To Sweat The Assets?

No, of course Jess Phillips did not threaten to resign over the appointment of Peter Mandelson. She did resign after having been gazumped by Harriet Harman, but even that was not because of the Paedophile Information Exchange, which has become background noise, like Kemi Badenoch’s having told LBC that she was “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, even though her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before Margaret Thatcher had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch may have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would in any case be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April 2026.

Far from the Conservatives’ having any objection to Commonwealth voting, their only gain in 2024 was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Badenoch and Phillips are of one mind in wishing to ban under-16s from social media, lest they discover that, for example, Britain’s projected spending of 10.6% of GDP on welfare was lower than in much of Europe, with more than half of it going to the recipients of what was nevertheless the lowest pension of any comparable country, and with two in five Universal Credit claimants in work, such that the State was subsidising low pay by corporations that paid kings’ ransoms at the top. By such means as to avoid most or all taxation, of course.

If, as Wes Streeting would have it, social media were comparable to smoking, then would Phillips or Badenoch consider herself powerless to stop under-16s from smoking in her home? Would she have much sympathy with any adult who professed such impotence? These comparisons reinforce the point that the responsibility is parental. The technology is available, and few parents of under-16s grew up offgrid. They did, however, grow up without the digital ID that everyone would need to make this ban work. And that freedom is worth passing on.

Whether People Want It Or Not

There is no Tony Blair without Peter Mandelson, of whom Tony Diver and Janet Eastham write:

Lord Mandelson advised numerous Cabinet ministers during his time as ambassador to Washington, messages to be released next week are expected to reveal.

The Telegraph understands that the disgraced peer often messaged senior Labour politicians and officials with suggestions on how to conduct official business far outside his remit as Britain’s ambassador to the US.

The messages are expected to be published next week alongside thousands of pages of material about his appointment, vetting and communications.

Whitehall sources said the advice was “mostly unsolicited” and that Lord Mandelson was not usually consulted by members of Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet on policy issues unless they related to the US.

Any evidence of attempts by Lord Mandelson to lobby ministers or influence policy decisions will raise further questions about Sir Keir’s decision to appoint Lord Mandelson, whose close links to Jeffrey Epstein were known and who, it has since emerged, failed security vetting.

Sir Keir is facing the prospect of a summer leadership battle if Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, can secure a Westminster seat in the Makerfield by-election and challenge him for No 10. The latest release of the Mandelson files could upend the contest if serving ministers are revealed to have had a particularly close relationship with Lord Mandelson.

Mandelson gave advice ‘whether it was wanted or not’

A source familiar with the messages said it would become clear that Lord Mandelson “thinks his opinion should be heard and listened to”, adding: “He’s definitely someone who offers advice.

“There is a certain generation of politician who thinks they have something to offer. He does that whether people want it or not.”

The messages are expected to include exchanges with Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, who is understood to have kept her conversations with Lord Mandelson to official channels, rather than on WhatsApp.

They will also show conversations between the peer and Peter Kyle, then serving as science secretary, about their joint visit to a global technology conference in California in March 2025.

Wes Streeting has already released his messages with Lord Mandelson, in which the former health secretary criticised the Government for having “no growth strategy”.

Mr Streeting, whose partner is a former employee of Lord Mandelson, said their relationship was not “close” but they had spoken several times and had dinner together.

A senior government source said the Mandelson files release was likely to contain messages between the peer and Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s former chief of staff, discussing Labour’s political and media strategy. Many messages were lost when Mr McSweeney’s phone was stolen in October.

It is not thought that many of Sir Keir’s senior advisers actively pursued conversations with the then ambassador, except about official diplomatic business, but that he often hoped to influence government decisions from Washington.

The Telegraph understands that MPs will also be given an update next week on an independent review by Sir Adrian Fulford, a retired senior judge hired by Sir Keir last month to investigate flaws in the vetting system.

Whitehall sources said the review had caused conflict between political officials and civil servants, who were concerned that Sir Adrian would describe the vetting system as “not fit for purpose”.

Officials are concerned that such a report would undermine the vetting system, which the Civil Service has used for decades.

Meanwhile, allies of the Prime Minister hope Sir Adrian will condemn the vetting process outright, which they believe would distance Sir Keir from criticism of Lord Mandelson’s appointment.

Peer’s links to Chinese minister

It also emerged on Wednesday that United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV), which recommended that Lord Mandelson be denied security clearance, raised concerns about his ties to a Chinese government minister.

The Guardian reported that Lord Mandelson spoke to Lan Fo’an, China’s finance minister, who was appointed in October 2023, several times a year, although the pair had not been in contact for 12 months prior to the peer’s vetting.

Sir Philip Barton, a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, told MPs last month that Lord Mandelson received Foreign Office briefings while vetting was under way and that these “must have included” an update on the status of the Government’s audit of China policy.

The Guardian also reported that vetting officers flagged Lord Mandelson’s longstanding relationship with Oleg Deripaska.

Sources speaking to the newspaper said UKSV noted that Lord Mandelson regarded the sanctioned Russian oligarch as a friend and had remained in occasional contact with him, although they had not spoken for about 10 years.

Lord Mandelson’s links to Tamir Hayman, a former Israeli military intelligence general, and a £1m loan the peer received to invest in Moon Active, the Israeli start-up behind the popular mobile phone game Coin Master, were also reportedly flagged.

Lord Mandelson reportedly spoke with Mr Hayman, who led Israel’s military intelligence directorate between 2018 and 2021, on a bimonthly basis.

Lord Mandelson declared his investment in Moon Active in the House of Lords register of interests in July 2019. However, that declaration contains no reference to a £1m loan used to pay for any shares.

Sources added that UKSV also noted Mandelson had a very close relationship with a British man, which was thought to be potentially compromising. The identity of this man has not been made public.

The purpose of national security vetting is not to identify wrongdoing by an individual or their associates, and inclusion in a vetting document does not indicate misconduct.

Files heavily redacted

The newspaper also reported that officials had heavily redacted, and even sought to withhold, some of the files on Lord Mandelson set to be released next week in response to a Humble Address tabled by the Conservatives.

Whitehall sources told The Telegraph that Lord Mandelson’s nine-page vetting summary had been shared with the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), the body responsible for assessing and redacting sensitive files relating to the former ambassador.

The sources said that redactions were “mutually agreed” so that the file could be published. They added that all documents that had gone through the ISC “process” would be published in the second tranche, expected next week, except for material the Metropolitan Police requested to be withheld.

The Met is investigating Lord Mandelson over alleged leaks to Epstein while he was a senior member of Sir Tony Blair’s government, which could constitute misconduct in public office.

A government spokesman said: “We are committed to complying with the Humble Address in full.”

Representatives for Lord Mandelson, Mr Lan, Mr Deripaska, Mr Hayman and Moon Active have been contacted.

And of whom Paul Lewis, Henry Dyer and Pippa Crerar write:

Peter Mandelson’s associations with senior figures in China, Russia and Israel were among the concerns raised by the UK’s vetting agency when it concluded he should be denied clearance, multiple sources have told The Guardian.

Mandelson’s links to China’s minister of finance, Lan Fo’an, the sanctions-hit Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a former Israeli military intelligence general, Tamir Hayman, were all flagged by the agency as areas of concern shortly before he took up his post as the UK’s ambassador to the US, the sources said.

They added that United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV) also noted Mandelson had a very close relationship with a fourth individual, who is British, that could be compromising.

Another concern identified by the vetting agency, the sources said, was a £1m loan Mandelson received to invest in an Israeli startup. And UKSV noted separately, the sources added, that he appeared naive about the risk that historical relationships with other individuals could be exploited.

These concerns were all contained in a nine-page UKSV summary of Mandelson’s vetting file in January 2025, according to the sources, all of whom spoke to The Guardian on condition of anonymity.

They said the concerns contributed to the agency’s conclusion that Mandelson posed a “high” overall concern and its recommendation to the Foreign Office that his developed vetting clearance should be denied.

After being briefed on the contents of the UKSV summary file, the then Foreign Office permanent secretary, Olly Robbins, granted Mandelson security clearance anyway.

Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said the disclosures made her “very angry”. She added: “It becomes quite clear why UKSV saw [Mandelson] as a subject of concern who shouldn’t be granted clearance.”

Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that responsibility for hiring Mandelson despite the concerns lay with Keir Starmer, saying that “glaring warning signs were wilfully ignored”.

The Conservative shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said: “These shocking revelations underline just how reckless Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was. A man with these links to Russia and China should never have been handed one of our most sensitive diplomatic posts.”

The Guardian’s decision to reveal details of some of the concerns flagged by the vetting agency comes after a powerful parliamentary committee said the government was failing to fully comply with a parliamentary motion known as a humble address ordering the release of all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment.

In an extraordinary intervention earlier this month, the intelligence and security committee (ISC) publicly accused the government of withholding some Mandelson vetting documents and implementing redactions “far too broadly”. During a debate in parliament last week, MPs from across the political divide criticised the Cabinet Office’s handling of the process, warning that public trust was being undermined by ministers who were challenging the sovereignty of parliament. Two MPs openly accused the government of a “cover-up” and one threatened to table a motion holding ministers in contempt.

The second tranche of Mandelson files is expected to be released in June. Ministers have said it will be one of the largest document releases of its kind in history.

However, multiple sources familiar with the Cabinet Office’s work said they believed officials had been heavily redacting and even seeking to withhold files to avoid political embarrassment. One source said UKSV’s nine-page summary, much of which the ISC believes should be released to the public, was due to be withheld by the government in its entirety.

On Wednesday night, a government insider disputed that. A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said it was “committed to complying with the humble address in full”.

The Guardian’s revelations will put pressure on Starmer’s government to release all relevant files and explain what “mitigations” were put in place to manage the risks in relation to Mandelson, which appear to have been wide-ranging.

Ministers will also be pressed to explain if there was any harm done to national security during the seven months Mandelson was in Washington. Those questions will be most acute in relation to Lan and Deripaska, two senior figures enmeshed in the power structures of hostile states.

Starmer sacked Robbins last month after the Guardian revealed that Mandelson had been given clearance despite UKSV recommending it should be denied. Starmer said it was “unforgivable” and “staggering” that the senior civil servant did not tell ministers about the agency’s findings.

Robbins decided to grant Mandelson clearance on 29 January 2025, hours after his department received the UKSV file.

In evidence to MPs last month, Robbins claimed UKSV regarded Mandelson’s case as “borderline”. He repeatedly declined to tell the foreign affairs select committee what concerns UKSV had about Mandelson, although he did say they did not relate to his relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the issue that led to Mandelson’s sacking in September 2025.

Mandelson’s security vetting began on 23 December 2024, three days after Starmer announced him as the pick for US ambassador.

The purpose of national security vetting is not to identify wrongdoing by an individual or their associates, and inclusion in a vetting document does not signal misconduct of any kind. Instead, officials gather information and conduct background checks to enable the government to make an “objective risk assessment”.

Applicants are asked to disclose detailed information, including about personal finances, business connections and associates. Officials in UKSV then identify areas of concern, which can be ranked as low, moderate or high. Multiple sources said those concerns would then be listed in a nine-page UKSV summary file, which concludes with UKSV’s overall concern and a decision or recommendation.

Mandelson’s summary file was completed on 28 January 2025 and sent to the Foreign Office via a “secure portal” the next day at 1.52pm. Hours later, after being briefed on the contents of the summary file by a security official in his department, Robbins decided to grant Mandelson clearance – with, he has since said, mitigations to manage the risks.

Ties to China’s finance minister

Lan was appointed to the powerful role of finance minister in China in October 2023 after a career in the Guangdong department of finance and a stint as the provincial Communist party leader in Shanxi.

It is not clear how and when Lan and Mandelson became associates. According to sources, UKSV noted that the pair spoke several times a year but had not done so for 12 months before Mandelson’s vetting process began.

While the vetting process was under way in January 2025, Mandelson is understood to have received sensitive Foreign Office briefings on China. Philip Barton, Robbins’ predecessor as permanent secretary, told MPs last month that the briefings “must have included” the UK government’s audit of its policy on China.

Mandelson’s interest in China dates back to his time as an EU trade commissioner, when he made several trips there to negotiate trade policy and tariffs. He also courted China contacts through his now defunct lobbying company, Global Counsel, although it is not known whether Mandelson’s relationship with Lan had a commercial dimension.

Since his elevation to finance minister, Lan has played an important role in talks between China and the British government. Lan greeted Starmer on the runway in Beijing in January 2026 as he made the first visit to China by a British prime minister since 2018. Lan held meetings with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in China in January 2025, when Mandelson’s vetting was ongoing, and again in Washington in April 2025, by which time Mandelson was in post.

The government will now be asked whether Mandelson was involved in any way in those meetings and, if so, how any conflict of interest was disclosed and managed.

Friendship with Russian oligarch

Mandelson’s controversial friendship with Deripaska has been known publicly for almost two decades. It dates back to before a notorious gathering on the billionaire’s 73-metre (238ft) yacht off the coast of Corfu in the summer of 2008.

Deripaska, once known as “the king of aluminium” because of his vast holdings in the metal commodity, is one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs.

After the yacht gathering, it was reported that Mandelson was “dripping pure poison” about the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, to another guest of Deripaska, George Osborne, the then shadow chancellor.

Mandelson’s relationship with Deripaska is believed to have begun before the gathering on the yacht and continued long after.

Files released by the US Department of Justice show that in 2010 Mandelson sought Deripaska’s help in an attempt to secure a visa for Epstein to travel to Moscow. The emails, first reported by Bloomberg, show Mandelson and a Global Counsel colleague referring to Deripaska with codes such as “OD” and “Mr D”.

In 2016, Mandelson and Global Counsel helped executives of the taxi-hailing company Uber access Deripaska’s party at the World Economic Forum at Davos, according to a leak to The Guardian of Uber’s files.

In 2018, the US imposed sanctions on Deripaska, citing his close ties to the Russian state and allegations of money laundering, racketeering and extortion, which he denied. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Deripaska was hit with sanctions by the EU and UK over his links to Vladimir Putin and his regime.

According to sources, UKSV noted that Mandelson regarded Deripaska as a friend and had remained in occasional contact with him, although the pair had not spoken for about 10 years.

Links to Israeli spy chief and tech firm

Mandelson’s link to Hayman, one of Israel’s former top spy chiefs, was not publicly known. According to sources, UKSV noted that Mandelson spoke with Hayman bimonthly.

As the head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate between 2018 and 2021, Hayman oversaw a powerful apparatus of surveillance, espionage and cyberwarfare. He has previously claimed that on his watch the military intelligence directorate influenced the US’s decision in 2020 to assassinate the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani.

Today, Hayman is the director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an influential security thinktank in Tel Aviv. How Mandelson came to be associated with a former Israeli spymaster is unclear.

An INNS spokesperson said Hayman had “no personal connection or familiarity whatsoever” with Mandelson. Before his appointment as ambassador, Mandelson had briefly taken part in an “external advisory framework” at the thinktank and “participated in several broad, multi-participant discussions”, they said. “This limited interaction constitutes the entirety of any contact between them.”

The other Israeli connection identified by UKSV relates to Mandelson’s stake in Moon Active, an Israeli company behind a lucrative and widely popular mobile phone game, Coin Master. The company, reported last year to have revenues of more than $2bn, has a reputation in Israel’s tech sector for being secretive.

Mandelson did declare his Moon Active investment in the House of Lords register of interests in July 2019. However, there is no reference in that declaration to a £1m loan used to pay for any shares, an omission that raises questions about whether the disclosure rules were complied with.

UKSV noted that the loan was given to Mandelson by a businessman, according to sources, and was used to acquire shares in the company that were due to be sold in 2026.

It is not known whether Mandelson disclosed the loan, or his associations with Lan, Deripaska and Hayman, in a separate Foreign Office conflict of interest form. The document, which has yet to be made public, requires officials to disclose financial interests and personal relationships that could raise a conflict of interest.

Why we have revealed the vetting details

The Guardian’s decision to publish details of UKSV’s concerns about Mandelson was taken after carefully weighing the public interest case for doing so.

In February, parliament passed the humble address ordering the government to release all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment. The motion said the most sensitive documents should first be referred to the intelligence and security committee, which would decide whether redactions on grounds of national security or international relations should be made before public release.

However, in the weeks afterwards, there was a debate at the highest levels of officialdom over whether documents about Mandelson’s vetting should be sent to the ISC.

Those discussions have since been confirmed by the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, Cat Little, and Robbins, who told MPs he was among those arguing that the files should remain in a “hermetically sealed box” for national security reasons.

It was only after The Guardian revealed on 16 April that Mandelson had been given clearance against the advice of UKSV, and Robbins was sacked, that key documents were shared with the committee.

A source familiar with the ISC’s work said “a flood of materials” was released to the committee after The Guardian’s story, including the crucial nine-page UKSV summary file.

The Cabinet Office published a template of that file, while Starmer, addressing parliament, revealed some of the Mandelson file’s contents, noting that UKSV officials had ticked two red boxes to denote “high” overall concern in relation to Mandelson and a recommendation of “clearance denied”.

However, there have been growing concerns in recent weeks that the government is still withholding materials it is obliged to release, and indications it may even block the public release of the key summary file.

On 15 May, the nine-person committee of trusted MPs and peers took the highly unusual step of going public with its concerns. It said the government was withholding vetting documents despite not having the authority to do so.

During a debate in the House of Commons on 19 May, Jeremy Wright, a KC and former attorney general who serves as the committee’s deputy chair, revealed that ministers were withholding “some documents related to vetting in their entirety” and applying redactions unrelated to national security or international relations, using grounds such as commercial sensitivity of third-party data. He said the issue could pose a challenge to “parliamentary sovereignty”.

Thornberry said in the debate that she shared those concerns. “My committee and the ISC are trying our best to get to the truth, and we are having obstacles put in our way,” she said.

One government source familiar with the Cabinet Office’s redaction process said officials had been looking for legal arguments that would enable them to abide by the letter of the humble address while “bypassing its spirit”.

During the parliamentary debate, Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, who is overseeing the Cabinet Office’s release of the Mandelson files, defended the government’s right to make its own redactions and withhold some of the most sensitive vetting files from parliament.

He told MPs the second batch of Mandelson files would be released after parliament returned from recess in June.

Jones denied accusations of a cover-up. “If there was any suggestion of a cover-up, I would not be standing at this dispatch box to defend the process,” he said. “I would resign.”

The Foreign Office and representatives for Mandelson, Robbins, Lan and Deripaska have all been contacted for comment.

To Cap It All?

By 10 pm, Tony Blair was less newsworthy than the weather. As he should be. But even 13 hours earlier, the Today programme had ended with Dan Tomlinson, who was only 15 when Blair left office, pointing out that Labour had never won his seat under Blair. That is the line from the Starmer camp: “Is that Tony Blair still alive?”

The challenges to Keir Starmer’s Premiership have moved Rachel Reeves to seek to protect her position by entreating her colleagues to buy British when procuring suppliers for artificial intelligence, energy infrastructure, shipbuilding and steel. Her letter is co-signed by Chris Ward, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, who was made Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister immediately upon becoming an MP, having previously been Starmer’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Holding this regime’s feet to the fire is having an effect.

Reeves has also announced reduced tariffs on 125 foodstuffs. The everyday essential character of many of them is easy to mock even if the move itself is welcome, but the mass importation of the rest is, when seen written down, far more shocking than one might still have expected. We import enough bread to make this measure worthwhile? Crisps? Baked beans? Tomato ketchup? Toffees and caramels? Chocolate bars? Not cocoa, which is also on the list. Finished bars.

To varying extents, all 402 Labour MPs know what, and therefore who, has caused that and so many other problems. Therefore, not a single one of them has come out in support of Blair’s rambling collection of clichés, mixed metaphors, statements of the obvious, and clunking references to things like relegation from the Premier League. I cannot call it an essay, lest my teachers’ ghosts torment me in the night. On 15 December, it will be 50 years of what came to be called Thatcherism. It began under a Labour Government. That was why we used to talk about 40 years of Thatcherism in the early Corbyn years, a decade ago.

We had Ofgem then, too. It was created by Blair. This very day, it has increased the energy price cap by 13 per cent. How is there a cap at all if they keep putting it up? Even the standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. As ever, someone is getting paid. And as ever, it is not us.

Don’t Be Bogged Down

Paul Knaggs writes:

A conjuring trick requires misdirection. The audience must watch one hand while the other does the work. Keep that principle in mind as you scroll through the endless, repetitive, deliberately narrowed argument about public lavatories, and the entire campaign snaps suddenly into focus.

The toilet is not the argument. The toilet is the frame.

It has been chosen with great care, because it achieves three things at once. It makes women’s objections appear mean, petty, almost obsessive. It reduces a broad legal settlement about women’s fundamental rights to a single, intimate, emotionally charged doorway. And it places women permanently on the defensive, forever justifying the existence of the boundary rather than those demanding its removal. The question is always “why are you so obsessed with where people go to the toilet?”, never “why is your campaign not about building new facilities for transgender use, but specifically about access to women’s existing ones?”

That last question answers itself.

Purpose-built, universally accessible facilities would solve the practical problem of provision. But the practical problem has never, in truth, been the point. The point is recognition. The point is access to women’s spaces, because access to women’s spaces signals that the word “woman” includes men who identify as women. That signal is everything. Every time it is successfully extracted from an institution, a policy, a law, or a public debate, the legal and material foundation of sex-based rights weakens by another degree.

Which is why the demand is never for new toilets. It is always for the toilets that match the sex they declare themselves to be. Anything less shatters the illusion.

THE NUMBERS NOBODY MENTIONS 

Before anything else, let us establish the demographic reality of what is actually being argued about, because it has been almost entirely absent from the public debate.

The Office for National Statistics Census estimate for England and Wales found that 0.54 per cent of people aged sixteen and over reported a gender identity different from the sex registered at birth. Not one in ten. Not one in twenty. Roughly one in two hundred people.

Within that already small figure, fewer than half have any outward transgender appearance. No medical intervention. No social transition visible to the world. Self-identification alone. A feeling, sincerely held, recorded on a form.

These people’s rights matter. Let that be stated plainly and without any qualification. The right not to be harassed, not to be discriminated against in employment, not to be subjected to violence or cruelty: these rights are absolute and non-negotiable. Protecting them costs women nothing, and any decent society provides them without hesitation.

But rights are not the same thing as demands. And the demand that half the population, fifty-one per cent of the people in this country, surrender sex-based protections won through generations of organised political struggle, is not a rights claim. It is a power claim. It is the assertion that the rights of one in two hundred must take legal and moral precedence over the rights of one in two, and that any woman who objects is not exercising her own right but committing a prejudice.

Anyone who will not submit to that ideology, man or woman, is branded a bigot, a transphobe, a hater. The accusation is the weapon. And like all weapons discharged without discrimination, it has destroyed its own utility: words that once carried genuine moral weight, attached to genuine hatred of genuine people, have been debased into instruments of political enforcement and fired at nurses, mothers, lesbians, gay men, scientists and any person, of either sex, who are attacked with malice for the sole offence of stating material reality.

A movement that commands this volume of institutional deference, generates this degree of political pressure, and extracts this level of ideological compliance from political parties, trade unions and public bodies, does not look like a vulnerable minority fighting for its survival. It looks like a well-funded political operation that has mastered the language of vulnerability while wielding considerable institutional power.

THE RULING THE CAMPAIGN CANNOT ACCEPT 

On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers. Note that word. Unanimous. Not a narrow majority. Not a contested finding. Every justice on the bench reached the same conclusion.

The ruling was not a revolution in law. It was a clarification of what the Equality Act 2010 had always meant. The terms “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Act refer to biological sex. Pregnancy protections. Maternity provisions. Single-sex services. Communal accommodation. Competitive sport. The Act is a coherent whole. It cannot function coherently if its central terms shift meaning depending on context. The Court saw this clearly and said so plainly.

The judgment also confirmed, and this is the part the campaign has worked hardest to obscure, that trans people retain full legal protection from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. The ruling did not strip anyone of rights. It confirmed that women’s rights and trans rights are both protected in law, and that the former cannot be rendered meaningless by the latter.

That is an intolerable outcome for a campaign that requires the category “woman” to remain infinitely expandable. So the campaign does what any campaign does when it loses in court. It shifts the battlefield to public opinion. It narrows the argument to its most emotionally charged symbol. It manufactures a narrative in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruling is an act of persecution, and the women who fought for it are its perpetrators.

The toilet became the front line. The conjuring trick began.

WHAT THE CODE ACTUALLY DOES

On 21 May 2026, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations was laid before Parliament. The Code does not create new law. It provides clarity about existing law, and clarity is precisely what a decade of institutional cowardice had denied women.

It applies to women-only domestic violence refuges. It applies to single-sex hospital wards. It applies to communal changing rooms. It applies to intimate personal care. It applies to competitive sport. It applies to women’s right to meet, organise and associate as women.

It states plainly that if a service provider admits trans people to a service intended for the opposite sex, it can no longer rely on the Equality Act’s single-sex exceptions. A service for women and trans women is not a single-sex service. A refuge that admits male-bodied people is not, by definition, a refuge from male violence. A sporting category that includes male physiology is not a female category. A women-only association that must admit men is not a women-only association.

These statements should require no courage to make. They are logical. They are consistent with the ordinary meaning of language. They are what women have been saying, at enormous personal cost, for years.

The cost has been real and it has fallen on working class women in particular. Nurses hauled before employment tribunals. Healthcare workers reported, disciplined, and in some cases stripped of careers, because they asked, reasonably, to provide intimate care to female patients without male-bodied colleagues present in those settings. They were not philosophers or polemicists advancing a theoretical position. They were women with mortgages and families doing physical, demanding, working class work, and they were punished for understanding that “female ward” meant what it said.

The institutions that punished them were not protecting vulnerable trans people. They were performing ideological loyalty to a doctrine that cost the institutions nothing, and cost the women in question everything.

Trans Liberation or Socialism: You Can’t Have Both 

Here the argument must be made directly, because it has been avoided for too long in left-wing circles.

This is a liberal campaign. It is not, at its root, a left-wing one.

The left is supposed to begin with material reality. Bodies. Labour. Class. Wages. Violence. The analysis of women’s oppression that produced the Equality Act, that built the refuges, that fought for the single-sex provisions now being contested, was a materialist analysis. Women are oppressed because they are female. Not because of how they feel about being female. Because of reproduction, sexual vulnerability, male violence, unpaid domestic care, wage inequality and systematic exclusion from public life. The material conditions of being a woman in this world are not a cultural mood. They are a structural fact.

Liberalism, in its contemporary iteration, has made a different set of commitments. It has committed to the proposition that identity is self-determined, that the sincere assertion of an identity creates an obligation on others to affirm it, and that any structure which resists this obligation is oppressive by definition. That is not materialism. It is idealism. It mistakes the declaration for the thing declared. It confuses the map for the territory, the word for the body the word describes.

There is nothing inherently left-wing in that position. It is, in fact, a philosophy that systematically privileges the subjective over the material, the assertion over the evidence, and the feelings of one group over the physical safety of another. On those terms, it is not the left that has adopted a new progressive position. It is the left that has been captured by liberalism and dressed the result in the language of solidarity.

The trade unions that flew flags. The politicians who recited catechisms about inclusion. The public bodies that rewrote their policies to place gender identity above sex. None of them bore the cost of those decisions. The nurses did. The women in refuges did. The girls displaced in sport did. The women who said something out loud and found themselves investigated did.

That is not solidarity. It is outsourcing the consequence to the people who can least afford it, while the institutions collect the applause. 

“YOU CANNOT PROTECT WHAT YOU CANNOT DEFINE” 

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, took this question before the UN Human Rights Council in 2025. Her report on sex-based violence called for the proper recognition of sex in understanding violence against women, preventing further harm and delivering effective support to survivors. It warned that disregarding the material reality of sex produced flawed data, weakened protections for mothers, girls and lesbians, obscured the patterns of violence against women and undermined the ability to deliver targeted services to those who needed them most.

She told the Council, with a weariness entirely appropriate to the moment, that she had never imagined it would become necessary to prepare a report affirming that the words “women” and “girls” refer to distinct biological categories, or that female sex is central to understanding the discrimination and violence women experience as a subordinated class.

Then she delivered the line that should end every debate in which it is deployed. 

“You cannot protect what you cannot define.” 

Nine words. The whole case made. 

If “woman” carries no material meaning, violence against women cannot be measured with any accuracy. If “female” describes a feeling rather than a sex, health data loses its coherence. If women’s spaces admit men on the basis of declaration, the one provision built around survivors’ specific need, the need to be away from male bodies, is destroyed by the policy designed to appear inclusive. If a political party cannot say what a woman is, it cannot represent women. It can only manage them.

THE VERDICT 

The Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC draft Code do not persecute anyone. They restore legal coherence to a framework that was always intended to protect both trans people and women, and that was hollowed out, institution by institution, policy by policy, tribunal by tribunal, during a decade in which ideological performance counted for more than working class women’s actual safety. 

The campaign to reduce all of this to a toilet argument is intelligent. It is not honest. 

The honest version of the argument would require its advocates to say plainly: we want the legal category “woman” to be defined by identity rather than sex, and we want that definition to take precedence over the sex-based protections women currently hold in law. Made plainly, that argument would lose. It would lose because most people, without requiring a Supreme Court judgment to guide them, understand that bodies are not merely opinions about bodies, that the reality of male violence against women is not dissolved by a change of identity, and that half the population did not spend a century fighting for legal protections only to be told those protections were a form of prejudice. 

Women did not invent sex. They did not construct it as a weapon against anyone. They were born female in a world that has treated that fact, for most of recorded history, as a liability. They won protections through movement politics, strikes, legal battles and decades of organised collective defiance. They should not be required to win them again, against people who have learned to speak the language of liberation while working to dismantle the laws it produced. 

The left must make a choice. Not between trans people and women; that is the false frame the campaign has constructed. Between material politics and liberal abstraction. Between representing the class that does the work, bears the children, staffs the wards, absorbs the violence and fills the refuges, or performing solidarity for those who fund the campaign and attend the conferences and receive the institutional applause. 

Women are not a subset of their own sex. And a politics too frightened to say what a woman is, has already told you, clearly enough, whose side it is on. 

You cannot protect what you cannot define. 

And a left that refuses to define women has no business claiming to defend them.

Nigel Farage, Josh Simons and The Guardian

The Morning Star editorialises:

What do Josh Simons and Nigel Farage have in common — apart from the nationalism, obviously?

Answer: They both blame embarrassing revelations on Russian hacks.

The disgraced ex-minister, and now ex-MP, was running Labour Together when it contrived, with the full knowledge of key Keir Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney, to blame the exposure of its law-breaking on a Russian hack.

The truth was that investigative journalist Paul Holden had uncovered the truth behind Labour Together’s failure to declare donations in line with the law through entirely legitimate journalistic enterprise.

It suited Simons to spin another narrative to the media — that his organisation, then busy shifting the Labour Party to the right and preparing, most inadequately as it turned out, to take office, was the victim of interference by a hostile state.

The lie — for that it what it was — would, in his reasoning, divert attention from the original offence and would protect McSweeney, above all, from the consequences of his wrongdoing which, Holden had revealed, may perhaps not have been as accidental as first asserted.

Starmer’s top confidante and strategist had been running Labour Together at the time of the failure to report the donations, and was therefore vulnerable to any exposé.

And now the leader of Reform is caught in the headlights of the revelation of a personal donation of five million pounds from crypto billionaire Nigel Harborne, the party’s main founder.

The slippery Farage has test-driven several excuses since the gift was first disclosed in The Guardian.

First, it was to ensure his personal security for evermore. Then, it was a reward for his tireless campaigning to secure Brexit. When neither of these appeared to land well, Farage defaulted on — a Russian hack. Why the Putin government should be interested in embarrassing one of the British politicians most friendly to it was unexplained.

A former director of the National Cyber-Security Centre has dismissed Farage’s claims, just as the NCSC declined the invitation to participate in Simons’s media plan by investigating his unevidenced nonsense.

So far, all this proves is that Russophobia is now the go-to cover story for all sorts of dodgy political dealings. Of course, Russia has its own intelligence operation and Britain is one of its targets, as Moscow is one of MI6’s.

But the idea that the hand of the Kremlin is behind every episode that someone powerful would rather keep secret is risible, and only serves to protect the most ignoble chancers in politics.

However, there is a significant difference between the tale of Simons and Farage’s story. In the case of the latter, The Guardian is outraged, surely rightly, to have its reporting smeared as a Russian manipulation.

Yet when Simons came to peddle his innuendo the urinal into which he chose to leak was — The Guardian.

Its reporters were nothing loathe to give his wild assertions credibility and told Holden they were about to run a story saying, falsely, that the security services were investigating his sources.

In the end, legal threats stayed the paper’s hand. But the double standards are striking.

They are testimony to the degree to which, before the election, wide sections of the media bought into the Starmer agenda and were only too happy to be led by the nose by its spinners and smear-merchants, just as their forebears once were by Peter Mandelson.

Perhaps the eminent bastion of the liberal media will have learned a lesson. For the rest of us, a lesson is the importance of the working class having its own independent press and media which cannot be suborned by the self-serving fairy tales of the powerful and unscrupulous.

New Labour, New Cadre?

Since this heat does not lend itself well to sleep, I have read Tony Blair so that you do not have to. Blairites, it is not whether I agree with Peter Mandelson’s front man. It is whether you do. For example:

I don’t believe with the Trump Presidency we’re witnessing a ‘rupture’.

To be clear, we were never asked to ‘join’ America’s military action in Iran and, never having been part of the planning for such a mission, could not have been part of it. The initial request was simply for the use of our military bases for the refuelling of American planes. I understand the reasons for refusal but it’s not the best way to treat our ally.

Not for full articulation here [why not?], but we need a functioning relationship with the other superpower: China. Keir Starmer was absolutely right to visit. We have major points of disagreement with China but the idea we can afford to ignore China or treat China as if we were dealing with a modern version of the Soviet Union is profoundly mistaken. The Western alliance should be strong enough to deal with whatever comes from China; but stay engaged with it and where viable, cooperate with it.

There is a developing sense that as the country becomes more ‘European’, and British opinion moves against Brexit, then at some point it is ripe to enter a debate about ‘going back’. This is not a strategy.

The net-zero acceleration ... The prime minister and the chancellor should have said right at the outset: these are commitments which economic circumstances have rendered unwise to proceed with.

We should deal by whatever means with small boats.

Not civil-service retraining, but a new cadre of workforce, with the specialist technical skills necessary to do systemic change. Departments effectively run by ministers not exclusively from the ranks of Parliament if they have the necessary experience and capability in change management, with special provision for them to be accountable.

On that last point, Dominic Cummings rides again. So, David Miliband, Alastair Campbell, John Rentoul, David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm, Philip Collins, and all the rest, do you agree with those statements? And if Blair’s entire programme, which no sitting Labour MP appears to have welcomed, is still acceptable within the Labour Party, then will Blair, who is seven years younger than Donald Trump, be Labour’s candidate at the next parliamentary by-election after the three on 18 June? If not, why not?

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

JD Flynn makes an excellent suggestion:

The leadership of the Society of St. Pius X has announced this week the names of four priests it intends to consecrate to the episcopacy, and by that, incur the penalty of schism.

We have spent a lot of ink at The Pillar on the SSPX, and we’ll doubtless spill more — in part because we’re watching in real time a new ecclesial rupture unfold, or at least be cemented, and one that comes with maddening insistence that disobedience is really the highest form of obedience.

There is some sense in which the consecration of the new bishops provides a sort of finality to the saga of the SSPX, who have occupied a gray area in ecclesiastical life for several decades. Priests will be consecrated bishops, they will be excommunicated, and the status of the society will more clearly reflect the break of ecclesial communion that goes unspecified in terms like “imperfect communion,” which have been favored by the Vatican in recent years.

The positive effect is that the break will offer Catholics — including the SSPX’s priests — a choice: You’re either obedient to the pope in a moment of black-and-white instruction, or you’ve thrown yourself in with disobedience, because of how you justify it.

That choice may see some SSPX Catholics choose to return to a more normalized sacramental life — especially if the pope seems more open to the liturgical preferences which often lead people to the SSPX in the first place.

But at the same time, the consecrations will have made four bishops who feel no compunction to obey the Supreme Pontiff when he gives them direct orders, and the Church’s ecclesiology is clear that whenever that happens, it’s a crisis.

Which is why I’m a bit surprised the pope hasn’t exercised an additional canonical option. Thus far, the Apostolic See has done all the penal law things that might be expected — issuing warnings with clear consequences, for those involved in the consecrations. I expect that the four announced priests will soon get personal warnings from the pope, outlining the imminent prospect of their declared excommunication, and the consequences thereof.

But if they disobey, they’ll still be bishops, consecrated with the episcopal character of the apostles’ successors, and with all the power that bishops have to ordain.

Except it doesn’t have to be this way.

Canon 841 establishes that “since the sacraments are the same for the whole Church and belong to the divine deposit, it is only for the supreme authority of the Church to approve or define the requirements for their validity.”

This is the canon which confirms that the Church can decree that Catholics can marry validly only according to canonical form, and before a delegated ecclesiastical witness, while other baptized Christians can contract the sacrament of marriage on horseback on the beach, or rappelling off the Sphere in Las Vegas, so long as they observe the civil law on marriage, making a true and recognizable consent to marriage’s essential goods and properties.

The Church sets strict requirements for Catholics who aim to validly contract marriage, because she believes those help to form Catholics to appreciate the sacred character of their marriages. And the Church has the power to do just that.

Which means, insofar as I can tell, that the pope can also decree that Catholic bishops can’t validly consecrate other bishops without a papal mandate. He would likely not want to take that so far as to say that no bishop can consecrate validly without a papal mandate — papal efforts to legislate over the Orthodox would set ecumenism back by about 500 years — but it’s not hard to imagine Catholic episcopal consecrations facing at least the same level of merely ecclesiastical regulation as Catholic marriages.

Now, I can’t be the first person to have conceived of this plan. But the pope hasn’t done it. And there may be good reason. But in case he’s reading it for the first time, I offer only that it’s within his power to do so, and that the canonists at The Pillar would be glad to suggest some colleagues who could draft the decree.