UK politics: postscript on Scotland, Conservative MP numbers decline

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 1^st 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.

What we learn from Liz Truss’s boldly titled new book

Considering that she served fewer than 50 days in office, former British Prime Minister Liz Truss has a boldly titled new book that has just come out, Ten Years To Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room.

To borrow from King Charles, one can say only, ‘Dear, oh dear’, which is what he said to her on their first prime ministerial meeting at Buckingham Palace.

Before I go into highlights from the book, before its publication, The Critic featured an article on her premiership, ‘No, Liz Truss did not crash the economy’. An excerpt follows, emphases mine:

… Liz Truss crashed the Conservative Party’s poll ratings and she temporarily crashed the pound. She did not crash the economy and mortgage rates today have nothing to do with her or her mini-budget.

There is no technical definition of “crashing the economy” but using GDP as the best measure of the economy, it has conspicuously crashed twice since 2007, including the worst nosedive in 300 years. In neither case was Liz Truss in charge.

Not only did she not crash the economy, she had no means by which to do so. Hardly anything she announced in the mini-budget was ever enacted. The big exceptions were the Energy Price Guarantee and the abolition of the Health and Social Care Levy (effectively an extra 1.25 per cent on National Insurance). Between them they were by far the more expensive policies in the mini-budget but they are rarely mentioned today because they had cross-party support and most people thought they were a jolly good thing. It is inarguable that both of these policies led to more government borrowing but they did not crash the economy and the economy did not crash.

The more controversial parts of the mini-budget — freezing Corporation Tax and abolishing the 45p rate of income tax — did not crash the economy for the simple reason that they never happened. 

What did happen is that bond markets became alarmed by a debt-financed dash for growth that was likely to be inflationary at a time when inflation was already at 10 per cent. Interest rates had been rising steadily since December 2021 as the Bank of England slowly woke up to the inflationary threat, but the fear of steeper rate hikes in response to the mini-budget led to a spike in bond yields and mortgage rates, both of which had also been rising for some time in Britain and around the world. But the spike in bond yields lasted less than a month … and the spike in mortgage rates did not last much longer. 

If you happened to take out a mortgage (or remortgaged) in the autumn of 2022, you can reasonably blame Liz Truss for getting a rate closer to 6 per cent than 5 per cent, but it is absurd to blame the mini-budget for mortgage rates today. As one mortgage expert said a year after the mini-budget: “Would we be in the same situation now if the budget hadn’t happened at all? I think we would probably be here or hereabouts, certainly in terms of rate.”

The main determinant of UK mortgage rates is Bank Rate and that is determined by inflation and expectations of inflation. It was the same across Europe and in the USA: inflation rose therefore interest rates rose therefore mortgage rates rose. Liz Truss had about as much impact on long term interest rates and mortgage rates in the UK as she did in America. A mini-budget that was undone before it could be implemented caused a month of chaos but has made virtually no difference to any macroeconomic variables since October 2022 when inflation peaked.

The Conservative Party’s reluctance to challenge the narrative that Liz Truss caused the cost of living crisis is understandable on one level. Rishi Sunak’s claim to Downing Street rests on being the grown up who took the car keys off a drunk. But all the electorate really hears is that the Conservatives crashed the economy with a mad experiment that they would probably repeat if they got the chance.   

Sunak could level with the public and tell them that the Bank of England printed a tremendous amount of money for him to give away back when he was popular during lockdown. This caused inflation, as it did in other countries where QE was tested to destruction, and he had warned about the risks of rising inflation and higher interests in 2020 when many people thought the magic money tree would last forever. Getting inflation down required higher interest rates and therefore higher mortgage rates, but interest rates had been insanely low for years and most other western countries had to tackle inflation in the same way. There are no free lunches and the last two years have been payback time. It’s been painful but the British public were generally very keen on lockdowns, furlough and “free” tests. Even today, only 21 per cent of Britons think Covid rules were too strict while 38 per cent think they didn’t go far enough. Everything that has happened since has been the inevitable consequence of policies that were wildly popular at the time and which the opposition parties wanted to do more of. 

This might be too bitter a pill for the public to swallow, but Sunak has tried everything else, so why not try telling the truth?

Rishi will never tell the truth there because Liz Truss won the Conservative Party member vote propelling her into Party leadership and into No. 10. All Rishi could rely on to achieve the same were the votes of the Parliamentary Conservative Party — his fellow MPs.

On April 15, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson interviewed the former PM, ‘Liz Truss: “The people who claim I crashed the economy are either very stupid or very malevolent”‘.

Halfway through the interview, which includes reminders of Truss’s premiership, Pearson writes:

Which brings us to the events surrounding her downfall: cock-up or conspiracy? Truss’s leadership victory party was on September 5. But Sunak did not look defeated. There were rumours that a plot was afoot to have Liz out by Valentine’s Day. She was more vulnerable than she knew.

As for the economy:

Does Truss believe they were deliberately gunning for her?

“Look, I don’t have any proof. I mean, one version of events is that the governor [of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey] just believed in what he was doing. The economic consensus had been, amongst the Bank of England, Treasury and the OBR, relatively loose monetary policy, cheap money, which had been going on for years. I think that was actually very damaging to the economy, with high taxes and high levels of regulation, and I don’t think Andrew Bailey wanted to move away from that, even though we’d got a mandate to do things differently. So the markets reacted badly to the fact that it was clear the governor of the Bank of England and the Government were not necessarily on the same side. And what the Bank of England governor should have been doing – and this is what happened when the Bank of England wasn’t a law unto itself as it is now – is the Bank of England governor should have been co-ordinating monetary with fiscal policy, and he just didn’t.”

After Truss was ousted, the Bank swiftly reversed its actions – which made it looked like the markets were overjoyed at the installation (I was about to write “coup”) of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the so-called “adults in the room”. So how is that not a stitch-up? …

She says a lot of people who support her policies have asked why she U-turned.

“I literally had a gun to my head, that there would be a debt crisis if I hadn’t done it, or that we would not be able to fund UK debt. And that’s why I had to reverse those policies. But why did the £70 billion figure from the OBR leak? Why?”

Truss, like many ordinary Britons, sees that the Prime Minister and the Government are not really in charge at all:

Truss is silent for a while, holding tightly onto the gold circle of her necklace. Finally, she says: “The outsourcing of decision making to technocrats is completely wrong. What we should be basing our decisions on are the principles about what is the right thing to do, not some flimsy prediction in the future by the OBR that is very unlikely to happen. So the whole system is deeply flawed, but it’s in the interest of people who are insiders, who are part of the status quo. Andrew Bailey, he’s paid more than twice what the prime minister is paid. Andrew Bailey has done a bad job. Yet he doesn’t get 1 per cent of the scrutiny the prime minister gets, so it’s a completely perverse system.”

Truss tells me she wants an inquiry into what happened. “I mean, I think it’s a scandal, Allison, it really is. And I think the level of power that is exercised now in Britain by people who aren’t elected is a huge problem. I put forward policies that I’d advocated in the leadership election, which I believe would have resulted in the economy being in a better position today. Raising corporation tax has not been a success. Things like the windfall tax on energy has not helped. So I believe the policies were right and I had a mandate to deliver them. And I was forced to reverse them.”

Truss’s husband gently warned her that No. 10 would not be easy; in fact, it could ‘end in tears’. Their daughters took the end of her premiership to heart, as she told Allison Pearson:

She gets upset for the first time when I ask how her teenage girls handled seeing their mother cast out like a pariah. “It was awful, pretty awful. Frances and Liberty are very protective of me. But they laugh and say, ‘Mum, what on earth is wrong with you, you’re never normal?’ and I suppose I’m not.” Indeed, Liberty rang from school to tell her mum not to resign, but it was already too late.

Truss told Pearson:

I’m not regretful, I don’t know why. I suppose I see myself as a warrior, a combatant. So I’ve lost this battle, but I’m still alive. I knew when I went for the job that it was going to be really tough and I would face the onslaught and opposition. I didn’t realise quite how big the onslaught would be, but it makes me more determined because what’s the alternative to fighting? The alternative to fighting is giving into these awful people and their Left-wing ideology who are damaging our country.

On the topic of left-wing ideology, a review of her book at Reaction summarises what she says:

Truss portrays the Conservative prime ministers under whom she served as either unwilling or unable to challenge the entrenched left-wing agenda. In David Cameron, she writes, “I never really sensed a drive to transform the country.” Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Truss says, had cemented the left-wing orthodoxy, and Cameron and Osborne expressed no wish to change it. Theresa May and Philip Hammond continued that orthodoxy in line with the Treasury officials, she says.

The establishment’s agenda is not restricted to the civil service and, a particular obsession of Truss’s, the “quangos”. Even Dominic Cummings is deemed insufficiently pro-Brexit and controlling of Johnson. Truss writes that she finally managed to get Johnson to sign off on trade talks with the US when the Prime Minister was in hospital in April 2020: “I knew he would have his mobile on him and be free of nefarious Downing Street influences”.

In the cabinet, Michael Gove was Truss’s main antagonist, and she characterises him as an obstinate opponent of her true conservative agenda. After the 2016 referendum, she writes, she urged Gove to run for the Conservative leadership but he declined. When Gove did decide to run, forcing Johnson’s withdrawal, he phoned to ask for her support. “By this time, my shock had given way to anger. I told him bluntly I could not back him.” She continues: “His actions in stabbing Boris in the back were unforgivable. I simply did not understand how someone could do that”.

The Guardian‘s April 8 review pointed out the advice the late Queen gave her new Prime Minister:

“Pace yourself,” the 96-year-old queen said – a suggestion Truss admits she failed to heed after the queen died, leaving Truss unsure if she could cope.

Truss later introduced radical free-market policies that crashed the British economy and saw her ejected from office just 49 days after winning an internal Conservative party vote to succeed Boris Johnson, making her the shortest-serving prime minister of all.

“Maybe I should have listened” to the queen, Truss writes …

Of her historic meeting with the queen at Balmoral in Scotland in September 2022, Truss says the 96-year-old monarch “seemed to have grown frailer” since she had last been in the public eye.

“We spent around 20 minutes discussing politics,” Truss writes. “She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.”

When the Queen died:

… Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”

Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.

Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”. She herself, she writes, predominantly felt profound sadness.

Truss describes carrying out duties including giving a Downing Street speech about the queen’s death and having a first audience with King Charles III. A subsequent Buckingham Palace meeting between the king and his prime minister was widely noted for its stilted nature – Charles being heard to mutter: “Back again? Dear oh dear.” But Truss says their first official meeting made her feel “a bizarre sense of camaraderie between us, with both starting out in our new roles and having to navigate unfamiliar territory”.

As the UK went into mourning, so Truss watched on television with her family as the queen’s coffin was brought from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Truss describes being “suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all”, and breaking down “into floods of tears on the sofa”.

“Once again,” she writes, “the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event, and the fact that it was happening on my watch.”

More recently, as most conservative-minded people know, Truss has been spending time in the United States:

Last April, she delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. This February, in Maryland, she spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, telling a pro-Trump audience the Anglo-American right “need[s] a bigger bazooka” to take on its leftwing enemies.

The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley gave his take on the book, relating what Truss said about what it was really like in No. 10 away from politics:

The job of prime minister comes across as near-impossible, down to the bare essentials. Truss had to do her own hair and makeup (which probably took up half the day). There was no on-site doctor to care for her health. And the inhabitant of No 10 is kept awake by the Horse Guards clock that chimes every quarter hour. This might seem trivial, but Ten Years to Save the West – a brilliantly presumptive title from someone who spent 10 minutes in office – makes the powerful point that a modern PM “is treated like a President but has nothing like the kind of institutional support for the office that we would expect in a presidential system”.

Another Telegraph article had more, including an anecdote about an unintentional legacy, allegedly from Boris Johnson’s dog:

Downing Street was a prison infested with fleas caused by Boris Johnson’s dog Dilyn, Liz Truss has claimed in her new book.

The former prime minister said that she spent her first weeks in the job “itching” because of a flea infestation at No 10, which she said some believed was a result of Mr Johnson’s dog.

She also compared herself to a “prisoner” when resident in Downing Street, saying that “just being stuck there” was one of the most difficult things to get used to.

In an extract of her new book, Ten Years to Save the West, serialised by the Daily Mail, Ms Truss wrote: “The place was infested with fleas.

“Some claimed that this was down to Boris and Carrie’s dog Dilyn, but there was no conclusive evidence. In any case, the entire place had to be sprayed with flea killer. I spent several weeks itching.”

But, she said that “the most difficult thing to get used to was just being stuck there”.

“Spontaneous excursions were all but impossible: I was effectively a prisoner,” she added.

“If I insisted on going for a run or a walk, arrangements were made for me to be driven to a quiet bit of Hyde Park – but even this felt like being allowed out into the prison exercise yard” …

In the new extract, Ms Truss also complained that there was a “lack of personal support” available to her while prime minister – and that she had to organise her own hair and make-up appointments.

She said it was shocking that as “one of the most photographed people in the country” she had to arrange such bookings herself.

“As well as being personally inconvenient, all these things took precious bandwidth away from me. Here I was, the prime minister of a major G7 country, and I was having to spend time worrying about when I was going to be able to get my hair done,” she wrote.

She added that she had “no medical support” and had to send her diary secretary out “in the middle of the night to buy me some medicine” as there was nobody else available to do it.

On Wednesday, April 17, Guido Fawkes reported that Truss’s book hit the No. 4 spot on Amazon, despite the fact that lefties tried to downplay her rankings thus far, as Gordon Brown’s former economic adviser Danny Blanchflower did:

Nobody is going to g to buy your stupid book it currently ranks 55172 on Amazon ….and all you do is blame everyone else for the fact that you are a mindless fool

Rank
#55,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#38 in European Politics Books
#67 in Democracy (Books)
#165 in…

— Professor Danny Blanchflower economist & fisherman (@D_Blanchflower) April 10, 2024

That day, Truss was the lead topic at Prime Minister’s Questions. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer began his questions to Rishi Sunak with this:

I am privileged to be the proud owner of a copy of the former Prime Minister’s new book. It is a rare unsigned copy; it is the only unsigned copy. It is quite the read. She claims that the Tory party’s disastrous kamikaze Budget, which triggered chaos for millions, was the “happiest moment” of her premiership. Has the Prime Minister met anyone with a mortgage who agrees?

Rishi responded with a deft riposte referring to a suspected tax controversy the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner, is involved in, a news story that has been running for weeks:

All I would say is that the right hon. and learned Gentleman ought to spend a bit less time reading that book, and a bit more time reading the Deputy Leader’s tax advice. [Interruption.]

That interruption was the howls of laughter from Conservative MPs. One political diarist said that it lasted for 32 seconds, a possible record.

To conclude on Liz Truss, she made a bold move in writing her memoir after a record-breaking brief time in office. One can only hope that the future holds brighter things in store for her.

Rishi and wife give interview to Grazia women’s magazine

Why on earth would the Sunaks give an interview to a women’s magazine?

It shows how hard up the Conservatives are if they think that the Prime Minister and his wife are going to score any points anywhere by revealing who stacks the dishwasher (Rishi) and straightens the bed in the morning (Rishi again).

On Tuesday, March 5, 2024, The Guardian‘s John Crace, someone whom I rarely quote, nailed the interview and its objective (emphases mine):

We are now in the Tunnel. That political parallel universe in which everything and nothing happens. You can take your pick. The news schedules are busier than ever but are forgotten within hours. Because nothing really matters. We are now on a rinse, spin and repeat cycle that will only end in a general election. Where the debate gets ever more extreme yet somehow less substantial. Most people have long since switched off. You can almost hear their screams of, ‘Make it stop’.

Just count the days. Breathe deeply. Squeeze in an extra pilates session. Anything to distract yourself. Be of good comfort. The end is getting ever closer.

How can we be sure? Because Rish! has just done a video for Grazia. The inevitable kiss of death. You know there is no way out now. This is the fate of every party leader with an election imminent. But there is no comeback. Once sold, your soul can never be redeemed.

You can read the Grazia interview and see a video here. I won’t be able to stomach it, so here is Crace’s summary:

This is the Sunaks relaxing at home together. Or rather Rish! and Akshata staring miserably into a camera while sitting on a sofa. A more excruciating five and a half minutes would be hard to find. You can see the look of death behind Rish!’s eyes. Even he – someone notoriously unself-aware – knows this is a video too far. But then he’s come too far to back down now. The wheels are spinning far too fast for him to get off now. All he can do is wait till they stop. Only then will he discover where he’s been spat out.

So he smiles and smiles and smiles. And still he doesn’t come close to warmth or sincerity. It is the icy smile of a man praying that his wife doesn’t land him in it. Because Akshata, at least, still seems up for it.

No one has told her there are no winners in this latest PR stunt. The best you can hope for is to come out unscathed. Either she is terminally bored with her life and finds mind-numbingly dumb questions a merciful release. Or she is a stunningly good actor.

We discover the Indian billionnaire’s daughter had a penchant for eating in bed, although it seems that Rishi eased her out of that bad habit:

Let’s start with the chores. Who makes the bed? Definitely not me, said Akshata. Full of energy, totes engaging with this. “I’m not a morning person. At college, Rish! – she’s even adopted my nickname for him – would come round and I’d still be in bed eating.”

A straightened bed sets the day up correctly. Here, too, the PM takes charge:

“Er, yes,” Sunak interrupted. This was too much information. Time to take control of the narrative. He really, really cared about bed-making. So much so that he would sometimes interrupt a meeting of the cabinet to go upstairs to the Downing Street flat to make sure it was done properly.

Rishi also controls the stacking of the dishwasher:

How about loading the dishwasher? Rish! dived in. This was also very much his territory. He happened to also really, really care about this. If it wasn’t done properly, he would empty it and start again.

The couple appear to be loving parents:

How about the children? Akshata was quite strict with them about their schoolwork, but otherwise wasn’t that bothered. Rish! liked to give them snacks. Bless. But he also wished they would walk the dog from time to time.

Unbelievably, they unwind to an episode of Friends just before bedtime. Dear, oh dear:

Rish! didn’t have time to read. So bedtime was the same episode of Friends over and over again.

The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley had a few more soundbites for us:

The result is a video of the handsome couple on a sofa, Akshata in blue, Rishi casually dressed down in shirt and tie. Body language experts will say they’re in love. They sit close, Rishi looking at her with goofy, wide-eyes …

Grazia justified this Terry and June profile with some woke fem spin: “Women, on average, do 65 per cent of the housework in heterosexual relationships” …

Rishi, one slowly realises with a sinking heart, does both. It is Rishi who does the dishes best. Rishi who tidies up the No10 bedroom. “I actually sometimes come up back into the flat… to make the bed, because I’ll be irritated if it’s not made.” (It’s “one of his special skills”, beams Mrs PM).

As for “meal planning”, Rishi “lays the structure”, while Akshata “fills in” …

The PM’s passive aggression is balanced by his wife’s marvellous “couldn’t care less” attitude – there’s a girl who likes getting caught in the rain – captured in a moment of tension about eating in bed. Akshata admits to doing it. Rishi looks like he’s about to heave.

The Times‘s Carol Midgley revealed that Grazia‘s spread was in advance of International Women’s Day:

I should probably clarify here that [Akshata] Murty used to eat in bed. Until, it appears, Sunak put a stop to it. But in an interview the couple recorded for Grazia she admitted that when they were students she used to leave plates in the bed too …

But never mind that. The bigger question is why have the prime minister and his wife chosen to “open up” about their domestic chores? Ostensibly it’s for International Women’s Day but we all know it’s because there’s a whiff of “general election” in the air, launching the desperate scramble for politicians to seem “normal”. Which always backfires …

Rishi does not want his two daughters to grow up with any food phobias:

… the way the PM wants his children to eat meals with “one protein, one carb, one veg”.

Interestingly, Akshata is not entirely on board with her husband’s teetotalism:

No G&T for him. He once said it “massively irritates” his wife that he doesn’t drink.

I cannot blame her in the slightest on that score. I could not have married a non-drinker.

However, on the other side of the aisle, we have Lord Mandelson, dubbed ‘the Dark Lord’ of the Blairite years, giving diet tips to Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, who looks every inch the dad — a bit flabby — unlike Rishi, who still looks like the head boy he was at Winchester.

On March 5, 2024, The Times reported, ‘Shed a few pounds, Peter Mandelson tells Keir Starmer’, which also includes advice for the PM:

As leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer is hungry for power — but one of New Labour’s big beasts has urged him to “shed a few pounds”.

“That would be an improvement,” Lord Mandelson said on the Times Radio podcast How to Win an Election — adding, to be “even-handed”, that Rishi Sunak could improve his presentation too.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting took exception to Mandelson’s comments:

The advice for Starmer received short shrift from Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who said he was “against that kind of fat-shaming”. Streeting told LBC: “Peter should know better. We have seen the odd paunch from [him] over the years … people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

The article explained Starmer’s food evolution from long-time vegetarian to occasional meat-eater:

Starmer, who was a vegetarian for almost 30 years, told the Table Manners podcast in July last year: “We don’t have meat or fish in the house, we don’t cook it.”

His children were raised as vegetarians but allowed to choose their own paths after turning ten; his son has since developed a taste for KFC, while his daughter continues to eschew meat.

Starmer, who now eats fish, has confessed to other momentary exemptions. A biography by Tom Baldwin tells of a journey home on the last train to London from Sheffield when Starmer was shadow Brexit secretary.

He said he was handed a takeaway box, adding: “I opened it sitting on a freezing-cold station platform and found it was chicken. I wasn’t going to get anything else at that time of night, so I ate every morsel — and very good it tasted too.”

As for Rishi, Lord Mandelson suggests less sartorial skinniness:

The prime minister, who often wears short trousers, a slim-fitting suit and skinny tie, was accused by Mandelson of choosing outfits that “diminish him rather than expand him”.

Gay eye for the straight guy, there.

The Times‘s fashion editor adds:

Any stylist will tell you that too much fabric on a short, slender frame is liable to cloak rather than complement. Rishi Sunak’s on the right track with his lean silhouettes, but he always takes it too far (Harriet Walker, fashion editor, writes).

It isn’t just the Savile Row prices of Sunak’s suits that must feel eye-watering. There’s nothing wrong with a skinny suit on a skinny man, but a skinny tie as well is overkill — especially when Sunak’s suits are so scant and spare, he often looks as though he has grown out of them.

The fact all his trousers are exaggeratedly short in the leg does nothing for the overall impression he gives as being overly boyish, and the skinny ties only add to the gawkiness. Sunak and his suits often appear to have the problem as the chancellor does in his budgets: not enough wiggle room.

Suits or Grazia, does any of this even matter any more?

It’s all immaterial. In fact, I cannot bear to watch political programmes outside of BBC Parliament at the moment.

Conservative MP has whip withdrawn for criticising London Mayor

Last week, I wrote about the history of Arabists in the UK and how the present generation of Arabists are influencing what has been taking place in London.

London ‘controlled’

Friday, February 23, 2024, was hardly a relaxing start to the weekend for Lee Anderson, the controversial Conservative MP representing Ashfield. He appeared on Martin Daubney’s GB News afternoon show to tell us what he really thought of Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London.

That evening, The Guardian reported (emphases mine):

The Conservative MP Lee Anderson has claimed that “Islamists” have “got control of London” and its mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Speaking on GB News, Anderson said of Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London: “He’s given our capital city away to his mates.

“I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London.”

The Labour party called for Anderson to lose the Tory whip. Anneliese Dodds, the Labour chair, said: “Lee Anderson’s comments are unambiguously racist and Islamophobic. Rishi Sunak needs to immediately remove the whip. If he is too weak, then people will take their own view of the modern Conservative party.”

Tan Dhesi, the shadow exports minister, said: “Given the recent spike in Islamophobia and antisemitism, and the febrile atmosphere in our country, it’s deplorable that an elected MP can openly make such incendiary and divisive statements; especially against Sadiq Khan, who has done so much to foster community cohesion and tackle hate crime.”

Sure enough, the Conservatives’ Chief Whip, Simon Hart, suspended Anderson from the Parliamentary party the very next day.

However, one Conservative came to his defence:

A Conservative source said: “Lee was simply making the point that the mayor, in his capacity as [police and crime commissioner] for London, has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently.”

Also:

In the same GB News appearance on Friday, Anderson suggested politicians should intervene in police operations because they had not cracked down on pro-Palestinian protesters.

“Ultimately we run the country, and if the police aren’t doing their job – and they’re not doing their job … we need to step in and take over,” Anderson said.

Most of the Conservative-voting public would agree with that. These protests have been going on in central London since Saturday, October 7, 2023, with no end in sight.

The row escalated that weekend. By Sunday, February 25, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer accused Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of harbouring ‘extremists’ in the Conservative Party. Dear, oh dear.

The Mail reported:

Keir Starmer has accused Rishi Sunak of harbouring ‘extremists’ in Conservative ranks following the suspension of the party’s former deputy chair Lee Anderson.

The ‘Red Wall’ MP had the Tory whip stripped from him yesterday after refusing to apologise for his claim that London mayor Sadiq Khan is controlled by ‘Islamists’.

His remarks caused widespread outrage – including from senior Tories – with Mr Khan hitting out at Mr Anderson for ‘Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, racist’ comments.

The London mayor has now also attacked the Prime Minister for his ‘silence’ over the Ashfield MP’s claims, while the Tories are being urged to launch an investigation into ‘structural Islamophobia’ within the party by the Muslim Council of Britain.

Sir Keir last night urged Mr Sunak to ‘get a grip’ and ‘stop this slide into ever more toxic rhetoric’.

Following his suspension by the Tories, Mr Anderson is due to sit in the House of Commons as an independent MP unless he defects to another party.

Lee still has a comfortable place on Conservative benches, even if he is sitting as an Independent.

On the news rounds that day, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said that all Anderson had to do was apologise for what he said. Dowden put the situation as ‘deeply concerning’, two words one is unlikely to hear in the former mining community of Ashfield.

Then there were former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s words from a few days earlier:

But the Deputy PM said other comments made by former home secretary Suella Braverman had not ‘crossed the line’ to require an apology.

She has claimed Britain is ‘sleepwalking into a ghettoised society’ with ‘Islamists’ in charge.

Mr Dowden said: ‘When it comes to the wording used by individual Conservatives, I said I disagreed with the language used by Lee Anderson.

‘I don’t believe that the language used by Suella Braverman has crossed the line whereby she should apologise for it. No, I don’t.’

In a round of TV and radio interviews, the Deputy PM kept the door open for Mr Anderson to have his suspension lifted and have the Tory whip returned.

‘Of course, if he apologises, we’d look at the nature of that and make a determination at that point,’ Mr Dowden told Times Radio, adding: ‘But that’s a matter for the Chief Whip.’

Anderson’s week was turbulent but ended on a positive note as he appeared at a dinner on Saturday, March 2, in another Red Wall constituency, Bassetlaw, where the guest of honour was his good friend and fellow MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith, for whom it was a re-election fundraiser.

The Telegraph reported:

A Conservative MP has said that Lee Anderson is “always welcome” in his constituency after he appeared with Liz Truss at a Tory fundraising dinner, despite having the whip removed.

Brendan Clarke-Smith, the MP for Bassetlaw, said that the ovation received by Mr Anderson at the event showed the “high regard he is held in by the party faithful”.

Mr Anderson told The Telegraph he was “overwhelmed by the Bassetlaw members who applauded me as I entered the venue,” adding: “After a difficult week that was the perfect tonic.”

Liz Truss was also on hand:

Mr Anderson made a surprise appearance, with the Daily Express reporting that he received a standing ovation from members and shared a hug with Ms Truss.

Those present — as well as many other Conservatives who weren’t present — clearly do not share the London-centric view of things:

While a number of Tory MPs condemned his remarks, Mr Anderson has received support from other backbenchers, with some calling for the whip to be restored.

Meanwhile, back in Bassetlaw:

Mr Clarke-Smith told The Telegraph: “Having Liz Truss come to speak at our association was a huge coup for us and it gave us all plenty to think about in terms of how we set a Conservative agenda and tackle the obstacles that stand between us in implementing this.

“Lee is always welcome in Bassetlaw and it was great of him to come along and support our fundraising efforts for the general election. The reaction he got shows exactly how high regard he is held in by the party faithful.”

Rochdale by-election

To add an extra twist, the Rochdale (Lancashire) by-election was held on Thursday, February 29, upon the death of sitting Labour MP Tony Lloyd. Labour had to suspend their candidate in the end for anti-Semitic remarks, although he still showed up as the Party’s candidate on the ballot paper; it was too late to have them reprinted.

The well-known carpetbagger originally from Dundee, George Galloway, won Rochdale handily by identifying his campaign with disaffected Muslims and Gaza. Rishi Sunak was so alarmed at Galloway’s victory that he gave a speech on Friday, March 1, on the steps of Downing Street to condemn a democratic vote, no matter what we think of the outcome or Galloway himself.

It seems as if Rishi had never heard of George Galloway, who has won and contested other constituency by-elections over the past few decades in Glasgow and London. Wherever he wins, Galloway represents his constituency for better or worse. One thing that can be said is that Galloway is one of the true last products of Scottish education: he is an erudite debater who does not put a word wrong.

On Monday afternoon, March 4, Galloway was sworn into the House of Commons, having been presented by the Father of the House Peter Bottomley MP and Alba Party MP Neale Hanvey. He took his oath on the Holy Bible and swore allegiance to King Charles. He signed the book, shook the Speaker’s hand and briefly took his place in the empty Labour benches. One can imagine that Labour were quite unhappy about losing their seat to controversial candidate from an unknown working person’s party.

Journalists seemed to enjoy Galloway’s press conference, held in the biting cold.

The Telegraph reported, ‘Exploiting the “Muslim wedge issue” is Rishi Sunak’s only hope for re-election, says George Galloway’:

The controversial politician said it was “clear” to him that Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, had identified “Muslims and Gaza” as the “wedge issue” that he intended to use as his “only hope of re-election”.

He vowed to target [Labour Deputy Leader] Angela Rayner’s seat specifically, claiming to have “at least 15,000 supporters” in the Greater Manchester constituency, enough to overturn the deputy Labour leader’s majority of about 4,000.

At an impromptu press conference after his swearing-in ceremony, he also urged Jeremy Corbyn to launch and lead an alliance of “socialist, progressive and anti-war organisations”.

Mr Galloway, the leader of the Workers Party of Britain and a former Labour MP, stormed to victory in the Rochdale by-election last week, having aggressively courted the town’s substantial Muslim vote on a pro-Palestinian ticket.

On Monday, he declared the next election “will be about Muslims” and “the taking away of civil liberties in this country”.

“It’s clear to me that Sunak has identified Muslims and Gaza as the proximate centre of that wedge issue that he intends to use as perhaps his only hope of re-election,” he said.

He added: “They want to force [Keir] Starmer either to stand up and defend the democratic rights of the British people, including the rights of its religious and ethnic minorities – and if he does that I’m a Dutchman – or to engage him in what will turn out to be a Dutch auction of nastiness.

“If he chooses, as I suspect he will, the latter, that’s going to allow us and independent candidates to pick up potentially millions of votes from those who treasure the free rights that we have enjoyed since the Second World War in this country, and who wish to defend the Muslim communities in Britain.

“Either way, that suits Rishi Sunak. So that’s what I’m predicting here. The next election will be about Muslims, and will be about the taking away of civil liberties in this country” …

“If I give you just one example: Angela Rayner has a parliamentary majority I think of around 3,000. There’s at least 15,000 supporters of my point of view in her constituency.

“So we’ll be putting a candidate against her: either a Workers Party candidate or more likely an independent candidate that we [will] support, and that will vitally affect the election of the Labour deputy.”

Ms Rayner won a majority of 4,263 in her Ashton-under-Lyne seat in 2019, down significantly on 11,295 in 2017 …

Mr Galloway’s return to the Commons is likely to reignite tensions in the chamber, with the Board of Deputies of British Jews calling for him to be “shunned as a pariah by all parliamentarians”.

The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley found Galloway intriguing, ‘George Galloway’s press conferences are so wickedly enjoyable, they ought to be illegal’:

Listening to Galloway is akin to flicking rapidly between the pages of the Morning Star and The Telegraph – his socialism is so old school it is practically nostalgic. In the Commons, he didn’t “affirm” his allegiance to the King – the Lefty option – he “swore” it. At his chilly presser, he bemoaned the lack of a “Mr Churchill” to unite the country, and proclaimed himself a “Roman Catholic” …

Journalists staggered away from the event humiliated, amused and satisfied … The Galloway press conference is so wickedly enjoyable, it ought to be illegal – and no doubt Sunak is drafting the legislation as we speak.

Tim Stanley is not wrong. On Monday, March 4, The Times reported that, in true pretzel logic, Michael Gove’s Levelling Up department was already drafting new anti-extremism legislation:

In an effort to tackle growing Islamic and far-right extremism in the UK, ministers are attempting to update the definition to encompass any group or individual that promotes an ideology that “undermines the rights or freedoms of others” …

Michael Gove, the communities secretary, is expected to announce the updated definition next week as part of plans to crack down on Islamic and far-right extremism.

Under proposals being considered, the definition would ban anyone in Whitehall, government bodies or quangos from engaging with or funding groups or individuals that meet the new definition. It is non-statutory, not a new criminal definition, so would only affect who government bodies, officials and ministers could engage with and fund.

The draft definition, which will need to be signed off by the cabinet later this week, currently includes three strands, according to government sources familiar with the plans.

It would define extremism as the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on intolerance, hatred or violence that aims to undermine the rights or freedoms of others.

Secondly, it would include those who seek to undermine or overturn the UK’s liberal system of democracy and democratic rights.

Any groups or individuals who intentionally create a permissive environment for either of these would also be banned from working with government bodies. It is understood that this would include influencers on social media who are not extremists themselves but deliberately play down the danger of extremism.

Senior government figures who have seen the current definition have warned it will “provoke tensions” with gender critical groups and a range of organisations such as religious groups who campaign against issues such as abortion or gay marriage.

“It’s going to be incredibly difficult,” a government source said. “You can see how, very quickly, small ‘c’ conservative groups will be hit with this.”

Gove’s department is understood to be working on plans to tighten the definition to ensure it protects people whose views fall under characteristics that are protected under the Equalities Act, such as gender, religion or beliefs.

Gove is also expected to announce that a new government unit for combating extremism will assess whether individuals or groups have breached the new definition. Government sources said this would add an extra protection to prevent groups inadvertently falling foul of the provisions.

Rishi Sunak also risks sparking a fresh battle with backbench MPs over the plans to broaden the definition.

Miriam Cates, a Tory MP from the socially conservative wing of the party, said that broadening the definition of extremism was a “slippery slope to the abolition of fundamental freedoms” and a “path to authoritarianism”.

Responding to revelations in The Times on Monday that the definition would cover actions that “undermine” institutions or values, Cates said such a move was unnecessary and Islamic extremism can and should be tackled through existing criminal offences such as incitement of violence, glorifying terrorism, promoting racism and making threats.

She wrote on Twitter/X: “What does it even mean to ‘undermine British values’ when there is no consensus — and certainly no legal definition — of what those values are? In a free and democratic society with a plurality of opinions and beliefs, it is foolish and dangerous to separate ‘extremism’ from violence and terrorism.

“Some people think that gender critical views are ‘extreme’. I think decriminalising abortion to birth is ‘extreme’. Opposition politicians think the current government is ‘extreme’. Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce and the suffragettes were all viewed as ‘extremists’.

“If ‘extremist’ views are illegal, then the person who defines ‘extremism’ has the power to curtail free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of association. This is the path to authoritarianism.”

In his speech outside No 10 on Friday the prime minister said the government would introduce a “new robust framework” this month to tackle extremism in the UK and “redouble support” for the Prevent programme, which is designed to tackle radicalisation.

This will end in tears, I can tell you now.

1924: the end of the Caliphate

Oddly enough, 100 years ago today, the world seemed to be a more enlightened place. The March 5, 1924, edition of The Times explored the end of the Ottoman Caliphate:

The Grand National Assembly at Angora has decreed the abolition of the Caliphate in the House of Othman, and Abdul Mejid, the last of the long line, has been expelled from the Ottoman dominions and conducted under escort to the frontier.

Of all the vast changes wrought by the war — the downfall of the Hapsburgs, the Romanoffs, and the Hohenzollerns, the transformation of the maps of all three continents of the Old World, the resurrection of ancient States and the rise of States unknown before, the evolution of novel forms of government, and the emergence of new ideas and new feelings among mankind — no single change is more striking to the imagination than this, and few, perhaps, may prove so important in their ultimate results.

The speech with which Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the fifth year of the Grand National Assembly on Saturday, and the favour with which it was received by the great majority of the Popular Party, were a clear presage of the doom that has fallen upon this august institution. The end of an office, invested in the eyes of millions through 13 centuries with attributes that are almost divine, is a great event in the history of Turkey, and of the world-religion of Islam; it may be a great event in the history of other lands and to the followers of other faiths.

All members of the House of Othman, it is thought, are to be expelled, religious schools are to be abolished, the religious jurisdiction sanctioned by sacred law is to be exercised no more, and religion is to be wholly separated from politics.

It would be injudicious to surmise prematurely how such changes will affect orthodox Moslems in Turkey but sooner or later it must affect them deeply.

For the moment, it is enough to note the far-reaching character of the event, and to express some regret at the disappearance of an institution so venerable from one of the great religions of the world. “Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great has pass’d away.” And the Caliphate has been great and sacred to countless millions of men.

And now, here we are 100 years later, with a desire for a reinstatement of a Caliphate of some sort.

The Post Office Horizon scandal and the Conservatives

Last week, I wrote about Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who were involved in the Post Office Horizon scandal as ministers. The week before that, I devoted a whole post to Sir Ed Davey, the current Lib Dem leader, who managed to do very well out of ignoring the plight of subpostmasters up and down the land.

2015

As we pick up our story with the Conservatives, a general election took place in May 2015. David Cameron won a small minority, enabling him to do away with the Conservatives’ Lib Dem coalition partners. As such, Jo Swinson exited the scene.

By this time, problems with Horizon software were becoming known in the public domain. An independent forensic auditing company, Second Sight, was also critical of the Fujitsu system.

A January 14, 2024 article in The Times, ‘Alan Bates letters show Tories ignored the postmasters too’, tells us (emphases mine):

An external review by the forensic accountants Second Sight had found that, in some cases, Horizon was “not fit for purpose”. It warned there had possibly been miscarriages of justice in relation to the Post Office prosecutions.

Alan Bates, the founder and co-ordinator of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), wrote to Jo Swinson’s successor Anna Soubry on May 19, which would have been soon after the election, to:

seek an urgent meeting.

Bates had been fobbed off by ministers before, but this time the discourtesy shown to him reached new heights. On June 8, 2015, Laura Thompson, a senior civil servant, replied on behalf of Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the department’s minister in the Lords, who had been handed responsibility for postal affairs.

Thompson said Neville-Rolfe was “very busy” and unable to respond “personally” or “accept every meeting invitation that she receives”. Thompson insisted the mediation scheme was a contractual dispute between the sub-postmasters and the Post Office, and it was inappropriate for the government to intervene.

Today, still a government minister in the Lords, Neville-Rolfe sees things differently:

Neville-Rolfe said this weekend that at the “macro-level” she was “very concerned that so many obviously respectable postmasters and postmistresses had been prosecuted or replaced” and that she had personally insisted that in 2016 the Post Office bring in an external KC to review its handling of the scandal.

Sajid Javid was the Business Secretary between 2015 and 2016.

Nadhim Zahawi was on the Commons Business Select Committee at the time. He won a well-played cameo role in Mr Bates versus the Post Office, the video of which Guido Fawkes has for us. In Episode 3, Zahawi grills the Paula Vennells character:

Zahawi told Guido:

I was gratified to have been given the opportunity the appear in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, just as I am glad to have grilled the former post office CEO in 2015. The team at ITV have done vital work in increasing the public consciousness of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in recent British history- and I would encourage everyone to watch it.

2016

Cameron was PM until the summer of 2016. He got huffy that the Brexit referendum won on Thursday, June 23 that year and announced his plans to stand down the next morning around 9:30.

This year, the BBC reported that some of Cameron’s ministers knew that Fujitsu could remotely access postmasters’ business accounts:

David Cameron’s government knew the Post Office had ditched a secret investigation that might have helped wrongly accused postmasters prove their innocence, the BBC can reveal.

The 2016 investigation trawled 17 years of records to find out how often, and why, cash accounts on the Horizon IT system had been tampered with remotely.

Ministers were told an investigation was happening.

But after postmasters began legal action, it was suddenly stopped.

The secret investigation adds to evidence that the Post Office knew Horizon’s creator, Fujitsu, could remotely fiddle with sub-postmaster’s cash accounts – even as it argued in court, two years later, that it was impossible.

The revelations have prompted an accusation that the Post Office may have broken the law – and the government did nothing to prevent it. Paul Marshall, a barrister who represented some sub-postmasters, said: “On the face of it, it discloses a conspiracy by the Post Office to pervert the course of justice” …

The secret investigation was uncovered through a BBC analysis of confidential government documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, from a time in 2015 and 2016 when the Post Office was under growing pressure to get to the bottom of sub-postmasters’ claims of injustice.

Hundreds of sub-postmasters had been prosecuted and jailed for cash shortfalls which were in fact caused by the Horizon IT system. They had long suspected that remote tinkering may have contributed to the problem.

The documents show how the secret 2016 investigation – looking into Fujitsu’s use of remote access from 1999 onwards – had come out of a review by former top Treasury lawyer Jonathan Swift QC. The Swift review had been ordered by the government, with approval from then-business secretary Sajid Javid.

It would conclude that it had found “real issues” for the Post Office.

Mr Swift had found a briefing for the Post Office board from an earlier review in 2014, carried out by auditors from Deloitte and codenamed Project Zebra, detailing how Fujitsu could change branch accounts.

Having seen that evidence, the Swift review said the Post Office must carry out a further investigation into how often and why this capability was used.

Deloitte returned in February 2016 to begin the trawl of all Horizon transactions since its launch 17 years earlier.

Ministers, including Mr Javid, were told this new work was under way to “address suggestions that branch accounts might have been remotely altered without complainants’ knowledge”.

But in June 2016, when sub-postmasters launched their legal action, the government was told through Post Office minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe that the investigation had been scrapped on “very strong advice” from the senior barrister representing them.

However, on January 14, The Observer (Guardian Sunday edition) reported that this possibility surfaced as far back as 1999. At that time, Tony Blair was advised that the Japanese-owned Fujitsu software had to be used, otherwise the UK would risk a diplomatic incident:

Just before the scandal began to unfold in 1999, a legal change was introduced stating that there would now be an assumption that computers were “reliable” unless proven otherwise.

Previously, a machine’s reliability had to be proved if it was being used as evidence. It has now been revealed that the Post Office itself lobbied for that law change. In its submission to the official consultation on the issue, it said the previous requirements were “far too strict and can hamper prosecutions”. The legal change would help it go on to privately prosecute more than 700 subpostmasters.

So how did such a succession of ministers fail to notice a rise in Post Office-led prosecutions that now look like one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history? Those who spoke to the Observer – all of whom are horrified at what has now emerged – described a combination of factors.

While they may be described as being post office ministers, they say, that was usually only a tiny part of a much wider portfolio of responsibilities. They also describe a context in which they were receiving reassurances from the Post Office over the Horizon system, while the courts did appear to be finding against those in the dock.

During meetings with the Post Office, the focus was on cuts and budgets – unsurprisingly, “they never wanted to talk about the Horizon issue”, said one former minister.

Another former post office minister said: “You’ve got something as big as the Post Office saying: ‘No, no, no, no – it’s definitely stolen money.’ Then they’ve gone through a court of law and been convicted. Unless you’re sitting there going through all the court transcripts, you’re going to think: ‘It’s British justice. There must be something in it.’ It does take a hell of a lot of curiosity [to challenge that].”

Then postmasters’ letters began appearing. Even then, they were still considered to be criminals:

“These letters would be heart-rending and shocking,” they said. “There was absolutely no coordination between them. I’m sorry to say that the first few probably got the department-drafted response. And it wasn’t until I had a few that I started thinking that something’s wrong here.”

The ministers’ questions, however, led to the same reassurances from the Post Office that “there was no systemic problem”. Minister after minister accepted the Post Office’s line – together with an assumption that the British courts could not be getting things so wrong.

By then, Bates was pursuing higher challenges:

Bates cannot remember whether he attempted to contact business ministers again during the remainder of David Cameron’s premiership.

Now we come to the Theresa May years:

But after being palmed off by successive Lib Dem and Tory ministers, he and the JFSA shifted their focus to proving their innocence in court. In March 2017, the High Court gave permission for 555 sub-postmasters to sue the Post Office.

During the preliminary hearings, the Post Office’s defence began to crumble. It acknowledged that Fujitsu, the provider of the supposedly unimpeachable Horizon IT system, did have the ability to access individual branch accounts — something the Post Office had denied for years.

In November 2018, as the first of the trials commenced, internal memos were disclosed showing that as far back as 2010 senior Post Office and Fujitsu figures were aware of 40 branches affected by problems with Horizon.

2019

Mr Justice Fraser’s verdict was damning:

The first of several judgments was handed down on March 15, 2019. Mr Justice Fraser concluded that the Post Office was guilty of “oppressive behaviour’ and that contractual terms imposed on sub-postmasters, holding them liable for shortfalls no matter the cause, were so unfair as to be unenforceable.

Back in Whitehall, the government’s response was to play down the severity of the situation.

Kelly Tolhurst, in charge of postal affairs at that time — and, like Anna Soubry, another lightweight — ‘suggested that the subpostmasters would have to make “difficult compromises”‘. Well, that is something an MP rarely has to do.

In a letter to MPs of March 19, 2019, Tolhurst pointed out that the Post Office had not been liable for anything:

she noted it was also focused on the “contractual relationship” — and the Post Office had not yet been found liable.

At the end of April, Bates contacted Tolhurst and forwarded his letter to Theresa May:

On April 30, he urged Tolhurst to listen to “commentators who say this case will cost billions to redress” and seek “independent legal and IT expert advice”, rather than relying only on that “received from Post Office Ltd and its entrenched legal advisers”.

He offered to meet Tolhurst with his legal team and forwarded the letter to Theresa May, the prime minister, urging her to intervene.

Tolhurst took more than a month to respond on May’s behalf. On June 28, she told Bates that the government would not intervene while legal proceedings were ongoing and it would be inappropriate for her to seek the independent advice he had advocated. “It is important that the court process be allowed to run its course in order to finally resolve those issues,” she concluded, without acknowledging his invitation to meet.

July 2019

Theresa May stood down tearfully as Conservative leader that summer. Boris Johnson replaced her as Party leader and PM late in July 2019.

The Post Office was in a deeper mess:

… the second trial was under way and the Post Office began to see the writing on the wall. It initiated settlement talks with the sub-postmasters. In November 2019, it agreed to settle their claims at £57 million.

The following month, Fraser handed down his judgment on Horizon, finding it was not “remotely robust” in the period leading up to 2010, when most of the shortfalls occurred, and remained riddled with a “significant number of bugs, errors and defects’’. For the Post Office to argue these faults did not exist was equivalent to “maintaining that the Earth is flat”, he added.

2020

Bates wrote to Tolhurst for a second time:

He said the latest judgment showed Horizon “had never been fit for the purpose”. While a settlement had been reached, Bates added, the exorbitant costs of the legal action meant the “greater majority” of the £57 million had been paid to lawyers and investors.

Quoting a letter he had received from Ed Davey in 2010, in which the then Lib Dem postal minister insisted there were no faults with Horizon, Bates told Tolhurst: “It is because of the nonsense spouted in such dismissive responses by ministers to real concerns that it has been left to the claimant group to expose the truth.”

He told her they would now be seeking to recover the costs of the litigation from the government. He attached a bill totalling £47 million. Today it is estimated the Horizon scandal will end up costing the taxpayer as much as £1 billion.

Tolhurst, who was by then working for Boris Johnson, responded on January 25. While praising Bates’s campaigning, she claimed “in mediation, it is almost invariably necessary for the parties to make difficult compromises” and asked him to recognise “the limits that the law places on what sums might be recoverable”.

“I must respectfully refuse your request for payment,” she added.

Today, Tolhurst says:

“During my time as minister, the legal proceedings that have exposed the miscarriage of justice faced by far too many were under way and it would have been wrong to have prejudiced the outcome of any of this work.

“It is truly devastating what happened to so many hard-working postmasters who have had to fight hard to get the justice they deserve, and I welcome the recent announcement of legislation that will make sure those convicted as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated.”

Finally, in February 2020, Paul Scully replaced Tolhurst:

By the time Tolhurst was replaced by Paul Scully in February 2020, calls for government intervention were no longer limited to compensation. MPs were demanding a public inquiry too.

On February 26, Johnson committed himself at prime minister’s questions to an independent inquiry. However, Bates would not drop the matter of compensation, and on March 2, he wrote to Scully.

He urged the government to “address the damage” caused. Unless it did, Bates signalled the group would consider legal action against the department. He invited Scully to meet him.

On March 18, Scully spoke on the telephone to Bates and two other sub-postmasters. Yet 12 days later, he wrote to Bates: “You will be disappointed, but our position has not changed.” He added that the government “cannot accept any further request for payment”.

Scully also said that rather than holding a full public inquiry — as Johnson had seemingly committed to just a month earlier — the government was in fact proposing an “independent review”. Unlike a public inquiry, it would lack the statutory powers necessary to compel witnesses to give evidence or provide documents.

Bates fired back a response on April 1, making clear the sub-postmasters would not back down on compensation. Having received no response, he sent a follow-up on June 15, 2020, making clear that “not one victim is prepared to take part” in the independent review.

Only a “judge-led public inquiry” would command their support, he wrote, and anything short of this and compensation would leave the JFSA with no other option but to “expose the failings in government over the years, in much the same way as we did with the Post Office in the courts”.

Scully again refused to budge on compensation when he replied on June 22, but urged Bates to reconsider the merits of a non-statutory inquiry, which he said would be quicker.

At the end of September, Bates wrote directly to Boris Johnson. Finally, things started to move, relatively speaking:

Bates wrote directly to Johnson on September 29, 2020, urging the prime minister to pay compensation and fulfil his promise of a statutory inquiry. He argued that had the government initially agreed to pay the group’s £47 million costs, “the chances are [that] most … would have probably been prepared to move on”.

That month the government appointed a retired High Court judge, Sir Wyn Williams, to chair the inquiry, but it lacked legal teeth.

Sir Wyn Williams continues to head the inquiry.

2021

In early 2021, Bates was working hard to beef up the inquiry:

In February 2021, he sent a pre-action letter to Johnson via his solicitors, notifying him that the JFSA was seeking a judicial review.

On March 9, Scully finally wrote back, but the position again was unchanged. Finally, two months later, the government succumbed to pressure and announced the inquiry would be upgraded — but only after Williams had requested the additional powers.

2022

The compensation scheme came in 2022:

… the government announced, on March 22, 2022, that a compensation scheme would also be set up for the 555 sub-postmasters involved in the High Court litigation. It would enable them to claim at least £75,000 upfront.

This would sit alongside a historic shortfall scheme launched by the Post Office in 2020, but would not include the 63 sub-postmasters in the group who had criminal convictions.

Rishi Sunak became PM later that year:

… the government, led by Rishi Sunak, announced a third scheme, allowing those who had been convicted to claim £600,000, or enter negotiations if they felt entitled to more.

Today, Scully defends his caution:

… he “couldn’t just announce unfunded policies on the hoof” and that the delay in securing compensation was because it “took many months to get the Treasury to agree to cover the costs, as although the moral alarm bells were ringing, they have an obligation to the taxpayer”.

On Bates’s fight for a public inquiry, Scully added that he “truly believed my original decision to make it a non-statutory inquiry, led by a retired judge, would give swift answers and mean money that could otherwise go to the victims would not need to be diverted to more legal fees”.

However, he said he changed his mind when the Court of Appeal quashed the first round of convictions and “happily agreed” with Wynn to put it on a statutory footing.

Although I’m hardly Paul Scully’s biggest fan, I have seen him at the despatch box in the recent Post Office debates, and he cares:

He added: “Of all the issues I’ve addressed in nearly four years’ service as a minister, this is the one that has given me sleepless nights and brought me to tears. If I could have done more then I’m really sorry that I didn’t. But hopefully Alan Bates and others will know that I listened to all sides, saw the human cost and frankly short-circuited the bureaucracy at times to get things started.”

A spokesman for Boris Johnson had this to say:

Boris Johnson’s government set up the original inquiry into this scandal. Boris was the first PM to pledge to hold such an inquiry. His government then upgraded it after Sir Wyn Williams’s request for additional powers. Under Boris, the government also set up a compensation scheme for wronged postmasters. Boris Johnson was the first prime minister to tackle this scandal head on when others did not.

Now we await compensation legislation under Sunak:

Sunak announced a law would be passed within weeks to exonerate the more than 700 convicted sub-postmasters. Before his announcement, just 93 convictions had been overturned. The move will also, finally, help to unlock compensation.

Yes, it has taken a long time, but the Treasury aren’t just going to rollover and start allocating taxpayers’ money in compensation.

James Arbuthnot

I will end this post with a profile of a then-Conservative MP who now sits in the House of Lords, James Arbuthnot, who served as an MP between 1988 and 2015.

His character appears in the first episode of Mr Bates versus the Post Office, when he visits a wronged postmistress and samples her lemon drizzle cake.

That was at the beginning of the unfolding scandal.

Arbuthnot threw his energies into pursuing justice for his constituent. On January 16, ConservativeHome interviewed him, quoting him as saying, ‘If something doesn’t feel right, don’t let go, would be my advice to a backbencher’:

“Who knew a Tory MP could be so nice?” someone says of James Arbuthnot in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama which has at last created overwhelming public pressure to put right the grotesque wrongs visited since 1999 on many hundreds of sub-postmasters.

Lord Arbuthnot, as he became after stepping down from the Commons in 2015, disclaims in this interview any credit for running the parliamentary campaign in support of the unjustly accused and convicted sub-postmasters.

He points out that Alan Bates, who set up the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance and is played by Toby Jones in the television version, is the hero of this long-running scandal.

Arbuthnot, played by Alex Jennings, contends that the whole unhappy story demonstrates the dangers of “groupthink”, and of arm’s length organisations such as the Post Office, for which for many years no one at Westminster was willing to take responsibility.

To succeed as a backbencher, he says, you have to be “obsessional” about the subjects on which you campaign, but he worries that only the mad would wish at the moment to seek election to the Commons:

You could say, and many people would, that you’d have to be certifiably insane to want to become a Member of Parliament at the moment, most of all for the Conservative Party.

Because politics has become so immediate and visceral and divisive and downright unpleasant that not many people would want to put themselves or their families through it.

Naturally, ConHome has a problem getting its head around Arbuthnot’s plummy upbringing:

ConHome: “You weren’t local, you’re an Old Etonian, second son of a baronet, your father was a Member of Parliament, you’re a direct descendant of James V of Scotland.

“You are an exemplar of everything the Conservative Party has apparently been distancing itself from in candidate selection for about 15 years.

“And yet you are – this is a term you would reject – the hero of this television drama. Is there a lesson for the Conservative Party in selection about all this, not in terms of class or where you come from, but in terms of character and what an MP should do?”

Arbuthnot: “First of all, I do reject it. The hero of this drama, as is perfectly plain from the drama, is Alan Bates. My achievement in this drama was actually nothing. As I said on LBC it was diddly squat.

“Now I don’t think I did anything that other MPs would not have done. I had the huge advantage both of having as a constituent Jo Hamilton [an unjustly accused and convicted sub-postmaster, played on television by Monica Dolan], who was impossible to disbelieve, and of having the circumstance that the sub-postmaster from Odiham [in his constituency] was removed for irregularities, and then his successor was removed for irregularities.

“That combination of events put me in a position that maybe no other MP was put in. So I don’t think my particular character, such as it is, was that much of a factor in this.

“I am obsessional about things. And in a sense in order to become an MP you have to be obsessional about it and about things in general. You don’t become an MP unless you’re very determined to do it.

“And you just have to have the quality of not letting things go. And I don’t believe my privileged background played a part in that. There are very good people in all parties who have that quality, and lots and lots of them.

“So I’m not suggesting the selection process as it has changed, in which I’ve been involved myself, has been wrong.”

ConHome tells us how Arbuthnot rallied other MPs to the postmasters’ cause:

“You wrote round the House, you found lots of other MPs, you got them together, you lobbied the Post Office, you were at least partly instrumental in the fact that there was a Select Committee inquiry.

“So isn’t the object lesson that Government can get things horribly wrong, as we’re discovering, but actually Parliament can sometimes get it right if it can stick at it?”

Arbuthnot: “The Government did get this horribly wrong until 2015, by which time I’d left the House of Commons. The thing that got it beautifully right was when Alan Bates – possibly, though I’m not certain of this, with the additional wind provided by the parliamentary publicity – managed to collect together 555 litigants, and litigation funding, and get in front of the judge. That was what changed the position.”

ConHome: “The additional wind did matter?”

Arbuthnot: “I don’t know. He has never told me in as many terms that. But I think it may have done, because getting litigation funding to sue an organisation as respected as the Post Office must have been really difficult.

“And so I would hope that parliamentary backing would have helped him get that.”

ConHome: “So it’s difficult to say what would have happened if you hadn’t been there?”

Arbuthnot: “Impossible to say what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.”

ConHome: “Leaving the Post Office on one side for a moment, how well do you think backbenchers are generally doing at holding the Executive to account?”

Arbuthnot: “I haven’t really given that much thought. I’ve been obsessing about this particular issue. I think on the whole the Executive is held to account, but sometimes, as with this issue, the Post Office issue, and as with the Chinook crash issue, and as with the general issue of resilience, which I’ve been talking about it in the House of Lords recently, and which is another of my obsessions, eventually the Government gets there.

“Whether it gets there in time or not is entirely a different question. And these things take too long.”

ConHome: “Is there any way in which the hand of the backbencher who’s onto something important can be strengthened? Or do you think it’s just up to the backbencher to make the most of whatever case is there?”

Arbuthnot: “I certainly think there are changes that need to be made as a result of the Post Office scandal, which will help the backbencher to get involved more effectively.

“For example, we need to move away from the issue of arm’s length organisations for which the Government takes no responsibility in practice.

“And I think that will be something that will come out of this scandal and will help the backbencher.

“Other than that, just keep plugging away. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t let go, would be my advice to a backbencher.”

ConHome: “There’s a sense in parts of the media, and perhaps in real life too, that this Post Office scandal has put its finger on something, and the something is this: those in power prosper at the expense of what a character in the drama calls little people.

“That if those in power do anything wrong they will cover it up – that the whole system is a system of self-reward, and that our politics is hopelessly and irredeemably corrupt.

“Is there anything in this at all, and if there is, what should be done? And if there isn’t, what can be done to improve the reputation of politics?”

Arbuthnot: “I think there is something in it, but to suggest that our politics, or for that matter our court system, is hopelessly and irredeemably corrupt is taking it too far.

“I think institutions and feelings have grown up in such a way as to make it harder and harder for the voice of the individual to be heard and to be acted on.

“It’s not surprising that large organisations, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on a particular system, will want to defend that system.

“It’s not surprising that individuals involved in something going wrong will want to protect themselves. That’s the human condition, natural behaviour.

“We have to find ways round that which don’t destabilise the whole of society. And each event like this will I think help us to do that.

“I don’t think politics is irredeemably corrupt. Corruption is in fact rare in politics. I have a huge amount of time for my colleagues in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords, from all parties.

“I think on the whole they are trying to do the right thing while being vilified for doing it, and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, in fact I don’t think it’s fair at all.

“But they’re up against a lot of things that most people don’t appreciate.”

They return to the Post Office Horizon scandal:

ConHome: “And what should happen now? There’s a Bill going through the Commons at the moment, there’s to be another Bill, there’s a Public Inquiry, but there are a whole mass of people who may not even have been identified yet who would have a legitimate claim against the Post Office, as well as the people who were unjustly imprisoned, as well as the people who’ve fallen ill…”

Arbuthnot: “More than 60 have died.”

ConHome: “What is the closure on this, insofar as there can ever be closure?”

Arbuthnot: “Closure is threefold I think. It includes the overturning of convictions – I think no Post Office conviction since 1999 is safe. It includes redress in the sense of financially putting the sub-postmasters back into the position they should have been in had the Post Office, the Government and Fujitsu behaved properly – to the extent that money can do it.

“And it includes holding to account those who were responsible, and that’s putting before the prosecuting authorities those people in the Post Office, in the Government and in Fujitsu who did what they did knowing what was going wrong.”

ConHome: “Should Fujitsu also be making a financial contribution?”

Arbuthnot: “Yes.”

That concludes our review of politicians involved for good or bad in the Post Office Horizon scandal.

More behind the scenes dirty shenanigans to come next week. You couldn’t make this up.

More politicians around at the time of the Post Office Horizon scandal

In my continuing series on the Post Office Horizon scandal, last Friday, I covered Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey’s involvement.

There are other Lib Dems involved, but we must first look at Labour’s time in government, when Tony Blair signed the deal.

Labour

On January 12, 2024, The Guardian gave us a retrospective. Note two names below: Harriet Harman MP, the current Mother of the House of Commons, and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, PM in waiting. Purple emphases mine below:

It was under a Labour government, that of Tony Blair, that the Horizon system was introduced to replace the old paper-based tills that had been used in post offices across Britain.

Also note that Labour, according to the article, knew of Horizon’s shortcomings before they came into government:

But, while the party was not in power when concerns started being widely expressed, a focus for the ongoing inquiry will be whether Labour ministers were intent on pressing ahead with the system despite initial reservations.

Harriet Harman, then secretary of state for work and pensions, had written as far back as 1998 to Blair to warn him there was a risk that the project would fail to achieve its objectives, while the then prime minister also received a Treasury briefing the following year outlining a series of failures.

Ian McCartney, who was handed ministerial responsibility for the Post Office in the first weekend of Blair’s premiership, told the inquiry in September last year that he had discussed a major problem regarding the project with the then minister of welfare reform, Frank Field, who said he was “appalled” by a lack of documentation.

But McCartney told the inquiry: “To have abandoned the Horizon project would have been calamitous. There would have been no contract, so we would have had to start from the beginning again.”

The current Labour leadership’s exposure to the scandal centres on the fact that Keir Starmer was heading the Crown Prosecution Service during a period it was also taking actions against some post office operators.

Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, denied he was aware of those prosecutions.

And Starmer could be mistaken, according to a Telegraph article of January 11, ‘CPS involved in up to 99 Post Office convictions, leaked letter shows’:

The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted it may have been involved in 99 Post Office prosecutions involving the defective Horizon IT system, according to a leaked letter seen by The Telegraph.

In the letter, a senior executive also disclosed that 39 sub-postmasters “believed to have been prosecuted” by the CPS had been written with advice on “how to challenge their convictions”.

Laura Tams, the CPS’s head of legal services, further revealed in the memo that two-thirds of the files concerning the 99 cases have been destroyed, meaning “the evidence is now scarce”.

The letter was sent by Ms Tams to Professor Chris Hodges, chairman of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, on Oct 3 last year, a little over a month after the CPS was asked about its “actions… and procedures and rules which apply to the process of overturning wrongful convictions”.

The scale of possible cases outlined in the letter is far higher than the 11 cases of fraud, theft and false accounting that the CPS has so far confirmed it had prosecuted that involved the Horizon IT system. The CPS has insisted that the vast bulk of the cases – more than 900 in total – were private prosecutions brought by the Post Office against its own sub-postmasters.

The CPS said on Thursday it was still trawling files. On Wednesday evening it released details of its current audit which showed 11 prosecutions in which it was involved over a 10-year period from 2008 to 2018. Three of those cases were investigated under the watch of Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader who was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. The new figures from the CPS suggest more sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the CPS while Sir Keir was in charge than previously thought.

Sir Keir has insisted none of the cases – and fears of wrongful convictions – ever came across his desk during his tenure. Problems with the Horizon computer system were first exposed in 2009 in an investigation by Computer Weekly and concern intensified over time, prompting a public inquiry and an ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office that has ignited the public’s anger over the scandal.

A few days before that report emerged, another Telegraph article quotes Sir Keir as saying to reporters:

No, I wasn’t aware of any of them. I think it was a small number within a 20-year window, that’s all I know.

I don’t even know, but I guess, I think, the CPS are helping with inquiries, how many of those may or may not have involved Horizon. That’s my only response to that, I’m afraid.

It should be noted that the Post Office has always had special status since it was created in the 17th century to prosecute errant postmasters, so Starmer sounds plausible:

The CPS has pointed out that the vast majority of prosecutions were conducted privately by the Post Office.

However, on January 9, Guido Fawkes examined Starmer’s lack of involvement and intervention when he could have done something useful (red emphases his):

Only now is Starmer calling the Post Office to lose its powers to bring private prosecutions. The scandal was first revealed in 2009 and prosecutions carried on till 2015…

Starmer’s team are saying that sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the Royal Mail in private criminal prosecutions, rather than by the CPS. Though according to the Post Office’s website, CPS did play a role in the scandal. There have been six appeals to date in which the CPS was the Respondent, not Post Office…

What Starmer didn’t do:

• • As Nigel Farage pointed out, take over or end private prosecutions: The Director of Public Prosecutions of CPS “has the right to take over any private prosecution (under section 6(2) of the Prosecution of Offences Act) and either continue with the prosecution or discontinue it.”

What Starmer did do:

• • Allow CPS to act on behalf of the Post Office in a number of cases, though the exact number is unclear. One case in 2010, Regina Vs Seema Misra, is on the record where CPS prosecuted a sub-postmistress.

If the TV series Mr Bates Vs. The Post Office hadn’t come out, would Starmer have said anything about the Post Office’s prosecution powers at all? 

Guido ended his post with an update:

The CPS is now refusing to reveal Starmer’s role in the wrongful prosecutions after admitting it took at least 27 victims to court. Guido reminds his readers of when Starmer happily boasted about carrying the can when his team dropped the ball… 

The next day, Wednesday, January 10, was Prime Minister’s Questions, with Starmer at the Opposition despatch box. The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant pointed out that, so far, the Post Office scandal hadn’t touched Sir Keir:

Keir Starmer swerved the Post Office scandal in his opening questions. Was it to appear statesmanlike and magnanimous? Or was it simply because the CPS prosecuted a number of sub-postmasters during Starmer’s rarely-discussed stint as director of public prosecutions and head of the CPS? Either way, Starmer honed in on Rwanda. “I think we should smash the gangs,” came the nasally tenor.

Guido wasn’t giving up. On January 11, he posted ‘Starmer Made It Easier To Take Over and Discontinue Cases When He Was DPP’, indicating that the now-Labour leader could have done something for the postmasters if he had wanted to:

… Labour are still claiming that Starmer doesn’t have any questions to answer. There were twelve cases brought by the CPS, three during Keir Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions…

Starmer fought for the right for the DPP to to take over Private Criminal Prosecutions in order to discontinue them. The policy on when the DPP could overtake and discontinue cases (Section 6(2) of Private Prosecutions Act) was changed by then DPP Starmer in 2009. Prior to 2009, the DPP would only halt private prosecutions on evidential grounds if no sufficient case was disclosed for the defendant to be called upon to answer. After 2009, the DPP could discontinue private prosecutions where the evidence is considered insufficient to make a conviction more likely than not (the ‘reasonable prospect’ or ‘better than evens’ test). After 2009, thanks to Starmer, it was easier for the DPP to take over and discontinue cases…

In 2012, a man whose case was discontinued by then DPP Starmer (who would not have been able to do so under the pre-2009 policy), brought a case against the CPS to the Supreme Court to determine the legality of Starmer’s 2009 policy change. The court ruled in favour of the CPS and the policy change. If Starmer wanted the right to discontinue cases so much, why didn’t he exercise this during the Post Office prosecutions? 

Lib Dems

After Ed Davey ended his time as Postal Affairs minister, came Norman Lamb, who was in post between February and September 2012.

The Sunday Times article of January 7 on past Postal Affairs ministers tells us that Alan Bates, the man who brought together the wronged subpostmasters, got in touch with Lamb on February 15 that year inviting him to meet with him and the other members of the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA), which he did:

Bates told The Sunday Times he was the one Lib Dem minister he warmed to and who appeared “quite concerned about it”.

Lamb also knew of problems with the Horizon software:

… having written to Davey in 2010 to raise concerns about his constituent Allison Henderson, who was one of the hundreds of sub-postmasters convicted. But he, like Bates, was told by Davey that “neither I nor the department can intervene” and that at “no time” during her case were any problems with Horizon identified.

By June, the JFSA and concerned MPs managed to get the Post Office to start an external review carried out by forensic accountants at a firm called Second Sight. It seemed as if things were looking up.

Then in September, Lamb was reshuffled.

Jo Swinson was his successor, serving between September 2012 and May 2015.

Jo Swinson also led the Lib Dems in 2019 and vowed that a Lib Dem government would reverse Brexit on Day 1. Memorably, Swinson lost her seat at the general election on December 12 that year.

The Guardian says:

Jo Swinson took over from Lamb during a period when an external review of the Horizon IT system was being carried out by the forensic accountants Second Sight, brought in by the Post Office as pressure mounted.

But in a statement to the House of Commons, Swinson backed up the position of the Post Office that there was “absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system”. She has subsequently said that she had been misled.

The Sunday Times tells us that Alan Bates wrote to her on April 17, 2013:

He said that it would have already been brought to the Post Office’s attention by Second Sight that there were “systemic failures” with Horizon and yet it was “continuing with their prosecutions of sub-postmasters” despite it being “so much more obvious that they are standing on very shaky legal ground”. Urging Swinson to refocus the review on these system failures, he also asked to meet her.

However, Swinson was not interested and told Bates to present his concerns to a Conservative MP, James Arbuthnot, who, today, sits in the Lords and is still very much involved in getting justice for the subpostmasters.

This was the nub of her 2013 reply to Bates:

On May 1, Swinson sent a 122-word response in which she sought to direct Bates elsewhere. While she “noted” the JSFA’s concerns about the “progress and direction” of the review, she said Bates should “follow these up” with James Arbuthnot, a backbench Tory MP for North East Hampshire who was assisting the group and acting in a “liaison role”. The scandal had been brought to his attention by Jo Hamilton, a constituent who had been charged.

In July that year:

Second Sight’s interim report was published, finding that two IT bugs in the Horizon system had caused accounting shortfalls of up to £9,000 at 76 branches. This ran contrary to the Post Office’s claims that the system was “absolutely accurate and reliable”.

On July 9, Swinson gave a statement to the House of Commons:

in which she claimed that “contrary to misleading media reports, the review explicitly confirms that ‘we have so far found no evidence of system-wide problems with the Horizon software’”. She also sought to downplay the problem, describing the sub-postmasters affected as a “minute proportion” of the Post Office workforce, and reiterated that the government could not intervene in prosecutions. When grilled by MPs, Swinson added: “It is important that we do not talk the Post Office down.”

Alan Bates wrote to Swinson that day, and on July 11 she responded:

recommending that he raise concerns with a working group being set up by the Post Office as part of a new complaint and mediation scheme to try to settle disputes with former and serving sub-postmasters. Over the summer, the mediation scheme launched, dozens of sub-postmasters applied to join and Bates updated Swinson on progress on August 27. On September 22, she thanked him and asked him to keep her updated.

However, the scheme did not go the way Bates had envisaged. On April 16, 2014, he contacted Swinson again:

with Bates notifying Swinson that “unfortunately, the reality of where the scheme is at is very different” from the terms agreed with the Post Office the previous summer. He added that seven months in, not a single case had been sent for mediation and that “many observers” had again come to believe that “the only way we are really going to resolve this matter is through the media and the courts”. He told Swinson that any assistance she could give to “head off the impasse I believe we are now heading towards” would be gratefully received.

Apparently, Swinson did not reply to Bates, as the article does not mention anything to that effect.

In December 2014, even MPs were fed up with the notional mediation scheme, which the aforementioned Conservative MP James Arbuthnot called ‘duplicitous’:

On December 22, Bates wrote to Swinson for a fifth time urging her to meet him and hear from those “affected, rather than from those who seem to be so desperately trying to keep the truth from you”. He also warned that in order for the scheme to be “resuscitated successfully”, the government needed to remove the Post Office from its “controlling position”.

On March 11, 2015, matters came to a head. The Post Office had stopped Second Sight’s forensic accounting investigation just as the final report was about to be published. The Post Office also closed the working group, which collapsed the mediation scheme. At this point, only 12 subpostmasters’ cases had been mediated.

Bates wrote to Swinson once again on March 10, and she replied on March 19, reiterating:

that the scheme was “independent of government”, while at the same time defending the decision to close the working group and claiming that the Post Office’s changes were “welcome in accelerating the process”. Amid calls for the final report not to be suppressed, Swinson said that the government could neither “compel its publication nor would we do so given the confidential nature of details within it”.

In April, Second Sight’s final report was published:

and its conclusions were damning. It described the Horizon system, in some cases, as “not fit for purpose” and warned there was a real possibility that there had been miscarriages of justice in the Post Office prosecutions. The Post Office rubbished its findings.

The Sunday Times says that, at this point, Bates could not recall if he contacted Swinson again.

Today, Swinson defends herself. It was nothing to do with her. The Post Office misled her, and she looks forward to helping out the public inquiry. Sure, she does:

Swinson defends her handling of the growing scandal and says she was misled by the Post Office: “In response to concerns raised with me by Alan Bates, his fellow sub-postmasters and their MPs, I repeatedly probed and questioned civil servants and Post Office Ltd about Horizon. They continually asserted that there was no evidence of any systemic problems with Horizon. Paula Vennells [then chief executive of Post Office Ltd] herself emphasised her commitment, and indeed Post Office Ltd’s legal duty, to disclose immediately any information that might undermine any of their prosecutions should it come to light.

“Miscarriages of justice can only be overturned by the courts themselves, and in 2015 I supported referring disputed prosecutions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Given what we now know from the High Court case in 2019, it is clear that Post Office Ltd misled me and other ministers on multiple occasions.

“I wholeheartedly supported calls for a public inquiry to investigate thoroughly this appalling miscarriage of justice, and I look forward to helping the Horizon inquiry in any way I can.”

However, there was a more prominent Liberal Democrat involved, Sir Vince Cable, who was the Business Secretary between 2010 and 2015. Ed Davey and Jo Swinson reported to him.

Cable also parrotted the same lines when asked to intervene, as Adrian Bailey MP, the then-chair of the Commons Business Select Committee did in March 2015:

On March 26, Cable wrote back, repeating the same line that had been stated ad nauseam by his juniors: the scheme was independent of government, it was not appropriate to intervene and that since “these issues were first raised over two years ago … it remains the case there is no evidence of systemic problems with Horizon”.

“That conclusion has stood firm through independent investigation by Second Sight,” he added.

As students of British politics will recall, a general election took place in May 2015. David Cameron won a narrow 12-seat majority and the Coalition government between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems came to an end.

Today, Cable says:

It is clear with hindsight that successive governments and ministers were misled by Post Office management who were responsible for this terrible miscarriage of justice.

Conservatives

The Sunday Times says that it was not until 2019 when the Conservative government began taking the Horizon scandal seriously:

By the time sub-postmasters stopped being prosecuted in 2015, more than 700 had been convicted. It was not until 2019 that the Post Office’s leadership acknowledged the broader scope of the scandal. Since then, only 93 convictions have been overturned.

Alan Bates was also in touch with Postal Affairs ministers then:

with Bates also palmed off by a number of Conservative ministers to varying degrees in the years that followed.

In early 2020, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister at the time, pledged there would be an inquiry:

even then it took months of wrangling before it was put on a statutory footing. Bates wrote to Johnson in September that year, setting out in exhaustive detail why a judge-led probe was necessary.

The Sunday Times left out an important detail there: we were in the midst of the pandemic at that time.

That said, The Guardian points out that the Post Office has not make an inquiry easy:

its progress has been repeatedly halted by obstacles, many of them put in place by the Post Office itself.

The paper does give credit to James Arbuthnot, now Lord Arbuthnot, for his involvement from the beginning:

the Tory peer and former MP James Arbuthnot has been one of the most trusted and persistent voices throughout the scandal.

I will go into the Conservatives’ involvement, including that of Lord Arbuthnot, in another post.

On January 12, 2024, Rishi Sunak announced that justice would be done. The Guardian says:

Amid a public outcry, Sunak announced this week that emergency laws would “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims”.

However, that is another subject, because it raises many legal questions about how best to clear convicted subpostmasters’ names and what the compensation level should be.

Contrary to what is circulating in the media, relevant Conservative ministers have been involved for nearly four years in seeing that wrongs are righted. They have been working on this since 2020, inquiry or not. Paul Scully, to name one, has been highly instrumental in investigating what needs to be done. On the other hand, only one Labour MP, Kevan Jones, has been helping this effort.

More to follow next week.

UK politics latest: toppling Rishi Sunak, Starmer’s culture war, Welsh Labour profligacy and more

Who knew that 24 hours would produce such a flurry of British political news about both Labour and Conservatives?

As yesterday’s post looked at Labour’s centenary of their first Prime Minister, let’s start with them.

Welsh Labour spend £13m on paracetamol

On Tuesday, January 23, 2024, Guido Fawkes revealed that Welsh Labour spent £13m on paracetamol tablets over the last five years in its free prescriptions programme (red emphases his):

Welsh Labour is dealing with a fiscal headache. It has now been revealed that their free prescriptions policy cost £14.5 million in the last year alone. In the last five years pharmacists’ dispensation of free Paracetamol tablets has picked up a price tag of a whopping £13,469,802. A bitter pill to swallow…

Meanwhile, among outgoing First Minister Mark Drakeford’s lasting achievements is a £900 million budget shortfall that has accumulated while Senedd politicians spaff cash on woke jobs and 20 mph speed limits …

One of Guido’s commenters put this into perspective:

If you go to Poundland you can get three boxes of paracetamol, that’s 48 tablets, for a pound. £13,469,802, the amount the Welsh government spent on the stuff, will therefore buy you 646,550,496 paracetamol tablets. The population of Wales is 3,107,500 (2021 census). That works out at 208 paracetamol tablets per man, woman and child in Wales per year. How is it humanly possible for the Welsh government to waste so much money on bloody paracetamol, which costs 2p per tablet, i.e. essentially nothing.

Labour’s Mark Drakeford announced at the end of 2023 that he would be standing down as First Minister, his replacement yet to be announced.

However, as another of Guido’s commenters pointed out, he is leaving behind more wasteful spending for the future:

Drakeford’s upping the number of assembly members to 92 at the next assembly election costing an increase of £121 million pounds. Also he’s proposed to pay each asylum seeker in Wales £1600 per month to help fight deportation … and last year he gave £150 million back to the treasury due to an underspend. England, Scotland you’ve got this type of government to come in a few months’ time.

Yes, that’s because, last year, Sir Keir Starmer said that Wales was the template he wanted to use for governing the UK as a whole.

Dear, oh dear.

This is the reality of Wales under Labour, says another commenter:

Anyone thinking of voting for Labour should look at Wales, which, under Labour control, enjoys:

The worst NHS in the UK

The lowest educational results in the UK.

The lowest economic output/head in the UK. (not aided by Senedd actions to destroy the tourist sector [the tourist tax])

Higher unemployment.

Still, one win, Wales has the highest level of absenteeism. Yay.

And let’s not forget the new 20 mph speed limit that covers most of the Principality! Another of Guido’s commenters wrote:

The 20mph fiasco might have given a few of the ‘always voted Labour cos my da did…..’ brigade pause for thought. The petition against it shows 468,462 signatures so far – that’s way more than voted Labour last time around. Question will be whether that can be translated into votes elsewhere.

Spotlight on Starmer

Allison Pearson had a piercing column on Sir Keir in Tuesday’s Telegraph, ‘Keir Starmer has some nerve — it was the Left that started the culture wars’.

Accompanying it was this photo of him with deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner MP from June 2020 over a subject that has nothing to do with Britons:

Pearson reminds us of the context and her criticism of the Conservative government (purple emphases mine):

Far from fighting the culture wars, an embarrassed government has been far too eager not to offend “progressives”. Scared of looking like “the Nasty Party”, it has seldom taken steps to defend our birthright against forces which loathe the United Kingdom. That capitulation was never clearer than in June 2020 when the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was sprayed with graffiti saying, “Churchill was a racist” during a Black Lives Matter protest following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. The BLM demonstration was illegal under coronavirus regulations. Instead of arresting lawbreakers, however, several Metropolitan Police officers dropped to one knee in a nauseating display of contrition for sins they hadn’t committed while a colleague made of sterner stuff chose to remain standing. That officer, according to an official report “was then subjected to sustained abuse by the protesters until he followed suit”. Bullied, in other words, by all those lovely, “Be Kind” anti-racists.

As the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson should have metaphorically thrown his arms around Churchill, I thought. Instead, he laid low in Downing Street while righteous hordes rampaged through Whitehall and our great wartime leader was boarded up for his own protection. A cringeworthy moment of cowardice by the state as it ceded key terrain to the social justice thugs.

By far the worst offender was Keir Starmer. On the day of George Floyd’s funeral, he and Deputy Ange took the knee in solidarity with “all those opposing anti-black racism”. If there is a more embarrassing photograph of a leader of the Opposition, I have yet to see it. With BLM now imploding with scandals, the Labour leader’s act of obeisance to a cult led by American, anti-white troublemakers looks ever more craven and ill-advised. The Conservatives should run the picture on billboards during the general election campaign with the caption: “Whose side is Keir on? Not Yours!”

She has more of Starmer’s diatribes against the Government and concludes:

Starmer’s comments about Conservatives being to blame for sabotaging civil society are an unwelcome preview of what we can expect when Labour wins the general election. Teachers will be given free rein to tell pupils their country is racist and despicable. Museums and galleries will withdraw “problematic” – ie anything the Left doesn’t agree with – works of art. Girls will have to use gender-neutral toilets at school because the trans-allies at Stonewall couldn’t care less if they get urinary infections because they’re too scared to go to the loo …

It’s a frightening prospect. The Conservative government should stop sucking up to progressives and spend its final months in office opposing Labour vandals who lie about its destruction of British values. Keir Starmer accuses the Right of waging a culture war, well, let him have one.

With that, let’s move on to the Conservatives.

Conservative MP aims to oust Rishi

Since 2019, we have had four Conservative Prime Ministers: Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the present incumbent.

On Tuesday, January 23, Sir Simon Clarke, one of Rishi’s backbenchers and Cabinet member under both Boris and Liz, wrote an editorial for the Telegraph, ‘Replace Sunak as PM or face decade of decline under Starmer’.

Admittedly, in terms of leadership skills, Rishi is at departmental manager level: nothing to write home about. As far as championing traditional Conservative values, he leaves us in doubt.

Back in October 2022, Sir Simon was a Rishi supporter:

In just a little over a year, he has changed his tune:

There has been much debate among Conservative MPs in Westminster over which election 2024 will most resemble: is this 1992, John Major’s improbable comeback, or 1997, his calamitous defeat?

To those willing to look at the polls, the answer is devastatingly obvious. 

In January, the Telegraph’s YouGov MRP poll showed that were an election to be held, the Conservatives would fall from our current 350 MPs to 169, just four more seats than Sir John held in 1997.

And as several experts have pointed out, that is, if anything, optimistic. The poll assumes the gap between Labour and Tories will narrow. And takes little account of tactical voting.

Nevertheless, while bending over backwards to be fair, the poll still shows more Tory seats being lost than in 1997, the Red Wall being wiped out completely and shocking defeats in historic Tory constituencies like Chichester, Horsham and Banbury.

The unvarnished truth is that Rishi Sunak is leading the Conservatives into an election where we will be massacred.

The Times says that Sir Simon Clarke is not acting alone. Lord Frost, our Brexit negotiator, released the results of that YouGov poll timed to coincide with Clarke’s piece for the Telegraph:

Clarke’s intervention appears to be part of a co-ordinated attempt to oust the prime minister started by Lord Frost, the former Brexit secretary. He released a poll last week suggesting that the Tories were heading for a 1997-style electoral wipeout before the critical vote on the government Rwanda scheme.

Further details of that poll, released on Tuesday night to coincide with Clarke’s call, suggest that the Tories could limit their losses under an alternative leader.

It asked people who they would ­prefer as prime minister — Sir Keir Starmer or a new unnamed, tax-cutting Tory leader with a tougher approach to legal and illegal migration. Those behind the poll claimed that voters in 322 constituencies in England and Wales preferred a new Tory leader, while Starmer came out on top in 164 seats.

Here is an illustration of the poll results of over 13,000 participants in England and Wales (click here to enlarge):

Clarke says:

Our country, with all the challenges we face, is on the brink of being run by Keir Starmer’s Labour for a decade or more. 

If Nigel Farage returns to the fray, as looks increasingly likely, extinction is a very real possibility for our party.

And it is now beyond doubt that whilst the Prime Minister is far from solely responsible for our present predicament, his uninspiring leadership is the main obstacle to our recovery.

Rishi Sunak has sadly gone from asset to anchor. He lags Keir Starmer — himself no Tony Blair — by double digits on the “Best Prime Minister” metric. 

He leads Keir in just 139 seats across Great Britain; he is behind in 493. His personal approval ratings have collapsed, particularly amongst the key voters we need to win back, and are now lower than Boris Johnson and even Jeremy Corbyn’s were when they resigned.

Remarkably, the Conservative party, hardly known for having a strong brand right now, outpolls Sunak in 88 per cent of constituencies — and in 98 per cent of the key seats we hold but are set to lose.

Rishi has great strengths. He is decent to his core, fiercely intelligent and works formidably hard.

I saw these strengths up close whilst chief secretary to the Treasury when he was chancellor.

But these strengths cannot compensate for two fundamental problems. He does not get what Britain needs. And he is not listening to what the British people want.

Clarke says that now is the time to act. Furthermore, that action will be straightforward — and will include Conservative Party members, unlike Rishi’s election which was restricted to Conservative MPs:

I know many MPs are afraid another change of leader would look ridiculous. But what could be more ridiculous than meekly sleepwalking towards an avoidable annihilation because we were not willing to listen to what the public are telling us so clearly?

A change of leadership would not have to be a protracted affair. As was planned in October 2022, the contest need only take a week.

Two days of MPs voting, a few more days before an online members’ vote. Which is worse: a week of chaotic headlines in Westminster, or a decade of decline under Keir?

I know I will be attacked for saying this. Perhaps even accused of positioning myself or on behalf of another — emphatically neither of which I am doing. I am speaking out because the stakes for our country and my party are too high at this moment to stay silent.

Every Conservative MP will need to live with the decision they make in the coming days for the rest of their lives. Failing to act would itself represent a decision.

We have a clear choice. Stick with Rishi Sunak, take the inevitable electoral consequences, and give the Left a blank cheque to change Britain as they see fit.

Or we can change leader, and give our country and party a fighting chance.

I completely understand his point. Yes, it will look ridiculous now, but it might be seen as a stroke of genius in future. And it would respond to what voters want: a properly Conservative leader.

The problem is finding someone who would fit the bill. We need someone with Boris’s bombast and bluster on the campaign trail.

A number of Conservative MPs were critical of Clarke’s call. We shall see how this unfolds in the weeks ahead. So far, Guido Fawkes says it is not looking good for Clarke.

Lee Anderson wants Deputy Chairman job back

After resigning the Conservative deputy co-chairmanship (the other being Brendan Clarke-Smith, who also resigned) over the Safety of Rwanda bill several days ago, Lee Anderson says he would like the position back were Rishi to offer it to him. He abstained from the vote.

On January 24, the former Labour councillor and ex-miner told the Telegraph that he wasn’t exactly put off from voting No, even though he claimed to be at the time:

… when he went to vote against the legislation, “the Labour lot were giggling and laughing and taking the mick and I couldn’t do it”.

But reflecting on the moment he changed his mind, he insisted “it wasn’t anything to do with running away or being scared”.

“I’m the last person to be scared of stuff like that,” he said.

“It was a reminder that actually I was letting my colleagues down and I’m not going to give you the satisfaction, that sort of stuff.”

At the time, Mr Anderson said he quit alongside Brendan Clarke-Smith, a fellow deputy chairman, because he was unable to vote for something he did not “believe in”.

But asked if he would return to his old role if approached by Mr Sunak, he said: “Yeah, of course I would.”

He added: “I did wrong. Well, I say I did wrong, I acted on a point of principle. I had to resign. I had no choice. I bear no malice or anything, it’s just I know the rules.”

Mr Anderson said both Mr Sunak and Simon Hart, the chief whip, have “been fine with me” since the Rwanda vote, but they have only spoken “in passing”.

Lee Anderson continues presenting his hourly television programme on GB News every Friday from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.

As for a new Conservative Party leader, Anderson:

urged colleagues moving against Mr Sunak to “stop being silly” and get behind their leader, as “our only chance to win the next election is by keeping Rishi in No 10” …

He also played down reports of disgruntled Tory colleagues submitting letters of no confidence in the Prime Minister, insisting there was “no chance” of Mr Sunak being removed before the next election.

“Read my lips: no chance,” he said.

Mr Anderson added: “He’s got a plan, we’ve got to stick to the plan, haven’t we? Rishi’s got a plan. I mean, Rishi’s working with inflation, he’s working with the debt. It looks like we’ve got some tax cuts coming in March. You know, if we start putting money back in people’s pockets, their attitudes can change very, very quickly.”

In closing, let’s move to the world stage.

WHO chief says global pandemic treaty under threat

This is great news.

Dr Tedros says that his master plan for the world’s nations to surrender their sovereignty to the WHO is under threat from misinformation.

The plan was to finalise everything at the 2024 World Health Assembly on May 27, but momentum has slowed down, partly by ‘entrenched positions’ and also by ‘a torrent of fake news, lies and conspiracy theories’ (click here for an enlarged version):

Well done, everyone!

Suella Braverman: the present

Last Friday, I explored Suella Braverman’s past as an MP, from 2019 through to November 4, 2019.

Many British voters appreciate Suella’s views and don’t mind the ‘hurty words’, as the terminology goes, in which she expresses her concern for the immigration plight the UK finds itself in at present with no relief in sight.

Her fellow Conservative MP Lee Anderson, Deputy Leader of the Party and also a GB News presenter on Friday evenings, tweeted that she had not ever sided with terrorist organisations this year, taken the knee as many did in June 2020 but, even so, she has been deemed to be ‘guilty’ and Labour MPs wanted her sacked as Home Secretary. Anderson said that Suella’s only crime is to utter what ‘most of us are thinking and saying’:

That photo was taken in Adam Brooks’s pub on the outskirts of north east London during Lee’s interview of her while she was still Home Secretary.

The Suella saga continues with a view towards her future with the Conservatives.

November 2023

On Friday, November 10, things started to hot up between Suella and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Guido Fawkes gave us a run-down about their clashes in 2023 (red emphases his):

Guido gives you the run down on all the times they’ve clashed before…

• • April 2023: Braverman wrote a piece in the Daily Mail claiming UK child grooming gangs were “almost all British-Pakistani”. Forced to amend the article later on, No.10 declined to comment on whether Sunak supported her language.
  • May 2023: Sunak declined to back Braverman amid allegations she asked civil servants to help her avoid getting points on her driving licence for speeding.
  • September 2023: Sunak repeatedly refused to say if he agreed with Braverman’s view that multiculturalism has “failed“.
  • September 2023: Sunak again declined to back Braverman’s claims that asylum seekers had pretended to be homosexual or transgender to “game the system”.
  • October 2023: Sunak refused to defend Braverman’s conference speech on a “hurricane” of mass migration. When asked on LBC if “we have failed in any way”, he said: “No, no, I think it is something we should be so proud of as Brits.”
  • November 2023: Sunak declined an offer to repeat Braverman’s claims that rough sleeping is a “lifestyle choice”.

The latest drama over Braverman’s Times piece may be the final straw, with rumours swirling round SW1 that the Home Secretary could throw in the towel any time soon. It seems it was bound to end in tears…

On Monday, November 13, Rishi announced a wide and deep reshuffle:

🚨 HERE WE GO

Today @RishiSunak strengthens his team in Government to deliver long-term decisions for a brighter future.

Stay tuned for the latest. pic.twitter.com/ianN6edyDU

— Conservatives (@Conservatives) November 13, 2023

One of the first casualities was Suella Braverman, whom he fired in an 8:30 a.m. phone call. She reported to Downing Street a few hours later. James Cleverly, who had been Foreign Secretary, replaced her as Home Secretary. Suella had duly returned to the back benches of the House of Commons.

The other move, which surprised nearly everyone, was former Prime Minister David Cameron’s return to politics as Cleverly’s successor. This involved getting Cameron whisked into the House of Lords as quickly as possible so he could start work. That is the subject of another post.

On Tuesday, November 14, UnHerd‘s political editor Tom McTague wrote ‘Suellaism is here to stay’ (purple and bold emphases mine, unless otherwise stated):

Rishi Sunak doesn’t know what he’s trying to sell. Suella Braverman does. Herein lies a problem for the Conservative Party.

Just over a year ago, Sunak claimed his mandate to govern came from Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019, a victory that was, he insisted, “not the sole property of any one individual” but that of the entire party. “And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto,” Sunak declared triumphantly outside No 10. “I will deliver on its promise.” 

Within a year, Sunak had junked it completely: corporation tax was hiked to 25% and HS2 scrapped. Sunak then spun these moves as part of a new mission to end the “30-year political status quo” which he wasn’t a part of. Then, a month later, he sacked Suella Braverman and made David Cameron Foreign Secretary …

The reshuffle reveals the terminal nature of the crisis now facing this Government. These are its dying spasms … Sunak seems to be trying to rebuild the Cameron coalition that was upended by Brexit. But Cameron’s coalition is also long gone. 

For the Conservative Left, Cameron’s appointment to Foreign and Braverman’s sacking from Home is long overdue …

However, some viewed the reshuffle differently:

As one senior Tory who is fond of Cameron put it to me yesterday: “This isn’t a strategy, it’s about shafting your enemies.”

Rishi might come to regret this decision as head boy, a position he occupied during his schooldays at Winchester College:

The problem for Sunak is that while Braverman might easily be discarded, Suella-ism will prove much harder to get rid of. Ultimately, she is expressing a feeling about modern Britain that is shared within the Conservative Party — beyond the fringes of its hard Right.

Voters can sense Suella’s passion for immigration policy. She once said she ‘dreamt’ of planes flying to Rwanda with asylum claimants. On October 3, she warned of a ‘hurricane’ of incoming immigration. She was dismayed that the Metropolitan Police did not take action against pro-Palestinian supporters during the October and November protests in London. Ultimately, no matter how nice she was to the civil servants in the Home Office, she could not get anything done:

At the heart of Braverman’s attack on the police is a much more interesting ideological shift taking place in the Tory party, and one, whatever its faults, that has a far more coherent story to tell about British politics over the last 13 years than Sunak has yet to come up with. Her story is this: the Conservative Party has failed. It won elections, but failed to change the country. Yes, it took Britain out of Europe, but — and here is the essence of Suella-ism — the Blob remains in charge: the courts remain all-powerful, schools promote their own ideology, police declare that “jihad doesn’t mean jihad”. It is time, she insists, to take back control.

… she is touching a nerve about today’s Britain.

… since October 7, and perhaps even in the West; … we’re living through some kind of great national argument where things are being said that cannot ever be unsaid, images seen that cannot be unseen. The Braverman battle with the Met is part of this national row, but only one part of it. 

… Even the degree of violent, elemental loathing for Braverman which seems to be considered fair game hints towards something darker underneath …

McTague concludes:

If she wants to win the Tory leadership, Braverman is going to have to explain why she achieved so little in office. But whatever happens to Braverman herself, the Tory liberals are going to need a better story to explain their own failure if they are to defeat Suella-ism in the long term.

On Thursday, November 16, Sebastian Payne, director of the think tank Onward, a political pundit and someone who wants desperately to run as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservatives, opined in the i paper, ‘Suella Braverman and her supporters have never understood Red Wall voters’. Frankly, Sebastian Payne understands Red Wall voters even less, but this is part of what he had to say:

The Government’s two major moments this week – the reshuffle removing Suella Braverman as home secretary and announcing a Plan B for delivering the Rwanda deportation scheme – have prompted a ton of badly informed commentary about why it is all evidence of giving up on the realignment and returning to a core vote strategy centered on the prosperous south. The eye-opening return of Lord Cameron as Foreign Secretary is further evidence for those disgruntled MPs who believe their views and voters are being shunned.

Such concerns are wrongheaded. Braverman’s ouster from the Home Office had nothing to do with policy; her temperament, public persona and failure to grip the machinery of government provoked her downfall. James Cleverly, her Brexit-backing, Johnson-supporting successor, has shown no indication of shifting leftwards. He is more likely to be emollient in office but will remain just as dedicated to reducing overall migration, dealing with small boats and securing our borders as Braverman. Albeit (hopefully) with greater success.

There is also little evidence in the reshuffle that Sunak has given up on those representing the realignment – particularly in briefs where action is most crucial. The appointment of Richard Holden as party chairman means a Red Wall MP will be leading the Tories’ campaigning efforts into the election …

Payne had met many Red Wall voters after the 2019 general election and wrote a book about his interviews with them:

One of the most misunderstood elements of the alignment is that the first-time Tory voters had gradually moved towards the Conservatives, just as the Conservatives had moved towards them. As the big nationalised industries in the Midlands and the North faded away, their communities and economies had changed while Labour had left them behind. There was a meeting of hearts, minds and ideals at the last election. They bought not only into Brexit and Boris Johnson, but the tested Conservative values of modernisation and pragmatism.

Later that day, Suella laid out her plan in The Telegraph for a revised agreement with Rwanda, which was this week’s big news as Cleverly went to sign a new deal, a treaty with ‘notwithstanding’ clauses designed to foil opposition from the courts (bold in the original):

… For emergency legislation to achieve what the PM says he wants, Parliament needs to amend the Illegal Migration Act so that it meets these five tests:

1/ The Bill must address the Supreme Court’s concerns regarding Rwanda
Parliament is entitled to assert that Rwanda is safe without making any changes to our Rwanda partnership.
However, for substantive and presentational reasons, it would be preferable to amend that agreement to address issues identified by the judges. This could include embedding UK observers and independent reviewers of asylum decisions.
It is less important whether these commitments are embodied in an amended memorandum or a new treaty.
What is crucial is that they are practical steps to improve Rwanda’s asylum system. On the basis of these new commitments, Rwanda’s safety could be credibly confirmed on the face of the Bill.

2/ The Bill must enable flights before the next general election
Legislation must therefore circumvent the lengthy process of further domestic litigation, to ensure that flights can take off as soon as the new Bill becomes law. To do this, the Bill must exclude all avenues of legal challenge. The entirety of the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights, and other relevant international obligations, or legislation, including the Refugee Convention, must be disapplied by way of clear “notwithstanding” clauses.
Judicial Review, all common law challenges, and all injunctive relief, including the suspensive challenges available under the Illegal Migration Act must be expressly excluded. Individuals would, however, be given the chance to demonstrate that they had entered the country legally, were under 18, or were medically unfit to fly – but Home Office decisions on these claims could not be challenged in court.

3/ Swift removal must mean swift removal
Those arriving illegally must be removed in a matter of days rather than months as under the Illegal Migration Act. This means amending the Act to ensure that removals to Rwanda are mandated under the duty to remove, with strict time limits. This will streamline the Home Office process as much as possible, so that the only Home Office decision is to determine whether an individual falls within the scheme or not.

4/ Those arriving here illegally must be detained
Legal challenges to detention must be excluded to avoid burdening the courts, making it clear that detention is mandated until removal.

5/ This must be treated as an emergency
The Bill should be introduced by Christmas recess and Parliament should be recalled to sit and debate it over the holiday period.

The new treaty, which Cleverly and Rwanda signed this week, have taken care of points 1 and 2 (see below), however, the other three will unfold in the coming weeks and months.

A Telegraph article by Home Affairs editor Charles Hymas, which appeared online immediately after Suella’s, showed a poll revealing that Britons across all political spectrums doubt that even a revised Rwanda plan would work. It also said:

On Thursday, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, admitted that the Government could not guarantee migrant flights would take off next year, while James Cleverly, the new Home Secretary, said “the timescales that we are looking at can vary depending on circumstances” although he was “absolutely determined” to make it happen before the election.

Mr Sunak faces the legislation being thwarted by the Lords with peers branding it a “constitutional outrage” and “profoundly discreditable” on Thursday and warning it would be “completely bogged down” by “constructive obstruction” and “eternal ping pong” …

Mr Sunak has insisted he is willing to change domestic laws and “revisit international relationships” if there are still obstacles by the spring to flights taking off.

On Saturday, November 25, The Telegraph‘s — and GB News’s — Camilla Tominey sounded the alarm over immigration, ‘Unprecedented mass migration threatens to erode our national values’. She is not wrong:

We need to reduce immigration not just to lessen the pressure on the country’s infrastructure and public services. Net migration at the current, massive rate is in danger of damaging social cohesion and eroding our national values.

There has rightly been a lot of focus on the latest net migration figure, which was this week revealed to be 672,000 for the 12 months to June 2023. Net migration for 2022 was also revised upwards to 745,000 – a new record. If immigration continues at the same pace, Britain’s population could soar to around 85 million by 2046.

These figures fly in the face of repeated promises that net migration will come down.

Theresa May pledged to reduce it to the tens of thousands. Boris Johnson vowed to “take back control” of our borders with an Australian points-based system. Rishi Sunak keeps insisting that arrivals must come down, only for them to reach unprecedented levels.

The public are justifiably angry about the failure of successive administrations to get a grip of this issue. They are also understandably worried about the impact on our already creaking infrastructure of adding a population the size of Birmingham every few years.

Yet the debate about immigration is too often viewed purely in economic terms. Of course this matters, but mass migration on such a grand scale also has implications for social cohesion …

Too many organisations and politicians also seem to have lost confidence in our country’s values, or have become embarrassed about promoting them. We’ve seen this in the attempts by ignorant apologists to woke-wash our history and depict everything about Britain, past and present, as evil.

But it is also surely almost impossible to effectively integrate such a large number of people, all coming here at once. Britain has been far more successful than a lot of European countries at integrating new arrivals. Let’s hope this is not about to change.

On November 26, Charles Hymas wrote another article about the former Home Secretary, ‘Rishi Sunak’s migrant deal with Suella Braverman revealed’ for The Sunday Telegraph, excerpted after the next item about Suella’s resignation letter.

This concerned the necessity in 2022 for Rishi to get Suella’s buy-in for his becoming Conservative Party leader — thus, Prime Minister — succeeding Liz Truss. In that letter, which she reprised in her resignation letter a little over a year later, she wrote:

As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as Home Secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of Party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities. Those were, among other things:

1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;

2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, i.e. exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;

3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;

4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.

This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you. It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister …

Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.

Yet, deny the deal Rishi did, as Charles Hymas’s aforementioned article points out:

Mr Sunak has not denied discussing policy options with Mrs Braverman or the existence of a document, but Downing Street has rejected any characterisation of it as a deal.

Mr Sunak told the Mail on Sunday: “Of course, you have conversations with people when you are in a leadership election and not just Suella.” Asked if he was worried about her producing proof of the deal, he replied: “That’s a question for her. I’m getting on with actually delivering things.”

Sources close to Mrs Braverman said the deal was not signed by Mr Sunak but that it was verbally agreed on multiple occasions – and in front of witnesses – and that he left their meeting with a physical copy of the document.

Hymas listed other immigration measures understood to be urgent:

A ban on nearly all postgraduate students bringing in dependents apart from those on research programmes was announced in May by Mr Sunak, which he has described as the single toughest measure in years to reduce net migration.

However, he is under pressure to go further. Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, who co-signed Mrs Braverman’s final letter in October this year, is pressing for a ban on care workers bringing in dependants and a cap on health and social care visas.

No 10 is “actively considering” measures, understood to include restrictions on care worker dependents and an increase in the skilled worker salary threshold. On Sunday, a spokesman said Mr Sunak had been very clear he believed migration was too high and had to come down to more “sustainable” levels. They noted the numbers were slowing, adding: “We’re prepared to act and do more” …

Ministers are expected this week to make final decisions on the new treaty with Rwanda and bill to declare it safe after the policy was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.

The bill will enshrine in law a treaty under which Rwanda commits not to remove any migrant deported from the UK, a move designed to answer the main criticism by the supreme court that asylum seekers could be returned to their homelands to face persecution.

Three days later, at PMQs on Wednesday, November 29, Rishi got a hard time from his fellow Conservative MPs. Andrew Gimson, writing for ConservativeHome, described the scene:

“That 1.3 million migrants over a period of two years is a catastrophe for Britain,” began Sir John Hayes (Con, South Holland and the Deepings), “is obvious to everyone apart from guilt-ridden bourgeois liberals and greed-driven globalists.”

An unfriendly start, and the irate Lincolnshire knight – a friend of the recently sacked Suella Braverman, and mistaken by no one at Westminster for either a bourgeois liberal or a globalist – proceeded to become more unfriendly.

He demanded the Prime Minister bring forward the Bill to deal with legal migration “in exactly the form recommended by his own Immigration Minister.”

Rishi Sunak was riled. He has not accepted the stringent measures recommended by the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, and would not now be bounced into accepting them by a Braverman ally.

“I’m pleased to have the Right Honourable Gentleman’s advice and support,” Sunak said.

Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, who was sitting beside the Prime Minister, smiled at this ironical riposte, for as everyone could see, Sir John was not supporting Sunak, he was goading him.

It is uncomfortable for a Prime Minister to have to turn, as Sunak can be seen doing in the photograph above this article, in order to respond to an attack from his own side.

December 2023

So far, this month has been a difficult one for Rishi Sunak as he faces determined and forthright pressure to reduce immigration numbers. This comes on top of all the other problems he has on his plate: increasingly low polling numbers, continued rail and junior doctors strikes and threats of no-confidence letters from his own MPs.

On Tuesday, December 5, James Cleverly signed the new treaty with Rwanda, pledging that the Government was not pursuing ‘cheap and quick popularity’.

That evening, Suella presented the annual Political Cartoon Awards, good-naturedly citing what many political cartoonists had said about her. The post also has videos (bold in the original):

… it was Suella who took the star of the stage, talking about all the different ways she had been portrayed by cartoonists in the ugliest of fashions but welcoming it as a vital part of the free press. And using the occasion to talk about the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator potentially being bought by Abu Dhabi businessmen. She received heckles throughout, including Guardian cartoonist Rebecca Hendin, whom Suella initially invited to the stage but was persuaded not to by the organisers.

She talked about being portrayed as a “vampire bat, a cranky crayfish, a Halloween ghoul, a zombie, a devil, Morticia Addams, a murderous Chiron. Spitting Image had me as the girl from The Exorcist. You also had me as an angry Statue of Liberty, a Superbraverman, and Barbie… you make politicians look much more interesting than we really are, to be honest, and you’re a pillar of our Free Press, and I hope that you continue unhindered by political interference.” To which she got the heckle “can we have that in writing?” But she continued, “whether politicians are offended is neither here or there and you can count on me to always fight for your right to offend. Freedom of the press is back in the forefront of our minds once more regarding the Telegraph newspaper and The Spectator magazine, and I want to be clear I oppose their takeover by Redbird IMI. The Telegraph is one of the bedrocks of our free press, and The Spectator is an irrepressible voice for challenging established orthodoxies. To my mind, there is no doubt that this takeover will hinder the accurate presentation of news and the free expression of opinion, and the independence of the paper will undeniably be compromised if its control is seeded to the hands of a foreign state that freedom is essential now more than ever in a healthy democracy and I hope that that takeover does not go ahead. To finish, thank you for uglifying us, thank you for taking the piss out of me; long may you continue doing your hard work.”

And the awards then took place… relatively smoothly, aside from one early kerfuffle. I took a bunch of videos from the presentation, at a different angle to any official video, which means that you can see Suella Braverman’s reaction to … everything.

Early on Wednesday, Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick — and good friend to Rishi — announced his resignation because he disagreed with the PM on immigration policy:

It is with great sadness that I have written to the Prime Minister to tender my resignation as Minister for Immigration.

I cannot continue in my position when I have such strong disagreements with the direction of the Government’s policy on immigration. pic.twitter.com/Zg3ezFJr8t

— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) December 6, 2023

Guido reprinted the text of Jenrick’s letter in full, excerpted below:

… As you know, I have been pushing for the strongest possible piece of emergency legislation to ensure that under the Rwanda policy we remove as many small boat arrivals, as swiftly as possible, to generate the greatest deterrent effect. This stems from my firmly held position that the small boats crisis is a national emergency that is doing untold damage to our country, and the only way we will be able to stop the boats completely is by urgently introducing a major new deterrent. I have therefore consistently advocated for a clear piece of legislation that severely limits the opportunities for domestic and foreign courts to block or undermine the effectiveness of the policy. One of the great advantages of our unwritten constitution is the unfettered power of our sovereign parliament to create law, and that is a power we must take full advantage of. The government has a responsibility to place our vital national interests above highly contested interpretations of international law.

In the discussions on the proposed emergency legislation you have moved towards my position, for which I am grateful. Nevertheless, I am unable to take the currently proposed legislation through the Commons as I do not believe it provides us with the best possible chance of success. A Bill of the kind you are proposing is a triumph of hope over experience. The stakes for the country are too high for us not to pursue the stronger protections required to end the merry-go-round of legal challenges which risk paralysing the scheme and negating its intended deterrent.

Reflecting on my time in the Home Office, I am proud of the improvements we have delivered together working alongside dedicated and capable civil servants. I am grateful to you for agreeing to much of my five-point plan to reduce net migration which, once implemented, will deliver the single largest reduction in legal migration ever. However, I refuse to be yet another politician who makes promise on immigration to the British public but does not keep them. This package must be implemented immediately via an emergency rules change and accompanied by significant additional reforms at the start of next year to ensure we meet the 2019 manifesto commitment that every single Conservative MP was elected upon. The consequences for housing, public services, economic productivity, welfare reform, community cohesion and, more fundamentally, for trust in democratic politics are all too serious for this totemic issue to be anything other than a primary focus for the government …

You and I have been friends for a long time … You will retain my full support on the backbenches even as I campaign on illegal and legal migration policy and the intersecting challenges of generating meaningful economic growth, solving the housing crisis and improving integration. The fortunes of the Conservative party at the next general election are at stake … 

Later that day in the Commons, Suella, now on the back benches, repeated her aforementioned five-point plan for Rwanda and additional emergency immigration legislation.

Guido has a video clip and a summary of her speech:

Guido concluded with this:

Braverman finished by saying “electoral oblivion” awaits the Tories if another failing bill is put forward. The gauntlet is thrown down…

He means that she is positioning herself for a leadership challenge.

Interestingly, Rishi must have felt a need to react — and soon. He scheduled an impromptu press conference to discuss immigration and the new Rwanda treaty on Thursday, December 7, at 11:30 a.m.

The Guardian‘s summary of the day said that Rishi ‘vowed to “finish the job”‘ and that Suella denied ‘spreading poison within her own party to get rid of Rishi Sunak’.

Guido has a video of Rishi’s press conference and a few comments:

Rishi gets irritable when challenged. This was no exception, as Guido says:

Guido’s not sure the tetchy performance will convince too many…

There we must leave Suella for now as Parliament goes into Christmas recess on Friday, December 15. Both houses return on January 8, 2024.

It will be interesting to find out what the New Year has in store for one of the UK’s most-loved Home Secretaries in recent history. How many of her MPs would support her in a leadership challenge either before or after the next General Election? We’ll have to wait and see.

A look at Suella Braverman: the past

As the Conservative MP Suella Braverman has returned to the backbenches of the House of Commons, now is the time to look at her past and her present, beginning with the former.

One thing characterises Britain’s former Home Secretary: her use of language.

2019

In the Spring of 2019, Suella was criticised for using the term cultural Marxism in a speech. The pile-on was deep and heavy.

On April 12, 2019, the conservative commentator Douglas Murray wrote about it for UnHerd (purple emphases mine):

One of the strange habits of our time is the one in which a self-appointed class roams the land, hands cupped to their ear, hoping to discern something they can identify as a ‘dog-whistle’. I wrote about this habit after Conservative MP Suella Braverman came in for a scolding for using the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ in a speech.

In the aftermath of that outrage, the Board of Deputies of British Jews – among others – expressed their concern that the phrase was in and of itself anti-Semitic. Since then, the Board has met with Ms Braverman and announced that it has discerned that there was in fact nothing “intentionally anti-Semitic” about her comments, and expressed sorrow about any hurt having been caused to the MP (who happens to have a Jewish husband) …

One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears.  So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself.

2022

In July 2022, the Conservatives were in a process of selecting a new Party leader after Boris Johnson’s resignation over Partygate. Conservative MPs, through a series of rounds of voting, were narrowing down the candidates for Party members to have the final vote in August.

On July 14, GB News’s Dan Wootton looked at the contest, which, by then, had three candidates left — Liz Truss, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt and then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Suella gave her views (start at the 3:00 mark) to say that voters should be able to have a choice of candidates from both the Left and the Right wings of the Party. She said that, ideally, there would be two from each wing. She classified Mordaunt and Sunak as being on the Left of the Conservatives:

When she was elected as Party leader and became the next Prime Minister, Liz Truss appointed Suella Braverman Home Secretary. When Rishi Sunak succeeded her, he retained Suella in that post, even though she had resigned briefly because of alleged security breaches, more about which below.

On November 4, Guido Fawkes reported on what a Times Radio focus group of British voters had to say about Suella versus Labour politicians. Again, Suella’s language was the nub of the question (red emphases Guido’s):

Twitter was sent into a spiral this morning by headline responses from a focus group of swing voters, who were sympathetic towards the Home Secretary’s language on immigration …

The voters were concerned with the volume of immigration, arguing that although people need to be looked after, Britain was at capacity and there needed to be a limit. One voter also took aim at the “do-gooders” criticising government policy. They then agreed that they trusted the Conservatives over Labour on the issue.

On November 14, Suella did an additional deal with the French in order to stem the tide of dinghies coming across the English Channel. Yet more millions wasted. Still, Suella is fluent in French, having studied at the Sorbonne, and it was thought she could reach the parts of their government that others could not. Guido told us:

Suella Braverman has given a pool interview following her early morning agreement of a new cooperation deal with France to tackle illegal small boats crossing the Channel. The Home Secretary stressed that illegal migration is “totally unacceptable” and emphasised the Government’s “multi-dimensional approach… to ensure there is a robust barrier”. The deal is worth €72 million and will see a 40% increase in British officers patrolling French beaches whilst funding increased port security. For all the hope and rhetoric, Guido doubts an extra 100 patrol men along the French beaches will put a stop to the crisis…

Meanwhile, Labour had not forgotten about Suella’s forced resignation under Truss and mentioned it often in Parliamentary debates. Incidentally, it had been alleged at the time that the discussion about security breaches developed into a lengthy, heated discussion about Suella’s immigration policy, which Truss and newly-appointed Chancellor Jeremy Hunt opposed.

That discussion aside, Labour still thought that Suella should go because of her security breaches. On November 22, Guido reported:

Among the chorus of voices was Taiwo Owatemi, who had this to say when Braverman admitted sending six work emails to a personal phone last month:

How can Suella Braverman be trusted with our national security when she leaks confidential documents & doesn’t take most basic security measures.

She is unfit to be Home Secretary. It’s time for the Prime Minister to put national security ahead of Conservative party politics.

All well and good… except Owatemi herself left a parliamentary laptop – with sensitive information and data on it – with an ex-staffer for nearly a year in 2021. When the staffer left her team early in the spring, no one bothered to collect the computer until December. What was that about “basic security measures”?

When asked about this obvious security oversight, Owatemi’s office blamed the pandemic …

On November 28, Suella took action against the large numbers of Albanians coming across the Channel. The Times reported:

All asylum seekers from countries deemed safe by the Home Office will be fast-tracked for removal as part of plans to combat the Channel migrant crisis, The Times has learnt.

Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is looking to resurrect a list of designated “safe” countries, from whose citizens asylum claims are largely regarded as unfounded. Rejected claimants will have no right to appeal.

The list would include Albania, the nationality which has accounted for the largest number of small boats across the Channel this year with more than 12,000 of the 43,000 arrivals …

Next week she is expected to travel to northern France to meet interior ministers from the Calais group of nations, which includes France, Belgium and the Netherlands, to discuss further co-operation on tackling people smuggling. The informal grouping was set up this month to take action against illegal migration in northern Europe.

Her action against Albania worked and their numbers have since dropped.

However, the following day, a senior Metropolitan Police officer, Neil Basu (now retired), accused Suella of fomenting racial hatred, which is strange, as both her parents are of Indian origin.

The Telegraph reported:

Neil Basu, the UK’s former head of counter terrorism, described the Home Secretary’s choice of language on the asylum issue as “inexplicable” and “horrific”.

Ms Braverman came in for criticism when she told the Telegraph she dreamed of sending migrants to Rwanda and also when she described the current crisis as an “invasion”.

In an interview ahead of his retirement from the Metropolitan Police, Mr Basu, whose father came to the UK from India in the 1960s, said such language reminded him of the racism his family endured …

Ms Braverman, whose own parents came to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya, has been criticised for her rhetoric on the migrant crisis, but has expressed her determination to tackle the issue.

On December 5, the UN took issue with a report on illegal immigration. It contained a foreword from Suella. Guido told us:

The Centre for Policy Studies has published a detailed and well-considered report on illegal immigration this morning, with a foreword from the Home Secretary. Naturally it has upset all the right people. The UN Refugee Agency in the UK was quick out the blocks, tweeting their criticisms at 8am. The UNHCR’s UK representative, Vicky Tennant, cited “factual and legal errors”, arguing that the report’s proposals would breach the 1951 Refugee Convention. It seems as though the representative didn’t actually read the report, as this was discussed at length… 

The report in fact contains 33 mentions of the Refugee Convention, including a sub-section dedicated to addressing it specifically. It also recommends solutions to various other legal barriers, including the ECHR and 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Perhaps Vicky should stick to dishing out awards to the “brave” trans women championing LGBTI rights in El Salvador…

Not long afterwards, on December 10, Nimco Ali, the best friend of Carrie Johnson — Boris’s wife — decided to leave her post as a Home Office adviser. The Times had the story:

An adviser to Suella Braverman has resigned on radio, saying she is on a “completely different planet” from the home secretary.

Nimco Ali has been an independent adviser to the Home Office on tackling violence against women and girls for more than two years. She is a prominent campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM) and a close friend of Carrie Johnson, the former prime minister’s wife.

Ali, 39, was asked by Cathy Newman on Times Radio yesterday if she was happy to remain in the position despite disagreeing with Braverman on some questions. She replied: …

“I’m just saying that Suella and I are on completely different planets when it comes to the rights of women and girls — and also the way that we talk about ethnic minorities and specifically people like me who are from a refugee background” …

The Times invited Ali for an interview, which appeared on December 17:

Suella Braverman’s rhetoric about migrants is stoking an increase in racism in Britain and “normalising” the politics of Nigel Farage, according to the government’s outgoing adviser on tackling violence against women.

Nimco Ali, a campaigner and survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM), also suggested that Rishi Sunak should sack Braverman, warning “he’s not going to win [the next election] with Suella as his home secretary” …

Ali was born in Somalia before moving to Britain as a child refugee, and said Braverman’s language about asylum seekers was “legitimising” the overt racism that she and others had experienced.

“She’s basically feeding into this Nigel Farage stuff . . . and when you start to normalise these things it’s really hard to put it back in its box,” she said. “When you have your home secretary speaking the way she is speaking and being cheered, that is problematic, especially when you’re the first man of colour to be prime minister” …

2023

In 2023, it became crystal clear that Suella faced powerful opposition from the Blob, including civil servants working under her and the courts.

On February 22, senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft spoke out. Traditionally, civil servants — informally called mandarins for their supposed wisdom — do not express their personal views on policy or politics, but he had plenty to say.

Guido told us, giving us a screenshot of Rycroft’s editorial for that week’s Civil Service Weekly News:

Fresh from trying to frustrate the government’s plans to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft has come up with a new tactic: Ignore the democratic will of the government altogether.

A leaked memo, seen by The Telegraph and now published in full by Guido, shows Rycroft dictate the priorities of his department to his hordes of civil servants insubordinate to elected ministers. Namely:

1. 1. 1. Righting the wrongs suffered by some members of the Windrush generation
      2. Combatting violence against women and girls
      3. Expanding global talent visa routes

Nothing on immigration numbers, nothing on small boats, nothing on getting Rwanda up and running. The priorities of the government and more importantly the voters are of no consequence to Rycroft.

Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Telegraph, “Permanent secretaries, and all officials, are responsible for making this a reality. One would expect the most senior officials to consider this their duty.” Nigel Farage reacted furiously, calling on Rycroft to be fired.

Despite outrage from the right, a Home Office source said Rycroft is a “great public servant and this isn’t isn’t an over-arching reflection of his or the Home Office’s priorities.” It’s an easy get out for the Tories after 13 years of government to blame lack of policy progress on the civil service working against them, but can anyone name one example of right wing sympathies within the institution?

UPDATE: A Home Office spokesperson says tersely:

“The Permanent Secretary works tirelessly to drive Home Office efforts to tackle the public’s priorities, including stopping illegal migration, cutting crime, supporting vulnerable people and protecting homeland security.” 

‘Homeland security’? Can the British please stop using American expressions?

It was alleged that Suella retaliated through an email sent out by the Conservative Party. She denied it. Nonetheless, Guido says it garnered her support from Party members and the general public. Mark Rycroft was not best pleased:

An email sent to Conservative members from Suella Braverman, which criticised an “activist blob of left-wing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour Party” for blocking immigration action has caused outrage – predominantly from the very same activist blob of left-wing lawyers, civil servants. After the boss of the FDA civil service union complained to Rishi, demanding an apology, Suella disavowed herself of the email …

Despite Suella’s claims of innocence, the email has caused trouble closer to home, as Harry Cole reports her Permanent Secretary, Matthew Rycroft, was apparently sent “shouty crackers” by the communication. This won’t come as a surprise to co-conspirators. Guido has often reported on the activist inclinations of the Marsham Street blob.

Although just one email is receiving press attention, CCHQ sent out two near identical emails yesterday – 5 minutes apart – evening. Just one included the provocative phrasing …

As far as Guido can surmise, CCHQ are far from concerned with the media reception of their communications, they’re pleased. Standing up to left-wing lawyers and civil servants seems like a vote winner in both the Red Wall and Tory shires…

The following day, Guido gave us more evidence of civil service opposition as well as a video from Suella’s appearance on Robert Peston’s ITV current affairs show.

Let’s start with Peston:

Last night on Peston, the Home Secretary disavowed the email and gave an unconvincing and less than sincere endorsement of her “hardworking and dedicated civil servants” – whilst not explicitly disagreeing with the “activist blob” sentiment:

Now on to the civil servants, beginning with Matthew Rycroft:

Given he’s so upset over this supposedly unwarranted criticism, Guido’s had a look back over the noises coming out of the Home Office in the last few years. Remember: these civil servants are supposed to serve the government of the day with total impartiality…

• • Just yesterday, Sam Freedman revealed messages from an internal Home Office Q&A, showing pearl clutching civil servants claiming they are “embarrassed and ashamed” to work for the department, moan they don’t get “consulted” on ministerial decisions (that’s not their job), and wrongly insist the small boats plan violates the civil service code.
  • Last month, Rycroft himself wrote an internal memo outlining the Home Office’s supposed top three priorities. No[t] one mention of the Rwanda scheme or small boats crossings…
  • In June, hundreds of anonymous Home Office civil servants clubbed together to run “Our Home Office”, a Twitter campaign that called the department a “repressed world” and openly attacked the Rwanda plan. The account currently has over 3,000 followers. They even took to slapping heart-shaped “refugees welcome” stickers on bins.
  • Last April, Guido revealed dozens of Home Office civil servants had used an official online consultation to discuss how to potentially block the Rwanda plan, compared themselves to Nazis “only obeying orders”, proposed going on strike, and questioned how to deal with their mental health in light of the policy. “We are ruled by a minority of narrow-minded bigots”…

Then, of course, are the repeated stories of Home Office mandarins spreading woke nonsense like encouraging the use of “neopronouns”, claiming “homosexual” is an offensive word, and advising people not to call their colleagues “mates“. The Home Office is notorious for this sort of thing; clearly there is massive internal resistance to enforcing the policies of the government of the day. Guido has repeatedly been told in private just how obstructive the Home Office civil servants have been. There is obviously a pattern, whether Rycroft wants to go “shouty crackers” or not…

A few days later, on March 13, she spoke in the Commons to say that she did not like being derided for ‘speaking such simple truths’ on migration, adding:

I will not be hectored by out of touch Lefties.

Guido has the video. The man sitting near her is Robert Jenrick MP, her ‘minder’: he worked under her as Immigration Minister, a post he still holds. It is thought that Rishi appointed him to keep an eye on her:

Suella referred to her predecessor, Priti Patel, who represents the Witham constituency in Essex.

Patel couldn’t get anything accomplished, either, because of civil servants’ resistance.

Suella’s reference to her showed me that she, too, recognised she was in the same boat, so to speak.

However, it turned out that Rishi’s Cabinet ministers were working against Suella, too.

On May 16, The Times reported:

Ministers have approved only one of a raft of measures proposed by the home secretary to cut immigration amid cabinet infighting over the issue.

Suella Braverman drew up at least five proposals to cut immigration after receiving a private briefing paper by Home Office officials predicting that migration would continue to hit record numbers unless the government took action.

There are signs that she is becoming increasingly frustrated at the failure of cabinet ministers to agree to plans to tackle legal migration, while Rishi Sunak has prioritised tackling small boats over reducing legal migration. Yesterday she used a speech to the National Conservatism conference to say that the government must bring numbers down before the next election to stop Britain’s reliance on foreign labour and ease the pressure on housing, education, health and other public services.

Net migration hit a record high of 504,000 last year and official data out next week is expected to show the numbers have increased to between 700,000 and a million.

November’s figures say 672,000 people entered the UK legally.

The article continues:

The five proposals that were drawn up by Braverman, seen by The Times, would increase the minimum salaries for companies employing skilled workers, make it harder to bring spouses to the UK, reduce the time foreign students can stay in the country after their course, ban them bringing family members, and remove students if they fail to finish their course.

However, only one limited proposal, which would ban foreign masters’ students bringing relatives with them, has so far been agreed by the cabinet, although it has yet to be announced.

Government sources blamed Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Steve Barclay, the health secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, for blocking policies designed to reduce the numbers coming to Britain.

A source pointed out that the absence of a single measure to cut immigration contrasted with two measures that have liberalised migration policy since Sunak became prime minister. In December the government lifted the cap on seasonal workers from 30,000 to 45,000 and today announced that the scheme would be extended into next year.

In the budget in March, Hunt announced five construction jobs to be added to the shortage occupation list, which makes it easier for certain industries suffering labour shortages to recruit from overseas.

On May 24, The Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey, also a GB News presenter, explained Rishi’s dilemma in keeping Suella, a staunch Brexiteer, as Home Secretary. He might have wanted to ditch her, but he couldn’t realistically do so:

The Prime Minister has … wisely decided to avoid a full scale war with the European Research Group (ERG) wing of his party, which appears fully behind their former chairman Braverman. The Home Secretary is a bigger threat to Sunak’s premiership than she once was because that anti cancel culture caucus of the party has fallen out of love with Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, over her watering down of the Retained EU Law Bill. Conservatives on the Right have long been looking for a figure who channels the courageous spirit of Margaret Thatcher and in assuming the mantle of the Left’s new public enemy number one for making comments like: “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt”, mother of two Braverman, 43, seems to fit the bill. (Tories like veteran Eurosceptic Sir Bill Cash also highly rate rising star Miriam Cates, a fierce advocate for family-friendly tax policies who supported Braverman in the 2022 Tory leadership election won by Liz Truss).

With supporters in the Common Sense group as well as the ERG, Braverman poses more of a threat to Sunak from the backbenches than the frontbench, where she is currently the Prime Minister’s convenient “fall girl” for controversial policies. His moderate allies insist he should have got rid of her because she is “a liability” with “terrible political judgment” but as with her predecessor Priti Patel, the Home Secretary remains what one Cabinet colleague describes as a “Rishi’s resident s—- sponge”.

Moreover, since one of Sunak’s five “deliverables” is stopping the boats – it would hardly have been a good look to get rid of the woman in charge of that key, potentially election-defining pledge.

Already facing criticism for what the Right perceive as his “un-Conservative” brand of Toryism, Sunak will also have wanted to avoid further riling the sorts of MPs who are already very vocally clamouring for tax cuts, the scrapping of VAT on luxury goods and an end to net zero.

On June 29, just over a year after a European court blocked the only flight to Rwanda to date under Priti Patel’s Home Office, the UK’s Court of Appeal dashed further hopes for the Rwanda plan.

Guido has the story and Suella’s speech in the Commons:

Suella said, in part:

The British people will no longer indulge the polite fiction that we have a duty or infinite capacity to support everyone in the world who is fleeing persecution… it is unfair on taxpayers who foot the hotel bill […] for people who’ve broken into this country. It’s unfair on those who play by the rules, and who want to see an asylum system that is fit for purpose. That our current system is exploited, and turned against us by those with no right to be in the UK. It’s unfair on those most in need of protection… This is madness, Mr Speaker, and it must end.

Guido added:

Rishi confirmed soon after the ruling that the government is taking the judgement to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the boats will keep coming…

And so they did.

A number of boat people seeking asylum have used Theresa May’s anti-slavery law as a plea in their claims. It is unclear if they are being honest in saying they are being trafficked. Suella thinks it is being abused. However, she was forced to do a U-turn.

On July 2, The Guardian reported:

Suella Braverman has withdrawn controversial new rules that make it harder for trafficking victims to have their cases accepted, months after introducing them as part of a flagship policy.

The government U-turn has been hailed as a significant victory by trafficking victims.

The home secretary introduced a new policy requiring victims to provide immediate evidence of trafficking in order for the government to deem them a potential victim of slavery, on 30 January.

She said she had to introduce the policy because some trafficking victims were “gaming the system”, although the chair of the home affairs select committee, Dame Diana Johnson, said she was still awaiting comprehensive evidence.

Before the case reached a full high court hearing, the home secretary conceded and withdrew the rules.

Braverman has said she will provide replacement rules by 10 July. Until then she has agreed that no negative reasonable grounds decisions will be made about trafficking victims.

Human rights and anti-trafficking charities had warned the change would lead to the cases of many genuine victims being rejected, leaving them at risk of further exploitation.

Since the rules were introduced, the number of cases recognised as genuine has fallen sharply. Home Office statistics show there has been a significant drop in what are known as positive reasonable grounds decisions, and a corresponding increase in what are known as negative reasonable grounds decisions.

In 2022, 88% of cases received a decision that they were potential victims of trafficking. In the first quarter of 2023 this figure had dropped to 58%.

Many of us would say that Suella was probably on the right track there.

A few days later, Suella was one of the guests at the much-coveted Spectator summer party, where all the great and the good from the political world gather to mingle with other greats — and journalists.

On July 6, the Evening Standard reported on the event. Their gossip columnist, The Londoner, was there:

The Prime Minister slipped in through the back gate of the Spectator’s garden to join the party. Other Cabinet ministers there included the Home Secretary Suella Braverman. We asked about her summer plans. “You can text me,” she said, fumbling to get away and pausing only to announce in a Thatcher-esque tone: “The Home Secretary never goes on holiday”. The Londoner suggested she might try Rwanda.

On July 27, the High Court ruled against housing migrant ‘children’ in hotel accommodation. I use the term advisedly.

Guido wrote:

The High Court has ruled that the Home Office’s “routine” housing of unaccompanied child asylum seekers in hotels is unlawful and the arrangements are “not fit for purpose“. In this morning’s ruling, Justice Chamberlain said placing children in hotels “may be used on very short periods in true emergency situations”. He also went after Suella personally…

It cannot be used systematically or routinely in circumstances where it is intended, or functions in practice, as a substitute for local authority care. From December 2021 at the latest, the practice of accommodating children in hotels, outside local authority care, was both systematic and routine and had become an established part of the procedure for dealing with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. From that point on, the Home Secretary’s provision of hotel accommodation for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children exceeded the proper limits of her powers and was unlawful.

… They could now appeal the decision, although they’re already busy fighting the Rwanda case in the Supreme Court…

Then came the barge to be anchored off the coast of Portland in the south of England. Suella’s natural opponents thought this was a terrible idea, and so did I, because, unlike oil workers using this sort of accommodation and staying put on it, the barge would sail to the coastline, allowing asylum seekers to roam around the neighbouring towns and villages by local bus.

On August 8, Guido gave us the results of a survey on the barge idea, with the ‘don’t know’ results removed, along with a reference to Conservative MP Lee Anderson, who wants these people to return to France from whence they departed — a safe country:

Two thirds of voters expressing a preference agree that barges make acceptable housing for asylum seekers. According to new polling from YouGov, 68% of voters (who expressed a preference), agree that barges are acceptable, with 32% disagreeing. Of the majority, 40% say barges are “completely acceptable”, with 28% agreeing they are “somewhat acceptable”. Just 17% of all voters think barges are “completely unacceptable”. Once again, man of the people Lee Anderson has his finger on the pulse of public opinion.

The barge didn’t work, either, as even though it had been completely cleaned and inspected, legionella had been found in it just days before migrants were due to board. Hmm.

Not surprisingly, the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees has come up for discussion. People ask whether it is still fit for purpose in the 21st century as asylum seekers are pouring in from all over the world, not just Europe and a few war-torn countries.

On September 26, Suella gave her views.

Guido has the story and the video:

Suella said:

The Geneva convention was intended to protect individual people from persecution. A significant number of people who claim asylum are doing so for broadly economic reasons. So I think it is right we look at the framework, as indeed other European countries are doing.

Also:

Britain, like all European countries, had inherited the post-war, post-Holocaust system and sentiment on asylum … [that is] completely unrealistic […] The presumption: “that someone who claimed asylum was persecuted and should be taken in”] was plainly false; most asylum claims were not genuine. Disproving them, however, was almost impossible. The combination of the courts, with their liberal instinct; the European Convention on Human Rights, with its absolutist attitude to the prospect of returning someone to an unsafe community; and the UN Convention [Relating to the Status] of Refugees, with its context firmly that of 1930s Germany, mean that, in practice, once someone got into Britain and claimed asylum, it was the Devil’s own job to return them.

Guido told us that Labour have also voiced the same sentiments over the past several years:

New Labour’s immigration minister Phil Woolas in 2009, and Tony Blair himself in his autobiography. Jack Straw made the same arguments in 2000.* Suella’s speech was practically anodyne by comparison…

*Hat-tip: John Rentoul for reminding Guido of New Labour’s attitude.

Suella then had to argue the difference between all and sundry coming to the UK and the people who came in the past who wanted to integrate into British society.

On October 3, The Guardian reported on her use of the word ‘hurricane’ (bold in the original):

Braverman says ‘hurricane’ of illegal immigration coming

Braverman says the trend that brought her immigrant parents to the UK was just a gust compared to the hurricane coming.

One of the most powerful forces reshaping our world is unprecedented mass migration.

The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.

She says the UK has been good at taking in refugees. “The decency of the British people cannot be questioned,” she says.

But she says the views of the people are clear. They think immigration is too high.

And they know that the future could bring millions more migrants to these shores …

… uncontrolled and unmanageable, unless the government they elect next year acts decisively to stop that happening.

We are the only party that will take effective action.

One month later, on November 4, she was castigated for saying that some homeless people prefer life on the streets. She called it a ‘lifestyle choice’. To an extent, that is true. I watched a GB News discussion with people who work with the homeless. Some on the streets refuse charitable shelters because they cannot drink or bring in their pet dogs.

Suella rightly also objected to the idea of setting up tent cities, as charities have been handing out tents to the homeless. It sounds like a good deed until you see the streets of Paris where some neighbourhoods have been dominated by tent cities, making those areas dangerous, especially for women.

On November 4, The Telegraph reported:

Suella Braverman has unveiled a crackdown on the use of tents by homeless people in urban areas in a move aimed at reducing anti-social behaviour.

The Home Secretary said that while nobody should be living in a tent on a UK street, it had become a “lifestyle choice” for some rough sleepers and led to aggressive begging, drug-taking and littering blighting public spaces.

Announcing the move on X, formerly known as Twitter, Ms Braverman said action was needed to ensure UK cities do not follow those in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she said “weak policies” had triggered an “explosion of crime, drug taking, and squalor”.

Under new measures pitched for inclusion in next week’s King’s Speech, homeless charities could face fines for providing tents that become a nuisance.

Unfortunately, it appears that charities are within their rights in handing out tents to the homeless.

This next part, however, is still pending:

The Government last year said it would repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which made begging and rough sleeping illegal, and promised £2 billion over three years to help get people off the streets.

However, just within the past few days in Parliament, a Labour MP expressed her disgust with the Government for planning to ‘replace the Vagrancy Act with a new Vagrancy Act’.

James Cleverly is the Home Secretary now. We’ll have to wait and see.

Next week, I will look at the recent spat between Suella and Rishi. It could bode well for her future in the Conservative Party.

Middle East protests: Met Police and protesters 1, Suella Braverman 0 — part 2

Continuing my post from Friday, November 17, much more followed on the Middle East protests in the United Kingdom and on Suella Braverman last week.

Monday, November 13 (cont’d)

Rishi Sunak conducted a major Cabinet reshuffle, which included replacing Suella Braverman with James Cleverly, former Foreign Secretary, as Home Secretary. The other earth-shattering news — I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1 — was bringing back David Cameron as Lord Cameron and putting him in the Foreign Secretary role. More on Cameron to follow this week.

Guido Fawkes has the full list of Rishi’s new appointments.

The Guardian reported that it was Suella’s tone that upset No. 10 (bold in the original there, purple emphases mine):

Downing Street implied Suella Braverman was sacked because of the tone of what she was saying, rather than because of a disagreement over policy. The press secretary said: “[The PM and Braverman] had a professional working relationship. Clearly there were some issues around language. The prime minister said he would use some of the words that she’s used before. Ultimately the prime minister reserves the right to change the team sheet at a point where he sees fit. He felt it was the right time to make some changes to his top team.”

Meanwhile, ordinary Britons following the news were concerned about the continued perception of two-tiered policing of the Middle East protests. This is the police oath. Substitute ‘King’ for ‘Queen’ here:

Interestingly, London’s Metropolitan Police said they were looking for a few suspects disrupting the pro-Palestine protest at Waterloo Station on Remembrance weekend as well as pro-Palestinian supporters carrying offensive posters at the march on Saturday, November 11.

The Revd Giles Fraser, the vicar of St Anne’s in Kew and contributor to UnHerd, wrote an article, ‘Don’t be fooled by the march for peace’:

… good people can also be the problem, providing cover for those who manifestly are not.

… it is the genteel, middle-class, soft-Left, hand-wringing antisemitism — the kind that wouldn’t dream of saying anything crass or extreme — that has been legitimised, has become high-status opinion even, on the streets of London. Do not think that your feel-good liberalism or soft leftism is any sort of prophylactic against your antisemitism. It isn’t.

Perhaps the most chilling thing I have ever read on the Holocaust was Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. First published in 1992, it tells the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a non-ideological group of Germans, many not Nazi party members, just ordinary people, who were persuaded to participate in the extermination of Jews simply from peer conformity and a deference to authority. As Browning challenges the reader in the final chapter, if people like these could end up murdering Jews, who among us could really be so confident that we would have acted differently? The reason we remember is, in part, to remind ourselves of the evil of which we are capable.

Tuesday, November 14

Suella said she would have more to say about her sacking in ‘due course’.

On Tuesday, she sent a three-page letter to Rishi, which some newspapers published in full, including The Express. Excerpts follow:

Dear Prime Minister,

Thank you for your phone call yesterday morning in which you asked me to leave Government. While disappointing, this is for the best …

As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as Home Secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions. Despite you having been rejected by a majority of Party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be Prime Minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities. Those were, among other things:

1. Reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto through, inter alia, reforming the international students route and increasing salary thresholds on work visas;

2. Include specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats, i.e. exclude the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law that had thus far obstructed progress on this issue;

3. Deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable;

I was clear from day one that if you did not wish to leave the ECHR, the way to securely and swiftly deliver our Rwanda partnership would be to block off the ECHR, the HRA and any other obligations which inhibit our ability to remove those with no right to be in the UK. Our deal expressly referenced ‘notwithstanding clauses’ to that effect.

Your rejection of this path was not merely a betrayal of our agreement, but a betrayal of your promise to the nation that you would do “whatever it takes” to stop the boats.

At every stage of litigation I cautioned you and your team against assuming we would win. I repeatedly urged you to take legislative measures that would better secure us against the possibility of defeat. You ignored these arguments. You opted instead for wishful thinking as a comfort blanket to avoid having to make hard choices. This irresponsibility has wasted time and left the country in an impossible position.

If we lose in the Supreme Court, an outcome that I have consistently argued we must be prepared for, you will have wasted a year and an Act of Parliament, only to arrive back at square one. Worse than this, your magical thinking — believing that you can will your way through this without upsetting polite opinion — has meant you have failed to prepare any sort of credible ‘Plan B’. I wrote to you on multiple occasions setting out what a credible Plan B would entail, and making clear that unless you pursue these proposals, in the event of defeat, there is no hope of flights this side of an election. I received no reply from you.

I can only surmise that this is because you have no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people.

If, on the other hand, we win in the Supreme Court, because of the compromises that you insisted on in the Illegal Migration Act, the Government will struggle to deliver our Rwanda partnership in the way that the public expects. The Act is far from secure against legal challenge. People will not be removed as swiftly as I originally proposed. The average claimant will be entitled to months of process, challenge, and appeal. Your insistence that Rule 39 indications are binding in international law – against the views of leading lawyers, as set out in the House of Lords will leave us vulnerable to being thwarted yet again by the Strasbourg Court.

4. Issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.

This was a document with clear terms to which you agreed in October 2022 during your second leadership campaign. I trusted you. It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister.

For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.

You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.

These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.

Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.

Another cause for disappointment – and the context for my recent article in The Times – has been your failure to rise to the challenge posed by the increasingly vicious antisemitism and extremism displayed on our streets since Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of 7th October.

I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion. Britain is at a turning point in our history and faces a threat of radicalisation and extremism in a way not seen for 20 years. I regret to say that your response has been uncertain, weak, and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs. Rather than fully acknowledge the severity of this threat, your team disagreed with me for weeks that the law needed changing.

As on so many other issues, you sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself. In doing so, you have increased the very real risk these marches present to everyone else …

I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.

I will, of course, continue to support the Government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.

Sincerely,

The Supreme Court’s decision on the Rwanda arrangement was due on Wednesday. To date, not one plane with refugees has left the UK for Rwanda.

That evening on his GB News show, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said that he agreed with Suella. The Mail excerpted his Moggologue, as he calls it:

Suella Braverman’s letter is excoriating, I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s part of the sulphurous mood on the Tory backbenches.

Suella Braverman is right – the Prime Minister has repeatedly and manifestly not delivered on his promises.

Tomorrow is a defining day for the question of the Rwanda policy… even if the Government wins tomorrow, owing to the Prime Minister’s concessions, Rwanda deportations will be subject to months of appeals and legal challenges.

Suella was willing to override the ECHR to get Rwanda done. She not only knew the public didn’t want mass migration, but also that it has social and economic consequences.

Sadly, this government no longer seems serious about solving illegal or even legal migration. If the government isn’t careful this will be reflected in the next election.

You can see the Moggologue here, after the adverts and the news at the 3:36 mark:

Before Rees-Mogg’s show was Farage. Reform Party leader Richard Tice hosted the show as Nigel is in Australia on a reality show in the jungle. His guests — The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley, Baroness Hoey, the Mail‘s Sue Reid and Conservative MP John Redwood — largely agreed that Rishi’s policies were not working. Baroness Hoey — Brexiteer and former Labour MP Kate Hoey — had much to say about how the Government had let Northern Ireland down since leaving the EU:

Meanwhile, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, currently an Independent MP, had been denying his support of Hamas. Guido featured two Corbyn interviews.

In one posted at lunchtime, Guido said (red emphases his):

Jeremy Corbyn has been lying to Times Radio and on Piers Morgan Uncensored about his infamous line calling Hamas “friends“. Attempting to rewrite history, he claimed on Times Radio last night that he only referenced Hamas as friends at the event 10 years ago as “they’d gone out of the room and I said in a collegiate way, where has our friend gone? That was all I said.” He again said the same on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Guido has the original video where he says “I’ve also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well…”

Moreover at the same event he claimed specifically that the government labelling Hamas as terrorists was a big historical mistake. It turns out that it was Corbyn making the big historical mistake…

Thanks as ever to @TimesCorbyn for the archive footage.

 Guido posted the second video that evening with the following commentary:

Corbyn continues to be the gift that keeps on giving, this time repeatedly refusing to call Hamas a terror group on Piers Morgan’s TalkTV programme last night appearing with [union official] Len McCluskey (he did accept Hamas were terrorists). CCHQ [Conservative Party HQ] and James Cleverly have already jumped on it. Morgan asked Corbyn 25 times throughout the show whether Hamas are a terror group and 11 times whether they should stay in power in Gaza. An exercise in patience…

The day ended with another excellent Israeli parody of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict — a must-watch. It has English subtitles:

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar׳s exclusive interview on BBC pic.twitter.com/KALi1gNWlH

— ארץ נהדרת (@Eretz_Nehederet) November 14, 2023

Speaking of the BBC, the corporation brushed away any complaints about Match of the Day host Gary Lineker’s spiky online comments to Suella Braverman:

Wednesday, November 15

Suella was on the cover of nearly every newspaper in England. (Scotland has their own editions.)

They referred to her aforementioned three-page letter:

The Supreme Court ruled that the Rwanda arrangement was unsuitable. The Court was unconvinced that Rwanda is a safe country in which to process refugee applications. There is a risk that unsuccessful claimants could be sent to a third country. At Prime Minister’s Question that day, Rishi vowed to clarify any concerns the Supreme Court has about the policy and, where necessary, revise it.

The Times had an article on the immigration crisis, ‘How Suella Braverman’s attacks on PM chime with the working class’:

Had Suella Braverman been in post for the Supreme Court ruling against the government’s Rwandan asylum scheme she would have been appallingly damaged as a politician.

Instead, having been fired, her advance warning of the likely judgment coupled with her brutal argument that prime ministerial indifference led to it have given her a platform she could never have hoped for.

And, worryingly for Rishi Sunak, her criticisms of him and the government read like a focus-group summary from one of England’s angrier towns. In places such as Stoke, Walsall or Wakefield, working-class swing voters talk about small boats in the same exasperated way.

Yet as Braverman anticipated, these voters do not blame “lefty judges” for the crumbling of the Rwanda policy — rather, they roll their eyes at government failure. They doubt that the government has the will to deal with the endless arrival of small boats packed with migrants, and they put a lack of success down to a lack of effort.

More broadly, given that most of these working-class people voted Leave in 2016, they are baffled that the government has not reduced conventional legal migration. “Getting Brexit done” was explicitly about taking control of borders.

On this issue, Braverman’s depiction of Sunak as a politician who does not care about meeting promises rings most true.

Yet there are other criticisms of Sunak that Braverman makes in her letter that will also concern Downing Street: in particular over single-sex spaces and how the government handles protests …

Regarding the protests, working-class anger and irritation are increasing. Although few voters understand the origins of the recent conflict in the Middle East, they know and feel enough to condemn Hamas outright and by name. Initially voters were protective of people’s right to protest, but the resulting mass inconvenience and sporadic violence have changed their views. They increasingly question why the government and the police tolerate it.

In her article in The Times a week ago, Braverman effectively accused the police of double standards. Many agree, but for different reasons. They think the police are excessively tolerant about any protests which are politically driven, whatever the cause. They think the police do not touch anyone waving a vaguely political flag …

Braverman is not well-known enough to lead any sort of movement in the way Nigel Farage could, but she has unquestionably injected arguments into the political bloodstream that will speak to working-class voters, and make the government’s electoral task even more daunting.

Interestingly, that day, The Telegraph published an article by an anonymous civil servant who works in the Home Office, ‘Why my Civil Service colleagues are celebrating Rwanda ruling’:

This week has left my Home Office colleagues celebrating. The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Rwanda plan, Suella Braverman’s exit and the appointment of a new untested minister [James Cleverly] have all uplifted the mood in Marsham Street.

Despite our change in boss, when it comes to controlling Britain’s borders nothing will change. I know this because I have worked for some time as a civil servant on immigration policy, and – in my experience – no priority is further from the Home Office in 2023 than stopping the boats or cutting net migration.

For all her strident bearing, Suella was cringingly apologetic in speeches to Home Office staff. Instead of instilling much needed discipline, she would tell us what a great job we were doing, not that this got her any kind of loyalty. She was mocked and insulted by London-based staff furious at the refusal to extend safe routes to an ever growing number of countries.

Home Office officials have a moral and legal duty to do everything in their power to deliver the Government’s priorities on immigration. Political impartiality is a central tenet of the civil service code, but this has morphed into a culture of “stewardship” …

What this means in practice is accepting the bien pensant view that immigration cannot and should not be controlled, overruling the instructions of ministers and thereby their democratic mandates, with many of my colleagues viewing their role as being part of the resistance to what they see as a radical Right-wing Government determined to ignore the rules to punish innocent migrants. This culture of defiance is so widespread that any suggestion of border controls is sneered at or ignored.

There is widespread understanding that our asylum rules are open to abuse. Any Border Force officer or civil servant who works on asylum policy will tell you this openly. Yet any suggestion that asylum rules be tightened or asylum seekers be refused is rejected out of hand as cold-hearted evil.

If I were to walk into a meeting and suggest reducing migration or ask how we could immediately deport small boat arrivals or foreign criminals, my colleagues might think to ring the many mental health services we are provided to check in on my sanity.

Even the most moderate attempts to do anything about migration are met internally as either unreasonable or not legally possible, with discussion being stopped dead by allusion to “international law” …

The mood is of self-congratulation and there is a refusal to engage let alone learn from the criticism the department receives, unless of course it comes from the Left or from an incredibly expensive commission finding that we are institutionally racist. There is no self-reflection on the fact we have completely failed to fulfil our democratic duty to reduce migration.

When the Rwanda scheme seemed a millimetre closer to happening, staff message boards were filled with comments vowing they will not work on such an evil project. Senior staff always mollify these messages and tell staff not to resign … policies cannot be enacted as they need governance, and the governance needs terms of reference and the terms of reference need to be redrafted and then circulated a few more times before we can hold the first meeting. Many relatively senior officials spend their time dealing with this work, toiling away at things that will never be read or used in an endless round of busywork.

In spite of all this it wouldn’t matter if the Home Office was a finely oiled machine ready and eager to deliver on every possible government priority and determined to protect the UK’s borders. The clear messaging behind closed doors from the Treasury and other departments is that legal migration should be expanded to boost lacklustre economic growth.

For my colleagues, I suspect James Cleverly’s ascension is merely an opportunity to run rings around an inexperienced minister in a new department. And for Britain, our borders will remain uncontrolled.

Meanwhile, a report of a November 11 incident emerged. On a bus in London, a woman launched into an anti-Semitic tirade against McDonalds. If I remember rightly, the restaurant chain sent food to the Israelis shortly after October 7.

GB News reported, complete with photos:

A woman aggressively launched into an antisemitic rant while on a London bus, in a moment captured on camera.

The woman, who has not been named, declared “only Jews eat at McDonald’s” in a violent rant at others onboard.

She was seen in the footage wearing a black bandanna, top, coat, and ripped blue denim jeans.

The footage was taken on Armistice Day in London, the same day 300,000 people marched through central London in a pro-Palestine protest.

A passenger was on board the evening London bus with her husband discussing McDonald’s chips. She claims that she heard someone shout “only Jews eat McDonald’s”.

In the footage, the woman then asks someone: “Are you a Jew?” After spotting she is being filmed by someone on the bus, she takes a swipe at a woman’s phone.

She then directs her anger at another passenger who tried to stop her from walking towards another man.

The woman is heard in the video saying: “Why are you touching me, fam?’ I’ll smash your glasses into your eyes, bro. I’ll smash your glasses into your eyes, bro” …

An eyewitness who took the footage said: “It is not safe to be a Jew in London right now.

“We are experiencing everything that we were warned about as children.”

“This weekend in London, Jewish homes have been graffitied, people had to be escorted by police whilst leaving Synagogue and posters have been waved that would have been proudly held up in 1930s Germany.

“Each bus or train journey becomes increasingly intimidating, making us question if this is a place we can continue to call home.

“To my non-Jewish friends and colleagues – please understand that this is the reality for Jewish people right now. Please do not look away. Please do not stay silent. Please reach out to your Jewish friends, talk to them, listen to them.

“And if and when you witness incidents like this – please, please, speak up. Because despite there being lots of other people on the bus, only one other person confronted her.

“And I was scared. This is a route I take daily, and while I had my husband with me this time, I can’t help but wonder who would stand up for me if I were alone?”

The BBC — the nation’s broadcaster — does not help matters in this regard.

Just before 9:30 that morning, Guido said that the BBC had misreported what was going on at the hospital in Gaza:

BBC News last night stated Reuters were reporting that the IDF in the Shifa Hospital were

“targeting Arab speakers and medical staff”

Shocking if true.

Reuters actually reported:

The Israeli military said on Wednesday: “We can confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies brought by IDF tanks from Israel have successfully reached the Shifa hospital. Our medical teams and Arabic speaking soldiers are on the ground to ensure that these supplies reach those in need.”

The BBC twisting the story to paint Israel in the worst possible light. This is beyond propaganda, it is demonstrably reporting incompetence driven by credulous BBC reporters ready to believe the worst of Israel.

Guido had a follow-up later that morning, as BBC News apologised for the erroneous and damaging report:

Just in from the BBC following Guido’s report earlier. The BBC have issued an on air apology for their false reporting about the IDF’s actions inside Gaza’s main Shifa hospital this morning. A BBC News presenter has just said:

“An apology from the BBC…we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted. This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report.”

They should wear their reading glasses next time…

Indeed.

But the week was far from over.

More to follow tomorrow.