This was the week Keir Starmer welcomed the fall of Syria’s Assad dictatorship. Now I am no expert but I don’t think I would have been quite so quick to herald it as a good thing, not with this character Muhammed Al Jawlani as de facto leader after his jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham led the toppling of Assad. Yep, this is a group that’s committed mass human atrocities and was co-founded by the former leader of ISIS as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Nice one.
But maybe Sir Keir has represented them in the past – as he once represented the now proscribed terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Only asking. In these globalist uniparty days with Boris Johnson singing from the same Syrian hymn sheet you have to wonder what’s going on.
Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, 90 per cent of the country’s Christians have abandoned Aleppo, Campbell Jack reported this week. ‘Will the remaining 10 per cent stay to welcome their jihadi “liberators”?’ he asked. Unlikely. But who cares if, like Johnson, you can brag about this being one in the eye for Russia?
So, for a different perspective I turned to the Russian blogger Simplicius but got a bit bogged down in a complex analysis of the causes that focused on Assad’s bad decisions and failings. But one disturbing sign of trouble ahead stood out: Simplicius revealed he’d ‘seen statements that Hamas supports the revolution and welcomes the new Syrian government’.
Somehow I can’t see an immediate reverse exodus of Syrian refugees from the UK, can you?
As for me, the week has been one big catch-up after my jaunt to Switzerland the week before. On Thursday Die Weltwoche sent me a follow up interview question: ‘The Tory Party has just elected its first black female leader. Will Kemi Badenoch make the Tories Great again?’
The brutal answer, I jotted down, is NO. Then I spent two hours trying to precis Paul Collits’s brilliant case against Badenoch and why ‘the conservative vision of the London-born Nigerian Tory remains a limited hangout in the new politics of the 2020s.’
He’s right; Kemi misses the bigger picture. ‘Her Tories, despite what they should have learned from their disastrous period of government and from their collaboration with the evil of the globalist covidians, still seem to believe in politics as usual and are determined to fight the last war.’ All in the comfort zone of their conservative in-club.
A TCW commentator called Ravenscar rightly observed that many can’t see this bigger picture because it is being blocked off. ‘This blog’ he said, ‘is a window, a beacon of light as the night closes in. You need to persevere, we all need to defend freedom and this place is one of the few standing.’
Would Kemi understand that, propped up as she is by the uncritical and sycophantic Telegraph and Spectator? She seems to me to be out of her depth, lacking the understanding and political instinct needed for the role. She lacks seriousness. Georgia Meloni has this. Even Rachel Reeves has it however much you dislike what she is doing. With Badenoch the optics are bad – a lack of self awareness, confidence or presence – in how she dresses as well as in what she does and says. What on earth was she doing for example wearing such a bare inappropriate dress (for her figure as well as for the occasion) to the State banquet for the Emir of Qatar?
Why did she allow a photo of herself snuggling into JD Vance, looking like an intern to whom he was being kind? Why, when over half the nation eats a sandwich for lunch everyday, was she so stupid as to say sandwiches aren’t food? Was she trying to be funny? What misguided instinct made her choose immigration (that her party in government signally failed to resolve and made worse) to attack Starmer with at Wednesday’s PMQs just when tractors were lining up en masse outside Parliament and the protesting farmers’ NFU boss weeping inside?
Why, too, in an interview, did she fall into the identity question trap? Nigerian politics are certainly worthy of serious comment. But making it personal was not wise.
Maybe I have just become a grumpy old lady – but a woman who is neither sure of herself nor in what she believes is not on track to make the Tories great again.
As if to underline it, this week saw even more politicians, councillors and donors flipping over to Reform UK. The party is on a roll, and Friday’s polling confirmed it. Reform came second again, two points ahead of the Conservatives and only one point behind Labour.
I noticed too this week that someone, somewhere, mooted Richard Tice as the UK’s answer to Robert F Kennedy Jnr. Well, though I haven’t seen any videos of Richard working out with 30lb weights, from our unathletic-looking crop of MPs he’s probably the nearest to RFK in terms of physical fitness. The question is would he ever have the guts to take on the MHRA (Medical Health products and Regulatory Agency) and its departing CEO, June Raine, in the way RFK took on and exposed Fauci. I sort of doubt it.
Yet we are in desperate need of a politician who will. Because the conscienceless MHRA have got away with murder. Literally. Adding to the catalogue of covid crimes Raine presided over, set out by Paula Jardine this week, was their discontinuation of ‘Yellow Card’ covid vaccine adverse events reporting since May. When Sally Beck asked them why, back came a smug reply, she told me, that, in effect, they consider the covid vaccine to be ‘stable’ therefore are no longer publishing data. Stable for whom?
So here we are, toward the end of another booster campaign, cancer diagnoses on an alarming rise, sudden deaths reported daily, yet none of our politicians are even calling for an inquiry let alone a ban on the vaccines.
There was, however, some rather unexpected good news on another front: a musical icon saying something surprisingly unwoke. Elton John must have had quite a few ‘progressives’ choking on their weed. Legalising cannabis in America and Canada, he said last week, is one of the greatest mistakes of all times. How right he is! He gave several good reasons. I could add more. But that’s for another week.
