Newark Is An Anagram

Later today, Shabana Mahmood will presumably be answered by Robert Jenrick. He has come a long way in the 11 years since he entered Parliament on Labour and Liberal Democrat tactical votes to keep out the old UKIP (the Labour candidate finally became an MP last year), and even in the nine years since he campaigned vigorously for Remain.

Being about one tenth as clever as he thinks he is, Jenrick is both crooked and vicious, so bent that even Boris Johnson felt obliged to sack him, and so spiteful that he ordered the painting over of cartoon characters on a wall lest they had given some small pleasure to refugee children. He spent at least £700 million of public money for Rwanda to take four volunteers. He would fit right into the present Government.

Not very long ago, Jenrick's remarks about skin colour, and that was explicitly what they were about, would have been career-ending. In September, he was criticised from the Bench for risking the collapse of a murder trial. Last month, in quite possibly defaming the Attorney General, he made far from his first demonstration of the fact that he did not understand the cab-rank rule. To the horror of Lord Sumption, Jenrick has a hit list of "dozens of judges" to be removed for their politics. Is he still a solicitor? If so, then how is that possible?

Jenrick gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher. Not Margaret. Thatcher. As an unsuccessful candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party, he claimed to have, "met pensioners who had illegal migrants in their bedrooms when they woke up in the morning." And he wants points of entry to the United Kingdom to display the flag of a foreign state. Within living memory, that was the flag of the anti-British inventors of modern terrorism. Only half as long ago, that state armed Argentina during the Falklands War. Though not for that reason, Jenrick's beloved Margaret Thatcher imposed an arms embargo on it.

We have lately seen the Honourable Members Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed speaking in front of the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag hung side by side. That is as it should be. Remember the British military veterans James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, who were unarmed aid workers in Gaza until 1 April 2024, when the IDF bombed them three times to make sure that they were dead.

In England, where Saint George is the Patron Saint as he also is of Palestine, his flag should be hung, flown or borne between the two. In that case, why not hang fly or bear the flag of Scotland or Wales between them, too? And Northern Ireland? The Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for South Down, Brigadier Ronald Broadhurst, had been Assistant Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Of course. The late Queen Elizabeth II, who visited almost every country in the world including Ireland, never went to Israel because of its anti-British terrorist origins. Of course.

Let us see seas of them, waving in our hands and from our homes as we stood against Mahmood and her measures that, being in force in Denmark, were clearly compatible with what were therefore the overrated and overpraised European Convention on Human Rights and United Nations Refugee Convention. Everyone who might be affected should engage in industrial action, peaceful protest, and peaceful civil disobedience. That includes the whole of the white working class. The parallel society, incapable of the integration that in any case it did not want, would stand exposed as the ghetto of Mahmood and Jenrick.