Rending Asunder

Danny Kruger is proving as difficult to Reform UK as he was to the Conservative Party. On Monday, the great “pronatalist” voted yet again for the two-child benefit cap, which as much as anything else is a demonstrable driver of abortion, while all other Reform MPs abstained apart from Robert Jenrick, who had to make up for not having known which lobby was which last time. Notice that no such obligation was felt to apply to Suella Braverman. She had not voted against it by mistake, so her penance was to abstain. But Kruger is a true believer.

Yet Kruger is correct to say that this society was “suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy”, and his choice of words is apposite. He is getting there. Pray for him. Already, he did vote against his then party’s Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020, and he is immensely courageous to make divorce the issue. The problem is that Nigel Farage is divorced from his first wife, separated from his second wife, and cohabiting with a woman who is not his wife. Richard Tice is divorced, and he cohabits in Dubai with a woman who has certainly been married to the father of her children, as she may still be.

Lee Anderson is on his second marriage. Donald Trump is on his third, as is Kruger’s old patron, Boris Johnson, who has twice left his wife for a next wife who was already pregnant, something that even Henry VIII only ever did once. Nancy Reagan was the second Mrs Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher was the second Mrs Thatcher. Unsurprisingly, Kruger has not been appointed to Farage’s “Shadow Cabinet”.

Still, Kruger has opened up the debate. Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. But now that they are available to opposite-sex couples, then divorce can and should be made far more difficult, since anyone who had not wanted that could always have had a civil partnership instead. Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce. Entitlement upon divorce should in any case be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party's fault were proved.

Furthermore any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses; the General Synod has been flexing its muscles on marriage of late, even if it will have same-sex marriages as soon as a member of the Royal Family wanted one, and no one will leave, because they never do.

The Methodist and United Reformed Churches also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, which should be amended to apply this provision to those bodies unless, respectively, the Methodist Conference or the General Assembly resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority. And there should be such an amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, with no need of a get-out clause.

None of this would be done by Reform. Likewise, the Greens are trying to corner the pro-drugs vote, but what we need is a party that understood that there could not be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.

Radical change has always been impossible when the workers, the youth and the poor have been in a state of stupefaction, and that is being contrived again. For example, Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Kruger? Of Braverman? Of Ann Widdecombe? The breakup of Reform will not be amicable.

Of State

According to the Royal Family's website, "The current Counsellors of State are The Queen, The Prince of Wales, The Princess Royal, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of Sussex, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice." Who and Princess Beatrice? And the Privy Council's website still lists Peter Mandelson as a member. Think on.

Not least in view of the fact that the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, told John Swinney the details of the charge against Peter Murrell, not even last month as previously thought, but nearly a year ago, while we have not even begun to examine the extent of Mandelson's activities while he was a European Commissioner. Ostensibly attractive alternatives are not necessarily any such thing.

Coming Apart?

The day after Ghislaine Maxwell's conviction, her brothers were all over the media in her defence. Would anyone else have been treated like that? Well, this evening, we have Peter Mandelson's claim, read out on air as fact, that he had been arrested yesterday only because he had been about to flee the country. There are things that a lot of us could say about the circumstances of our arrests, and we were not flight risks. I for one have never been required to surrender my passport.

Will either Mandelson, or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, be given a trial by jury? David Lammy announced today that he was lifting the cap on court sitting days, but Sarah Sackman has made it clear that abolition of almost all jury trials, and of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, were ideological, and unrelated to the backlog. All Commons stages are planned for one week, to begin within a fortnight from now. Lammy, Sackman and Keir Starmer clearly have no expectation of being in office long after that.

Today, someone called Louise Sandher-Jones has had to correct the record of the House of Commons because she had claimed that Starmer had never worked with Phil Shiner. Everyone knew that Starmer, with Richard Hermer, had indeed been instructed by Shiner's Public Interest Lawyers. That would now be enough to deprive Starmer of the support both of the Blairites and of the Old Labour Right if they had anyone with whom to replace him, but of course Mandelson has rendered Wes Streeting impossible, so they are stuck with Starmer.

Streeting has brought into the National Health Service the Palantir that is hand in glove with the IDF and with ICE, the Palantir that was a client of Mandelson's and in which Jeffrey Epstein had invested. It has since also been awarded a £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence, with no competitive process. Today, Lammy announced a massive extension of Artificial Intelligence in the criminal justice system, in which Palantir is already heavily involved, not least in the form of live facial recognition. Say it again, a Mandelson client and an Epstein investment, the IDF and ICE. And the big one is on its way.

The Official Opposition wants to ban social media for the under-16s, a measure that could not work unless we were all required to prove our ages by means of the digital ID for which the Minister was Josh Simons, from whose Labour Together Darren Jones has most disingenuously claimed to have received "not a pound" when in the months leading up to the last General Election, two members of its staff were seconded to his office, at a total value of £57,441.58.

It would be the simplest thing to ban smartphones from schools, which have always called home, or been called, when necessary. But banning social media for under-16s would deny them the formative experience of their generation internationally, together with any ideology other than that of the schools and of the official media. The people who want it in Britain want to lower the voting age to 16, having already raised the school leaving age to 18, when many of them want conscription.

Sexualised images of children are not free speech, nor are non-consensual sexualised images of adults, and any company doing business here has to abide by our laws. All of that said, the threat to the X-Twitter is pursuant to the Online Safety Act that was passed when Kemi Badenoch was Secretary of State for Business and Trade, not the immediately responsible Department but not the furthest removed, and when the Conservative Party still delighted in the membership of several people who were now prominent in Reform UK, including Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State who introduced the Bill.

At committee stage of that Bill, the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who was then a well-connected Labour councillor in Barnet, but who is now scandalously out on bail while awaiting sentence for offences including sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl. When he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Woodcock-Velleman, Sam Gould was both a Redbridge councillor and a Streeting staffer. And today, Conor McGrath was charged with three offences of taking or making indecent images of a child. He was formerly a Labour councillor in Stevenage and on the staff of the Labour MP there, Kevin Bonavia.

Reform expects to take the Stevenage parliamentary seat from Labour. From Labour to Reform defected, among at least five others nationwide last year, Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage, who contested internal Labour Party elections on the Labour Together slate. After all, who else is there? Adam Mitula? It will be fascinating to see in what "context" it might have been acceptable for him to have said that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust had been exaggerated.

Not that either Labour or the Conservatives is in any position to comment. Under them, Britain has spent the last four years backing 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, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps,  and all the rest of the displayers of the Sonnerad, the Wolfsangel, and the plain old Swastika.

All while matters turned out exactly as some of us predicted from the start in the Ukraine that in Ternopil had named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera; the Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom "the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen". Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty's Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its "political ideologist", Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. If Mitula is anything to go by, then such are essentially the people who would staff the Westminster and constituency offices of Matt Goodwin MP, assuming that he had made it through tomorrow's three-hour hearing in the High Court for alleged electoral fraud. What a way for a candidate to spend the eve of poll.

Nor is Mitula (and what sort of Anglo-Saxon name is that?) Goodwin's only questionable connection. As a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, he has links to Aporia Magazine, which is published by the same Human Diversity Foundation that publishes Mankind Quarterly and The Jolly Heretic, the podcast of my university contemporary Edward Dutton, who once tried to seduce me after Mass, so I know his little secret. Dutton is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda. In 2018, Dutton secured the publication of this masterpiece in Evolutionary Psychological Science. On the Editorial Board of that is Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and ornament of the Epstein Files. Noam Chomsky is a complete outlier both in those Files and on the Left, whereas Jeffrey Epstein, Pinker, Dutton and Batterjee constitute an Axis of Evil with anyone who cited any of them.

The HDF was founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard of OpenPsych. Kirkegaard is noted for his calls to legalise child pornography so as to reduce the number of rapes committed by paedophiles, to lower the age of consent to 13, and to make it even lower if puberty had begun. In 2018, he sued Oliver Smith for calling him a paedophile, but in 2020 he had to drop the action and pay Smith's legal costs, leaving him heavily in debt. The HDF has taken over most of the previous work of the Pioneer Fund, publisher of The Bell Curve and American distributor of Erbkrank. Goodwin has commended Coming Apart, Charles Murray's follow-up to The Bell Curve that applied its racism to class differences among whites. Reform would repeal even what little workers' and tenants' rights this Government had introduced, and reduce everyone's occupational pension schemes to the condition of the worst. Nigel Farage's talk of reindustrialisation feels a lot longer ago than it was.

Trust

"To all those whose parents migrated to obtain a better life for their children. To the economic migrant. The conflict migrant. Those under occupation, dictatorship, persecution, and those experiencing genocide. You matter. Your stories matter more than ever. Your dreams are an act of resistance. To those watching at home, archive your loved ones. Archive your stories yesterday, today, and forever. For Nigeria, for London, the Congo, Sudan. Free Palestine."

Agree or disagree with that, but during a two-hour delay between recording and broadcast, the BBC managed to edit it out. Yet it could not delete one word, the same word that was voluntarily shouted by a convicted paedophile when he lunged at Jennifer Melle, leading to her suspension. While silencing politically black opinion, the BBC reverted to the treatment of the disabled as sideshow freaks. Some of us have long known what everyone now knows to be that Epstein Class.

So light and middle-class that I had grown up thinking that I did not have it, my County Durham accent was mocked at Durham, so heaven knows what Bridget Phillipson had to laugh off at Oxford. But while her claims of childhood deprivation are nowhere near as far-fetched as Wes Streeting's, they do cry out for interrogation. Labour came to power when she was 13. Working for a charity founded by her mother was Phillipson's only job until she entered Parliament at the age of 26. If her council house had no heating upstairs, then why was that matter not addressed by her Labour council? Her mother was on it.

Yet now Phillipson wants all state-funded schools to join trusts. Sometimes, people should be made to have what they had professed to want. In the running of those schools, Phillipson's Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets her right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing them both, to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. If that involved doing deals with the Conservatives, then such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

Cain and Able

If you want Christianity, then go to church. Zia Yusuf's proposal to stop former churches from being converted into mosques presupposes that they would already be redundant. According to Nigel Farage, "More people might go to church, had we had better Archbishops of Canterbury." Dame Sarah Mullally may well retire during the next Parliament, with Farage possibly in a position to choose her successor.

Since Reform's Britain would by then be the principal redoubt of Trumpism, Farage should nominate Paula White. It is historically anomalous that eight of the nine Archbishops of Canterbury in living memory have been Trinitarians, even if the other one was an atheist. Not only would Her Grace correct that, but she would bring refreshing connections to the Unification Church, and through that to the Nation of Islam with which it organises mass events; in turn, the Nation of Islam promotes Dianetics, which is the foundation of Scientology.

As for the prosperity gospel, Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump's first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump's White House Faith Office. Now to bring her to Canterbury. Complete with her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don't stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

  

The present arrangements have never been adequate to the task of filling 26 seats in Parliament, three of which carried automatic seats on the Privy Council, with two of those having hitherto led to life peerages on retirement. The Liberal Establishment in the Church of England presumes the right to make those appointments, in one of many examples of the fact that there is far too little direct exercise of the Royal Prerogative by Ministers accountable to the House of Commons.

Like the Police, or the education system, or the BBC, or anything else that is alleged to have become "politicised", the monarchy has always been political, since, like each of those, the very concept of it is profoundly so. The question is whose politics. We ought not to be seeking to abolish the Royal Prerogative, but to exercise it. The whole of it, no matter to which committee or self-perpetuating oligarchy any part of it might have been surrendered. All of it must be taken back, and in most cases that would be perfectly simple to do.

Previous Governments have handed over vast powers to the Deep State. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate, or the judiciary? Yet those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude. But it is still there.

A Fatal Catch

Peter Franklin writes:

The Conservatives have been hyperactive this past weekend, clearly desperate to regain the initiative from Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s self-branded “shadow cabinet”.

On Sunday, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott launched a bold new policy on student loans. The gist is that the crippling rate of interest on Plan 2 student loans — which Badenoch condemned as a “scam” — should be reduced to the rate of inflation only. The brains behind the proposal, Tory MP Neil O’Brien, explained that it would be paid for by ceasing to fund the provision of low-value courses.

Meanwhile, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel was on a mission to stop the “disgraceful Chagos surrender”. She’s meeting with “counterparts” in Washington this week to ensure that US President Donald Trump’s evident hostility to the deal translates into an official US roadblock to the transfer of the islands to Mauritius. Also making the news over the weekend was the Shadow Equalities Minister, Claire Coutinho, who was pressing home her campaign against the Government’s puberty blocker trial, which has been delayed by the medical watchdog.

This is all good stuff from the Tories. And yet, politically, there’s a fatal catch, which is that the Conservative Party is running against its own record in government.

Take the student loan policy. Plan 2 loans were offered from 2012 to 2023 — during which time five million people had their finances blighted by these pernicious debt traps. Is it any wonder that Tory support among younger voters collapsed over the same period? It’s great that some saner voices are now shaping Conservative policy, but the time to act was 15 years ago. Instead of reversing the legacy of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, in power the Tories doubled down on it. Or rather, they tripled down — given that they tripled tuition fees while allowing the debt-fuelled over-expansion of the higher education sector to continue.

Badenoch’s pathological aversion to “psychodrama” prevents her from holding her Tory predecessors to account for their manifest failures. As a result, she’s unable to rebuild trust in the Conservative brand and thus gain a fair hearing for her own policies.

And it’s not just on the issue of student loans. For instance, the Chagos surrender can’t be blamed solely on Keir Starmer and his lawyer friends. Negotiations over the transfer of the British overseas territory began before the election, when James Cleverly — now a member of Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet — was foreign secretary. A process that a Conservative government should have strangled at birth was instead incubated, ready for Labour to take it to its hideous final form.

As for the puberty blocker trial, that too has echoes in the pre-election period. In particular, when Conservative ministers were standing up in the Commons to proclaim that “trans women are women”, and when the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (since shut down) was still operating within the NHS.

The impetus for these and other disastrous policies did not come from the Conservative Party itself. Instead, the rot spread from the subverted, dysfunctional institutions which constitute this country’s permanent establishment — universities, for instance, or the Foreign Office or the upper echelons of the NHS. Yet the party failed to recruit talented people who had not imbibed this worldview wholesale. 

Badenoch has boxed herself in. By insisting that Britain is not broken, she’s unable to offer a deeper diagnosis of our national decay. She’s only willing to say that our politics is broken. Judging by the consequences, that’s a distinction without a difference.

And James Lachrymose writes:

Much has already been written about the planned handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and much of it wrong. While the government’s moral and legal arguments for surrendering sovereignty have been persuasively dismantled by others, opponents of the deal have themselves lapsed into occasional nonsense. The teary-eyed pleas on behalf of the so-called Chagossian People have been taken apart in the Pimlico Journal [a bad undergraduate article, written for effect]. Another popular canard is that the newly Mauritian islands would, somehow, come under the control of China. This is a story that reveals more about its proponents than the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.

The Conservative leadership, having started the handover process under the brainless Liz Truss, have taken up the Chagos issue with the typical zeal of a recent convert. Priti Patel, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, described the arrangement as the “Chagos-China Surrender Bill” and accused Starmer of “kowtowing to China”. Mauritius is so frequently described as a puppet of China that you would imagine its prime ministers were appointed in Zhongnanhai. Exciting as these ideas are, they are deficient in one respect: they are completely untrue.

What is true is that Mauritius is the close ally of a rising Asian republic, deeply suspicious of Britain. Mauritius is dependent for its defence and economy on a nationalist, anti-colonialist regime that wants the Brits kicked out. A rival power does indeed plan to develop bases in the archipelago — but that power is India.

Mauritius’s closeness to India has been neglected in the Chagos discourse, but is hard to overstate. The former Prime Minister, Paul Bérenger, described the relationship as “sacred and umbilical” (two decades earlier, India had planned to invade Mauritius to prevent Bérenger taking office, lest he disadvantage the island’s Hindus; in the end, they simply intervened politically to prevent him taking office). Narendra Modi described Mauritius as “Little India” in 2015 70% of Mauritians are of Indian descent, and a leaked American cable described their relationship with India as “willing subordination”. Mauritius is completely, and explicitly, dependent on India for control of its territorial waters. For decades, Mauritius’s National Security Advisor, the commander of its coastguard, and the head of its helicopter squadron have been Indian citizens and officers in the Indian armed forces. Mauritius has no navy or army, and its police are trained in India. The ships of its coastguard and the aircraft of its airforce are provided by India. When the surrender of the British Indian Ocean Territory further expands Mauritius’s territory, it will be India who is depended on to protect it. In the words of Mauritius’s Foreign Secretary, the expanded Exclusive Economic Zone “needs maritime resources, and to be able to fully develop and exploit those resources, it will need assistance, and India is a preferred partner in providing that assistance”.

China has barely shown an interest in the British Indian Ocean Territory, beyond occasional platitudes. The People’s Republic actually abstained on the 2017 General Assembly resolution which referred the matter to the International Court of Justice (India voted in favour). India has backed Mauritius’s claim from the outset, and Mauritius has promised New Delhi a naval base on the islands since the 1980s. No wonder that Mauritius wants India closely involved in the handover process: as Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam said last year “We want to visit the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, to plant our flag. The British offered us a vessel, but we said we preferred one from India because, symbolically, it would be more meaningful”.

Indeed, while the claims about China negotiating a lease on one of the islands – expounded by Nigel Farage – were completely unfounded (and seemingly originated from misreading vague speculation in The Times) India has already constructed a base in Mauritius. Indian media have reported on plans to build a satellite monitoring station in the Chagos Archipelago itself, once handover is complete. While Mauritius is not a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a key part of India’s comparable MAHASAGAR strategy. 

Keir Starmer’s motivations for supporting a handover are uncomplicated: he is a human rights lawyer. In his own words, there is no version of his life that does not revolve around being a human rights lawyer. He believes international law requires him to follow this course, and all other decisions are rationally downstream of that.

So why then the mass hallucination of Chinese influence? In part, it is psychologically easier to process. Our issues with an authoritarian Communist regime can be smoothly analysed through the old Cold War lens (they just hate our freedom!). Hostility from a democratic republic has more discomforting explanations. We want to forget that much of the third world views us still as a former colonial overlord, to be shaken down for money and territory whenever the chance arises (see also: the rest of the world’s positions on the Falklands and reparations).

But a more important factor is that Chinese nationals and descendants have a marginal position in British elections. Nobody in Britain will lose votes by carping on about the need to confront Beijing. India, however, is a different matter. The Indian diaspora now makes up a noticeable part of our electorate — indeed, some Tory MPs only hold their seats thanks to the Indian vote. Try to imagine, for a moment, a Conservative MP hosting a celebration of Xi Jinping’s birthday in the House of Commons.

To return to Priti Patel, it is hard to understand why our Shadow Foreign Secretary is trying to conjure a Chinese mirage in the Indian Ocean. Why has she overlooked the role of her “dear friend” Narendra Modi, and his outspoken support for the deal? Why does the “India Diaspora Champion” seem ignorant of the influence of India in pushing the matter forward? On this we can only speculate.

Foresight? Communications?

The indefatigable Jody McIntyre writes:

Jess Phillips is the Labour government minister responsible for tackling violence against women and girls. But local advocates in Birmingham claim that she has not spoken out about abusers from her own party. Here’s what they told me.

In 2024, Phillips said that Keir Starmer was “obsessed” with eliminating violence against women and girls. But yesterday, it was revealed that Starmer, whilst head of the CPS, implemented “warning letters to paedophiles” allegedly used “to make investigations go away”. Retired police officer turned whistleblower Maggie Oliver stated that she “worked on a case where we had identified 97 child abusers. That investigation should have led to serious charges...on an industrial scale.” Instead, suspects were given “child abduction warning notices”. Jack Alderton supplied Georgina Boxall with Class A drugs from the age of 15. He received two “warning notices” from police, but no grooming charges. Georgina’s mother, Susan, said: “Starmer has blood on his hands.” 

After being re-elected in 2024 with a majority of just 693 votes [over McIntyre], Phillips insisted that tackling VAWG was a “very firm part of the party’s five main missions for government”. She said that pressure on her to act was “none more so than from a man, and that is Keir Starmer.” Phillips has been consistent in her loyalty to Starmer since Labour’s rise to power. Last July, when Starmer suspended four Labour MPs for rebelling against the government on welfare cuts, Phillips said: “You can’t have everything you want.” Last week, it was revealed that the Labour government have continued to consult Brendan Cox, who was forced to resign from more than one charity in 2018 after claims of sexual misconduct. At the time, Phillips said that she was “disappointed” in her “friend”. Nevertheless, Phillips continued to defend and praise Cox in public. As whistleblower Leslie Francis wrote for openDemocracy: “What made Cox so dangerous was [not just] his power, but politicians, journalists, staff who kept quiet…out of fear of their careers.”

Ivor Caplin is another Labour figure who has publicly praised Phillips. Last January, Caplin was arrested for alleged sexual communication with a child. His Twitter account, full of explicit material, was still being followed by Labour frontbenchers. After quitting as a Labour MP, Caplin took two lobbying jobs at Foresight Communications and MBDA Missile Systems. Foresight was run by Mark Adams, a former aide to Tony Blair. In 2019, Adams was convicted of rape for a second time after forcing himself upon a 19-year-old woman.

Phillips was also surprisingly quiet on the appointment of the now disgraced Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. Mandelson, a close acquaintance and “best pal” of notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had his security vetting fast-tracked by the Starmer administration. One Labour MP who was eager to defend Mandelson’s appointment at the time was Wes Streeting. In 2020, Streeting endorsed Phillips for Labour leader and served as her campaign chair. Phillips raised £58k for her leadership campaign before dropping out of the race. Sam Gould, a former aide to Streeting, was convicted of exposing himself to a teenage girl and then following her last April. Streeting has previously described Epstein-associate Peter Mandelson as a “legend” and said that he should not be considered “guilty by association”.

In December, Starmer’s office defended the decision to nominate Matthew Doyle for a peerage, even though he had previously campaigned for ex-Scottish Labour councillor Sean Morton. In 2018, Morton was convicted of possessing indecent pictures of a 10-year-old girl. Before the 2024 general election, Starmer was warned that parliamentary candidate Dan Norris was facing legal action, but let him stand for Labour anyway. Earlier this month, Norris was arrested on further allegations of rape, sexual assault, and upskirting.

Another supporter of Phillips, John Woodcock, resigned from Labour while being investigated for sexual harassment. He described Mandelson’s appointment last year as “an inspired choice”. He was also instrumental in the proscription of Palestine Action, which Phillips voted for. In 2023, Tom Dewey plead guilty to charges of possessing five “category A” indecent images of children. Six days after his arrest, Dewey was re-elected as a Labour councillor. Three councillors who demanded an inquiry were “deselected by Labour HQ”.

Before the 2024 election, Jess Phillips made a big deal about “resigning over Gaza”. Locals tell me she sent leaflets to every Muslim household in the constituency highlighting her achievements on the issue. Why has she not stepped down over the Labour Party paedophile crisis?