Jury Room?

Although the Government has shelved its plan to abolish most jury trials, it still intends to double the sentencing power of magistrates to two years, to introduce judge-only trials in “lengthy and technical” fraud cases, and to abolish the right to elect trial by jury in either-way cases, thereby greatly restricting access to legal aid. It is not clear whether or not the Government still intended to abolish the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court. Every one of those measures must be resisted without compromise.

I Think I Know The Answer

Peter Hitchens writes:

One day, when even the stupidest people grasp that marijuana is a terrifying, deeply dangerous drug, some may remember that I was one of the tiny few who warned against the unhinged, greedy plan to legalise it. This plan can't be far from success, with all its misery of wrecked families, destroyed minds and mad violence.

And one of the bodies which won't be able to escape blame for this avoidable tragedy is the BBC. Of course, nobody in the BBC is a marijuana user. The organisation is wholly drug-free. So the only explanation for its bias on the issue must be stupidity.

Many times on this page I have documented programmes in which the agenda of the drug legalisers has been advanced in discussion programmes and dramas. But last week the BBC came up with something new, which looks suspiciously like censorship.

Many people are now, far too late, waking up to the link between marijuana use and incurable mental illness. An observant few have begun to grasp the even more frightening instances of crazy violence by mentally ill people whose minds have been overthrown by dope.

I owe what follows to an amazing website called News Sniffer, which tracks changes in stories published on the web and later amended. It found that a BBC website report on a crazy killer began by prominently mentioning the killer's use of marijuana – and then dropped it. The mad killer is called Alexander Lewis-Ranwell. He slew twins Dick and Roger Carter, 84, and Anthony Payne, 80, in Exeter in 2019.

All three blameless men died of severe head injuries inflicted by an insane drug abuser who had (as so often) been allowed by the authorities to roam until he committed a serious crime. He has now been classified as insane and 'detained'. But there will be more like him as marijuana use spreads.

The corporation took three days to come up with this excuse for removing the word 'cannabis' from its report: 'This article was produced during an ongoing inquest… and updated to reflect new information. Reference to cannabis was added as part of the custody officer's evidence but, as Lewis-Ranwell's mother's testimony became the focus, we updated our report to show this while keeping references about "drug-induced psychosis".' It would answer no further questions or I would have asked why it could not have used the word 'cannabis' instead of 'drug' in the new version. I think I know the answer.

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

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. No prison sentence should include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

The Reality of Manchesterism

His purported Manchester miracle made Andy Burnham Prime Minister. But adherence to Manchester City Council’s own guidance would have seen Abu Dhabi’s Manchester Life build 294 affordable housing units, 20 per cent of the total, in its redevelopment of East Manchester. It built none. Nought. Zero. And Steve Robson writes:

Andy Burnham’s flagship ‘Number 10 North’ is set to be built on land where Manchester City’s owners had a controversial “sweetheart” property deal, The i Paper can reveal. The findings are likely to put more scrutiny on Burnham’s ties to the club’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) owners following the football cheating scandal fall-out.

Burnham was forced to backtrack last week over accusations of political interference in the independent investigation process. He originally said he would be “concerned” if ADUG stopped investing in the UK after City were found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial manipulation from 2009 to 2018, but later said nobody is “above the rules”. City deny all charges and have appealed.

However with reports of United Arab Emirates diplomats exerting pressure over what happens to City, the row has put a renewed spotlight on the extent of their influence in Britain. And nowhere is the web of connections between Abu Dhabi and political leaders more tangled than Manchester, where Burnham was mayor for almost a decade between 2017 and 2026.

City owners’ ‘first refusal’ on prime plots

ADUG, the company set up Sheikh Mansour to buy the football club in 2008, has poured hundreds of millions of pounds into the wider city. This includes the £300m expansion of City’s stadium and its training complex, the £450m Co-Op Live arena and a £60m graphene research facility for the University of Manchester.

More controversial is the joint property venture the group set up with Manchester Council in 2014. Thousands of high-end flats have been built in the city centre under the ‘Manchester Life’ scheme. But rival developers have long complained about what they believe was preferential treatment for the scheme from Manchester council, because of its connections to City’s owners.

ADUG was given “first refusal” on buying development sites across a huge swathe of land in a ‘sweetheart’ deal with the council, documents first reported by The Mill and shared with The i Paper show. The deal covered around two square miles of land between Etihad stadium and Manchester city centre for ten years between 2015 and 2025. But the The i Paper can reveal this includes the former Central Retail Park which has now been earmarked as the long-term home of ‘Number 10 North’.

‘Most controversial site in Manchester’

One property source said they were amazed at the decision to pick what they described as ‘the most controversial site in Manchester’ for Burnham’s flagship project. The Prime Minister has promised to shift power out of Whitehall and towards local leaders in a bid to boost economic development.

The 10.5-acre site was first purchased by Manchester council in 2017 for £42.35m. It is still believed to be the most expensive land purchase in the city’s history. Council leaders said at the time the site was perfect for developing into flats by Manchester Life due to its prime location in the city’s burgeoning Ancoats neighbourhood. ADUG and the council both invested £750,000 each towards the plan, documents shared with The i Paper show, but it never materialised.

However, under the terms of the ‘sweetheart’ development deal with City’s owners, the council was unable to offer the land to any other potential partners – leaving the site undeveloped for around a decade. One property developer in the Northwest of England told the Sunday Times: “This is a sweetheart deal between Abu Dhabi and Manchester City Council.”

A spokesperson for the Weiss Group, a rival developer which has complained about a number of allegedly ‘preferential’ property deals in Manchester, said: “This is a familiar pattern of behaviour. Manchester City Council keeps striking confidential deals with preferred partners that the public only finds out about years later. That is the reality of Manchesterism and it isn’t serving Manchester residents well.”

The developer has also obtained documents via Freedom of Information requests which they say shows the Central Retail Park site purchase by the council in 2017 was “unlawful”. Having assessed the original deal, Christopher Knight KC, a public law barrister instructed by Weiss Group, said this was because of the lack of a sufficient valuation report and the fact councillors weren’t told of any alternative offers.

A review carried out last year by external auditors found “weaknesses” in its joint venture deals – including Manchester Life – particularly around “overage”, extra payments which should have been made to the council when selling its land.

The council’s named contact on the 2015 contract with ADUG was Sir Howard Bernstein, the then chief executive./ Sir Howard, who died in 2024, became a ‘strategic advisor’ at City Football Group shortly after leaving the council in 2017.

The council is now reviewing the terms of its lease with ADUG for the Etihad stadium with a source telling the Local Democracy Reporting Service the relationship between the town hall and club “has changed”.

Site vacant for 10 years

The saga finally began ending under the leadership of Bev Craig, who served as Labour’s council leader from 2021 until replacing Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester in August this year. The council agreed a deal in 2024 to sell off half the retail park site to the government which plans to use it for a huge new ‘digital campus’ for almost 9,000 civil servants.

But The i Paper understands even at this point, ADUG were entitled to be consulted and give ‘sign off’ due to the continuing ‘sweetheart’ deal. It was only last year that the deal expired entirely and ADUG’s preferential interest in the land came to an end.

Following his rapid ascent to Prime Minister this summer, Burnham’s team have been looking for a long-term site for Number 10 North. Labour’s deputy Leader Lucy Powell confirmed the Ancoats site had been chosen in July. ADUG has been contacted for comment. A Manchester City Council spokesperson said: “The acquisition of the former Central Retail Park site in 2018 has ensured that the site can complement the wider regeneration of the area.”

On the claims about the purchase being unlawful, they added: “We disagree with the opinion presented about the acquisition. The decision to acquire the site has not been formally challenged and the price reflects the value of a large retail site and key city centre regeneration opportunity. The cost to the Council was agreed on the basis that it would be recovered through the long-term development of the site.”

A No 10 spokesperson said it is “essential” the independent investigation into City “is allowed to run its course and the outcome respected. Wherever wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.”

A Victory For Ordinary People

With deep reactionary roots, the Greens are a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism, of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. But they do not have to take dictation from their opponents as to what was or was not their proper concern. Nor is any British political party answerable to any foreign embassy, and perhaps least of all to that of the state that killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman when those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead. As for the Board of Deputies of About One in Five British Jews, 90 years ago it told Jews to stay away from Cable Street and just let the Blackshirts pass. But thankfully, as Paul Knaggs writes:

On October 4, 1936, the streets of London’s East End became a battleground for the soul of Britain. It was on this day that an unlikely coalition of Jews, communists, trade unionists, Labour Party members, Irish Catholic dockers, and local residents united in a fierce display of solidarity against the rising tide of fascism. Their enemy? Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), which had planned to march their Blackshirts through the heart of a predominantly Jewish community. Their intention was clear: to intimidate, to divide, and to spread their poisonous ideology of hate. But the people of the East End had other ideas. Echoing the defiant cry of the Spanish Civil War, they shouted: “¡No pasarán!” – “They shall not pass!” It was more than a slogan; it was a declaration of unity in the face of bigotry, a refusal to let hatred march unchallenged through their streets.

What transpired that day would become known as the Battle of Cable Street, a pivotal moment in British history that encapsulated the nation’s resistance against the fascist wave sweeping across Europe. It was a day when ordinary people – regardless of faith, politics, or background – stood shoulder to shoulder and said: Not here. Not now. Not ever. The threat posed by Mosley’s Blackshirts was not to be underestimated. With claimed membership of 40,000 and the backing of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, the BUF represented a clear and present danger to the multicultural fabric of British society. Their march was to be a show of strength, a flexing of fascist muscle in the heart of one of London’s most diverse communities.

The Battle of Cable Street: They Shall Not Pass 

But in the face of this threat, the people of the East End did not cower. They did not heed the cautious advice to stay away. Instead, they came together in a remarkable display of collective courage, forming an immovable human barrier against the forces of intolerance. The Jewish Board of Deputies advised Jews to stay away. The Jewish Chronicle warned: “Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings. Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping anti-Semitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you want to help the Jew-baiters, keep away.”

The Battle of Cable Street stands as a testament to the power of unity in the face of division, of courage in the face of intimidation. It reminds us that when people stand together, even the most formidable forces of hatred can be turned back. As we reflect on this historic day, let us draw inspiration from those brave souls who declared, with one voice: They shall not pass! 

Eyewitness Account 

Before his death at the age of 93, Professor Bill Fishman recalled, “The Jews did not keep away”, Bill Fishman was 15 when he became involved in the Battle of Cable Street. He was the son of an East End tailor who became a professor of social history and one of the greatest experts on the area where he was born. In his youth, Fishman took part in “the Battle of Cable Street”, the clash between Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Jews and others in 1936.

He recalled how, as the Blackshirts advanced protected by a phalanx of mounted policemen, “We all charged towards Cable Street. At the bottom end, an overturned lorry was used as a barricade and we blocked the road – Hasidic Jews with little beards and great strapping Irish dockers all standing together. People began to throw down their mattresses to block the street and a mass onslaught on the police ensued with two officers even being taken hostage. It all came to an end about 5pm when Mosley did an about-turn. I headed to Dubowzky’s pub on Cannon Street Road, where everyone was embracing.”

Bill Fishman, who was 15 on the day, was at Gardner’s Corner in Aldgate, the entrance to the East End. “There was masses of marching people. Young people, old people, all shouting ‘No Pasaran’ and ‘One two three four five – we want Mosley, dead or alive’,” he said. “It was like a massive army gathering, coming from all the side streets. Mosley was supposed to arrive at lunchtime but the hours were passing and he hadn’t come. Between 3 pm and 3.30, we could see a big army of Blackshirts marching towards the confluence of Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road.

Marbles

“I pushed myself forward and because I was 6ft I could see Mosley. They were surrounded by an even greater army of police. There was to be this great advance of the police force to get the fascists through. Suddenly, the horses’ hooves were flying and the horses were falling down because the young kids were throwing marbles.” Thousands of policemen were sandwiched between the Blackshirts and the anti-fascists. The latter were well organised and through a mole learned that the chief of police had told Mosley that his passage into the East End could be made through Cable Street.

“I heard this loudspeaker say ‘They are going to Cable Street’,” said Prof Fishman. “Suddenly a barricade was erected there and they put an old lorry in the middle of the road and old mattresses. The people up the top of the flats, mainly Irish Catholic women, were throwing rubbish on to the police. We were all side by side. I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of racism.”

Max Levitas was a message runner and had already been fined £10 in court for his anti-Mosley activities. Two years before Cable Street, the BUF had called a meeting in Hyde Park and in protest Mr Levitas whitewashed Nelson’s column, calling people to the park to drown out the fascists. Mr Levitas went on to become a Communist councillor in Stepney. “I feel proud that I played a major part in stopping Mosley. When we heard that the march was disbanded, there was a hue and cry and the flags were going wild. They did not pass. The chief of police decided that if the march had taken place there would be death on the road – and there would have been,” he said.

His experience of the possibilities of collective action undoubtedly informed his view of the 19th-century predecessors of the Cable Street defenders, in which he moved away from the common representation of the East End poor as a passive, downtrodden underclass. In works such as East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 (1975) and East End 1888 (1988) he showed them as agents of change — people who, through cooperative and collective action, were capable of winning significant victories. “It was a victory for ordinary people against racism and anti-Semitism, and it should be instilled in the minds of people today. The Battle of Cable Street is a history lesson for us all. People as people must get together and stop racism and anti-Semitism so people can lead an ordinary life and develop their own ideas and religions.”

The Dark Arts of Camden Labour: Part II

Further to this, Jessica Murray and Paul Holden write:

On 20 May 2026, Sagaal Abdi-Wali was elected leader of Camden Council. Yet she retained her council seat earlier this year by a mere sixty votes, having initially won it by more than a thousand. The dropoff in support exemplified the grim recent trajectory of Camden Labour: a project which reflects much wider national trends over the last half-decade of British politics, and which is now back in the spotlight thanks to this Thursday’s byelection.

The local party’s fortunes were related to tensions over the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Abdi-Wali was formally nominated to the leadership position in the chamber by Izzy Lenga, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) vice-chair installed in South Hampstead after the 2022 purge. Lenga, who previously did basic training with the IDF and was pictured in Israeli military uniform, gave a speech extolling Abdi-Wali’s virtues, and concluded on a personal note:

As [a] Jewish woman, it means a great deal to me to stand here and nominate my Muslim colleague and friend to do this role. Because in a world that too often seeks to divide us, Camden shows us something different. We show that solidarity is our greatest strength, and our diversity is not a weakness but the most powerful tool we have. 

Abdi-Wali responded with a stirring speech about Camden’s multi-faith diversity, emphasising the need for so-called community cohesion. ‘Diversity is a strength but cohesion also requires a lot of effort’, she explained. ‘At a time when division and fear are growing, we must bring people together to ensure every community feels safe, heard and valued. The dignity and safety of one community can never be separated from the dignity and safety of another.’

Those unfamiliar with Labour-right doublespeak might see in this a rebuke to the far-right and rising Islamophobia. But this has long been the stultifying language handed down by the fanatically pro-Israel Board of Deputies, typified by the ‘Jewish Manifesto for Local Government’, published the previous month.

The Board’s local government manifesto pressed candidates to consider six pledges, including to ‘promote community cohesion’. Another was to ‘avoid importing conflict’ by, in effect, limiting the ability of residents to mobilise on Palestine. The former supposedly flows from the latter: community cohesion can prevail only if people are silent — or silenced — on Israel’s atrocities.

‘Community cohesion depends on local differences not being inflamed by international events’, the manifesto informed prospective candidates, lamenting that local harmony was now at risk from ‘polarising decisions about symbolic displays, pension investment and divestment, town twinning; the raising of foreign flags, procurement, or use of council property.’

This is also the language of JLM, the explicitly Zionist organisation with whom Abdi-Wali is closely connected, and in whose promotional literature she has repeatedly appeared. In November 2023, JLM issued an open letter with Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) aimed at Labour councillors, in which they offered ‘wholehearted support’ for Keir Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza in favour of a ‘humanitarian pause.’ The following day, the death toll in Gaza topped 10,000, including 4,000 children.

‘Irrespective of views on foreign policy,’ JLM and LFI wrote, ‘as Labour councillors, your words and actions have a direct impact on community cohesion. . . . It is essential that you continue to counter the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and unbalanced posturing that seeks only to divide the communities your represent and those that thrive on discord.’

As it transpired, the Board of Deputies did not need to remind the Camden Labour group of these strictures. For the last two years, they had been assiduous in preventing residents from exercising democratic dissent on Gaza, frustrating residents’ demands that Camden Council’s Pension Fund divest from companies complicit in Israel’s atrocities. Now that the local party is hoping to send Abdi-Wali to parliament, as we wrote in part one of this investigation, it is trying to channel the feel-good atmosphere of Burnhamism. But its record, especially on the issues of Israel and housing, will not be easily forgotten.

Silencing Residents, Blocking Divestment

Camden Council’s Pension Fund invests over £2.4bn for its employees. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has calculated that the fund held shares worth £104m in companies it determined were complicit in Israel’s genocide and occupation, including Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, weapons giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop, and Palantir. PSC pushed a campaign asking local governments to divest from complicity, which was backed by the biggest Labour-affiliated trade unions including Unite, GMB and UNISON.

The Labour leadership on the council did all they could to thwart a debate. Lorna Russell — then the lone Green councillor — put forward a motion in 2024 to force the issue of divestment onto the agenda in the council chamber. To be heard, the motion needed seconding. Russell approached Sue Vincent, who had served as a Labour councillor for over a decade. She agreed to be seconder. But half an hour before the deadline for submission, Vincent pulled out. Her Labour colleagues had called her at the last minute and warned her not to support the motion.

Vincent announced in 2025 that she would not seek re-election as a Labour councillor and eventually backed the Greens in local elections this year.

Awale Olad, a Labour councillor of fifteen years (who, like Abdi-Wali, is from a Somali background) similarly decided not to stand again. He was the first and arguably only Labour councillor to properly call-out Israeli war crimes in an impassioned speech in the Council Chamber in November 2024. Olad rebuked the Party in a letter he released announcing his decision to stand down: ‘In the face of the tragic events unfolding in Gaza, I alone stood up and spoke out against the horrifying situation’, he wrote.

Despite the Camden Labour leadership’s strenuous efforts to block debate on divestment, the council’s constitution included a work-around. Any cause with the support of 4,000 locals had to be debated. Camden Friends of Palestine got the necessary signatures and submitted them to the council. The petition was delivered to the Town Hall by the Palestinian-born Camden resident Lubaba Khalid and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust-survivor who had left the Labour Party two years prior.

The motion was debated in the council chamber in January 2025. Numerous Labour councillors spoke against it. One, Anna Burrage, said that ‘blanket divestment risk[ed] being seen as one-sided.’ Burrage highlighted ‘Rachel Reeves’ prioritisation of economic growth as a cornerstone of Labour’s agenda’ and warned of how divestment might ‘undermine investor confidence.’

Councillor Nanouche Umeadi took the unusual approach of chastising protestors in the chamber, some of whom shouted that the council had blood on their hands. ‘People are dying in my country [the Congo], based on phones we have in all our hands. So based on that notion, everyone here who owns a Samsung or an iPhone has blood on their hands.’

Umeadi’s intervention was striking considering how she became a councillor in 2022, while Labour’s bureaucracy was blocking long-time and popular left-wing councillors. Umeadi became a councillor after meeting Starmer on a school-run, and then council leader Georgia Gould at a party in Kentish Town, she told the excellent local paper of record, Camden New Journal. ‘I met her for the first time and six months later, he I am. They set me up. It’s pretty surreal as this was not on my to-do list.’

In the end, the petition was referred to the Council’s Pension Committee, which many criticised as ‘dither and delay’. Minutes show that the Pension Committee then took close to a year to produce an outsourced audit of Camden’s shareholding — as if it were necessary to hire an outside company to search a spreadsheet.

A delegation from the PSC was told in March 2026 that everything was in hand. But three months later, the national Labour government passed new laws controlling the handling of pension investments. Camden Council explained last week by email that the new legislation and guidance meant ‘there are currently no plans to consider a standalone divestment motion of the type requested by the petitioners.’

The legislation and attendant regulation had been shepherded by Steve Reed, then-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. One of Starmer and McSweeney’s closest allies, Reed served as a director at Labour Together alongside McSweeney. He had promised Jewish community organisations in a 2020 meeting that he would fight any boycott campaigns related to Israel. ‘Steve will never accept attempts to exceptionalise and delegitimise Israel’, the minutes recorded.

In January 2026, Reed warned local councils they might violate the law if they acted on popular motions for divestment. ‘Councils should stay out of foreign conflicts and get on with the job of delivering local services’, he declared.

As Labour obstructed divestment, Camden Council continued to heavily invest in complicit companies, with the value of its shares in Palantir, for instance, increasing 1,200 percent between October 2023 and December 2025. In that same period, the total value of Camden’s investment in complicit companies increased by more than £28m.

Labour councillors did eventually take a stand — against protestors. After a protest in which residents had sat silently in the gallery holding up signs that read ‘End genocide’, the council successfully rewrote its constitution to give officeholders the power to curtail protest and deputations in the Chamber. Holding banners and signs in the public gallery is now impermissible.

The Ming Vase

Abdi-Wali absented herself from public controversy, with no comments in the Chamber during the divestment debate in January. A search of public sources and social media suggests that she has not uttered a word on Gaza at any stage between October 7 2023 and her selection as Labour’s MP candidate. Repeated emails asking her to share letters or comments she has made have gone unanswered.

Her first comment on Gaza came in a puff-piece interview with The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee — a Camden Labour member who attended her selection meeting — in September 2026, where she returned to a familiar theme. ‘If Greens stir up community antagonisms over Gaza that would be disgraceful’, Abdi-Wali warned, echoing the guidelines on ‘community cohesion’ pushed by the Board of Deputies and JLM.

In 2025, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign launched a Candidate Pledge, asking candidates for local government to work to end complicity in genocide. The pledge was signed by over 1,600 councillors, including 30 Labour Party councillors in the neighbouring borough of Islington. Needless to say, Sagal Abdi-Wali did not sign — nor did any of her fellow Labour candidates in Camden.

We have asked multiple former colleagues to explain why they thought she kept quiet on Gaza. ‘That is what she always does’, one explained. ‘She is personally warm, but has always stepped back when controversial matters are up for discussion.’

On this telling, Abdi-Wali has been ‘Ming vase-ing’ her career, choosing to step away from public battles lest they define her as having some definite commitments. In a Starmerite Party that has abhorred difference and quashed dissent — while handsomely rewarding loyalty — one can see the incentive to conform.

But there is also something unique about the tale of Camden Labour. Its transformation into a melting pot of the worst tendencies and personalities of the party’s right has been especially extreme. It is worth reiterating that in Islington thirty Labour candidates signed the Palestine Solidarity Campaign pledge earlier this year, while not one did in Camden.

North Sea Oil

Camden Labour’s abdication on Gaza is of a piece with its horrendous record on housing. There is no question that the latter is the most salient issue in the borough. In 2011, the Council launched the Community Investment Plan (CIP), its flagship programme to redevelop Camden, with the aim of boosting housing stock across the borough. It was conceived, in essence, as a giant public-private partnership scheme. Housing developments would not be directly provided or built by Camden.

Instead, the council would work with large private developers, who would be given planning permission for vast redevelopment schemes on the many plots of peri-industrial land dotted around the borough. Camden would further assist developments by selling pieces of land or warehousing to developers. Camden would negotiate with developers to build affordable housing and plug other delivery gaps. It would also put up its own capital — £1bn in total — to facilitate development. This figure was increased by a further £1.3bn in 2022.

The strategy was nicknamed the ‘North Sea oil’ plan, in a nod to the immense value of Camden’s land. The comparison was more apt than intended. In the 1980s, Britain’s oil windfall was spent plugging the holes Thatcherism blew in public budgets, while Norway banked its own in a sovereign wealth fund that still pays out today. Camden has done much the same with its land: a finite public asset, sold off, with little permanent council housing to show for it. The new buildings are often easy on the eye, but for residents stuck on the council’s housing waiting list, that adds insult to injury: these are homes they will never live in.

Camden’s bragging about the returns of the Community Investment Plan rings hollow. In 2024, the year Abdi-Wali became cabinet member for housing, Camden celebrated the building of 1,500 homes via the CIP over the previous thirteen years, of which 628 were ‘social rent’ homes owned by the Council. A Freedom of Information request in 2025 revealed that a further fifty had been built, bringing the total to 678 social-rent homes built between 2010 and 2025.

The catch? Camden had approved and overseen the demolition of 492 Council-rented homes in the same period. Over fifteen years, and despite huge capital outlays and massive redevelopments, Camden had added just 182 council homes for rent to its housing stock — fewer than ten a year. Martin Plaut, Starmer’s former parliamentary researcher, has praised the ‘tough’ decisions Abdi-Wali made as cabinet member for housing. Her constituents languishing on the waiting list might wonder what exactly they were.

In 2026, Camden confirmed that there were 8,380 households on the social housing waiting list in the borough, with most of those on the list living in severely overcrowded conditions. The numbers on the waiting list had increased by 9 percent in just one year between 2025 and 2026, while Abdi-Wali held the housing brief.

Not So Affordable

Camden’s current aim under the extant Community Investment Plan is to build 3,150 houses over and above the 1,700 already built. Of all the 4,850 new homes built under the scheme, 1,800 are council homes for social rent, with more destined to be ‘affordable housing’ charged at about 60 percent of market rent.

Even so, it would be astonishing if these optimistic projections came to pass. On Abdi-Wali’s watch, a paltry 84 affordable houses were started in the whole of the 2025-26 financial year. The average for London boroughs over the same period was 290. Tower Hamlets, run by Aspire and its steadfast ex-Labour Party mayor, Lutfur Rahman, started 1,050.

Again and again, Camden Labour appears to be played like a fiddle by developers, who promise the moon on affordable housing, before the council then approves significant reductions in how many affordable houses developers must build for already-approved developments.

In August, Camden’s planning committee (dominated by Labour councillors from the fresh 2022 intake, including Lenga, who replaced the purged councillors), approved a request from the developer Landsec to reduce the number of affordable houses being built on the site of the O2 centre on Finchley Road. Landsec had originally promised that 570 of the 1,800 new homes would be affordable; it is now obliged, with Camden’s approval, to build just 330, on the basis that prevailing economic headwinds made the original plan unprofitable. Landsec declared £346m in pre-tax profits for the year ending March 2026.

Normally, the decision to approve such a reduction would have required a full, independent review (a ‘financial viability assessment’) to establish if the developer’s economic case made sense. But in October 2025, Mayor Sadiq Khan and Housing Secretary Steve Reed formally reduced the London target for affordable housing in new developments from 35 percent to 20 percent; those offering 20 percent could now secure ‘fast-track’ approval. The upshot of this change was that local authorities would no longer be required to independently audit whether developers’ claims of financial hardship were justified.

And so Camden Labour’s coterie of young Starmerites approved the request, merely noting the reduction in affordable housing with regret. They ignored the appeals of the Fortune Green & West Hampstead Neighbourhood Development Forum and more than 1,000 written complaints the scheme had received. A member of the public in the gallery shouted betrayal. The Labour Chair of the Planning Committee, Liam Martin-Lane — one of the youngest new councillors in the 2022 intake — told the protesters they were welcome to air their views outside. ‘This is a meeting held in public, not a public meeting. . . . We do not invite contributions from members of the gallery.’ 

Starmerites Against the Community

The councillors purged by Camden Labour in 2021 had seen this coming. Paul Tomlinson had opposed the council’s approval of Grand Central, a 22-storey tower of luxury flats on one of the few patches of green open space in his Somers Town ward. Individual units now sell for as much as £2.75m; no affordable housing was included. Tomlinson called these failures ‘a form of social cleansing.’

Tomlinson, Leo Cassarani and Ranjit Singh (whose seat went to Abdi-Wali) would clearly not have so rolled over for developers while silencing protest from the public. In June 2019, Tomlinson and Cassarani — alongside Maryam Eslamdoust — had signed a call-in against Labour cabinet member Danny Beales’ decision to approve a ‘masterplan’ for Camley Street.

In early 2026, Camden gave final approval for the redevelopment of Camley Street. Tomlinson and others had warned the development would negatively impact local businesses, and they have since been vindicated. A 2026 BBC investigation spoke to multiple business owners, including a family-run garage that had operated for decades, facing significant financial losses from being forced out of the shops that had served the local community for generations. The businesses dismissed Camden’s claim that each business would benefit from a ‘bespoke’ transition solution.

Two weeks before the Landsec vote, Abdi-Wali sat down with the Camden New Journal to discuss her priorities as leader. The CNJ probed Abdi-Wali on the imminent approval of a new mega-masterplan to build a ‘film quarter’ on a massive tract of land between Kentish Town and Hampstead Heath, currently the site of an always-busy community recycling centre, a Royal Mail warehouse and sundry other businesses.

Current proposals have proven controversial, but people might be more forgiving of the scheme if it were to deliver a substantial quantity of genuinely affordable housing. Abdi-Wali was pressed on this point, asked to respond to concerns that the Film Quarter would suffer the same fate as other over-promised and under-delivered sites. ‘I don’t want to talk like that,’ Abdi-Wali responded. ‘We’re in a place now where it’s 50 per cent affordable housing — secured. . . . Having conversations about “what if they do this or that isn’t helpful.”’ A fortnight later, her party’s councillors on the planning committee waved through Landsec’s retreat on affordable housing at the O2 Centre.

Beyond the Grave

‘I don’t want to talk like that’ has been the watchword of Sagal Abdi-Wali’s political career so far. All but silent on the Gaza genocide in the name of community cohesion, she also said nothing about her council’s pension fund growing its holdings in Israel’s crimes. As cabinet member for housing, she held the brief while the waiting list grew and council house building stalled. As council leader, she fails to address questions about what might go wrong with the biggest development in the borough, just as the planning committee has rubber-stamped yet another affordable housing retreat.

As a candidate in the Holborn & St Pancras byelection, Abdi-Wali now offers ‘hope’. From the Prime Minister, the slogan may carry some significance, attached as it is to an ambition to break with a decades-long political and economic settlement. Camden Labour’s borrowing of the same talk is as empty as it is cynical. Its record is clear as day: putting the interests of private developers over those of residents, purging councillors who demanded the opposite, and silencing constituents who oppose the genocide in Gaza.

It is precisely this toxic combination — of genuflection to the wealthy and powerful with authoritarian disdain for anyone who fails to fall in line — that did for Starmerism in the end. In Camden, anger crystalised into the insurgent campaign of Andrew Feinstein in the 2024 election, which massively depleted Starmer’s majority, and into a Green surge which contributed to a major decline in Labour’s seat share, winning 30 seats out of 55 this year, a drop of 17 from its position of near total-dominance last time round.

It seems possible that the Burnham bounce will carry Abdi-Wali over the line this week. But if the Prime Minister is to avoid crashing down — if he is to succeed in rebuilding Labour’s shattered progressive coalition — he would do well to consign all Camden Labour has come to represent to the past.

The Position Has Now Been Reversed

María Corina Machado is never going back to Donald Trump’s Venezuela. The White House press corps hit back when Trump banned three outlets, but the British media did nothing when the Labour Party conference banned for the third year running the Declassified UK in which Ana Maria Monjardino and Jon McEvoy write:

Britain’s energy giants stand to make huge profits in Venezuela amid a major diplomatic rapprochement between London and Caracas, it can be revealed. It comes in the wake of the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year in a move described by UN experts as a “deliberate violation of the most fundamental principles of international law”. Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasised how the US intervention was motivated by oil interests, even telling the UN General Assembly last week: “To the victor belong the spoils”. Hours after Maduro’s seizure, Keir Starmer said Britain was “not involved”, but refused to be drawn on whether it was unlawful. “We shed no tears about the end of the regime,” he declared. 

The kidnapping is already resulting in a boon for Britain’s energy giants, with interim president Delcy Rodríguez welcoming foreign companies back to Venezuela and softening the country’s hydrocarbon legislation. Since January 2026, BP and Shell have signed major agreements with the Venezuelan government as it appears to be operating under duress from the Trump administration. Documents obtained by Declassified indicate how Britain’s Foreign Office has helped facilitate their return, with an influx of high-level meetings between executives and officials taking place in the weeks and months after Maduro’s removal. The opening of Venezuela’s economy has also paved the way for the normalisation of relations between London and Caracas. Plans were made earlier this month to upgrade diplomatic representation to ambassadorial level.

But serious questions surround benefitting from the kidnapping of a head of state amid a broader assault on Venezuela’s sovereignty. “US coercive control over Venezuela’s oil revenues may have involved violations of Venezuela’s sovereignty”, said UN special rapporteur Ben Saul. That includes breaches of “the duty of non-intervention, the right of economic self-determination, and the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources”. Professor Francisco Rodríguez, a leading Venezuelan economist who has advised its national assembly, told Declassified that “deals of this type are much more likely to survive when there is a broad consensus not only on their legal validity but on their desirability for the nation. At present, I see many more sectors of Venezuelan society that do not consider these agreements either legal or convenient for the nation, and some of them see them as outright exploitative.” Rodríguez added: “It is hard to see any truly autonomous Venezuelan leaders signing these deals were a gun not pointed at their head.”

Firesale

Venezuela’s economy has been restructured under Delcy Rodríguez, who assumed power in January and was pictured with Trump earlier this month in New York, just miles from Maduro’s prison cell. The country’s hydrocarbon legislation has been modified to make the terms more favourable for foreign firms, and its energy revenues are now being diverted through the US Treasury, with Washington taking a major cut. By July, the US government had collected more than $13 billion in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales, according to the Financial Times. In August, Trump also announced a “historic oil agreement” with Venezuela which would give the US control of more than 65 billion barrels of oil reserves for 100 years. The deal would secure “our energy dominance for the next century”, Trump declared, “all at zero cost to the United States”.

Remarkably, the company at the forefront of that agreement, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), hired three lawyers who had previously worked for the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. It is within this context that Shell and BP have returned to Venezuela. Shell has been granted concessions to develop and operate two offshore gas fields, named Loran and Dragon, which are projected to contain vast amounts of recoverable gas. The company also signed a preliminary deal to develop two onshore oil fields known as Carito and Pirital in Monagas State, one of the country’s most oil-rich regions. After signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Caracas in March, Shell’s regional manager Adam Lowmass recalled the company’s “long history in Venezuela, dating from 1912”. He declared: “I could not be prouder of our team”.

BP signed its own MoU with the Venezuelan government in April to develop the Cocuina-Manakin gas field which sits on the maritime border with Trinidad and Tobago. The company was also granted a licence for the second phase of operations on the Loran field in partnership with Emirati XRG and Qatari UCC Oil and Gas, and has started trading oil in the US. Shell and BP plan to process Venezuela’s natural gas using the Atlantic LNG plant and export terminal in Trinidad and Tobago, in which they are both major shareholders. This cross-border presence will give the firms significant control over the supply chain of natural gas in the Caribbean, a large portion of which will be destined for Europe.

Meetings and lobbying

Data obtained by Declassified through the Freedom of Information Act indicates how the Foreign Office has facilitated Shell and BP’s return to Venezuela. Executives from the companies met with Colin Dick, Britain’s chargé d’affaires in Caracas, eight times in the two months following Maduro’s kidnapping, compared with eight meetings for all of 2025. While the Foreign Office has refused to disclose what was discussed beyond a few heavily redacted emails, the frequency of the meetings might be seen as implicit endorsement for the energy giants’ new ventures in Venezuela. Oil has been guiding British foreign policy in Venezuela for over a century. Former foreign minister for the Americas Alan Duncan declared in 2018: “The revival of the oil industry will be an essential element in any recovery, and I can imagine that British companies like Shell and BP will want to be part of it”. 

Britain’s current director for the Americas Harriet Thompson was in Caracas in early March 2026 as Shell was gearing up to sign major new energy deals. Thompson “conducted a productive visit that included meetings at the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry and engagements with representatives of British companies to explore growth opportunities for both countries”, the embassy said. When asked in parliament whether those talks involved British natural resource companies, the Foreign Office said the question had already been answered in January – two months before the meetings had even taken place.

In its own write-up, the Venezuelan government said the delegation was the first of its kind for years, and opened new routes for “trade exchange” within a broader goal of “strengthening cooperation in strategic sectors”. Earlier this month, Venezuela’s foreign minister and former ambassador to the UK Félix Plasencia and National Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez, Delcy’s brother, were in London for another high-level diplomatic exchange. Standing outside the Foreign Office, Rodríguez noted how the meetings with British diplomats had covered “oil and gas investments” and the “rapid economic growth of Venezuela”.

‘Plundering’

BP and Shell have also been busy lobbying on Venezuela in Washington after a long period of relative dormancy. Their efforts have focussed on convincing the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to give them licences to operate in Venezuela as the Trump administration eases sanctions for projects which benefit US oil interests. In the first quarter of 2026, Shell registered lobbying activities worth $1.3 million in the US which involved “the commercial development of natural gas in the Dragon gas field offshore Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago pursuant to a licence issued by OFAC”. During the same period, BP registered $1.18 million in US lobbying activities which included a focus on “Venezuela and OFAC licensing”. Shell’s CEO Wael Sawan even met with Trump in January, saying he was “ready to go” with “a few billion dollars’ worth of opportunities to invest” in Venezuela. Days later, US lawmakers implored Sawan and other oil executives “to decline to participate in any transaction or arrangement that relies on the Trump Administration’s asserted authority to control Venezuelan oil assets”. Ricardo Vaz, lead editor of Venezuela Analysis, told Declassified:

“Much like it joined the US in its economic blockade, the UK and UK-headquartered corporations are determined not to miss out on the plundering of Venezuela’s natural resources in this post-January 3 context. BP and Shell have been on the frontlines to take advantage of the reformed energy sector and feature among the six corporations that received the first general licence to negotiate deals with the Venezuelan government. Both companies had an extensive operational history in Venezuela’s oil industry, and they will now arguably return in the most favourable conditions they have ever enjoyed”.

Diplomatic rapprochement

The improved position of BP and Shell in Venezuela has coincided with a significant diplomatic rapprochement between London and Caracas. Under Maduro, the UK government insisted fresh elections were necessary before diplomatic normalisation, but the position has now been reversed, with the Foreign Office saying a democratic transition requires improved diplomatic relations. “Upgrading our relations will strengthen our ability to play a constructive role in support of a democratic transition” and “promote UK businesses in Venezuela”, foreign minister Chris Elmore said earlier this month.

This “upgrade”, he said, would pave the way for the appointment of a UK ambassador in Caracas for the first time since 2017. To celebrate this new spring in the UK-Venezuela partnership, Delcy Rodríguez met with Britain’s chargé d’affaires Colin Dick in Caracas on 18 September. The pair were filmed laughing together as they fed deer and admired peacocks. “Venezuela and the United Kingdom are opening a new chapter in their bilateral relations”, beamed Rodríguez.

The frozen gold

One of Venezuela’s top priorities amid the improvement of diplomatic relations will be the return of roughly $4 billion of gold that has been frozen in the Bank of England for over seven years. While Elmore said Britain’s “long-standing position is to recognise states, not governments”, it was the UK government’s decision to recognise a parallel government under Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó in 2019 that fomented the gold deadlock. According to former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, then foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt was “delighted” to help with Washington’s destabilisation campaign in Venezuela, “for example freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England”. 

After a protracted legal battle over ownership of the assets, Guaidó was ousted and his parallel government dissolved in 2022 – but the gold remained frozen due to Britain’s enduring non-recognition of Maduro. The Rodríguez administration and the Venezuelan opposition have since engaged in negotiations, with both sides reportedly agreeing that the gold should be released. These negotiations, according to the Financial Times, might result in the gold being transferred from the Bank of England to the Federal Reserve of New York, with the assets only available as collateral for government borrowing rather than for sale.

Transferring the gold to the country whose leader orchestrated the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state – after freezing the gold amid concerns about democratic legitimacy – might raise awkward questions for the Foreign Office and the Bank of England. A spokesperson for the Bank of England previously said: “The Bank is not in a position to act on instructions until there is a further order from the UK Court which makes clear who has legal authority over the account. This requires the parties involved in the case to approach the UK Court to settle the dispute”. The Foreign Office, BP, and Shell were approached for comment.

Here Is Where The Costume Stops Being Funny

From Hunt & Gather:

There is a particular type in English public life who has done more quiet damage to this country than any number of obvious villains. He is not an aristocrat. He is something more useful to himself: a man who has worked out that looking like one is a career. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the finished version of the type, so he will do as the specimen. Tucker Carlson's interview with Rees-Mogg yesterday in our view revealed how little lies beneath the act.

I'll start with what is actually true, because the costume depends on lazy checking. His father, William Rees-Mogg, edited The Times from 1967 to 1981. He failed his scholarship to Eton and went to Charterhouse instead, then Balliol, where he became President of the Oxford Union. He was knighted in 1981, having been High Sheriff of Somerset. He was made a life peer on 8 August 1988, in Thatcher's Birthday Honours, as Baron Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewett, and he sat as a crossbencher.

There is no medieval grant anywhere in this. There is a successful journalist who was given a title at sixty, which is the modern English method of acquiring one without the inconvenience of having had to knife some poor bastard at Bosworth Field. Behind him there is land. A Mogg bought the manor of Cholwell in 1726. A Rees-Mogg rebuilt Cholwell House in 1855 — a country solicitor. That is three centuries of minor Somerset gentry: respectable, local, and about as aristocratic as a prosperous dentist with a nice lawn. The family's own trajectory makes the point. The father stretched himself to buy Ston Easton Park in 1964 and had to sell it in 1978.

On the other side the lineage is plainer still. Jacob's mother, Gillian Shakespeare Morris, was his father's secretary. Her father was a lorry driver and car salesman who became Conservative mayor of St Pancras. None of this is meant as judgement, from the grandson of a squaddie and a housemaid. It is an ordinary and rather admirable English story. But it is not the story being performed, and it is not the one being tacitly laid claim to by Mogg and his influence peddling ilk in their continued self-enriching betrayal of the people of this island.

What the son built on it is the performance. Eton, Trinity College Oxford, the City, a fund management company, a large house in Somerset - and a manner that seeks to suggest to those who don't know better that the last century and a half has been a clerical error. The vowels, the Latin, the Nanny, the children named as though from a parish register. None of this is the unselfconscious habit of a man raised among Holbeins. It is the habit of an ambitious man who noticed that a certain audience both home and abroad still finds it charming, and made a deliberate decision not to update the software. Reclining full-length on the green benches during the 2019 Brexit debate was the purest expression of it. Not contempt for Parliament, exactly. Something worse: the assumption that the scene was his to furnish. He wasn't 'caught napping'. He wanted the world to see he has the right to nap there, for the next time he picks the phone up to them.

The comparison that makes the type visible is Boris Johnson, because the two of them perform the same class from opposite ends. Rees-Mogg arrives as a finished Victorian. Pressed, buttoned, word-perfect, every vowel in its appointed place, as though he had stepped out of a carriage and found the twenty-first century already disappointing. Johnson arrives apparently mid-collapse — hair disordered on purpose, shirt escaping, the Greek deployed as though it had surprised him on the way in. One performs order, the other performs chaos, and both are performing the same claim: that they are from somewhere you are not, and may therefore be forgiven things - and given other things, that you are not.

The joke is that Johnson has the better pedigree. He is a documented descendant of George II through an illegitimate line, which is more royal blood than anybody at Cholwell ever got near. He simply calculated, correctly, that studied shambles sells better in a television age than studied precision. Rees-Mogg bet on the Victorian, Johnson bet on the Regency rake. Both bet a great deal on never really being made to pay for anything they have done, because that is what they teach the world has in store for them at Eton. Here is where the costume stops being funny.

The old landed class, at its least fictional, came with serious obligations. They were tied to a place. They spent a lot of their time thinking about drainage and tenancies and who was ill in the village. They turned up at Quarter Sessions. They turned up if one of your people needed help. The arrangement was indefensible in principle and occasionally useful in practice, because the man with the manner - and the manor - also had the responsibility, and the responsibility was local, specific and inescapable.

Carlson mentioned that Eton lost eleven hundred old boys in the First World War. Rees-Mogg corrected him: twelve hundred. He was right; he is nothing if not good with numbers. But the number that matters is that around five thousand six hundred Old Etonians served — which, for a school of a thousand boys, is very close to every single one of military age. They all went. One in five did not come back, against one in eight across the army as a whole, because they went in as subalterns and subalterns led from the front. That is what the manner — and the manor — used to cost. The diction, the Latin, the expectation of deference — and the understanding that when it came, you went first and you died at twice the rate of the men you commanded. Show of hands: who thinks Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees Mogg would ever go to war, or send their children to one? Thought not. 

In 1914 the bill was presented by the people to the Old Etonians, and it was paid in full. Mogg's version has the diction, but if it comes on top he will have forgotten his wallet, mark my words. The modern version has stripped the obligation out and kept the manner. It is aristocracy as lifestyle brand: all the diction, none of the damp. It travels well to television studios and party conferences. It requires no knowledge of anything in particular. Crucially, it can be set aside entirely when the spreadsheets want attention — Rees-Mogg co-founded Somerset Capital Management, whose funds were domiciled in the Cayman Islands and Singapore while he was arguing for Britain to leave the European Union, and he has been reasonably candid about having done well out of the aftermath.

That is the mechanism. Not hypocrisy, which is too small a word and too easily shrugged off. Unearned authority, is what it is. The manner is a claim to be taken seriously about everything while being accountable for nothing, and in a country still ludicrously susceptible to vowels, it works. Housing, wages, the mechanics of leaving the EU — all met with the same amused detachment a man might deploy when a guest reaches for the wrong fork. Detachment is easy when the fork is not yours.

Multiply him by thousands. That is what I want to leave you with. He is not one eccentric; he is the visible end of a class of people who learned that a borrowed accent and a borrowed confidence are the cheapest capital available in British public life. They run government departments. They sit on boards, edit papers, advise ministers, chair inquiries. They are fluent, charming, entirely unencumbered by expertise, and they have been failing upwards for forty years while the people who actually know how the drains work are told there is no money. The real aristocracy, whatever else can be said against it, could at least be found. It was attached to somewhere. You knew whose land you were standing on and therefore who to blame. The replacements have the manner and no address. The manner, but no manor - just a registered office in the Caymans. There is nobody to send the bill to.

So: enjoy the theatre or ignore it, according to taste. The suit is well cut, the house is large, and the man is amusing at times. Just don't mistake it for a title. The peerage came from Margaret Thatcher in 1988, for services to journalism. As for the squire of North East Somerset — he had the seat from 2010 until 2024, when the boundaries were redrawn. He stood again, and the people among whom his family had lived for three hundred years politely declined. Yesterday he told Carlson: "I hope to stand at the next election. We have a democracy that functions." The costume is paid for and the audience has not entirely dispersed. But if he comes up your road with his shiny blue rosette and nice vowels keep in mind: fake aristocrats only ever represent themselves.