Any Advance On This?

Advance UK has deregistered as a political party. I was reminded only recently, having quite forgotten, that I had been there and done that. Although I have never taken as few as 154 votes for anything. Nor have I ever taken fewer than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, whose support at Makerfield is being split by Count Binface, such that their combined tally should be projected into the percentage of the electorate that was in favour of the retention of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

Neither Count Binface nor Howling Laud Hope will be on Question Time from Makerfield tomorrow, but nor will the candidate whom Ben Habib had already endorsed, Rebecca Shepherd of Restore Britain. Shepherd's husband is a Dutch-Indonesian immigrant. Is he a Muslim? At any rate, their business model is purely parastatal, consisting entirely of the provision of therapeutic equine activities to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Service of Wigan Council. To my mind, that is a noble pursuit. But would Restore voters agree? Would the professed 37,000 members of Advance, although the true number would become clear if we ever found out how much had been repaid in subscriptions? Would Habib? Would Rupert Lowe?

The defining issue of Restore is remigration, so it would presumably have sent Henry Nowak "back" to Poland with his father whom it would still deport, and it would presumably send Habib "back" to Pakistan. It would not, however, need to deport Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to Ireland, of which he was in any case already a citizen, since he lived in Spain. Yaxley-Lennon endorsed Advance at Gorton and Denton. Does he endorse Restore at Makerfield? And what of the Sikh immigration that, having been doing so for 20 years, he was still encouraging as an anti-Muslim bulwark until at least last month? Fringe Sikh figures have been appearing on his platforms for decades, as he has on theirs. Last night in Southampton, he delivered an almost comical speech against "Pakistani Muslims". What about them?

Charging Points

Anyone would think that Vickrum Digwa had got off. He is a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, and his mother, Kiran Kaur, is not going to be given litter-picking for having hidden a murder weapon. If she is an Indian national, then she cannot hold any other nationality, since India does not allow that, so she will be deported automatically upon completion of her pretty stiff sentence. But what of the further weapons-related charges against Digwa, his father and his brother? Why have they not also been charged with perversion of the course in justice in what was a murder investigation?

Speaking of charges, Bonnie Blue of Reform UK, and whose real name, assuming that it is different, I refuse to discover by Googling her, ought at least to face something if she went ahead with her latest cunning stunt. Outraging public decency? Conspiracy to corrupt public morals? If she really is pregnant, and she has lied about that in the past, then the concern at the risk of injury or infection to her unborn child is a welcome sign that no one truly believes in nothing more than "a clump of cells" that was "part of a woman's body" such that she was free to do with it as she pleased. Yes, of course the child ought to be removed at birth from so glaringly unfit a mother.

And speaking of sentences, why should the £1.8 million fine imposed on South West Water for having supplied the people of Brixham with cryptosporidium be paid by its customers, including the victims? If the provision to fine the company's directors and senior executives in person exists, then why was it not used? Or if there is no such provision, then how soon will there be?

Take Action Today

Here:

Once again, disabled and terminally ill people are being put at risk due to proposals to legalise assisted dying.

Assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill.

As a national, grassroots disability rights group opposed to the legalisation of assisted dying and euthanasia as deadly forms of disability discrimination, we have been campaigning hard against Kim Leadbeater’s Bill since its inception.

Kim Leadbeater’s Bill is not only unworkable, it is dangerous for people in vulnerable situations - including disabled people.

If the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

The cost of this Bill passing as it currently stands will be paid by disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure and harm, and by a cultural shift that places greater value on some lives than others. We cannot allow this to happen.

For disabled people, this Bill is an existential threat, for at least the following reasons:

• Coercion - this danger is significant and cannot be adequately addressed by proposed safeguards; it simply cannot always be detected. At-risk groups (e.g. people who are elderly, disabled or financially disadvantaged) may feel pressured to choose death to avoid burdening families, as has happened overseas.
• Safeguards - they won’t work in practice. The legislation is weighted towards promoting eligibility rather than preventing risk.
• Slippery slope - other jurisdictions have seen widening of access and removal of safeguards. There are insufficient checks and balances to be sure expansion won’t happen here, too.
• Palliative care - resources for assisted dying could undermine already underfunded hospice care. Hospices are already warning of a “funding crisis”. The Association for Palliative Medicine warns that palliative care must be prioritised first.

All MPs need to understand that disabled people are terrified of this Bill being brought back. We already have to fight far too hard to be able to live dignified and independent lives. Legalising assisted dying through this Bill, which threatens our autonomy and our options, will make that harder still.

It comes down to the sort of country and culture we want to live in. We can’t settle for less, which is what Kim Leadbeater’s Bill asks MPs to do. It asks MPs to address the challenge of how we care for and support people who are in situations where they need greater protection and support - including disabled people - by giving them a way out through assisted dying, instead of a way up through investment in excellent palliative and social care.

When you enter your postcode, you will then be asked to provide your details, and you will see a draft email that you can make changes to before sending it to your MP. When you hit send, this email will be sent to your MP along with a physical postcard to their Parliament address (you can see what that postcard looks like here) - both will include the contact details you have provided, so it is clear to your MP that the message has come from a real local constituent.

Disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure or harm need the support to live, not a law that exposes them to greater danger. This Bill does the opposite - it facilitates premature death and puts people at risk.

We must stop this dangerous Bill from returning. Take action today - your message could make all the difference.

The text reads:

I am writing to you as a resident of [your constituency] and as a supporter of Not Dead Yet UK, a grassroots disability rights group.

I am contacting you following the recent MP Private Members’ Bill ballot, as I have been alarmed by reports that assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill. I am very concerned about this and would be very grateful if you would reply to reassure me that you will listen to the voices of disabled people and not support the return of this Bill.

As Baroness Grey-Thompson made clear at a House of Lords Select Committee hearing last autumn about the assisted dying Bill, “there is no organisation of or for disabled people that supports this legislation”. She described the Bill as “a danger to disabled people”, a view widely shared by the disability community.

I find it extraordinary that MPs would consider bringing back a bill that is so widely opposed by not only disabled people but also countless medical Royal Colleges, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, professional bodies and other groups representing vulnerable people, including people with learning disabilities.

Polling published since the assisted dying Bill was first introduced has shown how wide the public’s concerns are about the assisted dying Bill that was introduced in the last parliamentary session, including in relation to its existential threat to disabled people.

These concerns remain significant because if the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

This is particularly worrying because the House of Lords had not finished its work on the Bill when it fell. Peers were still considering serious concerns about whether disabled people would be safe under the Bill, including the risk that people could come under pressure or feel they had no real choice because they could not get the care and support they needed. These are not minor issues. They go to the heart of whether an assisted dying law would put disabled people at risk.

When MPs voted on the Bill, this further scrutiny in the House of Lords had not yet been completed. MPs who supported the Bill on the understanding that concerns would continue to be examined and safeguards could be improved should be deeply troubled by an attempt to bring back essentially the same Bill before that work has been done. Disabled people should not be expected to accept a Bill while serious concerns about their safety remain unresolved.

In relation to its impact on disabled people, a poll commissioned by Not Dead Yet UK of over 2,000 adults last summer showed the following:

- Two in three people (67%, including 72% of disabled people) agree that the UK Parliament should prioritise improving access to care for disabled people before introducing assisted dying (only 13% disagree). 

- 63% of the public and 67% of disabled people agree that some disabled people may feel a sense of responsibility to access an assisted death if they feel they are a burden on family, friends or society (only 16% disagree). 

- 60% of the public agree that some disabled people could be coerced into assisted dying by others who do not have their best interests at heart. 64% of disabled people share this concern. 

- 57% agree that disabled people who struggle to access the support they need, given the current state of the NHS and social care funding, may be more likely to seek assisted dying instead (only 17% disagree). This rises to over 6 in 10 (63%) for people who are disabled. 

- 59% agree that if disabled people are living in poverty, and benefits are being cut, they may be likely to seek assisted dying instead of struggling financially (again, only 17% disagree). This rises to 65% for people who are disabled.

In Canada, which first legalised assisted dying in 2016 under a law similar to the one proposed here (restricted to those whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable), disabled people have increasingly been put at risk under the country’s assisted dying law, with Paralympians and disabled veterans among those who have been offered an assisted death proactively without requesting it; one woman was offered an assisted death when she requested a stairlift. 

Roger Foley has written powerfully in the Herald of his experience as a disabled man living in Canada: “As Canada has expanded its assisted dying law, I have faced neglect, verbal abuse, and denial of essential care. I’ve been told my care needs are too much work, and my life has been devalued. Worse still, I have been approached and told by healthcare staff to consider opting for Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). Instead of offering compassionate support to alleviate my suffering, it is suggested to me that I should end my life.”

England and Wales cannot follow this path - the risk is too great, which was one of the reasons why Scotland recently decisively rejected assisted dying.

Legalised assisted dying would change our country forever. Disabled people will hear the message loud and clear that their lives are not worth living - Parliament will have said as much by providing a means of assisting death while failing to ensure disabled people have all they need to live dignified, independent lives.

Many disabled people are terrified about this Bill and were greatly relieved when it failed to become law in the last session. I plead with you not to support the Bill being brought back. My mind would be greatly put at rest if you could assure me that you will oppose any such attempts and any future similar bill.

Thank you for your work on behalf of our constituency.

Yours sincerely,

Gateway to the World?

The only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is the master race. The specimen in the first photograph, on the front line of the throwers of burning bins at the Police in Southampton, is Luke Jahn, the Portsmouth Branch Organiser of the National Rebirth Party. That party is shown in solemn assembly in the second photograph, while the third is of its Leader, Alek Yerbury. Form an orderly queue, Aryan maidens.

Suddenly, the likes of the National Rebirth Party like the Poles, in stark contrast to their attitude either 10 years ago or 85. As for their fellow travellers in and around the Conservative Party, Reform UK and Restore Britain, the weapon used to murder Henry Nowak was found by the jury not to have been a kirpan, which has never been known to have been used as an offensive weapon in this country, while the exemption of the kirpan from from the ban on bladed articles in public places goes back to the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Who was the Prime Minister in 1988? She also allowed into Britain more than 10,000 Vietnamese boat people who had illegally entered Hong Kong, before giving British citizenship to tens of thousands more who were then still there. "Maggie would have stopped the boats"? Would she hell.

Having made his successful call for "pure cold rage" in an unchallenged Emergency Address to the Nation, such as every MP should take to issuing, Nigel Farage characteristically did not turn up to Shabana Mahmood's statement to the House of Commons. He did contribute to a Westminster Hall debate on Monday, but he has not been heard on the floor of the House since 25 March, and he has not voted since seven days earlier again. Yet he has never been known to miss his other paid work. Both Reform and Restore want greatly relaxed gun laws, yet they also want to ban the kirpan, which has never killed anyone in Britain, where it takes a form that could not do so. Contrast that with the Orange Order, which marches with its three-foot longswords drawn, Wazir Khan rather than Guru Gobind Singh. Still, at least Reform does not promise Restoration at the hands of the Cromwell Club. Either you are laughing at that, or we are laughing at you.

Assuaging The Gilt

Perhaps it is because the first ever sovereign bond was issued by the Bank of England as recently as 1693, so 27 years after the discovery of gravity. In other advanced economies, the bond markets are to varying degrees important. But only in Britain are they given the anti-democratic constitutional status that, for all his misplaced hope in the Labour Party, Andy Beckett describes:

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

This is the assumption behind most of the debate about Labour and the bond markets. Pundits and politicians on the centre left as well as the right, and many mainstream economists and bond traders, all agree that whoever emerges as prime minister from the current undeclared leadership contest will have to design their spending policies according to what “the markets” – as they are called with reverent vagueness – find acceptable. As the once radical, now more conventional historian and journalist Paul Mason wrote recently: “Put simply, ‘defying the bond market’ is like trying to defy gravity.”

Such supposed reality checks have been delivered to Labour governments since at least the mid-1970s, when Jim Callaghan’s embattled administration was forced to agree to spending cuts in order to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Even Tony Blair’s much more secure premiership deferred nervously to free-market orthodoxies. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he told the 2005 Labour conference. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.”

Yet to see current capitalism as a force of nature, which cannot be held back or made to change course by governments in any way, is to underestimate all the effort that has been required to establish and sustain this economic model: busy conservative thinktanks, countless rightwing election campaigns, endless corporate lobbying. Free-market fatalism also requires a belief in economics as a set of simple laws – rather than a complex, contested, often inexact science, full of disagreements about the importance of and relationships between different economic interests and dynamics. As the late Samuel Brittan, one of the Financial Times’ most worldly commentators, once put it to me: “All economics is a construct.”

One of the most constructed – and therefore ideologically loaded – concepts applied to today’s UK economy and politics is “stability”. Broadly speaking, the financial markets understand it to mean a relatively long-serving government that keeps spending, debt and inflation under control. Such stability, the argument goes, allows businesses and investors to plan for the long term.

A more sceptical, less credulously pro-capitalist argument could also be made about this sort of stability, however: that some business interests actually want stability so they can behave in risky, destabilising ways and then be bailed out by the government if they get into trouble, as the banks were after the financial crisis. For some free marketeers, state intervention is always wrong – until suddenly it’s not.

Stability can also be defined in many ways the financial markets don’t think about much, if at all: social stability, climate stability, consistency in the provision of public services, cohesion between the nations of the UK, the continuation of traditional party politics and the current electoral system, and of faith in democracy itself. By all these measures, the market-pleasing austerity policies often followed by British governments since 2010 have produced not stability but the opposite.

Unless Labour takes an approach to governing less hemmed in by conventional economic thinking, this spiral of instability will probably deepen. As the investment analyst Cris Sholto Heaton writes in MoneyWeek: “What Britain needs is … pro-growth, pro-business policies combined with huge investment in physical and social infrastructure … to facilitate this and address the growing anger and despair that voters feel. Gilt [bond] investors seem averse to any hint of the latter [approach]. They appear not to fully appreciate that the consequences of the failing status quo will be much more populist governments.”

Arguably ever since Margaret Thatcher’s government replaced Callaghan’s, capitalism has often worked in Britain in a more short-term way than in much of Europe and Asia. For an unpopular Labour administration to persuade the financial markets and corporate establishment that much better-funded government will be better for the country – and also for the long-term prospects of many businesses – won’t be easy. It’s the perennial problem of left-leaning governments in the more conservative capitalist countries: how to convince instinctively suspicious, sometimes tribally rightwing business interests that a more functional state and a fairer economy will produce better economic outcomes.

Yet there are signs that Labour may be about to try. Andy Burnham argues that the UK has a sluggish economy and unhappy society because people are paying too much for essentials, often provided by privatised utilities that prioritise profits, shareholders and executive pay over delivering a functional or affordable service. His argument shows the influence of the thinktank Common Wealth and other well-informed leftwing critics of the economic status quo who contributed to Labour’s thinking during the iconoclastic shadow chancellorship of John McDonnell.

Until recently, that phase had seemingly been erased from the party’s history. But with Keir Starmer government’s initial economic orthodoxy having generated paltry gains and almost no political credit, and now being overtaken by events such as the inflationary war in the Middle East, even the usually cautious chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is sounding bolder. “I will not tolerate anyone exploiting a crisis to make a quick buck off the back of hard-working people,” she says, apparently condemning exactly the way many companies operate in this country. Meanwhile, the once thoroughly Blairite Wes Streeting writes: “The centre-left’s task is not simply to speak the language of markets more fluently than the Conservatives. It is to ensure markets serve society rather than dominate it.”

With the Tories and Reform UK promising yet more austerity, despite its unpopularity, a political space is opening up for Labour – one that its biggest rivals for the left-leaning vote, the Greens, are already exploring. It’s far too early to say that the domination of British politics by conservative economics is coming to an end. But that mindset is more vulnerable than for a long time.

The Evidence of Our Eyes and Ears

Nick Thomas-Symonds knows that no one believes him about the theft of his phone with all of his Peter Mandelson messages on it. The assertion of dominance is in making people pretend that they do. That is either also the case with regard to the autodelete function on Keir Starmer’s WhatsApp, or Starmer really is using it. Which would be worse? Pat McFadden agrees with Mandelson that most Labour MPs are contemptible and that Mandelson’s megarich, utterly depraved chums should not pay more tax to help the poor. The same McFadden claimed £40,000 in expenses to rent a constituency home next door to one that he already owned, on which he claimed mortgage interest expenses, and which he rented out. Well, of course. Now to talk about the really important things in the Mandelson Files.

Mandelson wrote by hand to David Lammy, begging to made Ambassador to Washington. He objected to having to list his foreign contacts, so an official emailed him to ask for a “handful of names” to “reassure the vetting team” in this “quite artificial” process. That was how it started. It ended with Starmer’s sacking of Mandelson because his account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been “less than totally candid”. On page 10 yesterday, the Government breezily admitted that it was withholding files lest they fell into the hands of the Metropolitan Police. And Paul Knaggs writes:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

There is a passage in Nineteen Eighty-Four, worn smooth by repetition but no less true for it, in which Orwell describes the Party’s most complete and final power: not merely the power to tell you what to think, but the power to decide what you are permitted to see.

Today’s Labour establishment has absorbed that lesson without needing to issue the order. They do not ask us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. They simply fail to provide enough of it.

The second tranche of the Mandelson files, over a thousand pages representing the largest government publication since the Chilcot report, has landed with the weight of a serious disclosure and the substance of a careful omission.

Large swathes are redacted, in significant part owing to the ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into Mandelson. Vetting documents are not included for the same reason. The stated justification is legitimate as far as it goes. A police investigation does not permit the casual release of material that could prejudice a prosecution.

But not all the gaps are explained by the detectives at Scotland Yard.

The Cabinet of Missing Messages 

The government admitted in the Commons that some messages may not have been recovered where devices were changed, or where disappearing messages had been switched on. That is a remarkable admission, delivered with the bland composure of a minister announcing a minor procedural update. Ministers, it turns out, were in the habit of using WhatsApp’s self-delete function while conducting government business. Whether they enabled that feature before or after a Humble Address became foreseeable is a question the Government did not volunteer to answer.

Then there is the larger absence.

The Cabinet Office wrote to Peter Mandelson via his solicitors, requesting information held on his personal phone. Peter Mandelson declined to comply. The Government has no further recourse.

Let that sit for a moment. Parliament voted to compel full disclosure. The Government committed itself, with what Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones described as an unprecedented exercise in transparency, to publish everything in scope. And the central figure in the affair simply said no, through his lawyers, and the Government acknowledged it could do nothing further.

This is not proof of wrongdoing. It should be stated plainly. A person is entitled to legal advice and to act upon it, and an ongoing criminal investigation provides legitimate grounds for caution. But the democratic accountability argument runs in precisely the opposite direction. The public was promised the full picture.

What it received was the picture that could be assembled from everything except Peter Mandelson’s personal phone. That is a locked drawer in the middle of the room.

The Absent Prime Minister

If the refusal by Mandelson to hand over his phone is the locked drawer, the next absence is the empty chair beside it.

For a controversy centred on a direct Prime Ministerial appointment, Keir Starmer’s own direct communications are conspicuous by their absence. The files are thick with the movements of the court: officials, advisers, private offices, special advisers, Cabinet Office processes, FCDO machinery, and the ever-present hum of Whitehall procedure. Morgan McSweeney appears. Ailsa Terry appears. Jonathan Powell appears. Civil servants appear. The machinery whirs and clicks.

But Starmer himself? Barely a footprint in the snow.

This matters because the appointment was his. The assurance to Parliament was his. The later withdrawal was his. Yet the documentary trail shows remarkably little direct correspondence from the Prime Minister’s own hand.

There may be innocent explanations. Prime Ministers do not personally handle every email. Much of modern government is conducted through advisers and private offices. No one should pretend that absence is proof of guilt, but there was plenty of contact before the appointment, personal messages during the 2024 general election, just none on record for the times in question.

But absence is not nothing either.

In politics, a missing file can speak as loudly as a leaked one. A gap can be a fact. A silence can be evidence of how power chooses to move, who keeps their hands clean, and whose fingerprints are allowed to appear on the paperwork, and Starmer, as former DPP, knows all about evidence, what is admissible and well…what isn’t there.

Perhaps all of this is coincidence: the disappearing messages, the unavailable devices, the personal phone refusal, the absent Prime Minister’s correspondence, the wrong address in the police report on McSweeney’s stolen phone. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about the weight of these coincidences taken together. What they cannot do is say they have been given the full picture. The man at the top of the appointment leaves the lightest footprint of all. In a thousand pages, Sir Keir Starmer is the quietest voice in the room.

McSweeney’s Committee Testimony vs. The Mandelson Files

What makes the locked drawer more conspicuous is what was found in the documents that were released.

The second tranche contains messages between Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, which reveal a relationship far more extensive, and far more intimate, than any official account had previously suggested. In July 2025, Mandelson emailed McSweeney suggesting the Prime Minister meet Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire then planning a London visit. In earlier exchanges, Mandelson described Number Ten as “beleaguered and bereft” and said it needed a “complete revamp,” assessments he was sharing freely with the man who ran the building he was criticising.

This is not the correspondence of a distant acquaintance. It is the language of a political operative who had a key to the back door and felt entirely comfortable using it.

It matters because of what McSweeney told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in April, under oath, on the public record.

McSweeney was keen to distance himself from Mandelson throughout that session, despite consistent reporting on their close relationship. He told the committee that Mandelson was not his hero. He chose the word “confidant” rather than “mentor,” as though the distinction between those two words might do significant load-bearing work. He claimed he did not know the full extent of Epstein’s relationship with Mandelson before recommending him for the Washington role, describing it as “a passing acquaintance that he regretted having and that he apologised for.”

The released files complicate that portrait considerably. The emails show a man offering unsolicited strategic advice about the Prime Minister’s schedule and the fundamental character of the government. Mandelson described himself, in one now-released note, as someone who would make sure Starmer “never regret” appointing him. He wrote in blue pen on House of Lords notepaper. He was lobbying for the job while publicly denying he was doing so. And the man at the centre of the appointment process was receiving emails of political substance from him while telling a parliamentary committee that their relationship was something rather less than it appears to have been.

McFadden Got You Watching The Other Card

So here is the position. The central figure has refused his phone. The Prime Minister has left almost no trace. And the one substantial body of correspondence that did survive, the McSweeney emails, flatly contradicts what its author told Parliament under oath. That is the scandal. That is where the appointment of an Epstein associate to the most prestigious posting in the British diplomatic service actually lives.

And what has the established press chosen to lead with?

Pat McFadden.

The detail that has dominated the coverage is a WhatsApp exchange between Mandelson and McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, in which McFadden complains about Labour MPs rebelling over welfare cuts. “Every meeting I have,” he wrote in May 2025, “is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.” It is a revealing line. McFadden’s contempt for colleagues trying to protect the people who voted Labour is plain, and those MPs and those voters deserve to see it written down.

But understand what has happened here. McFadden’s sneer has very little to do with the actual crux of the matter, which is how and why Mandelson was appointed, who vetted him, who vouched for him, and who is now declining to provide the evidence. The welfare exchange is a side conversation between two men, one of whom was not even the subject of the inquiry. And it has stolen the entire show.

The media needed its pound of flesh to make up for the loss of evidence. McFadden provided it. And while the cameras turned towards him, the locked drawer stayed locked.

Never mind the wrong question. McFadden is not the man behind the curtain. He’s the wrong direction entirely. He said the quiet part out loud, and for that he will take the week’s punishment in the press; he’s a big boy on a big salary, he can take it. But neither Starmer nor Mandelson ever says the quiet part out loud. That is the difference. They know which cards to show.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not need to be. It is simply how attention works when there is a void where the evidence should be. The press abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Denied the documents that matter, it reaches for the quote that is available, and the quote that is available is McFadden being unpleasant about the poor. The result is a story that feels like accountability while leading away from it.

Attention Control: Transparency And Containment

The lesson of the Mandelson files is not a government pressured into being transparent and accountable. It is one that shows the oldest tricks of power, misdirection and contempt, are still the tools of their trade. You do not need to chain a mind. You only need to guide its attention. Repeat the right words. Frame the right fear. Hold up one card while the real game is played elsewhere. Language, repetition and the controlled management of attention are the most advanced technologies we have; they are as ancient as they are modern, and they have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

McFadden’s contempt for Labour MPs defending the welfare state is a real scandal. But it is also a perfect card to hold up. It generates heat, it requires no further investigation, it confirms what people already suspect, and it leads nowhere near the locked drawer.

Real scandals rarely arrive conveniently. They do not come with signed confessions and cinematically placed smoking guns. They come, as this one has come, as fragments and omissions, procedural fog, carefully chosen silences, and a dozen separately explicable gaps that together form the shape of something withheld. No single document contains the cinematic smoking gun. There is no neat confession, no villainous flourish, no signed note reading: we knew and appointed him anyway.

But when the evidence is thin, when the Prime Minister’s direct correspondence is scarce, when the central figure refuses to provide his personal phone, and when the Government admits it cannot compel him, the public is entitled to ask whether this is transparency or containment.

The Party no longer needs to tell you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It can simply decide which evidence you are allowed to see. And when you point at the locked drawer in the middle of the room, it can remind you, with immaculate composure, that it has complied fully with every requirement placed upon it.

That, too, is a form of power. The oldest form, perhaps. Not the power to silence. The power to frame.

Watch which card they are holding up. Then ask what happened to the rest of the deck.

Transparency and disclosure are not the same thing. One is a process. The other is a result. This Government has mastered the first and avoided the second. The Mandelson files do not show us everything. That is precisely why they matter.

Bandit Country?

President Karol Nawrocki of Poland says that Ukraine's glorification of the "bandits and murderers" of the UPA makes it "not ready to be part of the European family", and thus unfit to join the EU.

Although Israel is equally critical, its capture of Beaufort Castle is not only a major symbolic assault on Lebanon's and the wider region's Christian and especially Catholic past and present, but also a major strategic capture north of the Litani, effectively laying claim to the whole of Lebanon. Those two aspects are intimately connected.

And those are just today, a day on which thousands more examples could be cited from around the world. In such a world as this, read the Mandelson Files and weep. But don't mourn. Organise.