First, I thought you might like to know that my piece last week about Rod Liddle reached more people than anything else I’ve written here since I started these occasional essays more than two years ago. It also encouraged a very healthy number of new subscribers to sign up, so a warm welcome if you’re one of them.

Now. Do you agree with this?

‘Even if you are a family member, like a husband, father or brother, you must never stop a woman from working or studying; control what a woman wears or where she goes; stop a woman from seeing friends or family; or make decisions for a woman without her agreement.’

How about this?

‘Both people must agree to sex or sexual contact of any kind. This means both people must say yes freely, without threat or pressure … Consent is needed in every situation. This means even if you are married or in a relationship with someone, they must consent to sex every time.’

Or this?

‘When you are in public spaces, alone or with friends, you must never make sexual comments to someone, even if you think it is a compliment; whistle or make kissing noises at someone; follow someone or block their path; make rude or offensive gestures; verbally abuse someone because of their gender, religion, or how they look.’

So far, I hope, there’s nothing with which you would disagree.

How about this?

‘Spend your spare time immediately in learning the English language and its correct pronunciation.

‘Refrain from speaking [your own language] in the streets … and in public places such as restaurants.

‘Do not make yourself conspicuous by speaking loudly, nor by your manner or dress. The English greatly dislike ostentation, loudness of dress or manner, or unconventionality of dress or manner. The English attach very great importance to modesty, understatement in speech rather than overstatement, and quietness of dress and manner. They value good manners far more than they value evidence of wealth.’

The first three quotes come from a newly-published booklet that the Home Office has produced for the benefit of people seeking asylum in the UK. The Conservative party say it shows that the government ‘knows that [asylum-seekers] are a menace’, and their leader, Kemi Badenoch, has — characteristically — gone even further.

‘Anyone needing this leaflet does not belong in Britain,’ she said. ‘Britain can be proudly multi-ethnic, but we should not be multi-cultural.’

The second block of quotes comes from a different booklet. It’s called ‘While you are in England: helpful information and guidance for every refugee’, and it was produced by the German Jewish Aid Committee for the benefit of thousands of refugees, including both my parents, when they fled from the Nazis in the 1930s.

Most of those refugees were Jewish, and I therefore can’t help wondering if Kemi Badenoch believes that the older booklet shows that Jews are also not the sort of people who ‘belong’ in Britain.

I also wonder if she has ever spent any time discussing British cultural values with, for example, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill, where many certainly don’t agree that, in the words of the new Home Office booklet, male relatives must never ‘control what a woman wears or where she goes; stop a woman from seeing friends or family; or make decisions for a woman without her agreement.’

Multi-ethnic, good; multi-cultural, bad. The Badenoch distinction is a false one, and seems designed to encourage the view that — taking an example not quite at random — Sadiq Khan’s parents (foreign-born Muslims) did not ‘belong’ in the UK, whereas hers (foreign-born Christians) did.

I don’t recall that my parents ever complained about the booklet telling them how to behave, even though they arrived here from a country that in its pre-Nazi incarnation shared identical cultural values to the UK. It seemed to them — as it seems to me, making allowances for what will now appear to us as its somewhat archaic assumptions — no more than basic good sense.

As Saint Ambrose is meant to have said all the way back in the 4th century (according to Wikipedia): ‘When I am in Milan I do not fast on Saturday, when in Rome I do fast on Saturday.’ In other words, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

So I see absolutely nothing wrong in spelling out to people who wish to make their homes here what are regarded as the UK’s basic social norms. Perhaps foreign tourists could be handed an abbreviated version …

As it happens, the Tories’ shameful attempt to turn the Home Office booklet into yet another weapon in their anti-refugee armoury comes just as the number of people seeking asylum here is falling sharply.

According to the latest official figures, a total of 93,525 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year up to March 2026, which was down by 12% on the same period in the previous year.

The figures also show that nearly 40,000 illegal migrants and foreign criminals have been returned or deported over the same period.

Fewer desperate people trying to make new lives for themselves in the UK; more undesirables and others being thrown out. Isn’t that exactly what Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and yes, Kemi Badenoch have all been shouting for?

Some people are never satisfied — but complaining about anodyne government booklets setting out basic behavioural expectations strikes me as plumbing new depths of absurdity in the search for an easy headline.

Photo: Gary Doak/Alamy

This is not a piece I wanted to write.

To be honest, I still feel uncomfortable about writing it, given that I generally try to subscribe to the dictum quoted in my headline: Say only good things about the dead.

There are always exceptions, of course, and Rod Liddle was one of them, as he would have been the first to agree. (In case you’ve never heard of him, he was a journalist and polemicist, ex-BBC, columnist for the Sun, the Sunday Times and the Spectator, who died last week at the age of just sixty-six.)

I worked closely with Rod for several months at the BBC while he was drafted in as acting editor of The World Tonight — and I formed a view of him, once he embarked on his post-BBC career, which I think needs to be aired, because it is very different from the consensus view among many of my fellow-journalists. Hence this piece.

The majority view among his many admirers seems to be that he was a latter-day incarnation of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell. I take a different view, because to me, he was not a fearless satirist but someone who never outgrew his days as a child who delighted in telling fart jokes.

Admittedly, fart jokes can sometimes be funny. Whether they have a place in mainstream publications ostensibly aimed at grown-ups is something we can discuss another day. For now, here’s a taste of Liddle from the last column he filed for the Sunday Times.

One of the few remaining unalloyed pleasures of motoring — running over cats — may soon become problematic if a petition passes 100,000 signatures. Campaigners are demanding that motorists should be forced to stop and report a “collision” with a cat, rather than just tooting the horn triumphantly and driving on.

OK, I do not really think it is a good idea to run over cats if one can help it. I just have a feeling our country would be a happier place with rather fewer of these deviant creatures murdering the local wildlife before taking a dump on your lawn — say, instead of the present 13 million cats, 20 or 30. Perhaps I had better start my own petition.

The man who hired him at the Sunday Times says he did so because ‘we needed a jester to prick the pomposity of the political class.’ Which I’m all in favour of — except that’s not what Liddle did.

What he did, and what he relished doing, is something for which there is a perfect French phrase — and I use it here because I know how mercilessly Liddle would mock me for doing so.

The phrase is épater le bourgeois, which became the rallying cry for 19th century French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and which means, roughly, ‘to scandalise or shock the middle classes.’

That’s why back in 2017, he mocked the BBC’s reporting of the plight of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar: ‘All we get is a BBC correspondent crying in front of the refugee camps every night. It’s probably true that the Burmese government has been a bit, um, heavy-handed. But shouldn’t we be told a little more about the causes of the problem?’

Which is a fair enough point, except that it is expressed as offensively as possible. ‘A bit heavy-handed?’ No, Rod, a hundred times No.

Peter Oborne, himself no stranger to controversy, said in Middle East Eye that Liddle ‘mocked, ridiculed and sneered at pretty well every minority group, but he reserved a special contempt for Muslims.’

For example, one of his pieces began with the words: ‘A quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to.’

To Liddle, to shock was to succeed. In an article pondering what kind of teacher he might have been, had he taken up teaching instead of journalism, he wrote: ‘I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one.’

If you find that funny, I shall have to conclude that we have very different senses of humour.

Oborne wrote: ‘Very few tributes even touched on the fact that Liddle was also a racist, a bigot and an Islamophobe. This open and undisguised bigotry was a core part of his public identity, his personality and his legacy.’

I agree with Oborne that racism, bigotry and Islamophobia were often front and centre of what Liddle wrote. Whether they really represented the man himself (he had, after all, worked for a time for the Labour party), we shall never know.

I wrote about Liddle in my memoir Is Anything Happening? I described how as The World Tonight’s acting editor he was ‘in the habit of presiding over editorial meetings while lying on the floor, and favoured a vocabulary that included many more words of Anglo-Saxon origin than we were used to.’

I also described how he had admitted to me that his ultimate ambition was to break free from the constraints imposed on all BBC journalists and make a name for himself as a controversialist. Mission accomplished, you might say.

Many years later, he wrote about a warning he’d been given by a senior BBC executive when he took over at The World Tonight, having previously been deputy editor at the Today programme. What it amounted to, he wrote, was this.

‘As a deputy editor, you can shag the staff, as many as you like. As an editor, you can’t: apparently, it’s a disciplinary issue and even a quick fumble with a junior member of the team will get you in trouble … All a bit pointless as the programme in question was The World Tonight and even back then I’d have drawn the line at Robin Lustig, much though I liked him.’

Yes, I admit, I smiled when I read it, because the truth is that we did get on while we were both at the BBC— even though more recently, Liddle frequently responded with extreme scorn to my various musings on social media. I made it a point of principle never to rise to the bait.

To Liddle, in his post-BBC, épater le bourgeois guise, I represented everything he affected to despise: a liberal, metropolitan mindset that is sympathetic to all the causes he most enjoyed attacking.

And he would doubtless have been ready, having read this piece, with a choice, unprintable epithet to describe me.

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth. © The Associated Press, 2026

First, a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers who have only recently joined my Substack family. If you fancy upgrading to a very reasonably priced paid subscription, you’ll have immediate access to the full archive of all my previous columns, as well as to my Robin Lustig Reading Stories series of podcasts.

And second, a reminder that if you haven’t yet bought my recently-published family memoir And The Cello Came Too, you can still find it either at your local bookshop or direct from the publisher by clicking here. (It’s also available here as an ebook or audiobook.)

One recent reader emailed me to say: ‘What a truly lovely book! Really very moving and dramatic, with such fully fleshed out characters, quite cinematic in places.’ Another said: ‘What a story! And told with such craftsmanship. I was very moved, and also impressed with it as a work of investigative journalism.’

But now, on with the show, because while much of the country is entering full summer holiday mode, one man is engaging hyper-drive. The new PM, Andy Burnham, has been unstoppable since he took office barely ten days ago, and — I have to be honest — I’m impressed.

Like it or not, he clearly has a carefully-planned programme of action, even if whether it survives contact with political reality remains to be seen. Every prime minister should have taped to the wall above their desk the adage attributed to the 19th century Prussian military commander Helmuth von Moltke: ‘No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.’

Which, to be fair, Andy Burnham readily acknowledges. Announcing his plan for a new National Care Service this morning, he said: ‘I know that this will require me to put what political capital I have on the table, and it could be it wears down that political capital in some ways.’

In other words, yes, he knows what happened when the Tories under Theresa May tried to tackle social care reform nearly ten years ago, and yes, he is prepared for the onslaught.

Indeed, the Daily Mail has already offered him a taste of what to expect. This was its front page yesterday morning.

Yes, the ‘Death Tax’ is back - and it pretty much did for Theresa May back in 2017. But Mr Burnham seems to think that his admittedly far superior communications skills, coupled with the massive parliamentary majority that was so helpfully bequeathed to him by Keir Starmer, will enable him to avoid the same fate.

He knows it won’t be easy, and he has begged for a fair hearing.

‘Can we not let the country look at this in a quite clear-eyed way without all of the the hype and the overwriting of some of these issues? … Can we allow people to weigh up the different options … and then just come to a considered view based on those facts?’

Oh, Andy. If only …

Robert Jenrick of Reform UK, perhaps predictably, lost no time in going in studs up.

‘Make no mistake, today Andy Burnham fired the starting gun on his scheme to raid the little money that hundreds of thousands of regular people have struggled to save over their lifetimes. That’s why he can’t rule out the new universal death tax. He won’t cut the money we hand out to migrants who have just come to our country, or cut the cash we hand out to rich foreign states in aid or reduce the benefit payments to people who are choosing not to work …’

Which is not, I suspect, quite what the PM had in mind when he appealed for an end to ‘hype and over-writing’.

So will his nifty little social media videos do the trick? After all, 30% of young voters now say they get their news from Instagram, 23% from YouTube and 22% from Tik Tok. Can a media-savvy Labour PM brimming with self-confidence beat back the combined forces of the overwhelmingly right-wing mainstream press? Maybe …

(Did anyone notice the correction in The Times yesterday, by the way? ‘In a headline and a leading article we said migrant care workers were each bringing up to 15 family members with them. This was incorrect … There is no connection between new visa approvals for care workers, who are not allowed to bring any dependants at all, and visas issued to the family members of care workers who were here already.’)

Be that as it may, Andy Burnham is undoubtedly off to a good start. The opinion pollsters are already talking of a ‘Burnham bounce’, although of course it should always be borne in mind that an essential characteristic of bounces is that they involve both upwards and downwards movement.

For Kemi Badenoch and the Tories, he represents the kind of opponent they have forgotten how to deal with. As Rafael Behr pointed out in The Guardian: ‘The right of British politics seems to be disoriented by the appearance of a Labour prime minister whose message isn’t crafted as a preemptive flinch at the accusation that he might come from the left …’

So who knows? Perhaps Mr Burnham really does represent a break with Labour’s past. No more New Labour, building on Tony Blair’s self-professed admiration for Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s legacy, but a political vision based on a belief that Thatcherism represents when Britain took a wrong turning.

As someone who followed Thatcher every step of her way to electoral victory in 1979, ushering in more than three decades of what we now call ‘neo-liberalism’, I can only applaud.

Illustration © Stanley Chow

I want to make a revolutionary proposal: that Westminster correspondents, political commentators and all other members of the chatterati class should cut Andy Burnham some slack.

I know it will go against the grain. We scribblers are taught from our earliest days in the cradle that our job — our sole reason for being — is to hold power to account, to shine light into dark corners, to ask morning, noon and night: ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’

It means digging beneath the surface, picking up whispers in pubs and coffee bars (or more likely these days, in instantly disappearing WhatsApp messages), and reading the Westminster runes every minute of every day.

I’m not suggesting that we should give that all up. But I am suggesting that we should rediscover a sense of proportion, a degree of reasonableness, even the virtue of patience.

Our incoming PM hasn’t announced his Cabinet yet? Shock, horror.

‘Burnham set for left-wing revolt over Mahmood’ was this morning’s front page headline in The Times.

‘IMF issues spending warning to Burnham,’ was the main story in the Daily Telegraph.

Come on, guys. What’s wrong with waiting until Monday, when Andy Burnham will be invited by the King to form a government, and will then announce his Cabinet? Take a break, go for a walk, there’ll be plenty of time to rip into him once he has moved into Number 10.

The problem — and yes, it is partly a problem of Burnham’s own making — is that since Keir Starmer threw in the towel three weeks ago there has been precious little real news for the Westminster village to get their teeth into.

(Except, of course, for the Farage/Reform donations imbroglio, which deserves far more attention than it has been getting, but which for some reason, most political journalists don’t seem too keen on pursuing.)

Nature abhors a vacuum, and Westminster abhors an absence of drama. When someone likes Burnham comes along, having mapped out his journey to Downing Street in microscopic detail and having decided not to throw any red meat into the media cage, the village reacts the only way it knows how.

I don’t say it invents stories, but I do suggest it enjoys inventing drama. And I worry that increasingly, with a plethora of media outlets, both mainstream and non-mainstream, all jostling for visibility, clicks and online ‘engagement’, it’s not doing the political process any good at all.

My old friend the veteran media academic Ivor Gaber, Emeritus Professor of Political Journalism at the University of Sussex, argues that Burnham has been deliberately keeping his distance from the hack pack because he has been determined not to give them unnecessary ammunition.

In an essay on Substack, Gaber writes: ‘Quite wise I’d say to avoid these confrontations whilst he was ‘leader-in-waiting’. But once in Downing Street, he’ll have to expose himself to the full glare of media examination. It might not be as much fun as teasing Kemi Badenoch about the colour of his tee shirt but it comes with the territory – and that’s what he’s signed up to.’

I agree. But while there will always rightly be tensions between those who are in government and those whose job it is to report on them, it must surely also be right — and in everyone’s interests — to give the new guy a chance.

Because as sure as eggs is eggs, there will be no shortage of cock-ups, crises and Cabinet rebellions. So let’s take a deep breath and wait a few days. Who knows? It might even be good for the country.

What finally did for Boris Johnson exactly four years ago was that his colleagues belatedly realised that he had an uncontrollable compulsion to lie to them.

In fact, they discovered, he was hopelessly addicted to the uttering of terminological inexactitudes for much of his adult life: as a husband, as a journalist, and as a politician. It took them a lot longer than it took some of us, but they got there in the end.

Lying to voters is not generally regarded by politicians as career-ending; needs must, and all that. Indeed, if the greater good requires it — which, alas, so they tell us, it so often does — then surely it would be the height of irresponsibility to allow old-fashioned ideas about the value of truthfulness to stand in the way.

Which brings us, as you may already have guessed, to Nigel Farage, a man who, despite their many similarities, seems to have a generously reciprocated contempt for our tousle-haired former prime minister. A shared admiration for the ethical code favoured by Donald Trump has plainly not been enough to overcome the gnawing pain of eternal personal ambition.

Ah, the unbridled love for power and profit, those twin evils that have beset humanity since the dawn of time. So thank goodness for the talents and tenacity of my fellow-journalists, who make it their business to dig out the grubby secrets that the Johnsons and Farages of this world would far rather we didn’t know about.

(Nigel Farage denies any wrongdoing or breaking of the MPs’ code of conduct relating to undeclared financial donations from wealthy benefactors, although last January he did apologise for 17 breaches of the code after failing to declare £380,000 of income on time).

There are good reasons why we expect our elected representatives to obey the rules. As the old saying goes: rule-makers shouldn’t be rule-breakers. If an MP or political party is secretly trousering millions of pounds from anonymous donors, we are surely entitled to ask whose interests are really being represented, especially if those donors appear to share extensive personal interests in the shadowy world of crypto-currencies.

Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage seem to have decided that what has worked for Donald Trump in the US will work equally well for them in the UK. Ignore the rules (allegedly), brazen it out, attack the ‘Establishment’ or the ‘fake news media’, and rely on an outsize ego to wriggle your way out of trouble.

So now the voters of Clacton hold Farage’s future in their hands. With the help of comedy writer Jon Harvey, better known as Count Binface, they have the power to put an end to Farage’s parliamentary career and, almost certainly, mortally wound his Reform Party’s chances of remaking the British political scene.

My suspicion is that most of them won’t bother to vote. After all, who needs a by-election in August? But my hope is that enough of them will be unable to resist the temptation to tell Farage what they think of him. In the 2024 general election, more than half the votes cast in Clacton went to the Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and Green candidates, so defeating Farage is by no means impossible.

Do I think it’ll happen? Frankly, no. But to see him forced off the political stage amid gales of mocking laughter would be a true delight — and, in an odd way, a real triumph for democracy.

Let the people speak — and if they want to do so while laughing hysterically, so much the better.

Twenty-three years ago this weekend, I was in Boston, Massachusetts, standing on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Charles River and admiring a magnificent firework display marking US Independence Day.

I was there as a guest of the Boston public radio station WBUR, and for the benefit of the other invited guests, I agreed to be interviewed by one of the station’s star presenters, Dick Gordon (who happened to be Canadian, not American, but no one seemed to mind.)

‘So, just to be clear,’ he said. ‘You Brits don’t have an Independence Day, do you?’

Remember, this was July 2003. George W Bush was the president; Tony Blair was UK Prime Minister. The US-led invasion of Iraq had taken place just four months previously; Saddam Hussein had been overthrown and was in hiding. Just a few weeks previously, the BBC, for whom I then worked, had broadcast a report alleging that the government had deliberately ‘sexed up’ a dossier on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Blair’s determination to position the UK as the US’s staunchest ally in a hugely controversial war (in a private memo, he wrote: ‘I will be with you, whatever’) had exposed him to widespread criticism amid allegations that he had, in effect, become ‘Bush’s poodle.’

So I answered, not entirely seriously — this was, after all, a drinks reception: ‘No, we don’t. We have a Dependence Day instead.’

Now fast forward to November 2024. Keir Starmer is UK Prime Minister and Donald Trump has just been re-elected US President. It would be difficult to find two more different political leaders.

Yet Starmer seems to have decided that it is still in the UK’s best interests to be seen as standing staunchly at the US’s side. ‘As the closest of allies,’ he says, ‘we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.’

Really? Shared values? If it was a dubious claim then, how much more dubious is it now, as Trump turns this weekend’s 250th anniversary celebrations into a tawdry pageant devoted to his own greatness.

The truth, surely, is that under Trump, the US has become something it always insisted it could never be: an imperial power prepared to use its military and economic strength in furtherance of an authoritarian leader’s own personal interests.

Last year alone, according to official financial filings, Trump made more than $2.2 billion from his private business interests. That’s roughly $42 million every week. This is a man who deserves to be in court (for this and many other alleged crimes), not in the Oval Office.

Starmer is now on his way out, having discovered too late that standing side by side with a quasi-dictator is not a good look, and we don’t yet know how his successor-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, will handle the US-UK relationship.

He needs to make a hugely important strategic decision. Is the Trump era an aberration — will the US return to its traditional role as the West’s primus inter pares — or has Trump permanently broken the mould? In other words, Burnham, along with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and others, will have to decide whether relying on the US as ultimate protector of the NATO alliance’s supposed ‘shared values’ is no longer a viable policy, whoever wins the mid-term elections in November and the next Presidential election in 2028.

It could well be that the 250th anniversary of US independence will be seen by future historians as the moment when Europe finally recognised what had been staring it in the face since Trump first burst upon the international scene.

The US has changed — and not for the better. Or perhaps those historians might be tempted to point out that the US was never the knight in shining armour, the benevolent protector of the West’s cherished freedoms, that it had claimed to be — that the myth of American exceptionalism was simply that, a myth, and that far too many people, for far too long, had accepted it at face value.

In a magisterial editorial today (aren’t they all?), the New York Times says: ‘At its best, this country has been a friend to the cause of human freedom. The ledger is not clean, but any fair accounting shows a nation that has turned its enormous strength toward the good far more often than not.’

And it concludes: ‘Let the anniversary be more than fireworks and flags ... Let it be a renewal of the work, a reminder that the right to govern ourselves is also the obligation to govern ourselves well: to show up, to listen, to tell the truth and to extend to one another the basic decency a shared citizenship demands.’

So, in the spirit of what the paper’s editorial board calls ‘fair accounting’, let’s just say: OK, but you need to be aware that the verdict of your erstwhile allies is by no means a foregone conclusion.

A reminder: my family history And The Cello Came Too is now available for purchase. Click here to order the print version or here for the ebook and audiobook versions.

So perhaps you’re still wondering, even after everything that has been said and written; why — exactly — has Keir Starmer resigned?

There is, as so often in politics, a short answer and a long answer. Short answer first: his own backbenchers lost confidence in him — and without the confidence of their own party, no prime minister can stay in office for long.

Just ask Theresa May, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. All of them victims of the Downing Street podium, and all of them thrown to the wolves with a deep sense of grievance.

At least Starmer tried to pretend that he accepted the verdict of his party — as he said through gritted teeth — ‘with good grace’.

Long answer: MPs have two priorities as they lie in bed at night, wondering what the future holds. First, who is most likely to lead their party to victory in the next general election, and thus increase their chances of holding on to their job; and second — let’s be charitable here — who is most likely to be able to change the country for the better?

Keir Starmer was the answer to neither of those questions. The opinion polls, and even more tellingly, the results of last month’s local and devolved government elections, showed beyond a shadow of doubt that whatever other qualities he might have, winning elections is not one of them. (That ‘landslide’ victory two years ago? Here’s what I wrote the day after.)

So why might that be? Mainly, I would argue, because what he offered voters was cautious, incremental change, whereas what they wanted — and what they still want — was something big, quick, and life-changing. Something that said: ‘The bad old days are over. Here come the good old days again.’

Perhaps they yearn for low inflation and prices that don’t rise every time they find themselves at the supermarket checkout. Or maybe it’s a return to a country in which all their neighbours are white and speak English as their first language. Or a country where shoplifters are apprehended at the shop doorway and dragged off to court by the scruff of their neck.

Keir Starmer didn’t know how to speak to those voters. And when he tried, he sounded insincere and unconvincing (who can forget his abysmal ‘island of strangers’ speech, which at the time, in a piece I headlined ‘Labour’s day of shame’, I called ‘shameful, mean-minded, wrong-headed, and politically inept.’)

A prime minister needs many qualities, and it is rare to find someone who has them all. You need a firm set of principles (Margaret Thatcher); you need to be a salesman (Boris Johnson); and you need to be able to win people over to your way of thinking by force of argument and force of personality (Tony Blair, who arguably had all the other qualities as well).

You also need good judgement, which is where Keir Starmer came badly unstuck (so, eventually, did Tony Blair). He appointed first Sue Gray and then Morgan McSweeney to be his chiefs of staff, neither of whom turned out to be good picks. He also appointed Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, which was stupid, wrong and utterly inept.

And because he never seemed sure about which principles really mattered to him, he changed tack, U-turned, or backed down with bewildering regularity.

In other words, he was no good at the job.

Will Andy Burnham be any better? Let’s hope so, because if yet another mainstream politician fails, there are some ugly alternatives waiting in the wings. If you’re not sure what I mean, I suggest you read a history of the Weimar Republic.

Photo: PA Images

I wonder how many of these names mean anything to you.

Peter Sutcliffe. Fred and Rose West. Harold Shipman. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.

Each and every one of them a murderer. Most of them mass murderers. And not one of them an immigrant, a refugee or an asylum-seeker.

You may ask: so what? To which I respond: so nothing. Murderers exist in all communities, at all times. Ghastly crimes of shocking brutality have not suddenly appeared among us out of a bright blue sky because of what some people choose to call ‘open borders’ or ‘uncontrolled immigration’.

You and I know that perfectly well. So let us be clear about what’s going on in the wake of the brutal murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton and the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast.

The ‘unrest’ that resulted from those attacks was deliberately incited by political leaders who believe that whipping up hatred against racial and religious minorities will bring them both power and wealth.

We have been here before, haven’t we? In my new book (see above), I describe what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, where both my parents grew up. And when I look at the images from Belfast, and read the accounts of immigrant families’ homes there being torched by masked thugs, I hear ringing in my ears the words ‘pogrom’ and ‘Kristallnacht’.

Nigel Farage knew exactly what he was doing when he called for people to respond with ‘rage’ — whether pure and cold or otherwise — to the murder of Henry Nowak.

So did Rupert Lowe, when he spoke of ‘foreign cultures that have no place in our country.’

As for US vice-president JD Vance, who blamed Nowak’s death on a supposed ‘mass invasion of migrants’, his ignorance is surpassed only by his unfathomable cynicism. (You might have thought that a man whose wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants might perhaps know just a little about Sikhs and their historic role in British life.)

The Farages, Lowes, Vances and Musks are deliberately fanning the flames of racial hatred. And they are exploiting horrific crimes such as those of the past two weeks to sow division, exacerbate tensions and incite violence.

They know perfectly well that Sikhs are no more likely to commit violent crimes than anyone else. Likewise people from Sudan, or Somalia, or Rwanda. Some of them, doubtless, are bad people; others are severely damaged after having lived through appalling trauma.

No, it’s not an excuse, but it might be an explanation. Has anyone ever wondered whether offering proper counselling and mental health care to traumatised immigrants might perhaps be a better idea than threatening to deport them en masse with mendacious claims about ‘alien cultures’?

But that’s not what the Farages and the Lowes are about, is it? They are following the age-old mantra of would-be tyrants since time immemorial: divide and rule, set neighbour against neighbour, turn on the weakest members of society and blame them for all its ills.

And the ethno-nationalists also have Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who owns the most dangerous social media site on earth, using his immense wealth and power to spread their message at every opportunity.

The Reform UK candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwin, wrote on X: ‘It’s not social media that’s “inflaming tensions”. It’s not Elon Musk. It’s not Nigel Farage. It’s not the ‘far-right’. It is the very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration & open borders. This policy has to end or it will destroy Western nations.’

To which Musk responded with just one word. ‘Exactly.’

No, Mr Musk. Not exactly.

There is no ‘very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration’. There are no ‘open borders’.

But we have heard this dangerous nonsense before.

And we know where it can lead.

Fritz Lustig, 1943

This is the final extract from my book And The Cello Came Too ahead of its official publication date next week. The extract is available to paying subscribers only, but if you want to be sneaky, you could cheat and try the free seven-day trial offer. Or you could simply buy the book now, by clicking here for the print version or here for the ebook and audiobook versions.

*******************

For my father Fritz, being recruited into military intelligence in 1943 meant that at last, nearly three years after having signed up to join the British army, he was doing something that might actually help to defeat the Nazis.

To his dying day, he remembered those encouraging words from his commanding officer Colonel Thomas Kendrick when he arrived at Latimer House in Buckinghamshire, where he was to join a top-secret unit monitoring the bugged conversations of German prisoners of war: ‘The work you’ll be doing here will be a damn sight more important than if you were firing a gun or fighting on the front line.’

Read more

The Ninth Fort, Kaunas, Lithuania

Read more

Here is the first of three extracts from my forthcoming book that I’ll be posting today, tomorrow and Thursday ahead of its official publication date next week. The extracts are available to paying subscribers only, but if you want to be sneaky, you could cheat and try the free seven-day trial offer. Or you could simply buy the book now, by clicking here for the print version or here for the ebook and audiobook versions.

******************

All lives end eventually, some well, others less well. My mother’s life ended at home, in bed, during the night. She was probably asleep when her heart finally gave up the struggle, after nearly ninety-two years of service.

A good death? Not really, because the last few months had been pretty wretched. She had been confined to her bed, unhappy, in pain, and increasingly confused. And for my father, it had been utter misery, trying to look after his helpless wife as she drifted towards her death.

Read more

Leon Neal/Getty Images

Hands up if you know who Sir Anthony Meyer was. (And no Googling at the back …)

Back in the mists of time — well, 1989 to be precise — he stood for the leadership of the Conservative party in what he knew would be a doomed attempt to unseat Margaret Thatcher, who by then had been prime minister for a full decade.

He was, as everyone knew, a stalking horse candidate, putting himself forward in order to encourage more credible candidates to throw their hats into the ring.

And tonight, Saturday 9 May, he is reincarnated in the form of Labour MP Catherine West, an Australian-born Sinologist who just happens to be my constituency MP.

Out of nowhere, she has suddenly ignited what could turn into a full-blown Labour leadership crisis by warning that unless a Cabinet minister puts themself forward to challenge Keir Starmer as party leader by Monday, she will attempt to trigger a leadership contest herself.

She’ll need the backing of 81 of her fellow Labour MPs — she says she already has the support of 10, but is confident that more will come forward if they’re needed.

I am reminded of Boris Johnson’s words when he left 10 Downing Street in July 2022. They were perhaps the truest words he spoke during his entire Premiership: ‘When the herd moves, it moves.’

In other words, there comes a moment in politics when there’s nothing more you can do. It’s over. The die is cast.

So the question this weekend is simply this: is the herd moving? Will Wes Streeting or John Healey or Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood pick up the gauntlet that Catherine West has thrown down?

If so, after less than two years as prime minister, Keir Starmer is toast. But my guess, as things stand, is that they’ll keep their powder dry. Now, they’ll say, is not the time. We need to take stock, work out exactly what last Thursday’s election results really mean.

And, most importantly for many Labour MPs, find some way to get Andy Burnham back into the House of Commons.

But back to Sir Anthony Meyer. Thatcher easily saw off his challenge, but less than a year later, her former Cabinet colleague Michael Heseltine mounted his own, much more serious challenge and she failed to win enough votes to continue in office. The rest is history.

So yes, Keir Starmer may well survive this weekend’s post-election turbulence. But if he thinks that resuscitating Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, both of them in their mid-seventies, will somehow inject a semblance of new life into his sickly administration, then he is simply confirming what too many of his own MPs already suspected.

He really is rubbish at politics.

Here’s what I would do. Tell Andy Burnham that I won’t stand in his way if he wants to fight a by-election in the hope of returning to the Commons. (After all, he might not win.)

And then, if he wants to mount a leadership challenge, tell him I’ll fight against him. In the words of John Major when he was similarly under pressure in the mid-1990s: ‘Put up, or shut up.’

A reminder: you can now order a pre-publication copy of my new book, a personal memoir and family history called And The Cello Came Too. Just click HERE.

Statement of principle I: attacking people because of who they are is always wrong.

Attack someone because they are Jewish? Wrong.

Because they are Muslim? Wrong.

Christian, Hindu, Sikh? Atheist? Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Statement of principle II: Criticising someone’s beliefs is not wrong.

Criticise them because they support Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon? Fine.

Because they support Reform UK? The Greens? Donald Trump? Vladimir Putin? Mojtaba Khamenei? By all means.

Note: I said criticise, not attack. You can attack an idea as much as you like, but in my book, you don’t attack someone because of what they believe. Isn’t that what Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights means?

‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion … Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’

In other words, I am perfectly entitled to believe that Palestinians have a right to a State of their own, wholly or partly on land currently controlled by Israel, but my right to manifest that belief may be restricted in the interests of public safety or to protect the rights and freedoms of others.

You, on the other hand, are entitled to believe that Jews control the world or that Islam is a religion that encourages the abuse of children or the slaughter of non-believers. Your right to manifest those beliefs, however, is similarly circumscribed.

In the past six weeks alone, there have been no fewer than six attacks on Jewish targets in north London. Last October, two people were killed in an attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.

But, as you may not have noticed, a week ago, a 58-year-old man was arrested following reports of racist abuse and death threats made toward worshippers at a mosque in Liverpool.

A week before that, a man pleaded guilty at Birmingham Crown Court to charges of rape, robbery, intentional strangulation and religiously aggravated assault after subjecting a woman to racist and anti-Muslim abuse during a rape attack in her own home.

And last month, two 18-year-old men were charged with planning terrorist attacks targeting a mosque in Cardiff.

There are nearly four million Muslims in the UK, more than ten times as many as Jews. Yet according to Home Office figures published in The Guardian tonight, there were nearly ten times as many religious hate crimes recorded against Jews per 100,000 population in 2024-25 as there were against Muslims.

We used to be taught that ‘live and let live’ was one of the principles that could be categorised as a ‘British value’. But now, with the rise of identity politics, and the expectation that we must all choose a label to wear, we seem increasingly to be retreating into our own, self-defined silos.

I am not persuaded that banning pro-Palestinian marches or proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will make any difference to the spread of anti-Semitic attacks.

Nor do I believe that the rise in the number of such attacks could be reversed by deporting all Muslim immigrants who have arrived in this country by irregular means.

After all, how many such immigrants were here in 1947, when anti-Jewish riots spread through several British towns and cities following the killing of two British soldiers in Palestine by a Jewish terrorist group known as the Irgun? (Its leader, Menachem Begin, went on to become prime minister of Israel and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 after signing a peace treaty with Egypt.)

Or, if you want to wind the clock back even further, how many ‘illegal’ Muslim immigrants were involved in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, in which British Fascist followers of Oswald Mosley were confronted by Jewish anti-Fascists?

Not to forget, of course, the York Massacre of 1190, when an estimated 150 Jews died during anti-Jewish violence.

All of which is to say that anti-Semitism long pre-dates the advent of multi-culturalism or an increase in immigration. But it is not to deny that there has been a sharp, and frightening, surge in anti-Semitic attacks over recent months, a surge that depressingly, seems not to be acknowledged by many anti-racist campaigners who are less careful than they should be not to conflate being Jewish to supporting Israeli actions in Gaza.

Hamas, which organised and carried out the slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, in October 2023, does not deserve the support of anyone who calls themself an anti-racist. It is perfectly possible to condemn Israeli actions in Gaza (and yes, I agree that those actions can be characterised as genocidal) while still condemning Hamas for its many years of attacks on Israeli civilians.

Keir Starmer was right when he said in his broadcast from Downing Street tonight: ‘Antisemitism is an old, old hatred. History shows that the roots are deep, and if you turn away, it grows back. Yet far too many people in this country diminish it. They either don’t see it or they don’t want to see it.’

We must do better.

In the good old days when tabloid headline writers ruled the world (spoiler alert: often they weren’t good old days at all), there was always one headline that could be guaranteed to shift copies off the newsagents’ counter.

WE NAME THE GUILTY MEN.

So in that same spirit today — as Keir Starmer watches what’s left of his authority dribble away into the Downing Street gutter — I name the guilty man.

He is … Morgan McSweeney.

The man who thought Peter Mandelson was the perfect pick to be the UK’s ambassador in Washington; who also thought that Labour’s electoral strategy should be to out-Farage Farage; and who insisted on purging anyone to the Left of Genghis Khan from positions of Labour party influence.

By pointing a finger at McSweeney, I do not for a moment intend to absolve Starmer of his own responsibility for the Mandelson fiasco. It was his decision, and his alone, against the advice of just about everyone else, to stick with McSweeney’s wizard wheeze.

But ask yourself this: if McSweeney hadn’t been whispering in Starmer’s ear, would Mandelson have been appointed to Washington? I very much suspect that the answer must be No. So although of course it is much too simplistic to suggest that there is only one guilty man in this sorry saga, I still think the general point is worth making.

‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ they say, and who cares if the thief you have in mind for the job has a record as long as your arm. Trump and Mandelson, eh? Ideally suited for each other. Or so they must have thought.

Until last February, Morgan McSweeney was the prime minister’s chief of staff. And because the prime minister himself seems to be unusually susceptible to other people’s bad ideas, what McSweeney wanted, McSweeney got.

Which is why Starmer appointed Mandelson to Washington. And why, against the advice of the then Cabinet Secretary, he announced the appointment before Mandelson had been security vetted. And why the stickler-for-the-rules Olly Robbins at the Foreign Office took the view that his job was to deliver what the prime minister wanted.

Isn’t that what civil servants are meant to do, always in accordance, of course, with the Civil Service Code, custom and practice?

The most damaging judgement about Starmer’s leadership qualities comes from an unnamed aide quoted in the book Get In, by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.

‘Keir's not driving the train. He thinks he's driving the train, but we've sat him at the front of the DLR.’

(Note for non-Londoners: the DLR, or Docklands Light Railway, is operated remotely. In other words, without a driver.)

The picture of Starmer that has emerged from a deluge of unfriendly leaks and briefings is of a man who either has no idea what he wants his government to achieve, or is wholly incapable of conveying his vision to those around him.

According to Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman, who says he has been talking to MPs, Cabinet ministers, government officials and political advisers:

‘The same story has been repeated again and again. The Prime Minister is failing. He is not doing the job. He cannot do the job.’

Consider this. Since taking office less than two years ago, Starmer has had three chiefs of staff, five directors of communications, three cabinet secretaries and two principal private secretaries.

That is not a record to be proud of. Nor is it a record of someone who is good at running things.

There is, of course, nothing new about prime ministers having powerful aides to help them get their own way, or even, sometimes, to help them decide what their ‘own way’ might be.

Boris Johnson had Dominic Cummings, Theresa May had Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, David Cameron had Steve Hilton, Gordon Brown had Damian McBride, and Tony Blair had Alastair Campbell.

What did they all have in common? They all, eventually, had to part company with their bosses. Acting as lightning conductor is part of the job description. ‘Sorry, old chap, things are getting sticky, so I’m going to have to throw you overboard.’

Starmer’s woes stem not only from the fact that he’s evidently a lousy judge of character — how on earth could anyone, let alone a lawyer, think that someone with Mandelson’s tawdry past was a suitable candidate for the UK’s most critical diplomatic posting? — but more fundamentally that he is neither interested in, nor any good at, the grubby business of everyday politics: building coalitions, selling a political vision, devising a coherent policy platform and sticking to it.

And as for Sir Olly Robbins, what an irony that after so many prime ministers have complained about the civil service resisting the wishes of elected politicians, he should find himself being summarily dismissed for having done his utmost to carry out a prime minister’s wishes.

As Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, points out in today’s Guardian, Robbins was faced with an impossible choice: ‘Oppose the PM’s wish or manipulate the process with mandarinate dexterity. Either choice was potentially career-ending.’

Morgan McSweeney will be answering questions from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday. It is likely to be a bruising encounter.

Quite right too.

An AI-generated image of what my father might have looked like on his arrival in Britain as a 20-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany in April 1939

At the beginning of this year, I wrote that when the time came, I would have more to say about a new book that I have written, and which is due for publication in just a few weeks’ time.

I am excited to be able to tell you that the time has now come.

And The Cello Came Too will hit the bookshops at the beginning of June, but you can order your pre-publication copy now, and — printers and the postman permitting — it’ll be in your hands well before publication day.

Thanks to the miracle of digital technology, all you have to do is click HERE. (Ebook and audio versions should be available shortly before the date of publication.)

The book is both a personal memoir and a family history, and it has already garnered some very generous pre-publication reviews.

The journalist and historian Neal Ascherson said: ‘This tender, skilfully composed memoir is the most sensitive account I know of how [Holocaust] survivors rediscovered one another, slowly settled into unfamiliar jobs in alien cities, and found new lives and loves.’

And Anne Sebba, author of The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, wrote: ‘I urge everyone to read And The Cello Came Too and reflect on the chance nature of survival, the courage to start again and the nature of patriotism, as well as the ever-present question of ‘What if?’ This book could not be more relevant to the unstable times in which we live today.’

We all have family histories, so why do I think my own family’s story deserves a book? First, because both my parents grew up in Nazi Germany and the story of the Nazi holocaust needs to be told and retold for each new generation — and it is a story that encompasses survivors as well as victims.

Most of my family were survivors, and in an era when the word ‘refugee’ is too often used as a shorthand for no-good scroungers with nothing to offer, I wanted to paint a very different picture. Although both my parents were refugees, they certainly weren’t scroungers. (Because of their work in British military intelligence during the Second World War, they were both commemorated with obituaries in The Times, which isn’t usually the case for scroungers.)

If it hadn’t been for the Nazis, who came to power when my Berlin-born father was 13 years old, he would almost certainly have become a professional cellist. For a time, he shared a cello teacher with Anita Lasker, who as Anita Lasker-Wallfisch would later co-found the English Chamber Orchestra, having survived both Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps. Last year, she celebrated her 100th birthday.

My father’s cello was by far his most important possession when he left Germany, so it is no surprise that he brought it with him when he arrived to start a new life in Britain. It stayed with him until his death at the age of ninety-eight in 2017, and it is a thread that runs right through the story of his life.

My parents grew up in a Germany that was in constant turmoil. First, it lost the First World War, during which between two and three million Germans died. (My maternal grandfather was wounded in the shoulder while serving in the cavalry, leaving him without the use of his left arm.)

Then it suffered economic collapse and hyper-inflation that wiped out the savings of millions of German families. Both my grandfathers lost their businesses and ended up as travelling salesmen.

And then came the Nazis. My family lived through it all, and my paternal grandfather, my father and my uncle all wrote memoirs from which I have been able to piece together a remarkably detailed picture of what their lives were like in the 1920s and 30s.

But by great good fortune, our family archives go back much further than that — I have, for example, the marriage contract that was drawn up when my great great great grandmother Fanny Magnus was married in August 1814, and one of my earliest ancestors, Josuah Hoschel ben Joseph, was the chief rabbi of Krakow in the mid-seventeenth century.

I say in the book:

None of us can escape the past; we are made from cloth woven over the centuries, our genetic make-up determined by all those who have gone before us. I have long believed that, at least in an ideal world, to truly know ourselves, it helps to know from whom we are descended.

But there is another reason why I think the book was worth writing — and why I hope you will agree that it is also worth reading. My family’s story is one of assimilation and adaptation, the story of a family that had cast aside its Jewish origins long before the Nazis came to power. My father and his three siblings were all baptised into the Lutheran church, and their own parents had had a non-religious wedding as long ago as 1903. None of which, of course, made any difference to the Nazis.

Neither my grandmother nor any of her three sisters, nor any of her four children, had Jewish funerals, nor, with only two exceptions, did any of the thirteen members of my own generation marry Jewish partners. As far as I know, we have no relatives living in Israel.

So at a time when we are increasingly expected to wear identity labels, my own family has eschewed them. I have cousins in Australia, the US, Japan and the UK — we are secular, non-Zionist, and non-observant. Citizens of everywhere, you might say.

If you’re within reach of London, I hope you might be able to join me on 1 June at the book’s launch event in the historic setting of the UK’s oldest bookshop, Hatchards of Piccadilly. Click here for tickets at £10 per person.

I’ll also be speaking at the Wiener Holocaust Library on 18 June — click here for a free ticket. And if you are a north Londoner, you’ll be welcome to join me at Waterstones in Crouch End on 25 June. Email cellowaterstones@gmail.com if you intend to be there.

Finally, if you’re a paid subscriber to this Substack, you’ll have exclusive access to extracts from the book in the week before publication. Why not upgrade now to be sure that you don’t miss out?

Sometimes, even for a hard-nosed old journalist like me, the news can be simply too much. So, especially when the sun shines, the trees are in blossom and the birds are in song, it is important to focus on what lifts the spirits.

During the Second World War, my mother kept a diary. She was in London throughout the Blitz, spending night after night in air-raid shelters or on fire watch. She knew that every night could be her last.

But she also went to the cinema, and to dances, and for walks in the country. She was nineteen years old, and life was for living. If you have read the accounts of what life is like today for the people of Kyiv, Beirut, Tehran or Tel Aviv, you will see much the same attitude. (Even in Gaza, a handful of cafés and restaurants are reported to have reopened, although life there remains nightmarishly difficult.)

This morning, I went for my usual walk in Highgate Wood, not far from where I live in north London. Thanks to a very handy app on my phone, I was able to identify the songs of eleven different bird species: blackbird, blackcap, great tit, wood pigeon, chiffchaff, ring-necked parakeet, song thrush, robin, dove, carrion crow, and blue tit.

I also stopped to admire a lush carpet of bluebells in full flower beneath a canopy of hornbeams, beech and oaks. And yes, they all lifted my spirits.

Don’t misunderstand me: this is not an argument for complacency. For anyone with an ounce of human compassion, it requires a supreme effort in today’s world to turn away from the suffering of others and concentrate, even for just a few minutes, on our own well-being.

But it is also difficult to look at the extraordinary images from outer space, beamed back to earth by the crew of Artemis II, and not marvel at the wonders of our universe and the extraordinary technical prowess of NASA’s engineers and scientists.

(Am I jealous of the astronauts? You bet I am. I used to dream of being the first journalist to set foot on the moon, but I fear the moment has passed.)

It requires great fortitude sometimes not to succumb to despair. But back in December 2024, when I wrote a piece here entitled ‘Too much damn news? Try going for a walk’, I quoted the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland: ‘Finding light in the darkness does not just happen. You have to work at it ... It means making a deliberate effort to fight the pessimism of the intellect, which has a nasty habit of getting in first.’

So yes, of course we should lobby our MPs, go on protest marches and do everything we can to campaign for a better, safer, kinder world.

But if my mother, and millions like her, could find joy even during the darkest days of the Second World War — and if the people living under constant threat of bombardment in Kyiv, Beirut, Tehran or Tel Aviv can do the same today — surely we who live in safety can make the effort to do do likewise.

Especially when the sun is shining and the birds are singing.

We live in an age of instant gratification — and it is making the world a very dangerous place.

‘I want it — and I want it now’ is the modern mantra. And thanks to the magical whizz-bangery of online shopping (‘What do you mean, it won’t be here before tomorrow afternoon?’) and digital communication (‘I sent you a message a whole five minutes ago, why haven’t you replied yet?’), we have come to expect that what we want is what we get.

Instantly.

So when someone starts a war — even if they happen to be the President of a major nuclear power — they confidently expect it to be over in days. They click on the button that says ‘Buy now’ in the unshakeable belief that it will deliver what it promises. Instant victory.

Which is why four long years ago, Vladimir Putin expected to have captured Ukraine in a matter of days, and why Donald Trump can’t understand why victory in Iran still hasn’t been delivered to him gift-wrapped to the Oval Office.

Shouldn’t they know better? Don’t they ever read history books? You know the answer as well as I do.

Perhaps it’s the fault of computer keyboards. Tap, tap, enter — and wow! Look at those missiles blasting off into space. Is it a video game, or is it for real? These days, who can tell the difference?

Not President Donald J Trump, that’s for sure. How else do we explain his grotesque remark just a few days ago that US forces might continue to attack Kharg Island, at the head of the Gulf, ‘just for fun’?

But it’s not only deranged political leaders who have succumbed to the lure of instant gratification. We journalists have long been addicted to the endorphine rush that comes with a ‘bloody good story’ — and yes, images of missiles and bombs falling from the sky will always make for a dramatic front page or a social media post that goes viral.

(Back in my days as a Fleet Street news editor, I had a colleague who when things were too quiet would remark ‘What we need now is a damn good hijack.’)

Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to Keir Starmer, a man who seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of not producing front-page headlines. ‘No drama Obama’ worked well enough for a man who oozed charisma from every pore, but ‘no drama Starmer’ rivals a mug of hot cocoa as a soporific.

I suggest you bear that in mind as we approach High Noon on 7 May, the day of local elections in England and national elections in Scotland and Wales, when the Starmer-led Labour party is widely predicted to take a brutal hammering that will then lead to a challenge to Starmer’s leadership.

But will it? In the middle of a Middle East war that threatens to do terrible things to the UK economy and the cost of living (Have you seen what’s already happened to the price of petrol?), are Labour MPs really going to embark on a civil war of their own, suggesting to voters that they care more about their own jobs than the fate of the nation?

It’s not impossible, of course, and the Tory party showed itself perfectly capable of doing exactly that during the May/Johnson/Truss years of blessed memory. And what great days they were for us hacks. Not so great, however, for the rest of the country.

But yes, voters must also bear their share of the blame. After Labour won their landslide election victory nearly two years ago, I wrote a piece in which I asked ‘How patient are British voters?’ It was, I suggested, the biggest question facing the new Labour government as the euphoria of their victory made way for the sheer hard grind of government.

It didn’t take long for us to learn the answer: Not very patient at all. Which is one reason — perhaps the main reason — why Labour is now languishing in the opinion polls and the unlovely Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have won the support of vast swathes of disaffected, impatient voters.

Democratic politics were not designed to deliver instant gratification. Putting an X on a ballot paper will never deliver the same kind of immediate win as ordering a new pair of jeans on Amazon or the week’s groceries on Ocado.

So yes, we can blame Trump, Putin, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Israel’s Netanyahu, and whoever else you want to add to your pantheon of villains. But let’s not forget the man who brought instant gratification to the masses.

Jeff Bezos, I’m looking at you.

Mr President, let me put it this way.

You told the Financial Times that you expect Europe to help you keep the Strait of Hormuz open because you helped Europe in Ukraine.

But, er, they’re not quite the same, are they?

Ukraine: invaded by a powerful neighbour, threatening the security of Europe and some of the US’s biggest trading partners.

Iran: attacked by the US and Israel for reasons that you have not yet been able adequately to explain.

You may remember, Mr President, from your days scrapping in the schoolyard that when you got into a fight, the first question the teachers asked was: Who started it?

And the reason they asked the question is that there is a difference — a big difference — between attacking someone and defending yourself against an attack.

That’s why NATO is a defensive alliance. It’s also why Keir Starmer was not prepared to back your initial attack on Iran, but is prepared to authorise military action to defend British interests and the interests of its allies.

NATO was created to bolster the security of all its members — and its Chapter 5 provision, under which an attack on one member is considered to be an attack on all, has been invoked just once in its entire history: in support of the US, would you believe, after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Your NATO allies contributed more than 100,000 troops to the war against al-Qaeda, among them the more than 450 British troops who lost their lives. So when you say ‘I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us’, it doesn’t sound too good on this side of the Pond.

Your Magaland guru Steve Bannon apparently thinks that drawing a line between offensive and defensive military action is ‘diplomatic bullshit’. (He used even spicier language when talking to the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward, but we try to observe certain standards here at Château Lustig.)

Do you remember General Colin Powell? Former national security adviser under Ronald Reagan, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first George Bush and Secretary of State under the second one?

A man, you might say, who knew a thing or two about military and diplomatic strategy, although you would probably take exception to his description of you as ‘a national disgrace with no sense of shame.’

Be that as it may, he had what he called the ‘pottery barn rule’, most commonly defined as ‘You break it, you own it.’ He used it when warning President Bush about the risks of invading Iraq in 2003 — were he still alive today, and in the unlikely event of you seeking his advice, he would doubtless use the same words again.

Europe’s leaders agree with you that Iran’s leaders are a danger to the world and and a threat to the future security of Israel. They have watched with horror the unrestrained brutality of the regime’s crackdown against anti-government protests earlier this year. But they do not share your apparent certainty that destroying their military infrastructure and degrading their nuclear research facilities (again?) will lead to a better future.

Mr President, surely even you must recognise that there is only one reason why the Strait of Hormuz is now, to all intents and purposes, closed to tanker traffic and oil prices are spiralling up into the stratosphere. It’s because you and your friend Bibi Netanyahu have embarked on one of the most reckless and ill-advised military actions of recent times.

Did you really think that you’d be able to bend the Iranians to your will as you did in Venezuela? That killing their brutal Supreme Leader would immediately herald a new dawn?

Is that what Bibi told you? And if it is, did you really choose to believe him rather than your own intelligence advisers, just as you believed Vladimir Putin when he assured you again and again that he wants to end the war in Ukraine?

Your NATO allies desperately want to remain on good terms with you. They know that without US military backing, the alliance is worthless. But they also know the difference between cause and effect.

Cause: Your decision to embark on a foolhardy war of choice with no obvious strategy or goal.

Effect: Deeper global instability, leading to a potential economic shockwave that will harm US voters as much as everyone else.

Yes, your NATO allies will almost certainly provide limited military assistance to try to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to traffic.

But they will also remember the words of the British prime minister David Lloyd George, reflecting on the origins of the First World War when Europe’s leaders, he said, had ‘glided, or rather staggered and stumbled, into war.’

They won’t want to make the same mistake again.

There is a very special world that exists only inside Donald Trump’s head — and in order to understand what he’s up to in Iran, I’m afraid we need to peer into this world.

It is a world in which the US ‘has already won in many ways’. (It hasn’t, however you care to define winning.)

It is a world in which Iran possesses Tomahawk cruise missiles like the one that killed more than a hundred and seventy people, most of them schoolgirls, on Day One of the US-Israeli assault. (It doesn’t.)

A world in which Iran was responsible for the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 crew members. (In fact, responsibility for the attack was claimed by al-Qaeda, and all those suspected of having been involved were Yemeni.)

A world in which Iran was ‘planning to take over the Middle East.’ (Yes, it has long harboured regional super-power ambitions, but even long-time rival Saudi Arabia had been fostering better relations until the outbreak of hostilities.)

And most serious of all, it is a world in which without the US-Israeli attacks, Iran ‘would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks to four weeks.’ (This is, to use the technical term, bat-shit crazy.)

What it all adds up to — and I suspect this comes as little surprise to you — is that Donald Trump is dangerously delusional. It’s not that he tells lies — although he does, every time he opens his mouth, whether knowingly or unknowingly — but that he seems, on all the available evidence, genuinely to believe what he says.

He won the ‘stolen’ Presidential election in 2020; the US economy is thriving under his leadership; his poll ratings are better than ever; and the US is better-respected, under the best President it has ever had, than ever before.

Oh yes, and let’s not forget, he has ended no fewer than eight wars around the world so he obviously deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In a sane world, a delusional leader would be kept firmly in check by a phalanx of aides and advisers to make sure that his fantasies can do no real harm.

But the US political system has shown itself woefully unequal to the task. Trump is surrounded by sycophants and charlatans who are neither able nor willing to rein him in.

Back in 2016, the man who is now his vice-president, JD Vance, said of him: ‘I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.’

And his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who ran against him for the Republican party’s Presidential nomination, said: ‘He is a con artist. He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.’

They were right, of course, yet now they happily lick his boots in the hope of one day inheriting the keys to the Oval Office.

Trump’s instincts are anti-democratic and imperialist. He wants to control everything in sight: Canada, Greenland, Panama, Cuba. You name it, he wants it.

He has chosen the new ‘interim’ president of Venezuela after having kidnapped her predecessor, thus acquiring unlimited access to that country’s oil reserves, and now he seems to think he can pull off the same trick in Iran.

Ever since his chronically inept response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, he has left himself open to the charge that he has been, in effect, Putin’s poodle. Now, in Iran, he is open to the same charge regarding the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent his entire political career trying to entice successive US Presidents into war with Iran.

Until now, not one of them has been foolhardy enough to do Netanyahu’s bidding. But Trump prides himself on being cut from a very different cloth than his predecessors.

What lies behind it all? I have long believed that the best answer is likely to come from a psychologist than from a political analyst. And as luck would have it, a psychologist just happens to be on hand.

His niece, Mary Trump, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, has come up with her own explanation for what her uncle now chooses to call his ‘excursion’ in Iran.

‘This is to keep himself and the world from knowing what an inept, depraved, compromised fraud he is. This is about his unfathomable desperation to avoid being humiliated. He has taken us to war at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that wouldn’t have been enough of a reason if doing so didn’t also coincide with his own self-interest.’

This is what happens when cowards stand by to allow a delusional President indulge his fantasies. Innocent people are killed, and a country is pulverised by bombs and missiles. (None of this, by the way, is to deny that the Iranian regime has been a brutal, corrupt danger to the world and has brought untold misery to millions of Iranians, Gazans, Lebanese and others.)

At the end of this wretched US-Israeli ‘excursion’, the world will be worse, not better, off. When Trump was first elected to the White House in November 2016, I wrote: ‘There is no point trying to deny it any longer: the election of Donald Trump has made the world a much more dangerous place … For the next four years [if only it had been just four years], the world will scarcely dare to breathe as we learn to live with a dangerous and unpredictable president in the White House.’

Predicting the future is always a mug’s game, but just occasionally, we soothsayers get it right.

A madman and an indicted war criminal go to war.

It sounds like the beginning of a dystopian, sci-fi movie, but it is, alas, the world we woke up to this morning.

Thank you, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, for making our world even more dangerous than it already was.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is the perfect example of an unnecessary war. It is also the fulfilment of Netanyahu’s most cherished dream: to inveigle the US into launching an all-out attack on Iran so that Israel can better stake its claim as the Middle East’s unchallenged, nuclear-armed super-power.

Last June’s attacks plainly weren’t enough. Knocking out Iran’s uranium enrichment programme — ‘obliterating’ it, in Trump’s fantasy world — wasn’t enough. Now, nothing less than the overthrow of Iran’s brutal and corrupt leaders will do the job.

Question: when has a war waged only from the skies — no one, thank God, has suggested yet that Israeli or US troops should actually invade Iran — successfully led to regime change?

Does anyone remember Libya, 2011? A UN-authorised, NATO-led bombing campaign against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi, ostensibly in support of anti-Gaddafi rebels, left chaos in its wake and resulted in continuing misery for millions of Libyans.

Even today, fifteen years later, the country is split into two rival entities, fragile, unstable, and riven by deep political divisions.

Iran is not Libya, nor is it Iraq or Afghanistan, two other examples of what can happen when regime change imposed by foreign military intervention goes horribly wrong. No one expects Donald Trump to pick up a history book or even to listen to what his most senior Generals tell him, even though just a few days ago, US media reports were suggesting that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, had warned him that military action against Iran would risk dragging the US into a lengthy war.

No matter. The man who insists that he deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and who claims to have ended eight wars (or is it nine now? I’ve lost count …), has once again authorised the use of military force. Add it to the list: Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Nigeria in the past year alone. (Nigeria? What was that about?)

And here’s the real tragedy. The concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions — which are not unfounded and which are shared by a great many Western powers — were already being addressed in indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

According to the Omanis, who were mediating the talks, Iran has said it would be willing to undertake never to build up a stockpile of weapons-grade enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpile and to allow independent verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

What it hasn’t agreed to is giving up its ballistic missile programme — it argues, rightly, that no other country has been prevented from building up a conventional arsenal — or abandoning its support for its proxy militia groups Hamas, Hizbollah or the Houthis in Yemen.

Let us be clear: the current Iranian regime is a menace to its own people, to the region and to the world. It suppressed the most recent opposition protests with appalling ferocity and has been a destabilising presence in the Middle East for decades.

Does that justify a renewed US and Israeli military assault when Iran is probably weaker than it has been at any time since the revolution of 1979 which overthrew the Shah?

Trump says his objective is ‘to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.’

‘Imminent threats’? What ‘imminent threats’? Not only is it an utter nonsense as a supposed justification for war, it’s not even a plausible excuse.

Both Trump and Netanyahu face difficult elections later this year, and going to war is one of the oldest tricks in the book for political leaders under pressure.

However long this latest war lasts, and however it ends, the likelihood is that the world will be more dangerous, not less dangerous, when the bombs eventually stop falling.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for both the people of Iran and the people of Israel as they live with the consequences of their leaders’ choices.