• Change

Open Democracy, commenting on his conference speech, referred to his insistence that “Change is…the Conservatives.” As his party has been in power (in coalition or otherwise) for thirteen years and as his party’s name is derived from “conserve”, this is a a tough sentence for many of us to accept. Kier Starmer, whose party is courting voters who do not labour in the way that applied when it was founded in 1900, must constantly be up against a similar semantic challenge. I can’t think of any better names for either of them. Clearly, neither can they.

Sunak is, we are asked to believe, new; the change personified; forward-looking; sceptical of the past. Then there was a re-shuffle – and, shiver my timbers, what have we here…?

Old smoothie-chops – aka the hapless David Cameron – is back, as Foreign Secretary. So too is Esther McVey, as minister without portfolio. This rather elusive role has been described as that of “Common-sense Tsar” who would be “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda”.

I’m not entirely sure what “woke” means so, not for the first time, looked it up. Being “aware of social and political issues, especially racism,” the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary suggested, going on to say that “this word is often used in a disapproving way by people who think that some other people are too easily upset about these issues, or talk too much about them in a way that does not change anything.” Other definitions exist.

My uncertainty about this, and all the issues like LGBT rights to which “woke” is related, is perhaps because it’s difficult to have a rational discussion about it. So polarised has the term become that to demonstrate any ignorance about the issues risks being interpreted as outright opposition, while to express any interest or sympathy can be seen as whole-hearted support. Like “fascist”, “political correctness” or “fundamentalist”, “woke” is now freely bandied about without, in all probability, any two people in the conversation sharing an understanding of what it means. In this respect, it seems a perfect word for regular use during an election, during which language is debased and contorted to an extent that is not found outside a marketing agency.

So: back to Dave. He’s a lord now, though I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call him that. One of the downsides of this, which his Labour shadow lost no time in exploring this week, is that, as a Lord, he can’t appear in the Commons to answer questions. This seems the least of the problems that his appointment presents.

In the last few months, the Covid enquiry has treated us to a re-run of half forgotten names like Cummings, Johnson and Hancock, each flashing before our eyes like identikit pictures from a long-forgotten crime scene. Now the dial is to be wound back even further – back to the days of the big society, “we’re all in this together” and austerity. All these unquiet ghosts have been re-awakened.

And that’s without mentioning Brexit. Cameron called the referendum in a bid to solve a division in the country but mainly in his party, led an ineffective campaign (as even George Osborne admitted) and lost. All that is now likely to flood back over us, just as Covid has. Back to the future might be the slogan for the Conservatives come next year. At least his appointment has helped address one deficiency, that of the declining number of Cabinet members who are Oxford PPE graduates.

Cameron also brings his own baggage to the Cabinet table in the form of his relationship with the financier Lex Greensill, concerning the Parliamentary enquiry in 2021 which said that the the ex-ex-ex-ex-PM had shown a “significant lack of judgement.”

So, we’ve gone back to Cameron: surely we can’t go back any further? I’m sure that Starmer would not want to invoke Tony “Iraq” Blair in his campaign? Oh, hang on…

• Sacked

Meanwhile, the sacked Suella Braverman has written a letter which seems to be modelled on that of Boris’ political inamorata, Nadine Dorries, a month or so ago. You can read the full text of it here. This includes her complaining that her letters to the PM on the subject of the conditions that she’d set out for her accepting the post of Home Secretary just over a year ago had been “met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.” The last two phrases are synonymous, which partly explains why the letter is so long.

She also also refers to his “failure to deliver” on key policies, his “betrayal”, his “magical thinking” (not a compliment) and the fact that he’s “uncertain, weak and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs.”

She concluded by assuring the PM that “I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.” As with “fascist”, “political correctness”, “fundamentalist” and “woke” mentioned above, “conservative” (with or without a capital C) seems to mean a number of different things to different people. For Suella Braverman, it appears to mean, “I will be leader by the time we fight the next election in about 2030.”

• Unlawful

James Cleverley’s first day at the Home Office confirmed my suggestion that being Home Secretary was the one job that could never, in any circumstances, provide its holder with good news. The bad news for the government that day was the decision by the Supreme Court that the government’s plan to send refugees to Rwanda was unlawful. Mind you, if Cleverly were still Foreign Secretary he’d probably have got snarled up on this as well, Rwanda being a foreign country.

That, indeed, is the nub of the problem. The government can pass all the laws and sign all the treaties it likes but the Judges decided, as reported in The Guardian, that there was “a real risk of claims being wrongly determined in Rwanda, resulting in asylum seekers being wrongly returned to their country of origin.”

This is something that a number of human-rights organisation have argued all along is likely to happen. Figures from Our World in Data appear to support this, with Rwanda being down near the bottom of V-Dem’s Human Rights Index (which runs from 1 to 0) with a score of 0.29. This is slightly better than Belarus, Iran and Tajikistan but some way behind Russia, Turkey and Sudan. There would therefore seem to be a real chance that the asylum seekers would be deposited in a place completely beyond the UK’s jurisdiction which presented even worse problems for them than did the place from which they had fled.

It’s also been revealed that the government has so far paid Rwanda £140m but it’s less clear what this has been spent on, given that no one has yet been sent there. Has our government asked theirs to make PPE kit for the next pandemic? Nor is it clear how much the whole scheme would have cost, nor how many refugees it would have dealt with, nor how many this would have stopped arriving in boats.

The headline-hungry Braverman was quick to step into the fray, saying that the choice was to “legislate or admit defeat”, this shortly before Sunak said that he’d take the former option. I can’t see what legislation – if it can be got through parliament at all – will accomplish: the issue seems to be, as the Judges have said, whether Rwanda is a safe place.

The Telegraph reports that Boris Johnson has claimed that the PM should pass a law deeming that Rwanda is indeed a “safe place”. Oh, is that all it takes to make it so? Who knew? Other right-wingers have suggested that the solution is to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Tories’ Deputy Chair, Lee Anderson, has an even more robust solution and one which which avoids all these legal subtleties altogether: ignore the law and “put the planes in the air now.”

This is the kind of food fight the PM might have hoped to avoid, barely a day after a cabinet reshuffle. Mind you, Labour seems in little better shape at present, fifty-six MPs having on 15 November defied Starmer on a vote which exposed a deep division over the party’s policy with regard to the Gaza-Isreal nightmare. The BBC reports that ten frontbenchers have left their roles over the matter. Who’s to say how many members of either party’s front bench will still be in-post and on-message come election day?

• And finally…

• One good bit of news for Rishi S is that inflation has fallen more quickly than predicted. The government will doubtless claim the credit for this though it seems to have more to do with the (independent) Bank of England interest rate rises and falls in the wholesale price of oil and gas. For many, the pain is still there though. Food prices have increased by about 25% in the last two years and fuel prices by about 50%. Better news for home-buyers, though, with prices falling 0.1% in the year to September 2023 according the ONS, as reported by Reuters.

• The US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is not the place one would immediately turn to if searching for a piece of testosterone-fuelled video gold. All that changed earlier this week when Senator Markwayne Mullin, previously a mixed martial arts fighter and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien faced off across the room over a series of jibes that O’Brien had made about Mullin. “You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here,” the Oklahoma Senator said.”That’s fine,” O’Brien replied. And so on.

The BBC reports that Mullin later told Fox News that he had acted to represent Oklahoma values and that, had he not, “people in Oklahoma would be pretty upset at me.” I can’t tell you much about Oklahoma values. We drove across the state in 1999 on our way from New York to LA but don’t think we stopped, except maybe once to get some gas. I don’t remember fighting anyone, though.

• An ultra-marathon runner has been banned for a year by UK Athletics for using a car in a race (not a car race, a running race). This article on the BBC website said that Joasia Zakrzewski used a car for about two and a half miles in the Liverpool to Manchester marathon in April 2023 and then finished the course “in a non-competitive way,” whatever that means. She later accepted the trophy and blamed the whole aberration on jet lag. Formerly from Dumfries, she’s now moved to Australia. If she wants to change career – she’s 47 now – then, were she to return, I’m sure that based on this brass-neckery, any political party she cared to join would consider making a seat available for her.

• And so we end, as we have done for several weeks in a row, with the Cricket World Cup. India reached the final on 15 November with a strong but not overwhelming 70-run victory over New Zealand. It’s hard to see how any team batting first in weather like that and on such a pitch could fail to lose. I repeat my suggestion that one-day matches be organised with each team batting half its overs first then resuming where each had left off to complete the match. In no sport can winning the toss be more important. In the final they will play Australia who beat South Africa (who choked again) by a narrower margin than might have been predicted after reducing them to 28-4.

I hope India win on Sunday. Australia, the Germany of cricket, have won this often enough. India are also by far the beat team at present: though that counts for nothing. The men’s Hungary football team were undefeated in all but one game for about four years in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, that one game was the 1954 World Cup Final…