National Intelligence?

It is amazing, and yet somehow not, how many people are fooled when, sanctions or blockades having led to economic collapse and to all of its consequences, those who had imposed such measures felt able to say that they had been proved right all along, with regime change to follow. But the United States has tried before to take Cuba, which on paper ought to be easy. We do not, though, live on paper. And Tulsi Gabbard has finally had enough, as Donald Trump prepares for a war with Cuba to distract from the war with Iran, which failed to distract from the war with Venezuela, which failed to distract from the Epstein Files.

With too few stamps to qualify for the lowest pension in any comparable country, Sarah Ferguson is angling for some sort of royal income to keep her mouth shut. She is four years too young to be a WASPI woman, but lower-upper-class women will and can do pretty much anything to keep the show on the road. Casting herself as a woman wronged by the Establishment, and allying to other such of her own generation, would be in character both for her and for her sort.

Andy Burnham is courting the WASPIs, thereby courting Labour MPs. For all the convulsions in the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2015 and 2024, the one thing on which they all agreed was WASPI. Did even the seceders to Change UK dissent from that? Even if each of the 3.6 million WASPIs had been paid the full £2,950, then that would have added up to £10.62 billion, most of which would have rapidly made its way into the consumer economy that employed the young. Now keep an eye out for everything that cost more than that.

As for the trans thing, no one seriously doubts that the 56-year-old Burnham has always really thought what the 42-year-old Bridget Phillipson has just confirmed. There was not a whiff of anything else when Burnham was Health Secretary. For that, you had to wait for a Conservative Government that was really quite aggressive about it, complete with the then Jamie Wallis, Britain's first and so far only transgender MP, though not Britain's first transgender parliamentarian, since that was Nikki Sinclaire, elected as a Member of the European Parliament as long ago as 2009 under the Leadership of Nigel Farage, having twice sought election to the House of Commons under that banner after having left the Conservative Party.

Reform UK has welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, and its grandee, Ann Widdecombe, opines that men who had "undergone extensive surgery" should be sent to women's prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males. Widdecombe was a faithful Junior Minister under John Major, a Minister of State under Michael Howard as he began the shredding of civil liberties in a bidding war with Tony Blair, a Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice a cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, a scourge of foxhunting, the only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, an autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient "safeguards".

And why not? Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Although Anderson changed sides having initially supported assisted suicide, Tice and Sarah Pochin voted for it all the way to Third Reading. That Farage felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicated how far that courtship had advanced. Who needs the Greens? Numerous Reform figures were fanatical supporters of the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. If the line is now that "immigration hasn't gone down, it's emigration that's gone up", then not only is that factually incorrect, but emigration was around double its current level when the Minister responsible was Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson felt obliged to sack him, but their differences were not political. Nor were those between Johnson and Scott Benton, whom Reform nevertheless refused to take, and who is therefore now running Restore Britain's by-election campaign at Makerfield, where he is telling canvassers to move on if anyone told them that they intended to vote Labour, since the point was to take votes from Reform. Extremely right-wing gay men with Theology degrees are of course routine, and among Old Testament specialists arguably especially so, but Benton came out to his parents just before his wedding to one Harry Symonds. Perhaps they had assumed until that point that he was going to be marrying Carrie Symonds? Indeed, have Harry and Carrie ever been seen together?