Royally Distracted?

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should convert to Catholicism, then there would be no need of legislation to remove him from the line of succession. Lucky us, that we run no risk of ever being caught up in any of this. The King has seven descendants, and there will be more to come, so the removal of his brother from eighth place is pure theatre. Like the arrest, which is supposed to be made only if a voluntary interview were impractical. In this case, how would it have been?

Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper remains in office despite having unlawfully proscribed Palestine Action, thus ruining people’s lives while wreaking havoc in the criminal justice system. John Healey remains in office despite having lied to Parliament that Britain faced legal challenges over the Chagos Islands. Steve Reed remains in office despite the cancelled and uncancelled local elections, which ended in his not contesting that he, too, had acted unlawfully. Josh Simons remains in office despite having falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Keir Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, had been Russian spies, and then having lied about it when he had been caught out. And Peter Mandelson remains as free as a bird.

Advance and Restore

If Nigel Farage thought that Matt Goodwin were even close to winning Gorton and Denton, then he would be there this weekend, and not in the Indian Ocean. Goodwin may yet lose by fewer votes than had been taken by Nick Buckley, who was Advance UK at Close of Nominations, since that was before Restore Britain had become a political party. Restore is growing like Topsy, but it seems to be made up overwhelmingly of very young men who were immensely active online. They are ruining their careers, by no means only in politics.

On Wednesday, North Northamptonshire Councillors Darren Rance and Jack Goncalvez defected to Restore from Reform UK. But by Friday morning, Councillor Rance professed to have been “bombarded with desperate messages from Restore” and to have joined “reluctantly”, only to discover, “From messages I received from both Restore supporters and those opposed, it’s clear that what this organisation stands for is far more sinister than I first thought.” Reform’s Group Leader, Councillor Martin Griffiths, graciously took him back. Expect a lot more of this. Some of us have seen it all before.

Goodwin is banging on that the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, drives a car. She is a plumber and a trainee plasterer, so of course she does. But having done the Green Party a favour that will never be reciprocated, the Workers Party, which took 10.3 per cent of the vote at Gorton and Denton in 2024, and the closely allied Independent Left need to take on the incompatibility of Green anti-car sentiment with the petrolhead culture of British South Asians. Last month, the Court of Appeal struck down Lutfur Rahman’s attempt to implement his election promise to remove three Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in Tower Hamlets. For good or ill, that is where the votes are.

For well over 20 years, there have been expressions of incomprehension at the perfectly logical alliance between a Left that was thoroughly anti-war, and anti-war Muslims who so agreed with left-wing economic policies that they had overwhelming voted Labour long before Tony Blair came along. But the Greens support the inexorable logic of Thatcherism in such forms as drug legalisation, gender self-identification, “sex work”, assisted suicide, unrestricted immigration, re-joining the EU, the war in Ukraine, and all sorts of other terrible things. Do they regret the defeat of the miners in 1985? That is a yes-no question, and the Greens should always be asked it.

This side of a Zarah Sultana takeover of Your Party, the Greens are the only British party in any significant alignment with the political philosophy of Noam Chomsky, making them as much a part of the Epstein Class as the centrists, the right-wing populists, and the right-wing elitists. George Galloway and the Morning Star may have endorsed them this once. But from Friday onwards, they need to take their gloves off. Some of us have never put ours on.

We March On

Has the latest adventure of Rupert Lowe elicited any comment from Harry Redknapp? And Matt Goodwin has been endorsed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, so would his election at Gorton and Denton prompt from Keir Starmer anything like the Prime Ministerial statement on the steps of Downing Street that the lifelong Southampton fan Rishi Sunak made when George Galloway won Rochdale? If not, why not?

8,576 votes for Hannah Spencer of the Green Party would match the combined Green and Workers Party total from 2024. If she managed that, and she would need more than that to win, then the Greens would once again be in the debt of the Workers Party and of the closely allied Independent Left, having taken more votes than the margins of victory of Wes Streeting over Leanne Mohamad, of Shabana Mahmood over Akhmed Yakoob, and of Jess Phillips over Jody McIntyre. The Green Party rightly contests every seat on principle, since its supporters are entitled to a candidate. Those voters are not the only ones.

The Most Dangerous Prime Minister Ever

Jody McIntyre writes:

Last night, I was contacted by a former roommate of Keir Starmer. After our conversation, I now believe that he is the most dangerous Prime Minister Britain has ever had. Here’s what he told me. My source lived with Starmer whilst attending Oxford University in the 1980s. At the time, Starmer was involved with the Militant Tendency, an “authoritarian” Marxist group within the Labour Party, even inviting expelled Liverpool councillor Derek Hatton to give a speech. However, my source claims that he found it “surprisingly easy” to “recruit” Starmer to his own Trotskyist group, which was “credibly rumoured to be financed by [Libyan leader] Gaddafi”. He added: “Recent weeks make me think my most conspirational suspicions might not be off.”

Starmer’s former roommate explained that “undercover police officers were around Keir from a young age”. “The Spycop inquiry revealed that there was an undercover officer in every organisation at the time, so now we have to ask: who was ours?” My source believes that the British intelligence link could be an explanation for “how devoid of all political spine he is”. Starmer’s driver and document handler during the McLibel case was outed as a police asset who got into a sexual relationship with one of the defendants. “But,” Starmer’s former roommate told me, “others think he was turned later, when he joined the Trilateral Commission.”

The Trilateral Commission was created in the 1970s by US billionaire David Rockefeller. Starmer is the ONLY person to have joined as a sitting British MP. Rockefeller set up the Trilateral Commission to deal with “an excess of democracy”. Starmer joined whilst serving as Shadow Brexit Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson were also members. The Trilateral Commission also includes Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, who has been wooed by several members of the Starmer administration, including Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner. Palantir, another US giant, has won multi-million government contracts “without competitive tender”.

My source claims that Starmer is “not leading anything”. But since the fall of key allies Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson, Starmer is attempting to reassert his position with two new appointments: Antonia Romeo as Cabinet Secretary, and Margaret Hodge at OFCOM. Romeo met with Palantir’s UK director Louis Mosley in April 2019 and then introduced him to David Prior, chair of NHS England. A year later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the NHS announced that Palantir would be “part of the country’s response”, issuing an “emergency contract”.

Romeo’s appointment has been condemned by her former colleagues, who formally accused her of bullying behaviour whilst she was working as a diplomat in New York. One said: “The many people she bullied and intimidated, most of them women, will now feel failed for a second time.” Starmer’s former roommate explained: “Keir has this ability to not have any conviction.” Here, his new pick for Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the country, is photographed smiling alongside serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.

Of course, this is not the first time Starmer has promoted the associates of sexual predators. Peter Mandelson, the “best pal” of notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was made US ambassador. Matthew Doyle, a friend of convicted paedophile Sean Morton, was given a life peerage. In September 2021, Starmer said that he “couldn’t believe” that 98% of sexual assault cases did not lead to charges, and that the figure “must change”. Starmer was head of the CPS for five years, responsible for “making independent charging decisions for the public”.

Another Starmer pick, Margaret Hodge, is about to be appointed as head of OFCOM. The head of OFCOM is responsible for regulating media, telecoms, and postal services. Hodge, an old friend of Peter Mandelson, would also be in charge of implementing the Online Safety Act. In the 1980s, whilst head of Islington Council, Hodge dismissed and ignored claims of a paedophile ring operating in children’s homes under her watch. She was later appointed as the Labour government’s Minister for Children. Now, she will be in charge of what you can see online. McSweeney’s 2008-10 campaign to get Hodge re-elected for Labour was supported by “Hope not Hate”. In 2022, Hope not Hate’s Political Adviser Liron Velleman gave evidence at the committee stage of the Online Safety Bill. He is now a convicted paedophile.

Starmer is battling to survive the fallout from his appointment of Epstein-informant Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. Starmer made Kevan Jones a Labour peer and then appointed him to the Intelligence and Security Committee. Jones will decide which Mandelson files are released. The British Prime Minister is a danger to the country, but he does not have long left in power. My investigations into McSweeney were read more than 20 million times. Now, he’s been forced out of office. Let’s ensure Starmer is next to go.

The New Risk

If there were to be a by-election at Makerfield, then let us hope that Labour would not have the wit to field Andy Burnham. Its sitting MP is the Minister for Digital ID, having falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Keir Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, were Russian spies. That is as bad as it sounds. So bad that even The Times feels moved to opine:

Josh Simons is a rising star of the Labour Party. He may have only been elected in 2024 as the MP for Makerfield, but he has rapidly risen to become a junior minister in the Cabinet Office. At the start of the year, the 32-year-old was handed extra responsibilities for implementing the digital ID scheme. A former academic who studied at Cambridge and Harvard before a private sector career (rare in Labour), he could expect to rise through the ministerial ranks in the coming years. Yet Mr Simons has plunged the government into scandal, once again, after revelations about his conduct during his time leading Labour Together, the influential think tank that took on the hard left and played a major role in making Sir Keir Starmer prime minister. Between 2017 and 2020, when the organisation was led by Morgan McSweeney, £730,000 of donations were not declared — a strikingly large sum for a Westminster think tank. This mistake, which was later made public by The Sunday Times, resulted in a significant fine by the Electoral Commission. The watchdog did not buy Labour Together’s explanation that it was an unintentional administrative error.

Labour Together should have accepted its mistake and moved on. Instead it commissioned a murky investigation into the journalists who broke the story. By now, Mr McSweeney had gone to work directly for Sir Keir and Mr Simons took his place as director. The latter paid £36,000 to Apco Worldwide, a public relations agency, to investigate the “backgrounds and motivations” of several journalists, including Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke from The Sunday Times. The resulting 58-page dossier included a baseless allegation that the story originated from Russian hacking and besmirched the character of the reporters.

The Apco dossier was circulated widely in the upper echelons of the Labour Party. The document was used to start a whispering campaign to discredit Mr Pogrund and Mr Yorke. Mr Simons was convinced enough by the Russian plot allegation to submit a version to the National Cyber Security Centre, an arm of GCHQ. Mr Simons has said that details about the British journalists were not passed on to intelligence officials, but reports now suggest otherwise. The reality is, these reporters were doing nothing more than their jobs.

Mr Simons has said he was shocked and furious that the report “extended beyond the contract” by going into Mr Pogrund’s private life, adding that it was “nonsense” that Labour Together wanted to investigate British journalists. Yesterday that was seemingly belied as an email was published between Apco and Mr Simons setting out the agreement to “investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article”. The email said it would include “human intelligence investigation”, going beyond looking into an alleged hack.

On social media, Mr Simons described the Labour Together saga as “a think tank paid a PR firm to find out if it’s private were [sic] obtained through an illegal hack”, adding: “HOWZATT.” That seems to have been undermined by the leaked email setting out the breadth of the Apco brief. The Cabinet Office has launched an investigation into the claims, the very department in which Mr Simons now serves. It was already clear that he should step aside, even temporarily, to allow for a full investigation. With the new risk that he may have breached the ministerial code with misleading statements, he must do so immediately.

Most Potentially Serious

The Epstein Files show Steve Bannon professing his admiration for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon while conspiring successfully with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage to overthrow Theresa May in favour of Boris Johnson. Johnson’s fan club is now taking over at every level the Reform UK that Yaxley-Lennon has endorsed at Gorton and Denton, with the go-to commentator on every such defection being Rees-Mogg, who always says just too little about his own intentions.

Rees-Mogg should consider that at the same time as he was plotting with Bannon, Bannon was plotting to depose the then Pope. Christian Nationalism is as heretical as the Christian Zionism that Tucker Carlson has just demolished in his devastating interview of the hopelessly out-of-his-depth Mike Huckabee.

But tomorrow, we shall be treated to Laura Kuenssberg’s latest “interview” of her beloved Johnson, in which he will call for British troops on the ground in Ukraine, where they obviously already are. No former Prime Minister would issue such a call except as an outrider for the Government. Yet, as Genevieve Holl-Allen writes:

The Defence Secretary has been accused by the Conservatives of misleading Parliament by saying Britain faced legal threats about the Chagos Islands.

John Healey said in May that the Government faced a legal challenge “within weeks” if it did not agree to the handover to Mauritius of the islands, including the Diego Garcia military base.

He told MPs the “most potentially serious” threat came from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which handles maritime disputes. But the Government has now admitted there is an exception to United Nations maritime laws for “disputes concerning military activities”.

The Tories said this admission showed Labour’s legal arguments in favour of handing over the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius had “completely collapsed”.

James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, said: “When John Healey claimed that we were ‘weeks away’ from losing legal challenges, he will have known this was simply untrue.”

James Cartlidge says the Defence Secretary would have known his claims about a legal threat were untrue Credit: Belinda Jiao Sir Keir Starmer signed a handover deal with Mauritius last May. As part of the deal, Britain will rent back Diego Garcia at a cost of more than £30bn for the next 99 years.

Announcing the handover last year, Mr Healey told the Commons: “Without action – without this deal – within weeks we could face losing legal rulings, and within just a few years the base would become inoperable.

“Some have suggested simply ignoring international legal decisions, but this is not just about international law; this is about the direct impact of law on our ability to control and operate this base.”

When asked about the nature of the legal threats, he said: “There are a range of international legal challenges and rulings against us. The most proximate, and the most potentially serious, is the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.”

But the Foreign Office confirmed last week that it stood by Article 298 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which carves out an exemption for military bases.

According to Article 298, the exemption covers “disputes concerning military activities, including military activities by government vessels and aircraft engaged in non-commercial service”.

This is the second legal argument Labour has put forward in favour of acting to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands which has been undermined.

It emerged last year the UK could not be forced to surrender its secure communications channels on Diego Garcia, despite claims from Downing Street.

The Government is in a legal stand-off with a small group of Chagossians who returned to their homeland this week. Misley Mandarin, the Chagossian first minister, and three others were issued with eviction orders, but won an injunction to temporarily stay on Île du Coin.

Senior Conservative and Reform UK politicians have been lobbying Donald Trump after the Government said it would not press ahead with the islands’ handover without US support.

In recent weeks, Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith have reportedly been pressing the case against the deal with the White House. Liz Truss, who met Donald Trump in Florida last weekend, was reported to have handed him a dossier outlining the case against the deal.

Mr Trump himself has alternated between supporting the deal and opposing it.

This week, he launched a fresh attack on the deal, writing on Truth Social: “We will always be ready, willing, and able to fight for the U.K., but they have to remain strong in the face of Wokeism and other problems put before them. DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!”

The outburst is believed to have taken place after Sir Keir blocked Mr Trump from using RAF bases to strike Iran. The US is putting together plans for a direct attack on Iran, with long-range bombing and refuelling aircraft sent to the Middle East in recent days.

Mr Cartlidge has written to Mr Healey to demand an explanation of why the Defence Secretary made the UNCLOS claims last year, and for the legal advice he received to be published.

In the letter, seen by The Telegraph, Mr Cartlidge wrote: “As this exemption remains, it must surely remove any legal threat to British sovereignty of the Chagos Islands.”

He added: “Labour’s legal arguments over Chagos have completely collapsed – the international law they have been hiding behind has an exemption for military bases.

“So, when John Healey claimed that we were ‘weeks away’ from losing legal challenges, he will have known this was simply untrue. As such, I’ve written to the Defence Secretary to demand answers.”

The Ministry of Defence has been approached for comment.

Before Such A Momentous Change

As the Trump Administration ships abortion pills into states with laws against abortion, making it no wonder that three conservatives on the Supreme Court voted against Donald Trump on tariffs as one trusts on more to come, Callum Miller writes:

The issue of abortion is back on the agenda in Westminster, though you could be forgiven for asking why. After all, what current legislation lends itself to this subject? What large campaign have you missed? What broad consultation or public debate has there been that has somehow passed you by? Good questions. I’m afraid the answers are less than satisfactory.

On Thursday, 16 October, the Crime and Policing Bill had its Second Reading in the House of Lords. The Bill focuses on issues such as anti-social behaviour, sexual offences, and knife crime, as well as violence against women and girls. It is darkly ironic, the — indeed tragic — that an amendment to decriminalise abortion up to birth for women in relation to their own pregnancies was shoe-horned in at the last minute by backbenchers in the Commons.

The amendment was tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi MP and added to the Bill as clause 191 after only 46 minutes of backbench debate in the House of Commons, with no impact assessment, no Committee stage scrutiny, no evidence sessions, and a refusal to allow any interventions during the solitary debate.

Clause 191 would amend the law so that it would no longer be a crime for women to perform their own abortions, for any reason, at any time, up to and during birth. As Lord Frost highlighted during Second Reading, such an amendment would mark the biggest change to the law on abortion since the passage of the Abortion Act in 1967. Indeed, were clause 191 to become law, it would almost certainly lead to a significant increase in the number of women who perform their own late-term abortions at home, a process which carries with it severe health risks for the mother.

Quite apart from any in-principle view one might take on clause 191, this change is particularly galling because the reason dangerous late-term abortions at home are even possible is the “pills by post” scheme pushed by the same people who would say they advocate for women’s safety. The scheme, which allows women to receive abortion pills by post without the requirement to undergo an in-person consultation with a medical professional, was originally introduced as a temporary measure during COVID-19. However, it was made permanent soon thereafter, amidst warnings — including from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the NHS’s safeguarding network — that the policy placed vulnerable women at risk of harm — a price considered worth paying for simple “ease of access” to so-called “abortion services”. Yet “access” must not simply be the trump card over all other considerations — the pills by post scheme is a policy which undeniably carries risks for vulnerable women.

As one example, the harm of which is amplified by the pills-by-post scheme, decriminalisation fails to account for the risk of coercion and the protective nature of the law as it stands. No longer can a woman say to her abusive partner that she cannot possibly obtain an abortion — even at a late gestation — due to the serious legal consequences she would face for doing so. Instead, the window during which an abuser or any other party may apply pressure is extended, with no legal safety net for a woman who may wish to keep her baby. There have already been several terrible instances of abuse of the “pills by post” scheme, in which vulnerable women have had their pregnancies ended against their will. This is not fanciful or alarmist, but rather reflective of the awful reality for some vulnerable women in our communities.

The position of the Government concerning decriminalisation of abortion is — extraordinarily — that they have made “no assessment”. Whilst abortion policy typically remains the subject of a free vote for parliamentarians and the Government likewise is concerned to stay neutral on matters of conscience, the impact on the lives of unborn babies and vulnerable women is anything but “neutral”. It is also worth noting that the decriminalisation proposals in Clause 191 go far beyond what the public is willing to countenance. A recent poll conducted by The Telegraph revealed that 91 per cent of 28,000 respondents opposed this amendment. Perhaps understandably, the balance of speakers in the House of Lords Second Reading debate was indicative of this, with 65 per cent of Peers who took a position on the issue of the amendment speaking against it.

One of the strongest critiques at Second Reading came from Baroness Monckton, who reflected that there “is no popular demand or pressure for this form of infanticide,” and also broached an uncomfortable subject for pro-abortion advocates, that of the impact of abortion pills. Rather than being a simple matter of taking the pills and the matter being resolved, Baroness Monckton noted that hospitalisation of women for complications arising from the use of abortion pills had increased by 50 per cent from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Could the pills-by-post scheme be to blame for this? Of course — and we all know this. Allowing women to abort their babies by themselves at home, well into the third trimester, is only likely to increase the already significant number of hospital admissions, with a study finding that one in every 17 women who performed their own abortion at home subsequently needed hospital treatment.

Baroness Monckton’s amendment to remove clause 191 entirely will surely attract significant support at Report Stage, as it should. This is not a matter of being for or against abortion in the round, or for or against decriminalisation of abortion, even. Rather, this is a rushed and ill-thought-through proposal which will have negative consequences — of course, for viable unborn babies, but also for women. This approach is not progressive; it embodies the worst form of ideological legislation, defined by a dogmatic belief in abortion, whatever the cost to women’s safety. The Lords must act to remove clause 191 — or at the very least, to require genuine scrutiny and public debate before such a momentous change.