Raise The Colours, Slay The Dragons

As well as having more MPs than all other non-Labour and non-Conservative parties put together, the underscrutinised Liberal Democrats lead more local authorities than the Conservatives. The Lib Dems have an overall majority on Oxfordshire County Council, which has given Raise the Colours formal notice to stop putting up flags.

But yesterday was the second anniversary of the deaths of James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman. While they were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, the IDF bombed those British veterans three times to make sure that they were dead, using British-made Elbit Hermes 450 drones, and using intelligence from the over 600 nightly reconnaissance missions flown for the Israelis, yet free of charge to them, from RAF Akrotiri. From the twenty-third of this month, raise in their honour both the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag, flanking in England the flag of the Patron Saint both of England and of Palestine.

Weak and Feeble, Heart and Stomach?

An ITV drama about a transgender Elizabeth I would not purport to be a documentary.

But had she been born a boy, then that would have had ramifications that would still be felt.

And Dylan Mulvaney has already played her mother, who in real life merely had her head cut off.

Anomalous Phenomena?

Of course Donald Trump is using Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, as UFOs are now known, as a distraction. Of course JD Vance is lapping it up. But the thing about UAPs is that you are never going to change the minds of the people who took the most interest. We cannot know that there is not extraterrestrial life, but we have no evidence that there is, much less that it has ever visited Earth. Any release of files would confirm that, thereby satisfying no one who did not already know it. The rest would only scream about another coverup.

Yet Vance is essentially correct. Saint Paul’s elemental spirits are Saint John’s fallen angels, and the human race worships them in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones, often misidentified as alien visitations. The court of Tony Blair featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides, just as Ronald Reagan had been heavily dependent on Joan Quigley. The demonic basis of the Epstein Class is undeniable and undenied.

One sign of hope is Artemis II. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the Shroud of Turin is in the news again. Last August, The Times excited the excitable with the dismissal of the Shroud by Nicole Oresme. The Church had been proclaiming the Resurrection for 13 centuries before that turned up, and She has never expressed any view as to its authenticity, permitting devotion to it by those who found that helpful, but emphasising that it had no bearing on the Teachings of Jesus or on any point of doctrine. The Times and its tendency, however, seemed to have discovered Oresme as an authority.

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Buy the book here.

Planned By Whom?

Kate Quiñones writes:

The Trump administration, citing legal challenges, said it will continue to give Title X grants to Planned Parenthood for another year — a move pro-life leaders see as a “betrayal.”

The administration first restored Biden-era Title X funds to Planned Parenthood in January, to the outcry of pro-lifers. News broke March 31 that the administration would extend the grants for another year, just a day before they were set to lapse.

Thanks to the grants, Planned Parenthood and some other clinics will continue to be able to submit reimbursement receipts to the federal government for low-income patients who received birth control and other non-abortion services.

While grants won’t directly cover abortion — the Hyde Amendment prevents the federal government from doing so — grants will subsidize an organization that performs hundreds of thousands of abortions yearly.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said the agency will issue Title X grant notices for 2027 “matched with agency priorities.”

The Trump administration had initially paused the grants in 2025, but after facing legal challenges from Planned Parenthood, HHS released the grants in January. Most pro-life groups decried the decision, though a few defended it by saying it was the administration’s only viable option as 42 U.S. Code Part 300, the rule governing family planning grants, had not been amended.

National pro-life groups have denounced the decision to keep funding Planned Parenthood. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the move “an inexplicable slap in the face to the pro-life GOP base.”

“This is a clear abandonment as the first Trump administration enacted the Protect Life Rule to stop Title X funding of Planned Parenthood,” Dannenfelser said. “It should have been ‘Day 1’ policy in the second administration. Instead, we are 14 months in and this hasn’t been prevented.”

Dannenfelser called the move “political suicide.”

“Three out of four GOP base voters support defunding Planned Parenthood,” Dannenfelser said. “One-third of those voters say they’d be less enthusiastic about voting this November if the GOP abandons pro-life policies.”

“This comes on the heels of the administration undermining GOP states by allowing the shipping of abortion drugs into their borders, violating their laws,” Dannenfelser continued. “And it comes after the president suggesting the GOP should be ‘flexible’ on the Hyde Amendment. This spells disaster for November.”

Jennie Bradley Lichter, who heads the March for Life, said that “funding Planned Parenthood is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Making America Healthy Again.”

“Absolutely maddening that [the HHS] is continuing to fund an org whose business model is built on ending human lives, misleading pregnant women into thinking abortion is their only option, and delivering substandard health care even in the rare cases when abortion is not involved,” Lichter said in statement provided to EWTN News.

Live Action called on the Trump administration to reverse the decision.

“The Trump administration has decided [to] CONTINUE supplying Title X funds to Planned Parenthood,” the statement read. “This is the largest abortion corporation in the country. They don’t need our tax dollars. They don’t deserve our tax dollars. This decision MUST be reversed.”

“Over 400,000 unborn children are killed by this corporation every year, making them the largest abortion chain in America,” Live Action President Lila Rose said. “The blood of these babies cries out. Taxpayer dollars should never fund the killing of innocent human beings.”

“The Trump administration’s decision to keep Title X federal funding going to Planned Parenthood is unacceptable,” Rose said in a statement shared with EWTN News. “Taxpayer dollars should never be used to prop up America’s largest abortion business. Planned Parenthood exists to end the lives of preborn children, and every dollar it receives helps sustain an industry built on violence against the innocent.”

“This decision is a betrayal of the pro-life Americans who expected this administration to stand firmly against abortion and against the forced public funding of those who commit it,” Rose continued. “The American people should not be made to subsidize abortion businesses under the guise of women’s health. Title X funds should go to real health care providers that serve women and families without taking innocent human life. The administration should reverse course immediately and fully defund Planned Parenthood.” 

Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Advice

The King has to go to the United States because the threat to the monarchy, the only serious such threat since at least the popular anti-German sentiment of the First World War, comes from factions that, though disparate, would all have voted for Donald Trump all three times. Next month's Unite the Kingdom rally was already going to call on Trump to invade this country and effect regime change.

Trump maintains that there has been regime change in Iran and that he now just needed the new regime to accept his terms for peace by reopening the Strait of Hormuz that he had closed in the first place. The American Embassy has reopened in the Venezuela to which María Corina Machado has not returned. With that kind of record, whom might Trump install? Matt Goodwin? Charlie Downes? Young Bob?

Yesterday, Keir Starmer literally gave the red carpet treatment to President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of "Tommy Robinson", and who is massacring Christians as befits a sometime second-in-command both of Al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State to which Shamima Begum was trafficked such that she was not permitted to return to Britain.

Al-Sharaa was particularly warmly welcomed by the Foreign Office Minister, MI6 asset, and nepo baby, Hamish Falconer. American regime change may not make Falconer Prime Minister, but it would favour someone like that, a hardcore Blairite as it had already delivered a hardcore Chavista and as it welcomed a hardcore Khomenist instead of mild backsliders in either case. Karl Turner could oppose the attack on trial by jury all he liked, but it was when he pointed out the obvious falsehood of Morgan McSweeney's account of his messages to Peter Mandelson that the whip was withdrawn, via media announcement alone, by McSweeney's wife. Think on.

Nice Girls Love A Sailor?

Remember that David Taylor has been known to holiday with Princess Beatrice, while Joani Reid is a stalwart of the Labour Together of Josh Simons and was therefore handpicked for her seat by Peter Mandelson, as you read Lucy Fisher:

The captain of one of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines has stepped back from his role this week after being investigated over his relationship with Joani Reid, the Labour MP whose husband has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China.

The Royal Navy launched an investigation last year in response to allegations that the senior military officer — who is married — had conducted an inappropriate relationship with Reid, according to people familiar with the matter. The probe was necessary from a “due diligence perspective” to examine any potential blackmail risk, one of the people added.

Fresh security checks were carried out this month after Reid’s husband was arrested under the UK National Security Act on suspicion of assisting China’s foreign intelligence service, the people said. The Ministry of Defence was satisfied by the checks and remains confident that there was no breach of security.

This week, after the MoD was approached about the matter by the FT, the officer decided to step back from his position for personal reasons. He has not left the Royal Navy.

People familiar with the case said that the allegations of an inappropriate relationship were thoroughly investigated last year and the captain was not subjected to disciplinary action. The officer has not broken any military rules.

However, the captain and Reid were found to have exchanged flirtatious messages and action was taken to mitigate any blackmail risk, one of the people said. Reid rejects that the messages were flirtatious, a person close to her said.

The officer and Reid, MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, first met as young adults, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Reid’s constituency is about 50km from His Majesty’s naval base, Clyde at Faslane, the site that is home to the UK’s strategic nuclear deterrent.

In January 2025 she visited the base as part of a visit organised by the armed forces parliamentary scheme, which provides UK legislators with insight into the operations of the British military. The captain was not on the base at the time, but the pair were in contact following her visit.

The pair are thought to have met once as well as exchanged messages, but have had no contact since September, the people said. There was no physical relationship between the pair.

A Royal Navy spokesperson told the FT: “The security of the nuclear deterrent is our highest priority, and we have robust processes in place to protect the security of our people and capabilities. We will not comment on individual cases.” 

Reid’s spokesperson declined to comment. The FT sought to approach the officer via the MoD, which declined the request. UK military personnel are not permitted to speak with the media without authorisation from the ministry. 

Reid’s husband, David Taylor, was one of three men connected to the Labour Party who were arrested in an operation led by counterterror police. The police investigation relates to “foreign interference targeting UK democracy”, security minister Dan Jarvis has said.

Taylor is named in Reid’s parliamentary register of interests as a family member engaged in third-party lobbying with regard to his role as director of the company Earthcott Ltd.

On the day of her husband’s arrest on March 4, Reid said: “I have never seen anything to make me suspect my husband has broken any law. I am not part of my husband’s business activities and neither I nor my children are part of this investigation.”

The following day she announced she had “voluntarily” suspended herself from the Labour whip “until internal investigations are concluded”.

The Royal Navy has been beset by scandals in recent years. In 2024, the commander of a Vanguard-class submarine was sacked after filming a sex video, according to reports.

It came after another commander of a Vanguard-class submarine was removed from his vessel in 2017 amid claims of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

Last year Admiral Sir Ben Key, then head of the navy, was sacked after an MoD investigation into his relationship with a female subordinate, as first reported by the FT. Key had made clear his intention to step down from the post.

The UK government has previously confirmed that if the actions or behaviour of service personnel “adversely impact, or are likely to impact, on the efficiency or operational effectiveness of the service then a range of sanctions may be applied, up to and including dismissal” and that “misconduct involving abuse of position, trust or rank . . . will be viewed as being particularly serious”.

Britain’s nuclear deterrent — its most sensitive weapons system — is provided by four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines, which carry Trident II D5A missiles and associated Mk4A/Holbrook warheads.

The programme’s total acquisition cost was about £23bn in 2024-25 prices. The estimated cost of the design and manufacture of the successor Dreadnought-class submarines, which are set to come into service in the early 2030s, is £31bn, according to the House of Commons library.

In their role providing a continuous-at-sea deterrent, one of the four boats is always at sea. Details of their operating patterns and location when at sea are among the MoD’s most closely guarded secrets.

The ageing fleet of Vanguard-class submarines requires increasingly complex maintenance, which in turn means seaworthy boats are forced to undertake arduously long missions.

Last year HMS Vanguard, one of the four boats, spent 204 days underwater before returning to the Clyde — a record patrol. It has become the norm for the nuclear-armed submarines to spend five months at sea.

While in relation to a different senior naval officer, Anna Mikhailova, Oliver Wright and Ben Ellery write:

An MP whose husband is facing claims of spying for China was reported for inappropriate conduct with a senior naval officer working on Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Joani Reid left the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) last year shortly after getting “carried away” during a visit to the Faslane naval base in Argyll and Bute, which is home to the UK’s nuclear submarines.

She was alleged to have behaved inappropriately with a senior naval officer during a drinks reception. The incident is thought to have led to her leaving the scheme, which has been operating for more than 30 years and offers MPs firsthand experience of the military, early last year.

The incident also led to Reid being reported to parliamentary authorities by an MP after her husband, David Taylor, was arrested on suspicion of spying for China in March. He denies the allegations.

They said they took the decision because of fears that information on Britain’s highly-sensitive nuclear deterrent could inadvertently have ended up in enemy hands. However, one senior figure said they were satisfied there was “no link” at all to the China spy case.

The incident was also separately reported to parliamentary authorities by the military before Taylor’s arrest.

Sources told The Times that Reid met the naval officer last year when she and other MPs on the scheme were taken to Faslane for a two-day visit organised by the AFPS to see the home of the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

The group are understood to have stayed at the base and had drinks in the officers’ mess. One MP said: “She behaved very inappropriately, and then carried on after the drinks.”

Another said that Reid had been “extremely drunk” and was “all over” the senior naval officer. They added that at one stage a female officer involved in organising the trip asked her to go to bed and had been sworn at by Reid.

According to another parliamentarian, there was “plenty of flirting going round when you’re that drunk” but added he could not remember any specific incident involving Reid.

However, The Times was told that Reid’s alleged behaviour had been brought to the attention of the Commons speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who is a trustee of the AFPS.

His office is said to have raised concerns with officials who run the scheme who confirmed that Reid was no longer taking part in the programme and had left of her own accord.

A parliamentarian on the trip said they had been made aware of Reid’s behaviour but had not witnessed it themselves. One accused Conservative MPs on the visit of “trying to make mischief”.

Labour whips were also made aware of the incident after concerns were raised by other MPs on the trip.

A source close to Reid said that claims she had been reported because of national security concerns were “opportunistic hypocrisy, as shown by the nearly a year gap between the events and the report”.

They said: “Many of the male MPs attending had plenty to drink too but only the woman is reported. Not hard to see what the real force behind this is when you consider that.”

They added that any suggestion Reid had any relationship with the submariner was nonsense. “They have never spoken since and Joani doesn’t even know his name,” they said.

Participants in the AFPS are able to choose which service course they wish to enrol in — Royal Navy, Army or RAF — with a minimum commitment of 15 days over the 12-month duration of the course.

Those who complete the course attend a graduation dinner along with senior military officers and defence ministers.

Another MP who was on the two-day trip described how the MPs were given a tour around the facilities at Fastlane and were shown equipment that they described as “petrifying” because of the state it was in. They were also shown around two submarines.

Reid, who was elected as Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven at the last election, resigned the Labour whip last month after her husband was arrested on suspicion of spying for China alongside two other men.

Speaking after his arrest she said she had never seen anything to make her suspect that her husband had “broken any law”. She added that she had never been to China nor had she ever spoken on any China-related matters in the House of Commons.

“I have never asked a question on China-related matters,” she said. “As far as I am aware I have never met any Chinese businesses whilst I have been an MP, any Chinese diplomats or government employees, nor raised any concern with ministers or anyone else on behalf of, even coincidentally, Chinese interests.”

She said that she was a social democrat who believes in “freedom of expression, free trade unions and free elections” and not any sort of “admirer or apologist for the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship”.

As in the West from the Industrial Revolution onwards, the social conditions of the China created by Deng Xiaoping and his successors have in turn created a New Left characterised by a strong patriotism and sometimes by a distinct cultural conservatism. Yet it was Deng who restored proper exams such as obtained in the Soviet Union and under Old Left influence in the West. That is a lesson to today’s Britain, which more broadly needs a Left that was searing in its critique of the anti-family and anti-sovereignty capitalism of the Epstein Class in general and of the Labour Party in particular.

But You Can’t Have It All

Marina Hyde writes:

“She’s produced a bestseller!” panted The Spectator. “Liz Truss’s new book has been out for less than 72 hours and it’s already sold out on Amazon.” Thus began the fairly widespread British media hallucination that the 45-day PM was once more igniting the nation with her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West. In the end, Truss’s book sold 2,228 copies in the UK in its first week, which placed it at No 70 in the “bestseller” charts . The next week it had fallen back to 223, comfortably obliterated by any number of cookbooks, novels, self-help titles and sticker books, none of which had enjoyed anything like its level of publicity. You hear a lot about AI hallucinations, but rather less about the hallucinations suffered by journalists all on their own.

So, then, to the furore over the academic/recent Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s new book, which I find at least as high-stakes for our culture as that courtroom battle between Gwyneth Paltrow and the – I think? – retired optometrist who accidentally skied into her.

Goodwin has self-published a book called Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, and the political writer Andy Twelves has made his case that the book is likely AI-assisted, given that it contains various imaginary quotes from philosophers and ChatGPT links in some footnotes and so on. One of them challenged the other to a debate on GB News, which was very much won by Twelves. But also by Goodwin, given we live in a post-shame political culture and you really could not buy this level of publicity for a sub-mediocre nonfiction book in its week of release. Neither gentleman is wearing their triumph lightly, shall we say. But we live in the click wars and the respective hustles have made a fun diversion while we wait for the petrol wars to start.

Goodwin is wisely posting through this wonderfully profile-boosting episode, and his chosen avenue is to suggest his book is a bona fide publishing phenomenon. (He has also said he used AI for research purposes only.) But let’s get down to brass tacks, because there are only so many self-aggrandising posts about this supposed cultural juggernaut I can become aware of before I have to ask the Opinion desk if I can file my column a bit later than usual so we can take a look at the actual verified sales figures when they drop. Guys, they’re in – and the second half of this column is for paid subscribers only. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Welcome, all; enjoy the stats.

To hear Matt tell it, this book has been taken up by a veritable army of “the people”. Of liberals/the left/whoever, he writes that “their biggest fear is coming true” because the book is the “second-biggest book in Britain”. Hmmm. I know you can’t say Easter in this country any more, but at the time of typing this paragraph, 11 out of the top 20 books on Amazon in the UK were Easter-themed children’s books. Goodwin was on Monday night pushing a picture of the top three on the Amazon UK bestsellers chart, with his book sandwiched at No 2, between Fluffy Chick: A Touch and Feel Book and a seasonal book about an illegal immigrant (Paddington’s Easter Egg Hunt). As Matt put it: “I’ve never seen anything like this.” You’ve never seen anything like coming second in something? Weird, because I heard you had – and only last month as well. Anyway, Goodwin was also relying on the “hot new releases” Kindle chart, presumably because at that moment, he was No 47 in the actual Kindle chart. Listen, you can make a lot of statistics seem to say a lot of different things.

In fact, many people will have noticed authors posting something along the lines of: “OMG I can’t believe I’m No 3 on Amazon’s Military Hardware and Bitcoin Numismatics chart! Thank you to everyone involved in this book – absolutely blown away!” Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that dear old Amazon wants to help authors push books, but a lot of these esoteric charts are the equivalent of participation medals.

Furthermore, dare I mention that March is a non-competitive month to release a book? If Matt really wished to gauge the strength of feeling for his output, he would publish in September or October, and see how he fares against the serious big hitters. And yes, I am including the airfryer books in that.

Of course, some books are so big that the release date doesn’t even matter. That Spectator article about the Truss literary supremacy went on to sniff: “Prince Harry may be rather affronted to see that his own book, Spare, is even lower on the biography chart in, um, 91st place.” Bless that “um”. Um, I think Prince Harry would probably have been OK with the fact that, despite being a January release, his was the fastest selling non-fiction title of all time, selling 3.2m copies in its first week – 467,000 here in the UK alone. On a Matt Goodwin-esque extrapolation of the stats, that means Harry was worth 200 Liz Trusses and, by populist demand, should have immediately replaced Rishi Sunak as prime minister. Never mind Harry’s royal titles – he should be fitted with the blurb “The PM They Tried to Ban”.

Ultimately, in a fractured culture, there’s always more than one way to spin a yardstick. Given that Truss only took an advance of £1,512, you could argue that as an investment her book was less commercially disappointing than, say, Boris Johnson’s. Given the publisher’s outlay-versus-return, BoJo’s was comparable to a big Hollywood flop, despite selling far more copies. Matt Goodwin’s self-published effort is the equivalent of a micro-budget indie horror.

Sorry, those actual stats, according to the official book sales monitor NielsenIQ BookScan. In its first week of sale, in a week where the No 1 book sold 33,000 copies, Suicide of a Nation sold 5,539, making it this week’s No 20. That’s a hell of a lot less than The Dinosaur That Pooped Easter, but you can’t have it all.