Eventually, every son has to position himself either with or against his father’s convictions. There is no third way. Some quietly absorb them, a few consciously build on them, and a small, self-dramatising number spend their middle age releasing their childhood resentments by disgracing their father’s beliefs in public.

Tucker Carlson, I’d suggest, belongs to that last category. The paternal convictions he has spent the past two years disgracing happens to be the values that Dick Carlson, the celebrated journalist and Cold Warrior, held more fiercely, and defended more publicly, than any others: Zionism and hostility to Russia.

Subscribe now

Read more

Who am I to psychoanalyse? But it seems to me that the key to understanding the peculiar ideological drives of our foreign secretary is looking backwards at his father.

Ralph Miliband, one of the most important postwar British Marxist intellectuals, was a prominent member of the subversive New Left after 1956. His work was multifarious, but one idea stands above all. As he argued in his best-known book, The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband believed that Britain’s system of government is not a fair arena for competing ideas and interests.

Rather, he believed it was rigged in favour of the capitalist class. This affected his view of Parliament. His 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism (his first) took the form of a sustained assault on “Labourism”, claiming that the Labour movement had become trapped in the lexicon of the capitalist political classes. True socialism, he argued, could never be imposed from within the corrupted parliamentary system.

Were Ed – his painfully gauche younger son – with us on the couch, he might be coaxed to admit to various neuroses flowing from his radical father. While not rejecting capitalism in its entirety, Ed has always harboured a deep suspicion of concentrated power, viewing his own role as one of subversion and redistribution.

Subscribe now

Read more

YouGov’s August numbers: Andy Burnham on net favourability of +13, the best any prime minister has managed since May 2020. Kemi Badenoch on -16. Nigel Farage on -44, down 17 points since last May. By the crude measure of who Britain currently likes, it isn’t close, and it isn’t Badenoch.

Yet.

The trends tell a different story. After peaking at about 30 per cent last autumn, Reform is now down to 22 per cent, the joint-lowest since January 2025. Labour, meanwhile, has climbed from 16 per cent under Starmer to 24 now that Burnham has taken over, but there is no reason to expect that this “bounce” will last.

As for the Conservatives, theirs has been a story of neither boom nor bust. Over the past month they’ve crept past 21 per cent, a point at a time, free from both scandals and bounces. Thus, in all likelihood, are we seeing Badenoch’s patient and methodical climb into a genuine three-way race.

Setting aside the polls, let’s ask a different question: how many of the pugilists competing for Downing Street lead a team that is actually competent?

Subscribe now

Read more

Read more

I tried to set the record straight in an appearance on TalkTV today. Just look at the names of the suspects. Hamza Iqbal, 20, Rehan Khan, 19, Judex Atshatshi, 18, and Saif Ali, 18. Most appear to come from Pakistani and Kashmiri origin.

None of this makes every British Muslim a suspect. The overwhelming majority probably want nothing to do with any of it, and are as disgusted as anyone else. But pretending the pattern isn’t there does nobody any favours either, least of all the moderate Muslims who are intimidated by hardline Brotherhood types in their own communities.

Make no mistake: this is imported extremism, and decades of mass immigration without a serious conversation about integration have left us badly placed to confront it. The answer isn’t collective blame. It’s honesty and ruthlessness. Prosecute the arsonists, proscribe extremist networks, imprison and deport those peddling hate and embrace the moderate voices who are currently ignored by the state.

The problem won’t go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

In a chilling development, on Thursday, Vladimir Putin threatened to strike British targets after Ukraine used London’s cruise missiles attack positions deep inside Russia. The UK was just “one step away” from “terrorism”, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, warning of “catastrophic consequences”.

It came after Andy Burnham handed Kyiv blueprints for British-made components for the Scalp missile, a French version of Britain’s Storm Shadow cruise missile, allowing Ukraine to produce the long-range weapon domestically.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the Russian military was now locating any missile production sites to destroy them. “Britain methodically and regularly adds fuel to the fire,” he said. Burnham retorted, cheekily: “Who started the fire?” A Ministry of Defence spokesman added: “Russia should be in no doubt about the resolve of this government to stand against Russian aggression.”

Really?

Subscribe now

Read more

Aside from the fact that idiots exist, none of this, on its own, may prove very much. Protest is not subversion, and nobody wants to live in a society in which free expression is repressed. As in so many other aspects of our culture, however, a bigger picture is at work.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s biggest jihadi organisation, remains entirely free to operate in this country, even as most Arab states have long since banned it outright. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, was finally designated a national security threat in July, on the very eve of Keir Starmer’s departure from Downing Street. Yet it still has not been proscribed under the Terrorism Act.

Then there is Westminster itself. Four independent MPs took seats in 2024 running explicitly on Gaza, part of a wider trend involving council wards where sectarian bloc voting is now openly discussed. Islamist-aligned networks have learned, with some sophistication, which levers in British public life are unguarded.

Put it all together and the outlook is bleak. Encampments, uncontested lobby groups, an unchallenged Brotherhood, a downgraded Revolutionary Guard, a parliament increasingly organised along confessional lines: these are not unrelated developments. They are part of a pattern created by people who understand that a liberal democracy will hold the door open for you, so long as you smile while you walk through it.

Today, I discussed all of this with Mike Graham on his YouTube show (clip above). We also talked about Andy Burnham, our new, unelected prime minister, who is about to hand our enemies something of a gift.

Within weeks, expect a “comprehensive set of measures” against trade with West Bank settlements, exactly the sort of watertight, surgical, easily-enforced policy that always turns out, the moment customs officials try to implement it, to be neither watertight nor surgical nor remotely enforceable.

Labour Friends of Israel has already articulated what everyone knows: a “settlement” ban of this kind becomes, in practice, a boycott of Israel by another name, one that will not advance the peace process even slightly, and will cost Palestinian workers in the territories their jobs first. As I argued here, it is the diplomatic equivalent of kicking yourself in the bollocks to make a point to somebody in the next room.

The truth is now obvious: Burnham is just as ideological as the man he replaced, only dressed in a donkey jacket instead of a Savile Row suit. Starmer’s instincts on Israel were reflexive Islington caution; Burnham’s are the appeasement of a municipal mayor who can’t believe his luck.

Nobody has ever left a room having met our new prime minister and thought, there is a man with electricity running through him. Rather, I’d lay a wager that many have thought: there is a man who has rehearsed being liked so thoroughly that he has mistaken the rehearsal for the thing itself.

Take away the trade ban and Starmer and Burnham would be indistinguishable on Israel, on identity politics, on the entire managerial Left worldview. The only difference is that one of them knew he was charmless.

Andy Burnham is said to be weeks away from banning trade with the Israeli settlements. This is a policy demanded by more than 140 Labour MPs, championed by Ed Miliband at the Foreign Office, and destined to be waved through at conference in Liverpool next month by activists who, I very much suspect, could not find Ramallah on a map.

The Prime Minister has already apologised for his predecessor’s supposed support for Israel. (That’s right, he meant Keir Starmer, the chap who recognised a State of Palestine while Israeli hostages languished in the tunnels.) This would appear to be another similar downpayment for begrudging backbench support.

But when the case for sanctions is made, the image that many leftwing outriders will likely reach for is that of a man with a sledgehammer, which was the latest gift from the Israeli far-Right to the world’s Very Online antisemites.

Last week, the Religious Zionism MK Zvi Sukkot, under IDF escort, took a hammer to a stone memorial in the Palestinian village of Madama, near Nablus, on the West Bank. The footage travelled the world within hours. It made for the perfect propaganda image: a politician, protected by soldiers, vandalising a Palestinian monument to the dead.

Yet almost nobody bothered to report what was carved on the stone that he demolished. Why? That is the dangerous question that opens up the truth of all this. Let’s look at what it said.

Subscribe now

The monument listed 10 names, with dates of death ranging from 1930 to 2004. At its base was an inscription recording that it had been presented by “the comrades in the Popular Front”. That is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Marxist-Leninist outfit whose armed wing assassinated the Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001.

Sukkot claims that one of the men commemorated is Yaman Tayeb Ali Faraj, who he says was involved in the suicide bombing at the Geha Junction bus stop in Petah Tikva on Dec 25, 2003, which killed four Israelis and wounded more than 20. That attack was carried out by the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the PFLP’s military wing.

Another of the 10, according to Israeli reporting, is Shadi Nassar, who blew himself up at the Eshel HaShomron hotel in Ariel in 2002, injuring 14.

You would not know any of this from the BBC, which told its readers the memorial honoured Palestinians killed at the battle of Karameh in 1968 and in the two intifadas, “whatever their political affiliation”. Right. The monument says who put it up. It is literally carved in stone.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, which proscribed it in October 1997, and is listed as such by the European Union. It is not proscribed in the United Kingdom; Britain bans the PFLP-General Command, a separate splinter, and the Home Office list goes out of its way to say so.

So we are now contemplating trade sanctions against Israelis; while an extremist destroys a monument erected by a terrorist organisation that this country, alone among its allies, cannot bring itself to outlaw; in a Palestinian territory where every town makes heroes of murderers. Perhaps somebody might raise that with Number Ten? Haha. Sorry.

None of this excuses Sukkot’s behaviour. Smashing up a village war memorial is the behaviour of a thug, not a legislator, and the outrage inside Israel tells you where its heart is. Benjamin Netanyahu’s own office called taking the law into one’s own hands “a reprehensible practice”. Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff now leading the polls against him, called it “a disgrace for anyone who claims to represent the public”.

The IDF said that Sukkot had obtained his escort deceptively and acted without authorisation, and removed him from the village. A serving Israeli general has warned the Prime Minister that settler violence risks igniting a wider conflagration (he’s right).

Yet Israelophobes around the world have taken this incident and, entirely predictably, run with it. Suddenly, the widespread condemnation in Israel has become evidence that the country is equivalent to the Nazis. Suddenly, the behaviour of Sukkot – with the details of the monument removed – has become typical of all settlers, even all Jews.

This is what they call taking things out of context. Try to imagine the equivalent in Ramallah. Try to imagine Mahmoud Abbas ending the payments – perish the thought! – to the families of men who murder Israeli civilians. Try to imagine him clamping down on the lionisation of terrorists across the West Bank; anybody who has visited can attest to the thousands of posters, portraits, graffiti and tributes to murderers in almost every town and city. We live in a world where such depravity is normalised, while far-Right thugs who hit back are condemned.

Subscribe now

The root of the Israeli-Arab conflict is quite simple. As former prime minister Golda Meir memorable put it, “they say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.” The sacralisation of bloodshed and sanctification of killers is the main reason why this conflict is so intractable. The monument is part of that story, yet everybody is ignoring it.

Indeed, as reprehensible as Jewish extremists may be, they are tiny in number, widely reviled in Israel and wreak relatively far less havoc than the jihadis on the other side. Consider the numbers. There were 541,085 Israeli civilians living in Judea and Samaria as of January this year. The Israeli army’s own assessment, published that same month, identified roughly 300 Jewish extremists involved in nationalist crime, of whom about 70 are hardcore. Seventy. Out of more than half-a-million.

That is a rate of violent fanaticism so low that most European police forces would regard it as a rounding error, and it is on the strength of those 70 that Britain proposes to punish the other 540,930.

Compare the ledger. The UN’s own human rights office found that of 1,001 Palestinians killed in the West Bank in the two years after Oct 7, some 968 were killed by Israeli security forces in the course of counter-terrorist operations, and 33 by settlers or settlers acting alongside soldiers. That amounts to around 3 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Institute for National Security Studies counted 46 Israelis murdered in terror attacks in 2024 alone, excluding the Gaza front entirely. One set of killers, in other words, is a criminal fringe reviled by its own state; the other is a salaried programme.

Nobody is seeking to pretend that Israeli law enforcement in the West Bank is not genuinely poor. The leftwing monitoring group Yesh Din has found that 93.6 per cent of investigations into settler violence between 2005 and 2025 closed without an indictment, and only about 3 per cent produced a conviction. That is a disgrace; indeed, Israelis say so themselves, loudly, in their own newspapers, which is another hallmark of a free society.

Moreover, the rise of the far-Right within the Israeli cabinet, and the tolerance showed towards the West Bank extremists as a result, is of genuine concern. As Simon Sebag Montefiore argued when Andrew Fox and I interviewed him on The Brink this week – if you missed it, you must catch up, it was fascinating – history shows that a small number of radical ideologues can precipitate the fall of states. I don’t mean to downplay this threat for a moment; all hopes are pinned to the upcoming election in October to rid Israel, which is a victim of its own proportional representation, of these firebrands (start praying now).

But they are not representative of the heart of Israel. Look back over the decades and it is apparent that when the state does move, it moves hard. In 1984, the Shin Bet dismantled the Jewish Underground terror group and locked up its leaders for the murder of students at Hebron’s Islamic College. Within weeks of Baruch Goldstein’s sickening massacre in 1994, Israel outlawed Kach and Kahane Chai as terrorist organisations, a designation the United States later adopted.

After Jewish extremist Yigal Amir murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the head of the Shin Bet resigned. Amiram Ben-Uliel is serving three life sentences for the Duma arson that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents in 2015, his appeal rejected by the Supreme Court. In June this year, six Israelis were charged with terrorism over an arson attack on a mosque at Deir Dibwan; this month, a settler was indicted for manslaughter over the killing of a Palestinian activist. No other country in that region prosecutes its own zealots for murdering the neighbours. The Palestinians even pay blood money for it.

As for the half-million “settlers” who find themselves tarred with the brush of extremism, the caricature bears almost no relation to the people. Roughly 53,000 Palestinians work in Israel and the towns in Judea and Samaria, and according to the Palestinian Authority’s own statistics bureau, they earned an average of 263 shekels a day in the second quarter of this year, against 134 shekels in the PA’s domestic labour market. That’s nearly double, from the very employer that the Western boycotters wish to shut down.

Indeed, in 2015, when the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement forced SodaStream out of Mishor Adumim, 500 Arabs lost their jobs. Visualise the scene: Palestinian workers wept at the factory gates while activists in London celebrated. Labour Friends of Israel is right that the impact of an embargo cannot in practice be confined to settlers, and it is often the Arab workers who get hurt first.

Then there’s the history. On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein through the UN truce supervisors: “We are engaged in defensive fighting on the Egyptian sector, and we shall not engage ourselves in any action against Jordan, unless Jordan attacks us. Should Jordan attack Israel, we shall go against her with all our might.” Hussein shelled Jerusalem anyway.

That is how the West Bank went from a Jordanian occupation – that had expelled every Jew from the Old City in 1948, and that almost no state on earth recognised – to an Israeli possession. Whatever one thinks should happen next, the land was not stolen. It was won from an aggressor that had been warned in writing.

So the position we are drifting towards is this. Britain will likely impose a trade embargo, harming Palestinian wage-earners most, over the conduct of 70 fanatics out of 541,000 Jewish residents of the West Bank, in a country whose courts jail such men, at the behest of a party that will not proscribe the terrorist organisation memorialised on that blasted monument.

The damage this will do to British-Israeli relations will be significant, and London will be the loser. Bilateral trade stood at £5.9 billion in the year to the first quarter of 2026, on which Britain runs a healthy surplus – we sold them £3.5 billion of goods and services and bought £2.4 billion back – and which, to the visible distress of the boycott movement, grew by 3.7 per cent over the previous year.

Twenty-two Israeli-linked companies are listed in London with a combined market capitalisation of $11.5 billion; nineteen more established or expanded British operations in 2024 and 2025, with 866 jobs projected to follow.

One in seven prescriptions dispensed in this country is filled by Teva, which employs more than 1,500 people here. The capsule camera that NHS England began rolling out to 11,000 patients in 2021, sparing them the indignity of a colonoscopy, was dreamed up by an Israeli missile engineer who repurposed the imaging technology from a guided warhead.

When Challenger 3 enters service next year, our tank crews will be protected by Trophy, the Rafael-built system that shoots incoming anti-tank rounds out of the air, bought under a £20 million contract in 2023; the Watchkeeper drone was built in Leicester by a joint venture with Elbit, whose British arm employs more than 680 people across 16 sites.

And in 2015, according to a Sunday Telegraph investigation, MI5 and the Met recovered three tonnes of ammonium nitrate concealed in ice packs across four properties in north-west London – a Hezbollah bomb factory in a residential street – after a tip-off from Mossad. That is just one example of countless times Israeli spies have kept Britons safe, most of which have gone unreported.

Spain has already run the experiment Burnham proposes: its embargo cost it close to a billion euros of Israeli kit, including the Spike missiles its own army had asked for and the laser-guidance pods for its Eurofighters. Given the state of our defences, Britain simply cannot afford to do the same.

Clearly, breaking our ties with Israel will make British taxpayers poorer and British lives less safe, yet neither fact will trouble the delegates in Liverpool. Sukkot may have swung a hammer at a stone, but Andy Burnham is preparing to swing one at himself.

Subscribe now

He has been at this for a year. Last September, on deportations: “Will the next road to Auschwitz go through Clacton?” On a proposed immigration department, the same question, more or less verbatim. On Nigel Farage’s spending plans: “Reform UK will build the next road to Auschwitz.”

In October, widening the net to the Conservatives: “Will the next road to Auschwitz and Treblinka go through Clacton?” And last week, on welfare reform, once more. A man does not reach for the same death camp six times by accident. This is not a slip of the thumb. It is a catchphrase.

The case against Sikka requires no defence of Reform whatsoever. Evicting foreign nationals from council homes within three months is a serious proposal and it deserves to be met with serious argument: about the British-born children who would be displaced along with their parents; about the mixed-nationality couples who would be penalised for whom they married; about whether a party that intends to govern can announce the removal of families from their homes and expect not to be asked how, precisely, it proposes to do it.

By all means, attack all of that and attack it hard. But what Sikka did was vault over the argument altogether and land on the gas chambers, because he had exhausted his feverish adjectives and Auschwitz was the only word left that still makes people flinch.

Roughly 1.1 million human beings were murdered at Auschwitz, some 960,000 of them Jews. They were taken from Salonika and Lodz and Amsterdam and Rhodes, sealed into cattle trucks for days without water, sorted on a ramp by the flick of a doctor’s glove, and killed with insecticide in rooms purpose-built for the task, their hair shorn for industrial use and their gold teeth pulled from their jaws. The distance between that and a housing allocation policy is not one of degree. Collapsing it into a slogan reduces the largest crime in European history to a piece of parliamentary abuse, and every victim to a rhetorical convenience.

Nor is Sikka an outlier in his party, which is the part that ought to trouble Labour rather more than it evidently does. At last year’s Labour conference, David Lammy, then deputy prime minister, revived the claim that Mr Farage had “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, and was obliged to row back within a day. John McDonnell, suspended at the time and since restored to the whip, told a TUC fringe meeting that Reform was “a proto-fascist organisation”, explaining: “in the thirties in Germany it would have been the Jews, here it is asylum seekers.” Notice this: the Jews of the 1930s were not the subject of that sentence, they were the unit of measurement, borrowed to lend weight to a point about asylum policy, then put back on the shelf. This is the party that spent five years under formal investigation over its treatment of its own Jewish members under the leadership of one of McDonnell’s old friends. Its fluency in the vocabulary of the Holocaust plainly has no bearing upon its understanding of it.

So what has actually happened? The post came down. Labour has indicated no further action of any kind. Lee Anderson has written to the Labour chief whip in the Lords, citing the murder of Ann Widdecombe and the temperature of politics around Reform; Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out a political motive before the case passed to counter-terrorism officers, and nobody yet knows what drove that killing. When all’s said and done, the fact remains that a member of the legislature has invoked the industrial extermination of European Jewry six times as a debating tactic against a lawful opposition party, and the only sanction is a deleted tweet.

Meanwhile, British Jews go on living with a level of security around their schools and synagogues that no other minority in this country requires, and on the day their communal bodies warn that something genuinely is a road to somewhere terrible, they will be met with a shrug. The word will have been spent on council housing. That is the real cost, and Lord Sikka will not be the one to pay it.

Looking back, the war was bizarre. For six weeks, American and Israeli aircraft pounded Iran around the clock in a barrage of exceptional ferocity. Meanwhile, Tehran eroded the Gulf’s missile defences with relentless bombardments and shut the Strait of Hormuz to every tanker but its own, inflicting the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil industry. There was nothing the West could do about it.

Stranger still, the Islamic Republic sold more oil during the hostilities than it ever had in peacetime: between Feb 28, when Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, and the first ceasefire on April 8, Tehran exported around 1.8 million barrels a day, comfortably above its 2025 average of 1.7 million. Washington, in other words, spent more than a trillion dollars bombing a country into higher oil revenues than it had enjoyed before the war, and placing it in a position of dominance over the region and global economy.

Six months on, that is finally being reversed, to some extent at least. The US Navy is now running two operations: a total blockade of Iran’s ports, and an escort service shepherding everybody else’s tankers along the Omani channel of Hormuz. The results are starting to speak for themselves. Iranian exports have collapsed to nothing; the rial has fallen past two million to the dollar.

Abdolnaser Hemmati, the governor of Iran’s central bank, has conceded that “it is a reality that we are not exporting oil”, while Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, is blunter still: “No matter how much military power we have, if people are hungry, and we do not have financial circulation and economic growth, we will not endure,” he said.

This is the first coherent move Trump has made since February. Those of us who have spent the last few months branding his war a shambles must acknowledge that the regime is now in genuine trouble. But this does not mean an American victory. Far from it. In fact it changes relatively little, apart from – ironically enough – showing how the United States could have won this war, if it had only had a tighter strategy from the beginning.

Subscribe now

The unavoidable truth is that the US blockade will only mean something if it is attached to a clear objective. Is Washington’s aim regime collapse? Then by what mechanism? Mere bankruptcy has never yet toppled a police state that retains the loyalty of men willing to massacre as many civilians as necessary, as this one proved in January by slaughtering tens of thousands of its own citizens in two days. There would need to be ground troops; an air campaign; a plan.

Moreover, if the regime did fall, who would govern 90 million Iranians the following morning? Exiled leaders? Which ones? A reformed version of the Revolutionary Guards? The bazaar? The street?

Or is the aim to secure some kind of better version of Barack Obama’s doomed nuclear deal? If so, which clauses does Trump want altered, enforced by whom, and with what penalty when Tehran cheats, as it has cheated on every agreement that has come before? Ask the White House and all you get is rhetoric, peppered with macho adjectives. As things stand, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Washington’s only objectives involve revenge and power posturing.

The tragedy is that the pieces of a real victory were all available from the start. All Trump needed to do was deploy them simultaneously, determinedly and in concert, rather than cancelling some under Islamist pressure, delaying others and only thinking of further solutions when under pressure.

Consider what the spring offensive might have looked like. Imagine that the blockade and Hormuz escorts we are now observing were imposed in February rather than August, so that bombs and the bankruptcy arrived together. Imagine the Kurdish ground offensive going ahead as intended instead of being cancelled by the White House, reportedly under pressure from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose interest in keeping Kurds away from a battlefield victory is a matter of Turkish domestic politics and no business whatever of American strategy.

Most consequentially of all, imagine that the campaign had been effectively sold to Britain, France, Australia and the Gulf states in advance; their objections heard and resolved; their buy-in secured; and their hulls and aircraft committed, so that America was never obliged to choose whether to deploy its assets to fight a war or police a strait.

That last point is an important fulcrum. When Epic Fury began, America had enough warships in theatre to attack Iran, but not sufficient numbers to blockade its ports and keep the Strait open as well. Above all, that shortfall was a diplomatic failure, and diplomacy was the one commodity that would have been available in unlimited quantities to a less volatile and capricious president. The allies were there to be asked. Instead, Trump belatedly attempted to pressgang them into joining a plan that he had preferred to keep in his own head. Their reluctance to comply was no surprise.

As a result, the blows arrived in sequence rather than with devastating simultaneity: first bombs, then blockade, then naval escorts. Each painful, none decisive. This was war on a payment plan, and payment plans impose costs that are easier to bear.

During the American civil war, Ulysses S Grant, the unionist general who became the 18th occupant of the White House, identified Trump’s future problem. Writing in 1865 of his forces as he found them, he said they had “acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together, enabling the enemy to use to great advantage his interior lines of communication”. His remedy was to move every federal army forward at once, so that the confederates could no longer shuttle his reserves from one pressure point to another and beat each union force in turn. The war was won within the year.

We have also observed the counter-experiment, and recently enough that Washington has no excuse. Operation Rolling Thunder, which ran from March 1965 to November 1968, dropped some 864,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam in graduated instalments, punctuated by at least 16 pauses intended to be read as signals. It achieved nothing. Then came Linebacker II in December 1972: eleven days in which roughly 20,000 tons was dropped at once. Hanoi returned to the table within weeks and signed the Paris Peace Accords on Jan 27, 1973. Same enemy; same air force; a fraction of the ordnance; far superior results.

Indeed, there is even an unhappy precedent for cancelling the Kurdish ground incursion. Opening the air campaign against Serbia on March 24, 1999, Bill Clinton announced: “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war”. This handed Slobodan Milosevic a most useful piece of information for a leader under bombardment: that all he had to do was wait it out. It took 78 days to correct the damage caused by that sentence; Trump is still scrabbling around to undo his own hamfistedness today.

Speaking of the bill – geddit? – it has a habit of coming in when you can’t afford it (not for the Iranians the folly of offering the enemy a payment plan). The USS Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s principal aircraft carriers, has been relieved after more than 270 days at sea without her exhausted crew once setting foot on land. Replacing her with the USS George Washington leaves the United States without a single carrier in the Pacific, a fact that will not have been lost on Beijing. Iran, cornered but far from finished, retains a formidable arsenal of missiles and drones, and it is led by Revolutionary Guard fanatics who would sooner put a warhead into a Saudi oil terminal than accept terms. After all, against Trump, escalation has bought them relief every time they have tried it.

What the blockade needs, in other words, is a strategic purpose. At this late hour, Trump must name his war aims, even though they will be rather diminished compared to what may have been achieved with better strategic sense from the beginning. He has no hope of bringing the allies in now, with their ships and their squadrons and the political cover that would come with them; he cannot conjure up stocks of offensive and defensive missiles to replenish depleted arsenals; he has little chance of restoring any ground threat, rather than advertising its absence. To make matters worse, Jerusalem is now otherwise engaged and both the mid-terms and Israeli elections are bearing down upon us.

But if squeezing a regime towards bankruptcy is not coupled to a specific outcome, why are American troops in theatre in the first place?

It is maddening. The United States was so close to winning a once-in-a-generation victory over Iran. As I have long argued, there is no way to dull the threat of this unhinged Iranian regime other than by the sword, yet Trump wielded it with tantrums rather than clear-headed resilience, allowing Tehran to play him for a fool. As things stand, a siege without a war aim – however painful – is merely an expensive way of delaying the humiliation of withdrawal.

Subscribe now

There is a discipline to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s new book that has gone rather out of fashion in Middle Eastern history: he refuses to tell you what to think. “The duty of the historian,” he writes in the introduction to The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East 1900-2026, “remains the pursuit of those facts and their weighing up and presentation in a way that is as balanced and detached as is possible in this imperfect genre.” This is not a book of polemic; you won’t find a thesis bolted on and defended against the evidence. Instead, we are treated to 500 pages of what actually happened, told chronologically.

Here is the curious thing about a history written that way: strip out the ideology, and the facts start arguing a case of their own. It turns out that when you consider the facts, the opinions write themselves.

Or to put it another way, the facts of life are Zionist.

Subscribe now

Read more

Ask a Druze elder in Jabal Bashan what “Syria” means to him these days, and you will get a shorter answer than you might expect. It means the men who came over the hills a year ago to burn his village. It does not mean the flag, the anthem, or the seat at the United Nations.

Just over a year has passed since Sunni Bedouin militias, backed by fighters loyal to Damascus, swept into Sweida, in Syria’s stony south, and slaughtered close to 1,500 people, most of them Druze, in a spasm of sectarian violence that shocked even a region inured to shocks.

Israel intervened with air strikes, ostensibly to protect the 700,000 or so Druze clustered around the area, a move Jerusalem has not been shy about repeating since. In July, marking the anniversary, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the Druze’s spiritual leader and the nearest thing it has to a head of state, thanked the country that came to his people’s aid.

“We will never forget those who stood by us,” he said. “I would especially like to mention the State of Israel, given our geographical proximity.” He has spent much of the past year calling, in terms that leave little room for misinterpretation, for self-determination in what he prefers to call “Jabal Bashan” rather than Sweida. In his vision, this would be an autonomous zone guaranteed by Israeli power, rather than continued subjection to a Damascus government led by men who, in living memory, were fighting for al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise.

Enter the diplomats.

Subscribe now

Read more

But something has shifted, and only a fool would keep facing the same direction while the wind changes behind him.

Watch the footage from Ceuta a fortnight ago — tens of thousands of migrants pouring across the border, Spain lurching into a genuine political crisis — and you’d expect a row about sovereignty, about Schengen, about the limits of a liberal state’s obligations to the world’s poor. That row duly happened. But underneath it, on the platforms where Tucker Carlson commands 32 million followers and Hasan Piker commands nearly three million more, an older and uglier story was already being told: that Israel had engineered the whole thing, weaponising Muslim migrants to punish the West for its insufficient devotion to Gaza. No evidence required.

This is the Great Replacement Theory, and to anybody who has spent any time studying fascism, it will look horribly familiar: Hitler’s own ideology repackaged for TikTok. One in three Britons, according to King’s College London, believe some version of it is true. And it isn’t confined to the neo-Nazi fringe I used to be able to file away as unserious. It’s turning up in Restore, whose campaigners have blamed Israel for 9/11. It’s there in Rupert Lowe cosying up to Carlson weeks after Carlson platformed Nick Fuentes. It was there, briefly, in Tommy Robinson’s own writing before he thought better of it and quietly took the essay down.

Here is the symmetry. The Left’s antisemitism dresses up in the language of Palestinian solidarity; the Right’s dresses up in the language of border control. Both borrow a real grievance and posit antisemitic Jewish caricatures behind it.

Watching only one political flank was always going to leave the other exposed. Social media has done for the Great Replacement Theory what Twitter did for Corbynism’s fellow travellers: turned a fringe obsession into an algorithmic certainty, delivered straight to people who never went looking for it.

I used to think I knew where the threat was coming from. Increasingly, I have to watch both doors at once.

These people are not coming from somewhere more dangerous than France, the country I went to on my holidays this summer, along with several million other Brits. They are not fleeing anything. They are coming from Calais. That is fact number one, and it discredits them as refugees. It places them, instead, in the category of criminals: people entering our country without any plausible excuse or reason.

So treat them accordingly. Arrest them and hold them in secure pop-up accommodation of the kind we threw up almost overnight for the Nightingale hospitals during Covid, on an uninhabited Scottish island, if necessary. Not inhumane conditions. Reasonable ones. But no benefits, no phone, and no chance of slipping off to work cash-in-hand in a nail bar or a car wash. Leave our international obligations if that’s what it takes, and get them out. Do that and you restore the deterrent, and you crash the business model the people smugglers are advertising online right across the Middle East and Africa.

The reason no government will do any of this was contained in that MP’s slip of the tongue. He is so obsessed with our colonial history, so convinced that our sins require some kind of payback, that he would greet with open arms whichever young men are strong enough to risk their lives crossing the Channel. It is time we respected our own borders, our own people and our own taxpayers instead.

None of this makes me an opponent of immigration as a whole. I am against mass immigration and illegal immigration. Britain should choose who it offers refuge to — people who will settle here and assimilate properly — rather than leaving an open door to all and sundry.

I also discussed the record number of foreigners now claiming benefits in this country, up 20,000 in a year, and why the bond markets are punishing Britain for its political dysfunction rather than its economics.

The full clip is above.

A few weeks ago, at a ceremony in the headquarters of the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres lit an “eternal flame”. Beside him stood Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly. The ceremony was a tribute to UN personnel who had died in the line of duty, and the names of the fallen were solemnly read aloud.

Among them was a man who had given more than a decade of his life to the education of Palestinian children in Gaza as a teacher, then a headmaster, at several UNRWA schools. The Secretary-General told the hall that it had been “the privilege of my life” to work alongside people like him. Such people, he said, “made our world a better place”. He committed himself to “carrying forward their work”.

Guterres may have been entirely sincere. He was also, it turns out, honouring a commander of Hamas. Is it any wonder that Matthias Schmale, the UN’s most senior official in Ukraine, went on the record this week to say that his own organisation was “no longer fit for purpose”?

Subscribe now

Read more

This week, a jury in Harrow convicted a man of a crime so depraved that I can’t bring myself to open with it. I’ll grit my teeth and do my best to return to the repulsive incident by the end of this column, because it’s something you need to hear; once again, it brings us face-to-face with the cultural vandalism of uncontrolled immigration, the longterm effects of which are only starting to be felt.

As I explored in my “View from The Brink” monologue, Britain is being sold two lies on the topic, from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Left tries to convince us that nothing is wrong: the boats are a manageable nuisance, the anger is manufactured by newspapers, and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot who needs re-educating.

An increasing number on the further reaches of the Tucker Carlson-inspired Right, meanwhile, insist that this has been a deliberate plot cooked up by the you-know-whos, and that the only honest response left is to start sorting British citizens by blood. Or as Charlie Downes, co-founder of Restore, put it, “Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”. (His leader, Rupert Lowe, has called kosher slaughter a “barbaric foreign practice”; Jews first arrived in Britain as long ago as 1066, stretching the word “foreign” to breaking point.)

Subscribe now

Read more

Pardon the pun, but which bright spark thought of that? The wildfire alert frightened the pants off the public – to coin a Covid-era phrase – thus drawing attention to the government’s woeful lack of preparedness for this dreadful hot weather.

From an administration that has enshrined Net Zero, it’s all a bit rich. These are the same people who have invested huge amounts of literal and political capital in preparing us for global warming, and they have been taken by surprise by the weather heating up.

From Israel to Australia, countries regularly facing the threat of fires have amassed aircraft, specialist ground units, surveillance, command-and-control, vegetation management guidelines and surge capacity. What was preventing Britain following suit as it heated up?

Subscribe now

The parlous state of our economy combined with sheer incompetence, that’s what. Speaking of which, let’s return to those fire services for a moment. In March 2025, England had 30,601 full-time-equivalent firemen. Ten years earlier, however, it had 35,699, a fall of 14 per cent.

Among on-call fire crews, the drop was steeper still, at 26 per cent. Nor is this ancient history. Between 2020 and 2025 alone, the total fell by a further 4.1 per cent.

This isn’t a party political point: the further back you go, the worse it looks. Numbers of firemen in England are roughly 41 per cent lower than in 2009. The National Audit Office found that in the five years from 2010-11, the spending power of stand-alone fire authorities fell by an average of 17 per cent in real terms, while the money handed to them by central government fell by 28 per cent.

To make matters worse, over the decade to March 2025, as numbers of firemen fell precipitously, the number of emergency incidents they dealt with rose by 22 per cent. Partly, this is because the fire service has quietly become the emergency responder of last resort for a country that has run out of anybody else to send.

Meanwhile, response times to serious fires have lengthened. The Fire Brigades Union has argued that the service now needs thousands more firefighters as wildfires and other risks increase. You think?

Then there’s the state of our Armed Forces. Anybody regretting those defence cuts yet? Just thank your lucky stars that it’s wildfires that are highlighting the thinness in our defences rather than an attack by Russia.

With the fire services overstretched, the last line of defence has been invoked, only for us to discover that there are rather fewer troops than would be ideal (as I have noted before, our entire armed forces could be accommodated within Wembley Stadium with 17,000 seats to spare).

Was all this really wise? As a symptom of Britain’s complacency, which has seen soaring levels of taxation matching eyewatering expenditure on the luxury of welfare for all, it couldn’t be starker. And there’s Andy Burnham investing badly-needed public funds on moving illegal migrants to middle class areas.

Our priorities are all wrong, and they have been wrong for a long time. Those sirens were alarming to millions of Britons, but they should really have been a wake-up call for the government to get serious before it’s too late.

Subscribe now

China, as today’s Telegraph front page reveals, is allegedly funding radical pro-Palestinian demonstrations — potentially a quarter of a million pounds to a single organisation. Iran is sowing discord through the IRGC, still not proscribed in Britain. The Muslim Brotherhood operates freely here, despite being banned across the Arab world, funded by Turkey and Qatar. Britain has become a playground for all of them.

Then there’s the Arabic bookshop selling Mein Kampf half a mile from a synagogue. This is unsurprising: modern Islamism took shape partly through radical Islam blending with Nazism, and today’s Islamist groups remain heavily inspired by Hitler. In Ed Husain’s 2021 book Among The Mosques, he visited a book shop in Blackburn selling copies of Sayyid Qutb’s poisonous writings. This is hardly new.

Propaganda and what to do about it: this is one of the great unexamined question of our times, and we continue to ignore it at our peril. I discuss on Talk TV.

I’ve been working hard this week on an important long essay about how a lethal American far-Right conspiracy theory has found its way to Britain, where a third of people now take it seriously. You’ll be able to read it in the Daily Telegraph in the coming days.

While researching the piece, I approached a number of academics who study the far-Right for a living. Most were generous with their time. One, however, was not.

Enter Professor Aurelien Mondon of Bath University. He is a genuine authority on far-Right extremism and its mainstreaming, and we engaged in an interesting email exchange in which I tried to persuade him that the Telegraph was not the enemy. Ultimately, however, he declined to speak to me because I was writing for a conservative publication.

What he didn’t realise is that he was making himself part of the problem.

Subscribe now

Read more

Let’s talk about fairness, shall we, Prime Minister? Fairness would be stopping these criminals from travelling from France – a safe country – to Britain and treating them like “asylum seekers” as if they have fled a warzone.

It’s not fair on working class people to house these shysters in their communities; it’s not fair on middle class people to do the same; and it’s not fair on the nation to gaslight us into believing that this is a problem that cannot be solved, like a natural disaster, and which requires everyone to “pull together”.

If you had the political will, Mr Burnham, you could solve this problem almost overnight. How? Not by adopting Reform’s catchy but unworkable plan to send the Royal Navy into action in the Channel (which Andrew Fox so masterfully dismantled here). No: it is much simpler to remove the incentives.

If every man landing on our shores was incarcerated pending deportation, possibly in some nightingale-hospital-style pop-up prison on a remote Scottish island, with no mobile phone, no access to black-market work, no cash handouts and no hotel accommodation, the problem would soon dry up.

In other words, this is not a blameless crisis. Our political classes have caused it, and continue to do so by refusing to grasp the nettle, while bleating about “sharing the burden” all the while.

You know how much illegal immigration there should be in Britain? Zero. That’s right. Whether you’re middle class or working class, you should not have to put up with it. (Bloody obvious, really.)