Monday
You would have thought that after 35 years of writing for the Guardian I would have mastered some of the basics of holiday protocol by now. Apparently not. While I had remembered to let the newsdesk know I wouldn’t be writing the political sketch for two weeks, it had completely slipped my mind to inform the Saturday editor. So rather than leave her with the headache of an empty page, you’re getting an extra dose of me this week. And, in truth, I don’t mind because, for what is a usually empty August, there’s an awful lot still going on. I’ve even told the newsdesk that I’d like to write next Friday as I can’t pass up the moment Nigel Farage celebrates his byelection victory against the “establishment”, AKA a comedian with a dustbin on his head. This summer has been quite the reckoning for Reform. First some excellent investigative reporting from the Guardian and the Sunday Times, followed by even some of the party’s most loyal followers in the Spectator and the Telegraph beginning to turn. We will know the game is up when GB News begins to have doubts about Nige. It can only be a matter of time.
This time last year, Reform was dominating the polls and setting the news agenda with weekly press conferences. Now it’s as if Nige has placed himself in a witness protection programme as he tries to avoid anyone asking about his financial arrangements. There again, it must be tricky for Nige to remember what’s what as it all seems so hideously complicated. There’s the £5m from Thai crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne that was first a gift to spend on Ferraris, then to pay for his security and now could be a downpayment on the £1m per year Nige said he would need to make it worth his while to return to full-time politics. Then there are funds travelling from various offshore bank accounts from George Cottrell – the boy who liked to call Nige “Daddy” – to his mum, Fiona, and then on to Dicky Tice. Some of which – no one is quite sure which – seemed to end up in Reform’s bank accounts. Nor can Nige even quite remember when he did decide he was politically active despite owning a majority share in Reform. Confusion doesn’t seem to begin to cover this. Nige still has a week to get his story straight for the Clacton voters.
Tuesday
What with one thing and another – first Jill’s cancer and then breaking her shoulder – it’s looking unlikely we will be making it to Minneapolis to see our daughter, Anna, and her husband, Robert, for a second year. . Instead they have come to visit us for a week, so we have been trying to plan fun things to do in London. Today, given Robert is American, we thought we should all go to see the exhibition to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence at the British Museum.
Truly, five minutes that none of us will get back. I’m trying to be generous to the museum here. Perhaps the trustees and curators have become so obsessed with not tearing the Bayeux Tapestry to shreds that they completely took their eye off the ball. Because this exhibition was an embarrassment. A darkened room with just four items on display. A peace medal made by Paul Revere. A tomahawk that doubled as a peace pipe and had been given to a British general. A wampum belt that had been made by Native Americans. All of which looked like they had been dug out of the museum’s storage department as an afterthought.
Then the piece de resistance: a facsimile of a declaration of independence, complete with a notice saying that the original, which is kept in Chichester, would be on display in September. Thanks for nothing.
What was the British Museum thinking? You’d have been disappointed if any of that had been on display at your local library. I guarantee that anyone coming to my house to see the ceramics I have collected over the years would have had a better time.
Wednesday
No one wants to kick a man when he’s down, but I can’t help thinking that Jason Arday – the professor of sociology who has just resigned from the University of Cambridge – has been badly let down by his former employer. Surely someone must have thought of putting his PhD thesis through a plagiarism detector before offering him a job? The most alarming thing about Arday is that he seems clearly unwell. A fantasist who makes it hard to take almost anything he says as the truth. The list is seemingly endless: his claim to be a world-class athlete who once ran 600 miles in six days, or saying he had been part of the epic TV documentary series Seven Up. A programme that has been watched by millions of people over the years.
Somehow, though, Cambridge managed to overlook all this and more. The greater the fable, the more the university defended him. And in the process it has done far more damage to him than if it had quietly and systematically gone through the evidence and declined to offer him a professorship. Thanks for applying, but no thanks.
Worse still, Cambridge has done a huge disservice to other academics of colour because it has opened the gateway to rightwing critics who will now claim that many other professors at other universities got their jobs on a nod and a wink. Jason has a book coming out later this month. If Simon & Schuster has any thought for its own credibility and Arday’s wellbeing it will quietly announce the book has been delayed “indefinitely”.
Thursday
Maybe there’s something in theair, but Kemi Badenoch seems to be having a bit of a moment. Having appeared on the Political Currency podcast this week to accuse Reform of “woke” politics and to rubbish Andy Burnham for having done nothing of any value – er, it’s only been two weeks and he’s already promised to solve social care. I guess there’s no pleasing some people.
Badenoch has now nailed herself to the cross of defending the former neo-nazi Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who was jailed for harassing the Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger. In Badenoch’s view, Bonehill-Paine is a reformed man and deserved a second chance to serve as a Tory councillor because all he would be doing was sorting out the “bin collections”. Bonehill-Paine clearly had second thoughts when some of his CV turned out to be nearly as creative as Jason Arday’s and he withdrew as a Conservative candidate. Only for Kemi to appoint him as a Tory special adviser.
Now I’m all for second chances. But Badenoch didn’t seem to think the Labour cabinet minister Lou Haigh deserved rehabilitation to atone for her phone fraud: a conviction that predated Joshua’s by many years. As far as Badenoch was concerned, Haigh still had to repay her debt to society. It’s also curious to know what is and isn’t acceptable in today’s Tory party. A bit of previous for antisemitism and Hitler loving? Just fine. Believing in net zero and the European convention on human rights, not so much. Grant Shapps has been banned from standing as a Tory MP because he happens to believe in the climate crisis. There again, maybe Kemi understands her party better than most. The columnist Tim Stanley caused huge waves in the Telegraph by writing that maybe climate change was true after all, and got 9,000 comments of complaint. All for saying what 99.9% of the rest of us know to be true.
Friday
It’s been hard to keep up with the excesses and moral corruption of the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino. As I write, various football bodies and national organisations have expressed their lack of confidence in him but for the time being he appears to be just about hanging on to his job. Maybe he will even ride this one out. But it has struck me that one person has remained silent throughout the scandal: David Beckham. For the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Beckham was paid millions to be a Fifa ambassador. His one contribution was to say he hadn’t spotted any gay people being persecuted. Top detective work from DB. This time round in the US, David seemed content being an unofficial ambassador, there to be filmed sitting in the VIP seats wearing a suit and looking miserable most of the time as he notched up another £24m that he doesn’t need in advert endorsements. He seemed to be Infantino’s mute puppet. He said nothing when Gianni devalued Fifa by awarding Donald Trump a peace prize. He said nothing when Gianni introduced hydration breaks and extended the half-time interval during the final. He said nothing when Gianni bowed to Trump’s demand to overturn Folarin Balogun’s red card. And he has said nothing while Gianni has tried to sell off stakes and reinvent the competition as an even fatter cash cow. It all feels so sad. A mini tragedy. David used to be almost a national treasure. Someone who appeared to have both a sense of what is right and wrong and also a good sense of humour. Now he just appears to be obsessed with wealth and status. Over the last few months, he could have been a voice for the country, speaking up against the commercialisation and obvious corruption of Infantino’s regime. We would all have loved him for it. Instead he has trashed his brand by being complicit. The only obvious reason for his silence is that either he doesn’t think Infantino has done anything wrong, or he just isn’t bothered as long as the cash keeps coming. It would be nice to be proved wrong. We want our Becks back.
