There Has To Be Some Representation

Jack Hunter writes:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died unexpectedly on Saturday at the age of 71.

I was born and raised in South Carolina and was his constituent for most of his three decades in Congress.

Graham became a member of the U.S. House in 1995. In 1996, my own political journey began in my early 20s as a Pat Buchanan conservative who avidly supported his insurgent populist bid for the Republican presidential nomination that year.

Graham entered the Senate in January 2003, three months after Buchanan cofounded this magazine as a much-needed conservative outlet opposing any potential war with Iraq. Three months after Graham became a senator, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

For all of that time, through the Clinton, Bush-Cheney, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies, right up until Saturday, Graham was arguably the most vociferous advocate in Congress for the neoconservative vision of American foreign policy. More than even most other neocons, Graham thirsted for U.S. intervention anywhere, at any time, for virtually any reason, and at any cost, including lives, foreign or domestic.

In this light, I can’t help but remember now how cheap Graham considered the lives of so many others throughout his entire political career.

In the early years of the U.S.–Iraq war, Graham was less distinguishable from other Republicans, almost all of whom considered unquestioning support for the war their core party identity.

But by 2008, the country had significantly soured on the war (by then, 63 percent of Americans were calling it a mistake), the Democrats had a rock star presidential candidate in then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose primary campaign message included a resounding rejection of Bush-Cheney and particularly the Iraq boondoggle.

Campaigning for his longtime neocon-brother-in-arms and 2008 GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ)—who, on the campaign trail, said he’d be fine with the U.S. spending “a hundred” years in Iraq—Graham said the following:

Calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq was one of the most unpopular things John McCain could have done. Some said it was political suicide. But you know what? It was the right thing to do… because losing in Iraq would have been a nightmare for America.

America had already lost in Iraq, and for most Americans, it had already long been a nightmare. By the end of 2008, there were over 4,000 U.S. military deaths. The Pentagon concluded that nearly 77,000 Iraqis had died in the same period.

These numbers never seemed to be a consideration for Graham when he advocated sending even more U.S. soldiers into wars most Americans were done with.

Four years after the U.S. formally declared the Iraq War over, McCain and Graham lobbied in 2015 for President Obama to send 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Iraq and Syria.

This didn’t happen, about which Graham would say in 2015, right before he launched a presidential campaign of his own, “At the end of the day, I blame President Obama for the mess in Iraq and Syria, not President Bush.”

The U.S. didn’t wage war enough in Iraq. Surely that was the problem.

Graham’s visions of war-related death and destruction had become increasingly more bizarre with age.

In 2013, Graham was pushing for U.S. military action against Syria, declaring, “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months—and you can quote me on this—there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.”

Graham also warned of Iran-backed terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb into America if the U.S. didn’t drop bombs on Syria soon.

“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” Graham said.

As a native Charlestonian, I can report that a nuclear bomb never did detonate in my home city, then or since.

A big war with Iran, however, did come 13 years later, launched not just by Israel but also by President Donald Trump, with Graham as the lead cheerleader. The war, still ongoing, is the culmination of a long-simmering Israel–Iran conflict that intensified after Israel launched its war in Gaza.

Barely two years ago, in May 2024, Graham said of Israel’s war on Gaza and Hamas, “When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.” He called that “the right decision.”

“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war,” the nuke-happy senator added. “They can’t afford to lose.”

The August 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities are estimated to have killed over 200,000, overwhelmingly Japanese civilians. President Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963 of those bombings, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Eisenhower, a former general and no stranger to the horrors of war, here showed some regret for what had been done. Graham’s comments, by contrast, were flippant to the point of inhumanity about possible nuclear use. Moreover, Ike had been talking about a world war in which the U.S. was a direct participant, not a regional war waged by a foreign nation in a strip of land the size of Portland, Oregon.

Graham wasn’t finished beating his chest about using nukes on Gaza.

“Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that?”

Graham said he was OK with it. “So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state,” he added. “Whatever you have to do.”

“Whatever” you have to do. This is not remotely in the realm of just war theory, not that Graham could have been expected to care about that. His reasoning did fit comfortably within Al Qaeda terrorists’ theories of war.

In late March of this year, roughly three months before his death, Graham basically said he didn’t mind if Americans died invading Iran.

You would think that at least this line would be a no-go zone. Apparently not.

On potentially sending U.S. ground troops to Iran’s Kharg Island, Graham told Fox News, “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”

‘Wait, what did he say?’ was the reaction of many.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was dumbfounded by Graham’s remark.

“Today Lindsey Graham, who for some reason has been the White House’s top spokesman for this war, went on TV and invoked Iwo Jima while calling for more escalation in Iran,” Walsh wrote. “Iwo Jima of course involved 26 thousand US casualties. It's extremely troubling that Graham has so much influence with the administration and has been so empowered to speak on its behalf.”

Walsh continued, “He is not conservative, he is not America first, he has never done a single thing in his career to advance the interests of actual American citizens, and he clearly wants this war to continue indefinitely and doesn't care how many Americans die in the process.”

Walsh was not overstating his case. Graham really didn’t appear to care about prioritizing any lives that happened to conflict with his political agenda.

Maybe some of this registered with me more than it should have because of my own antiwar politics. Yet for my entire adult, politically conscious life, this is what I saw year after year in this callous man—and I’m leaving out a lot due to the practical confines of this essay.

But from a South Carolinian, American, and certainly a pro-life perspective, I strive to never be dismissive of life (though I don’t always succeed), even that of someone who was so dismissive of it throughout his own.

Humans should never strive for inhumanity. I wish Lindsey Graham had thought the same.

And:

As the establishments of both major parties remain firmly wedded to Washington’s foreign policy consensus, particularly on U.S.-Israel relations, hard ideological factions on the right and left now seem willing to work together to present new challenges to that unanimity.

Exhibit A: In late June, Tucker Carlson announced he was done with the Republican party.

“How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interest of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?” Carlson said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast. He noted that he has been a lifelong defender of the GOP. Carlson is also an outspoken critic of U.S.-Israel relations and both countries’ war on Iran.

“I would not support the Republican party; there’s no chance I would support the Republican party,” the popular rightwing podcaster continued. “Not going to support the Democratic party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Then Carlson did something. He called for a new, antiwar party.

Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this month, “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.”

He said both Republicans and Democrats are in “lockstep” with each other on matters of “war and finance.” “If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war… then we need options,” he said. Those options are pretty limited when, as Carlson puts it, “(Democratic Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy.”

Fellow America First conservative and former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed with Carlson, telling Piers Morgan recently that she was “in talks with people” and that “serious conversations” were underway about creating a new party.

“There is a group of us that have literally fought the system, and I think there’s a group of us that, if we decide to align, we could launch a true America-focused party that doesn’t fall into the traps of Democrats and Republicans, but could align some serious players from the right and the left, and move forward,” Greene said.

While still in Congress, Greene was the first Republican to call the bloodshed in Gaza a “genocide.”

The difficulties facing the launch and success of a third party of course are immense. The requirements for ballot access are different in each of the 50 states and in many cases prohibitive. Competing with the two major parties in fundraising is hard enough, much less the high bar from access to public funding. The election landscape is littered with third parties that had emerged over similar bouts of voter frustration but were unable to break through the inherent obstacles.

But the fact that Republicans Greene and Carlson are even talking about a third party is an important signal, even if a new political vehicle never materializes.

Carlson is a formidably popular voice on the right. He is despised by the most hawkish conservative figures, who are constantly trying to cast him out for alleged demagoguery and antisemitism, but it's the threat he poses to the old neoconservative foreign policy consensus they appear to fear most.

For those who might recall Rush Limbaugh’s massive influence on the Republican party and the popular culture in the 1990s, particularly during the Clinton era and the Bush-Cheney aughts, the notion that Limbaugh would ever break away from the GOP for a third party was unthinkable. 2026 is very different than that time in so many ways, but it’s not hard to make an argument that Carlson is the most Limbaugh-esque rightwing influencer today, who now threatens to completely sever ties with Republicans and go his own electoral way. (That said, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, also promised a similar “America Party” a year ago, and not much has been heard about it since).

It is also notable that there are progressives and even Democrats who say they recognize the need for eschewing old left-right labels.

Progressive Young Turks host Ana Kasparian told Carlson in a 2025 interview that critics smear Carlson (rightwing antisemite) and herself (leftwing antisemite) as a way of preventing the two sides from getting together.

“It’s meant to discredit. And yeah, you’re right. It’s meant to stop these types of conversations from happening. Now, you are very conservative. I’m not very conservative. I have some views that lean more conservative than progressives feel comfortable with and that’s okay,” she said.

She added that she appreciated there was common ground on the populist message.

“I think that some of what you’ve been talking about lately hits at the heart of what I care most about, and that’s the importance of this country representing the American people,” Kasparian said. “The importance of the United States being a sovereign country that has politicians and a government that prioritizes the American people as opposed to a foreign government.”

This is an “America First” sentiment regularly shared by Kasparian’s co-host Cenk Uygur (who has also appeared on Carlson’s show), Glenn Greenwald (a left-leaning civil libertarian), Jimmy Dore (populist), and others. Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s have modeled their popular podcast on elevating both left and right visions of putting U.S. interests first.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Hawaii) are two members of Congress from the right and left who regularly join forces on matters of war and peace, including recent efforts to stop both major parties’ establishments from integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, giving Israel unprecedented access to Pentagon contracts and weapons manufacturing.

Of course, the House Rules Committee blocked Massie and Khanna’s amendment.

Massie just lost his Kentucky Republican primary in large part because of his opposition to AIPAC, which spent major dollars to defeat him.

“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first,” Massie said in October 2023 about a $14 billion aid package to Israel, which he voted against along with “Squad” Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib and (D-Mich.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

“I do believe that there are issues that populists on the right and left can collaborate on,” Khanna told Politico last year. He was speaking directly about the effort to open up the Epstein files for which he and Massie were the lead proponents in the House, but in the same interview he said, “obviously, we come from different ideological perspectives, but there are areas where we have agreement in making sure that we’re preventing wars of choice overseas and transparency.”

While there are schisms over Israel and the Iran war on the right, the Democrats are experiencing their own shake-up, with insurgent — and vocally anti-Israel — socialist Democrats defeating pro-Israel establishment Democrats in the recent New York primary. Trump’s eagerness to paint these Democrats as “communists” taking over the party seems hyperbolic given that there have been only a half dozen such primary victories to date, in New York and a few other states. But these outspoken antiwar political newcomers are making party leaders nervous.

As Politico framed it two days after the NYC elections, “Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak.”

Carlson says he has no plans to run for president, for any potential new third party or any other, but to focus on what Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos said on her most recent podcast, that there “is a War Party in this town, and it’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s both. It draws in the energy from the left and the right for more war, for using more militarism as the first tool in the toolbox.”

“There has to be some representation it would seem for all of us, particularly on foreign policy.”

That representation exists. How weak or strengthened, or even formalized it could become in the long term, we cannot know.

But the uniparty is not impenetrable. This, we know.

Failing The Test

Keir Starmer would watch England at the World Cup Final on his last day in office. But he has never met the nuclear test veterans. Such are the people who have spent more than a decade discrediting the anti-austerity, anti-war and anti-racist movement to keep the freebies that we hope, but do not expect, that they are now days away from losing.

For example, Natalie Fleet would have it that, “Nigel Farage and his gang of bin men get the same security as the rest of us. Sick of the faux outrage. None of them cared when a senior Reform UK politician was sharing my death threats!” Her predecessor as Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, has been known to describe Ann Widdecombe as “a little fascist beast”.

Kai Stephens and Laurence Fox will each be standing as one of those at Clacton, where they and everyone else look increasingly likely to be defeated, not by a bin man, but by a bin. While he waited for the next General Election to give him the chance to revive 3-2-1, Jon Harvey would presumably be in his seat, even if not in his Count Binface costume, on the next International Women’s Day, when Phillips would read out the names of every woman in Britain who had been killed by a man in the previous year. Including Ann Widdecombe.

It Tolls For Thee

Well, of course the Ann Widdecombe suspect was unknown to Prevent. Prevent is based on a proven hoax, and whenever these things happen, then it has either never heard of the perpetrators, or it had let them slip. When Essa Suleiman was referred to it to no effect whatever, then the responsible Ministers were Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick.

Prevent will no doubt turn out never to have heard of anyone who was sent down for 14 years for having expressed approval of what will be the efforts of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is effectively the Government of Iran since Donald Trump took out its rivals, to open the Strait of Hormuz free of Trump’s 20 per cent tolls. And be in no doubt that they will be Trump’s tolls. He is now literally a pirate, the head of a pirate state that is beggaring our people. Yet to say that will very soon be to face a 14-year stretch. Prevention, indeed.

Just So Lucky To Have Known Her

Claire Fox writes:

There’s been so many wonderful, heartfelt and heart-breaking tributes paid to Ann Widdecombe, written by close friends and colleagues, that when asked to write this I hesitated. What can I add? I see this as a postscript to those tributes, based on very specific circumstances that led to a rather peculiar but rewarding relationship.

When I agreed to stand as a Brexit Party candidate in the European elections in 2019, I was entering an alien political environment to that associated with my directorship of the Academy of Ideas, or my regular perch on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze or the Sky News paper review, or indeed my previous life as co-publisher of LM magazine (the successor to Living Marxism). If that was discombobulating, what was terrifying was my first meeting with Ann, the well-known Thatcherite and former Conservative shadow home secretary.

We were to share a platform at a Brexit Party rally, and she had asked to see me privately beforehand to ‘clear the air’. I had been told she was unhappy with my candidacy after something of a media storm about my previous – albeit decades-old – involvement in the Irish Freedom Movement, a UK-based organisation that campaigned against British rule in Northern Ireland. She had lost a friend in the IRA Brighton bombing in 1984 and had been at the Conservative conference which was being held at the time. So, as I nervously introduced myself, her opening words were: ‘So, you wanted to blow me up.’

After 45 minutes of forensic grilling, during which we enjoyed a frank exchange of views, she smiled wryly, squeezed my hand and said she respected honesty and principles. She concluded in that unmistakable school ma’am voice: ‘We’d better get on with saving Brexit then.’

She went on to deliver a barnstorming speech without notes. I followed her on to the stage with a sheaf full of notes, far more nerves and far less verve. But the cheering crowd was generous to both of us. We were all on the same side on this issue at least. As I left the stage, she gave me a warm hug and, with a twinkle in her eye, said ‘you’ll do’. We never looked back.

That seriousness, generosity of spirit and humour rather set the tone for our relationship when we were elected as MEPs, along with the rest of the victorious Brexit Party candidates who ended up in Brussels. Her experience as a proper, grown-up politician, as opposed to those of us who were new to the field, was invaluable.

She was meticulously professional. When she explained why it was important to answer all correspondence, even from those who were hostile, I took note. She taught me that accountability to the public was paramount. She was forthright and intelligently probing in all our group meetings, forcing us to think through tactics and positions. She was ferociously loyal to the Brexit Party as a group, but she was also her own woman, and fervently independent.

Inquisitive about people, she was always keen to look beyond the surface and find out what made others tick. In our many conversations, we discovered how much we had in common – from our shared commitment to free speech as a core pillar of democracy to our opposition to assisted dying. And when we disagreed, we both took time to explain why we believed as we did, disagreeing civilly, and always learning something from each other. This taught me that whatever the media caricature or public persona, when you actually dig deeper, people are always more complicated and interesting.

It helps explain why now, since the tragic circumstances of her untimely death, social media are littered with hundreds of photos of Ann with countless people from all social backgrounds. Having dinner with them, chatting to them, sharing a bottle of wine with them. And she is always looking as though she is having a ball. She honestly seems to have known everyone! And that’s because she was the opposite of a snob. She was distinguished – as a political figure, novelist, celebrity – but never too grand to be approachable. She was great company and a model public servant.

One thing I really loved was the delight that Ann took in our unlikely friendship – although she did sometimes tut-tut at my blaspheming. Whenever she was approaching me, she held her arms open wide and just embraced me with such warmth, often calling me ‘comrade’, with a cheeky grin. She joked about us being united as rebels from across the political divide, and her greatest compliment was when she laughingly admitted I may have brought out a bit of revolutionary spirit in her.

She had far closer chums, deep friendships with many, and we were only colleagues temporarily. But she made a huge impression on me – not so much in terms of my politics but how to behave in the political arena. She was unbiddable, unbuyable and uncompromising in speaking truth to power. She worked bloody hard, too. Indeed, she was one of the most tireless, diligent and irrepressible women I’ve ever met.

Since her death, many have noted that she would have been an obvious person to be nominated for a peerage. We might speculate about whether grandees in the Conservative Party were – as rumoured – so sectarian and spiteful that they denied this renowned elder stateswoman that honour. Despite this, Ann was lovely when I joined the House of Lords, and showed no envy whatsoever. Instead, she gave me invaluable advice on how to operate in parliament: ‘Gird your loins when encountering condescension and sneers; speak out as often as you can, but only on issues that matter to you; don’t be bullied by others; and only act on your conscience.’ It could be a charter for all politicians.

As for Ann, the truth is she was far too busy to sit on the red benches. Having already experienced life as an elected legislator, she rightly felt she could be far more effective at realising the project of Brexit by escaping the confines of Westminster.

I hate that she was struck down so cruelly while living her best life politically. She was behaving like a Young Turk, dashing around the country speaking at Reform UK rallies and local meetings, endlessly offering forthright advice to Reform UK bigwigs and her vast range of journalist mates without fear or favour. And she appeared regularly in the media, ensuring that distinct voice of common sense was heard loudly and clearly by millions. Perhaps someone thought an act of violence would silence that voice.

There is some minor consolation that, since her death, clips of Ann have been greedily shared on social media, with some even trending. Let’s help that endeavour by sharing Ann’s uncompromising defence of free speech at the Oxford Union a few years ago far and wide. Do listen – and you might just recognise me in one of her anecdotes (ouch!).

I was just so lucky to have known her.

Under The Counter

Have we the right to speculate on the death of Ann Widdecombe? Not if it might prejudice a criminal trial, but even if we did, then we have the right to do all sorts of things, and therefore the responsibility in how we exercised our rights. Now that National Counter Terror Policing has taken over this investigation, then it has never been more important to hold our tongues. If by choice, then by choice.

Elsewhere in counterterrorism, proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of countering or deterring the Armed Forces of other sovereign states. But as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult (and how are the presumably urgent battles against those progressing?), so the proscription of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned, not only Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and the GRU Volunteer Corps, but ICE and the IDF as well. Why not?

HAYI is a Telegram channel that in Britain may or may not have had a role in setting fire to four empty and decommissioned ambulances in Golders Green, in failing to throw an ignited container at the offices of Volant Media in Park Royal, in throwing two bottles of petrol at Finchley Reform Synagogue while it was empty in the middle of the night, in discarding two jars of harmless powder in Kensington Gardens and thus close to the Israeli Embassy among numerous other venues, in failing fully to ignite a bag containing two bottles of fluid at the former offices of Jewish Futures in Hendon, and in throwing a bottle containing an accelerant through the window of Kenton United Synagogue at midnight. Its attempt to claim responsibility for the nonfatal Golders Green stabbings in April was immediately dismissed as opportunistic. Had it also been responsible for the same attacker’s attack, on the same day, against the unmentionable Ishmail Hussein?

The ban on the GRU VC is presumably because, after we had laughed out the suggestion that the Wagner Group would have had nothing better to do than to pay two-bit South London drug dealers to set fire to an East London warehouse, the blame for that and similar has had to be shifted to the GRU. But no one would have had any such interest if our Government had not been sending the Starlink satellite equipment that that warehouse contained to Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. When are we going to ban those agencies of a foreign state? Pavlo Lapshyn is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and will be for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Battalion, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell.

By all means ban HAYI, the GRU VC, and indeed the IRGC, none of which has ever done anything like that in or to this country. At the same time, ban ICE, which detained Becky Burke for 19 days before deporting her in leg and waist shackles, which detained the valid visa-holding Karen Newton for six weeks before sending her to the plane home in handcuffs and leg shackles, and in whose custody Ben James Owens died while awaiting deportation proceedings. And ban the IDF, which killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman while those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead, using British-made Elbit Hermes 450 drones, and using intelligence from the over 600 nightly reconnaissance missions flown for the Israelis, yet free of charge to them, from RAF Akrotiri. The New York Times casually referred to the presence of the SAS in Gaza.

Believe that the Hillsborough Law will apply in practice to the spooks when you see it, and make yourself see it by charging Keir Starmer at least as an accessory to the murders of Kirby, Henderson and Chapman, as well as with incitement to genocide and with anything else that could be thrown at him for his assertion of Israel’s right to cut off the water and power supplies to Gaza’s entire population.

And Vickrum Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. With its obvious attraction to Digwa’s type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis, the hashish taken by the members of the Order of Assassins when they set out to murder the enemies of the Alamut state.

Proscribe that order under the good old Terrorism Act 2000, while introducing a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And we need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

Brief and Sudden?

Lindsey Graham is dead, so the Strait of Hormuz is closed as a mark of respect. An AI-generated image of Mitch McConnell has been issued as a reassurance. And Graham lived alone, so who called the ambulance?

Graham, whose father’s Christian name was Florence, did not change. Either Donald Trump did, or Trump revealed what he had always been. The only British member of his Board of Peace is Tony Blair. Think on.

10 Years On

As far as it went, we still need her original Prime Ministerial agenda of workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, shareholders’ control over executive pay, restrictions on pay differentials within companies, an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme including greatly increased housebuilding, action against tax avoidance including a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, a real cap on energy prices, a ban or significant restrictions on foreign takeovers, and a ban on unpaid internships; we do now have an inquiry into Orgreave. But Theresa May has been patronising an incoming Prime Minister who was in the Cabinet before she had ever sat for a governing party. She says that Andy Burnham needs more of the foreign policy experience of which she herself had absolutely none when she entered Downing Street, her entire Ministerial career until that point having been six years as Home Secretary. And as Bagehot writes:

On July 13th 2016 Theresa May strode to a podium in Downing Street and launched an assault on the “burning injustices” of Britain. Under her government, young black men would no longer fear the police; women would no longer endure lower pay than men. Social concerns would trump economic ones. Their systemic causes would be eradicated. It was a hymn to identity politics. It was, in short, woke.

Mrs May—now Lady May—was Britain’s first and probably last woke prime minister. It is a strain to accept this, at first. The thought makes both her allies and enemies wince. The mp who in 2000 voted against the repeal of Section 28, which forbade the “promotion” (or rather acceptance) of homosexuality in schools? The authoritarian home secretary, rigidly in favour of the Conservatives’ attempts to reduce immigration at any cost? The prime minister who railed against “citizens of nowhere”? How can Mrs May, a creature of curtain-twitching suburban England, be woke?

If the idea seems absurd, it is because Britain has drifted so far from the ideas and ideologies that dominated the country barely a decade ago. The policies Mrs May pursued—from trans rights to hammering the police for anti-black racism to pursuing “net zero” and eliminating “modern slavery”—are now seen as excesses from a different era. Mrs May is Britain’s only woke prime minister in the same way that Richard Nixon—responsible for environmental reforms and affirmative action as well as the carpet bombing of Cambodia—is probably America’s last truly liberal president. Mrs May was right-wing and right-on. An iron fist wrapped in a Pride flag; Britannia in a rainbow lanyard. Mrs May was woke.

Consider the way she treated the police. During one speech at the Police Federation, the de facto trade union for coppers, she in effect labelled them racist for unfairly targeting young black men and misogynistic for calling a domestic-abuse victim a “slag”. “It is an attitude that betrays contempt for the public,” said Mrs May, the then home secretary. She had entered the stage to polite applause. She left it to silence.

A decade on, and such a speech by almost any politician would be impossible. The police are racist against black people? Britain in 2026 is a land where the police are seen on the right as, if anything, racist against white people. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, which tops the polls for now, has attacked the police for an “obsessive commitment to anti-white discrimination” in a 7,000-word screed decrying “two-tier” Britain. It is woke means, with group identity and systemic injustice shaping everything, for unwoke ends.

In her moral crusade against the mistreatment of British ethnic minorities, Mrs May in 2016 commissioned a “racial-disparity audit”, which would reveal the everyday inequities against ethnic minorities. “There isn’t anywhere to hide,” she said. “If these disparities cannot be explained, they must be changed.” Now prejudice against the majority is of utmost political concern. “Anti-white racism is embedded into the heart of the state,” wrote Mr Farage.

What Mrs May sees as her crowning achievement, her successors now see as a pain in the neck. The Modern Slavery Act was a world first, rolling various anti-exploitation laws into a single act. Mrs May shone a light on the miserable existence of people forced to work in brothels, nail bars or building sites and car washes. Now, in British politics, claims of “modern slavery” are painted by each major party as little more than a ruse to dodge deportation.

In Downing Street Mrs May was a staunch advocate of trans rights. She considered adopting self-ID, allowing trans people to change gender without the say-so of a doctor. At the time, her position was mainstream. Today such views leave her on the fringe of British politics. A decade on, and a vociferous backlash to Mrs May’s proposals has left Britain with a de facto “bathroom ban” for trans people. Front-rank politicians who once baldly declared that “trans women are women” now cower when it comes to the subject. Cynical they may be, but it is probably for their own good: Mrs May’s views would likely bar her from high office today.

When politicians rail against the excesses of woke in 2026, they are often railing against the May government. Sweeping changes were adopted unthinkingly. In one of Mrs May’s final acts in office, Britain bound itself to being “net zero” by 2050, the first big economy to do so. There was a quick 90-minute debate, marked by broad consensus—a sharp contrast with the Brexit rows that curtailed her tenure in Downing Street. Now “net zero” is a fundamental fracture, with even Labour split on it.

Woke whiggery

Social change is not a ratchet. The woke world over which Mrs May briefly ruled has collapsed. “Who would not want to be woke?” she asked in her 2023 memoir “The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life”. Well, all her successors for a start. Boris Johnson’s government started a “war on woke” [although it delivered the exact opposite]. Rishi Sunak promised to “take on this lefty woke culture”. Sir Keir Starmer shuddered at the accusation that he, a human-rights lawyer, was in any way woke.

Politics is downstream of culture. In office Mrs May reflected society; she did not shape it. The shibboleths of her era were accepted with little introspection. Perhaps progressivism provided an oasis of political calm compared with the hysterical rows about Brexit, which defined her premiership. Now society has shifted and Lady May cannot move with it. Out of office, prime ministers become frozen in time, stuck in the period they ruled. In the House of Lords Lady May appears only occasionally to defend her modern-slavery reforms or to despair at racial disparity in the Mental Health Act, little more than an ermine-clad ghost from an era that is now long gone.