Labour’s Hollow Crown

I would buy a newspaper again for a column by Paul Knaggs:

They will tell you that Keir Starmer chose his moment and walked away with his head high. He did not. He was pushed, and he was pushed because his own party had become a thing the country could no longer bear to look at.

The wound had a name, and the name was Mandelson. Starmer chose him, called the appointment a stroke of genius, and sent him to Washington as ambassador. The vetting that should have come first came second, and when the security service raised the alarm, officials reached for a rare power to wave the appointment through, because the prime minister had already announced it. Then the emails surfaced. Peter Mandelson had stayed close to Jeffrey Epstein long after the conviction that should have ended every such friendship, and had sent him supportive messages. He was sacked. He has since been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office over documents passed to that same man. He has not been charged, and the courts have not ruled. But the political damage was done the moment the public understood what kind of company the leadership kept.

This was not the accident of one bad hire. Starmer himself spent years inside the Trilateral Commission, the off-the-record networking club of bankers, spies and transnational managers that treats mass democracy as a problem to be managed. He was one of only two sitting British MPs ever known to belong. He was not the only notable name on its rolls. By his own account in the Justice Department files now public, Jeffrey Epstein sat in the same Commission, a club that handed its card to a future Labour prime minister and a convicted child trafficker alike. We mapped the whole network when the files dropped. None of it makes Starmer a criminal.

All of it tells you the world he chose to live in, and the company that world keeps. The Mandelson affair did not reveal a new Labour. It confirmed the oldest suspicion we hold about it: that the people at the top of this party live in a world that has nothing to do with the people they were elected to serve.

The Mandelson affair did not reveal a new Labour. It confirmed the old suspicion.

So the mob came for a sacrifice. The parliamentary party that had cheered him into Downing Street turned and demanded a body. And here is the uncomfortable truth: in this one instance, the mob was right. The party was toxic, and the local elections had said so in numbers no amount of spin could soften. Someone had to go. Starmer went.

Now let me be clear about what does not trouble me, because it is where most of the commentary goes wrong. I am not scandalised that we do not elect our prime ministers. We never have. You vote for a party, and for a name on a ballot in your own town; you have never once put a cross beside a prime minister. Gordon Brown took the keys this way. So did John Major. That is the system, and on the whole it is the system as it should be.

My concern is sharper, and it is this. A party that won a landslide cannot find, anywhere on its own benches, a single person fit to lead it. It had to send outside Parliament for a rescuer. It had to persuade a sitting MP to resign a safe seat so that Andy Burnham could win a by-election and walk in through the side door, the first time a seat has been manufactured for an outsider this way since Leyton in 1965. And on the strength of that single contest, fewer than 25,000 votes in one corner of Greater Manchester, he is to be handed 68 million people. New crown, same head. Even Andrew Neil, no friend of ours, looked at the Burnham programme and found no policies in it.

That is the perversity. Not that he is unelected. That his party, with a supermajority, is so hollow it had to import him.

And the supermajority was never what it looked like. Labour did not win in 2024 so much as inherit the wreckage. 411 seats on 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest share any governing party has ever taken into office. That is not a movement. That is a vacancy, opened by a Conservative collapse and flattered by a voting system that turns a third of the vote into two thirds of the seats. Nobody marched for this government. They simply declined to march for the last one.

Labour did not win in 2024 so much as inherit the wreckage.

So let us stop pretending this is a Labour problem, or a Burnham problem, and name it for what it is. The rot runs through the whole machine. Corruption is not the property of one party; it moves freely between all of them. The vision is gone. The basic grasp of how an economy works, of how a country feeds and houses and warms itself, has gone with it.

What replaced it is a kind of managerial vanity. We have outsourced our industry, globalised our economy, and shrunk the entire national project down to a place in a table. Westminster frets over Britain’s standing in the G7 as though we were a football club scrapping to stay out of the relegation zone. And the cruel joke is that even top of the table would change nothing for ordinary people, because the levers that matter were given away long ago.

We govern on licence now. Licensed by the orthodoxy of the IMF, by the level playing field we were promised would set us free, by fiscal rules welded shut, by market forces, by the daily duty of keeping the bond markets soothed. The politician who swears he will transform your life has already agreed, in every room that counts, to touch none of the things that could.

Which leaves one question, the only one worth putting to any of them. Westminster has forgotten who it governs, and who it governs for. So ask the next leader, and the one after that, the question they are never made to answer: who do you serve? And do not imagine the other side is the answer. Before anyone offers Reform as the insurgency, look at who they are. All eight of their MPs have worn a Conservative rosette at one time or another. Four of them crossed the floor only in the last year. The great revolt against the establishment is staffed by the establishment’s cast-offs: recycled Tories in a new colour, selling the same managed decline. The choice on offer is a coronation on one side and a relaunch on the other. Neither asked you. Neither intends to.

This is what system failure looks like in its last stage, before the thing shakes itself apart. Not a coup, not a crisis you can photograph, but a machine driven long past its tolerance: a governing party that cannot govern, an opposition recycled from the people who governed before, a political class fluent in everything except the lives of the people it rules. Listen to it. The gears are grinding now, metal on metal, the whole apparatus juddering on its mountings. Change the face at the top as often as you like. You are not repairing the engine. You are standing beside it when it goes.

Because it is failing of the thing it has always lacked: care, vision, democracy, and any real understanding of who it was built to serve. A machine that has forgotten its purpose does not coast to a gentle halt. It runs hot, then hotter, and then it comes apart.

The king is dead. Long live the king. And the machine that’s shaking itself to pieces.

Degrading

But the problem is tribunals granting Sharia divorces to those who request them. Of course. Harry Davies and Rob Evans writes:

When Sarah Steele woke up on the morning of 2 December 2023, she found herself in a pool of cold water in a bathtub. She was naked and in the apartment of an American fighter pilot she had met in person for the first time the night before. She was confused. Her head hurt, and so did her neck.

This was the account Steele, a British academic, provided to prosecutors. They later accused the pilot, Capt Jacob Wulfson, of drugging and strangling Steele in his apartment in the east of England, and penetrating her vagina with his penis without her consent.

In the criminal justice system for England and Wales, Wulfson’s trial would probably have been held at the city’s crown court, and the alleged offence categorised as rape. A jury of ordinary citizens – men and women – would have heard the case. If found guilty, a judge would have decided the sentence.

However, Wulfson’s case was tried at a court martial on a US airbase, despite his alleged crime taking place while he was off duty and in an English city. The proceedings followed US military law, and the offence was not charged as rape but as sexual assault and “aggravated sexual contact”.

The judge, an air force colonel, sat before an American flag. He presided over a room of people in navy-blue uniforms. The jury – who heard the case in April this year at RAF Lakenheath, the largest US base in Britain – was a panel of eight air force officers.

All were stationed on the same base as Wulfson. All were men.

The panel’s president, equivalent to a jury foreman, was the chief of the squadron that maintains the jets flown by Wulfson. Another panel member had been acquitted of sexual offences at a court martial several years earlier.

Apart from two Guardian reporters and the British witnesses who took the stand, everyone in the courtroom was American. At one point, the NHS was misnamed. At another, there was confusion about how long it would take to get to Wales.

Unlike in the British courts, there was no dock for the accused. Wulfson sat at a table with the defence team, directly across from the airmen selected to weigh the evidence in the week-long court martial.

Wulfson, a decorated aviator, flew F-35s, the US military’s most advanced fighter jet. He served in Afghanistan and more recently had trained to fly carrying nuclear weapons. His elite squadron was nicknamed the “Valkyries”.

He did not give evidence in the court martial. For much of the proceedings, he was silent, exercising his right under the US constitution not to testify. As a result, he did not provide his own account of what had happened in his apartment.

Instead, Wulfson’s defence team sought to undermine Steele’s credibility. His lawyer, an ex-army litigator who had flown in from Florida, depicted her as a financially motivated, sex-obsessed “liar”, subjecting her to the kind of theatrical and combative questioning more commonly found in US courtrooms.

Steele’s experience throws into sharp relief what can happen when the alleged perpetrator of a crime in the UK is a member of the US military.

Technically, the UK authorities should have primary jurisdiction to prosecute crimes allegedly perpetrated by US service members off duty and off base. But the Wulfson case is one of several uncovered by the Guardian in which UK police and prosecutors appear to be ceding responsibility to their American military counterparts.

“The British authorities should be fighting to maintain jurisdiction,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a law professor and former US air force judge advocate involved in efforts to reform military law. “Why should they trust the American military justice system with anything related to sexual assault?”

In Wulfson’s case, the jury found him guilty of strangling Steele, but not guilty of penetrating her vagina without her consent.

If his case had been heard in the English courts, the judge would have at this point taken responsibility for sentencing Wulfson. Under national guidelines, the equivalent offence of non-fatal strangulation carries a maximum sentence of five years.

At the court martial, Wulfson could choose between the judge or jury to decide his punishment. He opted to have his fellow airmen, with little or no legal experience, decide his sentence.

The maximum sentence of imprisonment they could impose was 13 years. The prosecution requested five years. After three hours of deliberations, the men returned with a decision: Wulfson would be confined to a corrections facility for six months.

At the back of the courtroom, Steele looked exhausted. She had spent more than six hours on the stand that week. In a statement to The Guardian, she described the court martial as a “degrading” process that had placed her, rather than Wulfson, on trial.

‘His hand was on my neck’

RAF Lakenheath is in effect a small American town in west Suffolk. There are more than 6,000 active-duty personnel plus their family members stationed at the base, where the convenience stores are stocked with American candy.

The base has its own shopping mall, a drive-thru Taco Bell and a miniature Statue of Liberty. The currency used in its shops and cafes is dollars. To reach the emergency services (it has its own hospital, police force and fire service) you dial 911.

Lakenheath is home to the US air force’s 48th fighter wing. A typical morning on base involves formations of fighter jets departing for training missions. Some of its jets were recently involved in the US bombardment of Iran.

Wulfson worked at the base’s F-35 complex. After joining the Valkyries, one of Lakenheath’s two F-35 squadrons – the second is known as the Grim Reapers – his name and callsign, Lone, could be seen printed on a flap of one of the jets capable of dropping thermonuclear bombs.

Wulfson met Steele on Tinder in September 2023. They both lived in Cambridge, a 40-minute drive from the airbase. “I live on Midsummer Common,” he wrote in one of his early messages. “I’m a pilot up at Lakenheath.”

After exchanging messages on the dating app, they switched to WhatsApp, sharing details about their lives. Steele, then 39, had separated from her long-term partner earlier that year. In court, she said she had been dipping her toe back into the dating world. “I was trying to see what was next in my life.”

Weeks after they met online, Steele went into hospital for surgery to deal with complications arising from a mastectomy she had had several years earlier. From hospital, she texted with Wulfson, who was 29, as she lay recovering, joking about the strong painkillers she was taking.

They also exchanged messages sharing sexual fantasies. In conversations with friends, she referred to him as “the pilot”.

By 1 December 2023, Steele was back on her feet and slowly returning to her fitness regime. At the gym that evening, she discussed with a friend whether she should meet Wulfson in person for the first time. He had texted her earlier that day to see what she was up to.

At 10.42pm, Wulfson wrote again: “You should come here.” She asked where “here” was. “At my flat,” he replied. Back at home, Steele quickly showered and ate some slices of apple before driving over to him.

Before arriving, she texted him with what she described as “a few ground rules”. It read: “No means no when said. No hands on my neck. Ever. Condoms please.” She acknowledged that her message was “blunt”. Wulfson replied: “Yes, that’s fair.”

Security camera footage played in the court martial showed Steele arriving at his apartment building shortly after 11.30pm. Steele’s account of what happened next was laid out by the military prosecutors. 

Upstairs in the kitchen, Wulfson poured her a whisky and they chatted for around half an hour. The prosecution alleged it was while Steele was in his apartment that a potent drug, etizolam, entered her system. They advanced several theories about how it was administered but could not say for certain, and Wulfson was ultimately acquitted of the drug-related charge.

From the kitchen, they moved to Wulfson’s bedroom and undressed. Steele said on the witness stand that it was at this point “things sped up really quite fast”. Asked by the prosecutor to describe what had happened, she said that once Wulfson was on top of her, he moved “very rapidly” and penetrated her without a condom – against her stated wishes.

She said she tried to protest but couldn’t. The prosecutor asked why not. “His hand was on my neck,” she replied. She said she had wanted him to slow down but she “couldn’t speak”. She described looking up at him and noticing a light fixture on the ceiling above his head.

“One of his hands was on my arm, one of his hands was on my neck,” Steele said. Asked how this felt, she said she was frightened, and that things then started going dark. “[I felt] like I was going out, disappearing down a tunnel, and then nothing.”

Prosecutors alleged that Steele had passed out in Wulfson’s bed because of the etizolam in her body and the pressure he applied to her neck. “As he was squeezing her neck he was still penetrating her,” alleged Christopher Mitchell, the air force major on the prosecution team.

Her next memory, Steele testified, was waking up in the cold water of Wulfson’s bath.

She said her body was sore. Where, the prosecutor asked. “Throat, neck, head, feet, genitals,” she said. She described feeling confused about why she was in so much pain. At that point, she said, “I was not sure of anything.” 

‘Like someone had beat the shit out of her’

According to the prosecution’s case, Wulfson eventually helped Steele out of the bath and returned her to his bed. She remained there until the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. The nausea was acute, she said. “I had splitting pain in my foot and fire in my throat.”

Later, after Wulfson had driven Steele home (she said she was unable to drive due to an injured foot), he sent her a series of texts. “I am so sorry. I’m horrified with myself,” he wrote. “I need to spend some time thinking about who I am,” he added. “I feel so badly about what happened.”

Steele went that evening to A&E (a term that had to be explained to the American jury). She was scanned and X-rayed. A doctor who treated her testified that she had “injuries visible to the eye”, namely bruising on her face and body. The doctor did not observe bruising on her neck, though she said Steele presented symptoms associated with strangulation.

Steele left hospital the following morning and a friend took her to a sexual assault referral centre. There, Steele said, she gave a urine sample and photos were taken of her vagina as part of an intimate examination conducted by a forensic nurse.

She also had an off-the-record conversation with a UK police officer stationed at the centre. Afterwards her friend, a woman who worked for the US air force, took Steele to a nearby US base to have a similar conversation with military police.

Within 24 hours, US air force police had arrested Wulfson. A spokesperson for the federal law enforcement agency told the Guardian it “negotiated jurisdiction” with Cambridgeshire police and agreed the US “would take the lead”. Cambridgeshire police confirmed it had agreed the Americans “would take investigative primacy”.

Another friend who saw Steele around that time testified that “it looked like someone had beat the shit out of her”.

During the court martial, an alternative explanation for the injuries was presented by Wulfson’s lawyer, Tim Bilecki, a prominent defence attorney in the US court martial system who posts videos on YouTube about his courtroom victories. Steele’s injuries, he said, were the result of her own actions.

Bilecki, an imposing presence with a blond crew cut and pinstripe suit, said Steele had started “freaking out” in Wulfson’s bed because of a traumatic assault earlier in her life. He claimed she had hit the pilot and head-butted him, leading her to sustain a head injury and a concussion.

The lawyer denied that Wulfson had assaulted Steele, strangled her or drugged her. “Capt Wulfson has been falsely accused, plain and simple,” he said, adding that the pilot was “unequivocally not guilty”.

At the core of Bilecki’s case was an assault on Steele’s credibility. The approach had various lines of attack, starting with a claim that Steele had fabricated the allegations as part of an elaborate scheme to extract money from a UK government compensation scheme for crime victims.

In his opening statement, Bilecki confidently asserted: “This is a play for money,” saying his client had been “set up for money”. Steele repeatedly denied this. She said she had applied to the scheme – and had still not received a decision – to cover loss of wages arising from difficulties going back to work after the assault.

The prosecution described Bilecki’s theory as absurd. By his closing submissions, he seemed less confident in this aspect of his case. “Do I know if she’s doing this for money? I don’t know,” he said.

Another line of attack was that Steele abused prescription drugs. At one point, Bilecki seized on the texts she had sent Wulfson from hospital while recovering from breast surgery. She had joked about being on strong American painkillers.

By attempting to present Steele as a drug abuser, which she strongly denied, he suggested she had in fact taken the etizolam, a benzodiazepine-like drug banned in the UK and sometimes called “street Valium”. Bilecki suggested she may have wanted to “pop a few pills before going to meet a fighter pilot significantly younger than her”.

Bilecki said there was “zero evidence” Wulfson administered the drug. “Why would you need to drug someone who is willingly coming over to hook up with you? You wouldn’t need to, it’s absurd.”

In his efforts to paint her as a “dangerous” liar, Bilecki even raised doubts about whether Steele had had reconstructive breast surgery. He asked the jury: “Have you heard any record she had that surgery?”

Such speculative claims may not have been tolerated in English courts. Alleged victims of sexual offences are entitled to anonymity and eligible for protections that include testifying from behind a screen in order to shield them from the gaze of the defendant.

With no such measures in the court martial, Steele testified a few metres away from Wulfson.

As Steele sat facing the accused, Bilecki questioned her about texts she had sent Wulfson months before she went to his apartment, describing the ways in which she wanted to have sex. The lawyer read them out. He referred to others in which she had discussed teaching law students about BDSM. “She’s certainly not some victim in the bedroom,” he said.

On the stand, Steele mostly appeared composed, if at times nervous and occasionally exasperated with Bilecki (“That’s a stupid question,” she said at one stage). At other points, she was visibly distressed, struggling to hold back tears.

This did not stop Bilecki from making a jarring claim in closing submissions that Steele had enjoyed the court martial. “She loves the attention of all of this,” he said. As he spoke, a young woman in camouflage uniform at the back of the court gently shook her head.

A sentence handed down by peers

It took the panel almost five hours to reach a verdict. By the time the men retired to deliberate, they had heard evidence from 13 witnesses called by the prosecutors, including medical professionals, military police officers, and friends of Steele. No witnesses were called by the defence.

Among the witnesses was a US military forensic biologist. He said limited male DNA had been found on Steele’s body, but traces of Wulfson’s DNA had been on her neck and breasts (the prosecution noted she had spent hours in a bath and had showered before samples were taken). Swabs taken days after the assault did not find Steele’s DNA on Wulfson’s penis.

Due to specific requirements under US law, the intimate images and report detailing the forensic examination of Steele’s vagina shortly after the alleged assault were not admissible as evidence.

When the panel filed back into court with a decision, Wulfson stood to attention, his eyes fixed ahead on the officers tasked with deciding his future. A slip of paper recording their decision was handed to the judge. Wulfson was ordered to return to his feet for the verdict.

As well as the strangulation charge, he was found guilty of another offence: wilfully disobeying a commander’s orders to not contact Steele after the assault. He was acquitted of penetrating her without her consent and doing so knowing she had been drugged.

When Wulfson elected to be sentenced by the panel, judge Brian Thompson – a bespectacled colonel who wore a black robe over an air force uniform and sipped orange soda during breaks – instructed its members that deciding on a sentence would require “wise discretion”.

Jury sentencing is permitted in only a handful of US states. Its use in courts martial was ended in 2023 amid concerns over inconsistent decisions and the role of military personnel in dispensing justice. Wulfson’s offences occurred weeks before this came into effect, meaning the old system applied.

In making their decision, the judge said, the panel should consider factors including the impact of the offences on the victim and how to promote “good order in the armed forces”. However, in this phase of the court martial – in which new witnesses would testify – they could also consider Wulfson’s military character and combat record.

The defence called three witnesses: two senior pilots he had flown alongside and a colonel who spoke via video link from a US airbase in South Korea. Referring to Wulfson by his callsign, Lone, they described him as a diligent and unassuming wingman, and one of the air force’s top young aviators.

Stories were told of Wulfson’s missions in Afghanistan flying attack jets between 2019 and 2020. He had, for example, provided air support to special forces conducting night raids in villages, and flown sorties carrying 500lb and 2,000lb bombs.

Each witness was asked whether their assessment of Wulfson’s character was different now they knew he had been convicted of strangling a woman. No, they replied – they had seen his “true character” in combat.

As Bilecki argued against a prison sentence, he presented the panel with a folder containing a record of Wulfson’s military service. On several occasions, he noted how many people his client had killed. One mission in Afghanistan, he said, resulted in hundreds of “KIA”, a reference to enemies killed in action.

On the court martial’s final day, Wulfson broke his silence and stepped forward to address the panel. He spoke softly. He said that on the night in question he had been “highly intoxicated” and had taken things “too far”. Referring to the texts he had sent apologising to Steele after the assault, he said: “What I expressed to her remains.”

“I hope we can both move on with our lives,” he added, describing what happened as “one night, one bad decision”.

The consequences for Steele were laid bare in a victim impact statement she read to the court. She stood and addressed Wulfson. “I asked you not to do something, and you did it anyway,” she said. “That was not a misunderstanding. It was a conscious disregard for my autonomy, my safety and my voice.”

Speaking through tears, she said that when she had gone to meet Wulfson she had recently undergone surgery and had been trying to “reconnect with a sense of self and feel safe in a very different body”.

She said she was grateful for the conviction, but “the road to get to this point was long” and had required her to return to “the worst experience in my life again and again”. Steele concluded with a request for the panel: “I’d like to see justice served that will not only restore some of my own faith in humanity, but offer a layer of protection to other women.”

A US air force spokesperson said the military justice process “includes strict procedural safeguards by design to ensure proceedings are fair, transparent and thorough.” They added: “Maintaining the trust that underpins our partnership, while ensuring accountability and the fair administration of discipline, remains our priority.”

In her statement to The Guardian, Steele said: “The ordeal I went through was incredibly distressing and degrading. It felt intrusive and archaic.”

What happens next?

The building where Wulfson is serving his six-month sentence is a corrections facility at RAF Lakenheath, a short distance from the runway he used to tear down at hundreds of miles an hour in an F-35. At the time of his trial, only two others were being held there.

Detainees wake each day at 5am and wear camouflage uniforms rather than prison suits. They take on work around the airbase, and visitors are allowed on Sundays and US public holidays. Good behaviour can contribute to a reduction in sentence.

As well as the six-month sentence, the panel punished Wulfson with a formal reprimand and a dismissal from the air force, a penalty that can strip an officer of veteran benefits and leave a permanent record as a convicted felon.

In a statement to The Guardian, Bilecki said that prosecutors could have charged Wulfson with rape but had opted not to, and emphasised that the court found the pilot was not guilty of the sexual assault allegations.

He also played down the significance of Wulfson’s apology. “He apologised because it made sense to,” Bilecki said. “This woman had come to his home for the first time and left looking like she had been in a fight. Obviously, the night had not gone as planned.”

Wulfson’s case will now be automatically reviewed by an air force appeals court at a military base in Maryland, that can re-examine the case’s facts and evidence. He is due to leave RAF Lakenheath in mid-September, at which point he will be free to fly home to the US.

Were it not for this article, the only public record of Wulfson’s conviction would be an entry on a docket on an obscure US air force webpage. It lists the offence for which he has been convicted and the sentence received. There is no reference to any facts of the case. There is nothing to indicate the offence occurred in Cambridge, or that the victim is a British citizen.

This Is Spinal Tapp

No self-respecting Minister would stay in office if all of his requests for documents and meetings had to be approved personally by the Secretary of State. And no self-respecting Secretary of State would stay in office if the Prime Minister had refused to sack such a Minister.

The thing is that Keir Starmer has already resigned. Mike Tapp wants to be in the Home Office when Andy Burnham needed a Home Secretary. And Shabana Mahmood wants to be the Home Secretary at that point. At least one of them will be clearing a desk that day.

Tapp, Water

Shabana Mahmood has asked Keir Starmer to sack Mike Tapp because he had been taking ideas on which she had been working, and briefing them as his own in the hope of a job under Andy Burnham. Country First. The grownups are back in charge. It’s nice, isn’t it, the quiet?

Well, they have to fill up their time somehow. While betting the farm on solar energy, they cannot cope with the Sun in summer. There are restrictions on water use despite a spring that would have given Noah a run for his money, something that, like flaming June, is seasonal in itself even if there are degrees of it. Any water shortage in Britain would be downright laughable, except that it is not funny in the least.

Apart from Chile, where it was bequeathed by General Pinochet, only England in the whole wide world has privatised water, the failure of which is total. Lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

Yet who is to make this case? Kemi Badenoch? Rupert Lowe? Nigel Farage, whom Badenoch calls a Corbynite as if that were still an insult? Yesterday, Farage admitted that he had not spent any of Christopher Harborne’s five million pounds on “lifelong security”, nor apparently on anything else. But no one is given five million pounds for nothing. This is not going to go away. It is our business if it was less than a year before he entered Parliament, which it was. Those are the written rules. It is our business if he wants to be Prime Minister, which he does. Those are the unwritten rules. And if, while advocating very hard for cryptocurrencies, Farage did not use any of that money to invest in Kwasi Kwarteng’s cryptocurrency company, then what did he use?

Conversion Excursion

Although the Crown Court backlog may not be down by very much, it is down, but that is beside the point as far as the Government is concerned. Its desire to restrict trial by jury is ideological, and would therefore apply even if there were no backlog. Even with the prisons at and indeed beyond breaking point, it is cheerfully seeking to create whole new categories of serious criminal offence.

For example, what, exactly, is the “conversion therapy” that would carry a sentence of five years? The Government would no longer be unveiling anything of this magnitude unless it had been signed off by Andy Burnham, so we need not bother looking to him. It has been under Burnham that Manchester has come to present Canal Street as its social and cultural heart and soul.

Yet most lesbians and gay men had heterosexual experiences in adolescence, and sometimes well after that, before deciding that it was not for them. Why should there be either a cultural taboo around articulating the reverse experience, or a legal sanction for cooperating in someone else’s? Ignore hysteria about things like electroconvulsion, which went out with the Ark.

If conversion therapy is abhorrent, then what about the drastic and irreversible psychological, chemical and surgical aspects of so-called sex changes, which are a vast array of medical treatment for something that is supposedly not an illness at all?

And just as a ban on halal slaughter would also ban kosher slaughter, or a ban on the medically unnecessary circumcision of children would ban the bris, would not this measure ban the pastoral practice of Orthodox Judaism? We could not be having that. Could we?

Spiteful Class Warriors Assemble?

Kemi Badenoch versus Bridget Phillipson? My word. I would not even dare watch that on television. But it was always more than a little suspicious when, desperate to appear to have any specific policy, Labour revived its perennial internal crowd-pleaser, the imposition of VAT on school fees. That one never looked likely to happen, because the promise of it was too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for.

This policy has not been properly thought through. Is it intended as a permanent means of raising slightly less than two per cent of the education budget, or as a device for closing down commercial schools? It cannot be both. But might the real motivation be Phillipson's ambition? Call that a Third Way.

Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything. You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

Moreover, school fees corrupt the parliamentary process. To pay them, the Conservatives insist that an MP has to be paid a gargantuan salary. They then take other work as well, but by then the meeting of their initial demand has drawn other, mostly Labour, candidates who have been attracted by the money. People with pound signs in their eyes also have very sharp elbows. But the present salary is the existing rate for the job. The principles of trade unionism demand that everyone who was entitled to it take it in full, and that it not be cut, either in absolute terms or by being allowed to fall behind inflation. Level up, not down.

Yet while we are seeking to make the world a better place, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

And it must be said that the schools that they favour do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. By all accounts, Jeremy Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools, although he might accept them now. Before he was exiled, George Galloway regularly accepted such invitations. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state-funded school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left.

It is in the running of state-funded schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. That would involve doing deals with the Conservatives. Such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Anna Turleys of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

Their favoured IGCSE has been banned in the state sector for being too easy. That may be another reason why Oxbridge and socially comparable institutions no longer found their products attractive. But having been denied admission to the universities that they did not quite consider beneath them, the intense ideologues who had hitherto gone straight into overtly political roles at 22 will henceforth be going straight into them at 19. They will retain those roles no matter who had won anything so vulgar as an election.

Those roles include the positions of the Labour Party's almighty staffers. Anyone who has ever dealt with the Labour Party's staff will have noticed both their extreme youth and their extreme poshness. As the Forde Report set out forensically, that combination makes them dazzlingly arrogant and uncouth. Such are the people who always really run the Labour Party. And here we are.

The Flat Truth

Sarah Knapton writes:

In 1838, Samuel Rowbotham, an English inventor and flat-Earth proponent, conducted a bizarre experiment on a dead straight six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford River in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Rowbotham postulated that if the Earth really was round, he should be able to place a flag at one end of the uninterrupted watercourse and be unable to see it through a telescope as it would dip below the horizon.

To his delight, the flag remained visible, supporting his view that the world was indeed flat.

However, he had made a grave miscalculation. In January 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist, returned to the river and showed that the flag had been visible because of atmospheric refraction – a distorting effect that makes objects appear higher.

He carried out his own experiment, placing five posts much higher along the river to avoid refraction, and demonstrated that the middle post was slightly taller than those further downstream, as they fell away with the Earth’s curvature.

It is the same effect that makes ships’ masts visible for much longer after the hull has vanished over the horizon. If the Earth were flat, the ship would shrink uniformly as it headed into the distance.

Wallace’s experiment failed to convince the flat-Earthers, and to this day many still reject the scientific consensus of a spherical planet spinning at more than 1,000mph.

Some adherents believe the world is a disc with the Arctic Circle at the centre surrounded by land masses and with Antarctica at the edges. Others think it is a plain that goes on forever.

They argue that the horizon looks flat even if you climb 29,000ft to the top of Everest or travel in an aeroplane, and claim that water cannot stick to a curved surface, so the seas would simply pour away if they were on a globe.

To explain gravity, some claim that the flat Earth is accelerating upwards constantly, giving the effect of things being drawn backwards towards the surface, in the same way you feel heavier when going up in a lift.

At first glance their arguments appear to hold water, but dig a little deeper and their claims go down the plughole.

For a start, the Earth is vast and the curvature is so slight at that scale that it is imperceptible until you’re looking down from around 35,000ft.

Although planes can fly high enough, the curve is still incredibly subtle and requires a wide field of view that is generally not possible from a passenger window.

So if we can’t personally see it, how do we know that the Earth is round?

The idea of a spherical Earth is not a recent concept. Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle had come to the conclusion more than 2,000 years ago, after observing the Earth’s curved shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses.

Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, even calculated the circumference of the Earth in 240BC, based on the differing angles of the Sun at locations hundreds of miles apart.

By 1522, Ferdinand Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe, proving there was no edge of the world for ships to fall off.

However, it was not until 1930 that the curvature of the Earth was first pictured, when Capt Albert Stevens of the US army air corps took an aerial photograph over Argentina, clearly showing the horizon slightly bending.

Five years later, Capt Stevens took a high-altitude balloon 72,395ft in the air, capturing a more pronounced curve, and by 1946 the US had sent a missile with a camera attached about 65 miles up, giving us the first glimpse of Earth from space.

From the 1950s, satellites had started to send back the first images of Earth. By the following decade, humans were in space and able to witness the spherical planet in person.

Flat-Earthers will argue that the world’s space programmes are a giant conspiracy – ironically they sometimes term it a “global conspiracy” – yet in 2016, Oxford University calculated that such a conspiracy would have involved so many people that it would have been exposed within four years.

Even if you refuse to believe the decades of satellites, orbiters and astronauts from multiple competing space agencies, there are easy demonstrations that can be done from Earth that prove the planet is round.

A simple one is viewing large objects from far away, such as mountains. Their tops will always come into view before their bases.

The stars are another good indicator. From the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris, or the pole star, sits nearly exactly over the North Pole. Travel to the Southern Hemisphere, and it gradually sinks towards the horizon before it disappears completely. This effect is impossible on a flat Earth, as it would never be out of sight.

The movement of the constellations, arcing into view and then out again, is also only possible because the Earth is round and spinning while stars stay fixed in space.

Likewise, during a lunar eclipse the Earth passes between the sun and the Moon, casting a circular shadow on the Moon no matter where it is viewed on the planet.

“The ancient Greeks had a good handle on it,” said Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“The shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse – it’s round, ships disappear below the sea horizon, and the angle of stars like Polaris above the horizon varies with latitude.

“The angle of the sun in the sky at different latitudes was used by Eratosthenes to measure the circumference of the Earth 2,250 years ago.”

In 2018, Bob Knodel, a prominent flat-Earther, attempted to prove the Earth was not a spinning globe by setting up a highly precise gyroscope, which he expected to stay still.

In fact, the gyroscope drifted 15 degrees per hour, definitively demonstrating the Earth’s rotation. Mr Knodel speculated that “heavenly energies” may have intervened.

‘Their beliefs are not fact-based’

So how do you convince a flat-Earther? We asked Lee Mcintyre, a research fellow at Boston University and author of How to Talk to a Science Denier.

“It is nearly impossible to convince a flat-Earther with facts, because their beliefs are not fact-based in the first place,” he warns.

“Instead what I do is talk to them not about what they believe but why they believe it. I ask about their reasoning.

“The thing I’ve had the best luck with is to say ‘okay, so you claim your beliefs are based on evidence, right? So what evidence – if I had it in my back pocket – would convince you that you’re wrong?’

“And they can’t answer. That’s because they aren’t reasoning like scientists, who are willing to change their views when the facts change. Instead they are reasoning like ideologues, who will protect their identity-based beliefs with everything they’ve got.”

Verdict: Explicable

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Buy the book here.