: people “know there’s nothing behind the boasts, the gimmicks, the smug smile. He’s a dodgy salesman, desperate to sell them a dud”. Strong words…
Guido’s sketchwriter Simon Clark later explained that Rishi was unaware of Elphicke’s move until just moments before he went to the despatch box and pointed out that the PM’s initial terseness disappeared as PMQs went on. What’s more, the Conservatives had taken quite an electoral beating in council elections on Thursday, May 2:
Did the Tory whips know? No one knew. In the hubbub of pre-PMQs, the Leader of the House went to give the news to Rishi standing at the Speaker’s side. His most vociferous Conservative had defected in the last 90 seconds – the unkindest cut of all.
Rishi is getting seriously short of members. And quite short of Members. But what a brave face he put on it …
In defeat – in the aftermath of “the biggest by-election swing in history” as LOTO put it, the PM behaved with a dignity and a posture that was entirely admirable, and even amazing … He congratulated all former councillors, PCCs and mayors, saying, “I hope his new ones do him as proud as I am of all of mine”.
Keir’s script was less gracious but no doubt more pleasing to his supporters. “He’s lost 1,500 Tory councillors, half of his party’s mayors, and a leadership election to a lettuce.” It took a full second for his deputy to realise her leader had made joking and she almost made laughing. “How many times does the public, and his own MPs need to reject him before he takes the hint?”
Rishi replied more joshing than jousting, to remind him of Tony Blair’s advice, that “He can be as cocky as he likes about local elections, but in general elections, it’s policy that counts.”
Labour laughed and were probably right to do so. If policy counted, the Tories would be 20 points further behind the 20 they currently are.
However, Starmer managed to land a zinger when Rishi asked him a question. For those unfamiliar with the format, Starmer asks the questions, and Rishi answers:
He said, What about that Sadiq Khan? He believes there’s an equivalence between the terrorist attack by Hamas and Israel defending itself. So will LOTO take this opportunity to … (etc and so forth).
It set Keir up for a repartee we have grown to know and love: “He’s getting ahead of himself before a general election, asking me questions.”
Oh, dear. It’s not the first time that’s happened between the two and probably won’t be the last in the months that follow.
Yesterday, someone online posted the following photo of a page from a history book:
Someone else, replying to the image, said that it came from a volume by the famous British historian AJP Taylor.
The first page to the chapter ‘The Great War: Old Style, 1914-1915’ (book title unknown — to me, anyway) is illuminating in revealing how much freedom was in place in England at that time.
The final sentences on the page conclude (emphasis mine):
… broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.
Despite what many would call the ‘horrors’ of living in that era, we discover that there were no passports, income tax was low, education mandates were in place as well as health and safety laws.
In case the image disappears from this post, excerpts follow. Consider all of this highlighted:
Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman … He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence … The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.
For my overseas readers, the Liberals were a political party, the forerunners of the current Liberal Democrats. Note that they were partly instrumental in increasing the size of the state through increased public expenditure — provided by the taxpayer.
I wonder if any of the above is still taught in schools today.
Election news dominated British headlines on Friday, May 3, 2024 and will continue to do so over the weekend.
In Scotland, news concerned an SNP leadership contest following Humza Yousaf’s resignation on Monday, April 29 (see here, here and here).
South of the border in England, the Conservatives had a local wipeout at Thursday’s council elections.
Let’s look at both.
Scotland: more of the same
There seems to be little appetite for another SNP leadership election in just over a year.
The hapless John Swinney, a past Deputy First Leader, is the fourth ‘continuity candidate’ as the MSP and former finance minister Kate Forbes has decided not to run.
On Thursday, May 2, Guido Fawkes gave us the short version of the Scottish situation (red emphases and italics his):
UPDATE: On Kate Forbes, Swinney says: “I want her to play a significant part in the team” in a“very involved, senior position”.
UPDATE II: Kate Forbes announces she won’t stand for leader, saying:
I have concluded that the best way to deliver the urgent change Scotland needs is to join with John Swinney and advocate for that reform agenda within the Scottish Government. I can therefore today announce that I will not be seeking nomination as the next SNP leader. John will therefore have my support and endorsement in any campaign to follow.
Well, that settles that.
That day, The Times told us ‘Why Kate Forbes pulled out of the SNP leadership race’ (purple emphases mine):
The sun was streaming through the window of Kate Forbes’s Edinburgh flat as she sat with her family and watched John Swinney outline his pitch to be first minister.
By that point the deal between the pair was already done and she knew she was not going to stand. She just needed to hear it from him …
That confirmation, alongside his pledge to prioritise economic growth and listen to alternative voices across the party, was what she needed to make her decision final.
Swinney laid it on thick, about Forbes …
“She is an intelligent, creative, thoughtful person who has much to contribute to our national life and if elected I will make sure that Kate is able to make that contribution,” Swinney, 60, said of Forbes.
… and himself:
“And that will be part of a united team that draws together our whole party, which given my deep, deep devotion to the SNP I think I am best placed to put together.”
Forbes said later:
… the best way to deliver the urgent change Scotland needs is to join with John Swinney and advocate for that reform agenda within the Scottish government.
She also tweeted:
Forbes did not make any media appearances because of a family emergency:
… as she was making her final decision on Wednesday evening her daughter, Naomi, had a minor accident which led to the pair having to visit Edinburgh’s Sick Kids hospital.
That institution used to be the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital. The hospital administration changed the name to ‘Sick Kids’ to make it more user-friendly. I have news for them: no one, including a child, gets admitted to a hospital if he or she is well.
The article continues, telling us about what has been going on behind the scenes this week:
Her decision was the culmination of days of backroom talks through intermediaries, the ultimate conclusions of which had already filtered through into government.
Civil servants were told on Wednesday to prepare for a new first minister being sworn in next week. This suggests there was knowledge that a contest to be SNP leader was unlikely and Swinney would be the only person on the ballot at noon on Monday when nominations close.
That doesn’t mean that getting to this point has been easy. Swinney and Forbes had a face-to-face conversation on Tuesday aimed at ensuring there was understanding and respect between the pair.
Other conversations took place between two MPs serving as links between Swinney and Forbes. Sources said that Ian Blackford, the former SNP Westminster leader, and Stewart McDonald, the former defence spokesman at Westminster, played a role as go-betweens for each camp.
Discussions between proxies for Swinney and Forbes started tentatively on Sunday — before Humza Yousaf had even announced his resignation — and intensified throughout Wednesday.
Not only was time an issue but so was money:
It is also understood that it could cost the party up to £180,000 to run an election, an additional strain that it does not need given it is currently struggling to attract cash.
Not surprising, considering no one knows what happened to the £600,000 in SNP donations, missing since at least 2021.
I question the ethics of Forbes remaining a member of the SNP, given their crooked revelations that have come to light over the past three years.
The consensus is that Forbes can run again in the next leadership contest:
… she lives to fight another day and avoids a potentially bruising general election with Labour projected to win more seats than the SNP in Scotland.
“It is in her interests to play a slightly longer game,” said a source.
More of the same.
The Spectator‘s and the Telegraph‘s Fraser Nelson said that she has brought Christianity back into political conversation, ‘Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory — for religion in public life’:
It’s not just that she was born into the Free Church of Scotland: she converted into it, leaving the more liberal Presbyterian church. She disagrees with gay marriage, sex outside of marriage and even women [religious] ministers. She’d uphold everyone’s rights, she says – but her faith is real. And far more important to her than politics.
In 2023:
Forbes went on to almost beat Humza Yousaf, winning 48 per cent of the vote. She decided not to run this time and instead cut a deal with John Swinney, who will be seen as a caretaker first minister with her as the heir apparent.
She has unabashedly defended her faith:
A Cambridge graduate, appointed Nicola Sturgeon’s finance minister at the age of 29, Forbes has long stood out. Brought up in India to missionary parents, she first followed the normal pattern of dodging questions about her faith.
Three years ago, she changed tack. “To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ,” she told an astonished Nick Robinson [BBC presenter]. “I believe that he died for me, he saved me. And that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.”
Many politicians think this, but none would dream of saying so in public – not in such language. Talking about religion can only alienate and damage your prospects, it’s argued: faith needs to be kept as a dirty secret. Not just in politics but the workplace or any public space. You’ll be accused of bigotry and it’s best just to keep quiet.
This is the quiet-Christian consensus that Forbes wanted to challenge with her campaign, even if it cost her the race. But in the end, she ended up drawing more admiration than condemnation …
Forbes may well never end up as first minister and, if she does, the SNP may still be doomed. But she has proven an important point: it’s OK, now, to do God.
There’s a hymn sung in her church about the need to “dare to be a Daniel / dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose / dare to make it known.”
Adding the word “don’t” in front of each of these lines would have seemed useful advice to any politician in recent years but it seems Forbes has written a new rule book. She won’t be the last to use it.
Well, we’ll see. As of now, Forbes is still an outlier, albeit a welcome one.
The Conservatives’ historic losses
Moving on to England, the trend in the emerging election results from Thursday — as I write in the afternoon, final counts are not in — shows that Rishi Sunak and his Conservatives are in deep, deep trouble with losses of 122 councillors thus far:
Guido Fawkes told us that Conservatives were downplaying what could happen, e.g. in the London mayoral race:
The main Conservative talking point of the past 24 hours has been that London is looking closer than thought …
Really? There was no campaign. The Conservatives did not support their candidate, Susan Hall, at all!
Guido adds:
… it seems very unlikely Susan Hall will ultimately beat Sadiq Khan clinching a third term.
Too right.
Here’s another Conservative delusion that Guido reported:
The Tories are pushing hard that these are ‘mid term’ results so are irrelevant for a general election – an odd choice of defence given it’s the end of the parliamentary term and a general election year. Whether Sunak is safe is unresolved…
The ‘mid term’ local election was in 2021!
Guido explained Thursday’s elections:
Voters head to the polls for local elections today to elect eleven mayors, 2,600 councillors, 37 police and crime commissioners, as well as a new Blackpool South MP. The results will be significant, setting the mood music for the upcoming general election – and how internal Tory politics plays out over the summer …
Labour is streaking ahead by a solid and consistent 20 points in the national polls. On that basis, it is fair to say the Tories are going to struggle almost everywhere …
The government is spinning hard that winning just one of the Tees Valley or West Midlands mayoralties would be an incredible success. Both are in doubt in the final polling. Labour is managing down expectations on both – a sign that they are attempting to increase the damage should the Tories lose them. A mayoral wipeout would trigger major incoming flak for Team Sunak – but holding Tees Valley alone (Ben Houchen is the least Sunakite of the candidates) may not help them much either …
Notably, all the Tory mayoral candidates have distanced themselves from Rishi in their campaigns. The media has lost track of what is happening in Blackpool South, where Reform could well beat the Tories into second place. The results will drip out over the next few days. Watch out for some neck breaking spin …
On Friday morning, Guido told us:
… things are (as expected) bleak for the Tories …
The remainder of the picture is basically a total clean up for Labour – gaining Hartlepool, Thurrock, Redditch and even deeply formerly Tory Rushmoor. The Tories are pointing to Oldham, where Labour lost overall control of the council – but that is due to local factors over Gaza. A loss of control over the London narrative – with Tory briefings widely quoted overnight as saying Susan Hall would win – now seems unlikely. Plenty of big results still to come in though…
… Whether Sunak is safe is unresolved…
Then there is Richard Tice’s Reform Party. So far, its potential star candidate, Nigel Farage, has shied away from saying whether he will stand as a candidate in the next general election which must be held by January 2025 at the latest.
As of Thursday morning, Reform’s popularity is rising, according to a YouGov poll. Guido reported:
Though it’s no surprise the Tories are sinking in the polls, perhaps the bigger news is that Reform are on 15%, just 3 percentage points away from the Tories. Though they’re only fielding 300 candidates in the locals, they could pip the Tories to second place in the Greater Manchester mayoral race and in Blackpool South …
Imagine the polls if Nigel stood…
The Blackpool South by-election results are final. Scott Benton, the Conservative MP who won overwhelmingly in 2019, had to stand down a few weeks ago. Everyone predicted a return of the constituency to Labour, and so it proved.
Note Labour’s historic majority albeit with a turnout of only 33% and how close the Reform candidate came to the second place Conservative one:
Guido told us:
… Blackpool South has been convincingly retaken by Labour after Scott Benton’s implosion, with a massive swing of 26.3 points. That’s the third biggest swing from Conservatives to Labour in post war election history. Reform were within a whisker (117 votes) of putting the Tories into third place. Reform has performed strongly elsewhere so far where they are standing…
Is it that everyone suddenly loves Labour or the Liberal Democrats? No. It seems that people who have voted Conservative in the past stayed at home. One commenter on a Guido post has probably nailed it with this analysis:
The swing was from Conservative to Stay at home.
The Labour vote dropped by 12 % over their 2019 vote.
The Conservative vote dropped by 80%.
The Reform vote increased by 56.5% over the Brexit party vote.
Did Not Vote increased by 57.5% over 2019.
A swing from Conservative to Stay at Home lets Labour in.
The challenge for Reform is to persuade the 25% of the electorate who stayed at home this year, but didn’t in 2019 that there is an option they can vote for. Then there’s the 45% that didn’t bother in either, and had no faith in the system at all.
The challenge for the psephologists is to start acknowledging the underswell of disgust in the whole system that is swirling around the country.
A lot of those who voted Conservative in 2019 did so because a) Boris Johnson was such an effective campaigner as the face of Brexit and b) they trusted that their voices would be heard once more as happened in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Since then — admittedly, the pandemic (not a Boris speciality) did not help — the status quo returned, beginning in 2021, and those voters have once again lost faith in the Conservatives.
Does Rishi Sunak care?
Probably not. He can leave the UK for California — or his father-in-law’s country, India. Either way, everything will come up roses for him. The rest of us will have to bear up under Labour’s rose.
Dehenna Davison was one of the rising stars of the 2019 Conservative MP intake.
Unfortunately, she is not standing for re-election.
Amazingly, she was the first Conservative to win in the northern — County Durham — constituency of Bishop Auckland, created in 1885. Until her victory, only Liberal (forerunners of the Liberal Democrats) and Labour candidates represented that constituency, never a Conservative.
We found out early on that ‘Dehenna’ rhymes with ‘Vienna’.
Why she ran
Four days before the election, on December 8, 2019, the Mail published a profile of Davison, which included a photo of her with then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s girlfriend — now wife — Carrie Symonds on the hustings (campaign trail).
The article told us of her tragic circumstances growing up (purple emphases mine):
The poster girl for Boris Johnson‘s Election assault on Labour’s heartland has spoken in detail about the family tragedy that now guides her politics.
Dehenna Davison was just 13 when she learned her father Dominic had been killed by a single blow to the head in the pub.
Ms Davison, a Tory hopeful in a Co Durham seat which has never elected a Conservative MP, recalled how she sat in a hospital waiting room as doctors battled for 45 minutes to save her father’s life.
‘I can still picture it. I can tell you what the colour the walls were and everything,’ she said. ‘They [the doctors] stopped and I went to see my dad’s body, which is not something you expect to do at such a young age.’
Later on:
She recalled the trauma of attending every day of the resulting murder trial – and her lasting bitterness that the alleged attacker was found not guilty.
‘It gave me a very clear sense of injustice,’ she said. ‘I grew up overnight, literally overnight.’ At 16, she was representing ‘myself, my mum and my nan’ at a criminal injuries compensation tribunal. Even almost 13 years on, Ms Davison puts her real life experience age at 45 – not 26.
Since 2019, she has wanted a ‘one-punch law’ to be enacted, which would find perpetrators who caused the death of someone in that way guilty of murder. I am not sure that she has achieved that in the way that she envisaged. Although the Conservative government has toughened up sentencing in general through new legislation, this week, news reports have circulated wherein judges are asking for mitigating circumstances to be taken into account.
Returning to the Mail, we discovered more about her background:
She studied politics at Hull University and spent a year as an aide to [veteran Conservative MP] Jacob Rees-Mogg. Ms Davison, who has received support on the campaign trail from Mr Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds, said politics was about helping people ‘get their benefits claim through, getting a pothole filled’.
The former computer game shop worker admitted the ‘poster girl thing’ was probably due to her tragic backstory and her ‘slightly unusual demographics’. But she added: ‘I just want to get stuff done.’
Reality television marriage
After the election, reality television aficionados no doubt thought that Davison’s face looked familiar.
On December 14, two days after she was elected as an MP, The Sun told us:
A YOUNG woman, whose relationship with a man 35 years older than her was explored on a reality TV show, has been elected as an MP.
Dehenna Davison, 26, stood as the Conservative candidate for former Labour-stronghold Bishop Aukland – just a year after starring in Channel 4 programme Bride & Prejudice with now-husband John Fareham …
Dehenna was studying politics at Hull University when she met John, a Conservative councillor.
They fell for one another while out campaigning in Kingston upon Hull North, where she stood as a candidate in 2015.
John proposed to Dehenna – who also once worked as a parliamentary aide for Jacob Rees-Mogg – in 2015, but they still had to convince her grandfather Paul, eight years older than her other half, to support their relationship.
In the TV show, Dehenna and John, who was 59 when the programme aired, sought his approval for their marriage.
“Age doesn’t matter if two people really care about each other,” the future MP told the camera.
John added: “I had asked her before, but she told me to ask her properly.
“At my age, going down on one knee was going to be a bit tricky. It wasn’t the going down, it was the getting back up again.”
When the show aired, viewers rushed to give the couple their blessing – and criticised Paul’s unhappiness at the union.
One person wrote: “She’s 24 let her decide who to marry” …
The article included her election victory tweet, dedicated to her family:
Grandfather Paul was right.
Just ten days after the election — on December 22, 2019 — HullLive reported that the marriage was in tatters:
A new Tory MP, who studied and married in Hull, has split from her councillor husband, it has been confirmed.
Dehenna Davison married Bricknell ward councillor John Fareham in 2018 but, in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday, she confirmed the news.
Cllr Fareham and Ms Davison appeared together on Channel 4 show Bride and Prejudice last year, which documented the couple’s push for acceptance from her grandfather, before they tied the knot.
The show picked the pair as one of six couples as Dehenna, then 24, was 35 years younger than John, 59, who was similar in age to her grandfather.
However, their relationship has since come to an end, according to the interview released this weekend.
Activity outside of Parliament
It wasn’t long before the left-wing Hope Not Hate activists targeted the loveliest of new MPs.
On Valentine’s Day 2020, The Guardian reported:
Calls have been made for an investigation after photographs emerged linking a newly elected Tory MP with two alleged far-right activists.
Dehenna Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland and a prominent member of the party’s new contingent of northern representatives, was pictured holding a County Durham flag with Andrew Foster, a man described by anti-racism campaigners as a “Muslim-hating extremist of the very worst kind”.
The images, revealed following an investigation by the campaign group Hope Not Hate show the MP with Foster at a party celebrating Brexit in a pub on 31 January. At the same event she was also pictured with Colin Raine, a former Tory activist banned from the party after allegations that he was behind a far-right protest and made Islamophobic comments online. Raine has denied that he has any far-right links.
Davison, 26, sought to distance herself from any links with the two men. “These photos were taken at an event open to the public and I in no way whatsoever condone the views highlighted of the individuals concerned,” she said in a statement …
On March 4, 2020, Guido Fawkes posted a photo of a selfie that a glamorous Davison took of fellow Conservative MP Matt Vickers and — oddly enough — then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the Kebab Awards (yes, it’s an annual event). Perhaps she wanted Corbyn in shot to counter the Hope Not Hate smear?
On April 16 that year, nearly a month into lockdown, The Mirror reported that Davison posted a video of herself on TikTok, to which the defeated Labour incumbent Helen Goodman objected:
A Tory MP has been branded ‘self-indulgent’ for posting a sweary rap video video in which she appears to complain the coronavirus lockdown has left her bored.
Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison posted a TikTok clip, lip-synching to “Bored in the House” by rapper Tyga.
The clip shows her doing her washing, talking to her self in the mirror pouring a large glass of red wine and rapping “I’m bored in the mother f***in’ in the house bored”.
But the former Labour MP who Ms Davison replaced in December said she’s been left to answer queries from Ms Davison’s constituents, who can’t get an answer from their MP.
Ex-MP Helen Goodman said she was “shocked and horrified” by the video …
Ms Davison, 26, has since deleted the video.
She told the Mirror: “This was nothing more than adding to light-hearted content being produced by millions to stay positive during this lockdown.
“We should be celebrating the actions of 3.6 million people staying safe during lockdown rather than belittling them for keeping themselves and others entertained whilst following government guidance to stay home, protect our NHS and save lives.”
Ms Davison said the 3.6 million figure referred to the number of TikTok users who had made videos using the same song …
On September 7, when life with coronavirus was returning to normal in England, Davison wrote a pro-Brexit and pro-Boris editorial for The Sun:
… Knocking on doors during the election last year, three resounding messages on Brexit were clear: 1 – let’s just get on with it. 2 – Boris is the man to deliver it. 3 – we need to stand up to Brussels.
Now as talks reach the final furlong, more than ever, we need to remember that third message.
The Brussels bully boys will only blink if they recognise equivalent displays of strength from UK negotiators.
That is why I was so pleased to see the Prime Minister set out a definite deadline of October 15 for negotiations to be concluded or we will walk away.
We needn’t be afraid.
Whether we leave with or without a deal, Brexit marks the start of a bright future for Britain.
A future where we are free to strike our own trade deals, manage our own borders, make our own laws, and where we open our arms to the world as a truly global Britain …
In April 2021, Guido Fawkes told us that Davison was one of 40 MPs to join the think tank IEA’s Free Market Forum. Davison was one of the co-chairs of the group along with fellow Conservative MP Greg Smith.
Other members included future Prime Minister Liz Truss, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel and future Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
GB News began broadcasting in June 2021. Davison was a presenter on the new channel’s Sunday morning current events show The Political Correction along with Nigel Farage, blue Labour activist Paul Embery and, occasionally, the former DUP party leader — now Dame and Baroness — Arlene Foster.
On Monday, October 11, she gave an interview to fellow GB News presenter Gloria de Piero, a former Labour MP, in the series The Real Me, in which MPs featured:
In the interview, Davison revealed her bisexuality to de Piero, which generated a few news articles in response.
GB News recapped it:
Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is not a big deal and “just part of who I am …
“If anyone were to explicitly ask me, I certainly wouldn’t try and hide it because I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of.
“The reason I haven’t done a kind of ‘By the way, guys’ is because I don’t want being bi to be considered a big deal.
“If I did a very public kind of coming out parade, that would be me saying there’s something really unusual about this and trying to make a big deal of it when to me it’s not. It’s just part of who I am.”
She also spoke about her divorce and the future. By then, she was in a new romantic relationship — with a man:
“It’s going really well, and I’m very excited about it. But we’ll see, the future is a very exciting place.”
In 2018, Miss Davison appeared in the Channel 4 programme Bride And Prejudice, which showed the then 24-year-old marrying John Fareham, a Conservative councillor who is 35 years her senior.
In a tweet on Sunday evening, she added: “Really overwhelmed by the outpouring of love this evening. Thank you so much for your support.”
The Mail had more soundbites about her sexuality:
Conservative MP Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is just ‘part of who I am’ as she came out publicly as bisexual today …
In an interview on GB News, set to be broadcast today, Ms Davison said: ‘I’ve known that I’m bisexual for quite a lot of years. All my close friends and family know’ …
On October 12, the Mail reported on the hate she received on social media.
The Telegraph‘s chief political correspondent Christopher Hope, who now works for GB News, included her political insight:
In the interview, she described the shock of learning that her father, Dominic, had been killed by a single blow “in the side of the neck” when she was just 13 …
Her father’s assailant pleaded self-defence and was not convicted of the assault, she said. She has set up an all-party parliamentary group on one-punch assaults to see whether more needs to be done for victims and on sentencing assailants.
Not having been raised in a political family, Miss Davison said she had “genuinely thought growing up that Winston Churchill was a Labour prime minister”.
She admitted that she occasionally thought about leading the Tory party, adding: “You kind of fantasise and see who’s in at the moment and you think, ‘maybe this is something that I could do’ – but would I like to?
“The upside is you get a chance to really try and shape the country and try and make it better, which is what we all get into politics to do anyway. And what better way than by leading a party and potentially going on to lead the country? But I think there are so many downsides too. I mean, that complete invasion into your personal life.
“It’s hard enough being a backbench MP… and I’m just not really sure whether that’s something that I’d really want to do. And certainly I wouldn’t want that pressure put on my family.”
Once Boris Johnson’s Partygate became a regular feature in parliamentary debates, Davison was accused of being part of the Pork Pie Plot — said to have originated with the Conservative MP representing the home of pork pies, Melton Mowbray — to oust him as Prime Minister.
On February 4 2022, the Mail told us of Davison’s latest relationship, again with a man.
As to her divorce from John Fareham, the article stated:
It is not clear whether that divorce is complete.
We discovered an interim relationship from 2021:
Last May she informed parliamentary officials she was in a relationship with Ahzaz Chowdhury, 35, a parliamentary lobbyist. She later announced that the five-week relationship had ended.
The article told us about her latest — and current — relationship, complete with photos:
A prominent MP is having an affair with a dashing but married diplomat likened to James Bond …
… the Mail can now reveal the 28-year-old is in a relationship with Tony Kay, 49, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Office.
Awarded an OBE for his work during the Arab Spring uprising, the father of two has been deputy ambassador to Israel and once threw a fancy-dress screening of a Bond film for hundreds of official guests.
His latest post is as head of the Arabian peninsula department at the Foreign Office.
His affair with Miss Davison is potentially sensitive given his high-profile position. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Middle East minister James Cleverly have been informed about the relationship, a source said.
On Wednesday Miss Davison and Mr Kay were seen walking hand in hand down a quiet street on the south side of the Thames in London. They then walked to Waterloo station where they embraced and kissed for several minutes before he caught a train.
It is believed he was travelling to the million-pound house he and his 47-year-old wife bought three years ago in Ascot, Berkshire …
Apparently, everyone who needed to know knew:
It is believed that Mr Kay and Miss Davison met in July 2019 when she was in a small group of prospective parliamentary candidates on a Conservative Friends of Israel trip. The group visited Gaza and the West Bank.
The pair have been growing closer ever since and he has moved into her expenses-funded home.
A Whitehall source said: ‘The relationship between Dehenna and Tony hasn’t been going on since they met in 2019 – it’s six months. His wife has known for half a year, the kids know, the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss knows, James Cleverley knows, his line manager knows, the permanent secretary knows.
‘He’s done absolutely everything by the book, and kept his line manager informed throughout. He’s going through a divorce process with his wife, he’s still married.
‘It’s not entirely unreasonable for him still to be going to the family home, but his marriage is over. Dehenna’s flat is her flat, and she’s entitled to have whoever she wants in her flat.’
A few days later, on February 12, The Times Magazine did a big splash interview with glamorous photos of Davison in retro-1960s clothes asking if she was the future of the Conservative Party.
Janice Turner, the interviewer, wrote:
Before we met, I’d assumed a 28-year-old MP who got married on reality TV, shares a GB News sofa with Nigel Farage and posts TikTok videos plucking her eyebrows to Taylor Swift’s …Ready For It? might well be a showboating lightweight of no fixed political abode. Instead I’m surprised to find Mrs Thatcher’s granddaughter: a serious operator, with well-honed conservative views, fluency, ambition and drive. I doubt Dee, as her friends call her, is going anywhere except up the slippery Tory pole.
‘Dee’ denied being part of the aforementioned Pork Pie Plot. Instead, she gave a lot of credit to Boris and Carrie:
So what was her involvement in a plot? The red wall MPs, she says, held a secret ballot about whether to put in letters calling for Boris Johnson to resign. Has she? “No.” Is she tempted? “I honestly don’t know.”
… Davison says her view hasn’t changed. “What matters… is the PM really gets a grip of No 10 and over policy, to make sure we are delivering for people in the red wall.” In other words, she is sitting tight to see which way the wind blows.
Yet Davison acknowledges she owes her victory in large part to Johnson. “It wasn’t just Brexit. He does have this incredible charisma,” she says. “You know, there aren’t many party leaders you can take to a beachfront in Hartlepool and people stop every four steps for selfies and to shake his hand. That’s a rock-star politician, something you don’t see very often at all.”
But she’s also equally indebted to his wife. In 2019, Carrie Johnson contacted her, saying she wanted to support female candidates and could she campaign in Bishop Auckland. “And I said, ‘Yes, I would absolutely love that.’ And we got messaging a bit through the election; she’d check in to see how I was doing. When I was down in London for some work stuff, I visited her. My first time in No 10, actually, was to go and see Carrie and the dog.”
There’s also a 2019 campaign photo of her, Carrie, Dilyn the dog — and none other than Rishi Sunak MP.
Davison, an only child, admitted to be an annoyingly good student in school:
It’s clear why Carrie Johnson would take Davison under her wing: young Tory women are scarce. Mrs Johnson, the arch-political strategist, must have considered this attractive, TV-ready working-class girl from a Sheffield council estate and thought the party had struck gold. What better vision of modern conservatism than the only child of a stonemason and a nursery nurse, who was so bright that her teacher, Mrs Burton, insisted she apply to the private Sheffield High School. “I had a really inquisitive mind. I always wanted to race to the end of the work so I could do more, learn more. I was one of those really annoying kids.”
The family worried that she’d win a place and they wouldn’t be able to afford to send her. But Mrs Burton even offered to pay the fee for the entrance exam, so insistent was she that Dee would win a scholarship. Which she did.
Davison, who was in the catchment for one of the city’s worst-performing comprehensives, believes private school changed her life. “I don’t think I’d be here [in parliament] today. Absolutely not. And one of the greatest things about an all-girls school is there was never a second when I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a woman. It was really: ‘If you work hard, you can do it.’ ”
The article revealed that Davison’s divorce was still going through, even though the Mail alleged that she and Tony Kay — now Tony Kay OBE, no less — were living together. John Fareham was either a member of or a guest at three of London’s most prestigious private men’s clubs:
… Davison did the most unfathomable thing: she married a Hull Conservative councillor, John Fareham, who at 59 was 35 years her senior. (“We went clubbing my style, to the Carlton, the Athenaeum and the Garrick,” he said.) And she did so on a reality TV show, Bride & Prejudice, about couples who face family opposition. Davison’s grandfather is shown weeping miserably before he gives her away. Does she regret the show? “I don’t think there’s much point regretting it because it’s happened. But, yes.”
Amateur psychologists might suggest she was looking for a father figure: “Oh, I get the daddy issues trope all the time.” Her marriage is a closed chapter, she says: her divorce is still going through. She’s now seeing a 49-year-old diplomat, Tony Kay, a Middle East expert with the Foreign Office, who is also getting divorced from the mother of his two children.
The Times Magazine‘s Janice Turner concluded:
Whether she keeps her seat or not, she’s clearly in the party for the long haul. When [Labour’s Deputy Leader] Angela Rayner called Conservative voters “scum” [in the House of Commons], Dehenna Davison wore and gave away “Tory Scum” badges. “I wanted to reclaim the narrative. If they’re going to call us scum, I’d rather embrace it.”
Well, one could only wonder at the time.
Nine months later, on November 25, Guido Fawkes gave us the answer. By then, Boris had been forced to resign, as had Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak was the Prime Minister, by fiat from Conservative MPs.
Red emphases Guido’s:
The Tories’ 2019 poster girl, Dehenna Davison, has announced she’s to stand down as an MP after just one term. Dehenna won her seat of Bishop Auckland in 2019, with a swing of 9.5%. However after a meagre five years in the Commons, Davison is to depart at the next election. The third Tory MP to announce they’re doing so…
Davison explains the reason she’s departing:
For my whole adult life, I’ve dedicated the vast majority of my time to politics, and to help make people’s lives better. But, to be frank, it has meant I haven’t had anything like a normal life for a twenty-something.
Dehenna is the third Tory MP to make such an announcement, after Chloe Smith and Will Wragg. It’s not like they’re leaving a sinking ship. At 25 points behind Labour, they’re on the ocean floor …
Guido added an update to say that Davison was the eighth Conservative MP to announce there would be no run for re-election.
The Telegraph reminded us that Davison had had a ministerial role at that point, so was no longer on the backbenches. Having watched her on BBC Parliament, I can say that she did very well at the despatch box:
Tory rising star Dehenna Davison has become the latest MP to announce she will stand down at the next election.
The Levelling-up Minister, who is only 29, made history in 2019 by becoming Bishop Auckland’s first Conservative MP.
The article also gave us more of her resignation statement:
I will always be humbled to have had the opportunity to serve as a Member of Parliament. But now the time feels right for me to devote more of my attention to life outside politics – mainly to my family and helping support them as they’ve helped support me.
That’s why I won’t be standing in the next general election.
On September 18, 2023, Guido reported that Davison resigned as Levelling-up Minister because of chronic migraines, an ailment she had not had before:
Dehenna Davison has resigned as Levelling Up Minister this afternoon, citing health reasons in her letter to Rishi Sunak. Davison had already announced she will stand down at the next election, though she has decided to step back a year or so early owing to chronic migraines:
Unfortunately, for some time now I have been battling with chronic migraine, which has had a great impact on my ability to carry out the role. Some days I’m fine, but on others it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with the demands of ministerial life – and the timing of such days is never predictable. Though I have tried to mitigate, and am grateful to colleagues for their patience at times, I don’t feel it is right to continue in the role. At such a critical time for levelling up, I believe the people of communities like mine, and across the country, deserve a minister who can give the job the energy it needs. I regret that I no longer can. And, as my capacity is currently diminished, it feels right to focus it on my constituents, and on promoting conservatism from the backbenches.
Davison was the government’s youngest Minister, and only joined the Commons benches in 2019. She’s done the full MP lifecycle in record time…
That was an excellent observation from Guido.
Another competent Red Wall MP, Jacob Young, replaced Davison.
As we are well into 2024 and awaiting Rishi Sunak’s date for the general election, MPs from all parties wish the agony of waiting would end soon.
On March 17, The Observer, weekend edition of The Guardian published interviews with several MPs who discussed their eagerness for an election date to be called and gave their thoughts on what life in Parliament was like. Dehenna Davison was one of them:
In her office, Dehenna Davison curls her legs beneath her on a sofa, seemingly oblivious to the whopping great Dr Martens on the end of them. “Colleagues keep saying: ‘You’re counting down the days,’” she tells me. “But we don’t know how many days are left.”
The article delved deeper into what she thought about the House of Commons.
She said:
There have been moments when the abuse has been so vile. There’s definitely an element of misogyny.
She has received hateful online messages. Even though she had worked as Rees-Mogg’s intern and thought she knew what went on in Westminster, she realised that the reality of being an MP was something quite different:
Dehenna Davison’s office is in a building whose long, rather desolate corridors resemble those of a three-star hotel, and it’s so small: as we talk, our knees are practically touching. She seems very young – she’s sipping a drink via a straw from a huge, multicoloured plastic cup – and if not vulnerable, exactly, then like someone who hasn’t had the easiest time since she won Bishop Auckland just over four years ago (for the 84 years before her election in 2019, the town had always had a Labour MP). She took the decision not to stand again in part because she felt that by devoting her 20s to politics, she’d missed out on “normal adult life”. But the longer she talks, the more obvious it becomes that the bigger factor by far may be the abuse she receives online.
“You have to have a thick skin to go into parliament,” she says. “And I’ve always argued that the internet is a great thing. But the level of abuse online is something I never anticipated. There have been moments when it has been so vile. I’m not talking about policy stuff. We’re always going to have people who disagree with us; that’s legitimate. It’s the personal attacks [that are upsetting]. There’s definitely an element of misogyny there. When I posted a memorial to my father who passed away in 2007 [he died after being punched in a pub], I got one message that said: ‘I bet he’d be turning in his grave, knowing you’re a Tory.’ Another one said: ‘You’re such a slut, I bet he’s looking down, and seeing all the disgusting things you’re doing – though maybe he likes that.’” One troll received a police caution, having posted 100 messages online in 24 hours. Another, she says, is subject to a restraining order. What support does parliament offer in this situation? She laughs. “When I was elected, I sat down with the police. They gave me some general advice: not to be controversial, and not to post in real time where I am.”
Davison wasn’t intimidated when she arrived: she’d been an intern in Westminster, and knew her way around. But her status as a rising young star who’d won a seemingly impossible seat made things difficult at times.
“I got a lot of media attention, which I hadn’t sought. I think my colleagues thought my motivation was the limelight. It became very isolating as time went on, hearing indirectly what people had been saying about me, all the backbiting.”
Like her colleague Charles Walker, she likes the division lobby: the chance to brush shoulders with cabinet ministers and even the prime minister. But the system of whipping leaves a lot to be desired. “When I was elected, my whip asked me in for a chat. His first question was whether I wanted to be prime minister.” Was he trying to weaponise her ambition? She nods. “You know that [if you rebel] you’re putting down a marker against yourself getting any kind of future promotion.” When she once voted against a government motion, a male politician “stood too close to me, being quite aggressive”.
Davison insists the Tories can hang on to Bishop Auckland, and that a lot can change electorally in six months: “Don’t believe everything the polls say.” But about the future of the party, she sounds less certain – especially if there is a Labour rout. “Then there’ll have to be some soul searching. It will be interesting to see who’s left, and in what direction that takes us. I’ve a suspicion the membership would want to see a move towards the right, a more authoritarian approach. Whether that’s the right thing in this age, I can’t say. I find myself economically pretty rightwing, but socially I’m very liberal, so I wouldn’t want to see us doing a massive shift to the right.” She smiles. “But you know, by that point, I’ll be just another [Conservative Party] member…”
She slurps on her straw. Her heart, I sense, is already elsewhere.
I think so, too.
My far better half said that some of the 2019 Red Wall MPs never expected to be elected. Perhaps Dehenna Davison is one of them.
The latest we heard from her was in a Point of Order in Parliament on March 18, when Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner and a few other Labour MPs visited Bishop Auckland without letting her know. All MPs going to another’s constituency in a public capacity must advise the sitting MP of their visit before it happens.
Guido had the story and the video:
Guido wrote, reminding us of Rayner’s current controversy over her living arrangements some years ago, which could, at the very least, involve a tax liability:
It looks like Angela Rayner is forgetting the rules. Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison has asked in the Commons why Rayner, along with four other Labour MPs, parked up in her constituency unannounced to launch the Labour candidate for North East Mayor’s campaign. Anything to avoid a media interview…
The Commons Rules of Behaviour are clear – if an MP wants to visit a constituency of another “all reasonable efforts should be taken to notify the other Member“. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle weighed in to tick off rule-breaking MPs. Maybe Rayner was too tied up in domestic matters to remember the rules…
In any event, valete, Dee. It was nice knowing you, if only off the telly and in the papers.
Privately, many Christians in England celebrated Easter with much joyful reverence.
Publicly, the media covered the greatest feast day in the Church year quite differently. It’s not the media’s fault. They covered only what they saw.
What follows are news items from the last ten days of March 2024.
Ramadan at King’s Cross railway station
On Tuesday, March 19, the display at King’s Cross showed that day’s hadith for Ramadan devotions on the railway station’s departure board:
The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):
A Network Rail spokesman said the publicly owned infrastructure company was marking the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which stretches from March 10 to April 9 in 2024.
“King’s Cross station is made up of a diverse and multicultural workforce and at times of religious significance, messages such as these are displayed to celebrate the station’s diversity and inclusivity,” they said …
“Throughout the year, messaging at the station also celebrates festivals from other religions including Easter, Christmas, Passover and Diwali to mark the beliefs of our colleagues and passengers.”
When asked by The Telegraph for examples of departure board messages displayed to mark other religious festivals, the spokesman suggested none were available because staff had taken no pictures of them.
Incredible.
Pakistani flag flies over Westminster Abbey
Did we know that the Pakistani flag flies over Westminster Abbey once a year?
It seemed to be the first time the British public had seen a photo of it, which circulated online on March 22. I believed it only when I saw it on GB News.
Pakistan’s The News reported that this takes place annually as the nation is part of the Commonwealth (bold in the original):
LONDON: Pakistan Day Special Memorial Service was held at the Westminster Abbey. In keeping with the past practice, Pakistani flag was also flown on top of the north tower of the Abbey.
As per details, [the] Abbey organized a special Evensong in connection with the National Day of Pakistan. Special prayers were offered for the strengthening of Pakistan-UK friendship and the well-being of the people of the two countries. While the national flag kept flying on top of the north tower of Westminster Abbey the entire day …
Pakistan Day commemorates the passing of Lahore Resolution, under which a separate nation for the Muslims of the British Indian empire demanded by Muslim League was passed on March 23, 1940.
Westminster Abbey has strong links to the Commonwealth and prays for the countries of the Commonwealth throughout its regular pattern of daily services.
Each year, the high commissioners of the Commonwealth countries are invited by the Dean to evensong on or close to their national day. The National Flag is flown on the day when the High Commission is represented at Evensong.
The Cross offends
It has become clear that the Cross offends our betters in Britain.
Radio Times
When I first moved here decades ago, I was heartened to see that the Radio Times, the original and foremost of broadcasting listing magazines, had illustrations of crosses in the margins of their pages for Good Friday and churches on Easter Day.
Unfortunately, the crosses and churches, except for tiny ones, disappeared some years ago. The veteran Christian commentator Catherine Pepinster observed in the Telegraph on Wednesday, March 20, ‘British officialdom treats Christianity with open contempt’:
Christian symbols and spaces are contested, too. Years ago, the Radio Times would have a special border on its pages with programmes for Good Friday, with a cross within the image. This year, the cross – the very thing that denotes Jesus’ crucifixion which is commemorated every Good Friday – is missing and instead there is a gambolling spring lamb and a miniscule church. Perhaps they thought it too distressing or too, well, overtly Christian.
However, that all went by the wayside long before 2024.
Pepinster notes that Good Friday is now viewed as a day of celebration rather than penitence:
… some restaurants have emailed me with an invitation to “celebrate” Good Friday with a slap-up lunch.
Hot cross buns
On March 21, GB News reported that Iceland, one of our supermarket chains, decided to replace the cross on hot cross buns with a tick (checkmark):
Iceland is running a trial where it will sell hot cross buns with a ‘tick’ instead of a ‘cross’ alongside the traditional treats that feature a cross.
However, this has caused fury among some customers and Christian groups as it removes the religious symbol, with some shoppers calling it “craziness” …
Research by Iceland suggested a fifth of customers want to ditch the cross and would prefer a ‘tick’ symbol on their sweet treats instead …
Iceland has made the change as part of a trial to find out which customers prefer and said it hopes to gauge feedback before rolling out further changes.
I can only hope that the traditional hot cross buns outsold those with the tick.
This year saw another hot cross bun change: the extravagant flavour varieties. Traditionally, the hot cross bun is a modest, lightly sweetened roll flavoured with spices to remind us of our Lord’s suffering on Good Friday. The cross on top is not sweet, either; it’s made out of edible paste. Now there are several gourmet varieties of hot cross bun: chocolate, bacon, cheese — you name it. It’s just wrong.
St George’s Cross on football shirts
On March 22, news emerged that the Football Association (soccer) modified the George Cross on the England team’s shirt collars, adding blue to the red.
This did not go down well, either.
The Guardian said:
Perhaps with a little foresight the Football Association could have avoided the unhappiness over the recoloured George Cross on its latest overpriced scratchy nylon replica shirt by suggesting this design detail was related to the fact England v Brazil takes place on the weekend of Palm Sunday, when the cross is traditionally hung with purple, thereby out-sanctifying even the most patriotic of brocade-fondlers.
Not that this would have helped anyone get any closer to the objective truth here. Which is that the flag (and this isn’t The Flag. It’s a flag) is not a protected symbol. Nike’s decision to go with a purple, blue and pink version of the beloved cross may be pointless, gimmicky, and even quite cynical – nobody here does anything without focus-grouping every last chevron and flash: if the response really was unforeseen then the FA and Nike need to sack their entire marketing teams.
I wonder how the shirts will sell.
I am amazed at how offensive decision-makers in any sector of our society find the George Cross when there are several other countries which have it as part of their national flag. Those nations never find it embarrassing or shameful. Why should the English?
Ramadan lights in London
A week after the aforementioned King’s Cross station departure board display, Ramadan lights went up once again in central London. I saw them last year.
They say ‘Happy Ramadan’, yet I thought that Ramadan was supposed to be a time of fasting, prayer and reflection before Eid.
No one says ‘Happy Lent’, do they?
On March 27, Wednesday of Holy Week, The Telegraph reported:
Ramadan lights will be on display in London’s West End over the Easter Weekend …
This year marks the second year that the Muslim celebration has been marked with illuminations in central London.
The lights are funded by the Aziz Foundation, a charity founded by Asif Aziz, a billionaire property developer whose company owns sites including the London Trocadero that occupies much of the block between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.
The lights – wishing a ‘‘Happy Ramadan’’ – have drawn plaudits but prompted a warning from prominent local Conservatives that the council must also support the other major faiths during important festivals.
Last week Network Rail was forced to remove an Islamic message on the departure board at London King’s Cross.
The rail operator faced criticism following its decision to display a “hadith [Islamic epithet] of the day” to celebrate Ramadan, as part of a diversity initiative.
Among the criticisms Humanists UK said it felt public train stations “should not be urging ‘sinners’ to repent”, after the phrase was used in the message.
Paul Swaddle, leader of the minority Tory group on Westminster council, offered full support to the Ramadan lights but questioned why a Ramadan display in the window of Westminster’s city hall offices had not yet been replaced by an Easter one in time for this weekend.
Mr Swaddle said: “The thing I would question is this: there has been a Ramadan celebration in the window of Westminster city hall. But I just wonder if the Easter one is going up very soon? Easter is one of the most important Christian festivals of the year but what are they [the Labour council] doing to celebrate it? I am not aware they are. I suspect the window display is not going to change.”
Not a chance.
Maundy Thursday
For whatever reason, HMP (His Majesty’s Prison) Lewes decided to serve curry to the inmates on Maundy Thursday. The curry made them ill:
Hmm.
BBC drops televised Easter Day broadcast
On Good Friday, the Telegraph informed us that there would be no televised BBC broadcast of an Easter church service this year:
The BBC has been accused of turning its back on Britain’s Christian faith after scrapping its broadcast of the traditional Easter service from King’s College, Cambridge.
The programme has been dropped in favour of religious coverage elsewhere across the corporation’s platforms.
It comes after the BBC decided to invite “confirmed atheist” and humanist campaigner Alice Roberts on the Good Friday edition of Desert Island Discs [BBC Radio 4] rather than a Christian figure …
Critics have said the BBC appeared to be deliberately abandoning the part of its audience that professed the Christian faith.
Andrea Williams, the chief executive of Christian Concern, said: “The BBC’s motto, ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’, is Biblical in origin. The more the BBC seeks to forget and minimise the primary role of the Christian faith shaping this nation, the darker all things will become. Easter reminds us of Christ’s victory over death, which is a good-news message for us all.”
But the BBC has rejected claims that it is ignoring the role of Christianity and religion in general after dropping the King’s College Easter service, which was shown on BBC Two last year and had been on television since 2010.
Sad.
Church of England unhelpful
One cannot say that the Church of England has helped to bring the meaning of Lent, Holy Week and Easter to the English consciousness.
On Palm Sunday, the Telegraph reported that a female Church of England cleric, the Ven Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, wants to ‘smash the patriarchy’ and promote ‘anti-whiteness’:
Dr Threlfall-Holmes wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “I went to a conference on whiteness last autumn. It was very good, very interesting and made me realise: whiteness is to race as patriarchy is to gender.
“So yes, let’s have anti-whiteness, and let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression.”
In response, users of X suggested that if the Cambridge-educated priest wanted “anti-whiteness” then she should “lead by example and resign”.
We all know about the recent questions that ‘conversions’ have raised with regard to those who would like asylum status.
Even more of us know how disappointing the recent Archbishops of Canterbury have been, particularly the present incumbent, Justin Welby.
Just because Easter was on March 31 this year, the earliest in some time, Welby has hoped since 2016 that Easter in the UK would be on a fixed day every year, putting us at odds with the rest of the Christian world outside of the Orthodox churches.
On Good Friday, The Times told us about a law that gained Royal Assent which would do that very thing: ‘How a 96-year-old law could stop Easter hopping around the calendar’.
Oddly enough, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, promoted the idea:
The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Randall Davidson, supported it and a private member’s bill was introduced by John Simon, the former home secretary and future chancellor. The bill was passed, but all it did was create a mechanism by which the date could be fixed — and that mechanism has still not been triggered.
The 1928 Easter Act:
has lain dormant since the moment it was given royal assent as the conditions for its use have never been satisfied — but a movement could be building to change that.
Welby thinks it’s a great idea:
In recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, has expressed support for the idea and Anglican leaders discussed the matter with Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Should there be agreement, the Easter Act 1928 could be triggered and Easter Sunday would have a permanent slot …
… In 2016, Welby said he was talking to other Christian leaders about fixing the date of Easter, adding: “I would expect it to be within five to ten years’ time, as most people have probably printed their calendars for the next five years and school holidays and so on are already fixed and it affects almost everything you do in the spring and summer. I would love to see it before I retire.”
Not surprisingly, secularists support the idea. Planning around the greatest Christian feast day is just too inconvenient:
“It’s ridiculous that almost a century after legislation was passed to fix the date for Easter, businesses, schools and families are still inconvenienced by Easter moving around the calendar,” said a spokesman for the National Secular Society. “Instead of waiting indefinitely for the elusive consensus from church leaders, the government should press on and fix the date so the rest of us can benefit from the certainty of a fixed spring break.”
In 2021, the Conservative government said it has no plans to bring forward a statutory instrument (SI) to make this happen:
Paul Scully, then the small business minister, told the National Secular Society that he appreciated their case but that there was as yet no intention to trigger the Easter Act until Christians gave their assent.
That would have to be all Christian communities, not just the CofE:
… it would never happen without clear assent from the Christian communities.
Let’s hope it stays that way.
Easter Day
Meanwhile, there are vicars up and down the country who are doing their best to preach the Gospel and manage local church finances rather than focus on identity politics. One of them is the Revd Greg Smith, a husband to wife Fran, father of four and grandfather to three youngsters. The Revd and Mrs Smith live in Shropshire.
On Easter Day, the Telegraph related his story in ‘How Britain lost faith in the Church of England’:
On Sunday, the Reverend Greg Smith, rector of St George’s in the small south Shropshire market town of Pontesbury, will be leading services in three of the six far-flung churches that make up the benefice – or extended parish – that he heads.
Two other clergy will assist him with the rest, one of them St Luke’s, Snailbeach, now designated a “festival church”, meaning usage is so low it is only open on holy and high days.
“I’ve got a 6.30am, a nine o’clock and a 10.30am,” says Smith. “That is going to be a lot of running around in the car, rushing out of one church and into the next, never spending time with people, not able to prepare properly” …
The impression created that the rural ministry of the Church of England is on its knees is not one accepted by Greg Smith, who in whatever spare time he has when not driving around in his car between churches, running a food bank, two community cafes for young people and a bereavement service, is compiling a report on the subject for his local bishop …
The life he leads is, he agrees, relentless. There are currently 72 clergy in the diocese of Hereford in which Pontesbury sits, shouldering the burden of parish work in 406 churches, with nine vacancies, so it is doing better than Truro [the thinly-stretched diocese in Cornwall]. But three quarters of those priests in the diocese licenced to officiate at services are over 50 years of age.
And the workload on them isn’t made any easier when 90 per cent of the churches in the diocese are listed buildings. “It’s a challenge to care for one listed building, but I’ve got five and all have big bills round the corner,” reports Smith.
In St George’s, there is one pending for £250,000 for repairs to the stained glass at the east end of the church. Holy Trinity in Minsterley, the next village along, needs a similar sum.
“There are some grants available, but it’s a lot of paperwork that never stops.”
In the past, some of that form filling would have fallen to the church wardens, volunteers from the congregation, often with professional expertise. Yet a report earlier this month revealed that a quarter of all CofE parishes no longer have even a single church warden.
England’s Anglican churches need money to survive, yet:
A high-profile panel has urged an increase from £100 million to £1 billion in the fund already earmarked by the Church Commissioners to atone for Anglicanism’s historical involvement in the slave trade.
If the recommendation of the panel, whose chairman is Bishop Rosemarie Mallett of Croydon, is accepted, the cost would substantially reduce the Commissioners’ ability to give local churches the boost they are crying out for right now to keep things going.
As history tells us, the Church of England was prominent in the abolition of the slave trade in the 19th century, but let’s not allow facts to get in the way of identity politics.
Justin Welby’s acquiescence to close churches during the pandemic did not help, either.
Smith himself says of CofE wokery:
I’m not saying these things are not important but what I can say is that these are not conversations I am having locally. The only people who have spoken to me about reparations for slavery are other clergy.
People are much more exercised about keeping the [church] building warm and getting children, the younger generation, in to worship with us. The national church can feel a million miles away.
Another vicar has had the same experience, albeit in south London:
Like Greg Smith in Shropshire, the Reverend Ruth Burge-Thomas, vicar at Holy Spirit Church in Clapham since 2012, experiences the daily struggle to make the Church relevant to her local community in 2024.
A local girl whose mother grew up on one of the council estates in the parish, she argues that as vicar, “you are owned by the community. Whenever I go out, a five-minute walk often takes me 45 minutes because so many people stop me to talk about what is troubling them.”
I wish both vicars — and others like them — abundant blessings in their respective ministries.
On a church-related note, one happy event was King Charles’s walkabout outside of Windsor Castle on Easter morning. The Telegraph told us:
The King has re-emerged into public life for the first time since his diagnosis with cancer, in a walkabout with 56 handshakes, a homemade card, and a promise that he is “doing his best”.
He was “very touched” to see people there for him, he said, smiling broadly and thanking members of the public as their hopes that he “get well soon”, “keep going strong” and “never give in” rolled in.
At Windsor Castle, after the Easter Matins service which was his first public appearance since Christmas Day, the King was in his element after his doctors agreed he could resume the walkabouts he loves.
His mother would have been pleased, to say the least.
Well, while England’s Easter in 2024 might not have been the brightest and best in living memory, the remnant of believers holds fast to that which is good: the Gospel message — and the Resurrection.
Yesterday’s post was about the recent Guardian articles on the all-male Garrick Club in London’s theatreland.
It should be noted that the Garrick is far from being the only prestigious all-male private members club in London, just the best known.
Well, it seems that pressure from The Guardian and those against single-sex private clubs — don’t forget, there are several exclusively for women, too — has forced two Garrick members to leave the club. They are top civil servants.
On Wednesday, March 20, 2024, the paper reported (emphases mine):
The head of the civil service, Simon Case, and the MI6 chief, Richard Moore, have resigned their memberships of the Garrick Club after intense criticism of their decision to join a club that has repeatedly blocked the admission of women as members.
Their resignations come two days after the Guardian published for the first time details of the club’s closely guarded membership list, revealing that fellow members include judges, scores of senior lawyers, leaders of publicly funded arts institutions and King Charles.
The moves by Case and Moore are likely to put pressure on other high-profile members of the club to rethink their membership.
Case, who as cabinet secretary is the leader of half a million civil servants, had faced condemnation for arguing he only joined the London gentleman’s club in an attempt to overturn its all-male policy. The Cabinet Office confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that Case had resigned his membership.
It is understood that Moore, chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, decided to quit the Garrick after criticism from colleagues at MI6, which has repeatedly restated its commitment to improving the service’s poor record on equality and diversity.
Moore is understood to have written to all MI6 staff twice within the space of 24 hours. The first message, sent to thousands of its employees on Tuesday morning, addressed the Guardian’s coverage and acknowledged the reputational hit that news of his membership posed to the service, and in particular the risk of it undermining its work to attract more women to join MI6.
In that note, he said he would not be resigning because he was campaigning from within the club for women to be allowed to join.
But at 9am on Wednesday he sent a shorter note to staff saying that on further reflection overnight he had decided to quit the Garrick, the Guardian understands.
He is also understood to feel mortified at the attention surrounding his club membership because it has detracted from MI6’s work to address the under-representation of women. The resignation followed conversations with senior female colleagues.
What can one say? Should pressure also be brought to bear on women who have joined clubs allowing only members of that sex? Are there female civil servants who are members of such organisations? Perhaps we should be told.
As for women not joining MI6, has spying ever appealed to them? There are certain walks of life that attract more men than women and vice versa.
I recall 20 years ago when the male head of the Networks department — as in computer networks — in the consultancy at which I worked was desperate to hire more women. He got permission to place a prominent advertisement in the British IT weeklies. Response came there none. He was seriously disappointed.
One suspects that the same principle applies to MI6. Spying and intelligence gathering might not be something to which females naturally gravitate.
We need to learn to live with that — just as we need to accept that the Garrick and other single-sex member clubs, whether for men or women, exist.
For whatever reason, Britain’s pre-eminent private members’ club for men, The Garrick, has appeared in the press again this week.
For the benefit of younger readers, let’s go back 30 years for a moment. A number of private clubs in London’s St James’s and Pall Mall were for men only. Something kicked off in the media and, before one knew it, this inequality drew angry protests in front of clubs and much news coverage.
A few years ago, I met the catering manager for one such club who described what he called a dangerous scene trying to get to and from work each day during those tumultuous weeks. And yet, he pointed out, the club he worked for was already admitting women members!
I don’t remember the outcome of those mid-1990s protests, but a few clubs decided to admit women. Everything died down and went back to normal.
Fast forward to 2018, and women-only clubs began migrating from Manhattan to London. Tatler billed them as ‘girl power 2.0’. That year, The Londonist went behind the scenes at the top all-women’s club, Allbright. As with traditional men’s clubs, the ones for women only displayed the same elitism (emphases mine):
Allbright’s aims are admirable but at £50 per month (plus a £300 joining fee), it has spawned a sisterhood not everyone can afford.
Women-only member’s clubs have been depicted as a way for working women to get ahead but if you can afford a private membership then the likelihood is you’re already ahead, while the working-class women who might benefit from its perks are likely to fall further behind.
Back among the panel, the whiff of expensive perfume just about masks the smell of freshly painted walls. It’s the stench of exclusivity which a private members club, by its very definition, can’t shake.
Interestingly, the most democratic — meant in the apolitical sense of the word — women’s only club is the oldest. In January 2024, Country & Town House wrote about it:
The oldest club on the list by miles, the University Women’s Club dates all the way back to 1883. This was a time when a small number of women were attending university, but they were not able to graduate – bar those studying at The University of London, which started awarding degrees to women from 1878. One of these women was Gertrude Jackson, who was a student of Girton College, Cambridge. She had the idea to set up a club for university women, and after three years over 200 women had shown interest. Over the next few decades the club continued to grow, eventually finding its permanent home in Mayfair’s Audley Square – where it has remained ever since. Despite its name, you don’t need a degree to join, and membership will give you access to subsidised bedrooms alongside a calendar of enlightening events and talks.
Details: From £543 per year, with a £300 joining fee. universitywomensclub.com
Contrast those dues with Allbright’s, also featured in the same article:
Details: Annual memberships start from £1,980, with a £300 joining fee. allbrightcollective.com
In England, there are any number of women-only clubs for everyday ladies who aren’t posh entrepreneurs. They have banded together as the National Association of Women’s Clubs.
So, with all that in mind, here is the question: what is so wrong with traditional private clubs for men? If women can have them, then surely men can retain theirs.
This week The Guardian muddied the waters about The Garrick.
Before going into their crafty articles, the Garrick Club was founded in 1831 in the heart of London’s Theatreland. It’s motto is ‘All the world’s a stage’.
Students of English literature will — or should — remember David Garrick, the 17th century genius who put London on the map for all things theatrical. He was an actor, a playwright and a producer. The world owes him a great debt of gratitude. The founders of the Garrick named the club after him, and rightly so.
The Garrick was created as a place where those involved in the theatre, which was viewed as an ignoble occupation, could meet respectable men — e.g. wealthy merchants, military officers — in a quiet, convivial atmosphere with good food on offer.
Over the decades, members of the club invited actors and authors to join them. The famous names are too long to list here, but you can read about them on the aforementioned Wikipedia link and in The Guardian articles cited below. Many famous men joined the club, coming from professions such as the law and politics. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a member as are several Anglican clergymen.
As for women, the Garrick decided in 2010 to allow them — whether as members’ spouses or guests — into the club as visitors. Is it so necessary to have anything more when women have their own private establishments?
Then there is the club tie, which I would know anywhere as a number of men appearing on current affairs shows wear theirs. Look for a salmon and lime green diagonal stripe. You can see a photo of a member wearing one in The Guardian‘s March 18 article, ‘”It isn’t acceptable”: Garrick Club remains a bastion of male elitism’.
That article goes into the unfairness of the Garrick’s men-only policy. However, the Garrick is not the only all-male private club in the heart of London. There are several others. However, it seems as if it’s the best known, the big target.
Another Guardian article, ‘Garrick Club men-only members list reveals roll-call of British establishment’, tells us how many hip and popular men in the arts are members.
These are all men who are popular on our television screens:
The actors Brian Cox and his Succession co-star Matthew Macfadyen are members of the club, which was founded in 1831 as a meeting place for actors and gentlemen and named in honour of the 18th-century actor David Garrick. So are Hugh Bonneville, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Suchet and Damian Lewis.
Here are more artsy types:
The chair of the Royal Ballet school, Christopher Rodrigues, the artistic director of Wigmore Hall, John Gilhooly, and the chair of the English National Opera, Harry Brünjes, are also members, alongside Alex Beard, the chief executive of the Royal Opera House.
And here are more from a variety of occupations:
… the football manager Roy Hodgson, Nigel Newton, the chief executive and founder of the Harry Potter publishers Bloomsbury, the fashion designer Paul Smith, the Dire Straits vocalist and guitarist Mark Knopfler, the literary agent Peter Straus, the hotel magnate Rocco Forte, the editor-in-chief of Daily Mail and General Trust, Paul Dacre, and the BBC’s world affairs correspondent John Simpson.
The chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (who directed the orchestra at the king’s coronation), Antonio Pappano, is a member, as is the gynaecologist who delivered Prince George, Marcus Setchell.
In ‘UK’s top civil servant and head of MI6 urged to quit Garrick Club’, we discovered more heretofore unknown members:
The UK’s top civil servant and the head of MI6 have been urged to quit the Garrick Club amid criticism that their membership of an organisation that has repeatedly blocked women from joining showed poor leadership and judgment.
Simon Case, who as cabinet secretary is the leader of half a million civil servants, was also condemned for arguing he had only joined the London gentleman’s club in an attempt to overturn its all-male policy.
Case and Richard Moore, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), are part of a series of politicians, lawyers and other establishment figures whose membership of the Garrick was revealed by the Guardian, the first time its all-male list has been made public.
Case joined in 2019, a move that one former permanent secretary – a civil servant who leads an individual department – told the Guardian was “a poor signal in terms of leadership” of the civil service.
Jill Rutter, another former senior civil servant who has since worked on expert reports about government, said clubs like the Garrick were “clearly discriminatory”, adding: “I always hope that some government might make membership of a club like this a disqualification for a public appointment.”
A day after his Garrick membership was revealed, Case insisted to a parliamentary committee that he had joined with honourable motives.
At a subcommittee of the cross-party liaison committee of senior MPs, former Labour minister Liam Byrne asked Case how he could “foster a genuine culture of inclusiveness” while also being a Garrick member.
Case replied: “I have to say today my position on this one is clear, which is that if you believe profoundly in reform of an institution, by and large it’s easier to do if you join it to make the change from within rather than chuck rocks from the outside.”
Not every Garrick member wants to retain the male-only dynamic. Some members do want to admit women and have been quite vocal about it.
For now, what is the problem with the Garrick — and others — when women-only clubs abound, too? Leave each sex to its own establishments.
Much has been made in recent months of British MPs who are standing down at the next general election, anticipated to be held later in 2024.
The three main reasons for this are constituency boundary changes, the surprise at some 2019 winners at being elected and the age of some serving MPs, particularly among the Conservatives.
Objectively speaking, it is hardly astounding news, yet the media have made much of it.
On Sunday, March 17, 2024, The Guardian published interviews with a few of the outgoing MPs, including the Mother of the House — longest serving female MP — Labour’s Harriet Harman, a recent widow after the death of her husband, Jack Dromey MP. She has been an MP since 1982 (emphases mine):
Why is she going now? Wouldn’t she have liked to see in a new Labour government? She shakes her head. “I would have gone earlier, but the party was in such bad shape under [former Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn. I felt the ship was rocking.” On election night, she will still be up until dawn, touring the TV studios as a commentator. But beyond that, she cannot quite see. There is the Fawcett Society, which she chairs (the group campaigns for women’s equality). And perhaps, too, there is work to be done on widowhood. Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, also an MP, died unexpectedly in 2022 – “his office was right there, next door,” she says – and this has brought her to think about women who find themselves in the same situation. She is 73, which is no age at all these days. “There used to be a cultural norm about widowhood, which was that it’s a very sad and terrible thing; that the good part of your life is over. But my mum lived for 30 years after my dad died. You can’t say that a third of your life is going down the drain. We need a feminist take on widowhood. This is the next chapter of our lives, and we’re going to do it very differently.”
Then there are MPs who have been affected by mental health problems. Interestingly, Sir Charles Walker and William Wragg are Conservatives.
Walker, who has been an MP since 2005, has made some thought-provoking contributions in recent years, including on the pandemic:
Walker chairs the committee that drew up Smoothing the cliff edge, and he tells me that in this parliament, outplacement services are finally to be introduced: MPs will get help with such things as their CV. In the next parliament, vocational accredited training will be available. “People should be thinking about their last day in parliament on their first day,” he says. “Because it really is very transitory” …
When Charles Walker found himself getting crotchety with his constituents, he took it as an early sign that his time in parliament might be coming to an end: “My stepfather was an MP, and he said that once you start getting short-tempered, it’s time to go.” In 2019, he was at a political event – admittedly, this was not in his constituency – and it struck him as “one of the most unpleasant evenings” he’d ever had. “They thought they could be as rude as they liked,” he says. “So I basically told them what I thought of them: find yourself a new guest speaker, I said, because I’m going home. I called my wife from a service station. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said. She was the one who pointed out that I would have to do it for another five years because my name was on the ballot paper, and the nominations had closed two weeks earlier.”
Walker loves the House of Commons. He has never been a yes man, intent on clambering the greasy pole: on his first day in parliament in 2005, he got into a “terrible row” with his fellow Tory MPs when he said that they had to give up their outside jobs, and focus on the task in hand. He had no ministerial ambitions; he wanted only to be a good parliamentarian. “And I have been.” He is the fourth longest-serving select committee chair in the House, a former vice-chair of the 1922 Committee, and he has often amended legislation. In this sense, he has no regrets. But there is, he thinks, a problem. “I’m going to say something very controversial, which is that we’re far too close to our constituents. MPs’ offices are nearly all now staffed by five caseworkers, who just plough through the inbox, solving people’s problems. That’s a very noble thing to do, but ultimately, it’s not the role of a member of parliament. We’re here to legislate. I know it sounds like heresy, but we have to put some distance between ourselves and them. Most constituents are self-sufficient. So you end up working for about 1,000 people.” Walker believes passionately that more homes need to be built. Conservative MPs, however, are stymied by their constituencies if they talk about the green belt. “The Tory party has had numerous housing bills, but when it comes to the crunch, we find ourselves campaigning against them.”
His low point in the almost two decades he has been here was, without question, the period of the pandemic. Walker suffers from OCD. “I would happily have had the vaccination up my nose, or on a brioche… But I am needle phobic. It was absolutely awful when we started getting aggressive with those who hadn’t had a vaccination. I just hated it. The lack of empathy. The lack of humanity. All these nice middle-class people with their gardens lecturing others. I thought that was obnoxious.” But he thinks he began to “fall out of love with parliament” in the period after Brexit (he was a Brexiter, though he is much more agonised now about how it all played out). “I remember in a meeting of the 1922 Committee Theresa May being reduced to tears by the brutality of some colleagues around that table. If you were a shrink, you’d say that’s when I really started thinking I’d had enough.”
Some other complaints and observations. Boris was “chaos”, though he had “the Kryptonite of political stardust… and Truss was just a disaster. I mean, it really was, wasn’t it?” However, the media, with its obsession with gotchas, must also take some of the blame for the low quality of political debate: “The biggest decision any presenter of the Today programme has ever had to make is: what do I ask next?” He worries that parliament no longer attracts the brightest or the best. But so far as reform goes, he is resolute. Those who complain about outmoded practices “clearly don’t understand how the place works”. He likes nothing better than a vote in the division lobby, where anyone is free to nobble the secretary of state for this or that. How does he feel about the election, whenever it may be? Does he fear a rout? “I’ve always said that while governments come and go, parliament is a constant – and that’s fantastic. I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know how democracies work, and that’s a cause for celebration, not regret.”
William Wragg confessed:
I was in a depressive state and I asked myself: is this how I want to continue?
I found Wragg a bit of a bully, especially towards then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his final months. I am trying to square that with his mental health, which he has discussed openly in the House of Commons on occasion:
For Conservative MPs, the summer of 2022 was stormy – and it took its toll. “It was after the confidence votes in Boris Johnson,” says William Wragg. “I got back for the summer recess, and having come away from all that energy, tension and adrenaline, I just felt as if the ground from under me had opened up. I was in a depressive state, and I had to take some time out. It was then that I asked myself a blunt question: is this how I want to continue? Because it wasn’t going to be sustainable as a working life.” He waited. Best not to rush into anything. He told himself he might be able to push on. But it was no good. “We went through another tumultuous period. The party turned very introspective. The thought settled in my mind. I wanted more autonomy over my own life.”
Wragg has been open about his struggles with his mental health. But while this is the single most important reason for his decision to leave parliament, he doesn’t want to be defined by it. Does he think life as an MP is particularly hard for those prone to depression? “It’s hard on anybody, and it’s changed very much in the time I’ve been here.” Social media in particular has made life more difficult: “Maybe it’s one of the effects of the Brexit referendum, but the discourse doesn’t allow for any nuance.” The general public, he tells me, struggles to remember that MPs are human beings too: “A lady came to see me after I’d announced my decision, and she said: ‘You know, Mr Wragg, there’s no way I’m going to vote Conservative, and that’s how I’ve voted all my life. What have you got to say to that?’ When I said, ‘Well, it’s not just voters that can become disillusioned’, the look of surprise on her face…” Wragg is one of those who thinks long careers in politics may belong to the past. “No one is indispensable. But it’s a shame. There’s a lot of people with a lot more still to give who are leaving.”
As of February 12, 2024, Guido Fawkes estimated that 60 Conservatives will not be running for re-election.
One of them in Tracey Crouch, who first entered the Commons in 2010 and suffered with cancer during this Parliament. I fully empathise with her decision and, yes, she was an active participant in debates, showing up with a shaved head because of her cancer treatment. In any event, her seat of Chatham and Aylesford in Kent appears to be a safe seat for the Conservatives.
Sir Robert Neill, an absolute brainbox when it comes to the law, has served the Kent (outer London) constituency of Bromley & Chislehurst — soon to be Bromley and Biggin Hill — since 2006. He began his career as a local councillor 50 years ago, so he’s doing the right thing. The new constituency could well go to Labour. We can but see. I do not trust polls anymore.
Another proper Conservative, Colonel Bob Stewart, will be standing down from his Kent (another outer London) constituency Beckenham after many years. He has served his constituents well.
Sir Graham Brady, who heads the 1922 Committee, entered Parliament in 1997. He will also be standing down from his seat in Altrincham and Sale West:
I have decided to bring this fascinating and fulfilling chapter of my life to a close while I am young enough to pursue other opportunities and interests, so I will not be standing at the next election.
In physician Dr Kieran Mullan‘s case, after boundary changes, he was deselected in another constituency. Guido says:
Now that Mullan has nowhere to chicken run to he’s decided to fly the coop of Crewe and Nantwich, citing boundary changes and his personal life.
Mike Freer, who represents Margaret Thatcher’s former constituency in north London, is standing down after someone set his campaign office alight, allegedly regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict. Freer is not Jewish, incidentally, and says that the attack was the final straw with regard to his professional and personal life.
Sir James Duddridge, an MP since 2005, announced that he will be standing down from his seat in Rochford and Southend East:
I think I have done my time. Forgive me for moving on to do other things.
Steve Brine, who has represented Winchester (Hampshire) since 2010, will stand down, too, so that he can spend more time with his wife and children.
Dehenna Davison, who represents Bishop Auckland, was a surprise Red Wall win in 2019. I will have more on her in another post, but she will be standing down after one term. She has been plagued by unexpected physical health issues over the past five years.
Although that is just a small selection of Conservatives, their reasons are valid. I don’t know about Dr Mullan, but the others have pulled more than their weight not only on the backbenches but in ministerial or committee roles over the years.
Illegal immigration from across the Channel is a hot topic in England.
If anyone missed two reports from earlier in March 2024 about migrants who want to leave the UK, here they are, courtesy of the Daily Sceptic‘s Will Jones, who prefaces his March 6 piece with this:
A growing number of illegal migrants are finding life in Britain so miserable, they’re desperate to leave. But we won’t let them.
How can that be?
The first report comes from The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon, ‘This unbelievable farce sums up Britain’s immigration nightmare’ (emphases mine):
… According to reports, there is a growing number of people who have entered this country illegally, only to find that life in Britain is even worse than in whatever godforsaken hellhole they originally came from. Yesterday, for example, one newspaper carried an interview with a teenager from north Africa who arrived here last July via small boat. He said: “I hate Britain and wish I had never come here. I want to go back to France.”
Meanwhile, an illegal migrant from Sudan said: “I want to go anywhere else in Europe … There are many young migrants wanting to leave because there is nothing for them in the UK.” And last month, an illegal migrant from Syria said: “A lot of people who came over the Channel want to leave now – there is nothing for us here.”
A number of people living in England would heartily concur, but these migrants have a problem:
… They can’t leave Britain – because the police keep stopping them.
Take the illegal migrant from Sudan. Four weeks ago, the police caught him in Dover, trying to sneak aboard a truck bound for France. They then drove him all the way back to Preston in Lancashire, where the Home Office had housed him. The same thing happened to the migrant from Syria. He says he’s been trying to sneak out of Britain since last summer – but has been caught by the police every time.
What a remarkable situation. We’re hopeless at keeping people out. But we’re brilliant at keeping them in.
Deacon recommends a UK-led propaganda programme in France:
If the British Government had any gumption, however, it wouldn’t just let them leave. It would pay them to go to Calais and warn wannabe migrants about how wretched life in Britain is – so that they don’t come here in the first place. Supply the ex-migrants with loudhailers, so they can march up and down French beaches, bellowing: “Don’t board that dinghy! It’s not worth it! Britain is skint, miserable and falling apart! And the people-smugglers will charge even more to get you out than they’re charging to get you in! Please, take it from us – you’re much better off staying in France!”
However, even that has its downside:
It’s got to be worth trying. Then again, the plan does have one possible downside. If word gets out that we’re paying these former migrants good money to deter aspiring migrants, the aspiring migrants will be even keener to come – so that we’ll pay them to do the same thing. Thousands upon thousands of penniless people will come pouring into Britain, in the hope of being kicked straight out again.
The Mail‘s intrepid veteran reporter Sue Reid actually interviewed some of the young migrants. I don’t know how she does it. I’ve seen her interviewed several times on GB News, and she still has bags of energy.
Excerpts follow from ‘SUE REID: The migrants trying to sneak BACK across the Channel who say coming to Britain was the worst decision they’ve ever made’:
… The Mail discovered the phenomenon of disgruntled migrants quitting Britain earlier this month when we were approached by Alaa Eldin, 25 — a Syrian squatting under an upturned rowing boat on Dover beach.
He told us: ‘I am trapped in your country. I have been trying to get on a lorry for five months. The police spot me and bring me back to Dover. They won’t let me go.’
Last week, Alaa decamped to the former bomb shelter in the White Cliffs, which he proudly showed us round.
It has a store of groceries, duvets and outside are the remnants of a campfire.
‘I stay here. There are a few of us, sometimes 20. We all want to leave and some are now in France after hiding on lorries already,’ he said. Alaa claimed asylum after arriving on a traffickers’ boat in August 2021.
He was one of more than 28,000 migrants to cross the Channel to Dover that year. He had come from Germany, where he has family who have settled there from war-torn Syria.
On arrival, he was dispatched to a migrants’ hotel, the Britannia, in Leeds. But he broke the Home Office asylum rules when he left the accommodation for a week to try to earn money on the black market.
Thrown out of the asylum system as a punishment for illegally trying to work, he headed for Dover, the only place he knew in Britain and where he gets a daily shower at the nearby Outreach centre for the homeless.
Reid then told us about a draft-dodger:
… it was not hard in Kent to find asylum seekers who are fed up to the back teeth with Britain.
As it turned dark on Tuesday evening last week, a lone figure stood outside the Outreach centre wearing a hoodie and zipped-up jumper. This was an Eritrean Christian named Abel.
He told a distressing tale of how, aged 14, he had fled Eritrea — a ruthless dictatorship in East Africa, where every male must join the military at 18 …
Although Abel was granted asylum years ago, and even has a National Insurance card, meaning he can work, he has frequently found himself homeless …
‘I talk to my mother on my mobile, and she weeps at what has become of me. I would like to go home to her and my nine brothers and sisters.’
Yes, well, as the American Thomas Wolfe entitled his novel published posthumously in 1940, You Can’t Go Home Again, and that was about professional success:
‘But Eritrea is a difficult country,’ counters Abel, who speaks English well and for three years studied to be a mechanic at a Dover college. ‘I do want to leave Britain, but it would be hard to go back to my homeland now.’
There used to be a time when the world’s migrants realised that. That was the case with my 19th century ancestors and millions of others. You left family behind. It was a difficult decision — and a permanent one.
The next story shows how the smuggling network operates. Angers, referenced below, is a lovely, historic medium-sized city in France:
… Mohammed Boumatta, the weeping 17-year-old, is certain what he wants to do. In Dover, hundreds of lorries each week park and queue to join ferries for France. He is determined to stow away on one.
His asylum papers show the Home Office deem him to be a Moroccan citizen, although he comes from Laayoune, the dusty capital of Western Sahara, a disputed territory on the North-Western coast of Africa.
His father is a goat-herder there, while his 25-year-old brother, Otmane, lives in Angers, western France, where he is a mechanic.
It was to stay with his brother that Mohammed set off a couple of years ago, paying for a traffickers’ boat ride to the Canary Islands, now a hotspot for migrants fleeing Africa.
At first, all went well. He was sent as an unaccompanied young migrant to mainland Spain by the government in Madrid. From there, he made his way to France to live with his brother.
The French put him in school and paid him £600 a month as a living allowance.
What was there not to like? ‘I was learning to speak French properly. I was soon speaking the language really well,’ he admits now, remorse written on his face.
No kidding. Morocco was a former French colony.
The story continues:
But somehow, while he was in Angers he fell in with a trafficking agent, who told him Britain was a better country.
‘The agent told me that, as an asylum seeker, I would get an English education, a house, and more money still,’ says Mohammed. ‘I borrowed the £1,000 for the trafficking agent from a friend of my brother’s.’
After getting off the boat in Dover, he was sent to a migrants’ hotel in Liverpool and then to a Home Office multi-occupation house in Hindley near Wigan [north west England].
‘The men there were much older than me. I felt unsafe. I decided to leave to go back to France across the Channel. I already hated Britain,’ he says.
After his attempt to reach France ended at London City Airport, he was marooned. His asylum claim is up in the air.
‘No one at the Home Office has come looking for me,’ he explains over a plate of spaghetti at a Dover cafe. ‘I don’t think they care that I am missing.’
During his terrifying lorry journey across England, he lay on the axle between the vehicle’s wheels. The driver mysteriously headed to City Airport via Felixstowe, the East Anglian container port, but didn’t stop there.
‘My body was inches from the ground the whole journey. I could have lost an arm, a leg or my life. I think the driver was lost.’
Now Mohammed is back living rough at the dingy port. Does he still want to escape Britain?
‘Yes,’ comes the quick reply. ‘I will try every night — anything to get away from your country.
‘Coming to Britain was the biggest mistake of my life.’
I hope he succeeds.
This statement, sandwiched in Abel’s story, puzzled me, given Reid’s interviews:
The Home Office has a voluntary returns system, where migrants who don’t want to stay are given a flight back to their home country with £3,000 of taxpayers’ money on a credit card in their pocket.
How can that be when the police are preventing migrants from leaving? Yet another bureaucratic Government mystery.
Let these men go.
The big political news of Monday, March 11, 2024, was Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform.
One week ago, I wrote about Anderson’s criticism of London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the MP’s subsequent suspension from the Conservative Parliamentary Party.
By 9:30 yesterday, Guido Fawkes told us that the rumour mill was in full flow (red emphases his):
Reform UK is making a “major” announcement today, setting Westminster abuzz with rumours of what it may be about. Some speculate that it could be about Lee Anderson defecting to the party following his suspension of the Tory whip. Something Lee himself has not ruled out…
An hour later, all became clear. Recall that, in his constituency of Ashfield, Anderson was a Labour councillor then ran into trouble with them for his conservative — common sense — perspectives. He became a Conservative comfortably in time to run as Ashfield’s MP in December 2019. He was in the ascendant after Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, speaking to various Conservative associations and later serving as Deputy Party Chairman before he resigned over the Rwanda Bill earlier this year. Then he was suspended for his comments over Khan.
Guido gave us the news, a video and a reminder of where Anderson stood in January this year:
Reform UK Party Leader Richard Tice has announced that Lee Anderson has defected to Reform UK, to be the party’s first MP and their “champion of the Red Wall“. It’s the third party Lee’s been a part of in six years…
Despite the fact that just this January Lee said “Reform is not the answer. It leaves the door open for Sir Keir Starmer to get into No. 10 and undo all the hard work we’ve tried to do so far,” Lee took to the stand today saying: “My country has to come first, I’m scared that we are giving our country away,” pointing to his parents and constituents as inspiration for defecting to Reform. Tice went on to say that he’d be “surprised” if more MPs didn’t defect to Reform before the election…
For me, that’s a lot of bouncing around, even if the Conservatives did suspend him. Anderson said that he was under parental pressure to embrace Reform. Perhaps, but how will this look in future? It looks as if 30p Lee — referring to his ability to make dinner on the cheap — has 30p principles, too.
At the New Year, Reform’s leader Richard Tice and Anderson didn’t exactly see eye to eye:
Two months on, however, and the Conservatives seem to be moving ever closer to the One Nation Party, i.e. one that is all-embracing, clearly centrist and not too Thatcherite. This is no doubt an influence from former Prime Minister David Cameron, now Lord Cameron, our Foreign Secretary. GB News presenter and former Conservative MP Michael Portillo says that the Party is too concerned about right-wing extremism and not enough about what’s coming from the other side:
Yesterday afternoon, The Telegraph had more on Lee Anderson’s defection (purple emphases mine):
Lee Anderson has announced his defection to Reform UK, declaring “I want my country back”.
The former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party was suspended from the Tories last month over his refusal to apologise for his claims that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan and London.
Mr Anderson accused the Conservative Party of “stifling free speech” by forcing him to retract the remarks, as he insisted that he was speaking “on behalf of millions of people up and down the country who agree with me”.
He revealed that his elderly parents had pleaded with him over the weekend to quit the Tories, saying they could only vote for him if he joined Reform UK.
Announcing the defection at a press conference in Westminster on Monday morning, Richard Tice, the Reform UK leader, said Mr Anderson would be the party’s first MP …
Mr Anderson told the press conference: “I will start by saying I want my country back. Over the last year or so I’ve had to do a lot of soul-searching on my political journey. I don’t expect much in politics other than to be able to speak my mind.”
He said that led him to be “labelled as controversial,” but argued it was “not controversial to be concerned about immigration” or to “fight back in a culture war”.
Mr Anderson continued: “It is no secret that I’ve been talking to my friends in Reform for a while. And Reform UK has offered me the chance to speak out in Parliament on behalf of millions of people up and down the country who feel that they’re not being listened to.
“People will say that I’ve [taken] a gamble. And I’m prepared to gamble on myself, as I know from my mailbag how many people in this country support Reform UK and what they have to say. And like millions of people up and down the country, all I want is my country back.”
Later, in a huddle with print journalists, Mr Anderson said he had been “umming and ahhing” about the move for some time, while “trying to throw you lot off the scent” …
Mr Tice said he expected more Tory MPs to follow the Ashfield MP in joining Reform, while Mr Anderson said: “It’s a sad day that I’m leaving my colleagues. But if I’m honest, this time next year they’ll be sat on the same benches as me.”
In a swipe at Rishi Sunak, the Ashfield MP said “nothing’s changing” under the Conservatives “apart from words”, adding: “People want more than words, they want action.”
“You sort of live in hope that things are going to get better and they’ve not got better. The Conservative Party is, what, 25 points behind, probably, in the polls. We keep saying that’s going to close nearer the election, well every day’s nearer the election… we drop a point every week,” he said.
Mr Anderson said there have been “several tipping points” for him over the past few months, including his “unpalatable” suspension “for speaking my mind” …
I do not know whether he will be allowed to sit on the Conservative benches, as he has done since his suspension. He could be confined to the other side of the chamber at the top row behind Northern Ireland’s DUP MPs. We shall see.
Not everyone in Reform, a tiny political party, is taken with Anderson. Businessman and recent failed parliamentary candidate Ben Habib, who is always eloquently expressed when he appears on GB News, appeared to take a swipe at Anderson yesterday afternoon.
Guido reported:
While Richard Tice is swinging with his newest member of Reform (and first MP) Lee Anderson, it seems not all of his party share the same enthusiasm for the latest recruit. Reform UK’s Deputy Leader and former candidate for Wellingborough Ben Habib has come out with a rather luke-warm reaction to Lee Anderson’s defection. Having said last month that Lee wasn’t good enough for the party, he said today on GB News:
I am circumspect about all Tory MPs…particularly Tory MPs who can’t express themselves clearly…I picked [Lee] up on this when he said Sadiq Khan is controlled by Islamists. Clearly Khan is not controlled by Islamists.
While Reform sources say nine or ten Tory MPs are in advanced talks to join Reform UK, time will tell how Reform juggles internal politics whilst rolling out the welcome mat for fresh faces…
Well, that’s me done with Lee Anderson, because I was never going to write about no-hope Reform, the party (limited company, actually) that hasn’t a chance now or in future.
Churchmouse Campanologist 