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Recent restaurant and food history: 2014 to 2025

May 12, 2025 in food, history | Tags: 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2025, bacon, cattle, economy, farming, food, history, hospitality industry, Jay Rayner, noise, nostalgia, popular music, restaurants, tax, The Guardian, Tom Kerridge, UK, United States, Vesta meals | 4 comments

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.

Labour’s insensitive dead end with robotic personalities

February 10, 2025 in history | Tags: 2020, 2021, 2025, Angela Rayner, Conservative Party, coronavirus, crime, cronyism, David Davis, Gabriel Pogrund, Gagan Mohindra, Guido Fawkes, history, homicide, hypocrisy, Jenny Chapman, John Crace, justice, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Leonie Mellinger, lockdown, London, Lucy Letby, mental health, Morgan McSweeney, Nick Ferrari, Parliament, politics, Rachel Reeves, Robin Askwith, The Guardian, The Times, UK, Valdo Calocane, Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper | 5 comments

Why is it that so many of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet members seem like robots?

They speak in staccato, rarely with feeling except when they have a go at the Conservatives, often wrongly, and give the impression that they live lives disconnected from the real world.

Case in point: Yvette Cooper on LBC

On Thursday, February 6, 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper appeared on Nick Ferrari’s LBC morning show for a phone-in from interested callers. The general theme was violence and stabbings in our streets.

Yvette Cooper is the likely personality type for a Home Secretary. She eschews empathy and has a set of useless stock answers for the general public, just like most of her predecessors, from whatever political party.

The Guardian‘s John Crace listened to Ferrari’s show and filed the following critique, excerpted below (purple emphases mine):

… the home secretary is an experienced performer these days. Confident in her ability to play the game. On top of her brief. Certain she can fend off whatever comes her way. Yet still somehow guarded. She doesn’t really do compassion. Or listening. She’s nobody’s first choice for a shoulder to cry on. Not the person to go running to if you’re in trouble.

The opening question came from a woman whose son had been stabbed to death three years ago. What was she doing about knife crime? Cooper leafed through her notes. Halve it in 10 years. Install scanners and arches in some schools. Stop kids buying knives online. Could she be certain this would be effective? Yes, she said. Hmm …

We live in an imperfect world. We can learn lessons from every killing, every failure of the system. But we can’t stop some people from doing bad things. If history can teach us anything, it’s that we don’t have that much control …

So Ferrari asked Cooper what she could do to make sure young people stopped carrying knives and that there would never be another Southport attack. Cooper thought a moment. “I would tell them to stop,” she said. Now why hadn’t the rest of us thought of that? If only we had realised it was that simple.

Nick then played a recording of an interview with Katy, the daughter of the murdered MP David Amess. She wanted an inquiry into his killing. Just like there was going to be an inquiry into Southport. Yvette prevaricated slightly. She would be releasing more details. Though she couldn’t say if it would be an inquiry inquiry. There were all sorts of inquiries and she wasn’t yet sure whether the inquiry she had in mind could in fact be called an inquiry.

Weirdly, this made perfect sense to Ferrari. Maybe he and Cooper have their own private language which is separate to ours. They operate in a meta-sphere where soon there will be an inquiry into everything. Our lives will all be put on pause while we all hold inquiries into everything that has gone wrong. Maybe there will be an over-arching inquiry into all the ongoing inquiries. Just to make sure they were functioning properly …

We then moved on to a call from David. He was concerned that people were being showered with £3K of free clobber when they arrived in small boats. Yvette muttered something about criminal gangs. Nick intervened. Were we really going to give hats and puffer jackets to new arrivals?

But the audience never got the chance to find out. Conveniently, Cooper’s allotted time was up:

She had done her 30 minutes. All was well. She could leave the studio and get on with her day.

Guardian readers added their own jaded observations of useless political perorations.

Here’s one that fits the fatal stabbing theme well (126 upvotes):

Thoughts and prayers. Family and friends. Community pulling together. Lessons must be learned. Unacceptable behaviour. This must not be allowed to happen again. All meaningless platitudes trotted out after every horrible event despite clear evidence lessons are never learned and it will happen again. I’m all for lowering the risk as far as humanly possible but eventually if it can go wrong it will go wrong. But you are not allowed to say that.

This one may be applied universally to whatever is being discussed (only 19 votes):

And when your average politician says “let me be clear about this” you know that the very OPPOSITE is far more likely!

Although Labour posit that poverty is to blame for mass stabbings (hmm), someone dared to suggest a traditional, millennia-old solution — a stable two-parent family structure (9 votes):

It’s not usually being poor that holds back children’s education, it’s poor parenting and broken families.
The best chance children have in life is to have a mother and father actively involved in bringing them up.

Couldn’t agree more.

Case in point: Rachel Reeves, Heathrow and succeeding Starmer

Oh, the irony! Oh, the hypocrisy!

Rachel Reeves’s push for a third runway at Heathrow, overturned for decades, comes from a report commissioned by … Heathrow Airport.

Sounds a bit, ahem, Conservative, to me.

On Saturday, February 1, The Guardian reported:

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank criticised the chancellor on Saturday night for the justifications she gave for backing a third runway, saying it also believed the methodology used had previously been judged unreliable by the Department for Transport.

Alex Chapman, senior economist at the NEF, said: “It is very concerning that the chancellor appears to be basing her support for Heathrow expansion on a figure from a report commissioned by Heathrow airport.

“Even more worrying is the fact that the methodology they have applied is one that the Department for Transport has previously decided is not fit for purpose, and that the report uses forecast data supplied by the airport itself…”

You could not make this up.

Now if a Conservative had done this, Labour would have been whingeing publicly about it for ages. But Reeves is one of their own, so that’s okay.

But, as robotic as she is in her speech and general demeanour, could Reeves be the next PM?

Last weekend, The Sunday Times began serialising a new book, Get In, by two of their political reporters, Patrick Maguire and the near-infallible Gabriel Pogrund.

In one excerpt, the two explored the next leadership contest in ‘Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and the race to succeed Starmer’.

It all began with Beergate in Durham:

In May 2022, amid an investigation by Durham Constabulary into whether Sir Keir Starmer had breached Covid rules when he shared a beer and curry with activists the previous year, the Labour leader and his deputy Angela Rayner had promised to resign if they were issued with fixed penalty notices.

It:

plunged Labour into panic.

One group of influential Labour MPs pushed for Wes Streeting, then-Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary — now the actual one — to succeed Starmer as party leader.

Streeting’s ambition was no secret. From the moment he arrived in the Commons in 2015 the words “future leader” had been appended to his name like a Homeric epithet. His approach to politics was one of hyperactivity. After his appointment in November 2021, he blitzed the newspapers, broadcast studios and gatherings of party donors.

Streeting’s perceived ambition bothered another group of equally influential Labour MPs who supported Rachel Reeves.

On 18 May 2022, as the shadow of “Beergate” lengthened, a Financial Times magazine interview with Streeting was published under the headline: “Is Wes Streeting the saviour Labour desperately needs?” To many Labour backbenchers the answer was short and unambiguous: No …

And yet for all Streeting’s manoeuvres, it was the shadow cabinet minister who did least who won the most support. Without lifting a finger, Rachel Reeves emerged as the preferred candidate to replace Starmer among the PLP’s [Parliamentary Labour Party’s] power brokers.

One MP who encouraged Reeves to stand recalls: “She was grateful, and she definitely wanted to do it in that moment. She definitely wanted it. It was like: thank you so much … I’m really going to need you … Let’s stay in touch.”

There was — is — one problem. Reeves and Streeting are friends:

What it might do to their friendship was too ugly to contemplate.

One night around that time, the two had a conversation about who Starmer’s successor might be. Reeves said that there would be no new leadership contest. Streeting said it was worth talking about anyway. Just then:

The division bell rang. Reeves made away to cast her vote. They never spoke of it again.

Starmer survived Beergate, of course, and went on to fulfil his longheld ambition to become prime minister. But in that moment between Streeting and Reeves, the first act of Labour’s next leadership election had been written.

Case in point: a cardboard Keir Starmer

Another excerpt from Get In discusses Morgan McSweeney’s — Labour’s answer to Dominic Cummings — frustration with Starmer’s lack of personality.

‘”Keir Starmer’s not driving the train”: confessions of his inner circle’ is a must-read. It looks at Starmer’s career from the Blair era up to the present:

Keir Starmer always wanted to be leader of the Labour Party — and a Labour prime minister. But he could never quite explain why. As early as 2006, Gordon Brown dispatched Jonathan Ashworth, his long-suffering Man Friday, to invite the young barrister to stand as a Labour MP. Over tea in the Treasury canteen, Starmer said he was interested in environmental law, and then demurred. He would soon begin a five-year term as director of public prosecutions. Parliament would have to wait.

In November 2013, Ed Miliband was looking to use his powers of patronage to install a friendly barrister in the House of Lords. He called Charlie Falconer, the QC and former lord chancellor to Tony Blair, for his recommendations. Falconer mentioned Starmer. He did not know him intimately, but had occasionally offered his younger colleague counsel. Starmer had sought his advice when, after two decades banging on the door of the big state as a human rights barrister, agitating against power from the outside, he applied to work within its ramparts and run the Crown Prosecution Service …

Starmer was first elected as an MP in 2015. A man named Chris Ward ran his office. Ward later became Starmer’s chief of staff for a time.

Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader at the time. After Starmer succeeded him, he had the Labour whip withdrawn from Corbyn who, even today, is still an Independent MP.

However, even when Corbyn was still leader, Starmer and Ward discussed the succession:

Like the Corbynites, they called this the Project. “Is this a regular conversation,” Ward would ask Starmer knowingly, if he made some request or other, “or a Project conversation?” His tutee approached every task with the same masochistic, methodical obsession for detail that had been the hallmark of his unflashy manner as a barrister. He listed the demands of political leadership that he could not meet and worked through them one by one.

The book makes a relevant statement without listing any dates:

Starmer even took acting lessons from Leonie Mellinger, who had once appeared alongside Rik Mayall in the sitcom The New Statesman. With every chaotic week that passed under Corbyn, Starmer’s conviction grew. By the spring of 2016 he believed that a leadership election could come any day, that the left’s brief experiment with power would soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and the opposition of the Labour establishment. He wanted to be ready.

However, Starmer’s wooden personality was a problem:

Martin Plaut, a friend from Kentish Town who was a regular visitor to his parliamentary office in 2015 and 2016, recalls: “He wasn’t very clubbable. He didn’t go around speaking to people. He was the least ‘shake hands, have a beer with the guys’ person I met” …

He coveted the leadership and could not be seen as seditious. “He kept his skin very clean for this exact reason, and therefore was the only viable show in town.”

But even among friends he struggled to articulate exactly why he wanted power. Starmer subordinated every vexed question to New Labour’s guiding mantra: “What matters is what works.”

In March 2019, Starmer attended the first meeting to discuss his bid for the party leadership. He came across as a cardboard cutout. His allies encouraged him to open up. A few more interesting names pop up:

They met not in Westminster but in Camden Town, in his friend Jenny Chapman’s house on Arlington Road.

Around Chapman’s kitchen table sat the trusted few who called themselves, elliptically but unimaginatively, the Arlington Group. All were sworn to secrecy. There was none of the excitement or intrigue one might expect. Instead the atmosphere was almost funereal. It was almost as if Starmer himself could not bear the weight of his own ambition.

Starmer was overcome by diffidence. He declined to chair his own meeting, deferring instead to Chapman’s husband Nick Smith …

When his advisers urged him to share the story of his troubled childhood, he thought it absurd. “You don’t go around telling everyone you’re middle class,” he told his spokesman, Ben Nunn. At one meeting, Nick Smith asked precisely what a toolmaker did. Unwilling to disinter his buried trauma, Starmer refused to elaborate. “Most people don’t know what a lathe is, Keir,” Smith snapped back. “So you’re going to have to explain.”

Starmer won the leadership race in April 2020.

Both Corbynites and Starmerites wanted to know more about the future direction for Labour. However, Starmer gave no indication about the future.

Just over a year later, Starmer wanted to resign:

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives crushed Labour in the Hartlepool by-election of May 2021. Shellshocked, Starmer arrived in his office the next morning and announced that he would resign. He agreed to seek counsel from the only person who truly knew him before making any decision. “Let me think about it,’” he told his team. “I’m going to talk to Vic.” Most of them panicked as he left the room to speak to his wife. He left the room for ten minutes and then returned. “I still think I have to go.’”

At this point, Morgan McSweeney, who had worked on Starmer’s leadership campaign, stepped in to become Labour’s Dominic Cummings:

“If we stand still, we’re dead,” said McSweeney. “Got to keep going.”

The first stage in Starmer’s reinvention was a shadow cabinet reshuffle. His advisers agreed on one thing: that his freewheeling deputy Angela Rayner should be stripped of her nominal responsibility for Labour’s election campaign.

Chris Ward was still doing the hiring and firing, and Angela Rayner did not take the news well.

There are suggestions that Rayner was ready to assume the leadership herself:

One of Rayner’s closest confidants now says categorically that she was ready to launch a coup: “We could have taken him out there and then, without a shadow of a doubt. All of the unions were on board. We had Unite. We had the money. Momentum were lined up. We were done. We had a rally of 5,000 people ready to go.”

One leading adviser to Starmer rang Rayner in tears, begging her not to run. They begged because they were scared. “If there’d been a concerted challenge from the left,” said another aide involved in crisis talks that night, “Morgan was worried that Keir wouldn’t fight it. He didn’t think he was making headway. He wasn’t enjoying it. We were worried he wouldn’t fight it.”

Rayner went AWOL for several hours. She could not be reached. Starmer and his men grew ever more worried.

Rayner played a blinder with her psy ops on Starmer’s men.

The result was that she got plum positions in the shadow cabinet — and in the actual Cabinet today:

Midnight approached, but resolution did not. Helpless and besieged, Starmer’s aides reckoned with the realisation that they had indeed changed the Labour Party. It was now united in contempt for its leader.

Eventually, as McSweeney and [Rayner’s chief of staff Nick] Parrott hammered out the terms of an armistice, the situation was de-escalated. Yet that did not stop a salivating media from interpreting the eventual settlement as a resounding defeat for Starmer: a job title of shadow first secretary of state, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and shadow secretary of state for the future of work.

“They backed down,” said a friend of Rayner later, “because they realised if they wanted to go toe to toe, we’d have landed a nuclear missile on their faces.”

At this point, Labourites began questioning how much of a leader Starmer actually was — and who he was as a person:

… questions over Starmer’s political judgment lingered. Rayner, still smarting, later texted one confidant to remark that she did not know who ran the Labour Party. It could not be Starmer, she said, because he was incapable of running a bath — never mind the opposition.

The man who did run the Labour Party — McSweeney — had his private doubts about Starmer too. To even close colleagues and observers there has always been something unknowable about the compact between the two men. None call it a friendship. Indeed, to McSweeney there remained something unknowable about Starmer himself.

Even so, Starmer let McSweeney run the show while Labour were in opposition:

Yet to a tiny circle of trusted friends, McSweeney later wondered aloud whether his boss was strong enough to weather the storm that engulfed his office in 2021. He had often referred contemptuously to some MPs as members of “librarian Labour”. Too many of them, he felt, seemed drawn to the quiet life: unprepared to confront the Corbynite left and with it existential questions about Labour’s purpose.

At times, McSweeney wondered if even Starmer was a librarian. In private he voiced his fears that his principal might be too timid. The leader was prepared to work with people who either did not understand the urgency of the change required, or appeared inclined to sabotage it.

He told one friend in the early phase of Starmer’s leadership: “Keir’s very bright and picks things up very fast. He’s not completely unpolitical. He has some sense of skulduggery. But not like these people. Angela is political all the time, she manipulates people … All of her people come from Unite. Keir doesn’t realise these are people he cannot do business with.” To another, McSweeney was openly fatalistic, questioning his boss’s lack of politics: “Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader. What’s the point of circling the wagons if you can’t last?”

… In his weaker moments, even McSweeney would confide to friends that he knew neither what Starmer thought, nor whose advice he had taken.

Therefore, even before Starmer became Prime Minister:

Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot. Said one, referring to the driverless Docklands Light Railway that wound its way through east London: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

Which brings me neatly to Starmer’s mysterious scandal that emerged last week.

Did Starmer break London’s lockdown rules?

Coronavirus seems light years away for most of us, although, admittedly, it is still around.

Just as a reminder, this was a funeral held during lockdown. Someone in charge broke up the threesome of mourners at the front (I saw the video at the time):

For the rest of us, this was a daily reminder:

Casting our minds back to December 2020, let us recall that Boris Johnson’s government put London into Tier 4 lockdown, which meant no bubbles and no in-person meetings under nearly all circumstances.

On Sunday, February 2, Guido Fawkes picked up on Get In‘s mention of Starmer’s taking voice lessons from former actress Leonie Mellinger (see above).

Guido told us, beginning with the fateful quote from the book (red emphases and italics in the original):

She visited Labour headquarters in a mask on Christmas Eve in 2020, advising Starmer as he considered his response to Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal.

… On ‘Christmas Eve in 2020’ (24 December) the UK was in the tiered system of regional Covid lockdowns. At that time, Labour HQ was located at Southside, Victoria Street, central London. London had been placed in Tier 4 on Sunday 20 December, the highest tier with the most severe restrictions, broadly equivalent to the national lockdowns…

In Tier 4 the government imposed restrictions including: ‘everyone must work from home unless they are unable to do so’ and ‘no household mixing, aside from support bubbles and two people meeting in public outdoor spaces.’ This was stricter than ‘necessary for work purposes’ exceptions that existed at other points – London was under a blanket work at home order unless working from home was impossible. These were restrictions made in law – not guidance. How can Starmer’s in-person meeting with his voice coach at Labour HQ possibly have been allowed under those restrictions?

Even if you concede Starmer’s voice coach could not have worked from home, this would be inconsistent with an account of a previous training session recounted in the book: Pogrund and Maguire describe how Mellinger joined a voice training session by phone call in April 2020. So they had previously worked remotely…

Another issue is the suggestion Starmer “considered her role so essential that Mellinger even qualified for “key worker” status during the pandemic.” The government published lists of critical workers at various points in the pandemic – the point was those people could still send their children to school despite school closures, to enable them to continue working. Being a ‘key worker’ was not an exemption from anything else…

The key workers mentioned relevant to politics were: “Local and national government: This only includes those administrative occupations essential to the effective delivery of: the COVID-19 response; essential public services, such as the payment of benefits including in government agencies and arms length bodies“. Starmer’s voice coach can hardly have been considered essential for the effective delivery of the Covid-19 response…

In any case, Starmer had no power whatsoever to designate someone a critical worker anyway. This revelation, which took place during a much stricter period of restrictions than Starmer’s infamous Beergate episode, and is described in print in black and white, poses serious questions for Starmer. Mr Rules is in trouble…

That day, Guido posted a letter to Starmer from Conservative MP Richard Holden asking those same questions. Holden ended his letter with this:

You have said “honesty and decency matters” — I hope you will treat these questions to you with the same standards you have asked of others.

On Monday, Guido resumed the quest for answers, reminding us of the Durham (i.e. crony) investigation:

“He is Mr Rules” were the immortal words of a Labour briefing line issued in 2022 when Keir Starmer was last accused of breaking lockdown rules. How hollow those words seem today. During the ‘Beergate’ scandal, Starmer began by completely denying he had done anything wrong. The matter was first raised in detail on this website – and eventually, the BBC, The Times and even The Guardian caught up. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander…

The Durham incident ultimately was investigated by the police. It emerged during this period that Labour had spun a web of (at best) half-truths, inconsistencies and omissions. Starmer made a moral stand: he declared he would resign as Labour leader if he had broken Covid rules. Luckily for him, Durham Police dropped the investigation, letting him off the hook, and never pronounced a verdict on whether his beer and curry was actually a rule breach. There was speculation that Durham Constabulary took a much more liberal approach than the Met to these matters, and that he would have been fined had Beergate taken place in London. Starmer’s meeting with his voice coach took place in the Met’s jurisdiction…

Labour’s line this morning is: “The rules were followed.” Sound familiar?

By mid-afternoon, Guido told us of other news outlets that had picked up the story:

Sky News has reported on the Tories accusing Starmer of a lockdown breach, the Evening Standard, the Independent, The Sun and other papers have picked up on the questions Richard Holden posed that Starmer must answer. Broadcasters such as GB News are highlighting the hypocrisy of ‘Mr. Rules’, who lectured Boris on lockdown breaches and repeatedly parroted the sanctimonious line that “lawmakers should not be lawbreakers.” Meanwhile, TalkTV’s Mike Graham mocked Starmer over the absurdity, not just hypocrisy of it all—“of all the people to have a secret meeting with, a voice coach on Christmas Eve…What’s wrong with him?” This headache for Starmer isn’t looking to go away anytime soon…

Shortly after 3 p.m., the Mail filed a story about Mellinger’s social media posts following hers and Starmer’s in-person Christmas Eve meeting:

Alongside a picture of a completely deserted train carriage, Leonie Mellinger posted on social media: ‘#ChristmasEve #GoingHome’.

Her post at 6pm on 24th December 2020 came at a time when large parts of Britain – including London – were under a full Covid lockdown.

It was also the same day that Ms Mellinger, an actress and communications skills coach, was said to have visited Labour offices in the capital to help Sir Keir Starmer.

The article quotes more from Get In as well as her social media posts regarding her work during the pandemic:

The book excerpts detailed how – when Sir Keir stood at home to deliver a pre-recorded acceptance speech after being elected Labour leader on 4 April 2020 – Ms Mellinger coached him via an iPhone propped on his living room mantelpiece.

‘I was sitting on a phone on his mantelpiece!,’ she told the authors about events at the height of the UK’s first lockdown.

‘Talking to him… and watching as he gave that speech in his living room. I’ll never forget it. It was a wonderful moment, I have to say.

‘I’ve got a photo of myself at home with a glass of champagne, raising my arms in the air as I was so thrilled.’

Less than two weeks earlier, Ms Mellinger had posted a photo of herself coaching an unknown client via a video call on a laptop.

She wrote on 23 March 2020: ‘I am continuing to offer #coaching sessions via #videoconferencing during the #Coronavirus crisis.

‘Please contact me for further info. Wishing everyone the best during these difficult times.’

On 21 September 2020, when looser Covid rules were in force, Ms Mellinger posted an image of Westminster Tube station, adding: ‘Fantastic to be back working seeing people not through glass.’

The next year, on 1 November 2021, Ms Mellinger posted a photo of herself wearing a face mask on an airplane. She wrote: ‘First #flight for work for a long time.’

Guido found more of Mellinger’s social media posts and posed these questions:

… It has already been established that Mellinger and Starmer had over-the-phone training prior to this. Why did the actress change her online training method to meet Starmer in person under Tier 4? Downing Street is refusing to comment on whether the PM broke lockdown rules in a break from its previous policy and hacks are told there will be no independent investigation “into whether Starmer was working.” Pressure is mounting on Mr Rules…

Guido later deduced that, based on her social media, Mellinger has connections with Brighton:

It is not known where Mellinger was travelling on that particular journey. In the days before and after the actress posted numerous photographs in Brighton. The train is clearly empty, emphasising the fact that London was locked down at the time.

Another news outlet noticed the same thing:

On Tuesday, Labour’s minister for secondary care, Karin Smyth, appeared on GB News, interviewed by the comely yet effective Ellie Costello that morning.

Guido reported on the interview. In short, Smyth could not coherently defend her boss and blamed everything on the Conservatives:

So my understanding is working and Keir was working at that time preparing for interviews um and so on uh in and the run up to uh, I believe it’s 2020 wasn’t it, so the run up to those Brexit discussions and leaving and interviews for that and that was a working event at the time when we know that what the Tories were doing partying that’s well documented.

Well, I think this is all hypothetical and speculation. It’s the same MP that started that last investigation that is starting this one. We want to get on with changing the country… Keir is focused on the future – getting us treated, getting us through those waiting lists faster – and those are the those are the things that are really occupying us at this time.

Guido concluded:

Interesting use of “investigation” there. Starmer furiously denied rules were broken yesterday at his Nato press conference as Guido revealed details of Mellinger’s links to Starmer. Labour’s attempts to stonewall on this have so far not worked…

Guido posted the soundbite from the NATO press conference and a comment:

The Sun’s Jack Elsom shouted at the end of Starmer’s NATO press conference: “Did you break lockdown rules, Prime Minister?” Starmer returned to the podium to furiously say: “Of course not.” On the way out he said “all rules were followed.” Starmer will not be a happy man at all right now.

That lunchtime, Labour MP Mike Tapp was ill-prepared to answer questions on the BBC’s top weekday political show, Politics Live.

Guido posted the video and Tapp’s soundbite:

This was a complete failure.

Tapp said:

Well, of course the opposition is going to jump on this bandwagon and sling the mud but he’s been really clear: He had to make a speech – I think it was on the the 20th – because of a Brexit announcement he has a small team around him. They prepared for it the day before.

Guido responded:

The date is wrong, the explanation is wrong. As detailed in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book, Mellinger visited Labour HQ on Christmas Eve and returned home afterwards. Tory Wendy Morton said “we need a proper investigation to get to the bottom of this.” The sort of fact-finding exercise Starmer might have been calling for if the shoe was on the other foot…

Guido reminded us of Starmer’s love of pandemic restrictions in another post:

As co-conspirators will recall, few politicians made more noise about ‘taking Covid seriously’ in 2020 than Keir Starmer. He was one of the loudest voices calling for harsher restrictions than tiered lockdowns in December 2020. That same month, his office invited around 40 Labour advisers to a Christmas party, only to cancel it on December 15th London was placed under Tier 3 restrictions. Yet, despite this supposed caution, Starmer still saw fit to meet his vocal coach, Leonie Mellinger, in person on Christmas Eve—when London was under even stricter Tier 4 rules…

Earlier 0n December 5th 2020, Starmer was forced to self-isolate for 10 days after a staffer in his private office tested positive for Covid. Just eight days after his isolations period was over, he was sitting down for an in-person coaching session. Why did this meeting go ahead when he was cancelling other events due to elevated restrictions? Especially when he’d previously been happy to meet his voice coach online…

Incredibly, at Wednesday’s PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch barely touched the subject, leaving it to backbencher Gagan Mohindra to do so. Why? Meanwhile, she was ripping Conservative Party HQ staff to shreds when she wasn’t in Parliament.

Guido has the PMQs video and soundbite. Unfortunately, it was an easy answer for Starmer. He intimated that Conservative MPs were partying, when that actually was not true apart from two or three who were at quiet celebrations. Errant staffers were the egregiously guilty ones getting sick and carting booze around. Yet, that was and continues to be the Labour line:

While Kemi Badenoch missed the opportunity to hammer Starmer over VoiceCoachGate, Tory MP Gagan Mohindra stepped up and pressed the PM on whether he could confirm to the House that he, and his voice coach Leonie Mellinger, followed all the rules during their in-person lockdown meeting when London was under strict Tier 4 restrictions. Starmer refused to say that all the rules were followed…

Starmer’s sanctimonious line that the Tories were far worse during Partygate and that he’d been working “at speed” on a Brexit statement won’t cut it. His refusal to confirm that he followed the rules during his meeting with his long-time family friend — who wasn’t even officially working for Labour at the time — while he was pushing for harsher restrictions, will be sending Number 10 into full panic mode. Mr Rules’ credibility is hanging by a thread…

Despite all that — which ended last Wednesday, February 5 — I don’t expect any action to be taken.

Downing Street said that questions about Starmer’s time in opposition would not be answered. That leaves a lot of unknowns, doesn’t it?

Let’s remind ourselves of what Reeves and Starmer both said when Conservatives Johnson and Sunak both received Fixed Penalty Notices for violating pandemic restrictions:

… they both have to go.

They must both resign.

May we never forget Starmer’s 2024 campaign slogan, either. Going back to the pandemic, he had ‘absolutely nothing in common’ with Boris Johnson:

Confessions of a Voice Coach, anyone?

My older readers will remember Robin Askwith, most noted for his youthful starring roles in the Confessions series of bawdy films, the most memorable of which was probably Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), reminding us of what a better state the UK was in 50 years ago. Homemakers actually looked presentable when cleaning house.

Askwith went on to other acting roles in film and on television, but the Confessions movies are top of the heap where the public are concerned. He now leads a quiet life in Gozo, Malta, but returns to the UK for tours and other events.

Askwith met Leonie Mellinger in 1983 on the set of the BBC comedy Infidelities, depicting 18th century France. This is what she looked like at the time. It is no surprise the two were attracted to each other. He is 11 years her senior.

The Mail carried a retrospective on Tuesday:

… Ms Mellinger, however, then as now keen to work with a leader in his field, in 1983 fell for Askwith while appearing as his lover in French 18th century comedy Infidelities, for the BBC, alongside Christopher Biggins.

TV reviewers said its ‘slap-stick was so broad the Carry-On series is subtle by comparison’.

Ms Mellinger and Askwith were soon holidaying in the Caribbean.

She told a gossip columnist: ‘I know our images are very different – but we make each other laugh.’

By 1988, Askwith made his own confession to the press – they had snuck off to marry on Gozo, off Malta, followed by champagne by a pool with friends.

It seems Ms Mellinger was then wise to keeping hot news quiet.

Askwith said: ‘We kept it really hush-hush.

‘We didn’t want the news blazed out in saucy headlines like “Randy Robin weds luscious Leonie”.’

Ms Mellinger said: ‘I found Robin irresistible’.

Unfortunately, Askwith’s acting assignments put an end to the marriage:

In 1992, with Askwith having worked for months in Australia, they separated.

Four years later, Mellinger remarried:

In 1996 Ms Mellinger married again, to leading criminal barrister Anthony Burton. They had their first child with five months.

Ms Mellinger later switched to presentational coaching, but remains proud of the 1981 film of Doris Lessing’s dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor.

Star Julie Christie becomes effective foster mother to Ms Mellinger’s 13-year-old Emily, who is then taken advantage of by an older man, amid chaos and fear on the streets of a decaying England outside.

Guido told us more about Mellinger’s second husband Anthony Burton, a longtime friend of Keir Starmer’s:

Leonie Mellinger’s husband is Anthony Burton. Burton chairs the Death Penalty Project, which campaigns against the death penalty. Burton is an active founding director and has been since 11/11/2005. Another man founded it with him…

Keir Starmer was founding director from 2005 until 05/04/2020. Mellinger even tweeted about Starmer’s work for the charity back in 2011 …

UPDATE: Starmer was paid £18,000 for legal advice he provided to Burton’s solicitors firm from 2016 to 2019. He also received a £5,000 donation from the firm in 2017.

This is what I find just as interesting: the use of the word ‘relationship’, when I would have used ‘friendship’ or ‘professional relationship’ instead. Then again, I’m not a voice coach. They might speak differently:

She is quoted in the Times recently:

Starmer had given a televised speech on Brexit and asked Mellinger for her honest assessment. “I actually asked him a question … ‘I was wondering who you thought you were talking to?’ And that was the beginning of our relationship.

Mellinger has not been shy about hiding her political leanings.

Guido combed through more of her social media posts and, on Tuesday, told us she backed Labour’s calls for stricter lockdowns. Oh, my! Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!

… Mellinger, a committed Boris-basher and anti-Tory activist, has been relentless in her online attacks on any Conservatives, gleefully retweeting headlines like “Boris’s buffoonery and banter no laughing matter at PMQs” and “Desperate Boris Johnson to step up personal attacks on Keir Starmer.” She’s also reposted Starmer’s Guardian piece slamming Boris for supposedly “losing control” of Covid, calling for stricter measures than the ones at the time…

Mellinger—who miraculously managed to visit Starmer on Christmas Eve 2020, despite London being under Tier 4 lockdown and claiming all her work was online — was more than happy to amplify Labour’s partygate outrage. She reposted many Labour party and Starmer tweets calling for Johnson and Sunak to resign. She also reposted Starmer’s nothing to see here Beergate defence that “no rules were broken while I was in Durham.” Meanwhile, eyebrows have been raised over initial reports their “relationship began” in April 2020. Though as Guido revealed last night, Mellinger’s husband Anothy Burton co-founded a death penalty charity with Starmer much earlier than that – way back in 2005. Starmer was also paid £18,000 for legal advice he provided to Burton’s solicitors firm from 2016 to 2019. Was Mellinger more of a Labour fellow traveller than a voice coach?

On Tuesday, Guido revealed that Mellinger was hired as a freelance Communications Adviser to the Labour Party in … January 2021, a short time after her Christmas Eve 2020 visit to help out Keir Starmer with his strangled vowels. Mellinger continues in that post today:

Whether or not a voice coach could reasonably qualify as a “key worker,” it is unclear how Labour can claim the meeting was a LOTO-designated work event seeing as Mellinger was apparently not in the employ of the party during her visit.

So, who paid for Starmer’s 2020 voice coaching?

Guido has more:

Can a long-term family friend – apparently not employed by the party – visiting Starmer on Christmas Eve be anything other than a social call? On Christmas Eve, was any alcohol – or say, Christmas cake – consumed at any point during the visit?

On Wednesday, Guido asked questions about Mellinger’s employment status as of December 2020:

… There are a few basic questions Starmer must answer if he has any hope of the scandal dying down, including:

- Was the meeting actually a social call rather than a work event? His voice coach was a long-standing family friend…
- If so, was any alcohol consumed during the voice training session?
- If Mellinger was present for work purposes only, how can it be that she was not employed by Labour until the following month (January 2021)?
- Does any invoice or evidence of payment exist for the delivery of the in person voice training session?
- Given that NHS voice therapists were working remotely at the time – and Mellinger promoted her own remote practice – why was the in person meeting necessary?
- Why has Labour now dropped its initial explanation that Mellinger was a ‘key worker’?
- Who was her line manager? Did she have a contract of any kind at the time?

These simply highlight the inconsistent nature of Labour’s explanation of the circumstances. It doesn’t even get into the wider question of Starmer’s own hypocrisy. The very same week he met Mellinger in Labour HQ he was calling for an ever-harder, ever-stricter lockdown. The chief proponent of lockdown, ‘Mr Rules’, has been totally cooked by this latest book…

Sadly, Leonie Mellinger has not come out of this well in the eyes of much of the British public. As one online meme creator posits:

Suddenly, Leonie went from being a ‘D-list’ actor to a ‘D-list’ femme fatale.

Quite possibly.

Then again, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Still, she hasn’t exactly worked miracles with Sir Keir’s voice or delivery. Perhaps he should ask for his — or Labour’s — money back.

His Christmas 2020 Brexit response speech from the Opposition is here. Dire.

Justice news

Moving on to another serious subject, there have been positive moves in the area of justice, where the wheels grind slowly, supposedly ever so fine. I do wonder sometimes.

Victims of rape and sexual assault who were children at the time may have longer than three years to bring forward their claims for compensation in civil cases.

On Wednesday, February 5, The Guardian reported that Labour will be bringing in two bills to this effect within the next year:

Under reforms hailed by campaigners as a “watershed moment”, ministers said civil claims will no longer have to be brought within three years of a child abuse survivor’s 18th birthday.

Apologies will also be made easier to pursue, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said, as it announced implementation of two more of the 20 recommendations from the final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).

The parent of one grooming gang victim said the development will allow “dozens of women to seek compensation from rapists who have walked away without handing over a penny” …

The IICSA was told a “significant number” of claims are being rejected because it can take “decades for survivors to feel able to discuss their sexual abuse”.

Under the reforms, cases will proceed unless the defendant proves a fair hearing cannot take place, for example due to lack of evidence …

… reforms are expected to be part of bills due to be brought before parliament in the next year.

Last month, the government confirmed it would introduce a mandatory reporting duty for those working with children to report sexual abuse as part of the crime and policing bill.

Here’s the real headline:

The move followed increasing pressure on the government to act since the issue was taken up by billionaire Elon Musk on his social media platform X. Ministers have denied that they would not have acted if Musk had not spoken out …

In another justice news item, NHS England have made public the care review of Valdo Calocane, convicted of manslaughter of three innocent people in Nottingham in June 2023. He is currently in a mental hospital serving his sentence.

Oddly, the extremely violent man, aged 31 at the time of the killings, has a fear of needles. As such, he could not take the depot — slow release — drugs prescribed for him prior to the tragic event in Nottingham.

On Wednesday, The Guardian reported:

… He was known to refuse to take medication when at home, and depot injections are often used to increase medication adherence and consistency.

The report states: “The inpatient teams involved in Calocane’s care were trying to treat Calocane in the least restrictive way and took on board his reasons for not wanting to take depot medication, which included him not liking needles.”

The report also found that a risk assessment in February 2022 had urged staff not to visit Calocane at home and if required to do so, not to go alone.

The risk assessment notes state that Calocane had a “history of violence and aggression when detained … violence and aggression towards housemates … poor insight [and] does not agree that he has been unwell over the last 12 months”.

The report found that the assessment had looked at the risk to staff, but it did not consider how to manage the risk of Calocane not taking medication and the “potential acts of violence” that could follow …

Calocane’s first psychotic episode was recorded in May 2020, when he broke into neighbouring flats and frightened a woman so badly that she jumped from a first-floor window and injured her back, requiring surgery.

He was discharged from mental health services in September 2022 after missing a number of appointments, and staff were unable to visit him at home as he had provided an incorrect address.

He had no other contact with medical staff before the killings …

In such unthinkably brutal cases, people always ask where the family were. As in the case of Axel Rudakubana, they were asking for help!

It also found the “voice of Calocane’s family”, who frequently raised their concerns, was not heeded when evaluating risk during his treatment …

The full report into Valdo Calocane is here. He is referred to as VC.

Page 227 states that frontline staff were left to manage him:

Evidence suggests that at all levels of the regional healthcare system there was a level of knowledge about the challenges faced by the Trust. Despite this knowledge, the risk remained for Trust frontline staff to manage.

How awful. The man is physically strong and intimidating.

Also on the same page:

There were limitations with the assurance and oversight arrangements at the ICB [Integrated Care Board] in 2023. The arrangements were not formalised or robust enough to provide the opportunity to fully identify signals of issues with safety and risk. Nor were the governance arrangements mature enough to triangulate intelligence with partner organisations.

That means the police, for one.

Page ix suggests that, in 2021, he believed the world was out to get him:

On 24 September 2021, VC’s Section 2 was converted to a Section 3 of the MHA. Whilst he was assessed to be concordant with his medication, he was described as still lacking insight and it was noted that his delusional beliefs of persecution and conspiracy remained. On 1 October 2021, VC was stepped down from PICU to an acute adult inpatient bed back in the area but with another independent provider. VC was still under a Section 3 at the time of his transfer. His diagnosis was documented to be Paranoid Schizophrenia. VC’s medication was changed back to Aripiprazole and by the time of his discharge (22 October 2021) he was being prescribed 20 mgs a day. He was advised that he would need to remain on medication for the long term.

VC was discharged back to the care of the EIP team on 22 October 2021. VC attended scheduled appointments with his care coordinator in early to mid-November 2021. However, he then failed to attend any further appointments and attempts to contact him were unsuccessful in November and the first half of December 2021.

As was the case with the Rudakubanas, the Calocanes also lived in Wales. Not that this means anything, but it is an interesting coincidence. Wikipedia says (bold in the original):

The perpetrator was Valdo Amissão Mendes Calocane,^[a] a dual Guinea-Bissau/Portuguese national who was 31 at the time of the attacks.^[18]^[17] He has settled status through his Portuguese citizenship. He graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Nottingham in 2022.^[19] He came to the United Kingdom in 2007 with his parents and the family moved to Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where they were regular worshippers at the Calvary Church there (an independent Pentecostal Church in fellowship with the Assemblies of God).^[20] He attended Sir Thomas Picton School and was academically successful.^[21]

He worked at the Arvato warehouse on 1 May 2023, until 5 May 2023.^[22]

He identified himself as Adam Mendes when answering questions about the Nottingham killings.

After the trial, it emerged that he had allegedly assaulted two people at the Arvato warehouse in the weeks before the Nottingham incident:

Leicestershire Police also confirmed that Calocane had been reported for assaulting two colleagues at an Arvato warehouse in Leicestershire, six weeks before the Nottingham stabbings, but that no arrest was made.^[34] The force subsequently referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct over its investigation into the assaults.^[35]

Hmm.

In other justice news: experts revisit Lucy Letby’s case

On Tuesday, February 4, an expert panel looked into the infant fatalities attributed to nurse Lucy Letby, currently serving 15 whole-life prison terms after having been convicted of murdering seven babies.

While everyone was foaming at the mouth at her apparent atrocities, a second opinion never seemed to be forthcoming. Conservative MP David Davis was the only one to raise the matter in the House of Commons and recently had an adjournment debate on the topic.

Letby now has a new legal team which assembled an expert panel of the world’s foremost neonatal and paediatric experts to examine the evidence presented at her trial.

On Tuesday, The Guardian reported their findings. The expert panel:

had found no evidence of murder or deliberate harm in any of the 17 babies Letby allegedly harmed.

Instead, they pointed to “very, very plausible” alternative explanations for their deterioration, which in many cases centred on poor care by clinicians.

The panel was chaired by Dr Shoo Lee, a retired neonatologist, whose 1989 research paper was used by prosecutors to convict Letby of murdering babies and trying to kill others by injecting them with air.

Lee’s research on air embolisms was used by the prosecution to help convict Letby in her first trial from 2022 to 2023. He says his academic paper, published in 1989, was misinterpreted by the prosecution and its lead expert witness, Dr Dewi Evans, causing jurors to be misled …

Lee, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, has already given evidence to the court of appeal on behalf of Letby’s defence.

He told judges that the “only sign” of air embolism in preterm newborn babies was of pink blood vessels “superimposed” on a pink or blue body – and that it could not be diagnosed by any other skin discoloration.

This was significant because Evans, the lead prosecution expert, and several witnesses had told Letby’s original trial that the babies had shown alternative signs of skin “mottling” – which Evans claimed was evidence she had injected them with air.

In newly published research, Lee has found no evidence of any skin discoloration in babies who have been accidentally injected with air into the veins.

Letby’s legal team is led by Mark McDonald, a human rights barrister who took over last year from the former nurse’s trial counsel Benjamin Myers KC.

He was joined by the Conservative MP David Davis, who has led calls for Letby’s case to be reviewed as a “clear miscarriage of justice”.

One of the UK’s most eminent neonatologists, Prof Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was also on the panel of 14 experts, alongside others from the US, Japan and Sweden.

Because this is such overwhelmingly new evidence, Letby was able to submit it to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the independent body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice:

… the CCRC … is expected to receive the panel’s full report in the coming weeks.

The CCRC aims to complete most investigations within a year of receiving an application. If it decides there is a real possibility that judges could quash the convictions, it has the power to send the case back to the court of appeal – but these often take years to be heard again in court.

A second Guardian article detailed what this might mean for Letby’s convictions if the CCRC sends the case back to the court of appeal.

If these are accepted, it would appear that doctors and clinicians, rather than just Lucy Letby, could be implicated.

In the case of Baby One:

The expert panel found no evidence of air embolism and attributed the baby’s death to thrombosis.

Baby Four:

The panel concluded that baby four had died from systemic sepsis, pneumonia and disseminated intravascular coagulation, where blood clots form throughout the circulatory system. The mother should have received antibiotics in pregnancy, the panel said. When the child was born there was a delay in recognising that she was in respiratory distress and in starting antibiotics and further treatment. There was no evidence of air embolism.

Baby Six:

The experts found that the boy had prolonged hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar, because of sepsis, premature birth and borderline poor growth in the womb. He received poor medical care for hypoglycaemia.

Baby Seven:

On reviewing her medical notes, the panel concluded that her vomiting was due to an infection, possibly enterovirus. They found no evidence to suggest air was injected into the stomach or that the child was overfed.

Baby Nine had severe respiratory problems complicated by a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection:

Doctors caring for her failed to respond to surveillance warnings about the infection, did not recognise the diagnosis, and did not treat her with appropriate antibiotics. The experts found no evidence of air embolism or of air causing diaphragmatic splinting. Further evidence suggested the apnoea alarm may not have been switched off. “This was likely a preventable death,” the report notes.

Baby 11:

The panel found no evidence that the endotracheal tube had been dislodged. The reason the girl’s condition deteriorated was that the tube used was too small. The initial placing of the tube was “traumatic and poorly supervised” the report claims. It adds that the consultant did not understand the basics of resuscitation, air leaks, mechanical ventilation, and how equipment commonly used on the unit worked. There was also evidence that the incubator alarms were not turned off.

Baby 15:

The expert panel said the boy had died from a subcapsular liver haematoma, or bleeding beneath the outer layer of the liver, caused by traumatic delivery. This resulted in haemorrhage into the surrounding abdomen and profound shock. This was not recognised before the child died.

Conclusions:

In summarising their findings, the panel flagged more than a dozen problems that were likely to have contributed to the babies’ deaths. These ranged from failures in diagnosing disease, poor skills in basic medical procedures such as inserting chest tubes, poor management of common neonatal conditions like low blood sugar and a disregard for warnings about infections.

“There was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury in any of the 17 cases in the trial,” the report concludes. “Death or injury of affected infants were due to natural causes or errors in medical care.”

It will be interesting to see what happens this year. Only a few people in the media dared to suggest that Letby might have been a scapegoat for poor neonatal care at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England in the year to June 2016. In other words, there might have been a huge cover up of overall failings in the unit.

Let justice be done, regardless of whether we actually like Letby.

Well, such is the state of our nation today. More news to follow.

Sir David Amess’s coroner’s report on resuming inquest

October 31, 2024 in history | Tags: 2021, 2024, death, Donald Trump, Essex, Guido Fawkes, inquest, Katie Amess, Lincoln Brookes, murder, Sir David Amess, terrorism, UK | 2 comments

This post follows on from yesterday’s, which featured excerpts of Sir David Amess’s daughter Katie Amess’s interview with ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston.

Lincoln Brookes, the Senior Coroner for the County of Essex, where Sir David died, wrote an 18-page report on whether the inquest into his death should be resumed.

Guido Fawkes has the document in its entirety and an accompanying summary (red emphases and italics his):

Lincoln Brookes, Senior Coroner for Essex, has made public his full decision in response to calls from David Amess’ family for a full inquest into his murder. The murdered MP’s daughter is calling for a full investigation into how his killer managed to fall through the cracks of national security.

While Brookes resolves there is not “sufficient reason to resume an investigation and inquest into Sir David’s death,” his 18-page report details that jihadist terrorist Ali Harbi Ali was known to the Prevent programme after being referred into the scheme in October 2014 by the head of his sixth-form college. He remained in the scheme until 2016, at which point he “went dark” in an attempt to avoid further detection. The coroner makes clear that from this it is “apparent that there were some shortcomings identified in the operation of the Prevent programme.”

… Brookes adds: “The perpetrator was unknown to Counter Terrorism Policing beyond the period connected with the single Prevent referral… The family point out there has been no public investigation into what the state knew about the killer. That is true.” Despite planning an armed terrorist act for three years Harbi Ali was not known to Counter Terrorism Police.

Purple emphases mine in the excerpts below.

Lincoln Brookes devotes the first section of his report to the viability and usefulness of resuming the inquest. He runs through a number of legal cases on the subject and concludes (p. 5):

26. Where the above leaves me is that there is no hard and fast guide as to when an inquest should be resumed, rather, whether there is sufficient reason must be judged in each case on its own facts and circumstances, applying the guidance …

From reading the report, I think he is fair in presenting a variety of perspectives on the issue. He states that an inquest might not be the best way to resolve the concerns of the Amess family — Lady Amess and Katie Amess, specifically (pp 7-8):

36. The family’s wish for greater security for all MPs is laudable but, as I set out further below, I am not persuaded that a coroner’s inquest is the place to satisfy their wish for a review of the provisions for protecting MPs when now, three years since Sir David’s death, I have been told that many changes have already been implemented. The views of the family are of course relevant and I bear these in mind, but they are not determinative factors in my decision making.

39. If the family’s concerns were well founded, then there might be protected material relevant to national security that I, as a coroner, would not have security clearance to view. But this is not a barrier as if this were the case it could, if necessary, be considered by a judge appointed under schedule10, §3 CJA. Overall, whilst there may be some practical considerations if the inquest were to be resumed, they are not such that they need to have any bearing upon my decision. Resuming the inquest would be a practicable proposition if there was sufficient reason to do so.

43. Borrowing from Downes, I go on to ask myself what other useful purpose a resumption might fulﬁl? What relevant matters have not been established ‘in a manner in which the public interest has been adequately served’ 19 to be sufficient reason to now hold an inquest. I agree with the submissions of the family that the issue of Art 2 and any need to interpret ‘how’ as meaning ‘in what circumstances’ the death occurred, 20 alongside the public interest in a broad ‘Jamieson’ inquest (even if Art 2 obligations are not engaged), must also form part of my consideration of whether there is a sufficient reason to resume here.

44. In essence the family argue that an inquest is required because there has been no public investigation of ‘preventability’, involving the family, and that there ought to be, given that Sir David was killed because he was an MP …

Brookes then goes into the perpetrator’s experience of Prevent, beginning on page 9.

Brookes concludes (pp 10-11):

52. The family’s submissions note that the Prevent Learning Review did not examine whether the perpetrator was or should have been on MI5 and/or Counter Terrorism Police’s radar after 2016 to allow for detection, investigation and prevention of his murderous plans. That observation is correct, the Prevent Learning Review was not aimed at establishing those matters and so, beyond giving the outcome of the 12 month review on 4 December 2016, that report provides me with no assistance regarding the State’s knowledge of any threat he might have later posed.

53. But putting it very simply, correlation does not equal causation. The fact that the perpetrator’s case was not handled as well as it should have been in Prevent does not of itself amount to any evidence that Sir David’s death was possibly or probably preventable ﬁve years later had his case been handled better. One can only speculate that it might have done, and mere speculation is not in my view a sufficient reason to hold an inquest.

Brookes then discusses the Counter Terrorism Police knowledge of the perpetrator. Brookes was given material of this nature in 2022. SIO below refers to the Senior Investigating Officer at Counter Terrorism Command (CTC).

It was easy for the perpetrator to know what to do to avoid the interest of the authorities (pp 11-12):

56. He said that he had initially considered travelling to Syria to join Islamic State but by 2019 he had focussed on domestic Jihad, deciding that a just target would be MPs who voted in favour of air strikes in Syria. He said he had gone to Mike Freer MP’s surgery and that he had also researched Michael Gove MP. He said his actions were a ‘lone wolf’ attack he felt obliged to undertake, as encouraged by Islamic State media.

57. The CTC SIO report informed me that during his evidence at court the perpetrator had spoken of being referred to Prevent around 2014 and meeting with a worker. He implied that he knew even then what to do to ‘fob off’ this Home Office representative. After this encounter, he said he stopped talking about politics. He had also got himself a secure Proton email in order to evade security.

60. I was informed during a meeting in May 2022 with SO15 Counter Terrorism Command (DS Vanner and DI Corran) that the perpetrator was unknown to Counter Terrorism Policing beyond the period connected with the single Prevent referral that ended in 2016. I was told, that the authorities had now learned from the perpetrator himself what his activities had been, and that he deliberately ‘went dark’ and avoided behaviours that could have been seen as signs of radicalisation by the authorities.

Even so, this has nothing to do with the purpose of a coroner’s inquest (pp 12-13):

64. The family point out there has been no public investigation into what the state knew about the killer. That is true. But I do not consider the family’s unevidenced concerns that there could have been a failure to act by the state to be a sufficient justiﬁcation for a coroner to resume the investigation and inquest.

65. In this context the difference between speculative guesses or assumptions on one hand and, on the other, possibilities that have some, even if limited, evidential 13 basis is an important distinction. The fact Sir David died at the hands of a terrorist does not in itself demonstrate any failure (or arguable failure) by the state to prevent his murder. There is no evidence before me to found even an arguable breach of Sir David’s Art 2 rights. Mere supposition that there could have been a failure or a breach does not engage the Art 2 procedural duty of the state, an arguable breach must be more than fanciful and so founded on some evidence.

Brookes then discusses the threats made against Sir David and his son, also named David. Those appear to have been made by a former friend of the son’s. Essex Police activated ‘Operation Bridger’, which is a police security programme designed to check on MPs’ safety. No suspicious activity was seen at the MP’s home or at the residence of the son’s former friend. A male suspect was also involved.

The next section of Brookes’s report is about the Amess family’s expectation of protection of MPs, given Sir David’s death, that of Jo Cox in 2016 and the serious stabbing of Stephen Timms years earlier. Stephen Timms survived his wounds and continued to serve as an MP throughout.

Brookes contends that there is no special obligation for the state to grant special protection of MPs over other citizens (p. 15):

75. I do not accept the proposition that some special operational Art 2 duty was owed to all MPs at the material time, beyond the general Art 2 duties owed to all citizens. The submissions are tantamount to suggesting that the killing of an MP is a category of death which, without more, must automatically trigger the Art 2 procedural obligation to hold an Art 2 compliant investigation and inquest. I do not agree, and I am not directed to any authority from the ECtHR to this effect.

76. Even if, for the purposes of argument, an art 2 substantive duty did arise on the facts here, there needs to also be an ‘arguable’ breach of that duty. The threshold is not very high, but ‘more than fanciful’ must mean just that, speculative musings about ways in which a breach might possibly have occurred remain merely fanciful unless there is some, evidence to support those musings. The family have not set out what they rely upon as the evidence of an arguable breach of that duty in Sir David’s case beyond the fact of his death along with a suggestion that “it was incumbent upon the authorities to proactively monitor threats made in respect of MPs.”

An inquest is unlikely to be the correct or appropriate way forward to satisfy the concerns of the Amess family (pp 15-16):

79. The family say at §47 of their submissions: ‘The need to obtain further information on preventability from relevant State authorities is a further reason to resume the coronial investigation’. It seems that I am perhaps being urged to hold an inquest in order to see whether there is or is not any evidence of there having been an arguable breach of Art 2. I cannot agree that this is the correct approach to a coroner’s investigatory duty. There being an ‘arguable breach’ of a substantive Art 2 right is the gateway to an Art 2 inquest but there is no obligation to hold an investigation and inquest just to see if that gateway should be opened. To accept this proposition would be to rewrite and undermine the test that has been repeatedly endorsed in all decided authorities to date.

80. I must of course apply a low threshold to arguable breach, but speculation that there may have been a breach is not enough to cross that threshold. The evidence I have received does not enable me to say that there was arguably a point in time when the authorities should have appreciated a real and immediate risk of the perpetrator committing an attack on Sir David, or any MP, and taken potentially effective action to prevent it. Without at least some evidence on which to base a credible suggestion that the state failed in a duty owed to Sir David or owed more generally. I do not consider that it is sufficient reason to hold an inquest to begin to look for that evidence where the circumstances of this death do not, in my view, automatically engage the Art 2 ECHR procedural obligation.

Brookes then goes into the information he received from the Speaker’s Counsel at the House of Commons about improved security measures. Here, too, Brookes was advised against conducting or resuming an inquest as, constitutionally, what he would be examining falls within the remit of Parliament and the police rather than a coroner (p. 17):

83. I was also urged by the Speaker’s Counsel that, constitutionally, it is more appropriate for Parliament, and the specialist advisers supporting the Parliamentary Security Team and Police, to take the lead in such a review, rather than for it to be led by a coroner’s inquest. I have some sympathy with that position. A coroner’s inquest is not usually the right forum for addressing concerns about high level government or public policy, particularly when at present there is no evidence before me that there was any failure in MP’s security policy was causally connected to this particular death. As Lord Phillips observed in R (Smith) v Oxfordshire Asst. Deputy Coroner [2010] UKSC 29 at §81: an inquest could properly consider whether a soldier had died because a ﬂak jacket had been pierced by a sniper’s bullet, but would not “be a satisfactory tribunal for investigating whether more effective ﬂak jackets could and should have been supplied by the Ministry of Defence.”25

84. Lord Burnett also made it clear in R (Morahan) v West London Assistant Coroner [2022] EWCA Civ 1410 at §7: an inquest is not a surrogate public inquiry, but a relatively summary process to comply with the statutory scheme. ‘An inquest remains an inquisitorial and relatively summary process. It is not a surrogate public inquiry. The range of coroners’ cases that have come before the High Court and Court of Appeal in recent years indicate that those features are being lost in some instances and that the expectation of the House of Lords in Middleton of short conclusions in article 2 cases is sometimes overlooked. This has led to lengthy delays in the hearing of inquests, a substantial increase in their length with associated escalation in the cost of involvement in coronial proceedings. These features are undesirable unless necessary to comply with the statutory scheme.’

Brookes’s conclusion follows (pp 17-18):

CONCLUSION ON RESUMPTION

85. In summary therefore, having conducted initial investigations into this case, I have concluded that the criminal trial has already publicly answered the statutory questions under s.5(1) CJA. I am not persuaded that the information available to me reveals any arguable breach of any Art 2 duty owed to Sir David or owed more generally. Given all of the considerations I set out above I do not otherwise find that I have sufficient reason to resume an investigation and inquest into Sir David’s death.

86. I extend again my deepest sympathies to his family and all of those who knew Sir David for their loss in such dreadful circumstances. Nothing I have said above should be taken as suggesting that the threats posed to, and risks faced by, all of our MPs in their role as public servants is not a genuine matter of signiﬁcant public concern, although I do not agree that a coroner’s inquest is mandated to examine those issues.

Lincoln Brookes
Senior Coroner

I am thankful that Guido was able to publish the coroner’s report in full. It would seem that Lincoln Brookes is empathetic towards Lady Amess and her daughter.

Unfortunately — yet, objectively — he has concluded that a coroner’s inquest is not the correct legal way to go about establishing a policy or procedural shortcoming which lies elsewhere in the system.

I hope that Katie Amess and her mother find peace of mind eventually, if not temporally in this regard, then spiritually. I also agree with her conclusion that more people will be dying in a brutally violent way before truth is brought to bear on this subject.

Sir David Amess’s daughter claims ‘no accountability’ in his brutal stabbing

October 30, 2024 in history | Tags: 2021, 2024, Conservative Party, England, Essex, history, ITV1, James Cleverly, Katie Amess, murder, Robert Peston, Sir David Amess, television, terrorism, UK | 5 comments

In October 2021, one of Parliament’s most beloved MPs, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death at his constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

Three years on, one of his daughters spoke to ITV’s Political Editor Robert Peston about the questions that still surround his murder.

On October 29, 2024, ITV published much of what she told Peston, ‘”There’s no accountability”: MP David Amess’ daughter demands answers over his murder’.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Katie Amess takes issue the way Prevent, the public body that is supposed to fight terrorism, and Essex Police handled the tragedy.

She told Peston about the lack of help from Prevent:

In an interview with ITV News, Katie Amess hit out at the fact her father’s killer was known to authorities seven years before the murder but was not followed up on properly after he was reported to Prevent.

She told of her family’s anger of being denied answers by officials as she urged for an inquest to be re-opened to investigate why killer Ali Harbi Ali wasn’t assessed by authorities, and why his case was dropped after Prevent officials conducted just one interview with him.

“I just think that there’s no accountability and nobody wants to be held responsible,” she told Political Editor Robert Peston.

“My dad worked for 40 years for his people, for the country, and he is owed the respect of finding out where he was failed, why he was failed, and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

She said trying to cope with her father’s murder feels like she’s “living in a nightmare”, adding: “You wake up and you think this cannot be real. This has to be a dream.”

Ms Amess suggested “something weird is going on” and warned “this won’t be the last time that another person has to sit here having lost a family member.”

Some will say that Ali Harbi Ali has received justice in a whole-life prison term. In principle, that means he will not be released prematurely.

However, there is more to the story:

Seven years earlier, Ali had been put on the government’s Prevent programme, which aims to stop young people from becoming radicalised.

Ali was reported to Prevent in 2014 but after one meeting, his case was only followed up once by the anti-extremism programme.

In July, Essex senior coroner Lincoln Brookes decided not to resume Sir David’s inquest, which had been adjourned once Ali was charged with murder.

Mr Brookes said he was provided with a report into Ali’s involvement in the Prevent programme which found a six-month case review was “missed” but that a 12-month review revealed “nothing of concern”.

Outlining his decision not to resume the inquest, he said the evidence he had received did not enable him “to say that there was arguably a point in time when the authorities should have appreciated a real and immediate risk of the perpetrator committing an attack on Sir David”.

Katie Amess is distraught at being unable to find out more information about that missing six-month review:

… she is being refused an inquest into how that happened.

“The subsequent meeting with him – they decided that he wasn’t a terrorist because he literally just said ‘I’m not a terrorist’,” she continued.

“He even said during the trial that he just knew to nod his head and or shake his head at the right places and they would leave him alone. And that’s exactly what they did.”

“The scheme failed catastrophically,” she added. “Not just my dad, not just me and my family, but other members of the public.

“There’s a lot of instances where Prevent hasn’t prevented anything, it’s just allowed people to disappear back to do these terrorist acts. And it’s also failed other MPs because I’m telling you right now, this won’t be the last time that another person has to sit here having lost a family member.”

Ali’s trial also heard how he bought a knife and carried it around in his bag year after year, scoping out MPs he was thinking about murdering.

Asked by Peston about why the security services didn’t know how dangerous Ali was, Ms Amess replied: “I’m not allowed to know why, I’m not allowed an inquest”.

There is a grey area here, unfortunately:

The coroner argued in his decision that at an early stage, Ms Amess and her mother didn’t want the inquest re-opened. Ms Amess told ITV News this was a “cop out” and they weren’t told an inquest would be an opportunity to air these grievances.

She explained how her mother had a stroke soon after, and wasn’t in a fit state of mind to be making such decisions.

“We were told that an inquest would give the guy a chance to proclaim more about what he did and how amazing what he did was and that it would be highly traumatic to put the family through it,” Ms Amess said.

“We had no idea. Nobody told us the inquest is the time to find out what went wrong.”

When Ms Amess’ mother was better, they sought legal advice but were told the time that was allowed to conduct the inquest had expired.

Amess went to the Home Office as well as to the then-Home Secretary, James Cleverly MP. She expected progress, since the Conservatives were still in government.

Yet:

they were “refused”. She launched a civil case in court to gain more time to gather documents to re-open the case and hit out at then-Home Office Secretary, James Cleverly, for not helping.

She said: “Everything I’ve tried to do has failed. These people came to the funeral and were crying and said it was so sad it had happened, yet when I needed support and to be allowed to find out what happened, nobody was anywhere to be seen.

“I sit here by myself. I don’t see any of his friends or supporters here helping me and I would like to know why.”

Amess then described what happened with Essex Police, another grey area:

Ms Amess is also upset that Essex Police did not attend her father’s advice surgery the day after threats were made against his safety. She explained how the family had received calls the night before his murder making threats, which her brother reported to police.

She said she was “furious” that the coroner supported Essex Police in saying it made all the right steps after the threat was made, describing it as an “absolute insult”.

The force confirmed it received reports, adding in a statement: “We were contacted around 9pm on Thursday 14 October following reports of threats made to a man in his 30s.

“We immediately launched an investigation and a woman in her 20s and a man in his 30s, both from Southend, were arrested.

“This incident and the murder of Sir David were not linked in any way, and the people arrested and the person the threat was made directly to were known to each other and none were not connected to Ali Harbi Ali.”

That’s an interesting statement:

none were not connected to Ali Harbi Ali.

That means, whether the police meant it intentionally or not, that some were connected to the perp.

No doubt the wording was a bureaucratic mistake in trying to sound erudite.

The conclusion is that:

Essex Police said that “as with all forces up and down the country”, it does not provide officers to police constituency surgeries.

However, Katie Amess says that the perp testified that when he saw a police presence at other MPs’ surgeries, he left:

She added: “They [Essex Police] can say whatever they want about… if they’d have come to his surgery, possibly, they might not have saved him. But the guy who did it has already admitted that he went to other surgeries, saw a police presence and turned around.”

It is hard to say what will happen now. Anna Firth, a Conservative, won the by-election and praised David Amess nearly every time she spoke in a debate. The constituency now has a Labour MP, so it is doubtful whether Katie Amess and her family will see the decision on an inquest reversed.

If any good news follows, I will be sure to post on it here. I wish Ms Amess every success in getting to the bottom of this. She and her family deserve peace of mind — as do the British public.

Tomorrow: the Coroner’s report — ‘shortcomings’ in Prevent system

Free gifts, the penthouse and Labour’s ‘new principles’

October 3, 2024 in history | Tags: 2021, 2022, 2024, coronavirus, cronyism, death, election, Elizabeth II, greed, history, hypocrisy, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Lady Starmer, London, Lord Alli, television, UK, video | 11 comments

The controversy over various gifts to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Cabinet members continues.

Starmer says that he will return — or repay the value of — some of the gifts that he and Lady Starmer have received.

Labour’s ‘new principles’ on gifts

Business and Energy minister Sarah Jones had the news round today, Thursday, October 3.

She mentioned ‘the new set of principles’. Hmm, interesting.

Guido Fawkes has the story (red highlights and italics in the original):

Business and Energy Minister Sarah Jones has had the unenviable task of fielding the morning round after Downing Street made freebiegate even worse last night by announcing that the PM would repay £6,000 worth of gifts he’d received since becoming PM. But not the football – Starmer still needs free use of a box for vague ‘security reasons‘…

Jones was asked on Times Radio if there was a suitable reason for someone like Jonathan Reynolds to accept tickets to Glastonbury, seeing as if a corporate donated them for business it would seem like corruption and if they were donated for entertainment it would look like a freebie. Her answer hinted at just how thought out the government’s new strategy on dealing with freebie criticism is…

Well, I think that is the question that the prime minister is asking through the new set of principles… I think the question is now being asked. And that is the question that the prime minister is asking, as well as other people, for what purpose are we going to these events? Let’s look at these issues.

Apparently, Jones herself received tickets to an event. She now says:

I’m not going to go to another event like that that I’m invited to.

However, Guido points out that only Starmer seems to be talking about returns or reimbursement, meanwhile Labour are:

failing to explain why Starmer should be paying back his freebies and his ministers shouldn’t. Labour is struggling to deal with the logical aftermath of its incessant pious screeching over donations while in opposition…

Jones said that being in opposition is different to being in government. You don’t say. Guido remarks:

These lines are unravelling the moment they’re said…

Guido helpfully included one of Jones’s tweets from 2021 when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. He was having his Downing Street flat done up while flat owners were having to pay to have unsafe cladding on the exterior of their buildings replaced.

Jones’s tweet reads:

What are @BorisJohnson’s priorities?

£60k on curtains in No.10?

Or the key workers facing £60k bills for unsafe cladding?

Yes, it’s always easier to carp when in opposition.

However, Labour show just how venal they are when immediately jumping on the free gifts bandwagon.

Starmer accepted around £60k’s worth of gifts, news which emerged only days after he became PM.

Did Sarah Jones see that coming in 2021?

Starmer pays back £6k’s worth of gifts, Lord Alli under investigation

Wednesday’s big stories were all about the gifts.

The Guardian reported (purple emphases mine):

Keir Starmer has paid back more than £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality, including Taylor Swift tickets and rented clothing for his wife, after a row over his acceptance of freebies.

The prime minister handed back some tickets and gifts he had received since he entered No 10 in July as he vowed to overhaul the rules on what ministers are allowed to accept.

He has previously said he will not accept any more free clothing after a row over his decision to accept £32,000 of workwear, multiple pairs of glasses worth £2,400 and use of a £18m penthouse from the Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli.

However, his attempt to draw a decisive line under the row suffered a setback on Wednesday as the Lords standards watchdog launched an investigation into Alli over whether he had correctly declared his financial interests.

Public perception of Labour: for the greedy, not the needy

This would not have been such a big deal were it not for the fact that, as soon as they got into power on Friday, July 5, Labour said they would be removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of elderly people this year.

Both Conservatives and Labour can agree on that point. The Today programme invited former Conservative MP John Penrose and former Labour adviser John McTernan.

Penrose said, in part:

This is about whether or not we’ve got someone who’s not behaving like a lawyer, but rather behaving like politician who understands why people are upset.

And the rules don’t really cover the idea of, ‘Isn’t there a double standard here, for example, between living the high life, you and your ministers, while you’re taking money from from pensioners’ …

That’s a question of political judgment, political judgment, political understanding and being in tune with what the rest of the country is actually thinking when you’re sitting there at No 10.

McTernan said the same thing:

… the absolute fundamental rule of politics is the voters are never wrong. Rule one of politics is the voters are never wrong. Rule two, if you’re angry because you think the voters are wrong, please refer to rule number one.

The backdrop to every single thing that the Labour party has done in government has been its first action to take them into fuel allowance away from 10 million pensioners. That has set the tone for everything, and it’s the backdrop for for how actions are seen.

People see that you’ve taken this from 10 million people, and taking that for free from businesses.

That’s the truth. There’s anger out there, and behaviour has to change.

This photo of Starmer popped up elsewhere online last week with the caption ‘For the greedy, not the needy’:

Using Lord Alli’s penthouse: a brief history

Last week’s news was about exactly what Labour used Lord Alli’s West End penthouse for.

At first, Starmer told us it was so his son could study quietly for his GCSEs earlier this year.

On Wednesday, September 25, Guido recapped the story and came up with a few questions:

… Cue the violin. Speaking to the Today Programme, Starmer said:

My boy, 16, was in the middle of his GCSEs. I made him a promise, a promise that he would be able to get to his school, do his exams, without being disturbed. We have lots of journalists outside our house where we live and I’m not complaining about that, that’s fine. But if you’re a 16-year-old trying to do your GCSEs and it’s your one chance in life…I promised him we would move somewhere, get out of the house and go somewhere where he could be peacefully studying.

Naturally, Guido had a peek at the records. The dates of their luxury £20,437.28 stay? From 29^th May 2024 to 13^th July 2024. The first GCSE exam was on 9^th May 2024, and the final one wrapped up on 19^thJune 2024. So, not only did Starmer’s son start exams weeks before they checked in, but his last paper was nearly a month before they checked out. How much “revision” time do you need in a five-star pad post-GCSEs?

That day, Guido posted photos of Alli’s sumptuous, modern penthouse, which is in Covent Garden. It has everything one could want.

We also found out that Starmer had been using it, too:

Alli’s £18 million penthouse in Covent Garden is the perfect choice for any studious 16-year-old. Of Alli’s known properties (the other is a Kent mansion) this is the most likely – it’s one Starmer already admitted using for meetings and on election night. With three en-suite bedrooms to choose from, the flat offers panoramic views of London from no fewer than two terraces, all to help soak in crucial facts…

After a few hours of work in the spacious office any teen would let off steam in the games room before settling down to watch some telly in the dedicated TV room. A large roof terrace offers yet another study location with “lush evergreens” to keep the air fresh…

With 5,000 square feet of space there’s little chance a revising teenager would be disturbed by anyone else using the property, like Starmer and his team. Imagine how big the house is going to have to be for A-Levels…

Later that afternoon, it appeared that Starmer had used the penthouse as long ago as 2021, to broadcast his Leader of the Opposition’s Christmas message about the Omicron coronavirus variant. Hmm. I remember we were supposed to stay at home that holiday period.

Guido posted photographs and commentary:

Speculation is rife as to how long Starmer has been using Lord Alli’s properties. He declared £20,000 worth of ‘accomodation’ use during the election, revealed to be for meetings and to watch the election result …

Guido cast his mind back to December 2021, when Starmer produced a Christmas video message during the pandemic to attack Boris but praise the new Plan B system. Co-conspirators might just recognise the designer-made bookshelf in the background of the video from pictures of the office room in Lord Alli’s £18 million penthouse. Complete with postcards and family photos…

The video was broadcast on BBC One at 7 p.m, 13^th December. Five days prior to Starmer’s message the government announced the entirety of England would be moved to Plan B rules in response to the fast spread of Omicron. According to the regulations those who could were meant to work from home. ‘Mr Rules’ even said in the video message:

It will be easy to let the festivities we’ve all been looking forward to divert us from our national duty. Getting jabbed, wearing masks, and working from home if we can really will help prevent infections and help prevent the NHS being overwhelmed.

Guido’s not sure working from home rules included working from someone else’s home. Must have been nice to head up to the massive roof terrace after that was done though…

Guido continued digging that afternoon.

Guido came up with a list of questions relating to the aforementioned Christmas Omicron broadcast from 2021:

As Guido has uncovered, Starmer pretended Lord Alli’s penthouse was his own during his righteous Covid broadcast, where he condemned Boris and lauded the “Plan B” restrictions. Here are some pressing questions our “Mr Integrity” Prime Minister must answer:

1. December 2021 was Plan B—guidance rather than rules—but we know he criticised Boris for breaching guidance. Why did he ignore the guidance to work from one’s home if possible?
2. Plan B clearly stated to “work from home if you can“—he even acknowledges this in his video. So why did he accuse others of breaching guidance while he was working from someone else’s home?
3. If the Privileges Committee focused on breaches of guidance rather than the rules, why didn’t he follow the same standard?
4. Did he declare the use of someone else’s home as a benefit when MPs must register any gifts, benefits, or hospitality they receive from UK sources with a value over £300?
5. How long did he stay at Alli’s penthouse in 2021?
6. Why did he put pictures of his own family on the shelves behind him to make it seem like it was his own home?
7. Why, if he claims to want no photos of kids out in public, did he include that in the background?

Some for the transparency Starmer preaches, surely?

Guido had not finished, however. His next post for the day was ‘Starmer May Have Breached Parliamentary Rules With Alli Penthouse Covid Broadcast’.

Parliamentary rules on accepting gifts are as follows:

Members must register any gifts or benefits with a value of over £300 which they receive from a source outside the UK. They must also register multiple benefits from the same source if taken together these have a value of more than £300 in a calendar year.

Guido explains:

That includes “hospitality in the UK, including receptions, meals and accommodation.” Starmer used Lord Alli’s £18 million penthouse to produce a political message in 2021. That does not appear on the register of financial interests during the period.

It does appear for recent similar use of the penthouse this year: “Accommodation, value £20,437.28.” Why did Starmer not declare his previous use of the property?

Starmer’s team have made changes to the register this year following “advice” sought from authorities. They said they “believed we had been compliant, however, following further interrogation this month, we have declared further items.” If they want to clarify this, they had better do it fast…

Even The Guardian had to give Guido credit for his forensic investigation:

However, there was no ‘one-off’.

At 19:16 on Wednesday, Guido informed us, ‘Starmer Filmed Queen Elizabeth Death Broadcast at Lord Alli’s Penthouse’.

That was in September 2022.

Guido included a photo of a sombre Leader of the Opposition sitting in front of Lord Alli’s étagère in the ‘office’. The background is different. Note the Obama biography on the shelf.

Guido says:

Recognise the shelves? This is unravelling…

UPDATE: Again there is no declaration of the penthouse’s use as a gift.

Early on Thursday, September 26, Guido had taken note of The Guardian‘s commentary from No. 10 above and, in reference to his post about Starmer’s address about the late Queen, posted:

Unfortunately for Downing Street, exactly 37 minutes after their line was published Guido went to pixel with evidence that Starmer paid tribute to the Queen on the day of her death from the very same ‘one-off’ penthouse. Gone were the family photos – replaced with some dark urns and books including an Obama biography…

This is going to become untenable for Keir Starmer. The revelations about Lord Alli’s apartment have only just started…

On Thursday afternoon, Guido impressed upon us the fact that media outlets were covering his investigation:

Normally, it takes a new government a good year for the cracks to start showing. For Labour, it’s taken less than three months … Sir Keir’s morning coffee will have gone down bitterly today, with headlines from all sides picking up Guido’s scoop…

The Daily Mail splashed: “How Starmer ‘hoodwinked public by filming Covid video in Lord Alli’s £18m penthouse – dressed up to look like his OWN home’”

The Times‘ front page: “Keir Starmer used Labour donor’s £18m flat for pandemic speech”

The Telegraph: “Keir Starmer Covid broadcast urging work from home came from donor’s £18m penthouse”

The Guardian: “Starmer defends borrowing £18m flat as place for son to study during election”

The Independent: “Starmer: It is important to look at the ‘human story’ behind a donation”

Meanwhile, GB News, Sky and other news channels are running with the story throughout the day. Questions about how long Starmer has been using Lord Alli’s luxury pad as his personal office, and why the Covid video and Queen tribute weren’t declared, aren’t going to disappear anytime soon. This scandal is sticking around…

Guido’s next chapter in the saga concerned the period of the general election campaign, from Tuesday, June 4 through Thursday, July 4.

Parliamentary candidates must live in their home constituencies when their candidacies are declared.

Keir Starmer’s constituency is Holborn and St Pancras in central London.

That afternoon, Guido told us:

The Starmers say they moved into Lord Alli’s £18 million penthouse in Soho on 29^th May and ceased to use it on 13^th July this year. They valued this period of use at a bargain £20,437.28.

Lord Alli’s penthouse is in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency.

Guido reminded us of his son’s GCSE studies, then wrote:

This suggests Starmer was actively living in the penthouse for the entirety of the period – using it as his primary residence. This would have started just before nominations opened for the General Election on June 4^th….

Guido then gave us an example from the 2017 election when an MP got into trouble for not living in his constituency when his candidacy was declared at the time of his nomination:

When in 2017 UKIP’s Paul Nuttall claimed on his nomination papers he lived at a house he hadn’t yet moved into, it was made clear that the address had to be the place where he was actually resident at the moment of nomination. Peter Stanyon, deputy chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, said: “The general provision will clearly be that it needs to be a factual statement made at the point the nomination was being submitted.”

Guido followed that up with this:

Starmer’s nomination paper claims he was living at an address in Holborn and St. Pancras on that day. But we now know he was at Alli’s penthouse is in the Cities of London and Westminster…

For Paul Nuttall in 2017, it was a potentially sticky situation. As such, would Starmer endure a similar investigation?

Nuttall was investigated by police. He managed to prove to them that he used his house regularly as a “base” in the campaign for the 2017 Stoke By-Election. Starmer has accidentally admitted that he lived in a different property to the one on his declaration – did he campaign from his Kentish Town house? Downing Street will have to say so…

Guido pointed out other technicalities that could be troublesome for the Prime Minister:

In addition, Starmer’s stated explanation for his use of the donated penthouse is that he needed the accommodation for his son’s exams. In itself this would mean it is not subject to Labour’s national general election campaign expense. But it would be if he held any campaign meetings there, used the property for campaign purposes or did campaign work there…

It could also shift into the local expense in his capacity as an MP. There is no declaration of the donation during a regulated election period on Starmer’s Electoral Commission entries. Starmer’s period of residence at Lord Alli’s therefore may have breached electoral law. Twice…

Reform were quick to pick up on the anomaly.

On Friday, September 27, Guido told us:

Now others are starting to smell blood. On BBC Question Time, Reform UK’s chairman Zia Yusuf weighed in, saying:

There is now news just hitting the wires a few hours ago that potentially the Prime Minister has breached electoral law by misstating where his residence was… he was talking about moving to Lord Alli’s apartment apparently because [of] his son but if you spend time there overnight potentially there is a case to be had.

Guido explained the hypocrisy at play:

The sheer hypocrisy of Starmer, who berated the Tories for breaching Covid guidance and hammered them on declaring donations improperly is one thing that cannot be ignored. Though if Starmer broke electoral law, the position of the so-called “forensic lawyer” would be shakier than ever. Zia pressed Labour MP Nick Thomas-Symonds last night, asking, “if it is the case that Starmer breached electoral law, would you call on him to resign?” Nick didn’t have an answer…

Allow me to interject this tweet quoting Starmer on January 4, 2024, in which he pledged to do away with ‘cronyism’ and that ‘nobody will be above the law’ if he were leading Britain. Well, that time has now come:

Later last Friday — September 27 — Guido told us how Downing Street were attempting to fight off any hint of impropriety involving Lord Alli’s penthouse:

When Starmer revealed he had “moved” into Alli’s £18 million Covent Garden penthouse for 45 nights this summer—leaning on his son as a convenient excuse—many were left scratching their heads at the astonishing bargain he managed to secure. According to his registered interests, Starmer valued the accommodation donation at £20,437.28, covering his stay from May 29 to July 13, 2024. Quite the deal for a sprawling 4,860 square-foot residence right in heart of Soho…

To put it into perspective, renting a mere 800-square-foot luxury apartment in Soho for the same duration could set you back over £31,000, at market prices. A massively larger £18 million property, with three en suite bedrooms, would be considerably more…

MPs are meant to declare the use of accommodation at market rates. A conservative 5% yield on Lord Alli’s place would typically fetch an annual rent of around £900,000—meaning Starmer’s six-week sojourn could be worth a staggering £110,966. Given that MPs are required to declare the market value of any donations, the figure of £20,000 for such an opulent central penthouse is a massive under-declaration…

Number 10 also continues to spin the narrative that Starmer didn’t need to declare his supposedly “one-off” Covid video filmed at Alli’s residence (it’s not a one off, as Guido has reported). Starmer claims it was worth less than £300 – therefore did not need to be declared. But it is impossible to find even a basic studio in Covent Garden for that price. A day’s rental for a recording studio in Soho can easily start at around £650, and that is without the technical equipment. There is no way using Lord Alli’s house as a tv studio for a BBC One broadcast has a market value of under £300…

Labour insiders say Alli’s penthouse study is armed to the hilt with full broadcast equipment akin to a top-end media studio. The parliamentary authorities are going to have to investigate…

UPDATE: The luxury penthouse next to Alli’s goes for £1,800 a day. And it’s only 2,000 square foot compared to Alli’s 4,800 square foot pad….

Unusually for Guido, who posts only once on Saturday with his Seven-Up, listing his most read articles of the past week, he had more in a special feature on September 28, ‘Cabinet Office Does Not Deny Secret Government Transition Work Done At Lord Alli’s £18 Million Penthouse’:

When the Lord Alli scandal first broke – over his acquisition of a Downing Street pass – Labour’s explanation was that the donor was “doing some transition work with us.” The key word suggesting the transition between opposition and government…

Close to a general election, the main opposition party is offered a series of secret handover talks with senior officials – designed to prepare them should they win. Guido hears from multiple well-placed sources that some of those talks took place at Lord Alli’s properties, potentially including his extravagant penthouse. Confidential government handover work carried out in a political donor’s property…

The attendees would have included Keir Starmer, Sue Gray, and Simon Case. The meetings took place in the rough six month period before the election. On at least one occasion other officials are said to have been present, including Gray ally Darren Tierney, who has run the Propriety and Ethics (now Propriety and Constitution) Group in the Cabinet Office since March 2021, though reports are unconfirmed. Government business taking place at a top donor’s house would be highly irregular, especially given the sensitive nature of the talks…

It’s well-known that the confidential access talks “usually happen away from departments” – that is understood to usually mean a low key neutral meeting space. Not the luxury penthouses of ultra-rich, heavily politically-involved donors who will go on to gain access to Downing Street…

The properties are said to be one of the Labour leadership’s favourite bolt holes for high-level confidential meetings. Guido asked the Cabinet Office if any of the talks took place at his property to which a government spokesman said: “We don’t comment on access talks.” That is not a denial…

Along with Guido’s readers, I wonder if a government security team swept the premises for electronic bugs beforehand.

Another big question arises: What if the Conservatives had pulled a stunt like that?

There would have been no end of coverage for weeks on end on all news outlets.

More to come tomorrow as the saga continues.

The impracticality of electric vehicles — and the demise of the car

August 16, 2024 in history | Tags: 2021, 2022, 2023, climate change, electric car, electric vehicle, history, Rowan Atkinson, UK | 5 comments

Following on from my post on August 14 about electric vehicles (EVs) not being the solution to 21st century motoring, three articles below indicate that they will be problematic.

Getting people off the roads

Many people have commented online that the objective of Western governments is to reduce the number of car owners.

This showed up rather clearly in the Mail three years ago on August 19, 2021, with British statistics (purple and bold emphases mine):

Electric cars are widely considered to be crucial for a greener future.

But with millions of them set to take to already congested roads in the coming decades, the country faces a major shortage of parking spaces – and even more pollution, according to a report.

There are currently around 34million cars on the road, up 28 per cent since 2001 – a period during which the population has risen by only 13 per cent.

By 2050, car ownership is predicted to rise by almost a third to 43.6million, with a traffic increase of 11 per cent, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

Parking spaces, already in short supply, face further pressure as cars get bigger – the average model is now 28 per cent larger than one from 1965 …

Roads are currently so congested that a 60-mile journey on 60mph roads is reckoned to take 85 minutes at an average speed of 42mph.

The IPPR warns incentives to persuade the public to buy electric vehicles will backfire if they result in boosting car numbers …

The think-tank said the Government’s focus on electric cars will still require new roads to accommodate them, leading to more emissions.

While exhaust emissions might fall with electric cars, emissions resulting from building, charging and maintaining them will rise with more on the road.

‘Electric vehicles are an essential part of the global response to decarbonisation of transport, but we must remember that there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle,’ said the report.

It added more should be spent on encouraging walking, cycling and public transport.

Experts warn there could also be conflict between the owners of electric and petrol and diesel cars.

Professor Jillian Anable, of Leeds University, told the BBC that electric car drivers would ‘feel entitled to certain car-parking spaces’ while those with older models would ‘get further squeezed in terms of space’.

What’s involved in getting a home charging point

Another issue — some would say problem, and quite rightly — is the protracted process in getting a home charging point installed.

On May 26, 2022, Martin Gurdon, The Telegraph‘s motoring correspondent, wrote about the ordeal he went through in ‘What I wish I’d known before installing an electric car charger at home’. While it went smoothly, he had to co-ordinate the process with four different suppliers. Electricity is not always as straightforward as flicking on a switch:

… I don’t own an electric vehicle, but since I write about cars, having a domestic means of charging an EV on my drive seemed sensible. This turned out to be a protracted process because a lot of people with off-street parking have had the same idea.

… fitting one of these chargers requires a suite of electrical upgrades rather than a full domestic re-wire.

The process took months — 14 weeks — to complete:

Length of the process, from initial interest to final installation

This is what Gurdon encountered, including some minor inconveniences:

My unit was supplied by Hive, costing a grant-free £949, with use of the Hive smartphone app that controls it provided free for three years, then incurring a monthly 99p charge to keep all its functions, such as automatically charging during cheaper tariff periods and providing weekly and monthly spending history. Currently the app doesn’t have a remote locking security function, so if I was out anyone could swan up my drive and recharge their car at my expense. An app lock is allegedly coming at the end of June; until then I’d have to turn off the charger’s trip switch to make it theft-proof.

Hive is affiliated to British Gas, and to fit my 7.4kw Alfen Eve Single charger I had to jump through various practical hoops and electrical upgrades that involved both companies, energy supplier OVO and National Power. Wayne’s colleagues had appeared to replace our old 60amp main fuse with a beefed up 80amp job. They arrived in the middle of a five-hour time slot, refused tea and were gone in about half an hour. Understandably they had to turn off the power, which meant resetting all the clocks (except the one by our bedside, which died from the shock).

The process that led to their arrival had started about five weeks before, filling in some online forms from Hive. I had expected to get hives doing so, but the process was surprisingly painless.

Next, I was contacted by Reece from British Gas who wanted to check our wiring, along with other bits, because the Hive system can also do things like control your heating and remotely turn on your lights … Could I send him photos or videos of our water stopcock, gas meter, fusebox and ancillary fuses in the garage and summerhouse, together with bits of the house’s exterior from where the fuse box was located to where I wanted the charger? My wife was baking and became annoyed as I scrabbled about in the kitchen, took pictures and cursed when the phone signal died and Reece vanished.

Yet three calls later and we were all done. On the plus side, this process took half an hour rather than the 60 minutes predicted, and we had discovered I would need a new trip switch and the aforementioned beefier fuse.

It also turned out that some of my “tails” were too thin. These are cables that connect the fusebox to a house’s wiring and mine needed to be fatter to cope with the power drawn by an electric car’s on-board charger.

It was OVO’s job to fit the isolator switch and tails, and I spent a fruitless hour and 20 minutes on hold listening to 1980s pop songs on a loop, gave up, but got through the following day almost instantly. There was a lead time of about three weeks for an engineer, who arrived about 48 hours after the National Power duo and made friends with the dog. His job took 20 minutes. “I’m doing one of these a day,” he said.

This perhaps explains why for several weeks British Gas couldn’t fix a date to fit the charger itself, but I received several calls from a real person apologising for the delay, and eventually a time was confirmed.

Meanwhile yet another British Gas engineer arrived with a Hive router, “smart bulbs” and plugs, showed my wife and I how to download the Hive app, and soon had us remotely controlling our heating and turning lights on and off with our antique iPhones …

When the day of our installation rolled around, my wife was at home engaged in wall-to-wall Zoom meetings. “They’ll be drilling and turning off the power,” she said through clenched teeth. Two British Gas fitters – Dusan, originally from Slovakia, and Gavin from London – duly appeared at 9am. Negotiations about when they would shut down the power ensued and they agreed to do this at the end of the installation rather than the start.

For people drilling holes through brickwork they were surprisingly discreet as they ran a very long cable around the back of the house and attached it to a white plastic charging box. The predicted two-hour power shutdown turned into an hour … Five and a half hours later, Dusan and Gavin helped me pair the app and the charger and we bid them a genuinely fond farewell.

All this involved dealing with four organisations over three and a half months (and expending about four hours of my time), but at the end of it I managed to successfully navigate the process, and recently spent £10.76 to fully charge a Vauxhall Mokka, which has a theoretical range of 201 miles. As I write this, I am apparently succeeding in charging a neighbour’s MG5 electric car, too …

Rowan Atkinson: electric vehicles ‘not quite the environmental panacea’

Most of the world knows Rowan Atkinson as the comic actor who played Mr Bean.

However, the Oxford graduate also has a serious academic side which influenced his decision to become an early adopter of an electric vehicle.

On June 3, 2023, he wrote about electric vehicles for The Guardian, pointing out that other motoring solutions exist:

… My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

Although EVs produce fewer emissions than conventional vehicles, manufacturing them actually increases emissions:

In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis …

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is to inject hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine. JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years. If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks – and as a result every filling station stocks it – it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.

Atkinson also mentions advances in solid-state batteries:

that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale …

He says that a simpler solution would be for people to keep their cars for longer but acknowledges that today’s leasing agreements encourage us to change cars every three years:

Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years. It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO₂ emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.

Another solution would be the accelerated development of synthetic fuel:

… it’s a product based on two simple notions: one, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine and, two, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be replicated by other means. Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile using wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide. With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars, rendering their use virtually CO₂-neutral.

Overall, Atkinson thinks that EVs are not the best solution. There are other possibilities:

Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.

… Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.

Meanwhile, EV fires continued and sales slowed.

Electric vehicles not the solution to 21st century motoring

August 14, 2024 in history | Tags: 2021, 2022, 2023, damage, electric car, electric vehicle, England, fire, history, insurance, Scotland, UK | 6 comments

Electric vehicles — EVs — from scooters to buses and vans, still create a media buzz.

A history

In some ways, little has changed from the 20th century, as we can see from this 2012 photograph of a woman, her motorcar and the charging point in her garage:

Incredibly, the electric vehicle’s history began in the 1830s, as The Guardian told us on October 24, 2023, complete with photographs and illustrations (purple and bold emphases mine):

By 1900, a third of all cars on the road in the US were electric; we’re looking at the history of a cruelly missed opportunity, and it started astonishingly early. The Scottish engineer Robert Anderson had a go at an electric car of sorts way back in the 1830s, though his invention was somewhat stymied by the fact rechargeable batteries were not invented until 1859, making his crude carriage something of a one-trick pony (and far less useful than an actual pony).

It’s debatable whether Scotland was ready for this brave new world anyway: in 1842, Robert Davidson (another Scot, who had, a few years earlier, also tried his hand at an electric vehicle) saw his electric locomotive Galvani “broken by some malicious hands almost beyond repair” in Perth. The contemporary consensus was that it was attacked by railway workers fearful for their jobs.

Despite this unpromising start, electric vehicles had entered widespread commercial circulation by the start of the 20th century, particularly in the US. Electric cabs crisscrossed Manhattan, 1897’s bestselling US car was electric and, when he was shot in 1901, President McKinley was taken to hospital in an electric ambulance. London had Walter Bersey’s electric taxis, and Berlin’s fire engines went electric in 1908; the future looked bright, clean and silent.

But by the 1930s, however, the tide had definitively turned against electric, cursed by range limitations and impractical charging times while petrol gained the upper hand thanks partly – and ironically – to the electric starter motor. The Horseless Age magazine, which vehemently backed the petrol non-horse, would have been delighted. There was a brief resurgence of interest in the late 1960s, when the US Congress passed a bill promoting electrical vehicle development, but nothing much actually happened until the Nissan Leaf sparked interest in 2009. Electric still isn’t quite there yet, battling infrastructure and battery problems that might have been familiar to Anderson and friends.

Do take a look at the photographs and electric car advert from a century ago. The electric cars drove an egalitarian narrative. The Baker Car advert features a woman driver. Henry Ford’s wife drove an electric motor car, as did Thomas Edison’s.

There were also other types of electric things on wheels going back to the 19th century:

Other electric modes of transport were also available: Gustave Trouvé’s 1881 weirdly asymmetrical tricycle, for instance, which looks like something a man in London’s Dalston might ride (a sketch of it shows dogs and top-hatted men convulsed with shock). This electric baby carriage modelled by the elegant Mrs P Mackenzie never caught on, but why not? The patriarchy, that’s why.

For thee, but not for me

Fast-forwarding to the present, Western governments and their media have been promoting electric vehicles as one answer to the climate crisis.

Yet, on August 11, 2021, Guido Fawkes told us that most UK government ministers (Conservative) and advisers were still relying on their diesel cars (red emphases and italics his):

The government boasted yesterday that Britain has a network of 25,000 charging points, which sounds quite a lot until you realise that according to the CMA Britain actually needs 250,000 points in the long-term – at a cost of untold billions. It will also require a fundamental re-organising of the electricity grid by the time of the 2030 combustion engine ban. Our green government’s ministers will, of course, be leading the way…

Alok Sharma, who is the President of the upcoming COP26 summit, drives a diesel car, his spokesperson Allegra Stratton drives a diesel, most of the government’s chauffeur-driven Jaguars are diesel too. In fact, the only cabinet minister Guido has identified as owning an electric car is the Tesla-driving Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps. The rest of the government’s ministers are hardly leading by example…

In 2019, the Department for Transport claimed that one-in-four government vehicles would be pure-electric by 2022. Better get a move on…

All talk, no action

Ironically, given that the UK hosted COP26 in Glasgow that year, by December, Britain rolled back plans for charging points in car parks.

On December 27 that year, The Guardian reported:

The government has quietly backtracked on proposals to require every shop, office or factory in England to install at least one electric car charger if they have a large car park, prompting criticism by environmental campaigners.

The original plan required every new and existing non-residential building with parking for 20 cars or more to install a charger. However, the Department for Transport (DfT) has now revealed it will only require chargers be installed in new or refurbished commercial premises amid fears over the cost for businesses, according to a response to a consultation.

The move has prompted concern in the car industry and among experts that public charger access will lag behind demand, as sales of electric vehicles accelerate ahead of the 2035 ban on sales of new fossil-fuelled internal combustion engines. A quarter of new cars bought in the UK in November can be plugged in to recharge, according to industry data …

The DfT’s consultation response said it wanted to find “a more tailored approach” for existing non-residential buildings. Despite worries over the financial costs, the cost of about £1,500 for installing a charger point can be recouped within a few years by charging users for electricity.

The DfT declined to share the identities of those who objected to the policy on cost grounds. The consultation responses showed the most common objection was a lack of ambition for the number of charging points for larger premises. Only a “small number of respondents raised concerns about who would pay”. The DfT said it would draft an alternative policy.

All the large UK supermarket chains, led by Asda, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, have already started installing electric car chargers to try to lure shoppers – who can top up on energy while they shop.

That became apparent in May 2023 with this headline from the Mail saying that 40% of free charging points had disappeared from Britain’s roads because of ‘soaring energy costs’, more about which below:

Things were no different in Scotland.

On August 16, 2022, the Scottish Daily Express reported that Police Scotland lacked adequate charging points:

The SNP has been left humiliated after it was revealed that they invested in electric police vehicles but not in chargers to actually help them to be utilised.

It was revealed that at least 20 police stations across the country had the bespoke cars but officers were unable to recharge them on-site, meaning they were reliant on partner organisations and public plugs.

This is despite Police Scotland forking out almost £20m on a fleet of electric vehicles so that they can provide “a fit-for-purpose, efficient, effective and sustainable 21^st century police service.”

Figures discovered by the Scottish Liberal Democrats found that a whopping 23 police stations had the environmentally-friendly cars but no charging points currently installed.

In addition, there are currently 21 sites which have just 28 chargers spread between them …

The Scottish Lib Dems climate change spokesman Liam McArthur slammed the Scottish Government for under-funding important environmental projects such as this.

He said: “There is absolutely no point in spending millions on providing officers with electric cars without the tools to power them.

“Police officers having to attempt to charge cars from an office cable through a window makes an absolute mockery of the government’s pledges to tackle climate change.

“Officers can’t afford to be broken down, miles from the nearest charging station, when they are responding to urgent calls and trying to get on with the job of making Scotland safe …”

UK electricity prices among the world’s highest

In December 2023, GlobalPetrolPrices.com produced a bar chart of electricity costs around the world. The UK has one of the highest in Europe.

The article explaining the bar chart says:

… The highest residential electricity prices are in Europe at USD 0.234 per kWh and the lowest average prices are in Asia with USD 0.080. Africa (0.123), Australia (0.226), North America (0.132), and South America (0.183) are in between. The highest business electricity prices are also in Europe at USD 0.205 per kWh and the lowest prices are in Africa (0.110) and Asia (0.106). On the other continents: Australia (0.182), North America (0.156), and South America (0.189) …

The most expensive country in our latest rankings is Bermuda. A remote island country, it has to rely on fossil fuels for electricity generation with no option to import electricity from a neighbor. The Bahamas, also among the most expensive countries, faces a similar situation. But there are also several European countries among the most expensive such as Italy, Ireland and the U.K. These countries have higher taxes and relatively high transmission and distribution costs.

… China and the U.S. try to keep cost down whereas Germany maintains high prices as part of the effort to transition to cleaner energy.

However, the dilemma between affording food or fuel was apparent the year before. In August 2022, the BBC interviewed a woman from Ipswich who had cared for her father and was unable at that point to go out and work, something she desperately hoped to do in future:

Marina Keohane, from Gainsborough in Ipswich, is struggling with her finances and says the thought of higher fuel bills this winter brings tears to her eyes.

Here, the 53-year-old tells BBC News what her life is like as she tries to cover the costs.

To actually fear every day how you’re meant to live, that’s just something else. I didn’t think I’d get to this age and be worried about things like this. I’m living on nothing …

I don’t use anything, the only thing that’s on all the time is the fridge freezer. I have a TV on, I don’t have the light on – I sit in darkness.

Eating wise, I’m scared to use my cooker. It’s electric and obviously if you put something in the oven it uses more [energy] so I try to stick to ready meals in the microwave or do salads.

In September 2023, The Telegraph reported that the UK’s National Grid is not structured to cope with 21st century demands. Furthermore, bureaucracy also has its role to play:

… Rishi Sunak vowed to fast track solar farms, wind farms and battery storage sites by speeding up the process for connecting them to the grid.

But currently, developers are being told they must wait a decade or more to hook them up to the electricity grid …

The delays have been blamed on National Grid, which owns and runs the electricity transmission system. However it is governed by arcane rules overseen by Ofgem which control the queueing and planning system for grid hookups.

These queues currently work on a first-come-first-serve basis, meaning projects that are speculative and may never be built get priority over others whose funding and design means they could be rapidly completed.

Changing that system is also a slow process, because of the heavily regulated nature of National Grid’s business …

When the National Grid was built in the 1930s to 1960s the demand for new connections came from a small number of large fossil fuel generators.

The result is a grid designed to connect very large power stations to distant cities – with most of the wires running roughly north to south.

The move towards net zero has reversed that thinking. The Government’s net zero vision is to create a multitude of smaller generators.

Larger ones, like onshore wind farms and solar farms, may have an output similar to a small power station but smaller ones could range from farmers with anaerobic digesters to householders with solar panels on their roofs. All of them want to be connected to the local or national grid.

It means the National Grid has been inundated with thousands of requests for connections – even though few of the projects have been built and many never will be …

The National Grid is, however, not allowed to choose between them. The rules imposed by Ofgem, the energy regulator say connections must be offered on a first come-first served basis.

It means there are hundreds of applications waiting to be processed, many for speculative projects, collectively generating a 13 year wait to get a connection …

And yet, the Conservatives wanted car manufacturers to press ahead with electric over conventional vehicles or face penalties in 2024. That same month, the BBC reported:

From January, just over a fifth of vehicles sold must be electric, with the target expected to hit 80% by 2030.

The government confirmed the policy would remain even though Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the petrol and diesel ban would be moved to 2035.

Firms that fail to hit the quotas could be fined £15,000 per car.

Industry insiders said the quotas would be a “stretch” for manufacturers to achieve, adding the delayed ban could make it harder to sell electric cars, while Auto Trader suggested firms might cut prices to boost sales and meet targets.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has defended the government’s decision to push back the ban, insisting the UK will meet its net zero targets.

But there was some uncertainty whether the change to the ban would affect the quotas for electric sales, before Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch confirmed that the so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate would remain in place.

It is expected the mandate will require car makers to ensure 22% of vehicles sold are electric next year and increase each year after that to reach 80% by 2030.

The horror stories: fire and insurance

On October 18, 2023, The Telegraph‘s business reporter Matthew Lynn told us how much more expensive electric vehicles would be to operate in so many ways:

According to a new report from the consultants Arup, our car parks may need to become a lot more spacious because of the risk of fires. Simply put: parking spaces will have to be bigger, or cars will have to be parked further apart, because of the danger of electric battery fires spreading out of control.

And more space is likely to mean higher prices (and probably fewer parking places). Are we going to have to completely revamp the nation’s car park estate to make the transition to electric? Will councils and others make car parks bigger to compensate for larger spaces, or more likely will parking become even harder to find than it is now?

It’s part of a pattern. We’re constantly told that moving from petrol and diesel to electricity will not just be better for the planet, but will save consumers money. From problems with charging, to potholes, to insurance, that idea is becoming ever less credible.

The charging network is proving harder to build than anyone predicted – and taking far longer. And that’s before reckoning with the need to power it; we will need to generate a lot more electricity to power all the EVs expected to be on the road over the next few years. That will have to be paid for.

The cost of insurance, meanwhile, is soaring because batteries can easily be damaged. A minor collision that used to require little more than some paint now can cost thousands. John Lewis has paused offering insurance to EVs because it costs so much.

Our roads are increasingly pitted with potholes, which may be, in part, because EVs are so much heavier than conventional vehicles, so we will need a huge programme of repairs or surface strengthening to keep them navigable. Many bridges may have to be reinforced to make sure they can carry all the extra weight once all of the vehicles crossing are powered by heavy batteries.

It shouldn’t be like this. With the most successful technologies, the more widely they are adopted, and the more we figure out the different ways they can be used, the costs involved steadily go down …

Almost everyone agrees that we need to reduce carbon emissions from transport. That doesn’t mean we need EVs. Manufacturers such as Toyota are still betting heavily on hydrogen as a potential fuel. In Germany there is still huge investment going into synthetic green fuels.

Rishi Sunak has already taken one brave decision by postponing the ban on the sale of petrol vehicles from 2030 to 2035. Now he should take an even braver decision, and review whether they are the right solution to the green challenge at all. There may well be cheaper alternatives out there – and if there are, we shouldn’t be bullied by the green lobby into adopting a technology that isn’t ready and is proving ruinously expensive.

Four days later, The Telegraph had another article on the lack of insurance and perils of owning an electric vehicle, ‘Electric cars risk becoming uninsurable’:

… Jonathan Hewett, chief executive of Thatcham Research, the motor insurers’ automotive research centre, said a lack of “insight and understanding” about the cost of repairing damaged electric car batteries was pushing up premiums and resulting in some providers declining to provide cover altogether.

Mr Hewett said: “The challenge is that we have no way of understanding whether the battery has been compromised or damaged in any way.

“The threat of thermal runaway means that a catastrophic fire can take place if the cells of the battery have been damaged in a collision.

“What we’re struggling to understand at the moment is how we approach that diagnostic technique.

“It’s like a doctor trying to understand what’s wrong with you without any notes or an X-ray.”

John Lewis Financial Services stopped providing car insurance for electric cars last month for new and existing customers, as its underwriter Covéa analysed risks and costs.

Aviva removed insurance products for the Tesla Model Y earlier this year before restoring them several months later.

Vehicle repair costs rose 33pc over the first quarter of 2023 compared to 2022, helping to push annual premiums to record highs, according to the Association of British Insurers.

Average electric car insurance costs rose 72pc in the year to September, compared to 29pc for petrol and diesel models, according to Confused.com.

Mr Hewett said premiums would eventually begin to level out and match those of petrol and diesel cars once actuaries had the tools needed to better understand the risks of insuring electric cars, saying the issue would likely be “short term” …

One reason attributed to the steep rise in the cost of electric car repairs stems from recommendations for electric cars to be kept 50ft apart in repair yards over fears they might explode.

Government guidelines suggest electric vehicles with damaged batteries should be “quarantined” from other cars due to the risk of battery fires, which are typically harder to put out than fires in petrol or diesel cars.

The London Fire Brigade has warned that fires involving lithium batteries are the fastest-growing fire risk in London, after it was called out to 87 e-bike and 29 e-scooter fires in 2022.

Paris’s transport operator withdrew 149 electric buses from operation last year after two ignited on separate occasions.

The website Tesla-Fire.com lists 25 reports of Teslas catching fire globally since the beginning of 2023.

Thatcham Research said insurers would need to spend an additional £900m a year on quarantine facilities for damaged cars as a result of the safety measures by 2035, as more battery-powered vehicles take to the roads, with the changes forecast to add £20 a year onto all car insurance premiums …

One driver told either The Guardian or The Observer (Sunday edition) about his EV insurance premium hike from £1,200 to £5,000 within one year:

Not long afterwards, on November 6, industry experts predicted that lithium-ion battery fires ‘would go up exponentially’:

Indeed, between September and November 2023, a spate of stories appeared about electric vehicle fires.

On September 25, the Mail reported on a fire that took place at a family home near Liverpool, complete with a photo of the fireball:

A family home was lit on fire after their car reportedly exploded while sitting in their driveway.

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service rushed to a family home in Bromborough, Wirral at around 10pm on Saturday night after receiving reports that a car was on fire. The blaze was put out in just ten minutes.

The Liverpool Echo reported that the façade of the two-storey family home was blackened by the fire and that the garage was also previously on fire as well …

One woman said: ‘I heard tyres popping and people came out to see what was going on. Someone started screaming and people rushed out to help.

‘I saw it happen and it looked like the fire was coming from where they charge the car. The whole thing was up in flames by the end. It was so scary and my little girl was screaming because she thought something had happened to our house.’

On October 3, a Scot described what happened to his six-month-old electric vehicle’s brakes failed. The car was going down a main road. Fortunately, the driver was able to dial 999 and be surrounded by police vehicles. The RAC showed up five hours later. The driver returned home at 5:30 a.m.:

The next day, The Times picked up on the story, ‘Police forced to run malfunctioning electric car off the road’:

Brian Morrison was travelling home in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, when warning lights began flashing on his dashboard and he was unable to slow down …

The motorist told The Scottish Sun he had been left “petrified” by the incident and fears driving the car again …

“I had to ring 999 and they were even shocked — they told me that that never happened before and they’d never seen anything like it.”

Although he was only travelling at 15mph, Morrison said it felt like 60mph.

He added: “The thing is I also have a mobility problem so I thought, ‘I can’t even jump from the car. There’s nothing I can do, I just need to stay in the car.’

“So that’s what I did, I crashed into the police van — and when I got towards him he started driving off so it wasn’t as big an impact.”

After colliding with the police van the MG began to slow down before eventually turning off …

On October 6, a Vauxhall Vivaro caught fire in Cornwall. The owner says that the fire also caused them to lose their family home:

… there’s a photo of it starting under the bonnet and then it got worse, um, and then it engulfed in flames, the whole thing within like 10 minutes, and then it set fire to my house and it’s destroyed everything I own, literally …

Then there was the mysterious fire at the car park at Luton Airport in Bedfordshire. I say mysterious because some reports said it was because of an EV and others said the vehicle was a diesel.

The Mail carried a report on October 11 saying that the inferno caused no end of chaos for travellers:

This is the moment a Range Rover exploded at Luton Airport before a blaze that ripped through a car park and sparked travel chaos for thousands of passengers.

One hundred firefighters spent 12 hours battling the inferno at the airport’s Terminal Car Park Two when the £20million block was engulfed by flames and caved in just before 9pm last night.

Up to 50,000 passengers are suffering disruption at the airport, which only reopened at 3pm this afternoon, as more than 140 flights were cancelled.

Five people were taken to hospital during the fire, which was finally extinguished this morning.

Investigators believe the blaze was started when a diesel car suffered an electrical fault or leaking fuel line.

The fire then spread as a number of electric vehicles burst into flames in a domino effect, one firefighter suggested. As many as 1,500 vehicles are feared to have been damaged.

Dramatic footage on CCTV captured the moment the explosion erupted, as light fixtures crashed from the ceiling and a fireball soared through the building. The vehicle appears to be in the middle of the track used to get around the car park, rather than a designated space.

On October 23, Sky News reported that 1,500 vehicles were damaged in the blaze:

Returning north of the border, on October 13, an EV caught fire at a car showroom in Perth:

Here are photos of EV fires showing how devastating they are:

I will end there and resume the EV story in my next post.

Analysis of England’s Red Wall, 2019-2024

June 28, 2024 in history, surveys | Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, Boris Johnson, Conservative Party, Crewe, England, history, immigration, Jo Gideon, Labour Party, levelling up, Liz Truss, railway, Red Wall, Rishi Sunak, Shaun Bailey, Stoke-on-Trent, Stoke-on-Trent Central, survey, transport, UK, video, Wales, West Midlands | Comments closed

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.

Overall:

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):

This content isn’t available at the moment

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.

Valete, Dehenna Davison, a Red Wall MP

April 5, 2024 in Uncategorized | Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, Bishop Auckland, Boris Johnson, Carrie Symonds, Conservative Party, Daily Telegraph, Dehenna Davison, England, GB News, Gloria De Piero, Guido Fawkes, marriage, Parliament, politics, Red Wall, The Guardian, The Times, UK, video, women | Comments closed

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:

I did it for them. 💙

Mum, thank you for always supporting me, whatever life has thrown at you.

Dad, thank you for teaching me what it is to be a Davison.

Nannan, thank you for inspiring me to be the best version of myself.#ToryGain #Best4Bishop pic.twitter.com/IAKu6SL8PP

— Dehenna Davison (@DehennaDavison) December 13, 2019

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.

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

February 6, 2024 in Anglican, Catholic, clergy, history, Lutheran, Protestant | Tags: 2015, 2016, 2021, Anglican, Austria, Catholic, clergy, conversion, England, Germany, history, Lutheran, Protestant, terrorism, UK | 1 comment

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

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

Recent history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm. It sounds very minimal.

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

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

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

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

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

2021 Liverpool hospital bomber, a high-profile convert

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

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

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

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

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

Police arrived at the scene at 11:04.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guido posted Ashworth’s subsequent apology:

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

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

Guido wrote (red emphases his):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On November 19, The Express reported:

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

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

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

On November 20, the paper provided an update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Church of England denies responsibility

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

The Express interviewed the Hitchcotts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now back to Al-Swealmeen and Liverpool Cathedral:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article looks at the Cathedral’s motives:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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