Chris Whiteside's Blog

After the Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, let it be known that he had warned the Prime Minister not to appoint Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the USA - an interesting comment since Lammy was Foreign Secretary at the time and would presumably have had to sign off on the appointment - a "Labour source" told the Guido Fawkes site, (see here ) “ If Lammy’s political instincts are telling him it’s time to make his move, it can only mean that Keir is entirely safe. ”

 “There’s a theory about the Russo-Ukrainian war that is designed to satisfy the innate desire of the contrarians to be 'against the current thing.'” “It also satisfies the desire of anti-Western westerners to blame … the West.” "Best of all, that theory allows you to appear thoughtful and nuanced while everyone else is being hysterical about Russian aggression. Letting go of it is near impossible, because ones ego and intellectualism are at stake." "The theory goes like this: Russia invaded Ukraine in preemptive self-defense against American aggression, embodied by NATO’s arrogant eastward expansion. Had America simply shown restraint and honored its alleged promises to Gorbachev, none of this would have happened. It’s a compelling narrative - one that transforms a war of conquest (born out of ideology) into a story of Western arrogance and Russian victimhood." "There’s only one problem with that theory: it’s almost entirely fiction . A very carefully ...

This is what Angela Rayner, then deputy leader of the opposition, tweeted when Rishi Sunak became Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister without calling a general election:

Wednesday 4th February 2026:  Sir Keir Starmer at this week’s PMQs ‘ Morgan McSweeney is an essential part of my team. He helped me change the Labour party and win an election. I have confidence in him. ’ Sunday 8th February 2026: Morgan McSweeney resigns. He said: "After careful reflection, I have decided to resign from the Government. The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself. "When asked, I advised the Prime Minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice. In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient. In the circumstances, the only honourable course is to step aside."

  And Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris - known to popular history as "Bomber Harris" - was as good as his word. The point has also been made that the present Russian government seems to have attacked Ukraine with a similar naive belief that they could bomb the hell out of Ukraine's civilian population, but it would be an outrage if anyone did anything to them ...

 

The Crewkerne Gazette has put together a parody of Major General Stanley's song from "The Pirates of Penzance" - this one is called "I am the very model of a modern Prime Minister." If you watch it, you will probably find it worth watching to the very end: there is a surprise twist in the last few seconds!

Let me make clear at the start that I am not in favour of racism against anyone, whether their skin is white, back, brown, yellow, blue or any other colour, whether they are Jewish, Muslim or a member of any other faith group or none, and whoever the racism is coming from. Anyone may fall foul of the temptation to slip into racist modes of thought, anyone can be a victim of racism, and the suggestion that people of any particular colour are either uniquely guilty of or uniquely free from racism is itself racist. I am in favour of sensible attempts to educate people against racism and extremism. However, all such programmes must be constructed carefully to ensure that they do not become subject to over-reach and in particular, do not appear to target what the majority of society would regard as legitimate mainstream opinions. The danger of this is all the greater because it is usually the product either of genuine misunderstandings and miscommunication or of unconscious biases on the pa...

The CPC is to seek a retrial in the Elbit Systems case. I presume that on the charges where the jury acquitted the defendants those verdicts will stand, but there should indeed be retrials on those charges where the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

When the history of newspapers in Britain is written, Eddie Shah deserves to be remembered as the man who started a revolution in the industry by freeing the press from the print unions and introducing new computer-based technology to the nationals. His actions were hugely controversial at the time, but after his death in late December 2025, even The Guardian could write of him in their obituary published yesterday,  " Shah sparked the changes that broke the unions’ power and allowed the introduction of new printing methods, exploited first by Rupert Murdoch and subsequently by every other national newspaper group including the Guardian. From the grey and inky pages and grainy black-and-white photographs of the 1970s and early 80s, the newspapers burst into colour reproduction, more innovative designs and speedier and uninterrupted print and circulation runs. " They quoted Eddie Shah himself as saying “ It wasn’t a failure because our innovations benefited the rest of the ind...

 “I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.” — Benjamin Disraeli

 

 

This was Andrew Neil's monologue at "Times at One" yesterday, and posted on X "BETRAYAL  And still the revelations about Peter Mandelson’s betrayals from the heart of government come, each one more jaw-dropping than the last.  We learned earlier this week that he’d tipped off his convicted paedophile mate about an imminent €500bn bailout of the Eurozone, advance information hugely useful to a financial fixer like Jeffrey Epstein.   Even more incredibly, we saw how he’d advised America’s most powerful banker, via Epstein, to threaten the British government over plans to tax bankers’ bonuses in the wake of the Great Financial Crash, caused by said bankers.  Which the powerful banker then did in an intimidating call to then Chancellor Alastair Darling. A call inspired by the government’s very own business secretary, one Peter Mandelson.   Now we learn that the moment Mandelson was given a note about a highly sensitive meeting between Darling and then US T...

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) Yes, I have used this quote before, but in the past few years I have found that reminding myself of it has become more and more necessary given the number of terrible things happening in the world and sily thigs being said and written about them.

Today is the 52nd anniversary of the M62 coach bombing, one of the worst terrorist atrocities ever to take place on British soil. Twelve people, including a woman and two small children, were killed when a bomb exploded on a coach carrying off-duty soldiers and their families. An entire family was wiped out by the bomb. Another 38 people, including men, women and children were injured. The authorities believed the attack to be the work of the IRA, who never formally claimed responsibility but implicitly admitted later that this and another two incidents had been " authorised operations carried out by units of the Irish Republican Army. " Here is a plaque commemorating the victims at the M62 Hartshead Moor service station near to where the blast occurred. We will remember them.

“One of the reasons why I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over, and the two together form a coalition against the ordinary worker and the ordinary consumer.” Milton Friedman

Andrew Willshire, founder of the independent strategic analytics consultancy Diametrical Ltd, has a great piece on Conservative Home about Kemi Bdenoch's path to renewing the Conservative party and the internal contradictions in the arguments of her critics, particularly those of the recent Conservative defectors to Reform UK. You can read the whole piece at Andrew Willshire: Reform is a Frankenstein’s monster of a party | Conservative Home but here are a few extracts "Ever since the election, there has been a fashion among parts of the right-wing commentator class to tour news studios to demand that the Conservative party have some sort of “reckoning”, an “inquisition” into how and why it failed." "More particularly, it is apparent that the reckoning that they want is primarily for the so-called “Lib Dems in the party” to be expelled. By this account, it was solely the fault of these 40 or so MPs that 14 years of Conservative government failed to result in the New J...

I have written a number of articles on my blog about cases  When clever people do stupid things  and about  Why clever people do stupid things . You will rarely find a more example of a brilliant man who repeatedly does incredibly stupid things than Lord Peter Mandelson. I suspect future historians will gasp in disbelief at how, between 1997 and 2024, three consecutive Labour Prime Ministers (Blair, Brown and Starmer) appointed Peter Mandelson to some of the most important jobs in their power to bestow, and then kept bringing him back and appointing him to new high offices after he repeatedly crashed and burned in disgrace. The temptation to appoint him must have arisen because when he was at his most intelligent, Mandelson was one of the most able, effective and persuasive people Labour had. But it should have been obvious after at most the second time he had to resign in disgrace that when it comes to matters of personal ethics, Mandelson doesn't have the common sense o...

Jeremy Clarkson is not always right. But every now and again he hits the nail on the head. I think he may have a point here ...

"Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them." Thomas Sowell

I put up a quote at the weekend from a column in The Times by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The honesty of the column enormously impressed me: how many senior politicians an you think of who would write for publication that they are concerned about their successor repeating their own mistake? Rishi argues that the politicians' dilemma is this - almost every reputable economist will tell you that if you want to provide decent public services while protecting the standards of living of everyone in society, especially the most vulnerable, the most important  thing you should concentrate on is economic growth. (Even Starmer appeared to understand that at the outset.) But that is "Jam tomorrow" and is rarely at the top of the priority list for swing voters. You can't deliver a better society without growth, and you can't deliver growth if you listen to every trend on social media and the newspapers (or if you listen to a single word that delusional people like the...