A Profound And Preventable Tragedy

Paul Knaggs writes:

Simon Andriesz typed three letters into a search box. HWL. He had spent years as a managing director at BGC Partners and he knew that senior people there signed internal emails with their initials, so when the United States Justice Department released millions of pages from the Epstein files, he knew exactly what to look for. He found a 2018 exchange between Howard Lutnick and Epstein discussing the prospects of a start-up in which both had an interest. Lutnick is now the United States Commerce Secretary. He ran BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald for decades. Andriesz took what he had found to the House Oversight Committee, and in July he told the BBC’s File on 4 Investigates about it. He died in Thailand on 23 September, aged 57. His family said he had taken his own life and that there was no suggestion of foul play. Nobody has to have silenced Simon Andriesz for his death to be an indictment. He spent nine years telling the right authorities, in writing, through the proper channels, and the British system he told kept answering that it had looked carefully and found insufficient evidence.

THE MAN THE AMERICANS PAID AND THE BRITISH FILED

Andriesz had been a whistleblower long before Epstein’s name entered his story. By the BBC’s account he raised concerns internally about accounting irregularities at BGC in 2016 and was dismissed in 2017. By his own account he reported to the FCA from 2017, and he spoke to the FBI in 2020 and 2021. In November 2019 the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered BGC Financial to pay a $3 million penalty for supervision, reporting and recordkeeping failings stretching over five years. The CFTC paid Andriesz a whistleblower award of around $420,000, identifying him as an overseas claimant whose first-hand information had contributed significantly to the action. An American regulator read what he sent, acted on it, and paid him for the value of it.

The British response ran differently. The all-party parliamentary group on investment fraud and fairer financial services says HMRC issued a substantial determination on matters he raised; Andriesz himself put the figure at £96 million, which BGC disputes. The FCA, by his account, issued what amounted to a regulatory slap on the wrist. When he sent the regulator evidence of what he regarded as retaliation by his former employer and its lawyers, the FCA told him there was insufficient evidence to conclude that retaliation had occurred, a finding he believed made it harder to win at tribunal. 

BGC denies it all. The firm told the BBC his allegations were categorically false and that his employment ended because he refused duties and abandoned his role. A US arbitration panel ordered BGC Financial to pay him $500,000 in 2024 without giving reasons. A UK employment tribunal struck out his claim in August on procedural grounds, with no finding on retaliation. Nothing here asserts that BGC did what he alleged. The point is that he died with every substantive question about his treatment unanswered by any British body able to answer it.

A PROTECTION THAT RUNS ONE WAY 

In May 2018 the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority jointly fined Jes Staley, then chief executive of Barclays, a total of £642,430. His offence was attempting to identify the author of an anonymous whistleblowing letter. Mark Steward, then the FCA’s enforcement director, said Staley had acted in a way that risked undermining confidence in Barclays’ whistleblowing procedures. It was the first case brought under the Senior Managers Regime. Staley kept his job.

Hold that principle still for a moment. The regulator fined a bank chief executive a six-figure sum on the basis that a whistleblower’s anonymity is the load-bearing wall of the entire system. Now set it beside what the APPG says happened to Simon Andriesz. An FCA official told him he had lost whistleblower protection because his identity had become known. The FCA has since accepted that the advice was wrong. Same institution. Same principle. Enforced in one direction and withdrawn in the other.

When a bank punctures a whistleblower’s anonymity, anonymity is sacred and there is a fine. When a whistleblower loses his anonymity in the course of fighting for nine years to be heard, anonymity turns out to have been the condition of his protection, and the protection evaporates. He was told, in effect, that the price of speaking loudly enough to be noticed was forfeiting the shelter that speaking was supposed to earn him. Weeks before he died, Andriesz told a public event organised by MPs, whistleblowers and campaigners that he felt thoroughly let down and had been put through absolute hell by the FCA. At a Transparency Task Force meeting in July he said the regulator merely pays lip service to its own rules. Those are his words, and they were spoken while there was still time for somebody to act on them.

A BOARD MEMBER REVIEWING HER OWN BOAR

The FCA’s answer is a review. It has asked Lea Paterson, a new non-executive director, to examine how it interacted with Andriesz, in its own words to learn any lessons for the future. The case for Paterson is strong and deserves stating properly rather than sneering at. She set up and led the Bank of England’s Independent Evaluation Office. She has been a civil service commissioner since 2022 and sits on the board of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. If you were designing a person to audit a regulator’s culture, you would end up with something close to her CV. She also carries no responsibility for what was done to Andriesz, because her FCA board role began on 1 October, eight days after he died. 

That is also the weakness. She is reviewing an institution whose board she joined last week and on which she will sit while the findings land. The evaluation office she built at the Bank exists to help the Bank’s own Court of Directors keep its performance under review. Internal evaluation, however rigorous, is the organisation marking itself and deciding what to publish. 

John McDonnell, the Labour backbencher who chairs the APPG, called Andriesz’s death a profound and preventable tragedy and has demanded that the FCA pay for an independent and non-conflicted body to evaluate its handling of whistleblowers. His group’s reasoning is not sentimental. In November 2024 the APPG published the findings of a two-year call for evidence drawing on roughly 175 respondents, including whistleblowers, victims and the FCA’s own former staff. It concluded that the regulator was opaque and unaccountable, slow to act and slower to admit failure. The FCA’s public response was that it strongly rejected that characterisation of the organisation.

THE NUMBERS BENEATH THE MAN

Andriesz was not an outlier. The FCA received 1,369 whistleblowing disclosures in 2025/26, up a fifth on the year before. In the final quarter of 2025 it closed 282 reports, of which nine, around three per cent, resulted in what it calls significant action: an enforcement step, a skilled person review, a restriction on a firm or an individual. The regulator will tell you, fairly, that most of the rest informs its supervisory work. It will also tell you that confidentiality rules under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 stop it discussing individual cases. That confidentiality protects firms from premature accusation, and it gags the regulator when it wants to defend itself. The person who bears both costs is the whistleblower, who is told nothing, shown nothing, and left to work out from the silence whether anything happened at all.

Then there is the money. The FCA is funded by levies on the firms it regulates. Not by the public purse, not by Parliament, but by the industry. The APPG recommended legislating to change that, and it is the recommendation Westminster has shown least appetite for, which tells you how uncomfortable it is. A regulator paid by the regulated, immune from civil liability to the consumers it exists to serve, and reviewing its own conduct through its own board is not a watchdog. It is a trade association with statutory powers.

A CASE THAT LOSES ITS WITNESSES 

Andriesz is also the latest name in a case that has a habit of losing the people who knew most. Jeffrey Epstein was found hanged in a New York cell in August 2019, awaiting trial. Jean-Luc Brunel, the Paris modelling agent accused of procuring girls for him, was found hanged in La Santé prison in February 2022, awaiting his. Daniel Siad, the scout who appears some 2,000 times in the Justice Department’s files and was under investigation by Paris prosecutors for trafficking, was found dead at his home in Colombes on 20 July, before any charge was brought. Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent of Epstein’s accusers, died in April 2025, and her family said she had taken her own life.

Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger held that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action. The Tribune makes no such claim, and no inquiry has linked any of these deaths to another. We say only what the record shows: not one of the three men at the centre of this case has faced a jury, and the woman who named a prince is gone. In a case where the powerful have outlived the evidence and the accusers have not outlived the strain, the person holding the paperwork is the most exposed person in the building. Britain gave this one a review.

What should happen does not require new law. The FCA should fund an evaluation it does not control, by a body that does not report to its board, with terms of reference agreed with the APPG rather than drafted in Stratford. It should publish the Paterson review in full, including anything unflattering. The Treasury Committee should call the FCA’s chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, to account for how an official came to misstate the rules on whistleblower protection to a man already in crisis. And Parliament should finally build what it has dodged for decades: an Office of the Whistleblower with teeth, independent of every regulator it oversees. They did not need to silence him. They only needed to outlast him.

Blatant Retaliation

I am no Green for all sorts of reasons, but nothing that they or Zack Polanski had ever said or done had put them or him beyond the pale of the Establishment before Sunday. Yet if you think that Israel is that popular a cause in Britain, then you need to get out more. Most people are indifferent and most of the rest are to varying degrees pro-Palestinian, just as most people in Britain have no view on the Irish Question and most of the rest are to varying degrees pro-Nationalist.

No, “antisemitism” was not what did for Jeremy Corbyn. He took 40 per cent of the vote in 2017. It was Keir Starmer’s unscripted announcement of a second Brexit referendum, for which Corbyn was too weak to sack him, that caused the 2019 General Election to be called at all by Boris Johnson, since he knew what the result would then be. As did Starmer, who duly became Leader on the back of it.

Several of Starmer’s closest associates have reported the Green Party to the Police, who are the only people even more glad than the Greens that the miners lost in 1985, and to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is infamous for sacking its black and disabled staff first, for flatly refusing to investigate discrimination and worse against Muslims in the Conservative Party, and for managing to find nothing wrong in the then Government's conduct of the Windrush scandal. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

And in Starmer’s Camden, the Labour Chief Whip is Councillor Izzy Lenga, an IDF veteran and the Chief Scrutineer of the recent Labour Party conference. She appeared in the cult classic Panorama: Is Labour Antisemitic?, telling viewers that “every single day” Labour Party members were telling her that “Hitler was right”. That purported documentary was made by Rachel Jupp, who has just been made the new Director of News at the BBC, which like all broadcasters has been unable to find a single Palestinian to interview this week, but which has faithfully repeated the constantly changing but always absurd Israeli line about Flydubai, complete with a hijacker called Hamam al-Hammami, which means Bathroom al-Bathroom and whose plot was foiled by a plumber.

But anti-Zionism is a protected belief equal to being gender-critical, anything up to a third of British Jews are not Zionist, many of the right-wing and nearly all of the centrist Zionists in the Westminster Village believe that God gave the Land of Canaan to the Children of Israel even though God did not exist (on this as on abortion, they are no Christopher Hitchens), the majority of Zionists certainly in the world and probably in Britain are Christians who are at best unaware of the spitting at priests and the public urination on churches in East Jerusalem, and some of us are absolutely never going to stop pointing out the racism of the ideology that required those acts, and of which Peter Oborne writes:

Emily Thornberry, chair of parliament’s influential Foreign Affairs Committee, has called on Britain to refuse compliance with Israel’s closure of the British consulate in occupied East Jerusalem. Her intervention comes amidst mounting anxiety among Palestinians that Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will submit to Israeli pressure and shut the consulate on Thursday. Middle East Eye understands that the foreign secretary’s decision is being watched closely by other consulates, including France and Spain, who fear they will be next to be forced out if the British quit. Thornberry told MEE on Monday that the closure of the consulate was a “blatant retaliation against Britain for standing up for international law. The closure order is in itself illegal. I hope that Israel will not go through with the closure of a consulate which has served Britons and Palestinians since 1838. Britain should not allow Israel to do this,” she said.

Prayers were said in the Anglican cathedral on Sunday morning that the consulate could be saved. Special mention was made of the welfare of Palestinian staff, many of whom are certain to lose their jobs if the consulate is closed. Richard Sewell, Dean of St George’s College, told MEE that he was “really disturbed by the prospect of the imminent closure of the British consulate. It is a further attack on the Palestinian community and will severely impact the UK's relationship with them.” The Dean warned that closure “will also impact UK nationals living in East Jerusalem as well as British pilgrims, and visitors to Jerusalem. It is really important that this move should be resisted.”

Domino effect

There is alarm that Britain will for the first time lack a diplomatic presence at the annual Remembrance Day service due to be held next month at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Historically, the British consul-general always officiates at the event, which is normally followed by a reception in the consulate. Many thousands of British and Commonwealth troops were killed in Palestine in World War One and World War Two. Middle East Eye understands that the future of the British Council office in East Jerusalem, which depends on British diplomatic representation, may also be jeopardised.

Britain has two diplomatic missions to Israel and Palestine: the embassy in Tel Aviv and the consulate to Palestinians, based in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where Palestinian residents have faced years of threats of eviction and settlement expansion. Many Palestinians have told MEE of the importance of the work of the British consulate in providing witness of human rights abuses and reporting them back to London in a way that the British embassy in Tel Aviv cannot.

They have also expressed fear that the closure of the consulate will lead the way to the collapse of other diplomatic missions as part of a more generalised assault on Palestinian identity across Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Thanks to the repressive environment enforced by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Jerusalem Palestinians who voice criticism of Israel said they fear arrest and imprisonment. That can include torture, as documented by human rights organisations including the Israeli group B’Tsalem. Middle East Eye has therefore chosen not to publish the names of Palestinians we have spoken to.

Disaster for Palestinians

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced the decision to close the consulate last month in retaliation against the British move to ban trade with Israeli settlements. Many Palestinians interviewed by MEE believe that it is significant that Saar responded with measures against the British consulate rather than the embassy in Tel Aviv. Focus on the consulate means that it is difficult for Britain to respond with reprisal measures against Israeli diplomats in London. More importantly it fits in with a wider Israeli project to make life difficult if not impossible for foreign organisations, including aid agencies, international bodies and consulates, to operate out of occupied East Jerusalem. 

Palestinians have noted that Israel’s closure of the British consulate is unlawful, since Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem is illegal under international law. Miliband recently recognised the landmark International Court of Justice judgment of July 2024, which ruled that the Israeli occupation of the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, was illegal. Former British Attorney General Dominic Grieve KC wrote in a legal opinion last week that Israel has made “an unlawful assertion of sovereignty over occupied Palestinian territory. Successive British governments have affirmed that Israel’s rights in East Jerusalem are limited to those of an occupying power”.

Grieve wrote that “Israel is asserting a right it does not possess as an occupying power to impose sovereign control over East Jerusalem.” He further noted that British consul generals do not present commissions to Israel, meaning “there is no accreditation to Israel for Israel to withdraw”. Every Palestinian Middle East Eye spoke to insisted that the closure of the consulate would be seen as a victory for Israel and a disaster for Palestinians.

We are absolutely never going to stop pointing out the racism of the ideology of which Gideon Levy writes:

On Friday my cellphone pinged: a recorded message from Itamar Ben-Gvir about his victory in the Supreme Court. He promised "Bara, bara" ("Get out!" in Arabic slang) to Sami Abu Shehadeh – and he delivered. That was enough to drive anyone crazy: A racist, Kahanist cabinet minister who is a convicted supporter of terrorism and who boasts about the war crimes he orders in Israeli prisons, incites the commission of crimes against humanity and celebrates his victory.

He does this on the steps of the Supreme Court. Next to him is Ze'ev Wolf, a lawyer who, together with fellow members of the Kach movement's "Retaliation Unit," threw a hand grenade into a crowd in the Old City of Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter, killing an older Palestinian man and wounding several others in 1992. The terrorism supporter and the murderer defeated a man who has never hurt a fly, neither a Jewish fly nor a Palestinian one. The murderer became a lawyer, the terrorism supporter a government minister – and Abu Shehadeh was forced to withdraw from the Knesset election after the justices announced there was a majority in favor of his disqualification. A wicked man prospers, because he is Jewish; a righteous man suffers, because he is Palestinian. Could anything be more surreal than ex-cons defeating an innocent man in the High Court of Justice, and all because of an opinion piece?

The course was set when a panel of nine justices said that a majority would vote to disqualify Abu Shehadeh. This is the moral portrait of the Supreme Court in its current composition, the one whose independence the "change bloc" took to the streets to defend. This the court you defended? How embarrassing. Gone are the days when the erstwhile head of the Central Election Committee, Justice Mishael Cheshin, opposed the disqualification of Azmi Bishara over much graver claims than those made against Abu Shehadeh. "Your affiliation with Hezbollah annoys and outrages me," Cheshin said, adding: "but Israel's democracy is strong and can tolerate exceptions like Bishara."

Half a century later, Israel's democracy has weakened, its Supreme Court has weakened, Abu Shehadeh has been disqualified and Ben-Gvir is winning. The hearing on the disqualification of all the Arab parties lasted nine hours, with three hours devoted to Abu Shehadeh. Absolute madness. Ben-Gvir, in the role of Gideon Hausner, implies that Abu Shehadeh is Adolf Eichmann: "When I stand before you here, I am not standing alone. With me are the 1,163 people who were slaughtered in this massacre." Did the 1,163 victims authorize Ben-Gvir to speak for them? Eichmann? Really?

Thus began the humiliating hearing of Abu Shehadeh, reminiscent of a Stalinist purge committee. The exalted justices sought to probe his innermost thoughts. They would never do that to a Jew: Did you truly want to kill 1,000 babies? None of them dared to see the bigger picture, in which individuals who incite genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass starvation are fit to run for office while a candidate who is a proponent of peace and equality is disqualified.

Justice Daphne Barak-Erez wanted to know if the gentleman regretted his remarks, even though he has already expressed remorse, as if this would help him; Justice Alex Stein asked to see "a single essay in English" in which Abu Shehadeh called Hamas a terror organization. And if the redeeming essay were found, would Stein have voted against disqualification? Surely you jest. Is Hamas a terror organization? Stein interrogated him the way any Arab is interrogated: If he answers yes, they say he doesn't mean it. If he answers no, or tries to evade the question, he's a terrorist.

The Supreme Thought Court wanted to know what he meant, but Abu Shehadeh and his lawyer, Hassan Jabareen, never stood a chance. The court was compelled to offer up its pound of flesh to the zeitgeist, to Israeli fascism and to the government. After all, even the princess of Israeli justice, the attorney general, was for disqualification. The accused gave in, so we will never know if there was a righteous man in Sodom. But the spirit that blew through the court was clear: a Jewish and democratic disqualification, in the finest tradition of Zionist mendacity. From now on, Israeli Palestinians may think and express themselves only within the narrow confines set for them by the beacon of justice, whose light has long since been extinguished.

And we are absolutely never going to stop pointing out the racism of the ideology of which Yair Foldes, Noa Shpigel, Josh Breinerand Lior Dattel write:

An Israeli university lecturer is accused of planning mass terrorist attacks targeting Arab Israelis and Palestinians and seeking to recruit far-right politician and election candidate Moshe Feiglin to his plans, according to an indictment filed Monday with the Lod District Court. According to the indictment, the defendant, a mathematics lecturer at the Bar-Ilan University in central Israel, a man in his 60s, called his plan "Am Ya'aseh Transfer" in Hebrew, or "the nation will carry out a transfer." His stated goal, allegedly, was to cause Israeli Arabs to flee or be expelled to Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza.

The suspect is charged with preparing to carry out an act of terrorism under the Counter-Terrorism Law, extortion by threats and obstruction of justice. The State Prosecutor's Office asked the court to extend his detention until the conclusion of the proceedings against him. Among other efforts, the suspect sought to recruit Feiglin, a Knesset candidate running together with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. After the latter ignored his approaches, the suspect allegedly sent him threatening letters and attempted to extort him. According to the investigation, the suspect attended two public events held by Feiglin and attempted to arrange a meeting with him to present an outline of his plan, but the former lawmaker did not respond to any of his approaches.

In September, as the election approached, the suspect allegedly wrote an extortion letter addressed to Feiglin, criticizing and disparaging him for failing to cooperate with the plan he had devised. He allegedly threatened to publish the letter if Feiglin did not promptly agree to cooperate and help advance the plan, which he claimed would cause Feiglin political damage ahead of the election. About two days later, the indictment adds, the suspect allegedly went to Feiglin's home, handed over the extortion letter to a neighbor, and asked her to pass it on to the former MK, which she did.

The suspect later allegedly attended a Zehut party event at Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda Market, where he used another woman to deliver several copies of the extortion letter to the party's director-general, along with another letter containing a similar threat directed at Feiglin. The indictment added that apart from Feiglin, between April 2025 and September 2026 the suspect attempted to recruit former security officials, journalists and academics aligned with Israel's right. He presented the main points of his plan but didn't succeed in bringing anyone on board.

The indictment details how, amid the unrest during Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza in 2021 and following the October 7 massacre, the suspect, motivated by nationalist-ideological beliefs, decided to plan and carry out simultaneous terrorist attacks to kill hundreds of Arab Israelis, including Bedouins, as well as Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The indictment further alleges that over a period of more than three years, beginning in early February 2023 and continuing until his arrest last month, the suspect devised and prepared a systematic, detailed plan and carried out numerous concrete preparatory acts. These included conducting advance reconnaissance trips, preparing documents detailing the plan and its rationale, and attempting to recruit operatives to take part in the planned attacks.

Under the plan, 72 Jewish terrorists, at least half of whom would be licensed gun owners, including the lecturer himself, would be divided into 12 terror cells, with six operatives in each. They would be armed with various weapons, including pistols, rifles and axes, and would "launch surprise mass-casualty terrorist attacks in mixed Jewish-Arab cities and Arab communities across Israel." The plan also called for the cells to receive pre-coordinated assistance and backing from subversive elements recruited from within the Israel Defense Forces, including air, artillery and armored forces that would carry out attacks on Arab population centers.

According to the indictment, the suspect outlined instructions for members of the public to join in "carrying out mass killings, rapidly taking control of flashpoint areas, roads and the entrances and exits of Arab communities, mixed Jewish-Arab cities and hospitals." The indictment adds that the instructions called for participants to show no mercy, including toward Arab women and children, and not to stop in response to pleas, arguing that any hesitation would lead to an "unbearable situation of chaos and then a massacre of Jews."

According to the indictment, the suspect believed that the mass, simultaneous terrorist attacks, coupled with their amplification and real-time dissemination on social media, would lead Arab citizens of Israel to flee beyond the country's borders. During a court hearing following his arrest, the suspect said that his lawyer suggested that he would "act a little crazy," saying it "would help him" reduce his sentence. "[But] I'm completely competent and stand by my actions," he added. He also told the court not to be held in detention with Muslims, adding that "I am not a danger to anyone right now."

"My life has been completely turned upside down. I have so many things to do and financial matters to deal with. I don't see to whom I could pose any danger," he added. "All the prison guards are Muslim, and I'm afraid. I'm there alone. I'm a professor at Bar-Ilan University, and I worked until my arrest. I did nothing for myself. I buried my life for three years. I did all this before October 7. I don't think I should be punished."

In its request to keep the suspect in custody until the conclusion of the proceedings, the Central District Prosecutor's Office said his actions, which spanned several years, were rooted in an "extreme and murderous ideology" aimed ultimately at the mass killing of Arab Israelis, as well as Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The prosecution added that the nationalist and ideological motivations underlying his actions, coupled with the fact that they were carried out during a period of heightened security tensions, heightened the threat he posed.

Feiglin and the Zehut party said in a statement: "Immediately upon receiving the extortion and threatening letters from the defendant, Moshe Feiglin and the party leadership promptly contacted the police and filed a formal complaint. We thank law enforcement authorities for their swift and determined action and trust the security and judicial authorities to apply the full severity of the law against those who committed the offense. The Zehut party will continue to act responsibly in the public interest and without fear."

A statement by Bar-Ilan University said the suspect has been suspended until the conclusion of the proceedings against him, adding that it "condemns and is appalled" by the acts attributed to him. The university administration further called on police and prosecutors to "prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law if the allegations are proven." It added that the university "has and will continue to have zero tolerance for such conduct, which runs counter to the values we all share as Jews, Israelis and human beings, and certainly to the values of Bar-Ilan University."

If You Still Trust The Administration

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

For example, pornography is now being legalised in Ukraine to pay for the war. It had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side, the same side as the Green Party on this as on the war. Both in Britain and in Ukraine, the terrible fate of the United States beckons. Please read what follows in the light of all of that.

The first mention on this site of Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and the Paedophile Information Exchange was 20 years ago this month, and this site first mentioned the close connection between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein on 16 August 2019. So it is as a very accomplished rat-smeller that I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Esther Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house.

Nor is my record of rat-smelling restricted to the detection of guilt. See Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for the canonisation of Cardinal Pell. To keep Assange’s work going, I would have died in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond devoted his life, I expect that he and I would have got on. But Evans and I would find little to talk about, while Heath’s victims and I would have a very heated discussion indeed.

I am sure that would be able to stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, and with two brothers I can scarcely find the words to describe the idea of any of the three of us as a fanboy of either of the others in the manner of Tristan Tate. But I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as the Tates are being, and I would not be at all surprised if little or nothing came of this. Moreover, since no charge or even arrest has followed the alleged allegation against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, then it is fair to assume that there has never been a Police investigation into His Lordship. He should now sue every media outlet that had suggested that there was one. An Oratorian does not take a vow of poverty, and the English Oratories have friends who could afford any lawyer in London. I alone have publicly defended Bishop Byrne. I have done so from the very start, and I shall do so to my last breath. And Nikos Mohammadi writes:

In recent days, news of the “Cornell Seven” and the alleged “Cornell gang rape” has prompted a flurry of condemnation online, along with criticism of the supposedly “complicit” men and institutions on college campuses and across the internet. A recent essay in New York by Harvard undergraduate Zoe Yu, declares that “the post–Me Too generation gets its Me Too moment”. Three Cornell graduates and trauma psychologists write in HuffPost that they are “shocked, but not surprised by what’s happening at [their] alma mater”. And more than 1,000 Cornell alumni, in a co-signed letter to the editor in The Cornell Daily Sun, the campus’s principal student paper, speak of “decades of Jane Does” and demand that the university “turn inward to seek out the roots of sexual violence within its halls”. Anyone spending time on Instagram will also see the now-ubiquitous rallying cry, “I am Jane Doe.”

However, the facts of the case, which have been reported extensively in UnHerd, reveal a far more complicated story than what social media posting, many politicians, and the discourse in general would have one believe. An unnamed “Jane Doe” in her suit last month claims she was gang-raped by seven men on the evening of 19 October and the morning of 20 October, 2024 at a campus fraternity house when she was 20. She was voluntarily drinking alcohol, but is still suing her sorority (for allowing her to drink), a bar in downtown Ithaca (also for allowing her to drink), the university (for failing to adequately deal with the “rape”), and the fraternity and the men (for the ketamine-fuelled, hours-long orgy in question).

The wave of outrage began, at first slowly and gradually, on 21 September, with the student-run Cornell Daily Sun publishing this editorial: “We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force.” It also released the names of the seven men who had allegedly raped the woman, bringing forth the allegations. (Cornell had disciplined the students, expelling two of them, while the Tompkins County District Attorney had declined to press charges.) A Cornell student who spoke to UnHerd on the condition of anonymity noted that one of his professors had begun class by sharing Cornell’s anti-sexual-assault resources, with the caveat “if you still trust the administration.” Protests and walkouts, he said, are slated to happen on 5 October and 13 October, organised by groups otherwise mostly involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

By last Monday, the case had become widely publicised. I saw students at my own university — Columbia — relentlessly post on Instagram, highlighting stories from various other “rape” victims. One viral Instagram post detailed how, in 2014 and 2015, then-Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz had carried the mattress she was allegedly raped on around Columbia, from class to class, as a form of protest. (Allegedly because no legal or university disciplinary process substantiated her allegation.)

Meanwhile, a pro-Israel, Orthodox Jewish influencer who graduated from Columbia, and has over 85,000 followers on Instagram, posted, “I did not go to Cornell. I went to a different Ivy in New York. Title IX betrayed me there too.” (Title IX is the US law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally-funded educational institutions.) That also went viral, and even received likes from pro-Palestine students, and at least one activist. There was another: “Repost if you are against Rape! I can see if u.”

The posting frenzy has continued since, with Columbia fraternities condemning the Cornell case as “sexual violence” that was “deliberately silenced” on Thursday. The next day, an account entitled “Epstein off Columbia,” which frequently meshes together Epstein hystericism and anti-Israel sentiment, announced a rally to “#stopsexualviolence from the frat house to the White House”, scheduled for 8 October outside the university’s main gates on Broadway and 116 Street. On the prevailing sentiment at the Upstate New York Ivy, the student I spoke with repeatedly emphasised: “If you are not speaking out against the administration, that means that you’re complicit.”

While Wendy Kaminer writes:

Nearly a decade after the #MeToo movement exploded on social media, a two-year-old Cornell University rape case has reignited outrage about alleged sexual assaults on campus. This is not a simple ‘he said, she said’ case. There’s no dispute that a group of seven young men had sex with a drunken, drugged young woman, in one long night at a campus frat house. Our understanding of the facts may change as investigations progress, and we don’t know how or whether each of the men accused distinguished himself from his brethren. But so far this case centres less on conflicting narratives than on legal notions of consent and the definition of rape under New York law.

The facts as we now know them are complicated. According to in-depth reports by the New York Times, on the night of her alleged rape, Cornell sophomore Jane Doe started drinking at a sorority house and local bar before visiting a fraternity house to meet up with a friend. There, she later told campus police, she consented to sex with two of the men now accused of rape, noting that she was ‘pretty okay’ with it. She was also pretty drunk: as her civil lawsuit against her alleged rapists states, she was given large amounts of alcohol and pressured into snorting ketamine. In a night that lasted seven hours, seven men had sex with her.

At first, she didn’t consider herself a rape victim. One of the men involved texted her shortly after the alleged attack, apologising ‘for how things went down’, noting that he and his friend were also under the influence and unable to ‘shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand’. She responded amiably: ‘at the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being w u and matt’ (sic). Some three weeks later, she reported being raped to campus police. Why the change of heart? The New York Times suggests that in the weeks after the attack she was traumatised and grappling with a sense of shame and humiliation. She ‘wanted it to be consensual’, according to one of her roommates. She was also concerned about her reputation, as rumours spread and she was labelled a ‘slut’; and she was angered by being disinvited to a Halloween party at the fraternity where her alleged attack occurred.

Was she raped? Whether or not you consider her responsible for drinking, using drugs and initially consenting to sex with one or two men, it’s fair to say that she was exploited, abused and objectified. It’s hard not to be repulsed by the spectacle of seven men descending on one woman. But not all repulsive behaviour is or should be criminalised. Under New York law people who become inebriated voluntarily cannot claim they were unable to consent to sex. Jane Doe says she drank and used ketamine under pressure, but you might ask if she was free to leave. Giving in to social pressure is not exactly the equivalent of being coerced. You might also ask if the men who used her should have known that the sex was not consensual, given the alcohol and drugs in which they were all apparently indulging. Should they have recognised that they were raping her when she did not identify the sex as rape until weeks after it occurred?

Local district attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute this case two years ago, and we would probably not be talking about it today if Jane Doe hadn’t just filed a civil suit against her alleged attackers. Her lawsuit set off a firestorm and led to the appointment of a special prosecutor by New York governor Kathy Hochul, up for re-election next month. The accused men will likely be indicted but perhaps not ultimately convicted. New York law, limiting claims of incapacitation in rape cases and the reasonable doubts raised by Jane Doe’s own equivocations, could fairly result in acquittals. But if convictions are unlikely, law reform expanding the definition of rape seems inevitable.

A bill already pending in the state legislature would support third-degree rape charges when alleged victims are under the influence and out of control, whether or not they drank or used drugs voluntarily. This is a ‘binary issue’, according to Bronx assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who introduced the bill. ‘Either you’re on the side of the survivors or you’re on the side of the rapists.’ That is precisely wrong. You can also be on the side of due process and narrowly drafted penal laws. You can sympathise with Jane Doe and condemn the behaviour of the men she accused, while questioning the reflexive urge to prosecute them. She may well have civil remedies against her alleged attackers, but we will all be at risk if we ask the penal law to right every wrong.

All That Glitters

If that. Someone called Andrew Griffith, who is apparently the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has trotted out the old chestnut about Gordon Brown and the sale of the gold reserves.

Yet a sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency has no need of such reserves, no one objected to that sale at the time, nothing about the increased value of gold today could have been predicted then, Labour won the next two General Elections, Brown became Prime Minister in that third term, and he might have remained so if he had been properly supported by those on his own side who instead refused to accept the legitimacy of any Leadership or Premiership except that of Tony Blair, but who would settle provisionally for David Cameron.

If Labour made those points, then it really would have changed. But it will not, because it has not.

On A Cellular Level

The Conservative Party conference has given a rapturous reception to Jeremy Clarkson. He regards Brexit as one of the biggest mistakes of his lifetime, finds that it makes him want to sit in the gutter and weep, and cannot be friends with anyone who voted for it. Made rich and famous by the BBC, this friend and strong supporter of David Cameron used his newspaper columns to argue vociferously for Remain.

Clarkson is now prominent in a farmers’ campaign that has the Liberal Democrats speaking from its platforms while denying any official role to anyone from Reform UK. And along with both of their wives, Clarkson was spotted last February drinking in his pub with Ellen DeGeneres, who had moved to the Cotswolds as part of a trend of American liberal moneybags either fleeing to Britain or planning to do so. A special visa route for them has been proposed by the third largest party in the House of Commons, with which Clarkson has appeared on platforms from which Reform was explicitly barred. All in all, Clarkson is a perfect fit for the Conservative Party, as it clearly acknowledges.

Last year, that conference responded in the same way when Clarkson’s Sunday Times colleague, Matthew Syed, told it that he had become a Conservative specifically because that was the present vehicle for the New Labour of 2001, for which he told the adoring audience that he was “proud” to have been a parliamentary candidate, and from which all parties except the Conservatives had “moved wildly to the left”. The 2001 Labour manifesto, Syed asserted, “was miles to the right of almost anything you see in British politics today”, hence his pride. He called Nigel Farage “a Socialist, way to the left economically of the Corbyn-McDonnell manifesto of 2017”, and he stated that that was why he had joined the Conservative Party, which gave him a standing ovation.

And why not? The Conservatives know whom they have to beat, and it is almost never Reform, while they are in third place behind Labour at Great Yarmouth. It is in two of the five Green seats, half of one of them also in Norfolk, that they are the main challengers. In a pattern repeated across the Thatcherite, socially liberal, Rejoiner South, the seven MPs for Clarkson’s Oxfordshire are now five Lib Dems and two Labour, but with the Conservatives in second place in six cases, while Syed grew up in Berkshire, where only one of the nine MPs is a Conservative, where again they are no longer even in second place in one of them, and where a Lib Dem now sits for the Wokingham that Syed contested in 2001. Might he seek it as Conservative in 2029? If not, why not? And having been moved by boundary changes from Witney to Banbury, Clarkson now has not a Lib Dem MP, but a Labour one. Will he, too, be chancing his arm next time? If not, why not?

No Homeland Without Homes

Paul Knaggs writes:

Spain goes to the polls on 29 November. The prime minister announced it on Monday, after Congress rejected emergency measures meant to quell public fury over housing. The announcement came less than seventy-two hours after that defeat, delivered from the Moncloa Palace with a promise to defend housing against speculators and liberties against reactionaries. It is a good line. It is also, measured against his time in office, a late one.

There is a longer charge sheet against this government, and the right has been reading it aloud for a year. Sánchez’s former transport minister was sentenced to twenty-four years by the Supreme Court in June. Separate cases touch his wife and his brother. The courts will deal with all of it, as they should. None of it explains why an 87-year-old woman was carried out of her home on a stretcher. Because the election was not really called by Pedro Sánchez. It was called by María del Carmen Abascal.

How Maricarmen’s Eviction Ignited Spain’s Housing Crisis 

On 23 September, police carried her out of her flat in Madrid’s Retiro district. She was 87, she had lived there for 71 years, and it was the fourth attempt at eviction that year. She had arrived as a girl. Her mother had died in that flat, and she had expected to die there too. She was taken to the Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she remains, being treated for exhaustion. From her bed she recorded a message asking that what happened to her should not happen to anyone else, and that the unjust laws which allowed it should be changed. 

She will be going home. Her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, announced an agreement with the owners days later. Reached after four hours of negotiation and mediated by Madrid’s public housing company, it gives her an eight-year contract at roughly thirty per cent of her pension, about the 500 euros she was paying before. That was the rent until the investment firm that bought the building sought 2,650 euros a month instead. The company disputes the account and says it later offered a lower figure. Note the defence, then note what it concedes. The going rate for staying in her own home exceeded everything she had to live on. 

No bailiff exceeded his powers. No landlord broke a rule. The instrument was a leases act passed in 1994 by the Socialist government of Felipe González, which set a clock running on Spain’s old protected tenancies. A clause lets such a tenancy pass down a second time where the tenant has a recognised disability of sixty-five per cent. Maricarmen’s was assessed at fifty. By that margin she lost her home. In eight years as prime minister, Sanchez has brought forward no proposal to change it.

FIFTY CITIES, AND A CAMP THAT IS STILL THERE

Spain rose anyway. Protesters have been camped in the Puerta del Sol since the eviction, and the tents were still standing on Monday morning as the prime minister spoke. Last weekend brought marches in fifty towns and cities. The government’s own delegation counted 70,000 in Madrid. The tenants’ union claimed 500,000. Whichever figure you take, the placards were not asking for tinkering. The Sindicato de Inquilinas wants rents halved and homes held by investment funds taken off them, and its spokeswoman Valeria Racu says a general strike over housing is coming. Her Madrid colleague Alicia del Río called the government’s emergency package a minimum measure, which is the kindest thing said about it from that side.

She was right. The two decrees would have frozen evictions of vulnerable tenants, tightened the rules on short lets and made leases renew automatically. Useful, modest, overdue. On 2 October the Congress of Deputies threw them out, the first by 172 votes to 178, the second by 166 to 184. The Popular Party and Vox voted against, and so did Carles Puigdemont’s Junts, arguing that protecting tenants would shrink the rental supply and push prices higher.

That argument deserves a hearing, because it is the argument, repeated in every capital where rent has become political. Cap the return and the landlord withdraws the flat. What it lacks is any reckoning with where Spain actually stands. The Bank of Spain counts a shortfall of 750,000 homes between 2021 and 2025, with household formation running at 240,000 a year against 92,000 homes built. Social housing is roughly 3.3 per cent of the stock. The share of young Spaniards owning a home has fallen from 41 per cent in 2007 to 22 per cent. A market that produced those numbers unregulated will not be rescued by further restraint from the state.

A LAW THE RIGHT SIMPLY REFUSES TO OBEY 

And the restraint has been remarkable. The 2023 Housing Act let regions cap prices in stressed rental zones. Five have done so. The Popular Party’s regional governments signed a joint document in 2024 refusing to apply the law at all. Madrid, where rents are highest, has declared not one zone. Andalusia took the law to the Constitutional Court. Bills tabled by the PP in this parliament would delete the mechanism from the statute book entirely. This is the party favoured to govern. 

Within hours of calling the election, the government confirmed the sequel. Having lost in a full chamber, it will re-approve the decrees and send them to the standing committee that sits once parliament is dissolved, where the arithmetic is kinder and Junts is not needed. Perfectly constitutional. Also an obvious question. If that route existed on Tuesday, where was it in March?

WINNING THE ARGUMENT, LOSING THE COUNTRY

A survey by 40dB for El País and Cadena SER found 67.5 per cent of Spaniards back limits on rents, including 56.5 per cent of Popular Party voters and 55.2 per cent of Vox voters. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III found that half of Vox’s own supporters blame investment funds for the crisis. Yet every published projection but the state pollster’s now puts the Popular Party and Vox together between 201 and 213 seats, well past the 176 they need. Asked what should be tackled first, those same voters name immigration.

That is not a failure of public opinion. It is a failure of delivery. People will go on believing that speculation is the problem and still vote for the party of speculation, if the party that agrees with them spends eight years saying so and leaves the statute book exactly where it found it. Conviction without consequence is just commentary, and voters can smell it.

Maricarmen will get her flat back, rescued by public fury from a machine that will process thousands more this year with no camera present. The machine was built in parliament. It can be dismantled there. Spain did not lose its homes to the market. It legislated them away, politely, in daylight, and called it reform.

With that in mind, even The Guardian editorialises:

“To the millions of leaseholders across the country, you have my word. The days of you being squeezed for every penny are coming to an end,” Andy Burnham told the Labour party conference. Only a few hours earlier, his housing secretary, Angela Rayner, had announced that the government would legislate for a new independent regulator and launch a consultation to cap “rip off” administrative fees. While these are undoubtedly steps in the right direction, they are miles away from Labour’s manifesto promise to “finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end”.

In its modern form, leasehold in England and Wales turns homes into income streams for freeholders. It should be abolished. There are powerful vested interests – billionaires, aristocrats and big businesses – that would oppose this move. But the system of service charges is crippling the housing market because its exorbitant cost puts off prospective buyers. The average annual service charge for a flat in England and Wales is now £2,405, up 32.6% since 2020 and 55.6% over a decade. Owners of flats in high-rise blocks in London are paying service charges of more than £7,000 a year. Little wonder that first-time buyers are increasingly bypassing flats.

The current system sees homeowners enter into long-term leases in which they must pay sums annually to freeholders. These can rise quickly to very high levels. The government proposes a £250 annual cap on ground rents for existing residential leases and limits on fees for requests such as keeping a pet. Ministers are consulting over whether residents could pay less to buy out freeholds. But there is no sign of action on annual service charges for maintenance costs determined by distant firms. Last year, 37% of flats across England and Wales had a service charge that exceeded 1% of their value – making them hard to mortgage and sell. Surely homeowners should not have to buy their freedom at an outrageous price while being charged for years by a management system they cannot realistically change?

The issue of leasehold has become a campaign flashpoint in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. Six out of seven homes sold in the constituency last year were sold as leasehold. The Green leader, Zack Polanski, who is standing to be the MP, has made the issue a concrete test of Labour’s credibility. The Greens have paired leasehold abolition with rent controls and affordable housing as part of their claim to end “rip-off Britain”, accusing Labour of favouring developers. Labour denies this, but ministers know that housing is a political powder keg that has already exploded in Berlin and across Spain.

It is remarkable that while legislation banning new leasehold properties is expected before the next election, it is unlikely to come into force until after it. Ministers are said to be afraid of being taken to court by freeholders. But government has already won against them in the courts when defending Michael Gove’s housing bill. The question for the government is whether the proposed reforms give the owners of the existing 5m leasehold homes a credible route out of their dependency – or just regulate their continued subservience. Ministers must show how a leaseholder trapped today will in the future take back control – by obtaining the right to manage property, being able to buy the freehold or converting to commonhold. If ministers offer just another complaints mechanism, they will have broken their promise to end an injustice.

Not Sheiking It Off

And so to The New York Times, where Adam Crafton writes:

In those early, mysterious days of Sheikh Mansour’s ownership of Manchester City, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak offered a window into how he hoped the club would be seen following their 2008 takeover. “There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi, as Sheikh Mansour,” Al Mubarak told British newspaper The Guardian. “These are loyalty, commitment, discipline, long-term thinking, respect, appreciation of history… We are acknowledging that how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are.” He continued: “This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about.”

Last week, a judgment came down on City, declaring the club to have cheated financial rules across almost a decade. If we take Al Mubarak at his word, the Premier League verdict becomes a judgement, by extension, on Abu Dhabi. For a very long time, City have sought to impress upon journalists that they are not state-owned by the United Arab Emirates. In legal terms, they are correct. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan may well be a member of the royal family, deputy prime minister and vice president of the UAE, as well as the half-brother of the state’s ruler Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (also known as MBZ). But, on paper, Mansour is the majority shareholder in City via Newton Investment and Development, a company which may be registered in Abu Dhabi, but that he wholly owns privately.

Yet, in spirit and to the layperson’s eyes, City are inseparable from Abu Dhabi. The club’s shirt, stadium and academy campus are all sponsored by the UAE airline Etihad, whose chairman is appointed directly by MBZ. City’s chairman Al Mubarak has a portfolio of responsibilities which includes being chief executive of Mubadala, a sovereign investment firm which has $385billion (£291bn) worth of assets under management. He also chairs the board of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and serves on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as well as chairing the UAE’s Executive Affairs Authority, which provides policy advice to the country’s president. Other City sponsors include Abu Dhabi telecommunications firm Etisalat and tourism brand Experience Abu Dhabi, as well as Aldar Properties, whose board is chaired by Al Mubarak’s brother, Mohamed Khalifa.

In the good times, Abu Dhabi has been able to bask in the reflective glow of City’s successes on the pitch. Now, in the worst of times, City’s conduct casts a long shadow on the Gulf state. All of which placed the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham in a pickle. As he sought to balance a multitude of interests, Burnham ended up in a bind when asked for his view on the possibility of City’s owners being forced out of English football. “I would be really concerned to lose them,” Burnham told the BBC. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. “I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad (City’s home stadium) and the campus around it but also into the city.” 

The BBC reported that Burnham said “it would be wrong for him to intervene”, yet by giving a view at all, had he already made life more difficult for those adjudicating on City’s sanctions? On Thursday, the government found itself in retreat, twice seeking to clarify Burnham’s statement. A spokesperson said: “As the Prime Minister made clear, the initial judgement is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules… If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.” After social-media users rapidly pointed out that wrongdoing had been established by the Premier League, Burnham’s spokesperson issued an amended statement, saying: “Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.” City, it should be said, continue to deny wrongdoing, and have appealed. 

For Burnham, it was a clumsy episode which underlined the quandary facing him and his government. But it felt revealing that his first instinct was to empathise with an ownership group that has poured resources into the UK, rather than join the masses horrified by what Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, described as the “systematic” breaking of rules across nearly a decade. The challenge for Burnham is both regional and global. To the United Kingdom, the UAE is not a pariah state. As a source close to several politicians of the ruling Labour Party, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, explained to The Athletic, UK lawmakers may not always be comfortable with how the UAE operates regarding Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, and plenty have concerns about its conduct in Sudan, but taken as a whole, the UK-UAE relationship is considered crucial across security, investment and trade. 

It does not make matters any easier that City’s chairman Al Mubarak is, to all intents and purposes, an official representative of Abu Dhabi. When the previous UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, landed in Abu Dhabi for talks about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in April, amid the ongoing conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran, the man to greet him on the runway was Al Mubarak, seemingly on official government business. He is also the UAE’s Presidential Special Envoy to China, and according to Mubadala’s website, “leads several significant country files on behalf of the UAE.” In the same biography, which stretches to 723 words, it says Al Mubarak was previously made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2013, and, in 2021, received the Freedom of the City of London.

On Friday, a City of London Corporation spokesperson told The Athletic the latter honour was bestowed “in recognition of the close trading relationship between the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates” and his “leadership role” at Mubadala. The same honour was recently given to Sir Geoff Hurst, the England striker who scored a hat-trick as they won the World Cup final in 1966. It is an ancient tradition, first awarded in the 13th century, which has evolved from granting a person the right to trade in London (and the right to take your sheep over London Bridge) into a more symbolic recognition.

On Thursday, it emerged Al Mubarak was also granted UK diplomatic immunity six years ago, according to the publicly available list on the UK government website, which may complicate any potential civil or criminal legal action involving City. “He has been the effective prime minister of Abu Dhabi for many years,” explains Christopher M Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi: Oil & Beyond. “He has a strong and commanding position of big chunks of Abu Dhabi’s state-backed economy. He is the economics guru, or right-hand man of MBZ, the ruler, with a relationship with him that goes back many decades. It is hard to identify a more trusted and closer lieutenant not just to Sheikh Mansour, but to the ruler himself.” 

The sensitivity of the UK position is obvious in the topline numbers. According to the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, bilateral trade between the two countries exceeds £25billion per year and the UAE-UK Sovereign Investment Partnership, which launched in 2021 with a £10bn five-year target, has already committed nearly £30bn across more than 50 direct investments. It claims this has supported 48,000 UK jobs, “with a further 280,000 expected by 2030”. Earlier this year, the UK secured a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which the UAE is one of six states across the Arabian Peninsula. Around 250,000 British nationals are estimated to live in the UAE, many in Dubai. The UK has also been providing air defence support for its Gulf partners amid the ongoing conflict centered on Iran.

It is this interdependence, combined with Burnham’s comments, which has stoked fears among football fans that politics may yet infringe upon the Premier League’s appetite for sanctions. After all, this is not a case that falls behind a layer of unnamed UAE bureaucrats. For Burnham, the proximity to Abu Dhabi has fallen closer to home. Between 2017 and 2026, Burnham was the mayor of Greater Manchester. The current ownership of City had been in place for more than a decade before he entered office, during which time Manchester City Council sold off vast swathes of land to Sheikh Mansour’s private equity fund.

Last year, the Manchester Mill website revealed a ten-year “Collaboration Agreement” had been signed by the Manchester City Council and Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group in December 2015. The contract, obtained by freedom of information requests, revealed that the council had offered “right of first refusal” to the company over council-owned land in the area. The local council has also previously been accused by academics at the University of Sheffield of providing Abu Dhabi with a “sweetheart” deal, which they argued allowed the investors to benefit disproportionately. A Manchester City Council spokesman previously disputed the report, saying the land was valued by independent experts and the agreement was the best available “at a time when there was very little market interest in the area”. 

The council’s argument would be that the City ownership assisted a radical transformation of previously neglected areas of east Manchester and the trade-off was necessary during a period in which the UK’s then Conservative government had pulled back on public investment. Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s secretary of state for business, innovation, science and trade, recently told The Athletic: “If you look at New Islington (in Manchester), there was a social-housing estate that people abandoned properties on; they did not want to live there. Now it’s one of the most sought-after places, with loads of families and young professionals and all the benefits for an economy that come from people living in the city. It’s that investment that’s turned (those places) desirable. They weren’t desirable before then.” 

The story of gentrification is well told and not unique to Manchester, often accompanied by broader economic growth but rising rents and not always sufficient opportunities or affordable housing for those who had been in place prior to the luxury towers moving in. The UK’s Sunday Times newspaper has previously described Manchester as the city that “sold out” to Abu Dhabi. The Guardian said it had sold itself to the Abu Dhabi elite — and not even for a good price. Reynolds, who has lived in the city for more than 20 years, told The Athletic he reads those conclusions with an element of “disbelief”.

Davidson, an author and academic who worked in Abu Dhabi when the club was acquired in 2008, says the state’s political instincts were sharp, recognising that investment in the north of England was a cross-party priority for the UK. Previous Conservative governments had talked up the idea of a Northern Powerhouse, an attempt to rebalance the economic gap between the north and south of the country. “Abu Dhabi was there to help that,” he tells The Athletic. “There was a soft-power element to demonstrate to the UK more broadly that the UAE’s investments are necessary and positive. The Gulf states had a finger on the pulse of domestic UK politics. They saw a way of going further than the soccer club itself and actually becoming an integral part of the UK’s northern economics.” 

Most people agree investment by the City owners has supported economic growth in Manchester. Burnham has since pitched his platform onto that story, which tracked at 3.1 per cent annually across a decade, far outpacing the UK nationally and producing so many tall buildings that the city earned the nickname ‘Manc-hattan’. In recent years, it has hosted the Chanel catwalk and taken pop music’s Brit Awards ceremony from London, while basketball’s NBA is bringing games to the new indoor, 23,500-capacity Co-Op Live arena, located next to the Etihad Stadium, this winter. That arena is co-owned by City Football Group (CFG). Burnham’s political project is often described as ‘Manchesterism.’ On Tuesday, he said in his Labour Party conference speech: “I intend to take what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth, and drive it from the very centre of government into every postcode in Britain.”

Yet that Manchester association, previously deemed a virtue, is now thorny ground. Because what if that growth story was turbo-charged by a football club ownership now judged to be serial financial cheats? What if Burnham’s magic potion for revitalizing Manchester was not, in fact, the region’s get-up-and-go attitude and the policy-making latitude provided by devolution, but an excessive dependence on foreign money from people now embroiled in one of the world’s greatest sporting scandals?

There is more to Manchester’s story of improvement than Abu Dhabi’s riches, but any perceived loyalty to the City owners threatens to raise questions about Burnham’s consistency and integrity. In that same conference speech, Burnham said he was tiring of a world where “shareholders never lose” and “the public never win”. He asked his audience to “imagine living in a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. Yet, by appearing sympathetic to City’s plight, did he accidentally find himself on the side of billionaire owners who are also now facing questions about tax evasion?

On Thursday, leading UK tax consultancy Tax Policy Associates released a report in which it scrutinized some of what is known about City’s case and concluded that offshore payments made to the club’s then manager Roberto Mancini alone may have led to £12 million in unpaid UK tax. “The consequences could include a much larger tax bill and a criminal investigation… The commission’s finding that Manchester City knowingly filed false accounts suggests that Companies Act offences may have been committed,” the Tax Policy Associates report said.

Little wonder, then, that Burnham, who is seeking to position his platform against the establishment and on the side of the British public, quickly found himself rewriting statements. This did not satisfy the rival Liberal Democrats, who called for Burnham to publish details of any meetings with City’s owners and declare any hospitality he has previously accepted at the Etihad. This episode served to underline the uneasy realities of governing the UK in 2026, a country that has left the European Union and finds itself working overtime to entice investments from Gulf nations. Reynolds, speaking to The Athletic before the news on City’s charges broke, said it was not his place to be a salesperson for the UAE, but credited the country as an “incredibly stable, prosperous place, with quite a lot of legitimacy for the people who run it”. He said the Manchester investment story has “been really good”, a view that would almost certainly be echoed by politicians of most stripes when embedded into government. That was all before the publication of the Premier League’s verdict. But within the past month, Reynolds has met in person with Al Mubarak. A government source denied the City verdict was discussed in the meeting.

Some football fans are anxious about political involvement as precedents exist for government manoeuvring over sensitive Premier League matters. Previously, The Athletic obtained 59 pages of emails from the UK Foreign Office revealing extensive exchanges between government departments and the Premier League at a time when the PIF Saudi sovereign fund was attempting to conclude a takeover of Newcastle United in 2021. This included papers which detailed how the UK government considered the possible failure of the Saudi takeover of Newcastle to be an “immediate risk” to the relationship with the Gulf nation, as well as a chief advisor to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeking to find a “senior interlocutor to impress the interests” of the government on the Premier League. The papers even included details such as the UK Department of International Trade (DIT) intending to distribute a public relations offer to those involved in the takeover, with the Saudis long accused of egregious human-rights abuses. Masters had previously claimed there was “no pressure applied” by the government during that takeover process and the Premier League denied the eventual acceptance of the Saudi-led bid was related to government interference.

Multiple sources familiar with the workings of the UK government acknowledged this week that there will be plenty of parts of the state machinery anxious about next steps, but the same sources insisted there should be enough people around the prime minister who make the argument that big cheques cannot legitimise the undermining of the Premier League, itself one of the UK’s great soft-power exports. The UK government has previously admitted in 2023 that its embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in London have discussed the charges levelled by the Premier League, but refused to disclose the correspondence — requested by The Athletic — because it was determined that it could risk the UK’s relationship with the UAE.

In recent days, there have been the first indications of a response to the charges from some of those in Abu Dhabi. Etihad Airways, whose former long-term chairman Mohamed Al Mazrouei was also a City board member from 2010 until 2021, has threatened to sue the Premier League after its independent commission declared the club’s sponsorship agreements were “sham” deals. Etihad was not named in the report but is City’s foremost sponsor. It remains to be seen how far the club — and their ownership — are prepared to go in the quest to absolve themselves. Do their sponsors follow through with legal action? Will those long-term Emirati investments in Britain get called into question? Will all this be used as leverage to exert pressure on the UK government? Would the government be resilient to any pressure, should it arrive? With every next step, the spotlight on Burnham will only burn brighter. In June, during Al Mubarak’s annual interview with Manchester City’s own platforms, he said there is “no intention to sell” City. “Manchester City and this group within the football world is a pinnacle and these sorts of jewels you don’t sell,” the chairman insisted.

Davidson, however, argues recent events may prove a game-changer. “Once there’s some time to digest this, my feeling would be that they would extricate themselves,” he says. “I think primarily it would be seen from a political and cultural aspect. The ruling family of Abu Dhabi would feel that they had been embarrassed and disgraced by this ruling, and the best way of moving forward would be to sell now to cut the losses, as it were, rather than allow this to be a festering, lingering problem where the ownership of their club would be forever tainted in England. “I can’t see any scenario where they would continue.”