Christus Surrexit, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Surrexit in vere, alleluia, alleluia!

Closing The Philes?

Hearts prepare to break at the rumoured impending dismissals of Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle.

Kendall worked both for Harriet Harman and for Patricia Hewitt before Hewitt handed on to her the parliamentary seat that she herself had been passed by Greville Janner.

And Kyle is the close friend, closest ally, and former lover of Ivor Caplin, as well as an erstwhile Special Adviser to Hilary Armstrong, in whose Whips' Office Caplin served alongside Dan Norris.

An Attack On One

There is no NATO without the United States, so for all practical purposes NATO no longer exists. Not even The New York Times can still be bothered to get its name right. Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine. Finland looks silly for having joined. Sweden looks downright irresponsible for having sacrificed its work and reputation in peacemaking and in aid.

Membership of NATO subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable to Viktor Orbán, or to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or to Donald Trump. As a member both of the Executive Board and of the Gaza Executive Board of Trump’s Board of Peace, does Tony Blair retain a Labour Party membership card? If so, then why does anyone else? And does Trump’s British fan club now love Blair, who is the only British member of the Board of Peace?

The canonisation of NATO “because of Attlee” does not extend to the NHS, or to the public ownership of the utilities. That NATO was founded by Ernest Bevin on the principles of British trade unionism is a pious if self-regarding fiction that has a parallel in every original member state, including what was then Salazar’s Portugal.

And it is comical to assert that NATO was devised by Denis Healey, who was all of 31 when it was created, and who in any case went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, after he had perpetrated against the Chagossian people the evil that was later compounded by David Miliband of extraordinary rendition infamy.

But on Tuesday, the Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory overturned the 2004 ban on Chagossians living on the Chagos Islands, as four of them were already doing. Therefore, Chagos is now inhabited by people, by a people, with the right to self-determination. Never mind NATO. Celebrate that.

An Honest British Rebuke

Peter Hitchens writes:

I think King Charles should rebel against our government’s decision to grovel to President Donald Trump. Sir Keir Starmer has ordered our poor, kind, gentle monarch to travel to the ridiculous court of that erratic American Ayatollah. He has done so in spite of Mr Trump repeatedly insulting Britain. He derides us in spite of already being indulged with an unprecedented second State visit to this country last September. And do not forget Sir Keir’s distressing, wasted attempts to be civil and rational during their meetings and phone calls.

This is surely enough evidence that flattering this strange man only encourages him to be unpleasant. The Orange President has said many frightful and ignorant things about us, but perhaps the worst was his sneer that British servicemen and women had held back from the front line in Afghanistan.

Our soldiers shrug off such jibes, especially from a man who made such an effort to avoid combat in Vietnam. But those of us (I am one of them) whose family members took part in that conflict, and who counted every long, slow day of danger, are a bit more sensitive.

My suggestion is that HM should softly command the captain of his aircraft to divert to loyal Canada, as late as possible in the flight. I am sure the Canadians, whose monarch Charles is, would love to have him for a relaxing and good-humoured few days, free of crass rudeness and safe from Oval Office ambushes of the kind Mr Trump likes so much.

The people of Canada jolly well ought to be in front of Mr Trump, in the queue for such visits. Canada exists mainly because thousands of loyal British subjects fled north after being driven from their homes in the 1780s. They were cruelly persecuted and hounded by fanatical republican radicals, who could not have come to power alone, but sought the aid of Britain’s main enemy, France. Why should a noisy, rude inheritor of the rebels get a royal visit before loyal Canada does?

Just imagine the sheer glory of it, as President Trump, standing grandly by the red carpet at the Andrews airbase outside Washington, is told: ‘The King of England isn’t coming. He’s gone to Ottawa instead.’

I’d guess that a growing number of Americans would much enjoy such a snub. Mr Trump presumably wants a royal visit to try to shore up his shrivelling popularity. As things stand, his party is likely to do very badly in midterm elections this autumn. If it does badly enough, that may finish him off. He will not just be a loud, noisily quacking lame duck. He will have to abandon his worrying dreams of wangling a third term in the gold-leaf encrusted White House he increasingly treats as if it is his own.

Surrounded by flatterers, he grows more absurd all the time. An honest British rebuke would be good for him.

A month ago, I asked here: ‘Who does he think he is? The late Kim Il Sung? Perhaps the next thing will be a 100ft gold-plated statue staring out over the Potomac river.’

I thought I was joking. But it is always unwise to joke about Mr Trump’s grandeur. Last week a film was released of his planned Presidential Library, a flashy skyscraper destined to adorn Miami when he finally retires. As far as I could see from the video, the ‘library’ will contain no actual books, though it will have a golden escalator, a Boeing 747 and lo!, a gold-plated statue of Mr Trump.

The posture of this work of art, its fist raised, is remarkably similar to that of the monster idol of the late Kim Il Sung, supreme leader of North Korea, before which his subjects must bow their heads.

Kim’s image used to be gold-covered, too. It was stripped back to bronze after the Chinese, who North Korea had been begging for money, complained about the extravagance.

We Give Not To Our Princes

The King's Easter message last year, when he had good news to share about his cancer, and the then Queen's in 2020, in the throes of the pandemic, may have been the only two ever, and were certainly the only two in living memory. If you want to hear an Easter message, then do as the King will be doing and go to church. Herewith, Article XXXVII of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion:

The King's Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction.

Where we attribute to the King's Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God's Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.

Working back, then, there are the formal condemnation that the Catholic Church has never made of Christian pacifism (indeed, of opposition to any war waged by the King), an insistence on capital punishment that it was notable needed to be made in 1571, a repudiation of Papal authority that in view of the first paragraph could only mean all of it, and a clarification that "we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God's Word, or of the Sacraments". Do as the King will be doing. Go to church.

Branch Lines

The Greens have rejected the renationalisation of energy, and that is one of several excellent reasons to reject the Greens, just as Ed Miliband's expected veto of any further drilling in the North Sea will be one of several excellent reasons to reject the Labour Party, including by means of disaffiliation from it on the part or my trade union, Unite. Instead, once we had harnessed the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy, then let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on publicly generated electricity. As Peter Hitchens writes:

Britain's latest, most modern stretch of railway line has been ready for use since October but has yet to carry a single passenger.

Nobody knows when it will. An ultra-modern station likewise sits unused in the handsome Buckinghamshire town of Winslow, gleaming with newness by day and glowing brilliantly by night, but no traveller can reach its smart platforms, for there are no trains, just security guards.

It is said that a lone nostalgic steam excursion has clanked its melancholy way through, as its patrons stared, baffled at the ghostly untouched buildings. Test trains, freshly-painted and pristine, occasionally pass through with nobody aboard.

Otherwise, the line, which will cost £7 billion if it is ever completed, is the preserve of blank-sided freight trains.

Official sources won't say much, but everyone in the rail business knows that the line is unused and wasted (imagine the revenues lost by this) because of a dispute between the rail unions and the Department for Transport.

The government, obsessed for years with getting rid of guards on trains, has for some reason decided to make this costly, badly-needed stretch of line into a railborne version of Custer's Last Stand.

The unions say that, after the knife rampage aboard a train at Huntingdon last November, the abolition of guards on trains is even dafter than it already was.

Most passengers, especially women worried about travelling alone, probably agree. It is fairly certain that the government will have to cave in anyway. So why not now?

This is not HS2, a whole other story of folly, an absurdly overengineered line made much more expensive than it needed to be.

This is East West Rail, a simple reconstruction of about 90 miles of track between Oxford and Cambridge, which has so far got halfway.

It is one of the very few East‑West lines in the country. It cleverly links all the country's north-south mainlines and the Great Western line to South Wales and the West of England, allowing passengers and goods to bypass congested London.

It is a project which in many ways explains what has gone wrong with modern Britain, and especially its transport system. Its rebuilding is a huge admission of error, in steel, concrete and money. For it should never have been shut in the first place.

The line between Oxford and Cambridge was foolishly closed in December 1967. Even Dr Richard Beeching – the axeman appointed, in 1961, to devastate the railways by Tory Transport Minister Ernest Marples – did not urge its closure. But the Labour government of Harold Wilson, presumably lobbied by the road haulage industry, killed it off anyway.

Sixty years ago, in the age of cheap oil, everyone thought that roads, cars and huge lorries were the future. They believed trains were relics of a dead age, destined for the nearest museum or scrapyard. But bit by bit it has dawned on the world, even on the British government, that railways are actually the modern answer.

They have much lower friction than road transport and so use much less fuel. If electrified they can be powered by any fuel, from coal to wind. They are also clean, quiet and safe. Alas, we have lost much in the years during which these truths have dawned in the minds of Whitehall.

I have a special interest in this stretch of track. My brother and I used to travel on it between our home in Oxford and a boarding school in Cambridge. Had he but known it, my brother might have shared some of his journeys with the mighty author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis. Lewis called it the 'Cantab Crawler' because it did not go very fast.

But he liked it for its directness, and it carried him regularly to his professorial duties in Cambridge from his hillside house in Oxford, till his death in 1963.

The names of its stations could have been set to music as a lament for village England and railway branch lines in general – Islip, Oddington, Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, Launton, Steeple Claydon, Verney Junction, Winslow, Swanbourne, Sandy, Potton, Gamlingay and Lord's Bridge.

At Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, the platform seemed to have sunk into the marsh, and steps had to be brought up to the carriages so that passengers could climb down. Otherwise, they would have had to jump.

We always seemed to reach that particular station at dusk, with gas lamps just coming on, and an ancient, bent and cadaverous porter in a peaked cap attending to the steps. I have often wondered if Lewis had modelled his gloriously pessimistic swamp-dwelling character Puddleglum on this remarkable man.

Both ends of the line, in those days, were more or less lost in the world before 1914, and the countryside between seemed extraordinarily private and unmodernised, with slow old pubs and creeper-covered vicarages amid the elms.

Much of it is the landscape of John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress, and in those days it would have been recognisable to him. Not any more. The elms are all gone. The frenzy of building and hedge-grubbing which has swept England since those days has changed it utterly.

The line also has a place in global history, for its halfway point was at the town of Bletchley, easily reached by mathematical boffins from both England's great universities. And that is why Bletchley Park – now so famous – was chosen as the nation's secret codebreaking headquarters during the Second World War.

The tracks survived closure for a while. Until privatisation in the 1990s, the occasional goods train or Christmas shoppers' special bound for Milton Keynes passed that way.

But when, 15 years or so ago, I bicycled along the 90-mile route (or as close as I could get to it) to see what had happened, the cuttings were choked with brambles and the steel rails had evaporated – as expensive metal tends to do if you leave it lying around in modern Britain.

It probably takes longer to get from Oxford to Bletchley now by road than the 'Crawler' used to do. Try to drive between Oxford and Cambridge (or, worse, try to take the bus) and despite the spending of billions of pounds on new dual carriageways and costly engineering projects, it is an awkward and frustrating journey, involving an astounding number of roundabouts in Milton Keynes, a place which did not exist pre-1967.

Oddly, road engineers did know, back then, about 'induced demand'. This is an effect discovered in the USA, in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1930s – that road improvement schemes lead to increased traffic.

Anyone who doubts this only needs to visit the M25, but in the Britain of the 1960s the traffic chiefs and transport ministers acted as if this truth was unknown, and it was the season for axed railways and new bypasses.

Well, that season has at last come to an end. Why were we so stupid? Even a child at the time could see it was wrong.

Everywhere lines slashed by Beeching are coming to life again. The trains are fuller than ever despite their outrageous fares, and if we are to have a new oil shock then the government may have the sense to electrify the East West Rail line, something it has so far been too cheap, mean and short-sighted to do.

But first of all, it has to actually open it, and then get on with completing it all the way.

I long to travel on it once more, for the first time in nearly 60 years, though as I look out of the window searching for those lost spires and farms of long ago, and for the sunken platform at Marsh Gibbon, my view may be blurred a little by tears.

When Confronted By The Truth

Considering what those demanding an Easter message from the King normally thought of everything that he said and did, then they must want one purely to be annoyed by it. British monarchs have not traditionally delivered Easter messages, and if you want one of those, then go to church. Be grateful that you can, as Peter Oborne writes:

Harassment and violence against Christians call into question their long-term presence in Palestine and Israel, a respected Jerusalem think tank has warned.

In a shocking report, the Rossing Center, which aims to foster Jewish-Christian relations, records a “continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression” against Christians in occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and Israel.

It finds they are targeted not just as Christians but also – in the case of Palestinian Christians – as a national minority. 

The report blames Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government for what it calls “the recent surge in overt animosity towards Christianity”.

In a carefully worded intervention, the Rossing Center writes that a “renewed sense of Jewish identity finds its most extreme manifestation in right-wing ultranationalism, which has become a significant factor in Israeli society.

“This trend has been particularly evident among members of the current government and has been further intensified by the collective trauma experienced since October 7th 2023.”

The report does not mention Itamar Ben Gvir by name. But these comments will be widely interpreted as a direct reproach to Ben Gvir, who as security minister has responsibility for policing in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem’s Old City.

In October 2023, following an upsurge in reported incidents of spitting aimed at Christians and Christian holy sites, Ben Gvir defended the practice as an “old Jewish tradition” which did not amount to criminal behaviour.

Early last month, he opened the way for a massive expansion of firearms licences. According to the Times of Israel, more than 300,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem are now eligible to carry a gun.

Christians on Wednesday privately told Middle East Eye that they regard the widely touted prospect of a Ben Gvir premiership as dangerous for Christians and a calamity for Christianity in the Holy Land.

The Rossing Center report documented 155 incidents of harassment in 2025, but warns its figures represent no more than “the tip of the iceberg”.

Clergy harassed

The majority of the cases involve physical attacks, with clergy (monks, friars, nuns and priests) most likely to be targeted because of their “distinctive garments and visible Christian symbols”.

The interfaith think tank reports that “Clergy in areas such as Mount Zion and the Armenian Quarter report that harassment has become so routine that stepping outside can carry an almost certain risk of abuse”.

In a chilling finding it reports that these attacks are unlikely to be prosecuted.

The Rossing Center said it had aided victims in making complaints to the police.

“Most of the complaints were closed, some remain under investigation, and the rate of indictments is very low in relation to the scale of the phenomenon,” it said.

It also noted that “there is no police officer specifically designated to liaise with the Christian community in Israel”.

This religious persecution, it said, had reinforced among Christians “the perception that they are viewed not as an integral part of the land’s social fabric but as outsiders and, at times, unwanted guests”.

The Rossing Center has documented 59 attacks on church property, including graffiti, vandalism of religious statues, arson, garbage dumping and spitting at holy places.

Such attacks, it said, “feed a sense of vulnerability around sacred spaces and reinforces concern over the erosion of respect for Christian religious life in the public sphere”.

It also documented 18 recorded incidents of defacement of public signs.

The attacks, it said, “are humiliating and exhausting, producing a climate in which Christians feel increasingly unwelcome, pressured to conceal their identity, and uncertain about the future of their communities”.

In a powerful conclusion, the report finds that “Christian communities have been proudly rooted in the Holy Land for two thousand years. However, in recent years they have increasingly expressed serious concerns regarding the combination of forces that could drive younger generations away.”

The report highlighted its 2024 survey, which it said showed approximately half of all Christians under 45 were considering leaving the region.

The report was published after Israeli police blocked Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, patriarch of the Latin church, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate the Palm Sunday mass.

Pizzaballa’s office said in a statement it had been the first time in centuries that the patriarch had been unable to celebrate the mass marking the start of Easter week in the church, which Christians believe is built on the site where Jesus was crucified, and later buried and resurrected.

The Israeli security presence has been ubiquitous in the Old City throughout Holy Week. An Israeli policeman stood guard outside the locked door of Holy Sepulchre to deter visitors from approaching.

A permanent security post called the “Israeli Police Division of the Holy Sepulchre Church” stands beside the door of the outer courtyard, with an Israeli flag flying beside it.

Worshippers have told MEE that armed Israeli police are in the habit of entering the ancient church intrusively, including the tomb of Christ itself.

They said Palestinian worshippers feel intimidated by their presence. MEE put these claims to the Israeli police, but no reply had been received at the time of publication.

The International Court of Justice ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s security presence in occupied East Jerusalem is illegal, and ordered Israel to end its occupation.

Israel defiantly insists that Jerusalem is its capital. Moreover, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel is the “guardian of Christianity” in the Middle East.

That is very different from the picture which emerges from the devastating Rossing Center report, published in Christianity’s most sacred city in the holiest week of the Christian year.

As Fares Abraham writes:

On Palm Sunday, Israeli police stopped Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Francesco Ielpo, the Custos of the Holy Land, on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The church called the decision “manifestly unreasonable and grossly disproportionate,” noting that for the first time in centuries, its senior leaders were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday at Christianity’s holiest shrine. Only after global outrage did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reverse the restriction.

This event should alarm everyone, not just practicing Christians.

Palm Sunday is Christianity’s great anti-empire procession. Jesus entered Jerusalem without a chariot, legions, or spectacle. He came on a donkey. He did not arrive to flatter power but to expose it. He did not mirror the empires of his age; instead, he unmasked them. Palm Sunday is what happens when the Kingdom of God enters a city and reveals how insecure worldly power really is.

That is what makes this episode so revealing. A modern state with one of the world’s most sophisticated military and security apparatuses found itself threatened by a humble Christian observance. There is bitter irony in that. On the very day Christians remember Christ’s repudiation of imperial theater, armed power moved to police the memory of it.

Israel says this was about security during wartime. But even if one grants the seriousness of the moment, the facts still expose something deeper. The planned Mass reportedly would have involved fewer than 50 participants, within the gathering limits Israel itself was enforcing. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, rarely a critic of Israel, called the decision an “unfortunate overreach” and said it was “difficult to understand or justify.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz agreed that the security concerns should not have prevented the patriarch from entering the church. When Huckabee and Cruz are complaining that Israel has gone too far, Americans should pay attention.

Huckabee and Cruz now seem startled that a state they have treated as morally untouchable could trample Christian freedom in Jerusalem. But this is what happens when politicians spend years confusing biblical loyalty with political indulgence. Eventually the idol stops pretending to be holy.

Neither the leaders in Jerusalem nor those in Washington, DC should be romanticized as guardians of religious liberty simply because they wrap themselves in biblical language.

The deeper problem is not one bad decision that was quickly corrected. It is the logic underneath it.

For months, Muslim worship at Al Aqsa was heavily restricted, especially during Ramadan. Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall also lived under wartime limitations, so fairness requires saying plainly that this pressure was not borne by one community alone. But Palm Sunday revealed something that cannot be dismissed as routine.

When Pizzaballa was blocked from entering the church, the world saw how easily a broader security regime can become a mechanism of humiliation and control. It is hard not to see a pattern, or at least a test of limits. If the world shrugs when one holy site is constricted, power learns it may be able to constrict another. If the outrage is manageable, the precedent becomes useful. That is how freedom is narrowed, not always by one dramatic act, but by little steps.

Christians should be especially clear-eyed about what the Church of the Holy Sepulcher represents. It is not merely an ancient building or picturesque stop on a pilgrimage route. Christians have venerated this church for centuries as the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In the grammar of Christian faith, this is not ornamental; it is the hinge. The church stands or falls on the confession that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. To obstruct worship there on Palm Sunday is an assault, symbolic if not yet total, on the public witness of the resurrection itself.

And the man who was barred is not some imported dignitary with little connection to the suffering people of the land. Pizzaballa is the highest Catholic authority in Jerusalem and across the Latin Patriarchate’s territory, which includes Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Cyprus. For Palestinian Christians, he is a shepherd who has gone to Gaza, more than once, to stand with a battered flock. In 2023, he even said he was willing to offer himself in exchange for Israeli hostages. His presence has become a source of hope precisely because he has refused to abandon them.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem, not because the city lacked power but because it did not know the things that make for peace. He wept because he saw the use of sacred language coexisting with spiritual blindness. Two thousand years later, the tragedy remains. Jerusalem still knows how to control a crowd better than how to welcome peace. It still knows how to securitize holiness. It still knows how to mistake force for authority.

Palm Sunday announces that God’s answer to empire is not a stronger empire but a different King—one who rides into the city in a lowly manner but who exposes domination instead of sanctifying it. This King wept over Jerusalem even as its people were preparing to kill him.

That is the final irony here. The men with weapons, gates, and orders imagined they were controlling access to a church. But Palm Sunday has always been about something they cannot control: the public unveiling of a Kingdom that terrifies every empire precisely because it does not need to become one.

If Israel, backed by the most powerful friends in the West, still feels threatened by the memory of a peaceful procession led by the church, then perhaps we are seeing a gripping embodiment of how fragile power becomes when confronted by the truth of a donkey, a cross, and an empty tomb.