Photo: Andy Burnham arrives in Kyiv.

I know the journey well. So does every foreign correspondent, diplomat, spy, returning exile, soldier heading to the front, who has boarded the train to Kyiv from western Ukraine. Depending on what is happening in the rest of the country the journey takes between ten to fourteen hours. You sleep if you can, or spend the hours looking at the endless flat landscape, as the night comes on. Anton Chekhov called it the “majestic and serene steppe [that] makes no intelligible sound, utters no answer; yet at night, in the deceiving prairie, the mounds, the crags, the stubs, the scattered bushes bear human resemblance under the moon, and sing together as many voices, in perfect harmony, at one time murderous and loving, desperate and compassionate.” It is all here in Ukraine’s immense hinterland, the murderous and the loving, in the fifth year of Putin’s war of aggression.

Andy Burnham made the journey this week. He travelled in the special carriage for VIPs that has taken every Western statesman of note to the obligatory handshake with President Zelensky. Leaders have come and gone but Zelensky appears immovable, at least as long as the war lasts. But the visit by Burnham and other European leaders was something more significant than the traditional affirmation of solidarity with embattled Ukraine. The Prime Minister carried with him blueprints for missile components that will allow the Ukrainians to strike deep into Russian territory.

Instead of shipping finished missiles, as it has for years, Britain is now working with France to enable Ukraine to build the Scalp/Storm Shadow deep‑strike system. France and Ukraine plan to establish assembly lines in Ukraine to produce the system locally. This will have lethal results for Russian forces and bases. British weapons are still numerically small relative to Ukraine’s own drone production, but they matter politically - UK hardware striking as deep as six hundred miles inside Russia sends an unmistakable signal to Vladimir Putin. Far from backing off in the face of Russian threats, the British PM is upping the ante.

As seen from Moscow.

Which brings us to the Russian response. Putin’s army is being mauled on the frontlines of Ukraine and hopes of a decisive breakthrough have faded. He is beleaguered. The economy is stagnant, business costs are being driven up by high interest rates, and ordinary Russians are suffering a relentless decline in living standards.

The human cost has been immense, an estimated 1.5 million Russians have been killed, wounded or displaced. Russia needs to send 30,000 men to the front every month to sustain the war. These are the mathematics of insanity, the cost of one man’s imperial delusions, to say nothing of the agony inflicted on Ukraine. Because of all this there is a tendency to imagine Putin is out of options. That is dangerous wishful thinking.

The Americans have been signalling the danger of an attack on a Baltic state. The Germans now know that at least three drones were deployed at Leipzig airport in an attempt to attack a plane transporting ammunition to Ukraine. This was a hugely significant development with ominous portents for Britain.

Photo: Russian Presidency.

Putin doesn’t need to project a large-scale conventional military threat to cause mayhem in the UK. He has at his disposal a vast secret army of spies, assassins, cyber warriors and organised crime figures; his spies have already committed murder in Britain - remember the Salisbury poisonings - and are ready to escalate whenever the command is given. His pantomime villain Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has already rattled his sabre in relation to the Ukrainian use of British drones.

“The president warned about our right to act in any area of the World Ocean if someone encroaches on our interests, on our property. In the same way, we have the right to regard the proudly announced direct participation of British missile forces in strikes on the Russian Federation as participation in the war with all the consequences that follow.”

Mr Lavrov is one of the great barefaced liars of any Russian generation and he has served Putin’s agenda well. Lie, obfuscate, sow confusion. On February 15, 2022, he answered a question about a potential invasion of Ukraine as a “paranoid scenario.” Nine days later the Russians tried to seize Kyiv. The Leipzig example shows that Putin calculates such actions would not trigger a NATO Article 5 response in which the alliance as a body would hit back militarily. He may be right about that. More likely there would be days of agonised debate accompanied by stiff warnings and yes…more sanctions. In any case, he has decided he can live with any potential retaliation.

He might decide to attack a factory manufacturing weapons systems or a senior executive from the defence industry, or he could order the sabotage of vital undersea cables and cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.

Ready or Not?

What Andy Burnham needs to do and do fast is level with the British people about the scale of the danger. Conflict with Putin isn’t just another item on a busy, and largely domestic focused, agenda. Moscow is capable of bringing real pain into the lives of civilians the length and breadth of the UK. We forget at our peril that the Ukraine war is existential for Vladimir Putin. That is why it won’t end with a face saving peace. It has become the defining project of the Putin era and while he is a fool to believe he can win, it won’t stop him inflicting as much damage as he can on his enemies, up to and including igniting a potential wider war in Europe.

We already know Britain’s armed forces are not prepared for a war on the continent or anywhere else. It is unlikely they will be called to fight in the Baltic states or Poland anytime soon, but there is no certainty about that. For now we have to work on the basis that the immediate threats to national security are on the home front.

I am not arguing for the spilling of state secrets, but for enough of a sense of urgency to be conveyed so that people are not caught unawares by a significant Russian move.

The relentless, ideologically driven obsession with the small boats in the Channel has blinded much of the media to the far greater danger posed to our security by the malign master of the Kremlin. Giving Ukraine the means to produce its own long-range missiles is the right thing to do, but Andy Burnham has work to do to explain his reasoning and the potential cost to the British people. Every time we help make Ukraine stronger, the deeper grows Putin’s anger. He is looking for a way to cause serious hurt and I fear it will be soon.

Photo - author: the dead of a European war.

Andy Burnham is a better communicator than any Prime Minister since Tony Blair. Unlike Blair he doesn’t appear likely to lead the country into a ruinous war with devastating consequences for the Middle East. He is a likeable politician. That is a conspicuous asset against Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who, for different reasons, are two of the more charmless politicians ever to stamp crankily into our politics. Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer was, to quote T.S. Eliot, “one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two,” a vanishing vapor, never a leading man.

The man who presents himself as smiling, plain speaking Andy has sailed through his first three weeks in office. It’s a relatively short period, his opponents are a grim bunch, and so far he’s done nothing to make enemies. The prison release saga could yet get very messy. It is the kind of issue that resonates with the broader public, and upon which right wing populists thrive. It needs sorting fast. My instinct says he will swerve out of it successfully.

But nothing serious gets done, not least the radical change Britain needs, without upsetting big vested interests and, sometimes, significant sections of the population. What Andy Burnham has to tell us so far is strong on mood. So far so careful: Scrapping VAT on domestic electricity bills, reinstating a £2 bus fare cap, pledging to end rough sleeping. We can see the outlines of larger domestic policy. The promise to reverse nearly two decades of low growth with transport, housing and infrastructure investment. A revolution in social care.

A 10 year plan is coming but there’s no specific date yet for the launch. Perhaps with John Healey’s first budget in October? That is fair enough. Big ideas take time to cost.But the domestic is not my main area of interest here. There are crises looming abroad that can wreck the agenda of the Burnham government. Wars in Iran, Ukraine, the obscenity of what is happening in the Occupied Territories. The last demands a much tougher attitude towards Netanyahu than Starmer offered, but Burnham may get lucky and be facing a new, potentially more amenable Israeli government after the October general elections.

The crisis that can ruin his reputation is one that hasn’t happened yet. But it may not be long in appearing. The Starmer government lost a Defence Minister, John Healey, and Armed Forces Minister, Al Carns, on national security, both resigning in frustration over the failure to properly fund the military. Healey said Starmer had “been unable, and the Treasury had been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” Healey is now Chancellor, and will have to put his money where his mouth is or be accused of selling out.

Dangerous times.

We are living through the most dangerous period since the Cold War but are waiting for a defining statement of priorities from the Government. If the outlook abroad is bleak and threatening, then Andy. Burnham needs to step up soon and say what might be done differently.

Former spy chiefs, heads of the armed forces, and a standing army of pundits have queued up to deliver warnings of the dangers ahead. Yet the prophecies have failed to ignite public anxiety. Meanwhile time and energy are squandered with scaremongering over migrant ‘invasions’, whipped up by the right. Migrants are not the people plotting assassinations with deadly poisons on UK soil. They are not launching cyber attacks against us or threatening our undersea cable networks.

Worry about about Jihadis sneaking in on small boats is legitimate, but scale is everything: The noise of the populist right is diverting us from the real threats the country faces. Their American buddies are done with the UK for the foreseeable future. Even if the Republicans lose the mid-terms and J.D. Vance, or another MAGA candidate, fails in the Presidential election, the isolationism of the Trump era will take a very long time to fade, if it ever does.

Photo - CENTCOM: Trump meets the troops.

Americans across the political divide feel the Europeans, including Britain, have enjoyed a free ride. There is an element of truth to this, but the post-war security architecture of Europe benefited the US too. Western Europe was the first line of defence in a conflict that could have seen nuclear missiles targeting American cities.

The defence of Western Europe was the practical expression of Cold War strategist George Kennan’s policy of containment — what he called the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” As first Commander of NATO, Dwight Eisenhower pushed for robust forward defence in Europe.

Trump and Vance have successfully manufactured a new narrative, but when they whine about freeloading Europeans a more complex history is being erased. There is no longer, if there ever really was, any “Special Relationship” to take into account. Consider how the US might respond if their Argentine ally, the chainsaw wielding Javier Milei, were to invade the Falkland Islands next week. Is anybody sure that Britain could depend on US diplomatic support, or logistical assistance? Even back in 1982, during the Reagan administration when the US President and Margaret Thatcher were ideological soulmates, the Brits faced an uphill struggle to persuade Washington to impose sanctions and provide arms and intelligence.

The trigger point?

We need a long view here, prefaced on the belief that the Russian threat is growing. Putin is mired in Ukraine, but he is not defeated. He enjoys absolute control in Russia and despite prophecies to the contrary, his economy is not about to collapse. US intelligence agencies have assessed he is weighing up an attack on a Baltic state. His intelligence services are aggressively targeting the UK and know too well the weaknesses in defence which the Burnham government has inherited.

A plausible scenario is that he provokes – as per Crimea – an incident on the border with say Latvia, or there is a false flag attack on members of that country’s sizeable Russian minority - 24% of the population - many of whom are concentrated in Latgale in the east near the Russian border. Stepping in to ‘rescue’ ethnic Russians in a Russian dominated area is straight from the authoritarian rulers playbook.

In late May 2026 Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced it would take Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the International Court of Justice, accusing them of discriminating against Russian-speakers. The Baltic states and Poland have been progressively accelerating their defence planning. Estonia’s Defence Resources Agency announced that conscription of women would eventually be necessary given a projected shortage of men.

Photo - author: Ukrainian volunteer, 2022.

In theory, a Russian attack would trigger a mandatory NATO military response. An attack on one is an attack on all. But suppose the forces that went into the border zone were ‘unofficial’ as per the early stages of Crimea, and the war in Donbass and Luhansk in 2014? An uprising by ‘patriotic volunteers’ – in reality Russian paramilitaries – that provoked a Latvian military response would offer Putin a casus belli to send in his uniformed forces.

Cue confusion and disagreement among NATO partners. Who would commit to send troops immediately? Unlikely from an America under Trump. The Germans would surely plead for time to “consider all options.” Perhaps Estonia, Latvia and the Poles. Maybe the French. The Swedes and Finns would want to but might judge it too risky in the absence of a unanimous NATO position. If there were to be a Baltic crisis there would be days, perhaps weeks, of appeals to give negotiations a chance. The Russians would keep advancing. The Baltic states are small. They don’t have the vast spaces of Ukraine in which to confront the enemy and drag him into stalemate. What would the UK do? I am fairly sure there would be “grave concern”, much talk about liaising with allies and, yes, we might revive our old friend ‘strict sanctions’, all of which would have zero effect on deterring Putin.

There wouldn’t be much other choice. As of now Britain is in no position to take part in a large and sustained military action in Europe or anywhere else. Back in 1990 Britain could deploy 50,000 troops to the Gulf. That wouldn’t be feasible now. Between 2000 and 2025, the number of fully trained personnel across all forces decreased by between 31-32%. More recruitment is not the only solution. The development of drone warfare and AI targeting has changed how war is fought. Technology is re-defining attack and defence.

What would Burnham do?

When he took office Andy Burnham signalled Labour would keep the commitment to NATO to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035. That is an eye wateringly large amount: Between 25 to 36 billion a year in extra spending by 2035 on top of current budgets. The Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Helen Miller, says meaningful increases in defence spending can’t happen “without significantly cutting other Government programmes or raising taxes.” The IFS reckons hitting the 3.5% NATO target could require something like a 3 to 3.5 percentage point rise in the main rate of VAT. That would be electorally toxic for any government. There are few votes in building up your military to face a potential threat. Something has to give, and my instinct tells me it will be national security that suffers.

I am deeply opposed to militarism. My way is the way of multilateralism and respect for international law. I want a strengthened United Nations Security Council which does away with the veto power of the five permanent members and recognises the rights and concerns of the nations of the global south. I also believe that Putin and his ilk recognise no law except that of military deterrence. Just as I believe Netanyahu only listens to the Americans when they wield a big stick in his direction. Those who terrorise innocent civilians deserve the same opprobrium whether in Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan.

Photo - author: The chaos of invasion, Lviv, 2022.

I also know that the primary responsibility of a government is to protect its citizens. I have seen over decades how swiftly war descends on societies. The shock of collapsing services. The panic of food shortages. The unimaginable horrors of drone strikes. The memory of seeing tens of thousands fleeing Ukraine one dark night in February 2022 is etched in my mind. A woman giving birth at a border post. Men of military age saying tearful farewells to their wives and children. People fighting each other to get on trains and escape.

I am not saying that this will happen to Britain. But I believe it is very plausible that it might happen to some of our NATO allies, and that we have no way of knowing where such a conflict would end, who else it would draw in. We urgently need a public debate that rises above partisan politics. Can we reach a consensus on the scale and nature of the threats? If so, what are we willing to give up or pay to ensure Britain is properly defended, and we can meet our commitments to our allies?

These are not abstract questions. They are urgent. National security is precisely that: Every one of us is vulnerable in the event of war. Our children and grandchildren will pay the bills for our apathy now. Burnham needs to lead but the rest of us need to make some difficult choices.

Photo: From ‘Keane on Longley’, BBC NI.

I first saw Michael Longley read at Queens University Belfast sometime in the mid ‘80s. I was living in Belfast and working as a reporter with RTE, the Irish public service broadcaster. It was a challenging time to be someone who opposed political violence, whether it came from the paramilitaries or t…

Read more

Photo: Green Party official.

Nobody would like the prospect of having to apologise to a charlatan like Nigel Farage. Readers of last week’s The Keane Eye will know exactly what I think about the Reform leader and his toxic impact on Britain. He is bad for the country in a spectacularly emphatic way. Terminally bad if he were ever to get near 10 Downing Street. The leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, has articulated the danger and offered remedies that are popular with a growing segment of young Britons hungry for hope.

Let’s roll back to Zack Polanski’s first conference speech as leader of the Greens in October last year. Having had a go at Reform for its divisive politics, and criticised Keir Starmer for failing the poor and Palestine, he finished with a touching anecdote about a newly released prisoner being offered a cup of tea by a stranger.

“That’s what this country is when it’s at its best,” he said. “And that matters today of all days. It’s thoughtful, it’s considerate and it’s kind.” Looking ahead to the May local elections he declared what many took to be a core principle. “This May is huge – hateful, divisive politics will be on the ballot paper. We can and we must reject that.” Cue cheers. Cue strong election results. The Greens were energised. They offered radicalism with humanity. Zack Polanski looked like a man up for the righteous fight.

A question of principle

But wanting a better kind of politics means living according to principles that don’t change according to the enemy you face. Which is why I am confused. The same Zack Polanski is now refusing to apologise after sharing an image of a man wearing a t-shirt with an image of a guillotine and emblazoned with the words We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel. Unsubtle. Definitely. Hateful? I think so.

The police have said they won’t be taking any action. The argument is that it would be disproportionate to single out Polanski when 130+ others shared the same image. The Green leader has said he inadvertently shared the post and took it down when he was alerted to its contents. He tells us he was “horrified” by its “dangerous message.”

The police are right. A prosecution would risk becoming a circus. That hasn’t stopped Farage from bleating about ‘two-tier’ justice again. Mired in humiliation over his ridiculous by election adventure, he will, even more than usual, say anything to rally a base that is looking less malleable by the day. I don’t see Count Binface winning in Clacton, but he is superb entertainment value and is landing some heavy blows on the Grinning Gargoyle. Binface promises to spend more time in Clacton than Washington DC and not to take any £5 million donations from crypto billionaires. Nationally the response is positive with Binface polling at 33% and Farage 21%. Note to readers: this is not a local poll and Farage won Clacton comfortably in 2024 with 46.2% of the vote.

Photo: Reform official

Still, despite Farage’s woes that word ‘inadvertent’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting for Zack Polanski. Inadvertency is the basis on which he refuses to apologise. I’m not incompetent, I’m not arrogant, I’m inadvertent. Let’s recall the facts. The leader of a growing political party, the self-proclaimed enemy of ‘hateful, divisive politics,’ shares a post without bothering to check what it contains. If this were a nitwit celebrity re-tweeting some vileness in the coke fuelled hours after midnight you might say, ‘what a clown,’ then chuckle at the snivelling apology when the PR people scramble to undo the damage.

Zack Polanski understands the power of his brand as a beacon for young people despairing over cynical, big money politics. He is not a Charlie snorting nitwit and he knows how easy it is to slip up on X and elsewhere. So he either looked at the image and thought he’d get away with it, on the basis that it was edgy and enough people hated Farage, or we accept his word that he genuinely didn’t check. I believe him, but I had an old schoolteacher who responded to excuses about missing homework with the words, “I believe you but there are thousands who wouldn’t.”

The sceptical in Polanski’s case will be considerable numbers of uncommitted voters who hope the Greens might offer an alternative to whatever version of left light Andy Burnham comes up with.

Setting aside - I don’t in my heart, but will try for the sake of the exercise - the ethics of refusing to apologise, it is foolish for an ambitious politician to behave so arrogantly. Ok so you were stupid enough to repost something you didn’t check. It happens. But the effect of your actions is to put a hateful message into the public arena, and you won’t apologise?

The record

Zack Polanski has form when it comes to what might be generously described as misjudgement. His past claims about being a spokesperson for the Red Cross, and working at the Ministry of Justice - neither true. His retweet of a post accusing the arresting officers of excessive force against the suspect in the Golders Green attack - deleted, with an apology. The claim, back in 2013, that he could increase breast size through hypnosis. This turned out to be nonsense, but then he was an unknown hypnotherapist, not the leader of a political party.

The point is not whether we compare him to Nigel Farage. That is a low bar indeed. It is about what we are to make of his character. Polanski attempts to make this about Farage. He says he’ll apologise if the Reform leader says sorry for all the times his language has put people in danger. This is puerile. Deal with your own actions, then tell Farage what to do.

Polanski’s biggest apology is owed to the people who accepted at face value his commitment to challenge hate and division. I happened to be at a dinner table last night with three likely Green voters. All were under twenty-five. All liked Polanski and felt he articulated their concerns about excessive wealth, the climate and Palestine. But each believed he should apologise. Two said a failure to do so would stop them from voting for him. The third said he would still give him a vote because he was the only leader who offered the hope of fundamental change.

Photo: University of Liverpool.

The Greens enjoyed a boost under the aimless Starmer government, but Burnham’s arrival as Prime Minister has changed the odds. The latest polling tracker shows them at 10.3%, down from 12.4% the previous week. Polanski may have concluded that apologising would be a sign of weakness and precipitate further decline. I would argue the opposite is the case.

The circus will move on but the doubts planted by this episode will remain and come into sharp focus in a general election campaign. Both Farage and the Green leader have offered gifts to Andy Burnham as he attempts to win back voters from the right and left. One of Burnham’s big advantages is that he is a political grown up. He has run things, he is an effective communicator and is likeable and, so far, hasn’t done stupid stuff. Farage’s problem is that he is Farage. Beyond redemption. Polanski’s is that he increasingly comes across as an overgrown student politician. Some good ideas. Plenty courage. Great to rally a crowd. But I wouldn’t bet on his judgment under pressure.

Read more

I don’t loathe Farage because he went to a private school. I went to several. I don’t judge his personal life. It’s his business. I don’t begrudge him the ethically uncomplicated portion of his wealth.

I loathe his snarling hypocrisy. The greed. The bully’s swagger. The credible reports of anti-semitic bullying at school. The whining self-pity. The sowing of division.

Photo: UK Parliament.

Alpha Fatheads

Consider his friend, the fathead Richard Tice who calls mainstream climate science ‘garbage’ and wants to use Reform controlled councils to block renewable energy projects. Tice has plenty money for air conditioning if he needs it, and to relocate to some easier clime when the going gets tough. One might laugh (bitterly) at this prize jackass were it not for the fact that his voice carries influence among voters, and he has the financial resources to promote his dangerous views.

The core Reform gang project as alpha-males. Hard men. Big on flag waving. Warriors against woke. But Farage, Tice, and that awful blob of unpleasantness Arron Banks, are about as hard as clotted cream.

Were a war to break out and this country invaded, I suspect that bunch would vanish faster than the £350 million a week they promised to the NHS. I have met and know plenty of genuinely hard men, the kind who know that walking up a particular road could get them killed, but who keep walking because of that thing called duty. If you wonder why Farage and co adore Trump, it’s because they aspire to be him. The draft dodger is a role model.

I do not know Farage personally. I encountered him once at a television awards ceremony where he harangued the assembled ‘luvvies’ after they jeered him. He was collecting a prize for ‘Best News Presenter’ for his work on GB News, the channel defended so memorably by the outgoing Ofcom chief, Michael Grade as “speaking to the agenda of the majority.”

Richard Tice, Photo UK Parliament.

As a man of 65, I suppose I should welcome the contribution of elders in public debate, but Grade has turned into a cranky old bore, surely emboldened by the prospect of headlines in the anti-public service media. One delights at the late conversion of this establishment prince - Chairman of the BBC Board, Chief Executive of Channel Four, member of the House of Lords - into a tribune of the unheard.

Still, on the handful of occasions I met Grade he was good fun and thoughtful. Not so the Nigel Farage I observed at the awards ceremony. A nasty piece of work, I thought, watching his miserable face contort with anger. It would be a joy to see the back of this character and his gang. I am reminded of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s lines from The Great Gatsby about Tom and Daisy Buchanan who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Brexit anyone? Our children and grandchildren will be left to reckon with that disaster long after Farage leaves the scene.

He is far from finished. What persuades me? Remind yourself of his career. Seven failed parliamentary bids before winning a seat two years ago. Numerous resignations and rebounds as UKIP leader. He survived the ‘Bongo Bongo Land’ remark about UK foreign aid, the aforementioned anti-semitism allegations, and his accusation that the West provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine, making common cause with Tankies and useful idiots. He headed off on “I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here” while a prospective electoral candidate. Public entertainment, not public service.

The latest storm swirls around a reported £5 million gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, resident overseas, naturally, and undeclared payments from businessman “Posh” George Cottrell, a young man of considerable means but negligible character of the kind you might find stumbling around in a John Le Carrè novel. Farage thought it prudent to accept financial support from this convicted fraudster.

Farage is in the middle of a storm but he will slither out. Public attention will drift elsewhere. Andy Burnham should not allow that to happen. The hypocrisy over money and who really constitutes the establishment goes to the heart of the struggle over Britain’s future.

Burnham needs to forget about winning on the basis of condemning Farage’s divisive politics. Go after him on the money. On the lie that he is a man of the people, for the people. This is what will reach people struggling with the cost of living crisis, who cannot run to Sugar Baddies (not a misspelling) for a handy few million to tide them over. Do not get sucked into the culture wars. Nobody wins, except the extremes who need the oxygen to keep them fighting.

Just as important, set an example with your own politics. Immigration is not about capturing headlines. It is not about placating the rightwing press. From Blair through to Starmer this has been a fatal failure. Little England will never be satisfied. A particular corner of our culture yearns for a world that has vanished, if it ever existed, a Britain without colour and variety, not the reality we saw when Harry Kane and his comrades graced the World Cup and gave us hope.

This does not mean ignoring people’s concerns. Speak directly to them. Talk about what is practicable and what it is not. Enough with stupid, cruel fantasies like the doomed plan to deport people to places like Rwanda. People are not wrong because they want to live in stable, well resourced communities with a set of civic values that reflect the best of Britain and its history. What is wrong is to believe that this can only be achieved through creating a mono-culture, the kind of race baiting tripe that Robert Jenrick’s (now of Reform) ‘no white faces’ comments typify.

Dealing sensibly and morally with the issue of immigration means respecting the rights of people already living in Britain, working closely with Europe and the United Nations and, crucially, taking a long-term view that understands the less we do to confront climate change, the more we participate in an unjust economic order, and allow conflicts to flame across the world, the greater the numbers who will head to our shores. This is a case where the utter stupidity of Richard Tice is clear. Pretend there is no climate change. Allow the deserts to spread, the crops to wither, the desoloate cities to fill up with refugees from the countryside. Where do you think they will go Mr Tice? Where would you go?

Photo: UK Government Press.

Burnham can win.

Andy Burnham has a better chance than anyone else in British politics to defeat the lies. I sent out a note earlier this week, and I am going to repost it here in the newsletter. The new PM doesn’t need my advice, but one of the rewards of leaving the BBC, is the freedom to say what I want, within the bounds of libel and reason. There is nothing remotely revolutionary here, simply the distilled experience of reporting on lies in one place or another over decades. Please Prime Minister…

Say exactly what you mean. Clarity not cliches.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Don’t keep blaming the lot before no matter how big a mess they made.

Meritocracy always.

No Svengalis in your office.

No bullies.

No party cliques.

Re-energise the Whips office. You need to know about and act on scandal before the right wing press knows.

People in cabinet or civil servants will screw up. Own it immediately. Communicate the facts publicly ASAP.

Cynicism is broken promises and double standards. Hope is an attitude of mind, unflagging energy and attainable goals.

Wishing you luck. The country really needs you to succeed.

When you introduce writing by another writer into your film adaptation of possibly the greatest short story ever written well…you need to be very circumspect. Or you need to be touched by genius and truly love your subject matter. The late John Huston passed on both counts. Still, his use of the 8th century Gaelic poem, Dónal Óg, during the dinner sequence of his film of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, might have misfired as a piece of unnecessary melodrama in the hands of a lesser director, and lesser actors. As it turned out, Seàn McClory’s delivery of Lady August Gregory’s translation of this forlorn masterpiece (Poets and Dreamers,Hodges and Figgis, Dublin 1903) set the mood perfectly for the film’s denouement in a snowbound Dublin.

Read more

The attempt to drive the Palestinians off their land in large parts of the West Bank follows old rules. Make life hell. Make it so hellish they pack up and leave. It is a campaign that could not happen without the complicity of the state.

Gangs of settler thugs are busy creating so-called ‘facts on the ground.’ Their aim is the forced displacement of Palestinians to be replaced by Jewish settlers.

It is going on every day and night. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with a characteristic disdain for the facts, blames the violence on a “150 or so, what you call, juvenile delinquents.”

Anti-government protest at the Israeli Knesset.

Consider the reality. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - OCHA shows a relentless pace of settler violence: more than 1,000 attacks causing casualties or property damage between January and mid‑June this year. Over 230 communities have been affected— roughly six attacks every day. Around 360 Palestinians were injured by settlers between January and April 2026 - March alone saw the highest monthly figure since OCHA began tracking settler violence two decades ago. Displacement has surged. In the last three years around 6,200 Palestinians — nearly half of them children — have been forced from 119 communities, including 46 now emptied. An awful lot of work for 150 or so juvenile delinquents.

And the response of the Israeli state to the West Bank terror? Law enforcement has been minimal. Thousands of attacks yet convictions are rare. Israeli police and military forces are frequently present during attacks but in many cases fail to stop violence or use force against Palestinians.

The state as enabler

The state is the enabler, the colluder, the refuser of help to those under siege. Just imagine if the same level of daily violence was being inflicted on Jews in Israel or in the Occupied Territories and ask yourself what the government’s response would be? Troops, tanks, air-strikes, the homes of alleged attackers levelled with their families inside. Netanyahu would tell the world he was fighting a war for western values, and Israel’s propagandists abroad would denounce reporting of abuses as ‘biased’ and ‘antisemitic’.

I remain one of those, possibly deluded, observers who believe a peace settlement is still possible in Israel Palestine, a peace deal where Palestinians have a proper state and Israelis can live free from the threat of terrorism. This is in spite of having considerable periods of time reporting from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the last few years, and despite the fact that Israeli politics has shifted so fundamentally to the far right. Recently a minister from Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party remarked that there were not “a lot of ideological differences” between it and the far-right Otzma Yehudit – Jewish Power - led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. This thuggish character has been convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist organisation and condemned by the US State Department for racist rhetoric.

Itamar Ben-Gvir - coalition ally of Netanyahu.

There is no imminent prospect of meaningful political change. I am not talking about a shuffling of deckchairs in which Netanyahu is voted out, and another government comes in that will stick to the status quo and lack the courage to confront the settlers. If there was already a lack of belief in a negotiated settlement prior to October 7, 2023, the horrors inflicted by Hamas on that day have consolidated the grip of the militarist, no compromise mentality in Israel.

Glimmers of Hope

But never rule out the impact of events in other places. A change in America, where support for Israel is sliding, could ultimately force a change of attitudes in Jerusalem. Regional realignments could force Israelis into a more realistic appraisal of their situation. The far-right dream, shared by many in Netanyahu’s own party, under which Israel expands sovereignty over the West Bank, as well as creeping into parts of Syria and Lebanon, is filled with traps. What do the far-right imagine? That the Arabs will meekly back off, or settle for life in towns that are cut off from their hinterland, an archipelago of mini Gazas where many will eventually conclude they are better off leaving the land of their forefathers? It will not work. It invites endless war and suffering, and the remorseless degradation of Israeli society.

But there are glimmers of hope. They come from the brave minority in Israel who are part of dozens of activist networks, legal centres, and volunteer groups that document abuses, challenge state policy, defend Palestinians in court, and campaign publicly for accountability. They are the opposite of bullies

I am thinking of a conversation a few weeks back with a friend in Jerusalem. Gil Alexander was his usual ebullient self. “We cannot afford to despair. We can’t give up,” he said. Whether it is out on the sun blasted hills of the Jordan valley, drinking tea at his kibbutz home in Israel, or outside the Jerusalem courthouse where he is mired in a court case with a settler, Gil is ready to smile, and to fight.

The settler is Moshe Sharvit. He is under sanctions from the EU and the British government for having used “physical aggression, threatened families at gunpoint, and destroyed property as part of a targeted and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities”. He is one of the bullies. A dedicated one. Sharvit accuses Gil of attacking him. Gil says it was the other way around. The courts will decide.

I met Sharvit in the Jordan Valley last year. I was standing on an outcrop talking to Gil Alexander with a clear view of the land below us. The car we saw approaching looked like the same car we’d passed about fifteen minutes before while driving up. But the dust made it hard to be sure. The driver was coming at speed up the single track that climbed the Valley towards where we stood.

Gil was certain it was Moshe Sharvit. That was bad news. Gil is not a secular Israeli peace activist of the kind who regularly infuriates the settlers. He is something more threatening. An Orthodox Jew, a man of firm religious conviction who decided what was being done to Palestinians was morally wrong and politically stupid.

He and his friends of the Jordan Valley Activists group put their bodies between Palestinian farmers and settlers trying to intimidate them.

Ahmad Daraghme and Gil Alexander in the Jordan Valley.

It means getting beaten up and abused by settlers, harassed by the army and police, accused of being the instigators of violence, denounced as traitors to Israel and Judaism.

Gil is the son of French Resistance fighters who survived the Nazi Holocaust. He doesn’t need lessons in what being a good Jew is from the likes of Moshe Sharvit.

The Essential Gesture

Amid all the justified anger about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, it’s important to know there are Israelis fighting the relentless dehumanisation of Palestinians.

You may say ‘they are irrelevant’ or ‘they are just a token’, ‘they don’t change the overall reality’, ‘you highlight a few activists and background the Palestinians.’

But what matters is not what you or I think about Gil Alexander and his comrades. It is how his actions look in the eyes of the Palestinian farmers he stands beside.

To Ahmad Daraghme, a Bedouin shepherd from al-Farisiyah in the northern Jordan Valley, Gil is a friend willing to risk his safety for the principle of a shared humanity. Ahmad has lived under Israeli occupation since 1967 and wonders how long more he can survive on the land that is his home.

“Gil is my friend,” he told me once, “he shows that not everybody in Israel thinks the same thing.”

I think of the dark days of apartheid South Africa when small groups of whites stood in solidarity with the oppressed black majority. Some were killed, tortured and imprisoned for it. Others fled abroad to join the exiled resistance. Their actions were what the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer called the “essential gesture.” At that time, it didn’t change a thing. The point was how it would be remembered when history turned.

Back on the hillside Moshe Sharvit was less than a minute away. There was nobody around who might step in to help if things went wrong. Most of the other residents here were Sharvit’s fellow settlers.

Call the police or the army? They might come. They might not. Or they might arrive long after you needed them. Or if they did turn up you might be the one who gets arrested, as numerous Palestinians have discovered.

What followed was a very minor drama, certainly compared to what a Palestinian journalist or farmer could have expected. Sharvit blocked us in with his vehicle. He harangued us.

Then to my surprise he agreed to be interviewed. It was the usual settler rhetoric. All this land belonged to the Jews. The Arabs were lying about violence. But one day – and this was ominous – the Lion would wake from his sleep and end the story.

Then Sharvit left. Later as we drank coffee at a service station the police materialised and asked Gil to come for questioning. He went, then returned an hour or so later. There was nothing unusual really, he assured me. A typical day in the life of an activist in the northern Jordan Valley.

After so many years reporting war, I have become preoccupied with how things might be fixed, finding solutions that don’t involve slaughter, starvation, the mass displacement of civilians, and the creation of conditions for future war.

We are so far from that in the Middle East that even musing on the idea seems ridiculous. Not to Gil Alexander. He sees the humanity of another and stands with him in the storm. Sometimes the essential gesture is all that we have.

Author photo: Where I am now.

Read more

The first time I read Raymond Carver it was the Collected Short Stories. My father sent me a copy one Christmas not long before he died. This was the last year of the 1980s. I wondered if he was sending me a message. Carver’s stories told stories of lives squeezed by alcoholism, by poverty and broken hopes. A lot of dreams died in the crumby apartments and motel rooms of his fiction. But there was a faithfulness in the way he rendered those lives that could only have come from experience. No dramatics and no cynicism. The desperation more desperate because defeat rarely came in one big blow. It strung people along, made them hostage to their own delusions. Maybe one day it would get better. The ship would come in. Their luck would turn. Hope departed in increments.

Read more

UN Security Council in session (UN official photo).

The US Vice-President, JD Vance, is by any measure an easy man to dislike. His journey from Trump loather to Trump fanboy to VP was a journey of spectacular opportunism through the crowded moral sewers of our age. After calling Trump an “idiot” and “reprehensible” and comparing him privately to Hitler, Vance found it in himself to declare him “America’s best hope”. Vance kept his eye on the main chance. He spoke whatever his moment demanded and it paid off.

But Trump never forgets a slight, and I wondered this week if his dispatch of Vance to lead the talks with Iran in Switzerland was not a delicious revenge. Not since Socrates has a public figure been handed such poisoned chalice. The Iranians are delighted with themselves. The lesson they internalised decades ago - America will cave in when the pressure comes on - has been confirmed.

Think back to the release of American hostages from Iran as Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981. The US paid a high price. It unfroze approximately $8 billion in Iranian assets, pledged not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and committed to blocking lawsuits against Iran in US courts. Worse still, the US arranged the transfer of weapons to Iran via Israel. What, you ask? True. The US sent weapons to a regime listed as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. The guns flowed to the Mullahs and they paid cash, some of which went to the rightwing militia known as the Contras in Central America. Reagan also hoped Teheran would pressure Hezbollah to release American hostages in Lebanon. It did not work.

JD Vance smiling through the tears. (White House photo).

From actively aiding and abetting Teheran in the 1980s, to strengthening a cruel regime through stupidity and recklessness in 2026, the American right is at least consistent. JD Vance is now saddled with trying to rescue a face-saving agreement from disaster. It was mildly amusing to see him make a big deal of Iran’s reported - then denied - willingness to readmit UN inspectors. Yes, the same inspectors who were withdrawn because of the US Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025.

Isolation and its Consequences

This is a moment with lessons for all the superpowers. The fiasco of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran could be a moment of historic opportunity. Trump listened to Bibi and, like many before him, is learning the hard way - you cannot trust this guy. Bibi has Bibi’s best interests at heart. He manages the rare, perhaps superhuman feat, of being more narcissistic than Trump.

America needs a multilateral approach now. But having spent years decrying the idea Trump is unlikely to shift strategy - if one can even use the word ‘strategy’ to describe his way of working. But I make a prediction, hardly bold in the circumstances. The Republicans will lose the their majorities in The House of Representatives and the Senate at the mid-terms. The Democrats will also win the next Presidential election.

Not that this will end isolationism overnight. It has been a recurring element of the American polity since the 18th century. But a Democratic administration will have public support in rebuilding alliances, and drawing closer to the United Nations. It will be a question of necessity. The Trump years have shown - through the mess of tariffs, the breakdown of alliances, the Iran war - that being a mighty military power is never enough. When the US needed friends over Iran they were wisely sitting it out.

Grand statements of amity towards old allies will change the mood, not much more. If the US persists in old ways, the alienation of America from vast swathes of the world will continue. What I am imagining might sound naive in a world where Vladimir Putin Xi Jinping rule the other superpowers.

Both want an order where their spheres of influence are defined and protected. Both will ruthlessly crush any internal enemy that threatens the ruling autocracy. Both will undermine - for the moment, Russia most aggressively - their perceived international enemies. But I don’t believe these are sustainable policies over the long term. Caveat: by long I mean very long. Think scores of years.

The immediate question is - post Ukraine and post Iran - whether they prefer war and the economic crisis it creates, or negotiation and using the UN mediation and peacekeeping systems? I believe the Russian people - are absorbing a harsh lesson in Ukraine. It will take more time for that to sink in fully, but Putin may yet be forced into seeking a negotiated settlement that demands international support. Ukraine’s surrender is not going to happen.

Vladimir Putin - not all going to plan (Council on Foreign Relations).

In Beijing, always the more calculating power, they will have taken stock of the Russian losses, and the capacity, in Ukraine and Iran, of a smaller enemy to inflict military and political defeats. Invading Taiwan was never an easy option and President Xi knows it. So I would argue that a short term realignment in favour of even limited multilateralism is possible. That might mean revived talks to end the war in Ukraine that don’t ask Kyiv to surrender. And there might even be - hope of all hopes - resolute action to force a just peace in Israel Palestine. I am not holding my breath.

The Original Sin

There is no sign, anywhere in the west, of leaders willing to push for the bigger reforms that will define our common future on the planet. The superpower veto is the Security Council’s original sin. Since the Cold War ended in 1991, permanent members have blocked dozens of draft resolutions. The result is a body that cannot act when a permanent member, or its client, is the aggressor.

It is a relentless story of one step forward and two steps backward. But there have been constructive moves. The Liechtenstein “veto initiative” is the most significant procedural reform in a generation, put in place by a tiny European country. Adopted by consensus on 26 April 2022, it obliges the General Assembly to convene a formal debate within ten working days every time a veto is cast, giving the vetoing power first place on the speakers’ list and forcing it to justify its action before the full membership. It raises the political cost of a veto but has no binding powers. In essence it depends on the capacity for shame among P5 members and that, as we have seen, is a quality in short supply.

Getting rid of the veto - amending the UN Charter - requires a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly and ratification by two-thirds of member states including all five permanent members. The italicized words hit the crux of the issue: the Permanent Five have a veto over their own reform. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas. This is why expansion proposals have been deadlocked for two decades and we are left with the ludicrously unjust situation of powerful voices in Asia, Africa and Latin America locked out of permanent places. The same imbalance runs through many of the other organisations that underpin global security, economics and science.

The genocides of the 1990s — in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia — exposed the gap between the Security Council’s promises and its performance. High ideals collided with political division and lack of will. Yet those failures reshaped international law. If genocide could not be prevented, it could at least be prosecuted. Tribunals were created for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and special courts followed for Cambodia and Sierra Leone. UN forces intervened to protect civilians in Sierra Leone, and NATO acted in Kosovo to halt the expulsion of ethnic Albanians — a move that triggered a sharp confrontation with Russia, already wary of NATO’s eastward reach.

Prosecuting the Powerful

Out of this period came the push for a permanent court to try genocide and crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court was established in 1998 under the Rome Statute and began operations four years later. It is independent of the UN but created by its member states and working closely with the organisation. In 2009 the court issued its first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state, Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, and a year later he was charged with genocide. As with the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, the hope was that accountability would deter future atrocities. But a flaw was built in from the start, and it shadows today’s debate over Ukraine: the United States, China and Russia never ratified the Rome Statute.

The three largest military powers are outside the court’s jurisdiction, and the only route in — a Security Council referral — is blocked by their vetoes. When the court tried to investigate all parties in Afghanistan, the Trump administration sanctioned its chief prosecutor. In Xinjiang, an attempt to examine alleged genocide against the Uyghurs collapsed because China is not a member.

With Gaza the ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials, but the United States — Israel’s principal ally and a non‑member of the court — has rejected the court’s authority outright, and members of Congress have imposed sanctions on ICC prosecutors and judges involved in the case. For the moment the threat of prosecution for war crimes in Gaza is purely symbolic. But a time may come when it has real effect.

As I wrote here there was no golden age of a rules based international order.

I recall a conversation with a former UN official, Professor Mukesh Kapila, who argued that it was a mistake to see the world solely through the prism of great‑power rivalry. Kapila, who helped force recognition of the Darfur genocide, points to the case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, and to the rise of “universal jurisdiction”, which allows national courts to try foreign war crimes suspects. Germany’s conviction of a Syrian officer last year is a recent example. If the Security Council is paralysed, he says, the General Assembly can act as a wider jury — more democratic, and a source of pressure on the Council itself.

The Glimmer

Amid the wreckage of broken promises, we have something that was not there in 1945, nor in the years of Rwanda and Srebrenica when the international community failed so catastrophically: a global civil society of a scale and reach that no previous generation could have imagined. The number of NGOs holding formal consultative status at the United Nations has risen from 41 at the organisation’s founding to more than 6,400 today.

Pro-democracy demonstrators in Khartoum 2019 before crackdown (author photo).

They represent something real: the campaigns that forced the Mine Ban Treaty into existence within fourteen months; the Coalition for the ICC, which began with a handful of organisations in 1995 and grew to more than 2,500, helping write the Rome Statute. It led directly to Putin’s name and those of Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, appearing on arrest warrants; the Jubilee 2000 movement, which gathered 24 million signatures and helped cancel more than $100 billion of debt crushing the world’s poorest nations.

No to Apathy

What we are witnessing is not a steady march toward a more accountable world order but a grinding struggle. The organisation CIVICUS, which monitors civic space across 198 countries, found in its most recent report that only 39 of them can now be rated as open — and that 73 percent of humanity lives under conditions rated repressed or closed. The authoritarians have studied the playbook carefully. India, which once boasted more than three million registered NGOs, has cancelled the foreign-funding licences of nearly 22,000 organisations, among them Amnesty International and Oxfam. And in 2024, governments imposed internet shutdowns on a record 296 occasions across 54 countries — a 280 percent increase in eight years — deliberately severing the digital arteries which give civil society its reach.

If we want to survive as a species we cannot just retreat and hope for the best. Whenever I speak at public events, I am asked a variation of, “what can I do that would make any difference?” There is a lot. Join the civil society organisations that best represent our hopes. Climate. Human rights. Economic justice. Reform of the United Nations. Take your pick. But start by rejecting the gloomy inertia that has settled over liberal minded people in Europe. Stop doom scrolling and go out and join your local branch of Amnesty.

Don’t imagine it will get better by avoiding the fight. Engage with likeminded forces in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The community of conscience exists. We can hope a post-Trump America will take a different path, and Europe will consolidate around true democratic values, and dream that Putin will be replaced by someone less destructive. Maybe it will come to pass. And a lot of Maybe Not. But while I still have the choice I would rather fight a small fight every day than sign away my future to apathy.

(Source: campaign website.)

Not even Nigel Farage, that inveterate weaver of fantasies, bothered to try and sugar coat the result. It was, he declared, “a dramatic, emphatic win for Andy Burnham.” As statements of the obvious go it was more than usually pleasing to this ear. Not that I carry a flag for any party or individual. I have been too long an exile in the skeptical world of the foreign correspondent to feel comfortable in any place but my own politics. They are straightforward. I am for reasoned argument and the creation of a fair society. I believe racism - including anti-semitism, Islamophobia, anti-foreigner hysteria - is an existential threat to Britain. Until now I’ve resisted weighing in on domestic politics, largely because it has never been my natural stamping ground. But on this glad day the temptation is too strong. I live here, and so do my children, and I care about what is happening in our politics.

It’s just a pity the Reform leader himself wasn’t present to hear the news of his candidate’s defeat. Farage read the signs and knew his man was heading for the knacker’s yard in a convincing fashion. Neither was Starmer but for different reasons that we will come to shortly. Farage being Farage would have recognized that self interest was better served by curling up with a bottle of ‘Old Nasty Very Pale Ale’ and consoling himself that there was a long way yet to the General Election, with other battles ahead, and many more voters with fears to be manipulated.

The issue is not that people like Farage exist in our politics. They always have. Times of fear and disappointment bring them out as the rain summons worms. With his fake bonhomie and importuning manner, Farage is a combination of bookie’s runner and pox doctor’s clerk - nothing really fits when you get up close. But among a large constituency of people who see the ruling political class as the problem, the wealthy public schoolboy’s malevolent mishmash of impossible promises and old prejudices is powerfully seductive.

The real battle.

In Makerfield Andy Burnham was fighting Farage, not the local candidate. He was fighting to overturn an entrenched view of ‘establishment’ politicians. The constituency does not fit the stereotype of a declining Red Wall area, as Rob Ford’s excellent post here points out.

The Swingometer

The Makerfield by-election: High risk, high return

Here we go again. Less than four months after Gorton & Denton, Greater Manchester voters are off to the polls in another by-election. The Gorton & Denton contest was defined by the man who wasn’t there: Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. And Makerfield is also all about Burnham, now on the ballot in a surreal by-election where voters are being asked…

Read more

3 months ago · 118 likes · 29 comments · Rob Ford

Makerfield is still overwhelmingly white. The economic metrics are better than many in the region. But Reform still managed to pull in 35 percent of the vote. Alienation is rooted in a sense that the politicians don’t reflect the people they represent. It is an electoral magnet for the far right across the world. That a clique of the super rich and their ideological bootboys successfully present themselves as champions of the downtrodden is one of the great con tricks of any age.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The alienation with politics as it is that let Reform sweep every council ward in the May local elections hasn't gone away; Andy Burnham won in Makerfield because he was popular locally, because he offered an implicit end to the Starmer led government, and he made an attempt to project a hopeful message. Above all, he didn’t look like a wide boy in hock to special interests. Repeating that on a national level while making hard decisions in government will be a harder task.

None of the above options is palatable for Starmer but his choice will impact heavily on Labour’s future election prospects. For months the Prime Minister’s supporters have been going around warning that the public will not forgive Labour for the self-indulgence of a leadership election in a time of crisis. They were right, except the equation has changed: Makerfield has shown that an abdication followed by a swift coronation is what they now desire.

Of course it was not a national poll. It was not a test of the Labour membership. But the 76,000 strong electorate of Makerfield was making a choice for the 70 million people of the UK. The result is an existential moment for Labour and an opportunity not to be missed for the country. Does anyone seriously doubt that there is an overwhelming public desire for a change of Prime Minister?

End Days.

We are entering the end days of Starmerism, that politics that never defined itself but bumbled on, never a coherent narrative but a chain of events in which hard choices were nearly always postponed - the refusal to go to war alongside Trump excepted - and the vision thing…well it never materialised. The Starmer years were like riding a long train in stifling weather. Standing room only, numerous unplanned changes, constant delays, the station cafe always closed, and the destination never clear.

Andy Burnham has a unique chance to reset government, not in the interests of his party but of a weary and worried electorate. He must tell us the story he sees for Britain. There will be much debate about the public finances. Painful choices etc etc. But start with a vision Andy. Instead of trying to appease different lobbies on a multitude of issues, be your own man. Spell out how you’ll tackle the alienation caused by years of politics as a rich man’s game, the system that gave us the Mandelson Epstein scandal, that churned up Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and which places a chancer like Farage as a potential Prime Minister.

I had planned to write the second installment of my essay on the non existent international rules based order this week. That will have to wait a few days. What happened in Makerfield made me want to wade in on national politics. I am fortunate to live in this country. My kids were lucky to grow up here. With goodwill not anger there is much that can be made better. There is also much worth fighting to preserve.

If you wanted brighter omens this was a good week. England won convincingly in their first outing at the World Cup. Burnham faced down the politics of division in Makerfield. Summer has arrived and it could be a happier one than we have known for a while. Just please say goodbye Mr Starmer and leave the door open as you go. Give us reasons to hope.

I was never a contender. And unlike much else in my life, I can’t really blame myself. The thing is when you are up against U2 it’s only going to end one way. They were from Dublin. We were from Cork. Big city vs nicest city. They had Paul McGuinness as the best manager in the history of rock and roll. We had only a collection of friends and relatives who mucked in to drive us around between different parish halls. More to the point, whatever you think of Bono - and people think a lot of different things - the man can sing, and many of the songs are great. In our band - the late, long forgotten The Streets (before anyone else used the name) - I was the weak link. The musicians I played with were very good. Me? I brought a lot of energy, a reasonable voice, but lacked the star quality that would have punched through. Once I saw Bono coming out of a burger place in Cork. This was late 1970s, pre-superstar days. I saw him. He didn’t see me. The rest is history. Which is a long way around to get to the point I will shortly be making. Like now. Rock and roll is fun. The best legal fun there is. Which is why when the question of having a leaving party from the BBC came up, I wanted to put a band together with old friends and summon up sweaty, long distant nights in Cork. And it worked.

I put the word out on the grapevine, much as old outlaws do in the movies when they plan a last great heist before retirement. Back came the word. There were various dodgy knees. Bad backs. Lads with arthritis in their fingers. Doubts about being able to remain onstage for 90 minutes without needing to pee. But in the words of Molly Bloom it was, yes, yes, yes.

Read more

When I had put down Ben Faccini’s new novel, I thought of Gore Vidal’s immortal - and brutally self aware - remark on literary competition. “Every time a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” As a writer, edging his way through a first novel, I might have been nudged by the green eyed monster after finishing ‘Other People’s Children.’ It is that good. But the flair, generosity, and skill of the storyteller, are so profound that envy would be foolish. When one newspaper reviewer suggested it should feature in the Booker list this year I cheered. Because if you truly love words this novel is the summer reading (actually any time of the year) you have been waiting for.

First, a declaration of interest. Ben is a friend. A decent, warm hearted and very funny man. But irrespective of his personal qualities, or the depth of friendship, nothing would ever persuade me to praise a book I did not like. Writing matters too much. It is a sacred thing. You don’t mess around with false words and flattery. I have a rule that if a friend writes something that isn’t much good I will not lie, or damn with faint praise. I will keep quiet. Otherwise I am conning anybody who might see my recommendation and fork out to buy the book.

Ben Faccini.

The novel concerns itself with the long aftermath of war. The narrator Tommaso is a man under pressure, from within and without. His needs to travel for his job. The domestic sphere is buffeted by the turbulence of his girlfriend’s two sons. And, increasingly at the core of his responsibilities are the tender, sometimes unsettling rituals of caring for his grandmother, Alma.

I am reminded of a phrase I came across once about ‘the penance of memory.’ Alma is slipping now into memories she has spent a lifetime trying to bury. As the past begins to infiltrate the present, the shadows of a war Tommaso never lived through begin to fall towards him.

What is revealed threatens the tentative balance of his own life. To write of the aftermath of war is - in my experience - infinitely harder than describing the day to day horrors of the bloody business itself. One is summoning feeling, trying to reach the deep detonations of emotion that are not readily observable when the physical reality of the war has vanished.

This is where Ben Faccini’s skill comes so profoundly into play. The sentences are beautifully constructed to suggest, to draw us in, avoiding the obvious in a way that reveals an imperishable truth: the deepest sadness is one we can never fully heal, because though it inhabits us it is not entirely our own. It is made of parts that come from different lives. Our own. Our ancestors. And from the heart of the human condition itself.

Waiting for aid, Eastern Ukraine, 2016 (author photo).

I call it real idealism. Pragmatic humanitarianism, but no less noble for that. And a whole lot better than false promises to protect the poor and persecuted. I have encountered it in different people over the decades. They came from every part of the planet. Like Mike McDonagh from County Clare on Ireland’s west coast. He was the UN rep in north Darfur for a period when I was reporting the unfolding genocide there. Patient, wise, above all brave, Mike once smuggled my tapes out of a refugee camp under siege by the Sudanese police. When he died suddenly last year, I felt the world had lost one of its kindest souls.

Mike never gave up. His method was to be quietly, often charmingly, relentless. When you got blocked - by fourteen-year-olds with Kalashnikovs or timeserving careerists at HQ in New York - you tried to find a way around. Just never giving up. Always pushing until a small space opened up. It could mean the difference between people living and dying. Nobody in the White House or anywhere ‘important’ would notice that you got a truckload of medicine through to a town where people were dying in droves. But next time you visited the town there would be kids up and walking who would have been in their graves but for that truck.

Had I mentioned a ‘rules based international order’ to Mike, he would have chuckled and said it would be a good idea. To be honest we never indulged much in ‘big picture’ speculations. There was too much for him to do when we met in Southeast Asia, Congo, Darfur and other embattled places.

Mike McDonagh, and thousands like him, were and are the symbols of an international community of conscience. It lives by the simple rule of real idealism: do what you can, where you can. I think the current chaos of the world would have inspired him to work even harder.

Whose order?

Journalists and aid workers haunt the same territory. We have different roles, but we learn a simple enough lesson. History does not end. It is a continuum. It may take years, even centuries, for the consequence to be born, but one thing often does lead to another. Most of my forty years of reporting has been spent tramping around the battlegrounds that were born out of the unresolved business of two World Wars.

I first had cause to reflect on the rules based order when I watched the aftermath of a Soviet- backed napalm strike on an Eritrean village in the mid 1980s, but nothing could quite compete with how it didn’t work in Rwanda a decade later. I watched it in Iraq too, and most recently in Gaza.

I understood long ago that the rules-based international order was never real — not for the majority of the world’s population. From 1945 until now the rules have been routinely ignored or selectively applied when great-power interests demanded otherwise. We’ve spent the 80 years since the end of the Second World War too often perfecting the art of by-standing in the face of massacre and starvation while piously proclaiming our commitment to the United Nations Charter.

The Charter, signed in 1945, contains the most sweeping prohibition on the use of force in the history of international law. It calls on all member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

It was a document of its time, designed to eliminate the threat of another global conflict. Although the Holocaust had created the impetus for landmark laws on Crimes against Humanity and Genocide, the Charter did not foresee a future of civil wars and ethnic cleansing.

Most of Africa was still under colonial rule. The same went for much of South-East Asia and the Middle East. The old empires were in decline, new superpowers were on the rise; nationalisms and ideologies - some universalist, others narrowly sectarian - were stirring.

But the Charter said nothing about the use of force to protect populations from their own governments, or about civil wars or internal armed conflicts.

Children in the DRC, 2019 (author photo).

Text and reality

The Charter’s prohibition on the use of force has been violated, circumvented or reinterpreted by virtually every major power at some point since 1945 — including all five permanent members of the Security Council, who are simultaneously the Charter’s supposed guarantors. The US in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere; the Soviet Union in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; Russia in Georgia and Ukraine; China in Tibet; France in Africa; Britain in Suez and Iraq. The legal arguments constructed to justify each of these — self-defence, invitation by a recognised government, humanitarian necessity, pre-emptive action — represented the gradual erosion of the Charter’s implicit hope for a world governed by the rule of law.

The order was absent when Britain and America engineered a coup to overthrow a democratically elected Prime Minister, and in Indonesia where up to a million were slaughtered in the name of anti-communism with the assistance of the Johnson White House. Fast forward to Bangladesh in 1971 where anywhere between 300,000 and three million were butchered by the Pakistani military, and where the American Consul General, Archibald Blood, condemned his own government in a dissent cable.

“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities… Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.” National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had Blood removed from his post and brought back to a desk job in Washington D.C.

Much more could be said of Kissinger. About East Timor and Cambodia. He got the Nobel Prize for his role in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam and was lionised and sought after for his wisdom until he died in 2023.

Mother and child after escaping Gaza, Jordan, 2024 (author photo).

The Trump effect, or not

The Biden administration approved and transferred billions of dollars in military aid to Israel including 2,000-pound unguided bombs, and artillery shells that were being used in densely populated areas where the highest civilian casualties occurred. The temporary pause on the single shipment of large bombs in May 2024 was the exception that proved the rule. Trump at least spares us the guff about being committed to a rules based order. He’s not. Tough luck.

Maybe the last 250 years have been the primrose path that led to Trump and Putin, these ultimate embodiments of power without morality. Putin has adapted the politics of Soviet repression to the age of social media and organised crime, the perfect synthesis of gangster and autocrat, with the tech oligarch’s genius for creating alternative realities. I am focused on these two because at this juncture they represent the most disruptive elements in world affairs. I could write a lot about Xi Jinping and China, faltering Europe, and the alarming politics of the Indian subcontinent. Another day, and soon.

Benefits

I cannot ignore what has been achieved by international cooperation since 1945. There has been legislation - however unevenly enforced - that covers everything from trade to the law of the sea, to international banking.

The creation of the World Health Organisation – improving the life outcomes of tens of millions - the IMF, World Bank, and many other international bodies represented a genuine attempt to build multilateral governance. There are forums for negotiation, aid coordination, and dispute resolution that didn’t exist before. Until relatively recently arms control treaties constrained the nuclear arms race.

Pakistani UN peacekeeper, DRC, 2018 (author photo).

Having highlighted what the UN (by which I mean the big powers with the actual power) has failed to do, I must pay tribute to the peacekeepers I have seen risk and sometimes lose their lives in the world’s most dangerous places. So too the lawyers who are part of the system of international justice struggling in the face of big power opposition and persecution, and the humanitarians like Mike McDonagh who represent the better instincts of our fractured international community, and yes the nameless negotiators in offices in New York, Geneva, Rome, Vienna and elsewhere who try to keep our world on a legal path.

I have laid out my criticisms. I could write a lot more, but it’s not necessary. Next week I’ll write about the possibility of positive change and the places where the rules were upheld and what can be learned from there. How might big change happen? What would it look like? As a committed real idealist, I am obliged to do more than criticise.

I recently read Hanne Ørstavik’s novel ‘ti amo’ (And Other Stories books) and it has been haunting me ever since. Not a negative possession at all, but haunted in the sense of revealed truths that are sad and essential and reveal a beauty that catches the heart and sends it soaring. It is a novel/memoir - autofiction is the current term - about the loss of Ørstavik’s husband to cancer. At times I had to put it down, so intensely did the writing communicate the loss from which there is no rescue.

She tells the story with heart stopping honesty. There is not a scintilla of romanticising much less self pity. Because true love has no place for such things. I am on my way to the countryside for a few days so this is a brief post. But do read the book. It will sit with you in all the best ways.

London, June 4

There will be no more dramatic summonses. The news desk will not call me in the dead of night. No heart thumping, wondering what hell-hole I might be heading to, no frantic packing of a bag and trudging away from home before dawn for the taxi to the airport, and no boarding a near empty plane, the only other passengers my colleagues and competitors from other organisations, all of us flying to a place everyone else is leaving. I have returned my BBC ID pass, the mobile phone, the laptop. Sometime in the last few days the company email stopped working. If I ever return to New Broadcasting House, it will be as a guest waiting in reception to be shepherded to a studio. I walked out of the building without saying goodbye to a soul. That is my way. I cannot abide prolonged departures. The real friends I made at the BBC will be friends for life. We will still meet and gossip and be there for each other when the storms blow.

Passing by All Souls Church – John Nash’s Regency masterpiece beside NBH – I remembered the morning of my BBC interview in 1989 and how nervous I was. So much so that I popped inside and sat in silence and mumbled a sinner’s prayer to see me through the ordeal ahead.

Had I known what lay in the future – wars, famines, genocide, PTSD – would I have still walked across the road and entered the interview room? Yes. I no longer bargain with the past or torment myself with ‘What ifs?’ Besides, as I have expressed in a film just made by Alice Doyard, the long journey enriched my experience of humanity. It left me a hopeful person and one full of gratitude. See here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002x905/the-road-to-hope-with-fergal-keane

Listowel, County Kerry.

The River Feale is in full flow. A Heron stalks the banks below the bridge. I arrive in late afternoon, coming in the Tralee road with the Stacks Mountains to my right, the river on my left and beyond that the plain of north Kerry rolling to the shores of the Atlantic.

This is the heartland of the Keanes and Purtills, my father’s people, my people. This is a country of cattle farmers and writers. I am on my way to attend Ireland’s oldest literary festival, Listowel Writers Week, founded 55 years ago by, among others, my uncle, John B. Keane and his fellow writers Bryan McMahon and Brendan Kennelly.

There is a lovely lack of pretension at Listowel. No hierarchy of the famous, the nearly famous, the wanting to be famous, and the obscure. In my experience writers are an insecure bunch. Not the best people for small talk, the good ones at least. Listowel doesn’t have a green room or roped off area for the performers. It spares us the potential awkwardness of each other’s company. That means the literati and the people mingle. They drink, tell stories and sing in the pubs. Among these my cousin Billy’s bar on William Street is much visited.

I share a stage with the former trade union leader, Mick Lynch, who rouses the crowd with an appeal for solidarity in the face of right-wing advances in politics and media. I ask him if he will stand for election and he doesn’t say yes, and he doesn’t say no. Watch this space.

Church Street, sometime after 10am the following day.

There are a lot of Keanes around this place. As a child who came here in the summer holidays, I was constantly being introduced to people who were cousins. The poet Roger McGough remarked to me some years ago that everything in Listowel seemed to be ‘Keane’d’ in some way. Well, it might look like that. But many of the Keanes you meet are not actual relatives, or they might have been a few hundred years ago, but the family lines diverged. Still, the sense of tribal solidarity is powerful, a bit Sicilian I would say. An offence against one, an offence against all. I am staying with my cousin Conor and his uber kind wife Marie. It is a quiet house, the perfect place to be the day after I have left the BBC.

My late aunt, Mary, wife of John B., who ran the bar for decades, was the lynchpin of the tribe and my cousins are fond of recalling her words of advice about meeting adversity. “We’ll put our shop face on and we’ll hoor it out.” Damn any troubles behind the scenes, customers would see an unperturbed face. To ‘hoor’ it out is to face troubles defiantly.

The new day begins with rain. We are following my cousin John who is leading a guided tour of the town, with stops at various historic points or places noted for the eccentricities or quirks of their former habitants. He summons me and gives me a piece of paper to read. It is the election manifesto of a long-forgotten character in the town’s political history, one Thomas Doodle, a joke candidate invented by my uncle and his pals during the 1951 general election. At the time the town was still riven by bitter rivalries from the Civil War just under thirty years before. My uncle thought humour the best antidote to enmity.

Doodle - whose real identity is still disputed - drew 3000 knowing locals to his big rally. He was preceded by two brass bands and overshadowed the far smaller hustings of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who visited the same day. Newly freed from the constraints of BBC impartiality, no longer the big cheese reporter, I read out his manifesto in my best lying politician voice. Doodle promised to abolish taxes on gold found at the end of a rainbow, to outlaw buffoonery, to establish a factory for shaving the hair off gooseberries and - my favourite - a declaration that under his rule “every man would have more than the next.” I finished off with his immortal slogan: “Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Caboodle to Doodle.” The crowd cheered. The rain fell down on last year’s man. (Merci Leonard.)

Carrigafoyle Castle, the day after that.

As was their custom, the English massacred the garrison. Easter 1580 and the Italian and Irish troops, sent by the Pope, were cut down trying to flee across the estuary, or hanged in front of the castle. We were at Carrigafoyle Castle for the beautiful sea and country air and the view over the mouth of the River Shannon. A fine place on a morning when the rain has stopped.

We were three ageing hacks, a brilliant poet, the poet’s talented son and a harpsichordist with several hearts of gold. The hacks: I have known Julian Borger and Chris McGreal since my early days in Johannesburg as a foreign correspondent. They are the kind of buddies a man needs at this stage of life. They too have aching bones and are bewildered by the speed of the world around them. They are good human beings and argumentative customers, McGreal particularly, no matter the elevated rank of the one he tangles with. He sailed the oceans as a teenage deckhand in the Merchant Navy before becoming a newspaperman.

Some years back (2006) he wrote two major articles for the Guardian comparing the realities of apartheid South Africa and life for the Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. It was brave, necessary and credible reporting because McGreal had lived and reported in both places. He needed his thick skin to endure the tide of rage and misinformation that came his way in the aftermath.

The poet was Zaffar Kunial, one of the great rising talents of English literature, although ‘English’ is too narrow a definition for a man with roots in these islands but also in the Indian sub-continent, and whose inspirations are universal. His mother was English, his father from Kashmir. He is pictured above at the most unusual cricket grounds in the North Atlantic, at a place called The Spa near Tralee (Zaffar is an aficionado of a game I do not understand.)

I am sure he will not mind if I share with you this work. It’s a poem called ‘The Word’ aabout an exchange with his father, and speaks to the distances between father and son, the alienation between different worlds, and a deep tenderness.

I couldn’t tell you now what possessed me
to shut summer out and stay in my room.
Or at least attempt to. In bed mostly.
It’s my dad, standing in the door frame
not entering – but pausing to shape advice
that keeps coming back. “Whatever is matter,

must enjoy the life.” He pronounced this twice.
And me, I heard wrongness in putting a the

before life. In two minds. Ashamed. Aware.
That I knew better, though was stuck inside
while the sun was out. That I’m native here.
In a halfway house. Like that sticking word.
That definite article, half right, half
wrong, still present between enjoy and life.

Zaffar was at Writers Week with his son, Zaffar Óg, as the locals here christened him. He is 17 and Óg is the Gaelic for young. The young man is a talented musician and stunned us all with his intelligence and the breadth of his knowledge of music and writing.

Our harpsichordist, Karen Glen, doesn’t know it but she is heading for a breakthrough on the popular music scene. Karen is a full-time classical musician, but I have persuaded her to pause and join my rock and roll band. Riches have been promised. Fame. Impossible glamour. Read on…

South-west London, sometime recently.

The sun is pounding on my cranium. Even the dog Deilo, always game for a walk, is swaying in the afternoon heat. I am reminded of the mad king Sweeney’s words in Flann O’Brien’s comic masterpiece, At Swim Two Birds: “Piteous Christ it is cheerless.”

Alice and I enter the pub, the final stop on a Via Dolorosa of searching for a venue where ‘The Last Chancers’ might be able to play for their families and friends. We are five individuals of greater and lesser musical talent. I am at the far end of the latter but recently took possession, after a lifetime of longing, of a Fender Telecaster guitar. It has greatly improved my musical self-esteem. We will be loud, proud and there will be dancing and laughter. Our repertoire is blues and rock and roll and it will my first time playing a proper gig since South Africa in 1994. Then I played at the Foreign Correspondents Club dinner that marked the elections to end apartheid. Before that I’d played in rock and roll bands at school, dreaming of making it big until U2 – contemporaries – got there first. I hear on the grapevine they are terrified of the revival I am planning.

On matters of venues, and much else, I defer to the judgement of Alice. As a Parisian she has a solid belief in the rightness of her judgements, and more often than not on aesthetic matters she is right. So, it proves today. The place is small but full of what a TripAdvisor review might call “genuine atmosphere.” I muse dreamily on the Beatles and the Cavern, the Stones and Bowie at Eel Pie Island, The Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City. “Yes. I like it” says Alice. Four words. The deal is sealed.

All that remains is for ‘The Last Chancers’ to practice. And by God we need to.

But one of the nice things about leaving a full-time job as a foreign correspondent is that I can make plans and know that I will keep them. No danger of the civil war or natural disaster calling me away. And I am finding my way back to things I love, like playing music and making time for friendship. See you in a fortnight for another Wonder Diary. Keep on rocking in the free world.

Welcome to my official Substack launch. I am bringing to this space four decades of reporting the world and experiencing the vagaries of human nature. By instinct and training I live by reasoned argument. I will call things as I see them. At the outset I should warn you that I am, despite my travels, a hopeful man. To steal part of a phrase from Evelyn Waugh, I place the human capacity for love “high in the pantheon” of virtues.

In addition to my weekly letter, I am starting a diary which is a more personal space that might give you an occasional laugh or an insight into the worlds I am travelling, and have travelled through (like the nerve shredding moment with the Kurds who were fighting IS at the time.) The diary will start tomorrow (Thursday).

It is a strange feeling to write a piece that doesn’t have to be first seen and approved by a BBC editor. Liberating to be sure. I can write what I like within the bounds of libel and defamation laws. Nor do I have to worry that something I write will bring the hounds of outrage baying at the Corporation’s doors.

I never worried about them coming for me personally. I was schooled in a robust newspaper tradition in Ireland (see more in my first letter below), and decades of dealing with bullies in the war zones of the world prepared me well for the venom of social media.

But I was always acutely conscious of not drawing fire on the BBC because of anything I said or wrote outside.

I am encouraged by the new Director General, Matt Brittin. This is a view based on personal soundings, people I’ve spoken with, things I’ve heard. He has the intellectual sharpness and strategic brain for the hour we are in. I am told he has a strong moral compass. That is the essential attribute for an editor-in-chief when the storm is raging, because in an organisation as hierarchical as the BBC the line the DG draws will be the one everyone else defends. Whoever he recruits as his deputy, and his head of news, will need to have steel at their core. They are the ones who must ensure that the journalists get it right and are fair-minded – the essential obligations - but also that they feel supported when the heat comes on from pressure groups, vested interests or, as in the case of Robbie Gibb, from within the structures of the BBC itself.

I was lucky to have a succession of Foreign Editors who had my back. The understanding was that I wouldn’t hang them out to dry with biased or inaccurate reporting. The young who consume news get this. This is a generation with a desire for moral clarity in a world where words and images are routinely deployed in the service of lies.

You cannot attract younger audiences if they perceive you to shy away from the truth because of pressure. Journalistic courage is good for business. Enough of Keane the sage. For my first letter, I am reflecting on the changes I’ve seen since I started out as a reporter in the autumn of 1979. I am starting without paid subscriptions, to give you a sense of whether you feel my writing is worth forking out for. I will review in a fortnight. There will still be free content but I am planning a larger package with audio, video and long dispatches for paid subscribers.

From Stone Age to (I) Phone Age.

I was eighteen years old and wearing the first suit I ever owned. A light grey tweed that almost, but not quite, gave the impression I was an adult. I left home with this family gift and a few words of caution familiar to all Irish teenagers: “Don’t make a show (spectacle) of yourself.”

A few months earlier I had been a schoolboy in Cork dreaming of travelling the world. Now I was sitting on a train bound for Limerick city. A journey of 90 minutes through the sodden fields of that long ago Autumn. I remember changing trains at a rural junction where carriages loaded with beet were being lined up, muddy and grey, blocking the far horizon of my imagination. But it was a beginning. The job I had craved. How proud I was then when someone asked me what I did and I could reply: “I’m a reporter.” Had anyone then suggested to me that almost fifty years later I would be writing a valedictory piece for about my career as a BBC foreign correspondent, and the changes I’ve seen in journalism, I would have laughed at them. For most people the internet would not exist for another 12 years.

I arrived at the little newsroom of the Limerick Leader and Chronicle at 54 O’Connell Street to be greeted by a fug of cigar and pipe smoke, the clattering of typewriters, a constant ringing of landline telephones - mobile phones were still six years away in Ireland and Britain - and regular bursts of laughter and intermittent swearing.

This was a world of clearly defined roles. The reporters went out on stories - what we called ‘markings’ - and wrote them up, taking care to always make a carbon copy. The sub editor received the top copy to correct and mark up the headlines. As the junior I would then be sent back to hand the marked story to the printers.

I learned how to type and take shorthand notes. I spent my days reporting the local courts, agricultural shows, council meetings, local politics, rugby matches, greyhound racing, and I ran a circulation boosting ‘Bonny Baby’ competition.

The only hitch with the latter was that I lost a box of children’s photographs and had to spend some months avoiding irate mothers on the streets of Limerick.

It was an extraordinarily broad grounding in journalism of a kind that has vanished along with so many local newspapers in Britain and Ireland. According to the UK Press Gazette the UK has lost 293 titles in the last 20 years, while the number of journalists employed by the country’s three leading local newspaper groups has fallen from 9000 to 3000. It is a tragedy for journalism, cutting off an entry route for aspiring reporters and removing a key vehicle for holding local power accountable.

Drinking culture

On the Limerick Leader you could never forget your audience. You met them in the streets. You defended your reporting to the faces of those who might be displeased by it. A thick skin was required.

If you were inclined to put your opinions ahead of the facts, or entertained notions about the grandeur of your position, there was always a battle-hardened colleague to bring you down to earth.

The climate of 70s and 80s journalism - across newspapers and broadcasting - tolerated a ‘robust’ drinking culture. Liquid lunches. A short hop to the pub in mid-morning to quell a violent hangover. The one pint that stretched to two, three, four and more.

Free drink was widely available as businesses, state bodies, civic groups, politicians sought the favour of the press. Our collective attitude is best summed up in the words of a colleague who, when asked what possible news could be extracted from the launch of some minor product (it might have been detergent), replied, “We will eat and drink our fill and astonish them with our ingratitude.” In other words, nothing would be written about the event.

Questionable behaviour was endemic in many newsrooms. On one memorable occasion working in Dublin, I saw a typewriter fly across the room, propelled by an inebriated colleague. He vanished the following day, apparently on a ferry to Britain, never to be seen in the building again.

The drinking in newspapers and broadcasting seemed like fun at the time, but it did not make for good journalism, and it sent too many fine reporters to early graves, wreaking devastation on families.

That era is long gone. We operate now in a world of water coolers, herbal tea and oat milk cappuccino and - for the most part - careful avoidance of any words that might offend a colleague. Although I suspect the bullying has become more passive aggressive or mutated into back biting.

To one who was regularly addressed as “Keane you gobshite” or “Keane you clown” and many other colourful phrases, today’s environment is markedly less abrasive. I learned to give as good as I got. The men who taught me expected nothing less.

It was a male dominated environment. I have spoken with enough female colleagues of my vintage in Ireland and the UK to know how deeply they experienced a misogynistic ‘lads’ culture in journalism. It wasn’t until I reached the BBC in 1989 that I worked for a woman editor - a decade after I’d started out. According to the Reuters Institute women now occupy 46% of senior editorial roles in the UK, while 53% of journalism students are women. It is a different story in much of the rest of the world where the Institute criticizes “the prominence of gendered routines and ‘boys’ clubs’ within newsrooms.”

In other areas change has been intense and rapid. Like no period I have known. At times I wonder if this is what it felt like for the stars of silent movies when their world was overtaken by the talkies. How many of my generation feel overwhelmed by the landscape of Tik Tok and AI? I certainly do. Recording myself pontificating into the mobile phone, then posting it with hashtags and captions, feels like a ‘Dad at the Disco’ moment. I can do it, but the young are so much faster and better.

No Golden age.

There was never a ‘golden age’ of journalism. When I started out, just like now, there was great reporting, a vast tundra of competent work, and then the lower depths occupied by sensation mongers, ideological axe grinders and outright fabulists. What has changed is the power given by social media to cranks, bores, conspiracy theorists, lobby groups, liars and chancers, con artists of every shade.

All the worse because it is promoted by big corporations with a vested interest in manufactured outrage. Nothing makes money for the social media titans like anger.

I don’t make an argument against change. In four decades, I have gone from working on typewriters to main frame computers to laptops; from recording voice tracks down crackling phone lines to satellites that deliver the reporter in quality - sound and vision - instantly from almost anywhere in the world. How exciting has it been to go from the dominating western narrative of foreign affairs to a world where the peoples of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American nations increasingly tell their own stories and challenge stereotypes.

What is different is the speed of transformation. This makes demands which are cognitive, physical and moral. This last is what concerns me most. Fighting disinformation and hate demands courage. So does standing up to well organised lobbies who target journalists with coordinated, prolonged campaigns designed to shape our coverage. Like any journalist with a shred of sense I welcome feedback. Positive or critical, it doesn’t matter, as long as the purpose is to expand knowledge, address an imbalance or correct an error.

But too much of what I have seen in the past few years has to do with bullying journalists so that they toe the line or simply avoid certain subjects altogether. It continues because it works.

The physical targeting of journalists by governments and armed groups is rising at a frightening pace. The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 124 journalists and media workers killed in 2024 - the highest number since the CPJ began compiling statistics thirty years ago. The group Reporters Without Borders described Gaza as the most dangerous region in the world for journalists with over 200 journalists killed by the Israeli army, “including at least 35 whose deaths were linked to their journalism” since October 2023.

New life.

I decided to leave the BBC to do other things. Write more books, including my first novel. And it is nearly written! In saying this I am reminded of the apocryphal conversation in a Dublin pub between two well oiled hacks. One says to the other, “I am writing a novel”, to which the response was, “Neither am I.”

There will be documentaries. I will write here and in newspapers and magazines.

I have had friends and colleagues who gave their lives pursuing the ideal of public service broadcasting. John Harrison, killed in South Africa in 1994 months before the dawn of democracy; Kate Peyton, murdered in Mogadishu in 2005; Simon Cumbers shot dead in Riyadh in 2004.

There were those who came home changed for life by what they survived. My producer friend Stuart Hughes, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion in Iraq in 2003. Another blast killed the cameraman, Kaveh Golestan. I think too of Frank Gardner who was left partially paralysed in the legs and uses a wheelchair, after the attack that killed Simon Cumbers.

Ask me about the true spirit of the BBC? It is those people. It is the Palestinian cameramen in Gaza who bravely and accurately recorded the agonies of Gaza over nearly three years of war. The fixers in Ukraine who have taken me to the frontline, the security advisors who share our dangers and keep us safe, the stringers in cities and towns across the world filing the stories of their people, and it is the young journalists whose commitment to public service journalism I find so inspiring. I have learned so much from younger colleagues, about how to meet the challenges of new media , but also about the necessity of maintaining idealism.

What advice can I offer them? Put accuracy first. Follow the facts, wherever they take you. As my first editor in Limerick, Brendan Halligan, told me: “Go after the bad guys but make sure you get it right…” Intellectual rigour and scepticism are more than ever essential. But above all these days, have a moral compass. You will be bombarded with propaganda and straight out lying. Finding out what is true and having the courage to say it will demand all your moral strength. Just keep remembering who you work for.

Your ultimate boss is not the Director of News. It is not the Director General. It is not the Chairman of the BBC Board. Nor is it the pressure group that shouts the loudest. It is the man or woman in Hull, Manchester, Salisbury, Glasgow, Swansea, and so many other places across this nation. They pay you to get it right. To say sorry and fix it if you get it wrong. They pay you to stand up in the face of pressure from wherever it comes. Keep them in mind always and you will not go wrong.