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Although Tom Kerridge is not one of my favourite chefs, today’s Guardian features an interview with him, ‘”I’ve never known fear like it”: Tom Kerridge on booze, bad-boy chefs and the crisis for pubs and restaurants’.
It’s a pity the paper did not allow readers’ comments.
The people I know who have eaten at Kerridge’s Home Counties restaurants say they are ridiculously overpriced for what one receives. I can believe it. People I do not know have written that he does not pay his staff well.
2025: will hospitality survive?
Kerridge, who has a bob or two (allegedly a multi-millionaire) but still flaunts his air of faux bonhomie, told The Guardian a lot of old stories, admittedly by request of the interviewer, and gave his opinion on the current dismal state of the hospitality sector. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
With pubs and restaurants in a precarious position, Kerridge gives his verdict, beginning with the Labour government:
“I think they’re a six out of 10,” he says. “Listen, they’ve walked into something that’s incredibly difficult. Everything is broken. And global issues don’t help. But I sometimes wish they were a little bit more brutally honest about what needs to be done in terms of tax rises or how they’re going to do it. And I worry that not many of the members of the cabinet have run businesses themselves. So, like, the national insurance increase [from April employers have had to pay NI at 15% on salaries above £5,000, up from 13.8% on salaries above £9,100] was, I think, slightly ill thought out. For hospitality, healthcare, construction, where there’s a lot of lower-paid salaries, it makes a big difference.”
So if Kerridge was prime minister, what would he do? He barely pauses before answering: “A reduction in VAT. That’s a very difficult conversation to have when you’re trying to raise money into the Treasury, but it would keep places alive rather than closing. It would encourage growth long term. That and having another look at the NI raise would make a huge difference” …
There are no easy answers, he admits. “There’s no cavalry coming over the hill to save us. And to be honest, I’ve never known fear like it. But hospitality is very fluid. You can adapt, you can change. If I wanted to put something on the menu tonight, I could do it. You can use social media and can create a buzz. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 20 years, it’s that eventually things will change” …
Is it a customer’s responsibility to spend big? Kerridge sees both sides. Imagine you do 100 covers a night, he says. Plenty of your costs remain the same, but if everyone is spending £35 per head rather than £50 it’s going to make a huge difference in terms of revenue. “You need people to spend for it to become a viable business. But again, this is another reflection on society and people not having enough money.”
Kerridge describes the sort of person who makes a career in hospitality:
Kitchens, says Kerridge, have always attracted people who like to live outside society’s norms: “Slightly more left-field-thinking people that don’t conform to a nine-to-five job, who are more artistic, or maybe neurodiverse, who aren’t so worried about working nights and weekends.”
Often it’s a haven for people who maybe didn’t fit in at school and crave a sense of belonging like Kerridge once did. “It’s not always the coolest kids with the smart hair. It doesn’t matter about nationality, colour, race, religion, sexuality, economic background. You come in, you work hard, you show a skill set, you’re in. That’s it. It’s a wonderful place to have found.”
He discusses how he cares for his staff:
It’s really all about the people for Kerridge, the social side. That’s what gives him faith that hospitality will survive, even though the industry faces unprecedented challenges.
At the Hand & Flowers they have a wall of honour – anyone who does two years with them gets their name on a plaque. “That’s a pretty big commitment in such a transient industry,” reasons Kerridge. If you do a decade, Kerridge gives you a luxury watch. Earlier, head chef Jamie May had flashed me his while he tended the grills. “Ten years in a company is a massive part of someone’s life,” says Kerridge. I tell him I don’t remember receiving a glitzy timepiece after 10 years at the Guardian and he immediately looks sad again, like I’ve just turned down another coffee. “Did you not?” he says softly.
Kerridge describes his workplaces as “a socialist space” where everyone is of equal importance. “A pot washer, that’s the beating heart, that’s the engineering, because a chef can’t work without pans. Housekeeping is vital … because if they forget to make a bedroom up and a guest walks into a messy room, that now puts a huge amount of pressure on the rest of the business because we have to look after those guests in a completely new way” …
You might assume that someone as successful as Kerridge is riding through the current hospitality storm relatively unscathed, but he shakes his head at that. “We have six sites and I would say three operate at a very minor profit, two just about break even, and one’s losing a lot of money. It’s a constant battle of spinning plates and moving money to keep it bubbling along.” When I spoke to May earlier, he said the turbulence in the industry meant it was impossible to predict how each shift would pan out. “I prepare every day like I’m going into war,” he said, but that doesn’t mean armies of punters will show up at the gates.
The overall state of the nation, he says, is one of the biggest problems he faces: staff struggling with the cost of living, rents going up, delayed treatments. “Marlow isn’t cheap. We have staff houses to provide spaces for staff to live in. We also have gym memberships for everybody. We try to make sure we’re not just feeding them boiled pasta every day. We look after the staff because their world is very, very hard right now.”
That sets the tone for the rest of this post.
2014: the rise of the British brasserie
In his January 13, 2014 Guardian article about the demise of ‘snooty waiters’, Jay Rayner, who now writes restaurant reviews for FT Weekend, noted the change in British restaurants:
It may be too soon to announce of the death of that awful phrase, “fine dining” … But the claim by chef Mark Sargeant that the recession may have been “one of the best things to happen to the dining scene in the UK” because it forced the restaurant industry to look at the way it serves people, makes an awful lot of sense. Only last week Marcus Wareing announced he was ripping up his two-Michelin-starred dining room at the Berkeley hotel to create something more brasserie than waiter-frottage friendly. He wants service to be less French, and more high-end American. Starched tablecloths are disappearing – gone already from the dining rooms of Tom Aikens and Simon Rogan – along with the straitjacket of bowtie and DJ.
Indeed.
And that move has brought with it rather unfortunate developments: noisy restaurants, amplified by hardwood floors and ceilings with no acoustics, not to mention the proliferation of music everywhere. Why, oh, why? All of that ruins what Raymond Blanc in a BBC documentary called ‘a form of Holy Communion … You have the bread and the wine’ and, he added, good conversation with friends or family gathered around the table.
The prices remain the same as they would have done had the napery and soft furnishings to muffle noise stayed put.
I’ll return to this downpost.
2016: what restaurants must stop doing
Exactly two years later, Rayner wrote ‘The 12 things that restaurants must stop doing in 2016’ (bold in the original):
Please stop taking my order without a notebook. I don’t know you. I don’t know whether you are Francesco the Famous Memory Man, or were … on crystal meth and can now barely recall your own name. I don’t trust you to remember what I ordered. Write it down.
All restaurants must install big enough tables to accommodate their small-plate-sharing menus. The small plates menu was your idea, not mine …
And while we’re at it, please stop sending dishes out “when they’re ready”. I am tired of not being able to remember if everything I ordered has been delivered … It’s convenient for the kitchen. It’s not convenient for me. Stop it.
Apparently, there was a trend at the time to serve granola on top of main dishes; that, rightly, had to stop. Rayner also doesn’t like unsalted butter.
His list of requests continued:
Also, please sort out the lighting. I am old. I dislike having to power up the torch on my phone to read the menu.
What is it with taking the bread plate away at the end of the starters? No restaurateur has ever explained to me why that happens, but still you do it … Oh, and put salt and pepper on the table. Who do you think you are? …
Please stop putting the pages of wine lists inside plastic sleeves. It’s cheap and feels nasty. How much does it cost to reprint them? And list bottles in price order from cheapest upwards. I love learning about the wines of the world, but not when I’m knackered and just want a sodding drink. I don’t like having to hunt for something in my budget. And if I tell you I’ll fill the wine glass myself I mean it. Tell your colleagues so I don’t have to keep repeating myself. Don’t you dare move my bottle to a table at the far end of the room. It’s mine. I paid for it. I’ll do with it as I like. And finally, don’t you ever, ever, ever again give the bill to the only person on the table who happens to possess testicles. You have no idea who’s paying for dinner. Put the bill in the middle of that table and walk away.
I agree with most of those, although I’m less upset about wine lists inside plastic sleeves. That said, the question is, ‘Do staff give those a wipe to get rid of everyone’s germs?’ I wonder. Plastic is a great medium for growing bacteria.
2019: music in restaurants
On December 5, 2019, The Guardian‘s Elle Hunt shared her research on music in restaurants, ‘”Death metal rarely works”: how restaurateurs choose the perfect dinner playlist’.
My heart sank when I read it, although seeing ‘death metal rarely works’ was a brief consolation:
… At a time when streaming services suggest playlists by setting and mood, and music supervisors for film and TV are looked to for indications of the next big hit, there has never been greater awareness of the power of music to enhance a scene. Yet it is equally as capable of detracting from one – and this is often most evident when dining out …
Over the past 15 years or so, an entire industry has emerged to help companies reflect – or even construct – their brand identity. “The earlier we get in there, the better,” says Mikey Vettraino of MAV Music Supervision.
Vettraino founded the music consultancy in 2004 after overseeing the introduction of music to the members’ club Soho House, where he was then operations manager. Since then, the company has assembled a global portfolio of more than 500 clients, including Wagamama, the O2 Arena and Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat in Mayfair.
Vettraino says the music consultant serves as “blind DJ”: “You’re playlisting a song that’s going to come on, and you don’t know what the atmosphere is.” The company’s approach is to come up with a few playlists to suit different times of the day, each sonically cohesive enough to be put on shuffle (and about four or five times the length that it will play for, to avoid too much repetition – for the staff’s sake).
Song choice is informed by a back-and-forth with the client of representative songs, soundtrack snippets and moodboards. (Genres are considered to be essentially meaningless.) For example, Wagamama’s brief was to appeal to a twentysomething, urban woman, interpreted by MAV’s head of music and operations Alex Hill as … – “the very accessible side of alternative pop”.
Hill says … “Death metal, or minimal techno, isn’t going to work 99 times out of 100.” There are also technical considerations, such as whether a song has been overplayed or whether an explicit song has a clean version, as well as disruptive outros and intros, guitar solos and spoken-word breaks to navigate. Most crucial for the service industries are the peaks and troughs throughout the day, week or seasons (MAV typically updates clients’ playlists quarterly).
After the lunch rush at Wagamama, for example, the soundtrack becomes softer and more atmospheric to take the edge off the experience of dining in a fairly empty restaurant. “You don’t want your banging-est playlist on when the restaurant’s empty and there’s one guy sat there,” says Hill.
Conversely, Wagamama’s new “grab and go” lunch spot Mamago requested high-energy, fast-paced music to encourage turnover. (Hotels are known to do the same to encourage guests not to linger at the buffet.) Music’s influence on staff productivity and customer spend was established by research dating back to the early 80s.
When the soundtrack and dining experience are in harmony, it can become a key part of an establishment’s reputation. Vettraino says that MAV’s playlists have cropped up in several restaurant reviews.
Diners’ requests to know the name of the song playing can suggest a burgeoning credibility with music lovers. Part of the appeal of Shoreditch street food market Dinerama (where MAV playlists have replaced live DJs) is the chance of hearing an obscure song or remix you like enough to look up on Shazam, says Hill.
Really?
Oh, my. I must be getting old.
Some restaurateurs insist on death metal or something equally thumping:
Black Axe Mangal in north London is as often referenced for its blaring soundtrack of metal and grunge – Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age, Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe – as it is for its kebabs. “What’s the point in making it innocuous? You may as well not play it,” says its founder, Lee Tiernan, bluntly.
The thinking behind the polarising playlist is the same as the genitalia graffitied on the floor, he says – “I just know the people I want to attract. I think Jay Rayner said it best in that it’s not for everyone, but if you’re into it, you’re really into it.”
In that sense, the music at Black Axe Mangal is as much a part of it as the food, says Tiernan – although, these days, hard rock has given way to more UK grime and US rappers such as Action Bronson, Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean. “You can almost guarantee it’s going to be loud.”
Ugh.
2020: lockdown offers a chance to explain restaurant prices
During the lockdowns, Jay Rayner kept his column going and discussed various aspects of hospitality as well as classic cookbooks.
Early on, in April 2020, he asked ‘What makes a restaurant a classic?’
Readers reflected on the cost of dining in ‘classic’ restaurants.
Three comments on this topic are of interest. I have not edited them.
This is the first, from a man who runs a pub/restaurant with a small inn. His and his wife’s business survived lockdown:
I can help a little with this one, I’m going to change some of the prices to make it a bit simpler but should help hopefully, my pie is £17 and comes with the expected mash, veg, gravy
In our imaginary restaurant, let’s call it Rayner’s, the pie sells for £20, the first thing we need to do is take off the 20% VAT for the taxman leaving us with £16.67
The ingredients for my pie come to £3.68 but as this is a bit more expensive let’s call it £4, leaving us with £12.67 (so around a 75% GP)
Labour is the next big cost and to keep it simple we’re going to assume that our restaurant takes 50% of its money in food and 50% in drink, whilst a total labour percentage would sit around the 20-25% mark (depending on the level of service and sales); kitchens are always a bit more expensive so we’ll say the kitchen wage percentage is 30% so £3.85 taking us down to £8.82
Then you’ve got your controllable costs, this covers everything from utilities to equipment, repairs, scheduled servicing, statutory cleaning, refuse collections, recorded music, glasses, plates napkins etc, let’s round this up to about 20% (and then we’ll cut it in half as half is going to the wet sales, though it’s probably more than half for the food part) and call it 10% leaving us with £7.14
(Let’s not forget as well that these are our budgeted costs, a major repair or replacement, an unexpected down turn in trade, a temporary closure, is going to cost us more and take the % higher)
Now we come to non controllable costs, basically rates, rent and depreciation; let’s say rates of about 5% and then rent can be anything between 20 & 30 percent so let’s say in total they come to 30% (we’ll split it in half again to 15%) so £2.17
That leaves us with an imaginary profit on that dish of £4.97 so we’ll call it £5 which means you need to decide if you think that’s an acceptable amount of profit for our restaurant to make? Let’s not forget as well if we want to do a refurbishment, give the place a paint, buy some new tables, maybe extend a little that’s all coming out of that pot as well.
Hope this helps, as I said at the start there is a bit of over simplication in this (rents, rates, labour cost can vary hugely between businesses) but should give you a rough idea.
He added another comment:
There’s plenty of people that don’t think £20 for a pie is reasonable believe me!
I don’t know too many chains with £40 mains on but when you start to get into serious fine dining and Michelin starred restaurants, you also have to think about economies of scale, when I went to Restaurant Gordon Ramsay the final bill was about £500 for the 2 of us (on the 7 course tasting menu) however it had probably 60 covers max, with no attempt at table turning and a member of staff for each customer (not including a fully staffed kitchen probably doing a 12 hour shift for a 5 hour service) On an average Sunday we probably serve 600 people (not including just the drinkers)
That’s not to say that some places aren’t overpriced, clearly they are but I thoroughly enjoyed that meal and felt it was worth every penny for a special occasion, this is when we get into the cost versus value argument
Trust me though nothing annoys me more than places charging high prices and not delivering on that crucial value for money aspect of the quality and service, always happy to see them get the Rayner treatment here
The third comment came from a former restaurant manager:
Very roughly speaking, from every £100 restaurant revenue (net of VAT)
£30 – labour cost
£20 – cost of food & beverage
£20 – Fixed overheads (inc rent/rates)
£15 – Variable overheads
Often there will be further exceptional costs depending on the nature of the business. Also wise to provide for the inevitable refurb every 5-10 years.
These proportions will vary depending on sector/service model/location etc, but are a broad guide.
So theoretically restaurants can make a net profit of about 10 – 15%, but in reality often achieve half that or less, as many internal and external factors affect revenue and costs, and are hard to predict.
Unless costs are very tightly managed and the proposition is compelling enough to keep seats filled every day, most will struggle to make any money at all.
(N.B. – by way of some justification, my career was in restaurant management, some parts more successful than others!)
2020: lockdown lifts, Rayner’s culinary paean to London
One of Rayner’s first reviews after the first lockdown lifted in July 2020 was of Kolamba, a Sri Lankan restaurant in the heart of the capital.
He introduced it with a terrific culinary paean to London:
For those of us who live in cities, one of the most dislocating things about the lockdown was the way it forced us to live in villages. Londoners often talk about the way the capital forms into small neighbourhoods, each akin to a village. We say these things to dispel the notion that it’s a cruel, disorientating sprawl where nobody knows your name. And it’s true. I can tell you a lot about the community that lives in the south London streets I’ve called home these past three decades.
But when I give this speech I am also protesting too much. If I wanted to live in a village, I’d move to one. I live in London’s sprawl for a reason. I love my neighbourhood, but I also crave the noise and clamour beyond it – the one that others who don’t live here might find disorientating. I have a figurative hunger for the rush and clutter of languages and cultures, and a literal hunger for the food. It’s a simple way by which to begin understanding a community.
I love the jerk restaurants of Brixton where I live, where the air always smells of smoke and spice rub and time. I adore the ocakbaşi kebab houses in north London’s Green Lanes, the heart of the Turkish community, where intense men tend to the serious business of turning skewers of the good stuff over smouldering coals. There are the Middle Eastern cafés along the Edgware Road, and the Vietnamese places in Shoreditch and the Portuguese bars that throng South Lambeth Road. This is what makes cities so beguiling.
A mark of that: when the government announced it was now OK to drive wherever you wished to take exercise, a lot of people motored off to woodlands to stroll among the bluebells. Me? I bagged a Zipcar and drove to Soho to check that, like some Brigadoon, London hadn’t disappeared in the Covid mist. The bricks and mortar were still there, but the city wasn’t, not quite. For cities are made by their people and at that point it was like something out of I Am Legend, only without the portentous underscore, the mutants or the wild dogs.
Which is what made an evening at the Sri Lankan restaurant Kolamba on Kingly Street so thrilling. This restaurant drag, just back from Regent Street, wasn’t thronging with the masses, and quite right, too. But there was life here of a particular kind. It was a reminder that London, like so many of our great towns and cities, is only the sum of its people, so many of whom started elsewhere. Here was a team of those people seemingly thrilled to be back doing what they’d only started doing last summer when Kolamba first opened. Mostly, there was a menu of punchy, elbow-in-the-ribs dishes, which can transport you elsewhere. The food draws on the domestic culture of the founders, first-time restaurateurs Eroshan and Aushi Meewella, who grew up in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. Or, as they say in Sinhalese, Kolamba.
2021: vegan becomes cattle rancher
On August 30, 2021, The Guardian profiled an American vegan who became a cattle rancher, Nicolette Hahn Niman:
After refusing to eat meat for 33 years, Nicolette Hahn Niman bit tentatively into a beefburger two years ago. She had become a vegetarian because she was concerned about animal welfare and the environmental cost of meat. Unlike most vegetarians, she had experience of the dire conditions on factory farms during her career as an environmental lawyer campaigning against pollution caused by industrial meat production in the US. Then she married a farmer.
Hahn Niman’s journey from vegetarian activist to cattle rancher to writing a book called Defending Beef may be driven by love, but it is also informed by a lawyerly desire to stick up for small farmers besieged by the growing ethical and environmental clamour against meat. The burger turned out to be an unexpectedly delicious brief pleasure, but it was the 18 years working on the ranch alongside the man who grilled it – and raised the cow – her husband, Bill Niman, that inspired her.
Hahn Niman was raised in semi-rural Michigan and was working in New York as an environmental lawyer for Robert F Kennedy Jr when she fell in love with a farmer. Kennedy Jr’s charity, Waterkeeper Alliance, was seeking to stop livestock farmers from polluting water bodies with slurry, and Hahn Niman began working with farmers who were doing the right thing, including her future husband. When the couple met for coffee in Central Park, “I just realised, wow, this is a really handsome man, in addition to his work that I admire,” she says, on a video call from her farm kitchen. When she moved from New York to the Pacific coast to be with Niman on the rough, arid terrain of his 1,000-acre ranch, she planned to continue as a lawyer.
“I began doing small tasks around the ranch and I discovered I loved it,” she says. “I said to Bill: ‘I’d like to work on the ranch.’ And he was shocked. I was still vegetarian at the time, and he was like: ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t think you’d want to be a rancher.’
Her book, Defending Beef, is an antidote to activists who say cattle are destroying the planet as are the humans who eat them:
Many environmentally aware people believe that if they are still eating beef they probably shouldn’t be. Fuelled by the popular Netflix film, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, there has been a backlash against the meat …
Hahn Niman’s time rebutting the claims made in Cowspiracy includes debating with one of the film’s directors in San Francisco. “It was really shocking because I’ve never sat next to someone who knew less about agriculture in my life,” she says.
Hahn Niman puts forth her case:
Hahn Niman’s argument is summarised by a slogan T-shirt she likes to wear: “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.” A cow is not an innate eco-devil, but how they are farmed is often fiendishly damaging. She does not defend grazing on obliterated rainforests, but joins other influential farmer-writers such as Gabe Brown, Charles Massy, Simon Fairlie, and the controversial, iconoclastic ecologist-grazier Allan Savory, in proposing a better kind of cattle farming. If cows are freed from barns and feedlots – the cramped dirt pens in the US where they are fed grain – and allowed to roam and eat diverse natural grasses and shrubs as their wild ancestors did, they can restore soils, enhance natural diversity and help capture carbon. Cows, she believes, can engineer healthier ecosystems, and healthy grass-fed animals provide meat with measurable health benefits over factory-farmed stuff.
On that note, hats off to British beef farmers, who do raise grass-feed cows.
Furthermore, not all terrain is arable:
For instance, her own ranch has rough, dry ground and Mediterranean-style weather; they cannot grow crops there. So the Nimans are converting arid grassland into sustenance where no other human food could be produced.
… As the innovative Australian farmer Charles Massy puts it, says Hahn Niman, “Natural landscapes have a way of functioning. And in modern agriculture and modern human life we tend to ignore what that functionality looks like – where there should be watercourses, grasslands, forests.” We need to “create agricultural systems that work with the natural land function, rather than just ploughing it and doing whatever we want,” she argues. Where grasslands occur naturally and have been grazed by wild herbivores for millennia, farming with nature is grazing cattle.
… “I’ve learned from living here for 18 years that even one part of our ranch is incredibly different from another. What you should do on the land is radically specific to that place. I am convinced that grazing, when done well, is probably beneficial everywhere. But to legitimately quantify how much [carbon] benefit you’re going to get globally – I actually don’t think that can be done.”
… Hahn Niman points out that naturalistic grazing does not mean meat would be only for the rich because many poor people graze livestock this way already. “We need to have food bear its full cost,” she says. “Cheap food is not the answer – we need to make good food available for everyone.”
Interestingly, she had to forgo a plant-based diet — both vegan and vegetarian — for health reasons:
Her own return to meat-eating was driven by health concerns as she turned 50, including a diagnosis of osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis. She cites research showing how livestock will deliberately graze plants to address specific health issues (another reason to allow animals to graze naturally) and believes that humans have the same kind of innate “nutritional wisdom,” as Fred Provenza argues in his book, Nourishment …
Hahn Niman may have remained a vegetarian for many years after she became a cattle rancher, but after returning to meat she now eats it daily. “When I started eating meat again, I was reconnecting with my whole upbringing, my culture and the foods that I’ve grown up with,” she says. “I’ve felt physically and emotionally good. It’s been surprising how much joy that has brought me.”
Food for thought.
Favourite nostalgic dinners at home
And, finally, we come to our supermarket favourites from childhood and young adulthood.
In March 2014, Jay Rayner wrote about food we would have to have on hand in case of nuclear armageddon:
With the dank, fetid winds of manmade climate change blowing our way and worries over Russian military ambitions there has been much talk of Armageddon. And I have to say, it doesn’t look like much fun … Post the apocalypse, what will be on the menu?
I was given cause to think about this by the news that 20,000 crop samples from more than 100 nations have recently been deposited in a “doomsday vault” in the Norwegian Arctic Circle … for those of us left alive, the ones who have managed to trudge our way north, it will be a hideous disappointment. We’ll force open the blast doors of the global food repository only to find what amounts to a warehouse full of muesli.
That will never do. It will merely make us feel gloomier. We will need something properly sustaining. We will need comfort food. I’ve thought long and hard about what the UK section of the repository might look like, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it needs to be things that remind us exactly who we, as a nation, are. We must abandon any notion of ourselves as sophisticated cosmopolitan types with a taste for pot au feu and Iberico ham. We will need to go back to basics.
For a start we will need crateloads of bacon. By which I mean the cheap stuff that leaks white phlegm when you fry it. We will need house bricks of cheap sugary white bread, and barrels of brown sauce. Post the apocalypse we are going to be gagging for bacon sandwiches, of the sort drunk students make when they get home after a night on the Strongbow. The cheap bacon sandwich is the “in case of emergencies break glass” of comfort food.
After that we can get a little bit more exotic and nuanced. Obviously that means Findus crispy pancakes, and in particular the chicken curry flavour: a crisp breaded shell the colour of Sunny Delight; sweet-salty gunk inside. What’s not to like? There’s a temptation to supplement that with Pot Noodles. I can see that there’s a convenience point here. They do only require a kettle. But we need to be a little more ambitious, which means only one thing: Vesta instant chow mein. As a child, one of those made most things better.
Finally we will need dessert. There’s only one contender: Angel Delight. Butterscotch flavour. You may have other candidates for the post-Armageddon comfort food repository and I’d love to know what they are, but I think I’m on the right track. For here is the truth. Only by knowing exactly who we are can we hope to rebuild. Only by going back to basics can we start again. And anyway, as everybody knows, a cheap bacon sandwich is the solution to everything, including the end of the world.
In March, I covered where we can buy blancmange and Angel Delight.
Now I can reveal that you can buy Vesta meals at Morrisons and from the world’s favourite online retailer.
Go on, you know you want to! Experience Vesta once more!
Could supermarket comfort food from a box be more satisfying than a £500 lunch for two at Tom Kerridge’s Hand & Flowers in Marlow? I bet it is.
A number of traditionally Labour-voting or ‘Anyone-but-Conservative’ constituencies went True Blue in the last general election in 2019, when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister.
The day after his party’s ‘stonking’ victory, as Tom Harwood put it, Johnson recognised that those Labour votes were ‘on loan’ and that the Conservatives would do their best in Government to look after those voters’ interests.
However, it did not turn out that way, and the term Red Wall is rarely mentioned as we are but one week away from the next general election on Thursday, July 4, 2024.
Where did it go wrong?
Immigration
As early as September 7, 2020, just as we were coming out for a short breather from the pandemic, The Conservative Woman posted ‘Red Wall voters reject Johnson’s immigration plans’ (purple emphases mine):
MUCH has been written about Boris Johnson’s capture of the ‘Red Wall’ vote in the last election. Most important is that this support was on loan, and could be withdrawn at any time. Tory loyalism is hard to find in these traditionally Labour-held seats, and voters are just as likely not to bother voting at all as they are to vote Conservative again.
As has been the case in most of our recent political engagements, a major factor is immigration. Should patriotic, social conservative voters come to suspect that the rhetoric touted by the ‘Conservatives’ at the end of 2019 was empty, the party will have trouble winning them back.
A Migration Watch UK press release today provides insight into which way support for the Tories in these electorally significant ‘Red Wall’ seats might be heading. Working with Deltapoll, the think tank has found that voters in these constituencies oppose three key elements of Tory proposals on work-based migration by at least two to one.
The government plans to ‘suspend’ its cap on the number of foreign workers entering Britain, a decision opposed by 55 per cent of Red Wallers. Indeed, 72 per cent believe there should be strict controls on immigration by non-UK workers, especially in light of the economy-killing lockdown.
‘This poll is a wake-up call for the government,’ says Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK. ‘They cannot ignore such a clear rejection of key parts of their immigration plans by a majority of Red Wall voters.’
How are the Tories likely to respond? Their handling of the illegal Channel crossings, characterised by tough rhetoric and soft action, leaves much to be desired, and suggests that Boris Johnson is unwilling to fulfil the promises he was elected on. It seems likely that, instead of taking a firm stance on immigration, and prioritising British workers for British jobs, the Prime Minister will continue to say what he thinks we want to hear, whilst acting in his usual liberal manner.
Polls such as this highlight the high demand for patriotic policy-making rather than meaningless words. The latter can keep Johnson’s conservative mask affixed for only so long …
However, that cap on the number of foreign workers entering Britain legally would not be the big immigration issue for Red Wall constituencies. Many of those places found that the Government, through third parties, seconded their best hotels to house Channel migrants coming over in small boats.
This report from The Telegraph‘s Steven Edginton in December 2022 shows voters’ disappointment with such arrangements in Crewe, beginning at the 4:36 mark. One Brexit voter told him that the borders seem more open than ever:
Better rail links
Another pipe dream was the promise of better rail links across the north of England, particularly between there and the Midlands.
Former Chancellor George Osborne promised these over a decade ago when he touted the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.
Boris Johnson promised ‘levelling up’, which included the same pipe dream.
However, the plan — High Speed 2 (HS2) — began with Labour in 2009. It was part of an EU plan to have high speed rail in every member country.
Fair enough. Unfortunately, in the ensuing years, the cost overruns were enormous.
On November 14, 2021, The Sunday Times reported that plans were already being overhauled:
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, who is expected to announce the outcome of the Integrated Rail Plan on Thursday, is likely to face heavy criticism for the decision to drop the HS2 line east of the Pennines on the 120-mile stretch from Birmingham to Leeds.
But one Whitehall source said the reconfigured plans, with £96 billion of additional funds, will deliver many of the promised benefits without having to wait until the 2040s. “We’re looking at the same journey times as the original HS2 proposals but 10 years sooner. Lots of stations aren’t well connected to particular cities — we’re going to make sure stations are all properly connected to local transport networks.”
The cartoon accompanying the article says it all, with a railway employee telling a commuter:
It’ll halve the time it takes to get you to the replacement bus service.
We move now to Wikipedia’s article on HS2.
The Sunday Times article concerned the Integrated Rail Plan.
The length of the new railway has been reduced substantially since it was first announced in 2013. It was originally to split into eastern and western branches north of Birmingham Interchange. The eastern branch would have connected to the Midland Main Line and East Coast Main Line south of York, with a branch to a terminus in Leeds, and the western branch would have had connections to the West Coast Main Line at Crewe and south of Wigan, and a branch to a terminus in Manchester. Between November 2021 and October 2023 the project was progressively cut until only the London to Handsacre and Birmingham section remained.
In 2019, the Government commissioned civil engineer Douglas Oakervee to independently review the project. The Department for Transport (DfT) published the Oakervee Review in February 2020:
Oakervee’s conclusions were that the original rationale for High Speed 2—to provide capacity and reliability on the rail network—was still valid, and that no “shovel-ready” interventions existed that could be deployed within the timeframe of the project. As a consequence, Oakervee recommended that the project go ahead as planned, subject to a series of further recommendations. After concluding that the project should proceed, the review recommended a further review of HS2 that would be undertaken by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and would concentrate on reducing costs and over-specification.[21]
In July 2023, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority published its findings, giving:
Phases 1 and 2A project a “red” rating, meaning “Successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.” Measures such as reducing the speed of trains and their frequency, and general cost-cutting predominately affecting Phase 2b, would be assessed.
This year:
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, in a January 2024 report, in relation to the revised planned route, stated that:
“HS2 now offers very poor value for money to the taxpayer, and the Department [for Transport] and HS2 Ltd do not yet know what it expects the final benefits of the programme to be”.[23]
This report was clarified to mean following the cancellation of Phase 2.[24]
Wales is also affected, as HS2 was billed as an ‘England and Wales’ project, yet, none of the lines was to run through the principality.
This has drawn criticism from all parties in the Welsh Senedd (as recently as this month, broadcast on BBC Parliament):
HS2’s classification as an England and Wales project has been heavily criticised by MPs[243] and Welsh Government ministers in Wales, arguing that HS2’s classification over Wales gives little benefit or any reasoning, as there is no dedicated high-speed or conventional infrastructure of HS2 planned in Wales, minimal HS2 services to the north of Wales, and a Department for Transport study detailing that, overall, HS2 is forecasted to have a “negative economic impact on Wales“, as well as on Bristol in England.
As rail infrastructure is not devolved to Wales, it means that devolved authorities are entitled to less of the Barnett Formula, when funding is increased to the devolved administrations in proportion to an increase in funding for England or, in this case, England and Wales. The Welsh Government has stated that it wants its “fair share” from HS2’s billions in funding, which the Welsh Government stated would be roughly £5 billion.[244] By February 2020, the Welsh government received £755 million in HS2-linked funding, with the UK Government stating it was “investing record amounts in Wales’ railway infrastructure” and that the Welsh government has actually received a “significant uplift” in Barnett-based funding due to the UK Government’s increased funding of HS2.[245] Simon Hart, Secretary of State for Wales, stated that Network Rail would invest £1.5 billion in Wales’ railways between 2019 and 2024.[89]
Currently, trains between north Wales and London take roughly three hours and forty-five minutes, with HS2 set to decrease the travel time between Crewe and London by thirty minutes. However, with no confirmed services directly between Euston and north Wales, passengers could be required to change at Crewe, and use the North Wales Main Line between Crewe and Holyhead, where any improvements have failed to receive funding.[89]
Red Wall: early adopters of Liz Truss
Just days after the announcement about the revised Integrated Rail Plan, an unrelated development occurred.
On November 27, 2021, the Mail reported, ‘Red Wall Tories set up WhatsApp group called “Liz for Leader”‘:
Tory MPs have set up a phone messaging group to carry out secret plotting to install Foreign Secretary Liz Truss as party leader.
Members of the WhatsApp group – which is called ‘Liz for Leader’ and dominated by new MPs from the Red Wall seats formerly held by Labour – have been exhorting colleagues to rebel against Boris Johnson on issues such as the Government’s social care reforms and the Prime Minister’s doomed decision to defend Owen Paterson over sleaze allegations.
Mr Johnson’s recent political difficulties have seen his approval ratings tumble – while Ms Truss remains the darling of Tory Party members, who will be instrumental in electing the next leader.
A source said: ‘The 2019 intake, particularly the Red Wallers, are disenchanted with Boris, especially over migrants and high taxes.
‘They don’t think he has a Right-wing bone in his body and believe Liz would be more faithful to traditional Conservative values.’
It comes after Ms Truss removed a key aide over claims that he had been ‘aggressively’ agitating for her to succeed Mr Johnson by sounding out colleagues about her chances.
By early 2022, Boris was quickly losing his grip on the Red Wall. At that point, Partygate was in full flow, having started in December 2021. The Conservatives’ polling was beginning to suffer.
On February 27 that year, The Times reported:
They would … surrender 55 of the 65 “red wall” constituencies in the north that contributed to Johnson’s landslide win in 2019. Blyth Valley, Redcar, Sedgefield, North West Durham, Bassetlaw, Great Grimsby and Ashfield would swing to Labour. Of the 107 Conservative MPs elected for the first time nationwide in 2019, 70 would lose their seats.
The JL Partners poll of 4,500 people and the seat projection was conducted by James Johnson, Theresa May’s former pollster. It put Labour on 45 per cent of the vote, 13 points ahead of the Conservatives on 32 per cent, with the Lib Dems on 11 per cent — enough to win 16 seats, five more than last time.
Red Wall constituents also saw that Boris’s levelling up plans, more about which below, were not working. On May 31, The Telegraph reported:
Boris Johnson has been accused of failing in his “defining mission” to level up Britain after official data showed a growing economic gulf between London and much of the Red Wall.
GDP in the capital surged by 2.3pc in the third quarter of 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), driving overall UK output higher despite a 1.2pc slump in the North East.
Regional data published by the stats body also showed GDP falling in the West Midlands, East Midlands and East of England – all areas the Prime Minister has pledged to “level up” as part of his efforts to address regional inequality.
Andy Preston, the independent mayor of Middlesbrough, said the figures suggested that Mr Johnson’s plans for growth outside the capital were just empty rhetoric.
He said: “Nobody seems to be able to explain what it is that’s going to happen. What levelling up should mean is that people and communities and places realise that potential.
“What we’ve got clearly, and these stats bear it out, is the scale of the challenge requires a lot more than slogans and little bits of money. It really requires a concerted, focused effort in the medium term.”
Later that summer, Conservative Party members elected Liz Truss as Party leader over Rishi Sunak. Unfortunately, she became our shortest-serving Prime Minister. Now there was a story.
Rishi was elected Party leader solely by MPs in an effort to expedite matters. He never connected with the Red Wall, nor did he wish to do so.
Levelling up
On September 4, 2022, The Sunday Times reported on how levelling up was — and was not — working in Stoke-on-Trent, home to the historic Potteries:
“Levelling up — what’s that?” asks Anne Beckett, pausing for an ice cream outside the Potteries shopping centre in Stoke-on-Trent.
Her answer is actually a few hundred metres away, where a disused bus station is slowly being converted into a £20 million, 3,600-seat music arena. Yet Beckett, 76, a former teacher — enjoying the sun with her sister Linda, 73 – has never heard of it.
The sisters, lifelong Labour voters, switched to the Tories for the first time in 2019. Even if they cannot name Boris Johnson’s flagship policy, they voted blue out of a sense that Stoke-on-Trent had been “left behind” by a succession of Labour MPs.
Stoke, local Tories like to say, is the “litmus test” for the Johnson project. It won £56 million from the first round of levelling-up funding, more than any other local authority; Birmingham, a city four times as large, received £4 million less.
That is because all of the 2019 Stoke MPs were Red Wall MPs:
Its three Conservative MPs have been bullish in lobbying for grants in Westminster, earning them the nickname “Stoke mafia” among ministers. Critics scream this is “pork-barrel” politics in action. “We work bloody hard,” retorts Jo Gideon, MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. “The role of all MPs is to make the case for your area.”
Continuing on to the Truss-Sunak leadership contest:
The charm offensive continues: the whole cabinet came here in May, followed by the Tory leadership hustings in July, during which Liz Truss name-dropped local confectioner Walker’s Toffee. But both candidates have been largely silent on “levelling up”. Some ministers have whispered that the slogan may be axed. As its architect leaves office, does levelling up have a future — and can the red wall Tories survive without it?
Levelling up crept into the party’s 2019 manifesto, a loosely defined pledge to use “Brexit freedoms” to build prosperity and strengthen every part of the country. Polling by More in Common, a think tank, found that 57 per cent of 2019 Tory voters thought the government was initially committed to it.
Yet it took more than two years for the government to spell out exactly what that policy might mean. Now, the numbers who believe in the government’s levelling-up commitment have plunged to 32 per cent.
Stoke remains a city in limbo between the riches of its past and its promised future. In the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, the Staffordshire Hoard — the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork found — hints of the kingdom of Mercia’s former glories.
Another Stoke resident, Roy Greaves, 89, told The Sunday Times:
“I’d knock down most of it! Look at it,” he says, sitting on a bench in Hanley, the city centre. “Nearly half of the shops are empty, the rest aren’t doing proper business. They can’t bring any new investment in as there’s nobody around who buys anything. People just come in to have a bite to eat, then go home and watch television.”
Even though Stoke-on-Trent is in the West Midlands, a productive part of England, the prospects of its residents are unenviable:
The average person in Britain gets nearly 63 years of “healthy” life; in Stoke it is 55. Children here fall behind before they even reach secondary school, with some of the lowest primary literacy and maths performances in the country. By GCSEs, children are still performing well below average.
Disposable household income is £15,455, 28 per cent below the national average of £21,433. Twenty-four people a day die of smoking-related illnesses in the city.
As with other Red Wall constituencies, Stokies, as they refer to themselves, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, particularly in Gideon’s constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central:
In 2016, 69.4 per cent of her city voted to leave the EU, earning it the media accolade of Britain’s Brexit capital. A desire to deliver levelling up is tied up in that vote, Gideon says. “There was a sense that we hadn’t taken back control for a very long time because nothing had happened here.” After what she calls “decades of neglect” by her Labour predecessors, it will cost “billions and billions” to solve — but there “needs to be a sense of starting to sort things out”.
As with all regeneration projects, particularly urban ones, immediate progress is not always visible or viable:
In Stoke, aside from a few cranes, change in the town is hard to spot. A total of £31.7 million is being spent on transforming bus services — but that funding, Gideon says, will not arrive until the spring. Meanwhile, the bus company has been cancelling services. Up to 500 Home Office jobs will move here too, but not until the mid-2020s.
Most of the £56 million levelling-up fund will be spent on vast capital projects, regenerating the city’s industrial factories and warehouses. As well as Etruscan Square in Hanley — the largest city centre development in the West Midlands, which will include the indoor arena — the council wants to develop an old goods yard into a “micro neighbourhood” of flats.
These developments will undoubtedly bring in people and investment, but they are not stirring the hearts of the residents. “I’d put in a few more coffee bars instead,” says lorry driver Clive Hallmark, pointing at the empty shops. “Give people places to meet rather than just hanging around” …
Another crucial factor is opportunity. To David Harrop, 33, levelling up is “just something to satisfy the general discourse”. Harrop, a warehouse worker and aspiring author, didn’t vote in 2019, but might consider it if someone tried to transform the local workforce. “I’d like a real concerted effort to introduce some training and allow people to diversify. You have to be so adaptable in this labour market,” he said.
Harrop says most of the jobs available are still in distribution — a far cry, he says, from the proud industrial roles of the past.
The article concludes, asking:
Will a new music venue and some flats be enough to win again?
What of Labour’s chances?
The media have covered very little of the Red Wall constituencies this year.
Polls show Labour leading the Conservatives, but how many Red Wall voters have given their opinion on him?
A poll from July 27, 2023, shows that they disliked Keir Starmer. Guido Fawkes had the story (red emphases and italics his):
Keir Starmer has achieved net zero before even entering government. According to Redfield & Wilton, the Labour leader now has a net approval rating of 0% in the Red Wall, the lowest level since September last year…
Approve: 34% (-1)
Disapprove: 34% (+4)
Net: 0% (-5)
However, Labour was no longer at net zero some months later.
On January 12, 2024, Guido told us that two of Shaun Bailey’s local West Bromwich West councillors in Sandwell loathed him so much, they moved from the Conservative Party to Labour. However, Bailey believed that Sandwell council was poorly governed:
West Bromwich West MP Shaun Bailey … launched a petition last October to abolish his local council of Sandwell thanks to its poor governance. It looks like the councillors got the message…
LATEST SEAT PREDICTION: WEST BROMWICH WEST
LAB GAIN FROM CON @Shaun4WBW
MAJ: 17.5%
[UKPR Default] https://t.co/8OBLY2dXS4 pic.twitter.com/2x0CAKOoIt
— UK Polling Report (@PollingReportUK) November 11, 2023
Bailey’s not too popular with Tory councillors in the area. Guido hears two, both of whom happen to be chairman and deputy chairman of the local Conservative association, are defecting to Labour thanks to their hatred for Bailey. Councillors David Bilkes and Archer Williams are also taking the best wards with them as they go. Guido’s not sure that’s quite the look Bailey will want to go for heading into an election year – he holds Betty Boothroyd’s old seat with a majority of only 3,799. Especially as much of election campaign funding comes from the association…
On March 21, Guido reported that Bailey’s constituency office was boarded up:
If the wall is crumbling, there will be signs. West Bromwich MP Shaun Bailey has boarded up his office and upped sticks. A week after locals and association members began to notice the now-bare office on Whitehall Road in Great Bridge, Bailey published a video saying he was “moving”, though no one knows where to. That would have made sense last year, not 6 months from an election…
Guido hears from friends that Bailey knows he’s not going to win and is preparing, along with many other Tory MPs, for life after. He’s already working on getting a law degree. Boarding up won’t lead to much love lost with local Tories – the chairman and deputy of his local Conservative association defected to Labour in January…
UPDATE: Guido is informed the “grand opening” of Shaun’s new office is coming imminently.
Hmm. I wonder.
Today, I clicked on the video link which is Bailey’s Facebook page. It says (bold in the original):
When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people or changed who can see it, or it’s been deleted.
Not a good look for an MP running for re-election.
Oddly, Labour championed levelling up on March 28. I remember several debates in which Labour MPs chided the Conservatives because no one in the Red Wall constituencies knew what the term meant.
Guido told us about the Party’s volte face:
An op-ed popped up in The Times this morning by Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer praising Boris Johnson no less – and endorsing his flagship policy of levelling up. It’s certainly a change of tune. Rayner previously slammed Boris as a ‘pound shop Trump’ while Starmer said he ‘loathed’ the former Tory leader…
Labour’s top team write:
The Tories started to understand this with the levelling-up white paper. Much of the analysis in it was good. And there were parts that talked a good game about how Britain needed to build up all parts of the country. But the policy was killed at birth by the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who refused to back it…
It’s an accusation that Johnson himself has made against Sunak, who repeatedly blocked spending plans for the north of England, and who was caught on camera at a Tory event boasting that he had “undone” plans which “shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas”. It looks like Labour’s blueprint to regain the red wall will be a copy and paste job of the 2019 Tory plan…
Goodness knows if this is still a Labour talking point. As I say, no one in the media is covering the Red Wall, not even Guido to any meaningful extent.
—————————————————————————————————————————
We’ll find out on Friday, July 5, how well 2019 voters stayed with the Conservatives or reverted to Labour — or even turned to Reform.
Red Wall: we hardly knew ye. RIP 2024.
Dehenna Davison was one of the rising stars of the 2019 Conservative MP intake.
Unfortunately, she is not standing for re-election.
Amazingly, she was the first Conservative to win in the northern — County Durham — constituency of Bishop Auckland, created in 1885. Until her victory, only Liberal (forerunners of the Liberal Democrats) and Labour candidates represented that constituency, never a Conservative.
We found out early on that ‘Dehenna’ rhymes with ‘Vienna’.
Why she ran
Four days before the election, on December 8, 2019, the Mail published a profile of Davison, which included a photo of her with then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s girlfriend — now wife — Carrie Symonds on the hustings (campaign trail).
The article told us of her tragic circumstances growing up (purple emphases mine):
The poster girl for Boris Johnson‘s Election assault on Labour’s heartland has spoken in detail about the family tragedy that now guides her politics.
Dehenna Davison was just 13 when she learned her father Dominic had been killed by a single blow to the head in the pub.
Ms Davison, a Tory hopeful in a Co Durham seat which has never elected a Conservative MP, recalled how she sat in a hospital waiting room as doctors battled for 45 minutes to save her father’s life.
‘I can still picture it. I can tell you what the colour the walls were and everything,’ she said. ‘They [the doctors] stopped and I went to see my dad’s body, which is not something you expect to do at such a young age.’
Later on:
She recalled the trauma of attending every day of the resulting murder trial – and her lasting bitterness that the alleged attacker was found not guilty.
‘It gave me a very clear sense of injustice,’ she said. ‘I grew up overnight, literally overnight.’ At 16, she was representing ‘myself, my mum and my nan’ at a criminal injuries compensation tribunal. Even almost 13 years on, Ms Davison puts her real life experience age at 45 – not 26.
Since 2019, she has wanted a ‘one-punch law’ to be enacted, which would find perpetrators who caused the death of someone in that way guilty of murder. I am not sure that she has achieved that in the way that she envisaged. Although the Conservative government has toughened up sentencing in general through new legislation, this week, news reports have circulated wherein judges are asking for mitigating circumstances to be taken into account.
Returning to the Mail, we discovered more about her background:
She studied politics at Hull University and spent a year as an aide to [veteran Conservative MP] Jacob Rees-Mogg. Ms Davison, who has received support on the campaign trail from Mr Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds, said politics was about helping people ‘get their benefits claim through, getting a pothole filled’.
The former computer game shop worker admitted the ‘poster girl thing’ was probably due to her tragic backstory and her ‘slightly unusual demographics’. But she added: ‘I just want to get stuff done.’
Reality television marriage
After the election, reality television aficionados no doubt thought that Davison’s face looked familiar.
On December 14, two days after she was elected as an MP, The Sun told us:
A YOUNG woman, whose relationship with a man 35 years older than her was explored on a reality TV show, has been elected as an MP.
Dehenna Davison, 26, stood as the Conservative candidate for former Labour-stronghold Bishop Aukland – just a year after starring in Channel 4 programme Bride & Prejudice with now-husband John Fareham …
Dehenna was studying politics at Hull University when she met John, a Conservative councillor.
They fell for one another while out campaigning in Kingston upon Hull North, where she stood as a candidate in 2015.
John proposed to Dehenna – who also once worked as a parliamentary aide for Jacob Rees-Mogg – in 2015, but they still had to convince her grandfather Paul, eight years older than her other half, to support their relationship.
In the TV show, Dehenna and John, who was 59 when the programme aired, sought his approval for their marriage.
“Age doesn’t matter if two people really care about each other,” the future MP told the camera.
John added: “I had asked her before, but she told me to ask her properly.
“At my age, going down on one knee was going to be a bit tricky. It wasn’t the going down, it was the getting back up again.”
When the show aired, viewers rushed to give the couple their blessing – and criticised Paul’s unhappiness at the union.
One person wrote: “She’s 24 let her decide who to marry” …
The article included her election victory tweet, dedicated to her family:
Grandfather Paul was right.
Just ten days after the election — on December 22, 2019 — HullLive reported that the marriage was in tatters:
A new Tory MP, who studied and married in Hull, has split from her councillor husband, it has been confirmed.
Dehenna Davison married Bricknell ward councillor John Fareham in 2018 but, in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday, she confirmed the news.
Cllr Fareham and Ms Davison appeared together on Channel 4 show Bride and Prejudice last year, which documented the couple’s push for acceptance from her grandfather, before they tied the knot.
The show picked the pair as one of six couples as Dehenna, then 24, was 35 years younger than John, 59, who was similar in age to her grandfather.
However, their relationship has since come to an end, according to the interview released this weekend.
Activity outside of Parliament
It wasn’t long before the left-wing Hope Not Hate activists targeted the loveliest of new MPs.
On Valentine’s Day 2020, The Guardian reported:
Calls have been made for an investigation after photographs emerged linking a newly elected Tory MP with two alleged far-right activists.
Dehenna Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland and a prominent member of the party’s new contingent of northern representatives, was pictured holding a County Durham flag with Andrew Foster, a man described by anti-racism campaigners as a “Muslim-hating extremist of the very worst kind”.
The images, revealed following an investigation by the campaign group Hope Not Hate show the MP with Foster at a party celebrating Brexit in a pub on 31 January. At the same event she was also pictured with Colin Raine, a former Tory activist banned from the party after allegations that he was behind a far-right protest and made Islamophobic comments online. Raine has denied that he has any far-right links.
Davison, 26, sought to distance herself from any links with the two men. “These photos were taken at an event open to the public and I in no way whatsoever condone the views highlighted of the individuals concerned,” she said in a statement …
On March 4, 2020, Guido Fawkes posted a photo of a selfie that a glamorous Davison took of fellow Conservative MP Matt Vickers and — oddly enough — then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the Kebab Awards (yes, it’s an annual event). Perhaps she wanted Corbyn in shot to counter the Hope Not Hate smear?
On April 16 that year, nearly a month into lockdown, The Mirror reported that Davison posted a video of herself on TikTok, to which the defeated Labour incumbent Helen Goodman objected:
A Tory MP has been branded ‘self-indulgent’ for posting a sweary rap video video in which she appears to complain the coronavirus lockdown has left her bored.
Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison posted a TikTok clip, lip-synching to “Bored in the House” by rapper Tyga.
The clip shows her doing her washing, talking to her self in the mirror pouring a large glass of red wine and rapping “I’m bored in the mother f***in’ in the house bored”.
But the former Labour MP who Ms Davison replaced in December said she’s been left to answer queries from Ms Davison’s constituents, who can’t get an answer from their MP.
Ex-MP Helen Goodman said she was “shocked and horrified” by the video …
Ms Davison, 26, has since deleted the video.
She told the Mirror: “This was nothing more than adding to light-hearted content being produced by millions to stay positive during this lockdown.
“We should be celebrating the actions of 3.6 million people staying safe during lockdown rather than belittling them for keeping themselves and others entertained whilst following government guidance to stay home, protect our NHS and save lives.”
Ms Davison said the 3.6 million figure referred to the number of TikTok users who had made videos using the same song …
On September 7, when life with coronavirus was returning to normal in England, Davison wrote a pro-Brexit and pro-Boris editorial for The Sun:
… Knocking on doors during the election last year, three resounding messages on Brexit were clear: 1 – let’s just get on with it. 2 – Boris is the man to deliver it. 3 – we need to stand up to Brussels.
Now as talks reach the final furlong, more than ever, we need to remember that third message.
The Brussels bully boys will only blink if they recognise equivalent displays of strength from UK negotiators.
That is why I was so pleased to see the Prime Minister set out a definite deadline of October 15 for negotiations to be concluded or we will walk away.
We needn’t be afraid.
Whether we leave with or without a deal, Brexit marks the start of a bright future for Britain.
A future where we are free to strike our own trade deals, manage our own borders, make our own laws, and where we open our arms to the world as a truly global Britain …
In April 2021, Guido Fawkes told us that Davison was one of 40 MPs to join the think tank IEA’s Free Market Forum. Davison was one of the co-chairs of the group along with fellow Conservative MP Greg Smith.
Other members included future Prime Minister Liz Truss, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel and future Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
GB News began broadcasting in June 2021. Davison was a presenter on the new channel’s Sunday morning current events show The Political Correction along with Nigel Farage, blue Labour activist Paul Embery and, occasionally, the former DUP party leader — now Dame and Baroness — Arlene Foster.
On Monday, October 11, she gave an interview to fellow GB News presenter Gloria de Piero, a former Labour MP, in the series The Real Me, in which MPs featured:
In the interview, Davison revealed her bisexuality to de Piero, which generated a few news articles in response.
GB News recapped it:
Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is not a big deal and “just part of who I am …
“If anyone were to explicitly ask me, I certainly wouldn’t try and hide it because I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of.
“The reason I haven’t done a kind of ‘By the way, guys’ is because I don’t want being bi to be considered a big deal.
“If I did a very public kind of coming out parade, that would be me saying there’s something really unusual about this and trying to make a big deal of it when to me it’s not. It’s just part of who I am.”
She also spoke about her divorce and the future. By then, she was in a new romantic relationship — with a man:
“It’s going really well, and I’m very excited about it. But we’ll see, the future is a very exciting place.”
In 2018, Miss Davison appeared in the Channel 4 programme Bride And Prejudice, which showed the then 24-year-old marrying John Fareham, a Conservative councillor who is 35 years her senior.
In a tweet on Sunday evening, she added: “Really overwhelmed by the outpouring of love this evening. Thank you so much for your support.”
The Mail had more soundbites about her sexuality:
Conservative MP Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is just ‘part of who I am’ as she came out publicly as bisexual today …
In an interview on GB News, set to be broadcast today, Ms Davison said: ‘I’ve known that I’m bisexual for quite a lot of years. All my close friends and family know’ …
On October 12, the Mail reported on the hate she received on social media.
The Telegraph‘s chief political correspondent Christopher Hope, who now works for GB News, included her political insight:
In the interview, she described the shock of learning that her father, Dominic, had been killed by a single blow “in the side of the neck” when she was just 13 …
Her father’s assailant pleaded self-defence and was not convicted of the assault, she said. She has set up an all-party parliamentary group on one-punch assaults to see whether more needs to be done for victims and on sentencing assailants.
Not having been raised in a political family, Miss Davison said she had “genuinely thought growing up that Winston Churchill was a Labour prime minister”.
She admitted that she occasionally thought about leading the Tory party, adding: “You kind of fantasise and see who’s in at the moment and you think, ‘maybe this is something that I could do’ – but would I like to?
“The upside is you get a chance to really try and shape the country and try and make it better, which is what we all get into politics to do anyway. And what better way than by leading a party and potentially going on to lead the country? But I think there are so many downsides too. I mean, that complete invasion into your personal life.
“It’s hard enough being a backbench MP… and I’m just not really sure whether that’s something that I’d really want to do. And certainly I wouldn’t want that pressure put on my family.”
Once Boris Johnson’s Partygate became a regular feature in parliamentary debates, Davison was accused of being part of the Pork Pie Plot — said to have originated with the Conservative MP representing the home of pork pies, Melton Mowbray — to oust him as Prime Minister.
On February 4 2022, the Mail told us of Davison’s latest relationship, again with a man.
As to her divorce from John Fareham, the article stated:
It is not clear whether that divorce is complete.
We discovered an interim relationship from 2021:
Last May she informed parliamentary officials she was in a relationship with Ahzaz Chowdhury, 35, a parliamentary lobbyist. She later announced that the five-week relationship had ended.
The article told us about her latest — and current — relationship, complete with photos:
A prominent MP is having an affair with a dashing but married diplomat likened to James Bond …
… the Mail can now reveal the 28-year-old is in a relationship with Tony Kay, 49, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Office.
Awarded an OBE for his work during the Arab Spring uprising, the father of two has been deputy ambassador to Israel and once threw a fancy-dress screening of a Bond film for hundreds of official guests.
His latest post is as head of the Arabian peninsula department at the Foreign Office.
His affair with Miss Davison is potentially sensitive given his high-profile position. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Middle East minister James Cleverly have been informed about the relationship, a source said.
On Wednesday Miss Davison and Mr Kay were seen walking hand in hand down a quiet street on the south side of the Thames in London. They then walked to Waterloo station where they embraced and kissed for several minutes before he caught a train.
It is believed he was travelling to the million-pound house he and his 47-year-old wife bought three years ago in Ascot, Berkshire …
Apparently, everyone who needed to know knew:
It is believed that Mr Kay and Miss Davison met in July 2019 when she was in a small group of prospective parliamentary candidates on a Conservative Friends of Israel trip. The group visited Gaza and the West Bank.
The pair have been growing closer ever since and he has moved into her expenses-funded home.
A Whitehall source said: ‘The relationship between Dehenna and Tony hasn’t been going on since they met in 2019 – it’s six months. His wife has known for half a year, the kids know, the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss knows, James Cleverley knows, his line manager knows, the permanent secretary knows.
‘He’s done absolutely everything by the book, and kept his line manager informed throughout. He’s going through a divorce process with his wife, he’s still married.
‘It’s not entirely unreasonable for him still to be going to the family home, but his marriage is over. Dehenna’s flat is her flat, and she’s entitled to have whoever she wants in her flat.’
A few days later, on February 12, The Times Magazine did a big splash interview with glamorous photos of Davison in retro-1960s clothes asking if she was the future of the Conservative Party.
Janice Turner, the interviewer, wrote:
Before we met, I’d assumed a 28-year-old MP who got married on reality TV, shares a GB News sofa with Nigel Farage and posts TikTok videos plucking her eyebrows to Taylor Swift’s …Ready For It? might well be a showboating lightweight of no fixed political abode. Instead I’m surprised to find Mrs Thatcher’s granddaughter: a serious operator, with well-honed conservative views, fluency, ambition and drive. I doubt Dee, as her friends call her, is going anywhere except up the slippery Tory pole.
‘Dee’ denied being part of the aforementioned Pork Pie Plot. Instead, she gave a lot of credit to Boris and Carrie:
So what was her involvement in a plot? The red wall MPs, she says, held a secret ballot about whether to put in letters calling for Boris Johnson to resign. Has she? “No.” Is she tempted? “I honestly don’t know.”
… Davison says her view hasn’t changed. “What matters… is the PM really gets a grip of No 10 and over policy, to make sure we are delivering for people in the red wall.” In other words, she is sitting tight to see which way the wind blows.
Yet Davison acknowledges she owes her victory in large part to Johnson. “It wasn’t just Brexit. He does have this incredible charisma,” she says. “You know, there aren’t many party leaders you can take to a beachfront in Hartlepool and people stop every four steps for selfies and to shake his hand. That’s a rock-star politician, something you don’t see very often at all.”
But she’s also equally indebted to his wife. In 2019, Carrie Johnson contacted her, saying she wanted to support female candidates and could she campaign in Bishop Auckland. “And I said, ‘Yes, I would absolutely love that.’ And we got messaging a bit through the election; she’d check in to see how I was doing. When I was down in London for some work stuff, I visited her. My first time in No 10, actually, was to go and see Carrie and the dog.”
There’s also a 2019 campaign photo of her, Carrie, Dilyn the dog — and none other than Rishi Sunak MP.
Davison, an only child, admitted to be an annoyingly good student in school:
It’s clear why Carrie Johnson would take Davison under her wing: young Tory women are scarce. Mrs Johnson, the arch-political strategist, must have considered this attractive, TV-ready working-class girl from a Sheffield council estate and thought the party had struck gold. What better vision of modern conservatism than the only child of a stonemason and a nursery nurse, who was so bright that her teacher, Mrs Burton, insisted she apply to the private Sheffield High School. “I had a really inquisitive mind. I always wanted to race to the end of the work so I could do more, learn more. I was one of those really annoying kids.”
The family worried that she’d win a place and they wouldn’t be able to afford to send her. But Mrs Burton even offered to pay the fee for the entrance exam, so insistent was she that Dee would win a scholarship. Which she did.
Davison, who was in the catchment for one of the city’s worst-performing comprehensives, believes private school changed her life. “I don’t think I’d be here [in parliament] today. Absolutely not. And one of the greatest things about an all-girls school is there was never a second when I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a woman. It was really: ‘If you work hard, you can do it.’ ”
The article revealed that Davison’s divorce was still going through, even though the Mail alleged that she and Tony Kay — now Tony Kay OBE, no less — were living together. John Fareham was either a member of or a guest at three of London’s most prestigious private men’s clubs:
… Davison did the most unfathomable thing: she married a Hull Conservative councillor, John Fareham, who at 59 was 35 years her senior. (“We went clubbing my style, to the Carlton, the Athenaeum and the Garrick,” he said.) And she did so on a reality TV show, Bride & Prejudice, about couples who face family opposition. Davison’s grandfather is shown weeping miserably before he gives her away. Does she regret the show? “I don’t think there’s much point regretting it because it’s happened. But, yes.”
Amateur psychologists might suggest she was looking for a father figure: “Oh, I get the daddy issues trope all the time.” Her marriage is a closed chapter, she says: her divorce is still going through. She’s now seeing a 49-year-old diplomat, Tony Kay, a Middle East expert with the Foreign Office, who is also getting divorced from the mother of his two children.
The Times Magazine‘s Janice Turner concluded:
Whether she keeps her seat or not, she’s clearly in the party for the long haul. When [Labour’s Deputy Leader] Angela Rayner called Conservative voters “scum” [in the House of Commons], Dehenna Davison wore and gave away “Tory Scum” badges. “I wanted to reclaim the narrative. If they’re going to call us scum, I’d rather embrace it.”
Well, one could only wonder at the time.
Nine months later, on November 25, Guido Fawkes gave us the answer. By then, Boris had been forced to resign, as had Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak was the Prime Minister, by fiat from Conservative MPs.
Red emphases Guido’s:
The Tories’ 2019 poster girl, Dehenna Davison, has announced she’s to stand down as an MP after just one term. Dehenna won her seat of Bishop Auckland in 2019, with a swing of 9.5%. However after a meagre five years in the Commons, Davison is to depart at the next election. The third Tory MP to announce they’re doing so…
Davison explains the reason she’s departing:
For my whole adult life, I’ve dedicated the vast majority of my time to politics, and to help make people’s lives better. But, to be frank, it has meant I haven’t had anything like a normal life for a twenty-something.
Dehenna is the third Tory MP to make such an announcement, after Chloe Smith and Will Wragg. It’s not like they’re leaving a sinking ship. At 25 points behind Labour, they’re on the ocean floor …
Guido added an update to say that Davison was the eighth Conservative MP to announce there would be no run for re-election.
The Telegraph reminded us that Davison had had a ministerial role at that point, so was no longer on the backbenches. Having watched her on BBC Parliament, I can say that she did very well at the despatch box:
Tory rising star Dehenna Davison has become the latest MP to announce she will stand down at the next election.
The Levelling-up Minister, who is only 29, made history in 2019 by becoming Bishop Auckland’s first Conservative MP.
The article also gave us more of her resignation statement:
I will always be humbled to have had the opportunity to serve as a Member of Parliament. But now the time feels right for me to devote more of my attention to life outside politics – mainly to my family and helping support them as they’ve helped support me.
That’s why I won’t be standing in the next general election.
On September 18, 2023, Guido reported that Davison resigned as Levelling-up Minister because of chronic migraines, an ailment she had not had before:
Dehenna Davison has resigned as Levelling Up Minister this afternoon, citing health reasons in her letter to Rishi Sunak. Davison had already announced she will stand down at the next election, though she has decided to step back a year or so early owing to chronic migraines:
Unfortunately, for some time now I have been battling with chronic migraine, which has had a great impact on my ability to carry out the role. Some days I’m fine, but on others it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with the demands of ministerial life – and the timing of such days is never predictable. Though I have tried to mitigate, and am grateful to colleagues for their patience at times, I don’t feel it is right to continue in the role. At such a critical time for levelling up, I believe the people of communities like mine, and across the country, deserve a minister who can give the job the energy it needs. I regret that I no longer can. And, as my capacity is currently diminished, it feels right to focus it on my constituents, and on promoting conservatism from the backbenches.
Davison was the government’s youngest Minister, and only joined the Commons benches in 2019. She’s done the full MP lifecycle in record time…
That was an excellent observation from Guido.
Another competent Red Wall MP, Jacob Young, replaced Davison.
As we are well into 2024 and awaiting Rishi Sunak’s date for the general election, MPs from all parties wish the agony of waiting would end soon.
On March 17, The Observer, weekend edition of The Guardian published interviews with several MPs who discussed their eagerness for an election date to be called and gave their thoughts on what life in Parliament was like. Dehenna Davison was one of them:
In her office, Dehenna Davison curls her legs beneath her on a sofa, seemingly oblivious to the whopping great Dr Martens on the end of them. “Colleagues keep saying: ‘You’re counting down the days,’” she tells me. “But we don’t know how many days are left.”
The article delved deeper into what she thought about the House of Commons.
She said:
There have been moments when the abuse has been so vile. There’s definitely an element of misogyny.
She has received hateful online messages. Even though she had worked as Rees-Mogg’s intern and thought she knew what went on in Westminster, she realised that the reality of being an MP was something quite different:
Dehenna Davison’s office is in a building whose long, rather desolate corridors resemble those of a three-star hotel, and it’s so small: as we talk, our knees are practically touching. She seems very young – she’s sipping a drink via a straw from a huge, multicoloured plastic cup – and if not vulnerable, exactly, then like someone who hasn’t had the easiest time since she won Bishop Auckland just over four years ago (for the 84 years before her election in 2019, the town had always had a Labour MP). She took the decision not to stand again in part because she felt that by devoting her 20s to politics, she’d missed out on “normal adult life”. But the longer she talks, the more obvious it becomes that the bigger factor by far may be the abuse she receives online.
“You have to have a thick skin to go into parliament,” she says. “And I’ve always argued that the internet is a great thing. But the level of abuse online is something I never anticipated. There have been moments when it has been so vile. I’m not talking about policy stuff. We’re always going to have people who disagree with us; that’s legitimate. It’s the personal attacks [that are upsetting]. There’s definitely an element of misogyny there. When I posted a memorial to my father who passed away in 2007 [he died after being punched in a pub], I got one message that said: ‘I bet he’d be turning in his grave, knowing you’re a Tory.’ Another one said: ‘You’re such a slut, I bet he’s looking down, and seeing all the disgusting things you’re doing – though maybe he likes that.’” One troll received a police caution, having posted 100 messages online in 24 hours. Another, she says, is subject to a restraining order. What support does parliament offer in this situation? She laughs. “When I was elected, I sat down with the police. They gave me some general advice: not to be controversial, and not to post in real time where I am.”
Davison wasn’t intimidated when she arrived: she’d been an intern in Westminster, and knew her way around. But her status as a rising young star who’d won a seemingly impossible seat made things difficult at times.
“I got a lot of media attention, which I hadn’t sought. I think my colleagues thought my motivation was the limelight. It became very isolating as time went on, hearing indirectly what people had been saying about me, all the backbiting.”
Like her colleague Charles Walker, she likes the division lobby: the chance to brush shoulders with cabinet ministers and even the prime minister. But the system of whipping leaves a lot to be desired. “When I was elected, my whip asked me in for a chat. His first question was whether I wanted to be prime minister.” Was he trying to weaponise her ambition? She nods. “You know that [if you rebel] you’re putting down a marker against yourself getting any kind of future promotion.” When she once voted against a government motion, a male politician “stood too close to me, being quite aggressive”.
Davison insists the Tories can hang on to Bishop Auckland, and that a lot can change electorally in six months: “Don’t believe everything the polls say.” But about the future of the party, she sounds less certain – especially if there is a Labour rout. “Then there’ll have to be some soul searching. It will be interesting to see who’s left, and in what direction that takes us. I’ve a suspicion the membership would want to see a move towards the right, a more authoritarian approach. Whether that’s the right thing in this age, I can’t say. I find myself economically pretty rightwing, but socially I’m very liberal, so I wouldn’t want to see us doing a massive shift to the right.” She smiles. “But you know, by that point, I’ll be just another [Conservative Party] member…”
She slurps on her straw. Her heart, I sense, is already elsewhere.
I think so, too.
My far better half said that some of the 2019 Red Wall MPs never expected to be elected. Perhaps Dehenna Davison is one of them.
The latest we heard from her was in a Point of Order in Parliament on March 18, when Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner and a few other Labour MPs visited Bishop Auckland without letting her know. All MPs going to another’s constituency in a public capacity must advise the sitting MP of their visit before it happens.
Guido had the story and the video:
Guido wrote, reminding us of Rayner’s current controversy over her living arrangements some years ago, which could, at the very least, involve a tax liability:
It looks like Angela Rayner is forgetting the rules. Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison has asked in the Commons why Rayner, along with four other Labour MPs, parked up in her constituency unannounced to launch the Labour candidate for North East Mayor’s campaign. Anything to avoid a media interview…
The Commons Rules of Behaviour are clear – if an MP wants to visit a constituency of another “all reasonable efforts should be taken to notify the other Member“. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle weighed in to tick off rule-breaking MPs. Maybe Rayner was too tied up in domestic matters to remember the rules…
In any event, valete, Dee. It was nice knowing you, if only off the telly and in the papers.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the world is going down the plughole.
However, an illuminating survey from Our World In Data shows that this is not so. The organisation’s survey, which covers the years from 1820 to 2019, illustrates ‘The World as 100 People’. I found it elsewhere online and felt duty bound to share it. Note that the world’s population has increased seven-fold during that time, from 1.1 billion to 7.7 billion people. Click here for an enlarged version:
This is worth sharing with family and friends, especially children, who are panicked at school and worried about an apocalyptic future.
Also worth noting is Newsweek‘s 2024 Future Possibilities Index which places the United Kingdom at the top of the list of countries best placed to succeed in the coming years. Denmark comes second and the United States comes third. Click here for an enlarged version:
Admittedly, Newsweek‘s survey is along the lines of ‘building back better’, but it covers six economic criteria for success — Exabyte (high tech), Wellbeing, Net Zero, Circular, Bio Growth and Experience.
It is 61 pages long but comes with an executive summary at the beginning.
It is well worth reading, as it is something to be happy about in the doldrums of winter. Enjoy!
After the vote on the Rwanda bill on Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Conservative MP David Davis rescued a homeless man from a vicious assault near the Houses of Parliament.
Not only that, but the MP also gave him a bed for the night in his own flat.
The Evening Standard‘s Londoner’s Diary reported (emphases mine):
The drama didn’t end for one MP after the tense Rwanda vote in the Commons last night. David Davis, Conservative MP, former Brexit secretary and SAS reservist, was on his way home when he got into a fight with two hooligans on Great Peter Street near Parliament. The pair were chasing a rough sleeper, whom they beat to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the head, an eyewitness to Davis’s heroism told The Londoner.
“These two guys were kicking seven bells out of him,” Davis told us. He stepped in and placed himself between the victim and the pair. A scuffle ensued with the mo[re] violent of the two.
“About 35 years ago, somebody got kicked in the head and he died. Ever since, if I see something like that happening, I intervene,” he said. Davis passed the gruelling SAS selection process more than 40 years ago. Did he deploy some of his old training last night? “Only to stop them from hitting me, really. I’m not always so successful when following my rule. I have broken my nose and a few teeth in the past, but this time it was ok.”
After seeing off the two attackers, Davis took the victim, named Gareth, back to his Westminster flat and cleaned up his injuries. “I gave him a sofa for the night and took him to A&E this morning. He was still bleeding,” said Davis. “It’s fortunately nothing permanent other than a few scars, I think. He was a bit faint this morning which made getting him to A&E a bit difficult.”
“It was messy, but he’s all right. He’s still alive and that’s the important thing”. Not all heroes wear capes?
The Express also carried the story and added what Davis told the BBC about the incident:
The 74-year-old former Brexit secretary said the man was so “badly beaten up” that he let him stay in his home on his sofa overnight to recover, he told the BBC.
However, the victim was still bleeding in the morning so Mr Davis rushed him to A&E.
The MP for Haltemprice and Howden told PA: “I had to get between them, be very aggressive, one of them took a couple of swings at me and I had to deal with that, slightly manhandle him.
“I didn’t hit them, if you hit them you’ve got to hit them really hard and you might kill them, so I tried not to get into that, otherwise I’d be talking from a prison cell.
“I was basically being very aggressive, one of them started to back away and one of them, the more aggressive one, was a bit shocked and that gave me time to get the victim on his feet and away.
“Eventually it was alright, I think the aggressive one decided he didn’t want a straight-on confrontation with me.”
Background
For many years, David Davis was one of my Parliamentary heroes, especially for his stand on civil liberties and Brexit. Lately, he has said a few things in the House of Commons with which I have disagreed.
However, the items below explain why he is a great Conservative MP.
In the early summer of 2010, when David Cameron was Prime Minister and Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat, was his deputy, the two made a big promise about reviewing Labour’s laws, including Tony Blair’s July 2007 smoking ban. On July 28, the non-smoking smoker’s champion, Simon Clark, wrote that Davis supported revisiting the smoking ban, no doubt with a view to allowing at least some pubs to allow tobacco use. Unfortunately, none of Cameron’s or Clegg’s pledges came to anything.
In the summer of 2018, Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary and David Davis was Brexit Secretary. In July that year, then-Prime Minister Theresa May held a showdown meeting at Chequers in which she gathered the two along with other Cabinet members for an unveiling of her Brexit plan. Essentially, it was her way or the highway. Anyone who wanted to leave, she said allegedly, would have to fund their own transportation back to London that weekend. Johnson and Davis both resigned once they returned to London. On July 14, the Mail reported on a disgreement between the two as to whose idea it was, possibly knowing at the time how damaging May’s plan was to her premiership, which crumbled a year later, resulting in Boris becoming her successor:
Allies of Mr Johnson said Mr Davis suggested that they should announce they were leaving the Government over Brexit in a co-ordinated double act – but the former Foreign Secretary declined.
But sources close to Mr Davis said it was Mr Johnson who put forward the idea, which the former Brexit Secretary then declined.
The conflicting accounts came after Mr Davis resigned dramatically at midnight last Sunday, followed by Mr Johnson 15 hours later.
The Mail on Sunday has established that Mr Davis phoned several Ministers, including Mr Johnson, on Sunday to tell him he intended to quit. Thereafter, both sides give conflicting accounts of their conversation …
Some Tory MPs say that had the two Cabinet heavyweights resigned together, it would have put much greater pressure on Mrs May …
On September 17, 2019, Diabetes.co.uk reported that Davis changed his eating regime to a low-carb diet based on poor results from a medical checkup. After trying conventional weight-loss and health improvement methods, he turned to a low-carb eating plan:
Being of a scientific background, he trawled through the published nutrition literature to look for a solution.
“I thought I was familiar with food science. I’d spent most of my business career in the food industry, as an executive of the sugar giant Tate & Lyle. That was some 30 years ago. I had a low opinion of the quality of the food science back then.
“So I was astonished to find that over the past couple of decades, vast numbers of high-calibre studies have been performed on the biology of food, digestion and exercise, and how metabolic diseases are caused.”
It was through this research that Mr Davis learned about how sugary and starchy carbohydrates break down into glucose in the body, stimulating the production of the hormone insulin, and increasing the body’s propensity to store fat.
In light of this new knowledge, Mr Davis cut “carby white foods” out of his diet, taking the likes of bread, rice and potatoes off his plate. He had also previously been taking four sugars in his tea. He noted that the butter, cheese and meat he was eating made him feel fuller and more satisfied than the sugary foods he was used to.
“And because I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t find myself falling into the trap of substituting more calorific fatty foods to make up for lost carb calories. There was really nothing to test my feeble willpower.”
This new way of eating allowed Mr Davis to easily meet his weight loss target before Christmas. He said that his wife, friends and colleagues all noticed that he had slimmed down.
In 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, Davis made his views clear. On May 10, the grandfather, eager to see his grandchildren, told Sky News’s Sophie Ridge that he thought families should be able to see each other. At the time, we were not allowed any contact outside of our own households:
Lockdown brought about mentions of digital ID cards, something that Labour under then-PM Tony Blair wanted and that Conservative MPs were vehemently opposed to. For ‘safety’ and ‘security’ reasons, the pandemic brought about a change in thinking from Conservatives under then-PM Boris Johnson. On September 2, Davis gave an interview to the BBC’s John Pienaar, saying that the idea was ‘bonkers’. Guido Fawkes gave us this soundbite from Davis:
That’s one of the reasons, by the way, that this Tory government, that was elected in 2010, the first thing it did was cancel the Identity Card scheme. And they weren’t cancelling it because of the piece of plastic. They were cancelling it because of the huge databases that it applied would exist, within government. The sort of databases that would have made the Stasi happy.
On November 6 that year, he told talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer that the Government scientists were forcing Boris into spurious decisions, including the second nationwide lockdown that began around that time:
The summary for the video says:
Conservative MP David Davis has criticised government advisers over “bogus” coronavirus modelling that has justified the second England-wide lockdown.
Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the former Brexit secretary said: “The scientific advisers effectively put the prime minister in a no win, no choice position when in fact he did have options available to him.”
In early 2021, using parliamentary privilege, Davis turned his attention to the sexual harassment inquiry involving Scotland’s Alex Salmond, a former SNP MP who co-founded the Alba Party which put forward a number of candidates in Scotland for the elections that Spring. However, the inquiry was also going on at the time, and his former protege — and First Minister in 2021 — Nicola Sturgeon was determined that evidence would go against him. Strangely, she had no recall of many dates or discussions.
On March 16, The Herald gave a good summary of the situation:
A Holyrood inquiry is looking at how the Scottish Government botched a probe into sexual misconduct claims made against Mr Salmond in January 2018.
The former First Minister had the exercise quashed in a judicial review in January 2019, showing the whole process had been “tainted by apparent bias”.
After the Government’s defence collapsed, Ms Sturgeon revealed she had three meetings and two calls with Mr Salmond about the probe, and insisted she first learned about the investigation when he told her himself at her Glasgow home on April 2, 2018.
It later emerged Mr Salmond’s former chief of staff Geoff Aberdein told Ms Sturgeon on March 29, a meeting she claims she forgot as it was a busy day at Holyrood.
If Ms Sturgeon knowingly misled parliament on the point it would be a breach of the Scottish ministerial code – a resignation offence which she denies.
That day, Davis stood in Westminster to make an adjournment debate speech about the Scotland Act 1998, which Tony Blair spearheaded, and how it affected the Scottish Civil Service — and the inquiry into Salmond. Excerpts from Hansard follow:
… I have, I think, brought whistleblower views to the attention of this House on about a dozen occasions in the last 20 or 30 years and, on every single occasion, I have protected the innocent people involved.
The download that I am talking about—Sue Ruddick’s telephone download—is held by the Scottish police, so the accuracy of this account can be checked if they need to. Alex Salmond has asserted that there has been, and I quote,
“a malicious and concerted attempt to….remove me from public life in Scotland”
by
“a range of individuals within the Scottish Government and the SNP”,
who set out to “damage” his
“reputation, even to the extent of having”
him “imprisoned.”
These are incredibly grave charges. The whistleblower clearly agrees with those charges. He or she starts their communication with the assertion that the evidence provided, and I quote,
“point to collusion, perjury, up to criminal conspiracy.”
Since I received the data, it looks as though the Committee has received at least some of it themselves, and some has also been put in the public domain by the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill [Alba Party]), a previous Justice Secretary in the Scottish Government. It was described anonymously by one of the Committee members as
“just private conversations that we had no business intruding on”.
Well, I will let the House be the judge of that.
No single sequence of texts is going to provide conclusive proof of what the whistleblower described as a “criminal conspiracy”, but it does show a very strong prima facie case, which demands further serious investigation, by which I mean, at the very least, a thorough review of all the emails and other electronic records for the relevant personnel at all relevant times.
For example, these texts show that there is a concerted effort by senior members of the SNP to encourage complaints. The messages suggest that SNP chief executive Peter Murrell co-ordinated Ruddick and Ian McCann, the SNP’s compliance officer, in the handling of specific complainants. On 28 September, a month after the police had started their investigation of the criminal case, McCann expressed great disappointment to Ruddick that someone who had promised to deliver five complainants to him by the end of that week had come up empty, or “overreached”, as he put it. One of the complainants said to Ruddick that she was
“feeling pressurised by the whole thing rather than supported”.
The day following the Scottish Government’s collapse in a judicial review in January 2019, Ruddick expressed to McCann the hope that one of the complainants would be
“sickened enough to get back in the game.”
Later that month, she confirmed to Murrell [Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband] that the complainant was now “up for the fight” and
“keen to see him go to jail”.
Ruddick herself, in one of her texts, expressed nervousness about
“what happens when my name comes out as [redacted] fishing for others to come forward”.
Note, again, that this was after the criminal investigation into Salmond had commenced. This is improper, to say the least. Contact with, and influence of, potential witnesses is totally inappropriate once a criminal investigation is under way. That was known inside the SNP itself …
The nub of the matter, outside of what Salmond was going through personally — subsequently cleared — was that it could not be discussed at length in Scotland, although it could in England and other nations of the United Kingdom. The Spectator had published an article about the inquiry which anyone in Scotland could have easily viewed online:
Secondly, the Crown Office intervened to see that the evidence of the former First Minister was redacted, supposedly to protect the identity of complainants … Again, that redacted evidence focused on whether or not the First Minister breached the ministerial code, but The Spectator magazine had already published online Mr Salmond’s entire evidence with only a single paragraph redaction.
When The Spectator went to court to secure the publication of that evidence, the Crown Office made no objection whatsoever to the paragraphs that it bullied the Holyrood inquiry to redact. That leaves an absurd situation where the inquiry cannot speak about evidence that is freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The redactions are therefore clearly not designed to protect the complainants; they are designed to protect the First Minister from accountability to the inquiry.
Davis concluded:
At the very least, I ask the Minister to consider an amendment to the 1998 Act to deliver separation of powers to Scotland—something that I believe a previous Justice Minister, the hon. Member for East Lothian, has written to the Justice Committee about already—to strengthen the civil service, and to reinforce the powers of the Scottish Parliament, correcting the fundamental power imbalance between the Executive and the legislature in Scotland. Let us give the Scottish Parliament the power to do the job.
The Herald article synthesises Davis’s points from his speech:
The former Brexit Secretary said he had been sent “dozens” of messages from the phone of SNP chief operating officer Sue Ruddick, which were obtained for Mr Salmond’s criminal trial last year.
Mr Salmond wanted the jury to see them, but was blocked by judge Lady Dorrian …
… the Holyrood inquiry has refused to publish them.
Mr Salmond has been threatened with prosection if he makes them public himself, as they were obtained solely for the purpose of his trial defence.
However Mr Davis told the Commons he had been leaked text messages downloaded from Ms Ruddick’s phone and proceeded to share some of them.
Speaking in an adjournment debate, he said he was doing so because the Holyrood inquiry had been hamstrung by the Scottish Parliament’s limited powers.
He said: “We need to reinforce the ability of the Scottish Parliament to hold its own Government to account.
“I am here to strengthen the Scottish Parliament, not to bury it.
“A few weeks ago I was passed some papers from an anonymous whistleblower.
“The information in those papers consisted of a download of text messages from the telephone of Sue Ruddick, the chief operating officer of the Scottish National party.”
The Herald then discussed the response to Davis from the Government minister:
Replying for the Government, Scotland Office minister Iain Stewart did not comment specifically on the allegations made by Mr Davis.
Nor did he say anything relatively helpful about the reforms that Davis suggested.
Davis delivered a cracking speech, which you can see in full (22 minutes) here:
Guido has the clip of the moment when SNP MP Owen Thompson tried to silence Davis:
The Spectator and the pro-independence site, Wings Over Scotland, both covered the debate.
The next day, Nicola Sturgeon told Holyrood:
I refute, strongly refute, the suggestions and insinuations from David Davis in the House of Commons last night.
I am not going to have this Covid briefing side-tracked by the latest installment of Alex Salmond’s conspiracy theory and that’s just how it is today.
I have given eight hours of evidence to the parliamentary committee looking into this.
They are now able to assess all of the evidence they’ve taken, including, I’m sure, the evidence they have in relation to the suggestions and claims made by David Davis last night. They have a job of work to do now.
I’m going to allow them to do that job of work. And in the meantime, I’m going to get on with my job, which for the moment, is leading this COVID briefing, because I’m pretty sure most of the people watching right now want to hear about the COVID situation.
I watched a few hours of her testimony, which was full of statements beginning with ‘I don’t recall’.
Nicola Sturgeon suddenly resigned in February 2022, succeeded by another Glasgow MSP, Humza Yousaf.
In August 2021, Davis was Nigel Farage’s Talking Pints guest on GB News. Among other things, Davis discussed his humble beginnings growing up in a council house:
A fortnight later, Davis’s thoughts turned elsewhere.
When Joe Biden abruptly pulled US troops out of Afghanistan and left a load of materiel behind, Davis wrote about his impressions of visiting the country in the past. On August 16, he wrote a stark article for ConservativeHome, ‘The harsh truth is that we had no strategy — and fell back on supporting a corrupt state’, which states, in part:
… In effect, the Taliban provided a judicial system that worked better than the official one.
This was not the only part of the rule of law that was bent out of shape. No doubt there were many decent Afghan police officers, but some were little more than bandits in uniform. We heard numerous stories of criminal behaviour by the police, ranging from stealing a families’ entire wood supply – in the harsh Afghan winters an act of savage cruelty – to kidnap of young women for ransom or rape. Afghan farmers trying to take produce to market would be stopped at roadblocks and made to pay a tariff on their goods, sometimes by bandits, and sometimes by the police.
From the point of view of the ordinary Afghan, the official state was just another instrument of oppression and corruption. At the grander end of the scale, government officials and their families became remarkably rich remarkably quickly. No one was ever in any doubt that the Western-installed members of the ruling elite were on the take. But of course no one was charged or convicted. The UK, USA, and their allies have installed and supported a corrupt state.
Its effects have been felt by every ordinary family in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan Army was misused and mistreated, with its soldiers often going unpaid, unfed, and unsupplied. Its generals are frequently overruled by incompetent palace cliques.
This was why it was plain that this was a war that we would never win – or not until we solved these fundamental social problems. And because the Allied writ never extended more than a rifle shot from our isolated Forward Operating Bases, we were never going to solve them with the strategies that we have adopted for almost two decades.
A British journalist staying next door to me in Kabul told me about an American Marine colonel grumbling about “mowing the grass” – putting down an insurrection with a fierce round of firefights, only to have to come back and do it all again the next year. And he was not the only military officer who understood at that time the futility of the strategy.
This has now all been magnified by a stupid and cowardly withdrawal strategy, leaving even the best Afghan troops without the air support and backup that they were trained to rely on, as Joe Biden ignored his own military advisers.
Now we face an impossible problem. It was probably not always impossible. We could have simply intervened back in 2001/2, and then left, avoiding the sacrifice of blood, treasure, and reputation.
Or we could have designed a counter-insurgency strategy that worked. We have done it elsewhere in the world, but every time it involved as much a campaign about hearts and minds as about bombs and bullets. It would have been much more expensive in the short run, but undoubtedly less costly overall. We almost certainly could not have done it at the same time as invading Iraq. What we did instead was the worst compromise.
The lesson is horribly stark. If Britain, America, and the other Western Allies want to be a force for good in the world, and do not want their collective global reputation to be dictated by Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, then before we undertake any more foreign wars, we need a plan that extends way beyond the initial conquest, and right through the rebuilding of the country, with all the cost and commitment that that entails.
Meanwhile, the Western nations sudden rush to extract their own citizens will undoubtedly cause a panic which may accelerate the collapse. After that, the Taliban, with all its medieval behaviour, will reverse any good that we have done these last two decades. We will see the return of Sharia law, with its dismemberment and stoning. And the new regime will almost certainly exact vengeance on everybody who has helped us in any way. That will undoubtedly prey on our conscience in the years to come. And so it should.
My opinion of Davis began changing in 2022, once the rumours about Boris’s pandemic ‘parties’ began circulating in earnest. On January 19, during Prime Minister’s Questions, Davis bluntly told Boris it was time to resign:
Guido has another clip from that day of Davis condemning Boris:
I wonder if Davis has any regrets today. Since Boris’s resignation, Conservative polling has hit an all-time low in the Party’s history.
My last bookmark shows David Davis the way I would like to remember him, discussing his all-too-humble background and being an ordinary, principled man who just happens to be a long-standing MP. Guido posted this on Sunday, July 10, 2022:
On the whole, barring his opinion of Boris, David Davis has been a credit to the Conservative Party and to his country. We need more like him in Parliament.
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.
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:
-
-
- Righting the wrongs suffered by some members of the Windrush generation
- Combatting violence against women and girls
- 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.
My past two posts on how the Middle East conflict is affecting the UK can be found here and here.
Today’s post continues and concludes the long, sorry saga of last week’s events.
Wednesday, November 15 (cont’d)
Last Wednesday, the House of Commons voted on an SNP amendment to the King’s Speech of November 7 proposing that legislation regarding a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza be added to the parliamentary agenda. Not surprisingly, the Conservatives either voted against or abstained.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged his MPs not to support it. Although Hansard does not have a record of the debate, I watched some of it. A few Labour MPs accused the SNP of ‘political opportunism’, which upset the Scottish MPs.
However, other Labour MPs did vote to approve the amendment.
The Guardian reported (purple emphases mine):
Eight Labour frontbenchers including Jess Phillips have resigned as Keir Starmer was hit by a major rebellion over a vote for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Overall, 56 Labour MPs voted for an amendment to the king’s speech brought by the Scottish National party, a major blow to the Labour leader’s attempts to keep unity over the Israel-Hamas war.
Labour officials had said in advance that any frontbencher doing so would be sacked for backing the amendment, which called explicitly for a ceasefire.
Phillips, Afzal Khan, Yasmin Qureshi and Paula Barker quit their frontbench roles on Wednesday night after voting for the amendment and defying the whip.
Rachel Hopkins, Sarah Owen, Naz Shah, and Andy Slaughter were sacked by the Labour leader after the vote. Mary Foy, Angela Rayner’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS), and Dan Carden, another PPS, have also left the frontbench.
As votes closed, Starmer said he regretted that party colleagues had not backed his position …
The Labour leader had hoped to avert a rebellion with a separate amendment criticising Israel’s military actions but stopping short of calling for a ceasefire, and instructed his members to abstain on the SNP motion. Many chose to vote for both, however, amid anger among Labour members over how Starmer has handled the issue.
MPs voted 293 to 125, a majority of 168, to reject the SNP’s amendment, with Qureshi, Khan and Barker quitting before the vote.
Phillips, the most high-profile frontbencher, said it was with a “heavy heart” that she was quitting.
“This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered parliament,” the Birmingham Yardley MP said in her resignation letter …
Shah (Bradford West) and Khan (Manchester Gorton) told fellow MPs in the Commons of their intention to vote for an immediate ceasefire. Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) said she was going to vote for the amendment but decided to abstain.
Starmer has faced a growing backlash over his position on the conflict since he gave an interview last month in which he appeared to suggest Israel had the right to withhold water and power from civilians in Gaza.
He attempted to heal those divisions in a recent speech at the Chatham House thinktank, in which he urged Israel to adhere to international law but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire.
Starmer spent much of Wednesday locked in meetings with his shadow ministers as he attempted to minimise the expected rebellion.
The Guardian also has a list of how each MP voted.
Pro-Palestinian protests took place outside the Houses of Parliament around voting time. More on that in a moment.
From there, the protesters moved to Hyde Park Corner where a few of them had the effrontery to scale a war monument, the Royal Artillery Memorial, which is dedicated to fallen soldiers.
Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer, himself a veteran, posted the video:
Britons looking at social media or watching GB News’s coverage of the appalling incident were incensed that the Metropolitan Police maintained their perceived two-tier policing system.
One X (Twitter) user posted the Met’s statement as to the lack of action and his or her account of the situation accompanied by a photo of policemen idly standing by:
Note that the final paragraph of the Met’s statement says there is no law forbidding climbing on a war memorial, ergo no arrests could ‘automatically’ take place.
Yet, such a law was passed — the Desecration of War Memorials Act 2010.
Hansard has the full text of the legislation, which amends the Criminal Damage Act 1971.
Barrister Steven Barrett, who appears regularly on GB News and writes for The Spectator, expressed his displeasure at the police not enforcing the law. He thinks they are ‘political’:
The Met managed to rough up one man (video here), but he was not pro-Palestinian.
The BBC issued an apology that day for their highly inaccurate reporting of the conflict in the Middle East:
The BBC should be ashamed of themselves, especially because every Briton is obliged by law to pay the annual licence fee of £159 to keep it going.
Thursday, November 16
The Mail had a report on the incident at the Royal Artillery Memorial:
MPs vented their fury today after police stood by as pro-Palestinian protesters scaled a war memorial following Parliament’s vote against a ceasefire in Gaza – as the Met apologised for ‘not being able to respond quickly enough’.
Footage shows a mob of flag-waving demonstrators climbing on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, which was covered with poppy wreaths from remembrance weekend.
A group of officers appeared to simply watch on as the offensive scenes unfolded, despite a dispersal order being in place. Today, the Met expressed its ‘regret’ for the way officers handled the incident but insisted no laws had been broken.
Home Secretary James Cleverly, who served in the Royal Artillery, called the demonstration as ‘deeply disrespectful’ and suggested laws could be changed to give police powers to prevent protesters clambering over war memorials.
James Cleverly should check legislation first.
The article also had the history of the memorial, excerpted below:
The Royal Artillery Memorial commemorates the 49,076 soldiers of the Royal Artillery killed in the First World War.
The static nature of trench combat meant heavy guns played a significant role in ‘softening up’ enemy positions before troops moved in.
Designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger and Lionel Pearson, the memorial was funded largely by public donations and unveiled in 1925.
It consists of a Portland stone base supporting a one-third over-lifesize sculpture of a howitzer – which Jagger based on one in the Imperial War Museum.
Later that morning in the Commons, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt took Business Questions.
The long-serving Conservative MP Sir Julian Lewis expressed his concern over security issues during the previous day’s vote on the ceasefire amendment:
About 40 years ago I had an unlikely campaigning role that involved organising counter-demonstrations to certain mass marches, but one area we never had to worry about was the vicinity of Parliament, because no demonstrations were allowed in Parliament Square. The reason given for that was that Members must not be impeded in entering or leaving the Houses of Parliament. Even if demonstrations continue to be allowed in Parliament Square, it should be a common concern to those on both sides of the House that Members find themselves getting advice from their Whips on which exits they cannot use for fear of being mobbed by an unauthorised demonstration that comes right up to the gates of Parliament. This really has gone too far. Sooner or later there will be an incident, unless security on entering and leaving the Houses of Parliament is restored.
Mordaunt replied:
I thank my right hon. Friend for raising this important matter. It is quite right that Members of Parliament and their staff should be able to go about their business in safety and security, and should not be disrupted in doing so. Mr Speaker was particularly concerned about this even prior to yesterday’s incidents, and has been working with Palace security and other organisations to ensure the safety of Members of Parliament in particular. Since the Deputy Speaker is in the Chair, I shall make sure that Mr Speaker has heard my right hon. Friend’s concerns, and I will ask that my right hon. Friend be kept informed of progress on such matters.
Whatever part of the law allowing protests to take place in Parliament Square should be repealed. I realise that protests have been taking place there for at least ten or 15 years. That should not happen.
Guido Fawkes posted a list of Labour frontbenchers who had to resign either before or after the previous day’s vote and wrote (red emphases below are his):
10 of Starmer’s frontbenchers resigned last night to vote in favour of a ceasefire in a symbolic vote organised by the SNP. The King’s Speech amendment calling for “all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire” was defeated by a majority of 168. Performative, pointless…
On Thursday, pro-Palestinian activists encouraged parents to allow their children to skip school to protest instead. Here is one photo from London, however, this went on around England:
I’m happy that Andy Ngô was able to settle in London and pursue his fine investigative photographic and video evidence of what is happening on our streets. Granted, Adam Brooks took the above video, but Andy took one of the protest that happened outside the local Labour MP’s office. Dr Rushanara Ali did not vote for a ceasefire:
Elsewhere, Labour councillors were resigning in protest over Sir Keir Starmer’s stance on the Middle East conflict — but there was more to the story in the East Midlands town of Walsall.
GB News‘s Charlie Peters, one of the channel’s investigative journalists, reported:
Walsall Labour group has lost several councillors today in a mass resignation amid recent probes into alleged antisemitic social media posts by senior colleagues.
The quitting councillors include Aftab Nawaz, the group’s leader, and Cllr Sabina Ditta, Cllr Naheed Gultasib, Cllr Abdus Nazir, Cllr Saiqa Nasreen and Cllr Farhana Hassan.
They have blamed Labour’s position on the Israel-Hamas war for their quitting the party.
In a lengthy joint statement, the six councillors said: “We are saddened to inform you that we will be resigning from the Labour Party immediately due to Keir Starmer refusing to back and vote for a ceasefire in Gaza” …
But a source close to Walsall Council told GB News: “Two local Labour Councillors have resigned after being suspended by their Party in the past few weeks. Now this group, some of whom are under investigation by Labour, have decided to resign too.
“I don’t believe this has anything to do with their principles. I think it has everything to do with wanting to say what they like, how they like and without the fear of being held to account.”
Aftab Nawaz has quit amid a Labour Party investigation after GB News exposed his alleged sectarian chanting against a minority Muslim group in the West Midlands town earlier this year.
The fresh resignations come after deputy leader Khizar Hussain and shadow cabinet member Hajran Bashir both quit following GB News reports into their social media conduct.
This broadcaster revealed highly controversial social media posts made by the pair, which the Campaign Against Antisemitism described as “abhorrent.”
Hussain allegedly compared Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler; Bashir allegedly drew links between Israel’s foundation and actions with those of Nazi Germany.
Both posts breached Labour’s antisemitism policy.
Bashir and Hussain both quit the party hours after they were administratively suspended for investigation.
That afternoon, Guido had his gimlet eye firmly on the BBC’s parlous reporting of the conflict — including clips from BBC Verify, their much-vaunted fact-checking unit. The nation’s broadcaster could not even report the ceasefire vote result correctly:
The BBC has been forced to update its latest “counter-disinformation” piece on how fatality figures are calculated in Gaza. Puzzled readers pointed out the story made no reference to the fact the Gaza health ministry is run by Hamas until the last paragraph, where the BBC deigned to quote the IDF who “said the health ministry was a branch of Hamas and that any information provided by it should be ‘viewed with caution‘”. This was after directly quoting figures from the Hamas-run health ministry nine times without caveat. You’d have thought they would have learned by now…
Anything connected to the Israel/Hamas War seems to be fair game for BBC misreporting. Last night’s article on Labour’s ceasefire rebellion got the outcome of the vote the wrong way round. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity…
Guido asks:
Are unpaid interns running BBC reporting?
It would seem so.
Meanwhile, in Germany, police continued to crack down on anti-Semitism. Would that we were doing the same in the UK.
EuroNews reported:
Authorities are cracking down on supporters of Islamist groups after a rise in public antisemitism.
Several hundred German police officers carried out searches across the country on Thursday targeting an Islamist association suspected of supporting the Iran-aligned Islamist movement Hezbollah, the Interior Ministry announced.
“At a time when many Jews feel particularly threatened, we do not tolerate Islamist propaganda or anti-Semitic and anti-Israel campaigns”, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.
The police operation targeted the Islamic Centre of Hamburg (IZH) and five other organisations suspected of being linked to it. All are suspected of supporting Hezbollah, which Germany officially banned as a terrorist organisation in April 2020.
Searches were carried out at 54 properties in seven regions of Germany.
According to a statement from the Interior Ministry, the IZH’s activities are aimed at disseminating the theocratic Iranian regime’s “revolutionary concept”, which is “suspected of being contrary to the constitutional order in Germany” …
Well done, Germany!
In The Telegraph that day, the conservative pundit Douglas Murray wrote, ‘Britain is the new capital of anti-Israel hate’:
I have spent recent weeks in Israel, and goodness knows this is a country that has plenty of challenges. But one question I have been asked a lot by an alarmingly wide array of Israelis is: “What happened to Britain?” …
It amazes most Israelis – as it amazes me – that Britain has seen some of the worst scenes of all the anti-Israel marches across the world. And I say “anti-Israel” for a reason. The first protests in London happened before Israel had even begun its military response to October 7. Rallies were held within hours of the massacres. To most Israelis this is nearly unfeasible.
What other country would see 1,400 of its citizens slaughtered, 240 kidnapped and countless more wounded for life, and not be allowed even a day to mourn? What other country, having suffered a set of atrocities hardly superseded in the whole history of violence wouldn’t get even one day of sympathy?
Only the Jewish state. And everybody in Israel knows as much. Pakistan is currently in the process of forcibly deporting two million Afghans. Nobody cares. Bashar al-Assad is in his twelfth year of killing Muslims in Syria and the world’s cameras turned away long ago. Only Israel, when involved in any military action, or even when it is simply on the receiving end of extreme violence, cannot rely even on the world’s understanding.
And it is in this light that Israel notices the British politicians calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The ignorance of a large number of figures in British political life, from Humza Yousaf to Jess Phillips, can hardly be exaggerated. As it happens, a ceasefire of a kind existed in Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally, and very painfully, in 2005 – removing every Jew from the strip. They handed over the land and got rockets in return.
Everyone around the Gaza border and across wider Israel was used to running from rockets to the shelters. But despite various exchanges over the years, nobody ever foresaw the battalion-sized terrorist attack of October 7. It was Hamas who broke what ceasefire existed that day when its legions gunned down young people at a music festival, went door to door in small communities, and burned people alive in their homes …
To call for a ceasefire now shows an astonishing lack of military understanding but also a horrific lack of decency. I have watched the Israeli Defence Force manage the evacuation of Gazans from the north of the strip to the south, so that the IDF can try to isolate Hamas and destroy them. It is a righteous mission, though one that is likely to prove incredibly hard.
I have also met many of the parents of the children and others stolen into Gaza. They want their children back. Why has there been no mass movement of MPs – from Labour, say – demanding that there be no ceasefire until Hamas hand back the hostages? Such a move seems to have never been on the cards.
Anti-Israel Labour MPs and others only ever campaign and condemn when they attack Israel. Perhaps because they know that Hamas would never listen to them anyway. These MPs are internationalist eunuchs. But my, do they talk a big game. Especially while they whip along the sectarian politics, which are the real driver of the protests on our streets …
But as I watch hooligans clamber over our war memorials and statues and hold our city centres hostage, I wonder whether it isn’t Britain that is the one in real trouble here.
The Guardian had a chilling article on the subject, ‘Why is antisemitism so rife in UK academic settings? I have never found student life more difficult’. Shockingly, it was written by an anonymous student from — wait for it — Oxford University:
When I woke in my student house on Saturday 7 October, my stomach turned at the news from Israel. As fellow Jewish students and I checked on our loved ones there, one replied on WhatsApp: “Do not go to synagogue today.” In their moment of terror they knew that here, in the UK, antisemitism would erupt; racism would jeopardise our safety.
There have been more reported incidents of antisemitism on British university campuses in a month than there were in all of 2022. At Oxford University, where I am an undergraduate, acts of hatred, misinformation and a lack of empathy when we are vulnerable have turned student spaces into places of hostility.
Our Jewish Society president had the mezuzah (a protective Jewish prayer scroll) ripped from his door. At a freshers’ event, one Jewish friend told me that she was called a “coloniser” and “race traitor” (the latter by virtue of her non-European descent). I know male students who have removed their kippot (skullcaps) and others who have hidden their Stars of David. On Instagram, I saw students posting pictures of paragliders, celebrating Hamas’s massacre. I waited five long days for my university to condemn “appalling attacks by Hamas” and stress “that there is no place for antisemitism or hate of any faith at Oxford”. An Israeli student whose relatives were murdered at the Nova festival has returned home, telling me she felt safer there than on campus.
In the days after 7 October, I walked Oxford’s streets, my home away from home, overwhelmed with grief and despair …
While I was concerned with the plight of civilians, I encountered protests and chants: “From Oxford to Gaza / Long live the intifada” – words that sustain the violence and too often lead to violence against Jews in the UK, not just in Israel.
As I struggled to work, I wrote to my tutors, explaining my distress. They replied privately, expressing sympathy. But as I appeared at tutorials and seminars, sleepless and broken, I did not feel safe to raise my most pressing thoughts in public. A climate in which we feel fearful to address what we’re going through leaves space for others to dehumanise us and contribute to environments in which antisemitism is allowed to fester.
The silence we encounter stands in stark contrast to the sensitivity and outspoken support displayed by staff and students to those touched by other events, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine …
When I see faces I know call “From the river to the sea” or students sign off emails with the same chant, the phrase feels like something that goes far beyond a demand for freedom: a call to get rid of Israel and a dog-whistle for getting rid of Jews. When someone shouts “Free Palestine” at a Jew walking around Oxford wearing his kippah, as happened to a friend of mine, they are weaponising that idea against him. In these moments, where anti-Zionism implies, even indirectly, an outcome that entails violence against Jews, it shelters antisemitism; universities must seek to understand why it is so ferocious in academic settings. They also must address why here, of all places, misinformation is disseminated so readily …
TaxiPoint featured a story on a black cab driver who kicked out a passenger voicing anti-Semitic sentiments:
A taxi driver in London took a firm stance against racism by asking a passenger to leave the cab after she went on a rant about the ‘Jewish machine’.
The incident was caught on camera and has since garnered attention for highlighting the prevalence of hate crimes.
… The driver’s response has been praised by Tom Tugendhat MP, who commended him for his stand against racism …
WARNING: Strong language heard in video
As the day came to a close, The Guardian reported that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) discovered a dead hostage in Gaza City:
The Israeli military has recovered the body of an Israeli hostage from a building near al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, as soldiers continued to search the hospital complex after Wednesday’s early morning raid.
Yehudit Weiss, a 65-year-old woman, was abducted from the Be’eri kibbutz by Hamas militants during their attack on southern Israel on 7 October, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 taken hostage. She had been undergoing cancer treatment.
“The body of Yehudit Weiss, who was abducted by the Hamas terrorist organisation, was extracted by IDF troops from a structure adjacent to the Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip and was transferred to Israeli territory,” a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said late on Thursday.
“In the structure in which Yehudit was located, military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and RPGs were also found,” the spokesperson added.
Weiss’s husband, Shmulik, was killed during the Hamas attack.
The IDF also said it had uncovered a Hamas tunnel shaft and a vehicle with weapons at the Dar al-Shifa hospital complex.
“In the Shifa hospital, IDF troops found an operational tunnel shaft and a vehicle containing a large number of weapons,” the military said. It made public videos and photographs of the tunnel shaft and weapons, though no independent verification was possible.
Israel dropped leaflets into southern Gaza, telling Palestinian civilians to leave four towns on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, fuelling fears that its offensive would spread south …
Earlier, the IDF managed to find and fatally wound the man responsible for parading the young dead woman on the back of a pickup truck on October 7.
Friday, November 17
GB News’s Patrick Christys had a hard-hitting editorial on the protesters. He went to two protests, asking participants why they continued to demonstrate but was met with verbal aggression both times. In his editorial, he expressed his disdain for the anti-Semitism we have all been seeing, reading or hearing through media outlets and social media. Finally, he took strong exception to encouraging children to take time off school to march.
Go to the 7:00 mark (21:05 on the GB News clock):
Saturday, November 18
More pro-Palestinian protests took place on Saturday, some outside Labour constituency offices, including one near Keir Starmer’s.
Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of “supporting genocide” by hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters who barracked his constituency offices on Saturday.
Around 500 activists holding banners shouted: “Keir Starmer you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide”, after marching from outside Chalk Farm station in north London …
Passers-by beeped car horns in support of the marchers, who were kept back from the constituency offices by police barriers.
It came as hundreds of people staged protests in towns and cities across Britain on Saturday calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Around 100 pro-Palestinian rallies were held at locations around the UK, including Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Plymouth and Stevenage.
In London, there were 10 rallies held in boroughs across the capital, including Islington, Redbridge, Lewisham and Tower Hamlets.
Many of the protests targeted Labour MPs who had voted against or abstained in the vote last week on the SNP amendment to the King’s Speech calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In Birmingham, pro-Palestinian activists barracked the offices of Labour MP Shabana Mahmood, who abstained. Here they chanted accusations of supporting genocide against Sir Keir. There were also protests outside the office of Harrow East’s Conservative MP, Bob Blackman, who voted against a ceasefire call.
The localised demonstrations were held instead of a large march in central London, where national protests involving hundreds of thousands of people had been staged every Saturday since the outbreak of the conflict …
Another newspaper reported that Starmer fears for his family’s safety:
This is not the way to win hearts and minds.
Sunday, November 19
Shadow (Labour) chancellor Rachel Reeves appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC news show to discuss the protesters’ intimidation of MPs:
In other BBC news, war correspondent Jeremy Bowen said that the arms cache at al-Shaifa Hospital was for hospital security! Amazingly awful reporting:
The IDF made public their video of the 55-meter-long terrorist tunnel, 10 meters underneath al-Shifa Hospital. This is a must-watch:
Monday, November 20
Labour MP Zara Sultana gave an interview to left-leaning Novara Media claiming that her party is Islamophobic:
The Mail carried the story:
Sultana was elected to the House of Commons in December 2019.
One month before the election that year, the Jewish Chronicle reported on her social media posts that LBC (radio) had come across:
Labour’s election candidate for Coventry South, who previously apologised for saying she would “celebrate” the deaths of Tony Blair and Benjamin Nentanayu, has been forced to apologise again after it was revealed she had told someone who was pro-Israel “jump off a cliff”.
Zarah Sultana, a 26-year-old paid Labour staffer and West Midlands regional campaigner, was selected last week as the candidate for the seat from a shortlist of just two candidates.
The article has several of her quotes, all equally distasteful.
It also includes this tweet, which sums up the content:
Of course, she apologised:
In a statement published to Twitter, she said: “I am sorry that I posted these offensive comments on social media as a teenager. I was young and immature and the language I used was wrong.
“Through my political activism I have been on a journey which has included working closely with Jewish comrades who have taught me about the language and history of antisemitism.”
She said she had visited Auschwitz in 2013 and the trip had left her determined to “never to minimise the suffering of Jewish people.”
But — and it’s a big BUT:
… further tweets uncovered this week show that she went on to make offensive remarks in 2015.
Again, you can read the article to see the content.
Let’s not forget another fact about her:
She has no business being an MP.
Meanwhile, Mr Fafo — an actor whose real name is Saleh al-Jafarawi — is still around:
That afternoon, Speaker of the House Sir Lindsay Hoyle told MPs that, as a security measure, they could use taxis on expenses getting to and from Parliament. Furthermore, the independent expenses body, IPSA, said that it would keep all information confidential.
Guido has the story and Hoyle’s letter.
Let us hope that MPs do not abuse the privilege.
In a shocking development that Guido uncovered — and one that surely must be illegal — two councillors from Kingston in south west London have emailed every councillor in the UK to tell them to support a ceasefire, or else:
James Giles and Jamal Ch[o]han have organised the effort, giving their 19,102 fellow UK councillors until Friday this week to sign on. Otherwise, they will publish “the names of those who have been invited to sign but choose not to, in the interest of accountability”. Councillors across the country are reacting pretty angrily to the threatening letter…
Giles is left-wing and a supporter of former MP George Galloway:
running various campaigns for him including Batley & Spen’s by-election in 2021. Giles previously hosted Galloway’s programme for Russia-owned SputnikTV and Galloway’s The Mother of All Talk Shows when it was aired by the now-banned RT. He also ran his grandmother’s campaign in a by-election for the same council, which the LibDems and Conservatives denounced as “dirty” for attacking their LibDem rival for being an Ahmadiyya Muslim. A pleasant character no doubt…
Jamal’s father is a Conservative Party donor.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows.
Guido tells us:
Conservative councillor Jamal Ch[o]han is the son of Tory donor and PPE provider Ashraf Chohan. Guido hears he’s on his way through the candidate process to become a Tory PCC. Guido wonders what local Conservative associations will make of that…
Fortunately, the threat appears to be a damp squib:
UPDATE: A CCHQ source tells Guido:
The councillor in question has now been kicked out of the Tory group. He’s also not a party member, so any applications from him won’t be going very far….
Swift action from the new chairman. Not seeing the same from Sir Keir with his own elected MPs…
UPDATE II: The Local Government Association has expelled the pair and sacked them from all positions.
Guido posted a screenshot of the letter from The Royal Borough of Kingston which states that the Metropolitan Police have been informed.
Conclusion
We are at a crossroads here in the United Kingdom over this conflict.
I probably won’t report much more on this because of its base and appalling nature. However, these posts are testament to what has been happening here on our streets and in our Parliament.
However, I will have one more post on the conflict in general so that we can see how people either forget or misinterpret recent history.
While above-average temperatures have raged in continental Europe in July 2023, the UK has been wet and cold.
Last month, we Brits watched news of the seemingly non-stop inferno on the island of Rhodes in Greece.
Nearly everyone in the mainstream media said this was because of climate change.
Only GB News bucked the trend, although, for balance, they had to have a few guests who promoted the climate change narrative.
The channel’s Patrick Christys, who is of Greek (and Irish) heritage, was in Greece on his summer holiday while Rhodes burned. On Wednesday, August 2, 2023, he said that the Greek media immediately blamed the fires on arsonists. Climate change did not enter their narrative:
Arson was found to be the cause of forest fires in California a few years ago. Of course, that news emerged weeks after the fires had started and received little fanfare once they had been put out. I had bookmarked articles but they’ve since expired.
In September 2020, Oregon law enforcement explored arson as a possible cause in the Almeda Glendower fire after human remains were found.
Returning to California, alleged negligence by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) sparked a historically deadly blaze in 2018, a 2019 AP report said (purple emphases mine):
Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. power lines sparked a Northern California blaze that killed 85 people last year, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century, state fire officials said Wednesday.
Cal Fire said transmission lines owned and operated by the San Francisco-based utility started the Nov. 8 fire that nearly destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The fire wiped out nearly 15,000 homes. Many of those killed were elderly or disabled. The oldest was 99 …
Cal Fire did not release its full investigative report, saying it had been forwarded to the Butte County district attorney’s office, which is considering criminal charges against the utility.
The investigation also identified a second nearby ignition site involving PG&E’s electrical distribution lines that had come into contact with vegetation. The second fire was quickly consumed by the initial fire.
The disclosures came on the same day the utility’s new chief executive was testifying before a legislative committee in Sacramento. Bill Johnson told the state Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee he had expected the utility would be blamed for the fire.
“I have made the assumption when I got here that PG&E equipment caused the fire,” he said, noting the utility had said that was probable in recent filings. “It’s a disappointment that this happened. Let’s not do it again.”
Some people will rightly ask about fires in the Amazon, where climate change is seen to be responsible for discharging dangerous emissions.
In 2019, Watts Up With That posted research in ‘Amazon Fire History Since 2003’:
We are told that Amazon fires are at record levels right now. This is a blatant lie. The only “record” is that Amazonian fires have DECREASED over the “record” …
This comes from a wonderful site, https://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#elbeni
It uses NASA MODIS data, from the Terra and Aqua satellites, and is updated daily. By going to the website, you can look at individual regions in the Amazon, or as I have done, look at the totals for the Amazon. This site also has global data, but I am only looking at the Amazon region here …
One thing I saw by looking at each year, was a rough pattern – one or two bad years, one or two years at much lower levels, then a bad year. This pattern is there until 2010. 2010 was the last “bad year”. Levels since 2010 have been 1/2 or less of the “bad years”. The old pattern has been broken.
Not only does this site calculate number of fires, it also calculates carbon emissions (in Tg) from the fires. Note that the site issues a caveat about estimated later data, hence its grayed out.
This emissions chart from the website shows what I was talking about, in alternating bad/good years. But as I said, only until 2010. It is obvious there is a reducing trend in emissions, again using EBM1TI …
Conclusion: Amazonian fires, using very current NASA data, show a decline over the record, and are nowhere close to a record so far in 2019.
Another possibility for the fires is rewilding.
Tim Worstall recently wrote an article about this new eco-friendly trend for the Adam Smith Institute, ‘Rewilding is to blame for Mediterranean forest fires’ (emphases mine below).
He rightly points out that bush and forest fires have been a fixture of those countries’ regions since time immemorial:
Forest fires – more often scrub fires – are an entirely natural part of the Mediterranean ecology. Been going on for thousands of years. The major determinant for any one fire season is actually how wet the preceding winter was. Rains happen in winter, native vegetation is pretty much dried out and dying back by May. Some climate models do indeed predict more winter rain in these ecologies – so it’s possible that the climate change argument is right.
Summer temperatures have little effect on dry vegetation:
But it’s also true that summer temperatures make little difference. Dried back grasses and the like are not notably more flammable at 41oC than 40. Or even than 35. And they will be dried back – that’s just the basic pattern here, near no precipitation at all from late April-ish through to October …
Summer temperatures make pretty much no difference at all – because summer temperatures always do get to where unattended land might burn. But we would also insist that this is not the only effect at work here.
Which brings Worstall to the newish trend of rewilding:
Rewilding is a real thing here … That also increases the fire load. On this there is that academic research and we also bothered to ask our local fire brigade – anecdata perhaps but then data is simply the plural of that.
We’d also add one final point. The biggest reduction in forest fires in both Portugal and Greece came a few years back. It used to be that if the hillside went up in flames then there was automatic planning permission for – say – tourist villas.
Along with rewilding, in some part, goes poor brush and forest management.
For this, an Australian site, Bushfire Front, has an excellent post, ‘The Alternatives’. This could also apply equally to eco-friendly California, which has a lot of eucalyptus trees, obtained in the 20th century from … Australia. For those who do not know, eucalyptus trees have a lot of oil in them, particularly the leaves.
Bushfire Front posits that poor land management is to blame for Australia’s wildfires:
The fact is that large high intensity bushfires result from failed land management; like a disease epidemic, they are incubated over several years during which preventative medicine could have been applied, but was not …
We are not brand new settlers on this continent. Australian land managers, land owners, foresters and rural workers have been confronting the threat of bushfires for over 200 years, and wildland fire has been the subject of very high quality scientific research over the last 50 years.
This experience and science have revealed that there are three basic alternative approaches to bushfire management: you can let fires burn, you can try to suppress them, or you can try to replace “feral” fires with controlled fires. All of these approaches are applicable and appropriate singly or in combination in different parts of the country. The trick is to get the most effective mixture for a particular place at a particular time.
The ‘let burn’ approach works as follows:
… fires are left to burn to their heart’s content, to go out eventually if they run into last year’s fire, to be extinguished at the onset of the rainy season or tackled at the edge of the bush if human assets are threatened. The let-burn approach is appropriate for bushfires in the remote lands of central Australia and most of the rangelands where access is poor and there are few people or assets. The trouble is that it is now advocated by environmentalists for application to our high rainfall forest country. Those who advocate this approach, it should be noted, mostly live well inside suburbia, are not threatened by fires, do not have to fight them and cannot be held legally accountable for the outcome of such a policy. No government can afford to adopt the let-burn approach for the more populous forest and agricultural regions, at least not officially, although the Victorian government came very close to it a few years ago when it withdrew firefighters from the bush to protect towns.
Two problems arise with the ‘let burn’ approach:
(i) fires burning out of heavy forest country can be unstoppable when they reach the edge of the bush; and (ii) under Common Law a token effort must always be made by the land owner or manager to suppress wildfires, because not to do so lays them open to legal action.
The second approach is ‘all-out suppression’, which is what we see on television:
This requires fires to be attacked immediately after detection, using the resources of an emergency service, or “fire brigade” set up for the purpose. This approach originated in the cities of Europe in the middle ages, and was exemplified by the drama of the ringing alarm bells, galloping horse-drawn fire engines and magnificently uniformed and helmeted firefighters. The current image is equally theatrical, with water bombers and helitaks sweeping the smoky skies, convoys of tankers filing along country roads, and brilliantly uniformed Fire Chiefs being interviewed on television by breathless reporters.
This works well only if there are large fire brigades or groups of volunteers who know how to put the fires out:
In earlier days in rural Australia the suppression approach was implemented by volunteer brigades of farmers and bush workers, and was largely successful in developed farmland and country towns.
However, in rural Australia these days the small local bushfire brigades have morphed into the highly sophisticated paramilitary organisations such as the Country Fire Authority in Victoria and the NSW Rural Fire Service, complete with their decision-making headquarters in the city and their armies and air forces. Increasingly they are being expected to fight full-scale forest fires. This is partly because of the loss of experienced full time forestry agency firefighters and also the loss of firefighters from the former hardwood timber industry.
‘All-out suppression’ has become the norm in Australia, and it is not a one-size-fits-all solution:
The amazing thing about this is that it flies in the face of practical experience and bushfire science. This approach does not and cannot work in Australian eucalypt forests unless it is supplemented by other measures (discussed below). Fires on hot windy summer days in long unburnt forests simply cannot be put out by humans, no matter how many, how courageous and how hard they work and how good their technology. Even under relatively mild conditions, the intensity of fires burning in fuels over about 10 tonnes per hectare is simply too great to allow them to be attacked successfully. The 2007 Victorian fires demonstrated that the entire firefighting resources of Australia, plus international assistance from NZ, Canada and the USA, were inadequate.
This is a situation which was once well understood by Australian forest managers.
The third alternative, the ‘green burning approach’ is a preventive measure which is more likely to be successful, as in days of yore:
… in the 1950s there was a general move to adopt a third approach – the substitution of controlled mild intensity fire for uncontrolled high intensity wildfire.
… It recognises two simple facts: Firstly, that bushfires cannot be prevented – even if we eliminated all mankind from the forest, there would still be lightning. And secondly, periodic mild, patchy fires prevent the build-up of heavy fuels, so that when a fire does start it is easier and safer to suppress, does less damage, and costs less. A regime of green burning also produces a healthier and more vigorous forest and is better for biodiversity. This approach was applied rigorously in WA [Western Australia] forests for nearly 30 years, with tremendous success. Unfortunately since about the 1980s green burning has been under constant attack from environmentalists and academics. As a result, in Victoria and New South Wales, especially in forests which are now national parks, almost no effective prescribed burning is done. Even in WA, where green burning was once championed, the area burnt each year has now fallen well below that required to ensure an effective fire management system. Here the annual burning target is 8% of the forest – simple arithmetic allows you to calculate that this equates to a turn-around time of 12 years, which in the jarrah forest at least is nearly twice the recommended burning rotation length if summer wildfires are to be manageable. The anti-burners have achieved this irresponsible situation not through special expertise in fire prevention or suppression, not through being able to put in place an alternative and equally effective system, but simply by gaining control of government policy and by the capture of the new “conservation” agencies.
Opposition to prescribed burning has been accompanied by two further problems in the forest: a decline in the standard of road and fire trail maintenance – in some cases due to lack of funds, in other cases as a result of deliberate policy – and fewer permanent agency staff in the bush. The first of these factors has meant it is harder for firefighters to get to fires; the second has meant an increasing reliance on volunteers and on part-time and less experienced firefighters.
Unfortunately, the Australian government does not wish to hear from the Bushfire Front:
The Bushfire Front has tried for 15 years to influence State Government policy by logic, science and the weight of our >400 years cumulative practical experience in all aspects of bushfire management. We have had one meeting with the Premier and numerous meetings with many Ministers and senior agency staff and have made dozens of submissions. The result is that we have moved from getting the cold shoulder (where we were simply ignored) to getting the warm shoulder (where they agree with us, but do nothing). The Government feels very comfortable about this response because we pack no political punch.
Australian media outlets do not want to know, either:
We have found that journalists are interested in bushfires only as sensational disasters and theatrical drama; they find issues like damage mitigation and bushfire preparedness boring and un-newsworthy.
Sometimes the old ways are the best:
Australia does not need more helitaks, more water bombers, more infra-red gizmos or more overseas firefighters. What is needed is a fundamental change in bushfire philosophy and governance. Forest managing agencies and fire services must shift their focus from suppressing running fires to the critical long-term work of pre-emptive and responsible land management. Their job is to make the task of the firefighter easier and safer, not harder and more dangerous. Arson, Acts of God and possible Global Warming can all be anticipated and steps can be taken to minimise their impact. We know what to do and how to do it.
Finally, there is a lesson from history. At a conference of forestry officers in Perth in 1923, the Conservator Stephen Kessell was laying down his philosophy to departmental staff. “Preventing large high intensity forest fires,” he said “is the most fundamental requirement for forest conservation in Australia”. Kessell recognised that without effective bushfire management, no other management outcomes can be achieved.
It’s that simple. Sadly, 80 years later, many of the people who today are responsible for managing Australia’s forests have not grasped this fact. They fiddle, while Australia burns.
This climate change narrative is maddening. Why not return to plain old common sense with tried-and-true methods?
Proper forest management is not rocket science nor does it involve the pagan practice of appeasing Gaia. It’s just doing what needs to be done to save forests — and lives.
On June 23, I wrote about the House of Commons voting against giving Boris Johnson a former members’ pass to Parliament.
The hypocrisy of MPs voting to refuse him a routine privilege is breathtaking.
The Hansard debate is here. Excerpts follow, emphases mine, with news updates since then.
Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the House, led the debate. Her opening statement ended with this, a response to Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts:
The right hon. Lady brings me to my closing remarks on why what we do this afternoon matters, whichever way we decide to vote, or not to vote. The real-world consequences of a vote today may seem to come down to whether the former Member for Uxbridge has a pass to the estate. Our constituents may not appreciate why we are focused on contempt towards the House as opposed to contempts that they may feel have been made against them: the lockdown breaches themselves, which grate hard with those who sacrificed so much to keep us all safe; for others, the creation of a culture relaxed about the need to lift restrictions; for others, wider issues such as the debasement of our honours system. But we would be wrong to think that there is no meaningful consequence to our actions this afternoon.
The Committee of Privileges, in its work producing this report, did not just examine the conduct of a former colleague but sought to defend our rights and privileges in this place: the right not to be misled and the right not to be abused when carrying out our duties. As a consequence, it has also defended the rights of those who sent us here and those we serve. I thank the Committee and its staff for their service.
This matters because the integrity of our institutions matter. The respect and trust afforded to them matter. This has real-world consequences for the accountability of Members of the Parliament to each other and the members of the public they represent. Today, all Members should do what they think is right, and others should leave them alone to do so.
Well, in the event, only seven MPs, of whom six Conservatives, voted against the motion.
Not surprisingly, most MPs weighed in against Boris in this late afternoon debate that extended until the end of that day’s session, around 9:45 p.m.
Only Conservative MP Bob Seely raised a question about Tony Blair’s spurious reasons for going to war with Iraq. This intervention occurred when the Shadow Leader of the House, Thangam Debnonaire, spoke:
I want to make a brief point. I am voting in support of the motion and I did not vote in support of Owen Paterson, but I remind the hon. Member that we got rid of Boris Johnson a year ago because we lost faith in him, because he was probably not telling the truth. I am also an Iraq war veteran, and the reality is that when Tony Blair lied and lied and lied, you lot covered up for him.
Former Prime Minister Theresa May gave her speech at 5:02 p.m.:
I do not intend to dwell on the events covered in the report of the Committee of Privileges or its conclusions. It is a rigorous report and I accept its findings. I do wish to comment on the role of the Committee, the role of this House and the importance of today’s debate and vote for our political life, this Parliament and our democracy.
It is not easy to sit in judgment on friends and colleagues. One day we are judging their behaviour, the next day we may be standing next to them in the queue in the Members’ Tea Room. I know that it is not easy because, as Prime Minister, I had to take decisions based on judgments about the behaviour of friends and colleagues—decisions that affected their lives and, potentially, their careers. But friendship and working together should not get in the way of doing what is right.
I commend members of the Privileges Committee for their painstaking work and for their dignity in the face of slurs on their integrity. The House should, as the Leader of the House said, thank all of them for their service and for being willing to undertake the role. Particular thanks should go to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) for being willing to stand up to chair the Committee when the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) rightly recused himself. This Committee report matters, this debate matters and this vote matters. They matter because they strike at the heart of the bond of trust and respect between the public and Parliament that underpins the workings of this place and of our democracy.
Let us consider the pious Mrs May. One week after this debate, on Monday, June 26, The Telegraph tweeted that she, too, had attended a party during lockdown on the parliamentary estate. As we can see, Guido Fawkes got there first:
Guido posted that Theresa May attended an event on November 24, 2020, two weeks before the one in Deputy Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing’s office which Bernard Jenkin MP attended: the December 8 birthday party for his wife Anne, Baroness Jenkin. Anne is wearing the white coat and was also present, allegedly, at the November 24 event:
Guido has more photos and more on the story (emphases in red his):
Bernard Jenkin’s “cowardly” silence hasn’t deterred Guido from digging deeper into the Jenkin’s parties. Yes, you read that right, parties – plural. Guido can reveal that Anne Jenkin’s lockdown-breaking birthday bash in Eleanor Laing’s office wasn’t an isolated event. Just two weeks prior, when the country was in an even stricter lockdown, she hosted a “(socially distanced) party”…
At the time, lockdown regulations made clear “you must not meet socially indoors with family or friends unless they are part of your household… or support bubble”. There was no such thing as a “socially distanced party” permitted, and “everyone who can work effectively from home must do so”. There was no justification for an indoor social celebration – even if it was a ‘work event’.
The party concerned a support group for women MPs, Women2Win, which was celebrating its 15th anniversary:
Perhaps this is why Charlotte Carew Pole, director of Women2Win, has become unwilling to speak to Guido. Despite initially responding receptively, after the topic of conversation became apparent she seemed to suffer immediate amnesia. All she could say was that she didn’t run Women2Win’s social media and that she couldn’t remember any details. Although Charlotte insisted she would get back to Guido, she never has…
Guido did manage to get through to two other attendees of the celebration, held as a hybrid event in Policy Exchange’s Westminster offices. Theresa May was there in person, as Boris Johnson and David Cameron addressed the event via zoom. The hybrid event could arguably be a “work event”. It was certainly a live-streamed public event.
More problematic is that the event was followed by celebratory drinks described as a “birthday party” and Theresa May stuck around briefly for a few pictures – though apparently left swiftly and Guido has seen no pictorial evidence she had a lockdown-breaking drink. Whilst one of Guido’s source insists masks were worn at all times, the private photos differ from the publicity photos…
Baroness Nicholson pictured on the left (top photo) has no drink, whereas Anne Jenkin (on the right) has a drink in hand. In publicity photos everyone is masked with no drinks in hand. One attendee insisted it wasn’t a party, although they did describe it as “joyful” and “a celebration, definitely”.
The Telegraph article stated:
Theresa May is under pressure to clarify her involvement in a “socially distanced party” she attended during the second full lockdown.
The former prime minister was pictured taking part in an event held on Nov 24 2020 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Women2Win, a Tory pressure group she co-founded with Baroness Jenkin …
The Guido Fawkes website reported that Mrs May participated in a hybrid discussion in person at the headquarters of the Policy Exchange think tank, before staying to pose for a number of photographs.
A social media post on the Women2Win Instagram account posted shortly before the event read: “When Anne Jenkin and Theresa May founded Women2Win 15 years ago, there were 17 Conservative women MPs.
“Today there are 87 and we think that deserves a (socially distanced) party.”
The Guido Fawkes report went on to claim the panel was “followed by celebratory drinks described as a ‘birthday party’”.
Mrs May was reported to have left prior to this, and is seen socially distancing from other participants in pictures from before and after the discussion.
There is no suggestion Mrs May broke any Covid rules. In its original article, Guido Fawkes wrote: “The hybrid event could arguably be a ‘work event’. It was certainly a live-streamed public event.”
A spokesman for the former prime minister declined to comment when approached by The Telegraph.
There is no evidence that Boris Johnson broke Covid rules, either, including at the surprise birthday ‘party’ his wife Carrie organised. His cake stayed in its Tupperware container and Boris was photographed socially distancing from Rishi Sunak and others there. It lasted only a few minutes.
Moving away from Mrs May, with regard to Baroness Jenkin’s birthday party on December 8, which Dame Eleanor Laing hosted in her conference room on the parliamentary estate, we learned that another Conservative MP, Virginia Crosbie, was in attendance. Pictured below are Baroness Jenkin, Virginia Crosbie and their hostess, Dame Eleanor Laing:
The aforementioned Telegraph article said:
It came as a ministerial aide to Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, apologised “unreservedly” after attending a drinks party also said to have involved Baroness Jenkin.
Yes, here is a photo of Hancock and Crosbie during their time at the Department of Health and Social Care:
The article continues:
Virginia Crosbie, the Conservative MP for Ynys Môn and Mr Hancock’s parliamentary private secretary during the pandemic, is alleged to have co-hosted the event with the Tory peer on Dec 8 2020, the date of their respective 54th and 65th birthdays.
A ban on socialising indoors was in place in London at the time of the reported gathering. It has come under additional scrutiny after her husband Sir Bernard Jenkin, who was allegedly present, sat on the privileges committee of MPs that recommended Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, be suspended from Parliament for 90 days.
Ms Crosbie said: “The invitation for this event was not sent out by me. I attended the event briefly, I did not drink and I did not celebrate my birthday. I went home shortly after to be with my family.
“I apologise unreservedly for a momentary error of judgment in attending the event.”
Sir Bernard has denied attending a drinks party and an ally has said no rules were broken.
Let’s look at the party Theresa May attended for Women2Win, at which Baroness Jenkin was present:
Now let’s look at the joint Baroness Jenkin-Virginia Crosbie birthday party on December 8:
Guido suggested via tweet that this might be a case for Inspector Columbo:
Guido’s post was, rightly, quite pointed:
In the WhatsApp invitation from Anne Jenkin, the party is described as “joint birthday drinks“. It was both Virginia Crosbie’s 54th and Anne Jenkin’s 65th birthdays on December 8, 2020.* Why let a little thing like lockdown get in the way of having a party?
Guido should say that on the list of MPs invited, there are three current cabinet minister’s names and the name of one former PM. Guido has managed to speak to only one of those names. She got her SpAd to deny her attendance after claiming she couldn’t remember. The others are refusing to comment.
The obvious thing for the Metropolitan Police to do is the same they did with the suspected attendees at the Downing Street parties. Send a formal letter inviting them to pay a Fixed Notice Penalty or risk more serious consequences in Court if they deny attending and the evidence shows otherwise. As Bernard Jenkin sanctimoniously reminded us on the Privileges Committee: no matter how high we are, none of us are above the law…
Six hours after Guido broke the story, Virginia Crosbie issued a written apology:
What are we to conclude from a written apology? Boris Johnson made several apologies in the House of Commons but to no avail. The kangaroo court went after him anyway.
Therefore, why should it be any different for another MP? Is the only difference that Boris was Prime Minister?
Boris believed that civil servants were telling him the truth — that he was not breaking the rules with these brief leaving dos and the equally brief surprise birthday party.
All of these MPs should be investigated.
Fortunately, on Thursday, June 28, Guido Fawkes appealed for help from insiders to expose them:
Guido’s accompanying post lays out the ways that people in the know can contact him and his team in safety.
He warns that he has heard of more lockdown violations by MPs, including Dame Eleanor Laing:
Since we broke the story about Anne Jenkin’s party in Parliament, we have been getting snippets of tips about other lockdown legislators’ lawbreaking parties in Westminster. We know of other parties held by Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing in her offices on other days. We know of other MPs attending those parties. We also know of other parties held elsewhere. Guido believes that there is a cover-up being quietly organised by senior MPs who realise that on this issue “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
This is a call for information to add to our dossier. If you have evidence, invitations via WhatsApp or emails, better still photos. These parties were not held in total secrecy. Staff in Parliament will have known…
Sources are anonymous (unless you want credit). Who is on the fiddle? Who is lying? If you know “the line” is a lie, ask yourself why you got into politics; was it to cover up the truth or to tell it?
At least one member of the public thinks the Speaker of the House Sir Lindsay Hoyle should investigate the do that Deputy Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing hosted:
https://twitter.com/paynter_peter/status/1673416068574900249
https://twitter.com/paynter_peter/status/1673502623528353793
Someone else noted that another gathering in Boris’s Partygate was very brief, a leaving do for his adviser Lee Cain. That brief event was different to the joint birthday party gathering:
Now let’s look at the conclusion of Theresa May’s speech about the Privileges Committee report:
As MPs, we are in some sense leaders in our communities, but with that leadership comes responsibility. We each and every one of us bear the responsibility to put the people that we serve first, to be honest with them and with one another, and to uphold the standards of this place. We all know that in the rough and tumble of parliamentary debate between people of opposing views there will be exaggeration, careful use of facts and, in some cases, misrepresentation, but when something is said that is wrong and misleads the House, we are all—not just Ministers—under an obligation not to repeat it and to correct it at the first opportunity. Above all, we are all responsible for our own actions. Beyond that, this House has a responsibility to ensure that standards are upheld by showing that we are willing to act against the interests of colleagues when the facts require it. In this case, I believe they do.
The decision of the House on the report is important: to show the public that there is not one rule for them and another for us; indeed, we have a greater responsibility than most to uphold the rules and set an example. The decision also matters to show that Parliament is capable of dealing with Members who transgress the rules of the House—if you like, to show the sovereignty of Parliament. Following an unsettling period in our political life, support for the report of the Privileges Committee will be a small but important step in restoring people’s trust in Members of this House and of Parliament.
I say to Members of my own party that it is doubly important for us to show that we are prepared to act when one of our own, however senior, is found wanting. I will vote in favour of the report of the Privileges Committee and I urge all Members of this House to do so—to uphold standards in public life, to show that we all recognise the responsibility we have to the people we serve and to help to restore faith in our parliamentary democracy.
Oh, the irony!
The next MP to speak was Labour’s Harriet Harman, who chaired the Privileges Committee investigation after the head of the Committee, another Labour MP, Chris Bryant, recused himself because he was so anti-Boris.
She accused Boris of deliberately misleading Parliament. How could she or any other MP know that unless they had eyes into his soul, as Elizabeth I once put it:
The evidence shows that, on a matter that could hardly have been of more importance, Mr Johnson deliberately misled the House, not just once but on numerous occasions. The evidence shows that he denied what was true, asserted what was not true, obfuscated and deceived. It is clear that he knew the rules and guidance: as Prime Minister, he was telling the country about them nearly every day. He knew that there were gatherings: he was there. He knew that the gatherings breached the rules and the guidance. Yet he told the House that the rules and the guidance were followed in No. 10 “at all times”.
Misleading the House is not a technicality but a matter of great importance. Our democracy is based on people electing us to scrutinise the Government, and, on behalf of the people we represent, we have to hold the Government to account. We cannot do that if Ministers are not truthful. Ministers must be truthful; if they are not, we cannot do our job. It is as simple and as fundamental as that. The House asked the Privileges Committee to inquire into the allegations that Mr Johnson, who was then Prime Minister, misled the House. That is the mechanism—the only mechanism—that the House has to protect itself in the face of a Minister misleading it. We undertook the inquiry, scrupulously sticking to the rules and processes laid down by this House under Standing Orders, and following the precedents of this House.
At that point, a Boris supporter, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was Leader of the House under his tenure, intervened:
I wonder whether the right hon. and learned Lady could say something of her own position in relation to the precedent set by a judicial Committee of the House of Lords, when a decision in which Lord Hoffmann was involved was set aside not because he was biased, but because of the perception of bias. In relation to her famous tweets, how does she think she met the Hoffmann test?
Harman defended her position:
I am happy to answer the right hon. Gentleman. I was appointed by this House in the expectation that I would chair the Committee, with no one speaking against it. After the tweets were brought to light and highlighted, as I am concerned about the perception of fairness on the Committee—I agree that perception matters—I made it my business to find out whether it would mean that the Government would not have confidence in me if I continued to chair the Committee. I actually said, “I will be more than happy to step aside, because perception matters and I do not want to do this if the Government do not have confidence in me. I need the whole House to have confidence in the work that it has mandated.” I was assured that I should continue the work that the House had mandated, and with the appointment that the House had put me into, and so I did just that.
She also mentioned Theresa May, whom the Opposition always defends, possibly because the former Prime Minister did her best to thwart Brexit, even though she made it appear that she was on-side. May is also soft on illegal immigration, which also pleases the Opposition parties:
Like the right hon. Member for Maidenhead, with whom I share a great deal—including, it turns out, a necklace—I thank every member of the Privileges Committee.
Yes, both MPs wear what are called ‘power necklaces’, huge things slung around their necks.
This is the one that Harman was wearing when she gave her speech:
Far from flattering, although The Telegraph‘s fashion writer seems to like them. This is from March 23, complete with photos:
As statement necklaces go, Harman’s is peerless. That oversized gold chains are ultra-fashionable this season is the least of it: of far more significance is the symbolism. You don’t need a GCSE in cultural studies to know that chains are a symbol of bondage, or that prisoners are shackled by them upon their arrest. “It radiates justice like the chains on Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol”, one Twitter user noted, while others compared it to the spider brooch worn by Lady Hale in 2019, when the supreme court ruled that Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament during the Brexit crisis was unlawful. Well-played, Harman. Well-played.
It’s a pity that the paper didn’t mention May’s Wilma Flintstone neck pebbles.
Let’s look at Harriet Harman for a moment.
On May 26, 2022, while Boris was still PM, Labour appointed Harman in Chris Bryant’s place to investigate Partygate:
Guido told us that Harman was hardly above receiving fines herself:
… The vacancy was created when Chris Bryant stepped down because he didn’t want the investigation to look biased. Guido’s not sure whether any Tory in the country is going to accept Harman’s judgements as politically neutral…
If Labour goes ahead with the bizarre appointment, not only will the PM be judged by someone equally as biased as Bryant, having called for the PM to quit, it’ll be one of the few Labour MPs who’s racked up more Fixed Penalty Notices than Boris. As Guido pointed out when Harman accused the PM of breaking the laws he made, she was charged with three speeding offences during her time as a minister…
Guido posted the penalties from 2003, 2007 and 2010.
On May 30, 2023, Guido alum Christian Calgie alleged in The Express that Harman received reports on Boris from one of her relatives via marriage:
Alex Chisholm, Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office, is related to Privileges Committee chair Harriet Harman, the Express can reveal.
The familial tie is yet another link between the top Government department at the heart of the Partygate saga, sparking new questions about the neutrality and independence of the civil service.
Last week, top Mandarin Alex Chisholm passed Boris Johnson’s diaries over to both the Met Police and Thames Valley police amid allegations from Government lawyers that visits to Mr Johnson’s grace-and-favour mansion Chequers had broken Covid rules.
The Cabinet Office then handed the diaries over to Ms Harman’s Privileges Committee, which is investigating whether the former PM “recklessly” misled Parliament over lockdown parties.
A few weeks earlier, on May 12, Guido posted that Harman had been in touch with the then-senior civil servant Sue Gray, who, although she was supposed to be impartial, had allegedly agreed by then to become an adviser to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. Impartiality?
Guido wrote:
Chief Partygate investigator-turned Labour Chief of Staff Sue Gray was in personal contact with Privileges Committee chair Harriet Harman while Gray was still a civil servant. According to Sky News, Harman made frequent, direct contact with Gray in the early stages of the Kangaroo Court’s Partygate probe, claiming privately “I just speak to Sue”. A Privileges Committee spokesperson insists this is all above board:
The chair with the full knowledge of the committee has had regular contact with a number of ministers and officials in the Cabinet Office to discuss matters such as the provision of documents to the committee, the identity of potential witnesses and the welfare of civil servants who may be affected by the inquiry.
They also stressed “the privileges committee is not relying on evidence gathered by Sue Gray“. Just like how she ‘wasn’t’ working on the Partygate probe after opening talks with Labour – until it was revealed she was, after all…
Starmer claimed Richard Sharp being appointed to the BBC was corrupt because he was helpful to then PM Boris on an unrelated matter when the role was being discussed. Gray being appointed to Starmer’s office however is not corrupt despite when the role was being discussed her being helpful to the man who wants to be PM in getting rid of his most potent campaigning opponent. Completely different.
Going back further, to August 2019, weeks after Boris became Prime Minister, Harman was having none of his new position and said she should be a caretaker PM in order to prevent a no-deal Brexit:
We knew then how anti-Boris she was.
One month later, she decided to put her name into the ring to become the second female Speaker of the House, following news that John Bercow, who began as a Conservative but then revealed his left-wing, anti-Brexit stances during his tenure, was standing down.
On September 13, Guido posted the full list of MPs wanting to succeed Bercow. As he was technically a Conservative, a Labour MP would have to succeed him. Of Harman, Guido wrote:
The (self-described) ‘Mother of the House’. Pitching herself as ‘continuity Bercow.’ That will go down well with Remainers but is unlikely to pick up much Tory support…
Guido had his finger on the pulse even at that early stage:
Harriet Harman has the most sophisticated operation and the most support from the Labour benches. Another serious contender at this stage is Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle.
Well done. Hoyle was duly elected Speaker several weeks later.
In the meantime, Harman appeared to allege that the Commons never had a woman Speaker, which it surely did in the 1990s with Betty Boothroyd:
Harman was even an MP when Boothroyd was Speaker:
By November 4, former Labour Party member, Daily Mail journalist and Glenda Jackson’s son Dan Hodges tweeted that Harman’s campaign had been a disaster:
This was Harman’s pitch that day, which did not go down well:
Later that afternoon, Harman signalled to the then-Father of the House, then-Conservative MP Ken Clarke, that she was ending her candidature:
https://twitter.com/tompeck/status/1191413009442385924
In the end, Labour MPs carried Sir Lindsay Hoyle from their benches to the Speaker’s chair, a longstanding Commons tradition going back to when an elected Speaker did not want to take up the post.
Moving closer to the present, on December 7, 2021, The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole, another Guido alum, tweeted that Harman would not be seeking re-election in the next general:
That is why she was so determined to get Boris. She wanted to leave a lasting legacy.
On March 17, 2023, Guido posted that Harman seemed to have come to a conclusion even before grilling Boris as part of her investigation. Fairness?
When Harman interviewed Boris on March 22, she told him that Sue Gray would not be a witness:
Boris reminded Harman of her biased tweets against him:
Guido has a full rundown of the Committee’s grilling of the then-MP, who was by then no longer PM, along with these videos.
Note Harman’s power necklace:
Harman even brought up a speeding metaphor:
16:50 – Whilst berating Johnson’s assurances, Harriet Harman asked “if I was going at 100mph and I saw the speedometer saying 100mph – it would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it, if I said somebody assured me that I wasn’t?”. A peculiar choice of metaphor – coming from Harriet. Would this be the same Harriet Harman caught speeding twice, banned from driving for seven days and fined £400?
The anti-Boris Conservative MP Charles Walker, who is another MP not standing for re-election, asked Boris if he thought he was up before a kangaroo court:
Boris gave him a polite response.
The Mail‘s Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s ex-wife, thought that Boris had done admirably:
However, there is a long-forgotten past to Harriet Harman, one that my British readers remember and one that I mentioned in my 2011 post, ‘More on the Fabians, the Frankfurt School and society today’:
– Sanctimonious politicians whose minds are in the gutter. In my 2010 post on the Fabians and Labour politicians, I wrote that they presented themselves very well on television and radio interviews. Between 1997 and 2010, they articulately pointed out the shortcomings of British taxpayers who smoked, drank and ate too much. If we were not guilty of any of those, then we consumed too much electricity and gas. We drove too much. We didn’t get enough exercise. We didn’t read to our children enough. The list was endless. But did you know that one of these MPs, Harriet Harman, in an earlier incarnation as legal officer in 1978 for the organisation now called Liberty, wanted to lower the age of consent to 14 and to decriminalise incest? British readers should also note that at that same time Patricia Hewitt — later a Secretary for Health (!) under Tony Blair — was the general secretary for what was then the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL):
It also defended self-confessed paedophiles in the press and allowed them to attend its meetings …
In NCCL’s official response to the Government’s plans to reform sex laws, dubbed a “Lolita’s Charter”, it suggested reducing the age of consent and argued that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage”. It claimed that children can suffer more from having to retell their experiences in court or the press.
What I did not know until 2014, was that Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, who died in 2022, had chaired the NCCL in the 1970s. In 2014, he was still a serving MP and remained so until his rather sudden death.
On February 28, 2014, Guido reported on a story in The Sun, which appeared during the Leveson inquiry:
… Earlier this week Jack Dromey insisted:
During my time on the NCCL Executive, I was at the forefront of repeated public condemnations of PIE and their despicable views. I was then the first to argue that paedophiles could have no place in NCCL.
Today’s dark revelations in the Sun cast doubt over the credibility of that denial. While Dromey was sitting on the NCCL executive, general secretary Patricia Hewitt put her name to a press release arguing that it was acceptable to have sex with children as young as ten. Recipients of the press release were urged to contact Hewitt for further information.
Not only that, Dromey personally attended a meeting where the minutes of which show:
It was agreed that our evidence should propose that if a partner in a sexual relationship was under ten, s/he is presumed incapable of consent. If the partner is over ten and under 14, there is a rebuttable presumption that no consent was given, but the defendant should have to prove that the child consented and understood the nature of the act to which consent was given.
Which means that, far from taking a public stance condemning PIE as he told us earlier this week, Dromey was actually a member of the executive which called for the weakening of child sex laws. Hewitt has ‘fessed up and apologised for her actions. Is Dromey’s denial still really entirely believable?
A few days later, on March 1, 2014, The Independent featured an editorial by Joan Smith, ‘PIE controversy: Harriet Harman has got this one wrong’:
Between 1978 and 1982, Harman was legal officer of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty). Her husband Jack Dromey, who is Labour’s shadow police minister, chaired the NCCL in the 1970s; Patricia Hewitt, who was later a cabinet minister, was its general secretary. The links between the NCCL and an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange have been known about for years, and are a stain on its reputation.
The problem for Harman, Dromey and Hewitt isn’t that they were advocates of sexual relationships between adults and children when they were at the NCCL. It isn’t even an NCCL press release in 1976 calling for the lowering of the age of consent to 14 – a terrible idea, but not one supported only by paedophiles at the time. It’s that the origin of the attack seems to have blinded them to the fact that they might actually have something to apologise for.
Hewitt broke her silence three days ago and admitted she “got it wrong” on PIE, but Harman’s tardiness in acknowledging the organisation’s poor judgement has kept the story on the front page. She was defensive on BBC2’s Newsnight programme, and didn’t express regret about the link until the following morning.
… there was a collective failure at the NCCL to kick out a very nasty bunch of people. Harman’s defence – that any legal organisation was allowed to affiliate to the NCCL – suggests a lack of proper governance. Yesterday a Court of Protection judge confirmed that he resigned in 1979 when he discovered that representatives of PIE were speaking at NCCL meetings at the London School of Economics.
Harman has many talents but she also has a patrician testiness which doesn’t respond well to being challenged. I can understand her revulsion at having to admit that the Mail has a point, but I’m also surprised the story hasn’t blown up before now. The brightest people make mistakes, even if it’s a matter of failing to notice something or act robustly enough.
That’s what Harman, who went to work at the NCCL after PIE affiliated to it, should have acknowledged. Instead, she has played into the hands of a newspaper which wants its readers to believe the appalling smear that the Labour Party is stuffed with covert supporters of child abuse.
Incredibly, in 2013, Guido received a tip about an adult social media item that Jack Dromey ‘favourited’. Dromey was the Shadow Minister of State for Policing at the time. We can only be grateful that the hand of providence prevented these two MPs from doing more harm to our nation.
Jack Dromey died in January 2022:
Guido posted Sir Keir Starmer’s statement and this:
The Shadow Minister for Immigration has passed away at the age of 73. According to Press Association: “Labour MP Jack Dromey died suddenly in his flat in Birmingham on Friday morning, a statement issued on behalf of the 73-year-old shadow minister’s family said”. Condolences to Harriet Harman and the entire family. Rest in Peace.
So this is the woman who conducted the investigation on Boris for short leaving dos and a surprise birthday party that lasted only minutes:
This is a story of hypocrisy beyond belief.
And it is not over yet. Harman and her Privileges Committee MPs issued a second report today, Thursday, June 29, 2023, which will be debated in Parliament next week.
It is about those MPs who objected to Boris being investigated for Partygate and being hounded out of office as an MP. Yes, he resigned, but only because they recommended an unheard-of 90-day suspension which would no doubt have triggered a petition in his constituency for a by-election:
Here is part of the detail:
Guido says the Committee did not want any opposition to their dark doings:
Here is a readers’ exchange from Guido’s post, which omits the link to the report, or maybe it will be added later:
Reader A (in response to Reader B): … it lacked all the components of a fair trial that allow the social and cultural legitimacy of banning direct criticism of a judge and jury during a trial.
You are giving a p3d0 apologist the same social gravitas as a Judge. Have a think about that.
Reader B: Fine. Then a motion should be put to the House arguing that she is not a fit and proper person, and allow her to argue her case in defence. Otherwise, you are conducting your own witch hunt. Have a think about that.
Reader A: Yes I thought about it, and like the MPs in question are simply pointing out the absurdity of the Committees own view of themselves as above and beyond the demos, to the extent they feel they are above negative comment. That is the actions of a despot not of an organ of a democratic institution.
If they were adults secure in their objectivity and the logic and fairness of their rulings they would just laugh it off. The fact they have acted like this shows that not only are they hugely nervous about the foundations upon which they have cast their ire but also their own viability to be there in the first place. Paging Bernard Jenkins.
You don’t seem to have thought about the long term issue for trust and fairness of having someone as morally and intellectually compromised as Harman as a chair.
I could not agree more.
Yet, this is where we are. Harman’s investigation was supported by the four Conservative MPs on it. Their loathing of Boris clouded their judgement.
Will the other Conservative MPs ever be investigated for their lockdown breaches? And what about Labour? When Sir Keir and a few other Labour MPs were in Durham campaigning during a time when socialising was forbidden in April 2021, no one did anything, certainly not Durham Constabulary. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sadly, it seems that the only goal in this egregious process was to bring Boris down — and Brexit down with him.
More to follow next week.
Queen Elizabeth II had a full diary of engagements, even into her 90s.
Much of this post illustrates how busy she was in December 2019 and February 2020, when she was 93 years old.
First, however, let us go back to 2010, when she was still handing out honours at Buckingham Palace.
Awards ceremony 2010
That year, the Queen awarded a milkman from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire with an MBE — Member of the British Empire — medal for going beyond the call of duty.
Tony Fowler not only delivered milk and checked in on vulnerable customers but also foiled crimes during his daily deliveries.
On June 10, 2010, The Mail reported:
During his 19 years delivering milk, he has helped officers catch a string of criminals by keeping a look-out for suspicious behaviour, foiling burglaries, drug deals and car thefts. He also befriends the frail and elderly and provides whatever help he can.
‘It’s very humbling to be here and I regard this MBE as something for all milkmen,’ he said, adding: ‘I’ve done everything from helping to save people’s lives to getting the lid off a jar of pickles for one of my older customers.’
However, this was no ordinary medal presentation. Tony Fowler insisted on receiving it wearing a cow suit and notified the Palace of his intentions:
Buckingham Palace did have advance warning that Tony Fowler wanted to dress up for the event.
… aides had done their best to dissuade him – and no doubt the Queen assumed he would comply.
Instead, Mr Fowler, 51, merely toned down his outfit slightly.
He relented somewhat and had a customer sew white patches on his suit so that it had a Friesian motif. The article has rather amusing photos. Fowler was pleased as punch.
The Queen smiled, too, in presenting him with his MBE medal (emphases mine below):
Afterwards the milkman insisted that his outfit had gone down well with the monarch, who is a keen farmer.
‘She was a bit disappointed it wasn’t a Jersey (costume) because that’s her own cows at Windsor,’ he quipped.
December 2019
2019 was a tumultuous year for Boris Johnson, who became Prime Minister in July that year, having been elected the new Conservative Party leader upon Theresa May’s resignation over the Brexit impasse in the House of Commons.
Like his predecessor, Boris did not receive any co-operation, either. As a result, he prorogued — adjourned — Parliament in September that year, a move that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. When Parliament reopened, a State Opening of Parliament had to take place. The Queen dutifully presented her Government’s statement of upcoming legislation.
However, Boris still did not receive any further co-operation on Brexit, so he called a general election for Thursday, December 12. Parliament was prorogued once again, and MPs hit the hustings to campaign.
Boris was still PM during that time and attended the reception for NATO leaders at Buckingham Palace on December 3, which the Queen hosted:
The Mail carried a full report, along with photos of a resplendent Melania Trump in a yellow cape and magenta dress with matching high heels.
At one point, the Queen gave Princess Anne a look. It later emerged that the reception was running somewhat late, and the Princess was attempting to keep it to time:
On December 12, the Conservatives won a stonking majority of 80. As it was a new House of Commons, another State Opening of Parliament had to take place.
Once again, the Queen dutifully complied.
Once again, barricades went up around Westminster early the following week on December 18:
The next day, October 19, the State Opening of Parliament took place.
Interestingly, our apolitical Queen wore colours approximating those of the Brexit Party when giving her speech about the Government’s upcoming legislation, much the same as before:
No doubt it was just a coincidence.
According to The Guardian‘s John Crace, attendance from the House of Lords, where the monarch gives the speech, was thin on the ground. Most of the upper house voted Remain in June 2016:
Everywhere you looked in the Lords there were vast expanses of empty seats. Two Queen’s speeches in as many months is at least one too many. Especially when the first one was just a political stunt that was never intended to be implemented. This time the peers were voting with their feet. Just 10 Labour lords could be bothered to pull out the ermine and take up their places.
There were rather more Tories, but still not enough to prevent the upper chamber from becoming an echo chamber …
Even the Queen was staging her own dirty protest at having her time wasted. Hell, didn’t the government know that the last Thursday before Christmas was the day she traditionally headed off for Sandringham? This time she had given most of her retainers the day off, had dispensed with the state coach in favour of the company Rolls and just pulled on the shabby green coat that had been hanging by the door. Her face never broke from a scowl throughout. She couldn’t have made her feelings any more plain.
The last line of the speech is always the best, as the monarch asks for God’s guidance upon MPs and the Lords:
That was the last time the Queen participated in the State Opening of Parliament. Prince Charles led the next one.
As scheduled, the next day — December 20 — saw the Queen depart London for Sandringham for the Christmas holidays.
She took a commuter train:
https://twitter.com/UK16OUT/status/1208096010746155009
I wonder how many people noticed.
Someone in the know explained that this particular journey by train was customary for the Queen, who had her own compartment:
Sandringham had its own protocol for Christmas holidays. The Queen did not allow unmarried couples, even when engaged, to stay there. When Prince William and Katherine were engaged, the future Duchess of Cambridge had to spend the holidays with the Middletons.
With Prince Harry, that all changed.
On December 23, The Mail reported:
Princess Beatrice has been given permission by the Queen to bring her fiance to Sandringham this year – and they will even accompany her to church on Christmas Day.
In a sign of solidarity with the beleaguered York family, the monarch has extended a coveted invitation to her Norfolk estate to Beatrice’s partner, 36-year-old property tycoon Edoardo ‘Edo’ Mapelli Mozzi.
The gesture is also a sign of how the 93-year-old royal is moving with the times.
Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable for the sovereign, who is also head of the Church of England, to have unmarried couples staying under her roof.
But, in 2017, convention was relaxed to allow Prince Harry to bring his then-fiancee Meghan Markle to stay at the Queen’s estate for the festive season.
It is understood the Queen, like many senior royals, has felt desperately sorry for Beatrice, 31, who announced her engagement in September after a short romance but has seen her happiness overshadowed by the ongoing fallout from her father‘s friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his disastrous interview on BBC2’s Newsnight programme.
February 2020
Two events from February 2020 illustrate the wide-ranging type of events the Queen attended.
On February 19, she opened a new dental premises in London, something Meghan Markle probably would have sneered at.
The Mail reported:
The Queen looked in an upbeat mood as she arrived to open the new premises of the Royal National ENT and Eastman Dental Hospital today.
The monarch, 93, cut a vibrant figure in a purple hat embellished with two bobbles, and a matching wool coat.
Making a perfectly polished appearance, the royal wore her beloved pearl earrings, a touch of red lipstick, and matched her black Launer bag with a pair of low heeled court shoes.
The Queen’s appearance came after an insider claimed the Queen and senior officials have ‘agreed’ it is no longer tenable for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to keep the word ‘royal’ in their ‘branding’.
But the royal appeared in high spirits as she arrived in London to open the new dental hospital.
Disembarking from her chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, the royal greeted onlookers before being accompanied into the building.
On February 25, the Queen delivered a top-secret address to MI5 to congratulate them on their efforts in fighting terrorism:
Coronavirus-related addresses
The Mail‘s Dan Wootton summarised the Queen’s Christmas 2020 address, which focused on coronavirus. She had pre-recorded it earlier in the year, as usual, but it was apposite as we were in another lockdown:
Two months later, on February 26, 2021, the Queen told medical officials via Zoom that she was perplexed as to why Britons did not want to get their coronavirus jabs:
That was the point where I began to go off her, although she was still the best monarch we will ever know.
Guido Fawkes gave us this soundbite, part of what she said in the call (emphasis his):
The Queen has spoken out in favour of the jab, describing those refusing the Covid vaccine of failing “to think about other people rather than themselves”. Presumably being anti-vaccine is now treason…
Guido was not wrong. The popular MP, Andrew Bridgen, who represents North West Leicestershire, was expelled from the Conservative Party last week for badgering the Government on the dangers of the vaccine and requesting a debate on the upcoming WHO treaty for future epidemics, which, frankly, could be anything.
Christmas 2021
The Queen’s final Christmas was marked by an intruder at Windsor Castle on Christmas Day.
Prince Philip had died in April that year, and she never recovered from the loss of her husband, her best friend and confidant.
The Times had the story of the young intruder, hapless and ignorant in his socio-political zealotry. No one wanted to bring about reconciliation more sincerely than the Queen:
The father of a teenager suspected of breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow after allegedly vowing to assassinate the Queen in revenge for the Amritsar massacre of 1919 has said: “Something’s gone horribly wrong with our son.”
Jasbir Chail, 58, said that his son, Jaswant, 19, needed help after being detained under the Mental Health Act accused of scaling the walls of the castle on Christmas Day.
A video posted on social media the morning of the alleged attempt showed a masked figure saying his name was Jaswant Singh Chail, announcing the plot and making Star Wars references.
“I will attempt to assassinate Elizabeth, Queen of the royal family,” a distorted voice is heard to say, according to The Sun. “This is revenge for those who have died in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre” …
Jaswant Chail has undergone a mental health assessment and is in the care of doctors while the police investigate the circumstances of the break-in. He was the fifth person to have breached security at Windsor in the past nine months.
The suspect was seen using a rope ladder to scale a metal fence, according to newspaper reports. The breach happened as the Queen, 95, prepared to greet the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall for festivities.
The Queen missed the Christmas Day service at St George’s Chapel but sources said that it was a health precaution because of the coronavirus. Charles, Camilla, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children Lady Louise Windsor, 18, and Viscount Severn, 14, went to the service regardless of the security scare.
The Queen’s Christmas speech was a ratings winner. None of us watching could have imagined it would be her last:
More than nine million people watched the Queen’s message on Christmas Day, more viewers than for any other programme. The Queen reflected on the impact of the pandemic and a year of personal grief, saying that there was “one familiar laugh missing” after the Duke of Edinburgh died at the age of 99 in April. The speech was shown by the BBC, ITV and Sky …
“Christmas can be hard for those who have lost loved ones,” she said in her annual message. “This year, especially, I understand why. In the months since the death of my beloved Philip I have drawn great comfort from the warmth and affection of the many tributes to his life and work. His sense of service, intellectual curiosity and capacity to squeeze fun out of any situation were all irrepressible. That mischievous, inquiring twinkle was as bright at the end as when I first set eyes on him.”
The couple are believed to have met in 1939 during a visit by George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where Philip was an 18-year-old cadet. Princess Elizabeth, 13, was smitten at first sight.
“But life, of course, consists of final partings as well as first meetings,” the Queen added, “and, as much as I and my family miss him, I know he would want us to enjoy Christmas. We felt his presence as we, like millions around the world, readied ourselves for Christmas.”
The broadcast opened with an excerpt of the Queen’s speech in 1997 at Banqueting House, marking her golden wedding anniversary, where she described Philip as “my strength and stay all these years”, and included footage of special moments during their marriage.
Interestingly, the broadcast had been pre-recorded just the week before Christmas. Usually, it was several weeks earlier:
Saturday’s message, recorded last week, was delivered from the White Drawing Room at Windsor alongside a photograph of the couple marking their diamond wedding anniversary in 2007 at Broadlands, Hampshire, where they had spent their honeymoon in 1947. The Queen wore her sapphire chrysanthemum brooch, which she also wore to mark their diamond anniversary and for a photocall during their honeymoon.
It was a moving address. I missed only one of the Queen’s Christmas addresses in the past few decades, and that is because we were out of the country.
More to follow tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist