We are being governed by a load of muppets. That is not my judgement, but that of an anonymous Labour MP, who told the Telegraph that the UK prime minister has been forced into sanctioning Israel by ‘muppet’ MPs who are ‘freaked out’ by email campaigns from Gaza activists and are worried about the anti-Israel Green Party stealing their seats.

Andy Burnham and his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, will today announce a ban on goods and some services from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, among other sanctions on the Jewish State. The move is part of what Miliband has described as a ‘comprehensive resetting’ of the UK’s relations with Israel.

That is where we have got to in 2026. Britain now makes foreign policy to appease the most contemptible fringes of the far left. With a majority of 157, you’d have thought that the Labour government would not need to bend to these ‘freaked out’ backbenchers. But no.

With Sir Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras up for grabs in the coming weeks, and with the Greens as serious contenders, Burnham cannot afford to relax. Such is the deplorable state of British politics on the left: national self-interest is happily thrown away in the hope of staving off electoral disaster.

Theobald of Cambridge won’t ring a lot of bells these days. But for many Jews – particularly British Jews – this is where almost 900 years of suffering begins. He was the iniquitous scoundrel who, in 1144 in Norwich, falsely claimed that a local boy, William, had been killed by the Jews as part of their malevolent rituals. This was the first recorded instance of the blood libel, the ‘baby killers’ calumny that has been levelled at the Jews so maliciously ever since. Reader, Theobald was Jewish. ‘The commission of the crime was no secret to me’, he lied, after converting to Christianity.

Which brings us back to Miliband. Last week, Britain’s most influential Jewish politician, straight from a meeting with unnamed figures who had been ‘on the ground’ in Gaza, released a video filled with lurid allegations against Israel and its ‘horrific’ actions in the Hamas-run territory. Surprise, surprise, infanticide formed the centrepiece. ‘You know, the stories that people were telling me, of medicines being blocked, children dying while waiting for vital life-saving treatment’, he drearily intoned.

This emotive little clip was designed to set the stage for Labour’s new, hostile set of British policies towards the only democracy in the Middle East. ‘We as a UK government… have got to act, and act more decisively than we have’, Miliband concluded.

Ostensibly, Britain’s coming trade embargo against Israel is a response to the bullying of Palestinians by Jewish extremists in the West Bank. As reprehensible as those people are, those carrying out such crimes against the Palestinians number in the low hundreds at best, out of a population of about 530,000 ‘settlers’ and 10million Israelis.

Should confronting these extremists really be Britain’s priority? The Palestinian side, meanwhile, is infested with jihadism, which threatens us here at home almost as much as the Israelis, in a region notably short on democracy.

Here are four of the main things the British public stands to lose from Labour’s reset:

First, economic advantage. Bilateral trade between the UK and Israel stood at £5.9 billion last year, with a healthy British surplus bringing in billions in profits to the economy and supporting many thousands of jobs.

Second, security. Mossad has saved innumerable British lives with tip-offs over the years, a fact that has been openly acknowledged by MI5 as well as by the Israelis. When the British Army’s Challenger 3 tanks enter service next year, they will come equipped with the Trophy active defence system, which is an Israeli product similar to a mini Iron Dome. The British Army’s Watchkeeper drone is also Israeli, built in Leicester by Elbit, whose British arm employs almost 700 people.

Third, tech. One in seven boxes of medicine issued in Britain is produced by Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical company. The ‘capsule camera’ used by the NHS so that tens of thousands of patients can avoid colonoscopies each year was invented by an Israeli missile engineer.

Fourth, international standing. It is not just the Israelis who have threatened retaliation against this hostile move by potentially removing Britain from involvement in the reconstruction of Gaza – Donald Trump has threatened the same.

Even before today’s announcement, the American administration accused Britain of anti-Semitism in response to Miliband’s video. Should the notoriously mercurial Trump turn this rhetoric into policy, the UK could be very vulnerable indeed. Can our economy cope with draconian American tariffs? And what if the White House were to recognise Argentina’s claim on the Falklands, as some Israeli ministers are now urging it to do?

The supposed trigger for Burnham and Miliband’s sanctions is Israeli building on E1, a four-mile area that would adjoin the West Bank Jewish town of Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem proper. The UK says this settlement threatens the prospect of a ‘two-state solution’ – which, as Simon Sebag Montefiore put it when Andrew Fox and I interviewed him on our podcast, The Brink, is an idea that has been embraced with all the fervour of a new religion.

There’s no need to go into the matter in detail. Suffice to say that the Palestinians have rejected a state that would fulfil all their demands, not once but at least twice. In the first instance, during the talks at Camp David mediated by Bill Clinton in 2000, Palestinian president Yasser Arafat was offered 92 per cent of the West Bank, with Israeli land to make up the difference, plus Gaza and a capital in East Jerusalem. Roughly the same offer was tabled again by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.

Both were turned down. ‘I tell people what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it’, Clinton recently lamented. ‘You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open and all the possibilities weren’t still there.’

Only you can, it seems, when your jihadi brethren curry the sympathies of the world – not least the British government – by carrying out the worst atrocities since the Holocaust on 7 October 2023, then flooding us with propaganda in which they pose as the victims. That is perhaps the most deplorable aspect of all this. In our foreign policy, which is now apparently controlled as much by Labour backbenchers as the Foreign Office, Britain is treating the Middle East’s only democracy as an enemy and the jihadis, tyrants and corrupt regimes as friends.

Why the obsessive focus on the faults of our allies rather than the far greater evils of our enemies? Truly, we are undoing ourselves. As some readers may recall, before the religion of the two-state solution – as well as the national self-loathing and other assorted liberal dogmas that now grip our political elites – we had something called Christianity. Although I can’t claim to be a believer myself, perhaps Miliband, Burnham and the others might benefit from meditating on Matthew 23:24, in which Christ criticises the hypocrisy of the Pharisees: ‘You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.’

Don’t you love it when virtue-signalling goes wrong? When some progressive ponce gets so tangled in the weeds of woke jargon that they end up spouting pure shite? We’ve had not one but two such delicious moral implosions this past week, and even better they’ve involved two of the most insufferable women to ever draw breath. Buckle in.

First up was Miriam Margolyes, the Harry Potter actor turned chat-show parasite who never shuts the fuck up. She’s on my TV so often that I’ve seriously considered taking out a restraining order. She titillates the Radio 4 classes by saying ‘front bottom’ and recounting how she once wanked off a man in a bush in Edinburgh. Last week, finally, her ceaseless yapping landed her in hot water.

She was on This Morning, oozing smugness from every orifice, displaying her rectitude as usual. Put it away, ma’am! Everyone’s welcome in Britain, she was saying, regardless of their origins, yada yada. Then she turned to the host, poor old Andi Peters, who’s black. ‘What are you?’, she demanded. ‘You’re a mix, aren’t you?’, she said, no doubt causing mass wincing among the jobless hordes who watch this cursed show. Then came her killer question: ‘You’ve got a black daddy and a white mummy?’

Peters looked bamboozled, as well he might: he probably hasn’t been so crassly interrogated about his racial pedigree since the school playground. ‘Both my parents are black’, he awkwardly chuckled. But Margolyes wasn’t done. You’re not ‘deeply black’, she insisted. ‘You’re what I would call high yella.’ Jesus Christ, Miriam. Using a racial term described by the OED as ‘offensive’ and ‘outdated’ on daytime TV? Couldn’t you just have talked about your front bottom again?

My point, she said, is that ‘we welcome everybody’. Even high yellas! One envisions the producers whispering ‘Wrap this shit up’ in Andi’s ear lest Margolyes start prattling about mulattos. It could happen to any of us, I guess. One minute you’re breathlessly broadcasting your anti-racist credentials, the next you’re badgering a black man on live TV about his exact concentrations of melanin. Easy mistake. Margolyes hilariously made matters worse when she addressed the ‘race controversy’. I’m just ‘interested in how black people, fat people and cripples feel about who they are’, she said. Strewth. And what about spastics, Miriam?

Even among damp liberals who are usually tickled pink by Margolyes’ court-jester eccentricities, there’s been discomfort with her racial blather. Funny these folk weren’t likewise perturbed when she said ‘Hitler has won’ and turned Jews from ‘compassionate’ people into ‘vicious, genocidal’ warmongers. Oh sorry, I forgot: they don’t give a shit about Jews. Yet to my mind there’s a perverse logic to Margolyes’ televised racialism. It’s the bloody afterbirth of a cult of identity that instructs us not to ignore race but to see it.

A couple of generations ago, the virtuous thing was to approach individuals as just that – individuals, not proxies for their race. Now the ‘virtuous’ thing is to wang on about ‘white privilege’ and ‘black oppression’ and to treat everyone you meet as a bundle of pigment requiring either reprimand or pity. The end result of such cloying racial grandstanding is a foghorn celeb going on TV and basically saying: ‘You’re half black and half white and I DON’T CARE!’ Character, Miriam, not colour.

Next up was Stella Creasy, the Member of Parliament for Stella Creasy. Roll up, roll up and hear about how a ‘proud feminist’ ended up running cover for a regressive religious festival at which unholy women were segregated from men!

Yesterday, Creasy took to X, where she lives, to say what a hoot she was having at Walthamstow’s Milad Al Nabi march to celebrate Muhammad’s birthday. But eagle-eyed X users noticed something missing from her fawning, slack-jawed video clips. ‘Where are the women, Stella?’, asked Times columnist Jenni Russell.

Then the funniest thing happened. Ms Creasy posted a follow-up video of herself gurning in front of a tiny assembly of black-clad Muslim women. Some had their faces covered in the fashion of Islamic obscurantism. One pictures poor Stella meekly making her way through the mob of Islamo blokes, crying ‘Ladies? Ladies?’ in a desperate effort to locate the fairer sex amid the misogyny of it all. But it was too late to hide the truth: this preening self-styled feminist had whooped for a festival and a religion in which women are treated as second-class citizens, their sinful flesh cloaked, their blabbing mouths gagged.

This is the same Stella Creasy who protested against London’s blokes-only Garrick Club. As the Spectator quipped, at the Garrick ‘male-only membership was misogyny’, while at an Islamo-festival ‘male-only marching is multiculturalism’. Honestly, is there anything more tragic than white liberal women obsequiously rubbing shoulders with Islam, a religion that would happily put them in a black sack? Creasy bows to the religion of transgenderism, too. I hope she’s explained to her Muslim mates that you can have a schlong and be a woman and thus Friday prayers segregation is a transphobic obscenity that denies the fluidity of gender. I’m sure they’ll update their policies accordingly.

In her attempt to prove she’s not racist, Margolyes asked a black man how black he is. In her bid to prove she’s not ‘Islamophobic’ – and to keep winning Muslim votes – Creasy cheered a gathering that she would have damned as sexist in every other circumstance. That’s virtue-signalling for you. One minute you’re yapping about ‘justice’, the next you’re cheering the placing of rapists in women’s jails. One minute you’re saying racism stinks, the next you’re saying ‘high yella’ to a black man on TV. One minute you’re a feminist, the next you’re making excuses for a religious ideology that treats women like shit. If this is virtue, what the hell is vice?