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Yet another crisis has emerged for the government. Rachel Reeves has admitted to breaching housing regulations, having rented her family home in Southwark without a rental licence since moving into Whitehall. Reeves and her husband rented their home through an agency. Reeves initially blamed the letting agent, but emails from July last year revealed they were both aware of the matter. The agent apologised, took the main share of responsibility, and Reeves also admitted failure.
Kemi Badenoch has called for Reeves’ resignation. The scandal follows Angela Rayner’s avoidance of stamp duty and Rushanara Ali’s resignation as Homelessness Minister after hiking her tenants’ rent. And it comes ahead of the government’s Renters’ Rights Act (to be implemented mid-2026) and an expected imposition of National Insurance on rental income in the autumn budget. Both will conspire to pile pressure on small landlords.
The relations between Prince Andrew and the Royal Family have dominated the news cycle this week. The posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl three weeks ago has mounted pressure on the Royal Family to do something about Andrew. Titles have been stripped (now known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor) and his eviction from Windsor Lodge is in progress. He remains, however, eighth in line of succession.
In the Commons this week Nigel Farage led a Ten Minute Rule Motion for Britain’s withdrawal from the ECHR. It was defeated 96-154. Farage was heckled, jeered and sneered at throughout his speech, mainly by Liberal Democrats. The vote saw Tories and Reform in alliance against a broad Lib-Lab bloc.
Pressure to leave the ECHR reflects a hardening of the public mood against the liberties and abuses of asylum seekers. Earlier this week a man (Wayne Broadhurst, 49) in Uxbridge was stabbed to death while walking his dog by an Afghan asylum seeker. Two others were also stabbed, one a 14-year-old boy.
It follows the Epping asylum seeker who was convicted for sexually assaulting a woman and a girl, and accidentally let out last week, turning up in Finsbury Park after a two-day manhunt. The government succeeded in repatriating him to Ethiopia this week by paying him £500. The government is considering accommodating asylum seekers in military barracks in Inverness and East Sussex to stem public discontent.
Blog
Russia-Ukraine War – Four Possible Scenarios by Adrian Hill
The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington has forecast four possible scenarios of what might happen in Ukraine. Adrian Hill gives his comments, based on thirty years as a soldier and diplomat often in countries at war with the neighbours. He suggests that the fourth scenario – which the CSIS considers the least likely – is not impossible, not least because ‘In war the impossible is what usually happens.’
Media
Madeline Grant in The Spectator: Landlords need protecting too
Christopher Howse in The Telegraph: What will we really call Mr Mountbatten Windsor?
Key Points
Crisis? Perpetual Crisis?
In recent months the Starmer government appears to be in perpetual crisis, to the point of normality. Starmer will stick by Reeves for the time being as he knows losing his Chancellor will undermine his authority (as it did for Liz Truss) though the public are increasingly making an association between hypocrisy and the government. This comes as a disappointment to Labour’s electors who were promised that they were voting for sensible grown-ups (aka adults-in-the-room).
Starmer is in an awkward position. He is caught in an emerging gulf between left-democrat and right-democrat anti-liberal doctrines on the economy, foreign policy and immigration. Starmer has been playing it safe, taking positions to accommodate both (e.g., reducing immigration, increasing taxes on wealth, denouncing Reform policies as racist, NHS prostration). This could succeed, but so far he has been floundering. And he hasn’t been helped by incompetencies – from the Epping asylum seeker to Rayner and Reeves.
Inside Farage’s Mind
Farage is no fool. In fact, he reads. He reads about British political history. Here is a short excerpt from a recent interview by Bloomberg on The Mishal Hussain Show:
Hussain: What are you reading at the moment?
Farage: The last book I read was Mr. Balfour’s Poodle [by Roy Jenkins, 1954] which was about the constitutional crisis between the Commons and the Lords.
Hussain: In the early twentieth century?
Farage: The principles are exactly the same. By the way, the Salisbury Convention has been there since 1911.
Hussain: Why are you interested in that?
Farage: Because say we get elected on the manifesto to say we’re going to do X,Y and Z. What if the House of Lords were to block us? What if the Civil Service were to block us?
Hussain: You’re going back a hundred years to try and find the answers to that?
The surprise, disgust and bewilderment are a window into the soul of the interviewer and the contemporary Liberal mind. The notion that a political leader would read about something that took place a hundred years ago to better understand the present is evidently mad. Though Aristotle, Plutarch, Machiavelli and some others may disagree.
But it’s more interesting knowing what Farage thinks. ‘Analysis’ of Farage is often quite narrow, comparing him to Trump or a right-wing European democrat; more imaginative views look back to English political types like the radical, roguish scourge John Wilkes (1725-1797) (of whom Cherie Blair is a far-off descendent).
But the most informative comparison, to my mind, is the one Farage implicitly made himself: Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891).
Parnell was the first effective Irish nationalist parliamentarian, working closely with Gladstone for Home Rule in Ireland but failing to get it through the Lords three times in the 1880s. He had an illicit affair which condemned him to ignominy and died young, aged 45 – though he lived on in the minds of his admirers, not least in Joyce. (Parnell’s is a life made for an opera.)
Between an illiterate Irish peasantry and hard-edged Irish revolutionaries Parnell was the respectable glue. He went to Magdelene College, Cambridge but was sent down for bad behaviour. He cared nothing for ideas though was fond of the earth sciences and engineering. He started off as a nervous, shy speaker and would become a rhetorician of mystical force (a certain vigour in his eyes was often remarked upon).
Parnell was a troublemaker, like Farage. He was an agitator, a grit-in-the-oyster character. Perhaps Farage used to see himself in this fashion – and it’s not an unreasonable comparison. Parnell knew that politics was about timing – that it was musical, despite not having musical talent – and Farage has shown a similar understanding.
Parnell died too young to have officially ruled Ireland: but Farage is in the running to rule Britain. The main question about Farage is therefore whether his agitating abilities can be transferred to high office. Of this we must remain uncertain.
