I WAS tempted this week to look back at the first month of 2026 – it already felt like a year – an intemperate world seen through the sober eyes of my 31 days dry. Ben Shapiro’s hopeful claim that this will be the ‘year of clarity’ prompted it. Nor so far, it isn’t. The only clarity I am aware of has been in TCW’s pages.
Nothing has changed about the daily news carousel. Anything of significance is immediately forgotten too quickly for any clear thinking. Remember Greenland? By Wednesday, when we published John Le Sueur’s explanation of Russian-Sino ambitions that Trump understands better than the mainstream, the world’s largest island and its pocket of misused people had slipped back into obscurity.
Submerged not by rising sea levels but by Labour’s Burnham saga (as Danny Lockwood asked, who needs Traitors?) before Starmer’s far more terrible treachery to our military veterans and to the country was uncovered. And by the short-memory response to Suella Braverman’s defection. And, lest we forget, by ICE outrage. Left and right reunited again in their condemnation of that (now proven) fascist bully Mr Trump. A man who can do no right. Even the Critic couldn’t find a kind word to say about him. Why is it Trump and not the shockingly subversive China-loving placeman Starmer who is the object of their disapproval?
However Niall Ferguson, I was delighted to see, broke cover on ‘the over-confidence of Trump’s critics’ pre and post Davos.
Starting tomorrow, Daniel Jupp’s TCW series on the history of ICE through to the present George Floyd Mark 2 Minneapolis spectacle will set the record straight on blinkered and poorly informed MSM commentary. Gavin Innes’s measured and factual reporting last week on the deaths of Good and Pretti set out a clear-thinking path.
‘Showing up unarmed signals peaceful intent and lowers the risk of misinterpretation,’ he argued. ‘Bringing a weapon into an already fraught confrontation dramatically increases the likelihood of escalation. Even if Pretti never drew his gun, its mere presence heightened danger. Much of mainstream media reporting omitted this context. Headlines declared “executions” before investigations, public figures lauded both Pretti and Good as symbols of just resistance. Commentators described Pretti as a “hero” without noting why he was present, how he arrived so quickly or the risks involved.’
Bernard Carpenter, our man in Minneapolis, offered another corrective to those blind to the obvious benefits of Trump’s second presidential term. Will it fall on stony ground? Meeting some former media colleagues last week reminded me just how entrenched is the Westminster village worldview. (An oxymoron that says it all!) A Truman Show, in which the directors and reporters are actors too, believing their own scripts. Like Truman, they are unaware, or have forgotten, that it is a fake and self-serving ‘world’.
Of course there are some more awake commentators who straddle the political and the real world. Jonathan Sacerdoti is one. His moving account in the Spectator of the IDF’s determination to find the last Israeli hostage, his exhumed remains flown home, caught my eye. But how many of his mainstream colleagues have heard of the UK’s latest registered political party, Ben Habib’s Advance UK, gaining 40,000-plus members in just a few months? Not my old colleagues. Compare that with the coverage given last year to Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Your Party’ and its questionable membership claims. If you are on the left it is news, if you are ‘small c’ conservative right, it is not – unless it is labelled ‘far right’.
Even the best of the MSM are yet to discover there are other conceptions of the political world to theirs. That the ‘far right’ views outside their bubble are perhaps more right.
Certainly on the Assisted Dying Bill and the grotesque abortion amendments pushing their way through Parliament to their final solution. Both legalise killing, both cross that fundamental moral line ‘thou shalt not kill’ that restrains baser human impulses. There remain, thank goodness, a few good peers in Westminster doing their very best to stem this assault. Charles Moore, with whom I don’t agree on much these days, is right on this. They are not filibustering; they are doing their job. Who, I thought, is Lord Falconer to say it is not constitutional? A man who did more than anyone else apart from Tony Blair to destroy our constitution.
It’s the same blinkered mentality that silenced any criticism of the covid vaccines. Notably of the MHRA, the regulatory body that conspired to get the inadequately tested AstraZeneca vaccine approved and marketed. A Children’s Health Defense report last Thursday was my most gobsmacked moment of the week. Long-time readers will remember when we first raised the alarm over covid vaccine Yellow Card reports in 2021. They showed an appalling associated AZ vaccine injury rate of one in 47 children and one in 103 for adults, 1,087 deaths, 2,291 cases of pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis and 414 of pericarditis/myocarditis and 10,766 cardiac disorders. Now I found myself reading that these figures were a massive under-count.
According to both the Children’s Health Defense article and GB News, a Freedom of Information request by Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan has revealed that in 2021 alone the MHRA received 48,472reports of cardiac-related adverse events linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine, nearly five times as many as originally reported. Of these, 23,914 cardiovascular events had already been reported by late March 2021. UK authorities knew about the reports, but continued to tell the public that the vaccine was safe and effective. We are investigating this further.
Last week wasn’t without some fun. A bit part player in the Truman Show that is our own political and media circus, Giles Coren, had us all laughing across X where he virtuously declared he had cancelled his family holiday in America: ‘I cannot in good conscience take my wife and children there and tell them they will be safe. The United States is no longer a place for decent people.’ Better was to come. Where was his preferred destination? A sharp-eyed tweeter gave complacent Mr Coren away, finding him in that much more democratic country, Oman, where ‘homosexuality & transexuality are illegal, marital rape & domestic abuse are legal & an estimated 33000 people, mainly migrants, are trapped in legalised modern slavery’.
Finally, I raise my first glass of 2026 to that courageous ‘alt’ investigative reporter ‘Lauren The Insider’ (also of Urban Scoop reporting fame), who has shamed her mainstream counterparts once again with this royal ‘halal meat’ scoop.
She, you will have gathered, is not part of the Truman Show.
