Blow, Winds, And Crack Your Cheeks?

As the storm lashes, are those old fellas still at Drumcree? King Lear does not have a happy ending. And have they been informed that the Royal Confrater of the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls had approved the election of the Papal Confrater of the College of St George at St George’s Chapel, Windsor? The Royal Confrater had to be installed, meaning that he had to go to Rome and pray with the Papal Confrater, who will in turn have to be installed, again liturgically.

No doubt the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead looks forward to welcoming the Democratic Unionist Party, Traditional Unionist Voice, the Loyalist Communities Council, the Loyal Orange Institution, the Grand Royal Arch Purple Chapter of Ireland, the Imperial Grand Black Chapter of the British Commonwealth, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, and Jamie Bryson. All chanting “Not My King! Not My King!” while talking of UDI. That will be worth the television licence fee on its own.

After all, the alternative project has completely collapsed. Enoch Powell, Jim Molyneaux, David Trimble and Ian Paisley were all more than familiar with highly ambitious young men who were utterly convinced of themselves. Each of them had been one. Yet each of them in turn saw something particular in Jeffrey Donaldson. Whatever might that have been? Northern Irish politicians are surveilled up to their eyeballs both at home and in London, so the suggestion that “nobody knew” is unworthy of serious attention. Was Donaldson blackmailed first to take over the DUP and then to lead it into full compromise with Sinn Féin, itself riddled with touts? The full story will be more complicated than that. But it is quite clearly along those lines.

Who Writes The Sum?

Paul Knaggs writes:

In Gaza, Israeli intelligence officers had a word for the dead before they died. NAZA is an acronym for nezek agavi, Hebrew for collateral damage: the estimated number of civilians the Israeli military considered acceptable to kill. Twenty NAZA meant up to 20 civilian deaths approved to eliminate a single target. For one high-value target, a figure of 500 was approved. Nobody said “women and children”. They said a number, and then they pressed a button.

That word is now the title of a film. NAZA, written and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, opened in British cinemas on 16 October. It is built from interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, describing their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes. Naomi Klein watched it, and then recorded a short video for her Substack with a message the technology industry would rather we did not hear.

We keep being told to fear the day artificial intelligence slips its leash. Klein’s answer is blunt: it never needed to. “It isn’t rogue,” she says. “It hasn’t gone rogue.” The speculative chatter about killer robots is, in her words, “an elaborate distraction” from crimes already committed and still being committed. What makes her argument powerful is what she refuses to blame. “I’m not saying that it’s the technology that’s to blame,” she says. The danger lies in the marriage of a powerful tool with an ideology that has already decided some lives count for less.

A PROBABILITY, NOT A PERSON 

The film’s sources describe how that marriage works in practice. Intelligence officers detail an AI-assisted system known as Lavender, which identified people for assassination using data gathered from thousands of hacked mobile phones. Klein puts it precisely: targets were generated “based on data patterns, not based on evidence”. A suspicion becomes a score; a score becomes a building; a building becomes rubble with a family inside it.

The Israeli military rejects this account, and its response deserves to be stated fairly. It insists that AI does not decide whether a person or object becomes a target, nor whether a target is struck, and that appearing in Lavender does not authorise a strike. The Guardian, which produced the film, says it stands fully behind it, and points out that the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press have also confirmed the use of AI systems and the loosening of civilian safeguards.

But notice what the denial concedes. Nobody disputes that the database exists, or that civilian deaths were priced in advance. The argument is over how many, and how much human judgement stood between the machine’s suggestion and the bomb. That gap is the whole story. One interviewee reaches for the oldest alibi in the book: “My role is entirely technical,” he says.

THE COMPANY IN THE ROOM

Klein demands the names of the technology firms behind this machinery. One name already sits on the public record. In January 2024 Palantir agreed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defence, and its executive vice president Josh Harris told Bloomberg that both sides had agreed to harness Palantir’s technology “in support of war-related missions”. Bloomberg noted that Palantir had recently introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform, AIP, a decision system able to analyse enemy targets and propose battle plans.

To be exact about it: Palantir has denied developing, in whole or in part, the automated targeting systems used by the Israeli military in Gaza. Lavender is not proven to be its product. But a company that publicly volunteered its technology for a war now under examination for genocide is not a neutral supplier of spreadsheets. It chose a side, and said so.

The then UK Defence Secretary John Healey and Palantir CEO Alex Karp signed a £1.5 billion investment commitment in the UK. And that company is inside our health service. In November 2023 NHS England awarded Palantir the £330 million contract to run its Federated Data Platform. More than half of English NHS trusts now use it. The NHS points out that the contract bars Palantir from commercialising or marketing NHS data, even in anonymised form, and that the platform manages waiting lists and theatre schedules, not life and death. Fair enough, today. The question is not what the software does this year. It is who owns the machinery of knowing everything about every patient, and whose values will steer it when the money runs short.

THE OLD ARITHMETIC

We do not have to imagine how a British state might use an algorithm against the vulnerable. It already has. A Department for Work and Pensions fairness analysis in February 2024 found a “statistically significant outcome disparity” in the machine-learning system used to vet universal credit claims for fraud, with bias by age, disability, marital status and nationality. Claimants were not told, because the department decided they “do not need to know”. The assurance was that a human made the final decision. The humans of Gaza’s targeting rooms made final decisions too.

So the fear in this article is not science fiction. It is history waiting for better software. The idea that a disabled person is a cost to be calculated was once mainstream policy across the civilised world. In 1927 the United States Supreme Court upheld forced sterilisation in Buck v Bell. Nazi Germany’s 1933 sterilisation law put roughly 400,000 people under the knife, and its propaganda posters told citizens how many Reichsmarks a hereditarily ill person cost the national community over a lifetime. From there it was a short administrative step to Aktion T4 and the murder of disabled people in their tens of thousands, by doctors filling in forms. Britain had its own eugenic enthusiasts, many of them respectable progressives who spoke the language of efficiency.

None of them needed a computer. What a computer offers is the thing they lacked: scale, speed, and the comforting fiction that nobody in particular decided anything. Feed a model the logic of austerity, tell it to minimise lifetime cost, hand it genomic data and disability records, and it will produce a recommendation with perfect neutrality. The cruelty will already be in the question.

THE WORST USE COMES FIRST

None of this should surprise us, and nothing in it is new. Bad men will always find the cruellest use for a new tool, and they usually find it first. The first great battlefield use of industrial chemistry was chlorine gas, released over the trenches at Ypres in 1915. The first public demonstration of nuclear fission erased Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The motor car killed thousands on British roads before anyone thought to make drivers take a test, which only arrived in 1935.

In each case, the horror came first and the thinking came after. The Geneva Protocol banned gas warfare in 1925. The Non-Proliferation Treaty tried to contain the bomb. The driving test, the seatbelt and the breathalyser turned the car from a menace into something we hardly think about. Societies do learn. Technologies that began as instruments of death have become, under law and democratic control, instruments of ordinary life.

But the learning has always been paid for in lives, and bad men are only half the story. Gas did not release itself, and the men who released it did not think of themselves as monsters. They were following procedure. The soldier in NAZA who says his role was “entirely technical” is the most dangerous figure in the film, because he is the most ordinary. Evil needs a few people to give the orders and many more to feel they are only doing their jobs. Artificial intelligence is the most powerful tool yet for producing that feeling. Following orders excused nothing at Nuremberg. Following an algorithm must excuse nothing now.

THIS TIME, THE LAW MUST COME BEFORE THE BODIES 

That is why the Nuremberg tribunals refused to accept that following orders excuses anything, and why we must now establish, in law, that following an algorithm excuses nothing either. We have the advantage no earlier generation had: we know the pattern. We have seen what the first use looks like, in Gaza, and we have seen the smaller trial runs closer to home, in a welfare algorithm that singled out disabled people while telling them nothing.

The first test is close at hand. A break clause allows the government to stop Palantir’s NHS contract renewing beyond March 2027, a ministerial decision is due by December, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham has not said what he will do. He should use it and bring the health service’s data infrastructure into public ownership, answerable to Parliament. No company with an undisclosed role in an alleged genocide should hold a British public contract. No decision about a person’s benefits, treatment or entitlement should be made by an automated system without a named human being legally responsible for it. Every algorithm the state uses on its citizens should be published, audited and open to challenge in court.

Klein is right that the decisions remain human. So must the responsibility, and so must the punishment. Every new technology has been used at its worst before it was used at its best; the only choice we have is how many people pay for the lesson. The machine will never go rogue. It will simply do the sum it is given, and the only question that has ever mattered is who writes the sum.

An Overt Political Posture

According to the Bell Report and thus the Government, there is antisemitism, and then there is mere “general racism”. The first black woman ever elected to the House of Commons is now its longest-serving female member. But the Labour Party has suspended her twice for having pointed out that it was operating a hierarchy of racism. Yet the Labour Government has just adopted a 27-point plan to give effect to its acceptance of the specialness and superiority of antisemitism, itself defined in line with the infamous IHRA Definition while violating it by conflating Jews with Israel. Keir Starmer commissioned Sir David Bell to produce this to order for internal Labour factional reasons, but his smell and spirit linger on.

Considering how much else has happened in human history, or even just how much else happened during the Second World War, then how much more teaching of the Holocaust could anyone possibly want, since presumably the call is not for the inclusion of, for example, the experience of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people, whose children remain the worst treated on ethnic grounds by the education system? Education is not a politically neutral act, and those bemoaning bias in it do not want it to be. They just want it to agree with them, on the accurate or inaccurate assumption that it used to.

If you polled black or Asian pupils about being victims of racism at school, then you would not find two in five who said that they never had been. You would not find one. I do not mean one in five. I do not mean one per cent. You would not find one person. Yet as when three non-fatal stabbings led to a COBRA meeting because two of the three victims were Jewish, this is somehow a national emergency while the far bigger problem is just life, suck it up, get on with it. And 60 per cent of Jewish schoolchildren supposedly experience antisemitism at school, while it is not in dispute that only 30 per cent of them do not go to Jewish schools. Take as long as you need.

Moreover, that figure of three in five comes from a survey of 5000 children, 92 of them Jewish. Those 92 were asked if they had personally experienced antisemitism at school. 70 responded, of whom 29 said yes, less than one third of those asked. 12 per cent of respondents said that antisemitism was a problem at their school, with two per cent saying that it was a big problem. All of this, including an extra seven million pounds of public money, is because of the self-reported experience of 29 people. As Ralph Leonard writes:

The British government has announced that it has accepted all 27 recommendations made in a review by Sir David Bell on antisemitism in schools and colleges in England. These include improving Holocaust education, encouraging schools to adopt the IHRA definition, and making sure teachers maintain political impartiality. Bell also calls for the recognition of antisemitism as a “distinct form of hatred”.

There is no question that antisemitism is a growing problem in the UK. In the first half of this year alone, the number of reported antisemitic incidents was up by one fifth. Yet the report’s recommendations risk leading to a situation where children are reluctant to freely express their views for fear of being accused of bigotry. The impact of the IHRA definition in particular could make classrooms sanitised environments, where the thorny political questions of the day — particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict — are never brought up lest anyone be offended.

While the IHRA definition states that criticism of the state of Israel, similar to that levelled against any other country, cannot be treated as antisemitism, it also regards “denying Jewish people’s right to self-determination” as an example of antisemitism. This could leave young people who describe themselves as “anti-Zionist”, or who advocate for a one-state solution between Israel and Palestine with equal rights for all, being accused of racism.

Teachers can and should provide an environment for students to discuss and argue these questions with one another without fear of being accused of prejudice. Let’s take the question of Gaza. Many young people sincerely believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and some draw comparisons with the Holocaust. The IHRA definition of antisemitism identifies comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazi Germany as examples of antisemitism. Such comparisons are generally grossly hyperbolic, tendentious and emotionally manipulative. But when a student makes one, it is often out of ignorance rather than malice.

These historical comparisons ought to be assessed on evidence, meaning and context — and not automatically assumed to be bigoted, especially when coming from young students. The important point is: are children arriving at their views through their own intellectual reasoning? Or because they are being politically pressured to view an issue a certain way?

Bell is right to suggest that teachers shouldn’t impose their political views on young students or use the classroom to grandstand for a “cause”. Consistency, though, is important. Education Secretary Lucy Powell has declared that schools are not a place for “making protests and statements about geopolitical events”. But just last year, the Department for Education released videos of former education secretary Bridget Phillipson and Keir Starmer sitting alongside pupils waving Ukrainian flags during a school visit. Considering that Britain’s support for Ukraine is most definitely an overt political posture, the recommendations now open a clear field for students to accuse the government of hypocrisy.

The problem of antisemitism is real. Jewish children should not be abused or bullied, and the Israel-Palestine conflict shouldn’t be used as a rationalisation. These two things need to be disaggregated. However, the school climate can only be detoxified if students have an environment where they can learn, think, and work through these questions for themselves. Students might just understand how little they actually know, which is the beginning of becoming an educated person.

Folk Left With The Faith To Fight

Well, the spooks had to be doing something while they were failing to notice Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean or Kim Philby. Good chaps, you see. Right schools and all that. Unlike Aneurin Bevan. The only two British MPs ever known to have been on the books of any Eastern Bloc country, and in both cases it was Czechoslovakia, were the conventionally Hard Right Conservative Ray Mawby, and John Stonehouse, who still has a reasonable claim to have been the most right-wing Labour MP ever, again including from the point of view that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior.

Not that either of them did anything like the practical damage of Sam Watson, after whom a room in the Knesset building is named, who unless I am very much mistaken never served in uniform, and who remains reviled for his long tenure as General Secretary of the Durham Miners' Association. In what was then that powerful position in the life of the nation, he acted as an unofficial Israeli Ambassador, he conspired to have Bevan expelled from the Labour Party, he collaborated with the National Coal Board to close pits, he opposed all local strikes, he instructed local officials to support management over sackings, and accordingly he left the Durham miners with the lowest pay in the country until the strikes of 1972 and 1974, after his death. Why did they not get rid of him? He was backed by Israeli, and American, muscle, and that meant muscle.

In that spirit today is Wes Streeting, with his ever-escalating supply of military assistance to a Saudi Arabia that was already armed to the teeth and where he himself would face capital punishment for his homosexuality. If the threat to Britain really is in the High North, then why are we sending Typhoon fighter jets, and then who knows what else, to the Arabian Peninsula instead? If the threat is to our undersea cables, then why are we spending three billion pounds per year on arming the country that has already blown up three of the four Nord Stream pipelines? If we are arming Saudi Arabia, which is arming the Sudanese Armed Forces, then why are we also arming the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the Rapid Support Forces among whom British-made equipment has been found during the RSF's war with the Saudi-armed SAF? We have been arming the RSF via the Emiratis since long before their erstwhile Governor of Greater Manchester became Prime Minister. If there were to be a problem with that now, then that would be because Andy Burnham was not the good enough chap from a right enough school that Keir Starmer was.

Starmer has been named as a core participant in the rape gangs inquiry. He was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: "He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales." Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file.

But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made it. Starmer's "experience" as DPP was held up by his supporters as his qualification to be Prime Minister. Yet now they insist that it was a purely titular headship such as might have been given on an unpaid basis to a minor member of the Royal Family. Or, in his heyday, to Jimmy Savile.

The Britain of Savile, Esther Rantzen and Margaret Thatcher became the Britain of Starmer's appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington, and now of intimidatory letters to sitting MPs including Jeremy Corbyn (who is a Privy Counsellor), Clive Lewis, Rachael Maskell and Shockat Adam from the Palantir of another close associate of Jeffrey Epstein's, Peter Thiel, the man who runs JD Vance. Already, Palantir has effectively integrated the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, at least seven Police Forces, and the United Kingdom's customs data, with Donald Trump's ICE and with the Israeli Defense Forces, just as that same NHS was being discredited by the discrediting of its long-dead founder, Aneurin Bevan. Think on.

General Principle

Peter Hitchens writes:

Is Britain becoming an army with a country, instead of a country with an army? Who is actually making national policy on Ukraine and war in general? The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, delivered an astounding speech to soldiers last week. He said, as if he were prime minister: ‘Our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security.’ And then he told the soldiers: ‘Ultimately, we’re going to need them to back us, to back you, to do the one thing that you do, that nobody else gets to do, and that is to take the fight to the enemy.’

It was surely not his job to put the case for sacrifices by the voting public. Nor was it for him to tell politicians to explain this to the public. Whatever you may think about the Ukraine issue, is this not the wrong way around? Surely politicians tell generals what to do? Generals, spies and chiefs of the secret police (for that is what MI5 is, I’m afraid) have queued up in recent years to make militant speeches about the Russia threat and the necessity of supporting Ukraine. But support actually means a sustained effort to stoke and prolong the Ukraine war.

Look carefully at that conflict over the past two years and you will notice the outcome, a change from a grinding land war into an increasingly costly and bloody exchange of missiles and drones, much of it deep in Russian territory. Whether you like this policy or not, is it proper for public servants to promote it? Until quite recently, all these people would have been bound by a rule of silence. I have heard from reliable sources that Roland Walker is a pleasant, intelligent and likeable person. And he has a fine record as soldier and commander. But he is not a minister of the crown. He holds no elected office. His duty is to ensure that this country has an effective army.

Other sorts of nation, generally despotisms, like to install generals as defence ministers. We do not do that here, because the principle of civilian control of the military is a key part of the rule of law. Yet the general’s speech was blatantly political. It was surely designed to increase the fear of approaching war and make the populace more war-minded. I would be glad to have a debate about these issues in parliament, in which both sides were for once fairly represented, but there is none. Dissent is dismissed as treachery. Parliament, the BBC and almost all the print media are deserts of conformity on this topic. Even apparently independent minds, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, join in the general Ukraine worship. The question of how Britain benefits from stoking war with Russia is never debated.

What remains of the left, once sceptical of war, has now begun to press its trouser creases and polish its marching boots, ready for combat with Moscow [you need to get out more]. Dame Emily Thornberry, a prominent Labour MP and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said a wondrous thing during a recent visit by German politicians. She opined that Germany ‘is and always has been a key ally’. I have met Dame Emily, and I would not be surprised by anything she says. Yet this remark illustrates something very important about modern Britain. I know that a lot of people find the endless Struggle for Mastery in Europe a bit of a strain, striving to tell their Talleyrand from their Metternich, or the Aare from the Elbe. As for the Ukrainian hero Stepan Bandera, best not even speak his controversial name.

Yet every boy in the land was until quite recently brought up on the great 1939-45 conflict with Germany. We bent over our lurid little volumes of the War Picture Library [that was not ‘quite recently’], in which rock-fisted British heroes yelled ‘Eat lead, Fritz!’ at cringing Krauts in coal-scuttle helmets, who cried – ‘Aaaaargh!’ as they died. I believe English football crowds, where German teams are involved, are still heard to chant ‘Two world wars, one World Cup!’ The Russians, by contrast, were our vital if unlovable allies. We sent them a beautiful hand-crafted sword to commemorate their victory at Stalingrad. My late father risked his life on the Murmansk convoys, taking tanks and guns to Stalin. I have his campaign medal.

It’s easy to work out when this began to change. But is there any enthusiasm for our new alignment, or any understanding of it? The old balance in Europe has now been so totally forgotten that the actual chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee thinks Germany has ‘always’ been our ally. The reality is that the wiring of diplomacy in Europe has now been reversed. The European Union has become the continuation of Germany by other, more tactful, means. And the EU and its cousin Nato are now our friends. Russia, our ally in 1914 and 1941, is now mysteriously our enemy. Most of the grimmest battlefields of Europe’s gory 20th century, the Balkans, Ukraine, the Baltic coast and the Caucasus, are alive again, ready to receive new corpses or already doing so.

In general, I think our decision to go to war in 1914 on the Russian side (or anyone else’s) was a grave mistake which ruined us and wrecked Europe. But in 1914 our home islands were rich and secured by a mighty navy. The years since have proved Adam Smith’s maxim that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. But now there is not much left. Our navy is a melancholy remnant. We are sunk in debt. Why do we want this new war? If there are any intelligent and responsible people in our governing classes, perhaps they could speak up for wisdom, experience and our national future. But no generals, please.

Its Solutions Are Not Exactly Credible

The report into antisemitism is schools is demolished in the videos here, here and here, while Ricky D. Hale writes:

As expected, the Labour government has accepted 27 recommendations of a report into antisemitism in British schools. The report suggests that antisemitism is a major problem, but its solutions are not exactly credible. They focus on killing solidarity with Palestinians, and re-educating children to make them pro-Israel.

A key argument for this moral panic is that three out of five Jewish pupils have experienced antisemitism in schools. However, that figure comes from a survey of 5,000 kids, only 92 of who were Jewish. That’s right, the sample size was just 92!

Those 92 kids were asked if they’d personally experienced antisemitism at school and only 70 responded. Twenty-nine said yes—that’s less than one in three of those asked! Only 12% of the kids who responded said they felt antisemitism was a problem at their school and only 2% said it was a big problem.

You can count the number of kids who felt antisemitism was a problem at their school with your fingers. Yet the government decided that means antisemitism must be put into its own special category of racism and treated more seriously than the others.

To make matters worse, the report did not bother asking Muslim kids about their experience of racism. This is presumably because it would undermine the narrative by showing they are far more likely to be victims of hate.

One figure that has been pushed by the BBC is that Jews are nine times more likely to experience racism than Muslims. However, that figure is bullshit. The Home Office says the most reliable data comes from the Crime Survey for England and Wales. Guess what? It shows that Muslims are twice as likely to be victims of hate crimes than Jews.

You might wonder how the report could get it so badly wrong. Well, let’s take a look at the author, Sir David Bell. He sits on the council of the Academic Group for the Study of Israel and the Middle East—a charity whose main focus is to oppose BDS.

Despite this potential conflict of interests, the media has made no attempt to scrutinise Bell’s report. Instead it has used it as proof that antisemitism belongs at the top of a racism hierarchy. It’s essential we challenge this framing because the proposed measures will hurt solidarity with Palestinians.

The report is supposed to be about antisemitism, but it mentions Israel and Gaza dozens of times. It suggests that Palestinian flags and badges contribute towards a hostile environment for Jewish kids and that schools should consider their dress codes accordingly.

Palestinian flags are not antisemitic and banning them because they make Zionists feel uncomfortable would be absurd. We should be teaching kids that a genocide is taking place and the correct moral position is to oppose it. Instead the report wants neutrality on genocide.

It recommends that schools have balanced, impartial discussions “particularly those relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict and contemporary antisemitism.” It also suggests schools should adopt the IHRA guidelines (which conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism) and kids should be trained to confront antisemitism online [how, exactly, if they are to be banned from social media?].

If you are serious about tackling antisemitism, you do not recommend a range of measures to suppress support for Palestine and boost sympathy for Israel.

Principal Beneficiary?

Rowena Mason writes:

Nigel Farage’s newest billionaire donor was in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation under the authority of the country’s supreme leader, raising questions about his past dealings with the hardline republic. Hossein Ghandehari, also called Sasan, was little known in the UK until he pledged to give millions to Reform UK this summer and donated £50,000 to Farage to cover the cost of two passes for the Davos World Economic Forum. He has said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK in order to make “regular payments” of more than “one or two million” to the party.

The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman, who says he runs a $10bn (£7bn) fund called HP Trust, has declined to give details about how his family made its money beyond saying the fund owns assets in Europe and North America. Now, a French arbitration decision unearthed by the Guardian sheds some light on Ghandehari’s past dealings with Iranian state-linked entities between 2013 and 2016. It also reveals Ghandehari’s further Iranian business links to another Reform UK donor, John Richard Simpson, an administration professional and churchwarden from Potters Bar, north of London. Simpson’s design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape, counts the Ghandehari family as a client and gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year. Farage has been highly critical of Iran over the past year, and in March accused it of being a bigger danger to the UK than Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. 

The French judgment reveals that Ghandehari was the major investor behind a deal to supply and build a fibre-optic cable to carry telecoms traffic across Iran in a joint venture with a state-linked Iranian partner. The businessman’s HP Trust was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which took a 49% stake in the venture, called Omran Razavi International Co, in 2015. The other 51% of the venture was owned by Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion pound religious foundation in Iran’s second city of Mashhad. AQR’s leader at the time was ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, who was appointed custodian of the foundation by the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, and served from the 1979 revolution until his death in 2016. Vaez Tabasi had been an ally of some reformers but remained close to the next supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and, according to the BBC, was reported by state media in 2009 to have said of opposition protest movements that those behind “sedition” in the country were “enemies of god” who deserved to be executed under sharia law.

The joint venture ended in about 2016, with the Ghandehari-backed entities being pushed out of the deal as a hardliner was appointed to replace Vaez Tabasi. The US imposed sanctions on AQR in 2021, saying it controlled “large swaths of the Iranian economy, including assets expropriated from political dissidents and religious minorities, to the benefit of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian government officials”. It describes it as a bonyad, one of the “opaque, quasi-official organisations generally controlled by current and former government officials and clerics that report directly to the supreme leader”. Ghandehari’s lawyers said it would be misleading to characterise him as “working with Iran” without the context that, after 2016, he was targeted by Iran’s supreme national security council with the false allegation that he was working with hostile western powers. They also said his involvement was intended to promote political change through greater access to information, which he believed was why the US and French authorities authorised the project. 

Tom Keatinge, the director of the Centre for Finance and Security at Rusi, the foreign affairs thinktank, said dealing with Iran “has always been a risky business as a financial institution because of this blurring between kind of state and the private sector. The private sector is not free to operate. It’s just very hard to operate in that country without touching a live rail.” He said there was clearly a range of positions among ayatollahs but it would be “pretty difficult to operate in an industry like telecoms” without the acceptance of the core leadership. The judgment also revealed that, until 2016, Ghandehari’s HP Trust was the owner of Orico General Trading LLC, which was contracted to supply telecoms equipment from France’s Alcatel-Lucent and transport it from Dubai to Iran. After 2016, this company was transferred to Simpson, the administration professional, who was responsible for winding down Orico’s operations and taking hundreds of staff out of the region.

Simpson told The Guardian he acquired the company after Iranian extremists took over AQR, when the project’s assets were seized and those involved faced political persecution on national security grounds, including accusations of working for hostile western governments. He said his plan was to wind down the business, adding that he carried out detailed checks before acquiring Orico. Ghandehari’s lawyers said AQR was independent and respected, and therefore the only viable choice for a joint venture in Iran. They said Ghandehari had never met Vaez Tabasi and that he did not regard him as an advocate for freedom or human rights but had believed him to be the only force in the Iranian hierarchy capable of holding back the hardliners in order for the project to go ahead.

The original contract for the deal was awarded to the Omran consortium in 2012 by the Iranian state-owned Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran. According to Iranian corporate filings, Omran Razavi International Co also owned stakes in two majority state-owned banks, Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat, in 2013. Both were subject to sanctions over involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme at that point. Ghandehari’s lawyers said Omran Razavi disposed of the small stakes in the banks before HP Trust’s Ori Group signed its agreement for a 49% stake in the venture in December 2014. They added that the deal was fully approved by authorities in France and the US.

In 2016, AQR took over the whole of the joint venture. Around the same time, the project’s chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Iran’s infamous Evin prison, serving an 18-year sentence. Ghandehari and Noory are both named on leaked judicial papers published by the hacktivist group Edaalat Ali as having being under investigation in Iran after the deal collapsed. Ghandehari’s lawyers say he first became aware of the “bogus allegations” during French court proceedings and that the intelligence services had not given him any further details. Ghandehari’s representatives said fabricating financial and social cases against its targets to discredit them was part of the Iranian regime’s playbook and had been widely documented and recognised by western governments, human rights organisations and independent journalists. Ghandehari’s lawyers said he had not been to Iran for 30 years and his wealth had no connection to the country, since his ancestral property and assets were confiscated in 2016.

Farage has been highly critical of Iran’s government this year, supporting Donald Trump’s war against it, and attending a protest outside the Iranian embassy with pro-democracy activists in the spring. Last week he warned about Iranian agents entering the UK via small boats across the Channel. In a joint interview with Farage and Ghandehari in July, the Telegraph described Ghandehari’s business deal in Iran without mentioning its connections to Iranian regime-linked companies. It described it as a project to bring access to high-speed internet to Iran that would help drive reform, but that it later went wrong and resulted in Ghandehari’s assets being confiscated.

It is still not clear how Ghandehari and his family have built up their extraordinary wealth. His fortune is said to have gone from an estimated $2bn, when his late mother bought a property on London’s “billionaire’s row” in 2008, to a reported $10bn now. In a recent court case over a Picasso painting, Ghandehari was asked to provide proof that he could afford £1.5m in legal costs. His lawyers pointed only to a brochure from his Davos trip with Farage, with a description that he controls a trust with a “collective investment value in excess of $10bn”. At one point, he offered a letter from a “partner in a leading accountancy firm” confirming he was the principal beneficiary of HP Trust, and drawing an annual income from it. However, this was later withdrawn, as Ghandehari decided he did not want its contents to enter the public domain.