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Internal opposition removed. Powerful capitals and political forces neutered. Enough overlapping responsibility in her team to ensure she’s the only possible arbiter of actionable power. By appointing a new slate of European commissioners in her own image, president Ursula von der Leyen this week ensured she will enter her second five-year stint at the head of the EU’s executive with an ever-tighter grip on the Brussels machine.

On Tuesday, von der Leyen unveiled a tapestry of political compromises. She handed out grandiose titles to important member states such as France, Spain and Italy while keeping the key levers of power in the hands of her allies — and herself.

A day earlier, she disposed of her most prominent internal critic, the erstwhile French commissioner Thierry Breton, with a deft piece of political horse-trading; convincing French President Emmanuel Macron to send a more amenable replacement in exchange for one of those grandiose titles. 

In a maze of overlapping responsibilities and shared policy control, von der Leyen has unveiled a team of “equals” with enough complexity and chaos to ensure she is above the fray.

Even people involved in the formation of her team — known as the college of commissioners — describe it as “a matrix”, “a complicated structure” and “a lot of cross links”. 

Those on the outside are more blunt.

“It’s deliciously balanced in a way that there are enough people on each issue to ensure they will never all agree,” said a senior EU diplomat involved in the lobbying for commission portfolios. “Which means she’s always going to be the one making the final decision.”

“Without a doubt, she’s coming into this next five years even stronger than before,” the diplomat added.

At an informal gathering of her new team of commissioners, von der Leyen encouraged the five incumbents who served in her first term to explain to the 21 newcomers what to expect. The message was clear: the supporting chorus might be different, but the lead actor remains the same. 

“Welcome to The Ursula Show,” quipped one person in attendance.

An admitted workaholic, the slight 65-year-old lives in a small apartment on the 13th floor of the EU’s Berlaymont headquarters. Former office space has been refashioned into sparse living quarters, meaning she sleeps just footsteps from her desk.

“She’s the hardest working of all of us,” said a person who works closely with her. “It’s often brutal to keep up.”

Diligent and details-focused to the point of driving some of her aides to distraction, von der Leyen has over the past five years greatly expanded the power of her office at the expense of both EU institutions and the prime ministers and presidents she was appointed by.

She responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by centralising decision-making around herself, delivering outcomes such as a pan-EU vaccine programme and a rapid sanctions programme against Moscow that was co-ordinated with the US White House.

As domestic political turmoil has weakened the clout of Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — two offices that have traditionally steered EU priorities — von der Leyen has pitched herself as the answer to Henry Kissinger’s mythical question: “who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”.

Few decisions are now reached in Brussels without the approval or at least acquiescence of “the 13th floor”.

Critics say she routinely overstretches her powers and bypasses proper due process. She is subject to an ongoing legal demand to publish private text messages with Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, during the race for Covid-19 vaccine contracts.

But admirers, including many EU leaders, revere her ability to get things done by cutting through the byzantine layers of European bureaucracy.

Born in Brussels in 1958, where her father was one of the original German Eurocrats, von der Leyen enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1978 under a false name and police protection due to kidnap threats related to her father’s prominent political career.

She later graduated in Hannover as a doctor of medicine, before raising her young family in California for four years while her husband worked at Stanford University.

A mother of seven, she was first elected to the German state parliament of Lower Saxony in 2003. She would serve 14 years in chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, first as minister for family affairs, then labour and social affairs and finally defence.

In 2019 she was plucked from relative obscurity by Merkel and Macron to lead the European Commission after more prominent alternatives failed to win political backing. She landed in Brussels underestimated by many who assumed she could be easily manipulated by national capitals and the commission bureaucracy.

Those same bureaucrats now worry that with five years’ experience, a more amenable commission and continued weakness in Paris and Berlin, nothing is left to stand in the way of her personal ambition and drive.

henry.foy@ft.com

It was a temp job that sounded almost too good to be true for a university student fed up with handing out nightclub flyers for peanuts in Brighton.

During the holidays, a university friend of mine had been making almost triple what I was spritzing perfumes in the glamorous beauty halls of Harrods.

The luxury store was one Tube ride away from where my parents lived in zone 6, and I wanted in.

What neither of us knew at the time, more than 15 years ago, was that behind the glitz and glamour of this famous department store lay a world of abuse.

From my first interview in a west London townhouse, run by an agency which hired mostly young actresses for ad hoc shifts on the ground floor beauty halls, the rot was evident.

We were told that pencil skirts should be so tight that we should struggle to take a big step, heels had to be a certain height and make-up was mandatory.

It soon became clear that these rules, which were strictly enforced, had little to do with creating a polished image for the department store and everything to do with something far more sinister.

When Mohamed Fayed walked the shop floor, women considered not to his taste were asked to disappear. I was once threatened for not wearing enough make-up.

I have a memory of receiving a strange call about where to meet someone after my shift.

When my bewildered response made it clear that mine was the wrong number, the caller hung up.

I never got to the bottom of it, but it was all part and parcel of a toxic environment where nothing felt as it seemed.

The abuse at Harrods under Fayed was an open secret.

This was a dangerous man convinced he had the power to do whatever he wanted to vulnerable young women.

Sadly, he was right. Lawyers are now representing 37 alleged victims of the late former Harrods owner, but I suspect that there are many more.

I have always been aghast at how such high levels of abuse could have gone on so openly in such a well-known institution.

“About time,” a message sent to me from an old school friend read after the stories of abuse were published. About time.

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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Conservative brand was “bust and broken” as the party’s leadership pledged to fight the next general election bashing believers in the green transition and “net zero” policies.

Addressing over 3,000 people gathered at a conference centre in Birmingham, Farage declared: “This weekend is when Reform UK comes of age.”

With a huge union jack hanging over the stage, Farage entered the auditorium on Friday afternoon doing US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s signature move of pointing at the audience, many of whom were wearing caps emblazoned with the words “Make Britain Great Again”.

Farage announced this week that he was ending the arcane corporate structure the party has had since its inception in 2019, and would therefore be relinquishing his majority shareholding. 

The existing company would be dissolved, and a new “limited company with guarantee” set up. “You the members will own this party, not me,” Farage said on Friday, to rapturous applause.

The MP for Clacton in Essex also vowed to model the party’s strategy going forward on that of the Liberal Democrats, by building a strong base of local campaigners and ruthlessly targeting seats where the party came second in the last general election on top of its five wins.

Earlier in the day, deputy leader Richard Tice told the Financial Times the party planned to fight the next election against the “extreme cult of net zero”.

“In the same way that immigration for us was a big battleground, I want to make the next general election about net zero,” he said on the fringes of the conference.

“Both main parties are completely obsessed with it, they’re both completely wrong and it’s already killing our jobs in steel, automotive, oil refineries.”

Tice said the party would focus its campaigning where they saw Labour as most vulnerable, in the North East, coastal cities and the industrial Midlands, where “traditional socially conservative working-class [people] are being shafted by a high-tax, no-growth environment and by high energy bills”.

The party came second in 98 seats in July, of which 89 were won by Labour.

Tice said senior business people were approaching him regularly to say: “Thank god you’re speaking out [on green policies]. Privately I’m with you, publicly I have to pretend I want to buy green steel; I don’t.”

During his conference speech, Tice described energy secretary Ed Miliband as “the most dangerous man in Britain” for the economy.

Miliband wants to quadruple offshore wind capacity, double onshore wind and triple solar power to meet the target of cutting UK emissions from electricity generation to net zero by 2030.

The target is five years faster than the goal set out by the former Conservative government.

Reform UK is banking on the view that government investment in renewables will drive up energy prices over the next few years, an issue it would be able to capitalise on ahead of the next election.

Tice said he hoped the party’s membership would swell from 80,000 today to 150,000 next year, buoyed by hoped-for momentum from local elections in May where the party is targeting the new Lincolnshire mayoralty.

Tice said he was still a strong proponent of moving to an electoral system of proportional representation.

He claimed that PR would have prevented July’s Labour landslide and would have led instead to a coalition government that was “much more steady”. He claimed that politically the “most stable period in the last 15 years” had been the Tory-Lib Dem coalition of 2010 to 2015.

Tice would not be drawn on whether he would go into coalition with the Tories in the future.

“Until there’s a massive mea culpa, we’re going to go to war with them,” he said.

Speeches from Reform UK’s MPs and celebrity supporters leaned heavily on rightwing tropes on immigrants and trans people, with arguments that British culture and identity were being “eradicated”.

Lee Anderson, its MP for Ashfield, returned to targeting London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Comments earlier this year that the Labour politician had “given our capital city away to his mates” led to him losing the Conservative whip before he changed parties.

“I will never apologise to that man.” Anderson told the conference.

869

Nearly 15,000 women in the age group 16-24 years wrote to Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in February 2024 to demand a dedicated university in their district, Nuh. This is not a new ask; the girls have written to the chief minister as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi several times in the past too.

The petitioners drew attention to the fact that only four percent of women in their district made it to universities. The district, considered one of the poorest in the country, lacks higher education institutions and training centers, especially for women. It has the highest dropout rate and lowest age of marriage in Haryana, according to The Tribune.

“Every year, we hear announcements about big roads being constructed and new cities being developed but our district still strives for basic things like having a university,” said Fatima Chowdhary. “While men get the opportunity to move away to pursue higher education, we do not,” she added.

This story was only covered by The Tribune, a Punjab-based English language daily newspaper, but not by any corporate or mainstream news organizations in India. Even the article in The Tribune is a short daily story that doesn’t fully address the larger context and the full scope of relevant perspectives from the petitioners, experts, or the government.

In 2023, when the women sent 10,000 postcards to PM Modi to make their request for a university, it was covered – albeit superficially – by corporate media including The Times of India.

In 2018, the central government’s think tank NITI Aayog listed Nuh as the most underdeveloped of India’s 739 districts. Nuh is also the only Muslim-majority district in Haryana and has been at the center of communal tension.

On March 10, the state’s chief minister announced development projects worth Rs 700 crore [roughly USD 89.5 million] in the district. A university for women was not one of them. However, this focus on Nuh illustrates its importance as a political and ideological battleground ahead of the Lok Sabha election later this year.

Source: Sumedha Sharma, “Nuh Women Seek Varsity in State Budget, Write to CM,” The Tribune, February 17, 2024.

Student Researcher: Tarini Mehta (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism)

Faculty Evaluator: Ankita Kumar (UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism)

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UK foreign secretary David Lammy has been accused of a diplomatic blunder after he suggested that Azerbaijan had “liberated” the disputed Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The remark was made by Lammy on Monday in a new blog on the Substack website, where he plans to write more long-form pieces about world affairs and UK foreign policy.

“Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,” he said in the post. The sentence had not been removed or altered by Friday, despite sparking a wave of criticism.

The territory he was apparently referring to was Nagorno-Karabakh, an interpretation that has not been disputed by UK officials.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a short but bloody military operation to seize the tiny mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In some 24 hours of fighting, the Baku government restored its control over the territory, which had been held by Armenia or local Armenian leaders since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a devastating war between the two historic enemies left it under Armenian control.

Though Baku seized territory that had been internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, the military action forced the entire Armenian population of the enclave — more than 100,000 people — to flee within a few days. Refugees spent days making a gruelling journey down the mountainside from Karabakh, leaving their homes and lives behind.

Many Armenians, who traditionally consider Karabakh a national and spiritual heartland, known to them as Artsakh, accused Baku of ethnically cleansing the region, something Lammy’s comment — and use of the word “liberate” to describe Baku’s military action — failed to reflect.

Britain has urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to engage in negotiations to end their long-standing conflict.

Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said on X that Lammy’s comments on a “vanity blog” appeared to be “contradicting long-standing UK policy” in a way that was “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment”.

The Foreign Office was forced to clarify on Friday that Lammy’s comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nonetheless, the Armenian government is formally seeking further clarification from the UK in the wake of Lammy’s post, an Armenian official told the FT.

US congressman Brad Sherman also weighed in on X, saying the remarks were “a stain on UK foreign policy”, as he accused the UK foreign secretary of having “endorsed ethnic cleansing”.

Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House, said: “It’s a real gaffe by the foreign secretary.”

Accusing Lammy of the “simplification and conflation” of developments in various post-Soviet states, Broers said the foreign secretary was “misreading the situation” regarding Azerbaijan, and “reinforcing the talking points of an autocratic regime”.

The EU parliament accused Baku of undertaking ethnic cleansing in the disputed territory last year. Azerbaijan has denied the claim.

Elin Suleymanov, Azeri ambassador to the UK, said: “I don’t understand why there’s so much response to this blog by the foreign secretary, because what [Lammy] said is absolutely true . . . It reflects the longstanding position of the UK government, which has always been supportive of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

“For 30 years the territory of Azerbaijan was occupied by Armenian forces, and in 2020, Azerbaijan did liberate its territory.”

After the ceasefire in the region last September, Lammy urged on X that “Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians must be guaranteed safety and dignity”.

The title of the new Substack account is Lammy’s name rather than his ministerial title, but the blog was written by the foreign secretary in an official — rather than personal — capacity.

However, the Foreign Office refused to confirm if it had been reviewed internally within the department before it was published.

A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “There has been no change in UK policy. The foreign secretary supports the territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is encouraged by both sides engaging in meaningful dialogue. The UK will continue to support their commitment to lasting peace in the region.”