Due Process

Keir Starmer has never sued anyone for saying, as numerous people have said outside parliamentary privilege, that he had been responsible for the failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile. We all know why not. If Starmer did not sue anyone for saying, as numerous people are saying outside parliamentary privilege, that he lied to Parliament over the appointment of Peter Mandelson, then we would all know why not. All this, and the trial of Roman Lavrynovych, Petro Pochynok and Stanislav Carpiuc is scheduled to start at the Old Bailey on 27 April.

Remaining with Ukraine, just as the Wagner Group would have had no interest in paying two-bit South London drug dealers to set fire to an East London warehouse if our Government had not been sending the Starlink satellite equipment that it contained to Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, so, if this is happening at all, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would have no interest in paying North London teenagers to set fire to empty and decommissioned ambulances unless Britain had been from the start a full participant in the war on Iran. That and similar attacks would not be an excuse to "enter" this war. They would be yet another reason to exit it. So keep an eye on this, since even harsher anti-protest and related laws again are coming down the line, in time for the everyday food shortages that this war will very soon be causing. As the latest pretext for such repression, the war is too useful to be allowed to end.

Let’s Get This Strait

Before Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on Iran, two months after the demonstrations had been put down so don’t give me that, the Strait of Hormuz was not only open, but toll-free. It has still not properly reopened, and there will now be tolls, with Trump taking a cut. That, and that alone, has been the reason for this war.

Very soon indeed, this will literally be the textbook unjust war. Certainly via RAF Akrotiri and RAF Lakenheath while as good as certainly in numerous other ways, Britain has been a full participant in it from start to finish in return. As ever, we have wasted our blood and treasure for absolutely nothing from the Americans, or from the Israelis, or from the Gulf monarchs who apparently needed to be defended in the cause of democracy and against Islamist terrorism.

Keir Starmer’s barefaced lie about our role in this war has been as perfectly characteristic as the uselessness of the equally Epstein Class Conservative Party and Reform UK in taking him at his word. But is there anyone, anyone at all, who really and truly believes Starmer about Peter Mandelson? How intriguing a conversation with such a person would be, not only on this, but on absolutely anything. I have known for 30 years that Mandelson was a wrong’un. Never mind Starmer. Make me Prime Minister. Or anyone else at all, really.

Chris Bryant Also Misled Parliament

John McEvoy writes:

Last September, trade minister Sir Chris Bryant sat alongside foreign minister Hamish Falconer at a parliamentary hearing about arms exports to Israel.

By this time, the death toll in Gaza had surpassed 64,000, and the Labour government’s limited suspensions of arms export licences for Israel were in the spotlight.

Bryant, a former Anglican priest, told the trade committee that among licences still active were components for trainer aircraft, which he claimed could not be used by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The chair of the committee, Liam Byrne, pushed back, suggesting that such equipment “could be used for training pilots who are then in combat over Gaza”.

After all, Declassified had previously exposed how parts for the M-346 aircraft, which Israel uses to train fighter jet pilots, were being shipped from Britain to Israel amid the genocide.

The components, manufactured by US arms firm Moog in Wolverhampton, had been sent to an Elbit Systems site in Hatzerim as well as to the Israeli ministry of defence.

“That is a perfectly legitimate question that I have asked myself”, Bryant responded.

“But the assessment is that the training of an aircraft pilot on such equipment would take so long that they would not be among the people who would be engaged in fighter combat in Gaza”, he added.

‘Flimsy excuse’

Declassified has now obtained Bryant’s briefing notes for that hearing which expose how he misled parliament on two counts.

The notes make no mention whatsoever of a time lag between training and actually piloting fighter jets, raising concerns that Bryant may have been making it up as he went along.

Yet by suggesting the issue of a time lag, Bryant appears to have inadvertently conceded that trainer aircraft parts ought to have been suspended had the Israeli pilots using them gone on to fly fighter jets over Gaza.

Data analysed by Declassified now indicates it can take less than a year for Israeli pilots to go from flying M-346 trainer aircraft to the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets which have been used to pummel Gaza.

The information suggests Bryant’s statement was factually incorrect, and adds weight to the argument that trainer aircraft parts should not have been exempted from the arms suspensions on Israel.

Indeed, according to an internal Foreign Office briefing obtained by Declassified, the M-346 is “used to train IAF fast-jet pilots” and “facilitates the development of an offensive capability”.

Campaign Against Arms Trade spokesperson Sam Perlo-Freeman told Declassified: “The M-346 plays a crucial role in training Israeli pilots for combat, for their genocidal bombing of Gaza, the brutal invasion of Lebanon, and the illegal war on Iran. These planes clearly facilitate Israel’s war crimes, and as such the UK should, by its own policy, have stopped the supply of UK components for them.

“They are using a flimsy excuse to allow these sales to continue, can’t even seem to get their own story straight about it, and appear to have misled Parliament. This is yet another aspect of the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. That complicity can only end with a complete arms embargo”.

Bryant did not respond to a request for comment.

Bryant’s briefing

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the trade department was asked to release all internal correspondence relating to Bryant’s appearance at the trade committee.

The request focussed on “any briefing notes, submissions, or speaking notes” prepared for Bryant which specifically addressed the issue of trainer aircraft exports to Israel.

Last month, the trade department released an annex of material entitled: “Extract of Briefing provided by [trade department] officials to Minister Bryant relating to trainer aircraft”.

The document shows how Bryant was specifically briefed on how to deal with the “tricky” issue of: “Why did you not suspend trainer aircraft or submarines?”

Importantly, Bryant’s briefing makes no mention of how long it would take to train Israeli fighter pilots.

In fact, the briefing simply argues that trainer aircraft components can continue to be exported to Israel because they have no “operational role in the present conflict in Gaza”.

It says: “Trainer aircraft have no combat utility and cannot be used with live ordnance without extensive upgrading. The licences for trainer aircraft components are therefore not within scope of the suspension for items in use in military operations in the Gaza conflict”.

When asked to review its original FOI response, the trade department further acknowledged: “Combat utility is the focus of any assessments made, rather than specific training durations”.

Bryant thus appears to have gone well beyond his brief in claiming that it would take so long for Israeli pilots to train on fighter jets that the trainer parts could not be useful for operations in Gaza.

Factually incorrect

Worse still, Bryant’s statement appears to be factually incorrect.

Evidence collected by Declassified shows it is not only possible but also likely that Israeli pilots have trained on M-346 aircraft and gone on to fly fighter jets over Gaza since October 2023.

After undergoing a six-month advanced course on the M-346, Israeli pilots typically require around a year of conversion and operational training before flying fighter jets in active operations, according to the Israeli air force (IAF).

Since October 2023, no fewer than 140 Israeli pilots have graduated from the M-346 programme, according to Israeli Air Force data.

At least 70 of those pilots graduated after September 2024, when the Labour government imposed partial arms restrictions on Israel.

“It’s very easy to make the transition from the M-346 to a real fighter jet because it’s very similar to the fighters”, said former IAF general Avi Maor.

“You learn how to fight and then do the transition to the real fighter. You don’t need to learn how to fight again with the real fighter, so you save a lot of hours”, he added.

In any case, Bryant had no basis to suggest an end date to the Gaza genocide and therefore could not have known whether UK-made trainer parts would be useful to Israeli fighter pilots.

Facilitation

If Bryant was merely shooting from the hip, the government’s only rationale for issuing trainer aircraft licences to Israel is that those parts are not used in direct attacks on Gaza.

Yet this argument also faces a significant legal hurdle.

The government’s Strategic Export Licensing Criteria not only forbids the sale of items which might be used to “commit” serious violations of IHL but also those which can “facilitate” them.

It was this criterion which was cited by Britain’s then foreign secretary David Lammy when he announced arms suspensions to Israel in September 2024.

“The assessment I have received leaves me unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”, he said.

An internal Foreign Office briefing obtained by Declassified, dated October 2025, acknowledges that the M-346 is “used to train IAF fast-jet pilots” and while not “used for combat mission, facilitates the development of an offensive capability”.

In other words, the government privately conceded that UK-made trainer aircraft components enhance the operational capacity of a military which is not committed to complying with international humanitarian law.

At the same time, however, the Foreign Office and trade department have justified the trainer aircraft exemption by saying that “combat utility” is the only factor under consideration when issuing export licences.

The inference that can be drawn from this is that the government assesses fighter jets can be used by Israel to commit violations but training pilots to fly them does not amount to facilitation.

Applied within a criminal context, this would seem akin to a judge holding a gunman responsible for a shooting but not the person who knowingly trained them to shoot.

A spokesperson for the trade department commented: “We have suspended all licences for equipment for Israel that might be used in military operations in Gaza, with the exception of the special measures relating to the global F-35 programme.

“The suspension does not cover components for trainer aircraft, which are assessed to have no combat utility in Gaza. Ministers have written to the Business and Trade Committee to provide a full account of all extant military licences involving the Israeli Government, alongside the relevant assessments, which are kept under regular review”.

Profit motive

Internal documents seen by Declassified also raise the prospect that a profit motive may have influenced the government’s decision-making on trainer aircraft licences to Israel.

As of July 2025, 33 of the 55 extant military export licences for use by the Israeli government related to trainer aircraft components, amounting to 60 percent.

The cumulative value of those 33 licences was seemingly £27 million, which would represent over 95 percent of the total value of military items destined for use by Israel.

And while the government has allowed trainer aircraft parts to be sent to Israel, Britain’s Royal Air Force has also been thinking about purchasing its own fleet of M-346s.

FOI documents show how Italian arms firm Leonardo, the lead producer of the M-346, has been in direct contact with the UK government on this issue over the past two years.

In November 2024, a Leonardo director wrote to the Foreign Office about how Sir Richard Knighton, then Britain’s chief of the air staff, had voiced interest in the M-346 at an event.

“I’m not sure whether I need to be excited about this, but it’s unusual for a person of his stature to make statements of this sort, unless he’s very clear about the way forward”, the director wrote.

There was potential “to deliver up to 40 aircraft and Ground Based Training Systems into the UK”, representing a “huge business opportunity in the Italy-UK relationship”, they added.

Last September, Leonardo said it was open to its M-346 undergoing final assembly in the UK should it be selected as the replacement for the RAF’s current fleet of Hawk trainer aircraft.

That Consensus Is No More

On 27 February, I wrote,“The Assisted Suicide Bill in England and Wales is effectively dead, David Lammy has always been opposed to it, and it is within his power to refuse Royal Assent to the comparable legislation in Jersey and in the Isle of Man. He should do so. As with the closure of all tax havens in the British Overseas Territories and in the Crown Dependencies, anywhere that did not like it would be free to become independent.” Today, Lammy did so in the Manx case. Thank God for that. And for this, of which James Johnson writes:

Five years ago, I spent several evenings traversing England talking about death. Over more than 15 hours of focus groups, I explored every facet of the public’s attitudes to assisted dying.

I remember the conversations vividly. One woman spoke movingly of how her 25-year-old daughter died painfully of cancer in a hospice. A Conservative pensioner championed the policy on the grounds of personal choice. A businessman talked of the unfairness that other countries were moving towards a solution while Britain was not.

The polling backed it up, including that by my own firm. I wrote then, in 2021: “JL Partners’ research found very significant support… for assisted dying, by a margin of 72 per cent supporting and only 9 per cent opposing. In the context of policies I’ve tested over the years, that is a very significant margin – and it is even larger amongst Conservative voters. We also found that voters are persuaded of the effectiveness of the safeguards built into the proposed assisted dying laws, and that ultimately the vast majority of people see this as a matter of personal choice.”

My view was that the assisted dying proposal then – enabling people of sound mind, terminally ill with less than six months to live, signed off by two doctors and a High Court judge, to choose to end their own lives with specific medication – had the support of the British public to become law.

I now take the opposite view. As the proposal stands in 2026, there is not public consent for its passage. The public has not changed: it remains supportive of the principle of assisted dying. It is the shape of the policy that has altered and, when informed about what it looks like now, the British voter wants nothing to do with it.

The current Leadbeater Bill does not require a High Court judge to approve a decision after receiving a declaration countersigned by two doctors. Instead, it rests on a voluntary assisted dying commissioner and an assisted dying review panel consisting of a legal member, a psychiatrist member, and a social worker member. Once written into law, experts say the safeguards read more like statements of intent than rigorous means to detect and minimise coercion or family pressure.

Polling by JL Partners this week shows the reaction. Though the public continues to support the principle of assisted dying, there are deep reservations when information is put to them about the Bill as it is today.

Two in three of those who back assisted dying in principle want to see more safeguards for terminally ill people. Three in four (72 per cent) say it is more important to strictly define the eligibility of assisted dying than to continue with the changes. Nearly eight in ten – 78 per cent – say someone must explicitly be offered other options like hospice or palliative care before proceeding. Only 18 per cent say that people should be able to request assisted dying shortly after receiving a serious diagnosis, without a sustained period of assessment.

By a margin of 79 percentage points, they want the process to be directly supervised by a qualified physician. By a margin of 59 percentage points, they want the Bill to force the informing of family members. By overwhelming margins, people think a vast array of people currently eligible under the Bill should not be: pregnant women (82 points), people with eating disorders (74 points), people with mental health issues (74 points), people expressing suicidal thoughts (74 points), and homeless people (72 points).

The only version of assisted dying with anything near the levels of support seen in 2021 is one limited to those terminally ill people experiencing unbearable physical pain – not a requirement of the Bill. The public only support a Bill unrecognisable from its current state.

That will not stop people continuing to trot out polls purporting to show it has the public’s backing. Some exploit public misunderstanding to assert that support is higher than it looks by merely polling the principle rather than the detail. It is hardly surprising this generates poll headlines that look better for assisted dying than the reality: in our most recent polling, 80 per cent of voters claim to know what the assisted dying Bill is, but only 38 per cent can correctly describe it. Some tactics are more dishonest: supportive campaign groups still share polling conducted before the removal of the High Court requirement.

It would not have taken a genius to see the public turn against the Bill. Upon returning to my 2021 polling for this piece, I was struck by one finding in particular. Asked about safeguards for assisted dying, only 10 per cent said that if there were not enough safeguards to make assisted dying safe, it should still be legalised. That’s right: only one in 10 – a fringe minority – backed proceeding regardless.

There was once consensus for assisted dying in Britain. As the public now looks at what they deem to be the deficient, much-altered Bill in front of Parliament today, that consensus is no more.

Now we must win the peace, from disabled people’s rights, including to benefits, to palliative care, which hitherto has scarcely been mentioned except in relation to assisted suicide.

Off The Rails On A Crazy Train

As Dennis Skinner said, “When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants.” And the great Professor Robert Skidelsky FBA, Lord Skidelsky, has passed from our midst. Despite Keir Starmer’s pretence that we were either not in the Iran War or at least not in it all the way, its effects are damaging Britain more than any other major economy, so we have never needed Skidelsky more, and that is saying something.

Instead, we must make do with a sex toys MP called Niblett. Is this a Carry On film? Which of the legendary ensemble cast should play which of today’s politicians, and why? Anything more sophisticatedly satirical would be impossible when Reform UK’s candidate for Lambeth’s Brixton Windrush ward was called Oliver Cromwell Khan.

In anticipation of the local elections, Reform is now in negotiations with Unite to resolve the Birmingham bin strike. The Labour Party is simply and rightly being bypassed. Did Sharon Osbourne ever follow through on her pledge to move to Birmingham and contest Sparkhill? The Conservative Party wanted her as its candidate. Is she a member? At any rate, she has promised to attend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s Unite the Kingdom rally on 16 May, when both British and foreign speakers will call on Donald Trump to invade this country to effect regime change. Will Kemi Badenoch’s Sharon Osbourne be one of them?

No one seems to be telling Osbourne to say in her lane. They save that for the Pope, about whom Trump has lied directly by claiming that, “The Pope made a statement, he said “Iran can have a nuclear weapon”.” The Pope’s brother’s Illinois home has had to be evacuated after a bomb threat, while the Pope himself teaches, “Jesus told us, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” but woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

The Pope is in Cameroon, where there has been a civil war for nearly nine years. While of course his words have a wider application, they were not immediately addressed to Trump or to his supporters. Still, they have clearly heard them, so let them take them to heart. As Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas tweeted on Wednesday, “Public officials may opine about theology, as is their right. The Successor of Peter teaches. This is his office. If what he teaches doesn’t sound like what we want to hear, we should admit the likelihood that the problem is in what we want to hear, and not in what he teaches.”

The “anything but a definition ex cathedra is just his opinion” school of these things is on the same level as the German Synodal Way, or the attempts to justify the impending entrenchment of the Lefebvrian Schism, or the quotations from Shakespeare in the Book of Mormon because Joseph Smith thought that they were from the Bible, or Pete Hegseth’s quotation from Pulp Fiction on the same misapprehension, which has made some of us feel our age as surely as the forthcoming induction of Oasis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

To The Usual Standard Set

Has anyone nicked Keir Starmer’s phone yet? I dare not become Prime Minister while Pippa Crerar lives, and since she is only a year older than I am, then that means never. Could she really be about to bring down a second? Yes. Yes, she could. Gosh.

To whose benefit? For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for some people, and they have always got their money’s worth from George Robertson. Wes Streeting’s next day agreement with him, that benefits would need to be cut to enrich the arms trade even further, was followed within hours by The Guardian’s confirmation that Starmer had lied to Parliament about Peter Mandelson. Streeting was Mandelson’s schoolboy protégé, and the old Blairites had never trusted Starmer even before he had pretended to keep Britain out of the Iran War, so might Mandelson be the source of the leak? Streeting, or Mandelson, has offered the Chancellorship of the Exchequer to Yvette Cooper, and no doubt plenty of other things to plenty of other people.

Whatever happened to Josh Simons, the Minister for Digital ID who had tried to frame critical journalists, including Starmer’s Independent opponent at the last General Election, for crimes against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act? Whatever happened to Simons’s close associate Joani Reid, the Lewisham councillor whom Mandelson imposed as the Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, and who turned out to have been carrying on drunkenly with 50 per cent of the captains of Britain’s nuclear armed submarines while married to a man who had been arrested as an alleged Chinese spy three weeks after his firm had paid her £2,400? Like the meningitis that was set to cause another lockdown a month ago, those matters must have resolved themselves. As, we trust, will this.

Due Diligence

To bring about a Leadership challenge after the forthcoming elections, someone has leaked the fact that Keir Starmer lied to Parliament in order to appoint Jeffrey Epstein’s best mate as Ambassador to Washington, as Paul Lewis, Henry Dyer and Pippa Crerar write:

Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting clearance but the decision was overruled by the Foreign Office to ensure he could take up his post as ambassador to the US, an investigation by The Guardian can reveal.

According to multiple sources, Mandelson was initially denied clearance in late January 2025 after a developed vetting process, a highly confidential background check by security officials.

Keir Starmer had by then announced he would be making Mandelson the UK’s chief diplomat in Washington, posing a dilemma for officials at the Foreign Office, who decided to use a rarely used authority to override the recommendation from security officials.

Mandelson’s failure to secure vetting approval has not previously been publicly revealed, despite intense scrutiny over his appointment and the release by the government of 147 pages of documents supposed to shed light on the case.

Further documents are due to be released. However, it can also be revealed that senior government officials have been considering whether to withhold from parliament documents that would reveal that Mandelson was not given vetting approval from security officials.

The decision, which rests with the Cabinet Office, has not yet been taken. Any attempt to withhold the documents from the intelligence and security committee could amount to a breach of a parliamentary motion to release “all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment”.

The revelation that the now former ambassador was not granted clearance by UK Security Vetting (UKSV), a division of the Cabinet Office that scrutinises the background of prospective civil servants, will raise further questions about the prime minister’s judgment in appointing him.

Starmer will also be pressed over whether he misled the public in remarks about the security vetting process, which he said had given Mandelson “clearance for the role”.

It is not known whether the prime minister was made aware that his pick for Washington ambassador had not been granted approval by UKSV, which conveys its decision as a recommendation to government departments. Neither is it known who in the Foreign Office made the decision to overrule UKSV.

Sir Olly Robbins, the current permanent secretary in the Foreign Office, was the department’s top civil servant in late January 2025 when the decision was made, having taken up the role earlier that month. The foreign secretary was David Lammy, who is now the deputy prime minister.

Starmer’s then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who resigned in February over his role in appointing Mandelson, could also now be asked whether he had any involvement in, or knowledge or, the decision to overrule UKSV’s denial of clearance.

That decision was made weeks before Mandelson was due to take up his post in February 2025. Seven months later, he was sacked over his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Ministers and officials are now likely to be pressed over whether they have been fully transparent about the process that led to his appointment.

At a press conference in Hastings on 5 February, Starmer responded to a question from a journalist by saying there had been “security vetting, carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that gave him [Mandelson] clearance for the role. You have to go through that before you take up the post.” He added: “Clearly both the due diligence and the security vetting need to be looked at again.”

This appeared to partly put the blame for Mandelson’s appointment on the failure of a vetting process which, according to sources, his government had overruled.

As a result of Mandelson’s sacking as US ambassador on 11 September 2025, after the extent of his relationship with Epstein came to light, parliamentary scrutiny mounted. On 16 September, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, and Robbins, her top official, responded to questions over the vetting process with a letter to the foreign affairs select committee.

“Peter Mandelson’s security vetting was conducted to the usual standard set for developed vetting in line with established Cabinet Office policy,” the letter said, explaining that the process had been undertaken by UKSV on behalf of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

Cooper and Robbins said the process had “concluded with DV clearance being granted by the FCDO in advance of Lord Mandelson taking up post in February”.

What the letter failed to inform parliament was that UKSV had denied Mandelson’s clearance – a recommendation that threatened Starmer having to withdraw a high-profile appointment he had already made public.

UKSV’s vetting decisions are almost always enforced by government departments, but they technically have the authority to override the recommendations. The precise reason that UKSV recommended that Mandelson not receive clearance is now likely to be subject to intense speculation.