Ruled Out

There are no rules anymore. Ann Limb retains her peerage. Peter Mandelson is still on the Privy Council. Yvette Cooper, Steve Reed and Josh Simons are all still in office. Neither Mandelson nor Simons has been arrested. Mandelson's close friend Margaret Hodge is being lined up to chair Ofcom; as Leader of Islington Council, she not only presided over what amounted to a network of child brothels, but she did so while advertising in The Lady for a nanny.

Antonia Romeo has been appointed Cabinet Secretary. "The Queen of Woke" has been welcomed by Reform UK's probable candidate for Foreign Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi. The Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, told John Swinney the details of the case against Peter Murrell before they had been made public, prompting it to be delayed until after the Holyrood elections. And on and on it goes.

Resilience and Uncompromising Principle?

An MP from 2010 to 2024, the 56-year-old Jack Lopresti has joined the Azov Brigade. Ukrainians are among the very few people with a safe and legal route to asylum in Britain, so expect an influx from the Ukraine of that and of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of the displayers of the Sonnerad, the Wolfsangel, and the plain old Swastika.

That is the Ukraine that in Ternopil has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. It is the Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. And it is the Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, the 2013 murderer 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 Brigade, 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.

In Britain, as at least across Europe, the Greens are right behind the war in Ukraine. Of course, they have deep reactionary roots, and they and the Far Right cross over on the ground of paganism, occultism, pseudohistory and pseudoscience. Therefore, it is not merely laughable that Zack Polanski has claimed to be able to hypnotise women to make their breasts grow larger. That is potentially as pernicious as Julius Evola. Likewise, the court of Tony Blair featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides.

We knew that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism was inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. We pointed out that they constituted a single milieu. But we were right beyond our worst nightmares. Whereas QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up a deliverer in the person of Donald Trump, the Epstein Class is made up of centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist.

The Epstein Files call to mind Eusebius in Book I, Chapter XXXVI of his Life of Constantine: “But the crowning point of the tyrant’s wickedness was his having recourse to sorcery: sometimes for magic purposes ripping up women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of newborn infants. He slew lions also, and practised certain horrid arts for evoking demons, and averting the approaching war, hoping by these means to get the victory. In short, it is impossible to describe the manifold acts of oppression by which this tyrant of Rome enslaved his subjects: so that by this time they were reduced to the most extreme penury and want of necessary food, a scarcity such as our contemporaries do not remember ever before to have existed at Rome.”

That was Maxentius in 312, on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the eve on which Constantine received his famous vision of the Cross. In that Sign, Constantine conquered, and Christendom began, bringing at least some degree of restraint to intercourse with Saint Paul’s elemental spirits, which are Saint John’s fallen angels, and which the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. They always return to the fore when the Faith is in retreat.

The extreme depravity did not go underground. It went, as it were, overground, continuing in circles so elite that the rest of us could not usually see them. But we have seen them from time to time, and this is one of those times. Such are both the roots and the fruits of the refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire. In hoc signo vinces.

The Bare Minimum

“Falling inflation” means only that prices are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. They are not coming down.

All this, and 5.2 per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

Thus, while the unemployment rate of 14 per cent among those aged 18 to 24 has arisen without the equalisation of their minimum wage with everyone else’s, the solution is assumed to be the abandonment of the Labour manifesto commitment to that equalisation. 30 years ago, we used to wonder how, if the arguments used against a minimum wage were correct, then County Durham could manage to have both the country’s lowest wages and its highest unemployment. That point was unanswerable. But no one would make anything like it now.

Instead, all parties are far more likely to concur with Clean Up Britain that Universal Credit claimants, one third of whom were in work while another quarter had met the extremely arduous conditions to be found medically unfit for it, should be compelled to spend at least four hours per month picking litter. If there is litter picking to be done, and there is, then it should be someone’s properly paid job. It sometimes is. Are those workers to be sacked and put onto Universal Credit so as to do it for free? We did not work for free in prison. And why does anyone with a full-time job have to claim Universal Credit, as millions do?

Not that anyone is offering any change. Robert Jenrick texted a copy of yesterday’s speech to George Osborne, generous host of Peter Mandelson, with the message: “George, trust you’re well. Here’s a copy of a speech I gave today on the economy. It commits to the OBR and to fiscal responsibility, which I hope you will approve of.” On his podcast with Ed Balls, Osborne responded, “I say yes, I do.”

Butt of Malmsey

And suddenly he can sweat after all. They will have taken his DNA, so they now know for certain whether or not he is a lizard. But none of this is unprecedented, even in recent years. Princess Anne has a criminal record, having been prosecuted by her mother.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is a patrilineal descendant of Elimar I of Oldenburg, yet he has to call himself that. Only the related line of Borbón y Battenberg surpassed this combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, and even that had the House of Bourbon in its name. Mountbatten-Windsor? Cruel and unusual punishment.

In any case, he is at least Lord Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as the son of a Duke, and indeed Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, as the son of Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. Now, since the Police are on a roll today, did someone mention Peter Mandelson?

Care Plan?

What would be the correct number of SEND pupils, and why? The Statement has always been extremely difficult to get, like PIP. If more people are now managing it, then, in a system set up to fail them, more people are getting the help that they need. Deal with it.

But Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.

Thus Darren Jones has been known to describe disability benefits as "pocket money", and the Government now plans to restrict or abolish EHCPs, echoing the mistreatment of Teaching Assistants by the former Labour Leadership of Durham County Council, which is now controlled by Reform UK.  Reform, is that the company that you wish to keep?

Strategically Situated

By the time that you read this, Donald Trump will have changed his mind again. The only people who will still care about the Chagossians in a year’s time will be those of us who had done so a year ago, and a lot longer ago than that. The bandwagon-jumpers always used to say that the moral and legal justification for the American base, about which alone they cared, was that there was no Chagossian people.

They still insist that there is no Palestinian people. In discussing the West Bank and Gaza, the United Nations Security Council was chaired by Yvette Cooper, who unlawfully proscribed Palestine Action, and who did so specifically by reference to the charges of aggravated burglary that have now been dropped against 18 defendants, following the acquittal of the other six. Cooper’s is the only British political party to have a member on Trump’s Board of Peace. Specifically, Tony Blair sits on its Executive Board, and on its Gaza Executive Board. A vote for Labour at Gorton and Denton would be a vote for that.

Advance UK and Restore Britain need to sort themselves out, of course, but Advance’s Nick Buckley may well take more votes than either the Labour or the Green margin of victory over Reform UK. And then whither Matt Goodwin? He could never go back to academia, but why should GB News continue to employ him, either? Nigel Farage’s failure to make him Shadow Education Secretary strongly suggests a lack of confidence in his forthcoming electoral triumph. This time next year, Goodwin will be on Blankety Blank. Not necessarily as a panellist.

Politically, though, who cares? Green and Reform councillors both vote for austerity, just like, and indeed alongside, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat councillors. Just like, and indeed alongside, Conservative and Lib Dem parliamentarians, Green and Reform parliamentarians vote against even such limited workers’ rights as Labour can be bothered to propose. If you vote Green, then you may as well vote for Farage. If you vote Reform, then you may as well vote for Zack Polanksi. The Greens have increased Brighton Council’s surplus by the same £60 million that they have cut from services. A Portsmouth City Councillor of 30 years’ standing, Jason Fazackarley, who had sat both as a Green and for Labour, moved in November from the Lib Dems, who had made him Lord Mayor, to Reform, following at least one other sitting Lib Dem councillor, Jeff Sumner of Burnley.

From Labour to Reform defected, among at least five others nationwide last year, Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage, who contested internal Labour Party elections on the slate of Morgan McSweeney’s and Josh Simons’s infamous Labour Together. Reform expects to take the Stevenage parliamentary seat from Labour. Of the 20 councillors who joined Reform UK on 14 January, five had been Independents, but 14 had been Conservatives 24 hours earlier, and one had been in the Green Party. Yesterday, Robert Jenrick announced that Reform would keep Gordon Brown’s surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy, keep Nick Clegg’s Office for Budget Responsibility, and restore the two-child benefit cap plainly and simply.

Meanwhile, although originally elected as a Conservative, Councillor David Wilkes of Sandwell has just defected again, this time from Labour to Advance, while at least one of Kent’s expelled Reform councillors who have joined Restore has done so after having been rebuffed by the Lib Dems. Expect a lot more of this. The Epstein Class is centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist. Think on.

Serious Doubts About The Motivation

Gordon Rayner and Claire Newell write:

A Cabinet Office minister used a law firm to smear a journalist who was looking into pro-Starmer group Labour Together, The Telegraph can disclose.

Josh Simons instructed Mishcon de Reya to warn Telegraph journalists that it had “serious doubts about [the] motivation” of Paul Holden, who was writing a book about the Starmerite think tank, and “his credibility should be treated with extreme caution”.

At the time, Mr Simons was head of Labour Together, a think tank that helped propel Sir Keir Starmer to power. He is now a minister in the Cabinet Office.

Sir Keir is already facing calls to explain what he knew about Labour Together’s activities after it emerged that it had paid a public affairs firm to look into the sourcing of a Sunday Times story about the think tank, which resulted in its journalists being falsely described as Kremlin stooges.

In February 2024, Mr Holden, who has spent decades investigating corruption, was working with The Telegraph on a story about £730,000 of donations that Morgan McSweeney, the former director of Labour Together, had failed to declare to the Electoral Commission.

A letter from Mishcon de Reya sent to The Telegraph suggested that the information obtained by Mr Holden, and passed to The Telegraph, “relate to a sensitive ongoing investigation by the UK intelligence services into a hack of the Electoral Commission”.

The implication was that Mr Holden’s information had come from a hack, but in fact he had obtained it by submitting a freedom of information request to the Electoral Commission.

The distinguished law firm – best known for representing the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in her divorce from the King – was being instructed by Mr Simons, who succeeded Mr McSweeney as head of Labour Together. There is no suggestion that Mishcon de Reya was doing anything other than passing on instructions from a client. 

Mr Simons is already facing calls to resign for commissioning the report into The Sunday Times, which resulted in highly personal and false information about its journalists being shared in Westminster.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir is facing calls to sever all links with Labour Together. Mr McSweeney, who recently resigned as Sir Keir’s chief of staff, used the group to position Sir Keir as the choice to replace Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. It has also given financial support to several Cabinet ministers.

Mr Holden is the author of six books and was a key witness to the Zondo Commission that exposed corruption in South Africa. He described the allegations that Labour Together made in the legal letter as “despicable”.

He told The Telegraph: “They were desperate to make sure people stopped talking about the money.

“The story I was working on with The Telegraph was based on documents I had obtained from the Electoral Commission after a series of freedom of information requests. It was the most impeccable sourcing you could imagine.

“But they wanted to delay the reporting of the story while they were putting together their dodgy dossier.”

The public affairs company that wrote the report into The Sunday Times, Washington-based Apco Worldwide, had suggested the newspaper had obtained its story as a result of a Russian hack of the Electoral Commission. In fact, a whistleblower had leaked a cache of emails to Mr Holden, who was the source of the Sunday Times story.

When Mr Simons received the 58-page report, codenamed Operation Cannon, he passed a copy to the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, which dismissed the claims of Russian interference as baseless.

Mr Simons was contacted by The Telegraph, which was referred to Labour Together and Mishcon de Reya, which both declined to comment.