4 min read8 min

The irony is that the Labour Party acknowledged the importance of driving up standards, not just in their pre-election words and promises but in terms of the legislative and tangible changes that are required to deliver it. The bad news is they only decided to move beyond the warm words when it was too late.

The recent local election results reflect the scale of public disillusionment. After years of political misconduct, sleaze allegations, lockdown parties, murky financial arrangements, and a revolving door of scandal-hit ministers, drastic change was needed. Labour’s central promise was to restore the dignity and trustworthiness that Westminster had squandered so recklessly under the Conservatives.

A little under two years on and Keir Starmer’s already beleaguered premiership is under threat, in part, to a scandal of his own making thanks to his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington. Governing in the post-Brexit era with increased global economic and political uncertainty was never going to be easy but the basic pre-election promises of improved integrity and stability are already disintegrating before our eyes.

The tragedy is that trust, once broken, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. Political capital is not like financial capital in that you cannot simply replenish it through smarter budgeting. It requires consistent and real action, genuine reform, and the visible dismantling of the structures that enabled misconduct in the first place.

Labour spoke a lot about restoring trust in our politics, pre-election. However, it was only following the Mandelson revelations that the Prime Minister commissioned the newly-formed Ethics and Integrity Commission to conduct a review into our laws concerning lobbying, disclosure and access to government. It may well be that the Commission’s recommendations end up in the inbox of a new leader. Whoever that may be would be foolish to ignore them.

Reforming the Lobbying Act – the rules that address transparency in who is seeking to influence the policy-making process – now sits at the very heart of building back public trust, for all parties and all politicians. The CIPR is supporting Baroness Hayter with her Private Members’ Bill in the Lords that seeks to expand the lobbying register to in-house lobbyists, demonstrating the breadth of support for change from within Parliament itself and the recognition that the status quo is no longer sustainable.

Lobbying and the relationship between business and politics now occupies a unique space in the public imagination. They are sympathetic and supportive of the idea that government needs real-world input when making policy – as long as it is done fairly and with a degree of transparency.

The existing Lobbying Act, introduced in 2014, makes that nearly impossible and has long been criticised as inadequate and riddled with loopholes. It covers a narrow band of consultant lobbyists while leaving vast swathes of activity in the shadows, unregulated and unscrutinised. For a public already primed to distrust Westminster, this gap is populated with mistrust and scepticism.

Overhauling the Lobbying Act would send an unambiguous signal and demonstrate that this government is prepared to take action to ensure the lobbying scandals of recent years cannot be repeated. It would also send a powerful message that our politics cannot and should not be influenced opaquely. Expanding the register of lobbyists, strengthening enforcement mechanisms and closing the loopholes that mean in-house lobbyists have no way of statutorily recording their activities is the basic architecture of a democracy in which power is exercised visibly, and accountability is genuine rather than performative.

Labour must understand the urgency of the moment. They need quick and decisive wins, and soon, and few come easier than this. It also has the added bonus of commanding overwhelming support in Parliament and beyond, including within the lobbying industry.

Fail to grab the opportunity and this government risks not just its own electoral future, but the deeper, more corrosive consequence of a democracy in which citizens have simply stopped believing that the rules apply equally to everyone.

Alastair McCapra is CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations

Bella Maclean as Taggie O’Hara and Alex Hassell as Conservative MP, Rupert Campbell-Black | Image courtesy of Disney+

5 min read7 min

Bingeing the first four episodes of Season Two of Rivals should feel like a guilty pleasure. But there is zero guilt here.

It is exactly what you want it to be: outrageously good television. It sells aspiration and a life of privilege out of reach of most people – the idyllic Cotswolds setting, private helicopters, influential TV executives and, yes, politicians. It delivers a stellar lineup of some of Britain’s finest actors with dialogue that is sharp, wicked and gloriously alive. It is sexy and scandalous and funny and completely addictive. I love it.

But beyond the crisp shirts being unbuttoned, the hot bodies and the devastating one-liners, this is a show about what happens to human beings when sex sits at the centre of so much in our lives yet is never spoken about openly. Or worse, when it is spoken about in ways that create shame, and where sex becomes a weapon used to control.

Jilly Cooper’s greatest gift was always her refusal to be ashamed of desire

The show is set in the 1980s, with Section 28 looming on the horizon: that vile piece of legislation that would make it illegal for schools to “promote” homosexuality; which told an entire generation of gay children their love was not fit to be spoken of. In Rivals S2, we watch wannabe Tory MP Gerald Middleton, a gay man, feel he has no choice but to marry a woman and perform as a straight man in order to win a seat. It is devastating, not least because his real and true love is the adorable Charles Fairburn – and what about Caroline “Muffy” Hampshire, the woman tricked into marriage?

I meet young people today figuring out who they are without adequate support, without language, without anyone sitting them down and saying simply: all of this is normal and you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Then there is the storyline that made my heart hurt. Daysee Butler, raped in Season One by the vile Reverend Fergus Penny but silenced by Lord Baddingham, a man who chose his own power over justice. What is so unbearable about the way Rivals tells her story is not just the act itself but the way shame is somehow shifted onto Daysee. I hope the rest of Season Two sees her get the revenge, if not the justice, she deserves. Because we all know how abysmal the conviction rate for rapists remains. Removing the shame and silence around sex would see men like Penny have far fewer shadows in which to thrive.

The show also gives us the consensual, beautiful, but agonising love of Lizzie Vereker and Freddie Jones, two people who no longer feel desired by their respective spouses and who fall, helplessly, for each other. The deep connection they share, amplified by physical intimacy, leaves them consumed by guilt. They are a reminder of the quiet but vital role that desire and sex play in keeping long-term relationships alive.

It’s something equally absent from the life of the suave, loveable and deeply troubled Rupert Campbell-Black, a Tory minister exposed for a string of sexual encounters and publicly destroyed for it. Hedonistic and decadent he may be, but he is also deeply lonely. And that loneliness turns my mind to the young men being recruited into the manosphere every single day. Their journey there does not begin with hatred. It begins with loneliness, shame and silence.

That silence needs breaking. That void needs filling with education, honesty and open conversation.

In the 1980s, we did not talk about sex because we were embarrassed. In 2026, we are still embarrassed even though we have convinced ourselves the job is done – and we still do not talk about it enough. It is not done. The ignorance, the shame, the violence, the loneliness: it is all still here, as sinister and damaging as it ever was.

Author Jilly Cooper’s fingerprints are on every inch of this production, and her greatest gift was always her refusal to be ashamed of desire. She thought pleasure was human and funny and worth celebrating. I agree with her completely. A nation that learns to talk about sex honestly, in schools, in homes, in GP surgeries, online, across a whole lifetime, will be a nation with less violence, less shame, less loneliness, and far more genuine human happiness.

Rivals is brilliant television. Watch it. And then let’s talk about why it still feels so radical.

Samantha Niblett is Labour MP for South Derbyshire

Rivals: Season 2

Directed by: Elliot Hegarty, Jamie J Johnson & Dee Koppang O’Leary

Broadcaster: Disney+

On Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told Laura Kuenssberg that the SNP’s accounts “went up and down” as her excuse for not noticing that hundreds of pounds had suddenly vanished from them.

Several things leap out immediately from that clip.

One, there very much WAS “something glaringly suspicious in the accounts that I should have seen” – the party had raised almost £700,000 in two “ring-fenced” fundraisers that wasn’t there any more, which ought to have made its leader at least mildly curious.

And two, attempting to fob responsibility off onto the independent auditors simply won’t wash. It’s not their job to determine whether the SNP has kept its political promises or not, their job is simply to match up money coming in against money going out and produce a set of numbers to show what it all adds up to. It makes no odds to them if it was spent on a party conference, a fancy motorhome or a 50-foot golden statue of Danny La Rue. All they can see is numbers.

(In any event the party’s longstanding auditors resigned in 2023 rather than risk being caught up in any more dodginess. It took months for the SNP to find anyone else willing to take the job on.)

But even leaving those things aside, if we’re going to learn anything about how The Great Indyref Swindle got to this calamitous point unchecked we need to examine just how hard Nicola Sturgeon had to look the other way to fail to see what was going on literally under her nose and literally in her own back yard.

(You’ll have to forgive us a bit of repetition in this piece, readers, because this is the full story of Operation Branchform with all the dots joined up for the first time ever anywhere. If some of it is a little familiar, just bear with us.)

Let’s start with 2015, the first year that Sturgeon started as SNP leader. Since we’re mainly concerned with events from 2017 onwards, we’ll just skip through the first couple quickly for background.

2015 ACCOUNTS

Sturgeon inherited a very healthy party from Alex Salmond. Even after fighting the 2015 election the SNP had over £400,000 in the bank, and a recently-quadrupled membership that would bring it millions of pounds in additional funding every year.

(For perspective, 2013 – Salmond’s last full year – saw the party receive £585,691 in membership income. For Sturgeon’s first full year the figure was £2,743,413 – almost five times as much. She was in charge of a golden goose.)

2016 ACCOUNTS

2016 was also an election year, and having spend a colossal £2.4m on the election campaign (£800,000 more than the previous Scottish election, and £600,000 more than on the 2015 Westminster campaign), only to lose Salmond’s groundbreaking majority at Holyrood, the bank balance plunged accordingly.

2017 ACCOUNTS

And here’s where we really come in. With Theresa May’s snap UK election meaning that the SNP had had to run four big national campaigns in four years, the coffers were understandably almost depleted.

But just a minute. 2017 was also the year of the “ref.scot” fundraiser, which made £482,000 and which the SNP angrily swore had NOT been spent on the election.

So where was it?

Readers may note that the accounts list “Fundraising income” and general “Donations” to the party separately, and the amounts are such that the ref.scot cash must be in the latter category. But it’s fairly academic anyway, as the money was all just dumped in the same pot – the SNP only has one bank account.

The 2017 accounts make clear that there’d also been a large debt repayment.

And we know exactly what it was – £500,000 had been returned to Chris and Colin Weir, specifically £250,000 each. (The other £100K was another separate loan from the Weirs, and would be repaid in March 2018.)

The Weirs had loaned the party £1 million in March 2016 to fight the forthcoming Holyrood election, the day after the SNP had launched the “ref.scot” fundraiser to create a “ring-fenced” independence referendum campaign fund.

Half of it had been paid back in 2016. The £1m of total loans from the Weirs is shown in the 2016 accounts, as is the £500,000 first half of the repayments (plus another £8,126 of other loans).

And the December 2017 repayment was the outstanding balance.

(The Electoral Commission website lists the repayment date of each loan as 1 December 2017 because that’s when each was fully repaid. It makes matters seem more complicated than they really are – in 2016 the party paid each of the two Weirs HALF of their loan back, rather than paying back, say, Chris’s in 2016 and Colin’s in 2017. They did the same the following year. So each loan – Chris’s £500,000 and Colin’s £500,000 – wasn’t considered as cleared until the second halves were paid back in 2017.)

So while you could argue the toss about whether the money had been spent on the election campaign or on paying back the Weirs, it was a pretty moot point since it all came from the same bank account – what matters is that it definitely HAD been spent.

2018 ACCOUNTS

2018 was the first year in five when there hadn’t been a referendum or a general election to spend money on, so the SNP’s funds got a hefty boost. It should be noted that this WASN’T fundraiser money, though, because there was no fundraiser in 2018, and in any case it wasn’t enough – it was £71,000 short of the amount the ref.scot appeal had collected. It was simply the bounty from the huge membership.

Still, if you were the SNP leadership there now seemed a very good chance that the difference could be made up next year, in which there was also no scheduled election, so that all the missing money would be back in the bank before anyone noticed and they’d have gotten away with it all.

2019 ACCOUNTS

But at that moment Boris Johnson – with, astonishingly, the enthusiastic help of the SNP – threw a whacking great spanner right into the works.

Strangely, when it came to the vote no SNP MPs actually voted for the second snap election in two and a half years. Angus MacNeil voted against and the rest abstained or were absent. Perhaps the leadership had realised the ramifications and panicked, but by then it was too late and the vote carried by 439 to 22, effectively sealing the party’s financial fate there and then.

Because 2019 was the year things got really murky.

You’ll remember from 2017 that the ref.scot fundraiser income was actually listed on the accounts under “Donations” rather than “Fundraising income, and the same appears to apply in 2019, because receipts from the latter are only £35,000 higher than in 2018 (when there was no special fundraiser) even though the yes.scot one launched in April of 2019 is known to have generated around £185,000.

(We know this because Colin Beattie confirmed in 2021 that the total raised was just short of £667,000 and the ref.scot total of £482,000 was publicly visible, leaving £185,000 to have come from the yes.scot appeal.)

Yet having raised £667,000 in “ring-fenced” funds for a referendum campaign and a booklet, which it by definition wasn’t allowed to spend on anything else, and having produced neither thing, the SNP only had £97,000 left in the bank.

Nicola Sturgeon tells us now that she did not find that fact “glaringly suspicious”, and the only reasonable explanation for that is that she already knew she’d broken her promises and spent the money, and therefore had no expectation of the money being there and wasn’t at all shocked when it wasn’t.

But even when we know that the 2017 fundraiser proceeds were actually used to pay off the Weirs, the SNP should at least have had the £185,000 from spring 2019 still in the bank at the end of the year, yet it had barely over half that sum.

Inescapably, half of the “ring-fenced” money had once again been spent on general SNP business, not the thing it was expressly and specifically solicited for. And under Scots law that is, unambiguously, a serious crime.

We’re told that the specialist fraud detectives from the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh were furious from when the Crown Office declined to prosecute Sturgeon despite her refusing to answer their questions for seven hours, but we don’t know whether it was in relation to the missing fundraiser money, or suspected complicity in Murrell’s embezzlement (or both, or something else).

We can understand their anger.

2020 ACCOUNTS

With no general election in 2020, the SNP’s bank balance recovered to the point where the £185,000 from the yes.scot campaign had effectively been replaced.

However, the “Household Guide” still failed to appear.

(We passingly interject at this point that in Wings’ opinion, the “Household Guide” campaign was a cynical attempt to piggyback on the popularity of our own “Wee Blue Book” from 2014, which has been much-imitated since.)

The party did however purchase £615,270 of what it listed as “tangible investment assets” that year – an almost ninefold increase on the previous year.

It can be deduced from the accounts that the sum is in fact the total of the amounts spent on new office furniture and computer equipment, which tally to exactly £615,270. Let’s just keep that figure in mind for a while.

Remarkably, it’s more than the combined total spend on the same things (£496,652) during the entire other eight years of Sturgeon and Murrell’s joint reign combined.

It may or may not be coincidence that 2020 was the peak year of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement, in which he’s now admitted to stealing over £150,000 from party funds.

Wings noted at the time that these sums seemed astronomical, and it now looks very much as though the figures may have been artifically inflated in a crude attempt to disguise how much money Murrell was stealing.

In the most recent 2024 accounts, the figure is just £3,038.

2021 ACCOUNTS

By the time the 2021 accounts were published in August 2022, the cat was firmly out of the bag. Operation Branchform had been under way for just over a year.

(Incidentally exposing the lie of Nicola Sturgeon’s assertions to Laura Kuenssberg that she couldn’t respond to concerns about finances from the NEC because there was a live police inquiry. There simply wasn’t. Her notorious video telling the NEC to shut their faces was in March 2021, but the police didn’t open any sort of inquiry until that April, and did not escalate it into a full-scale investigation until July, by which time John Swinney had already, in May, reassured viewers of The Sunday Show that there was “a huge amount of scrutiny of party finances” within the SNP “day and daily”.)

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After paying for yet another election campaign (£1.65m this time), the party’s reserves were back down below the level of the yes.scot fundraiser, at just £145,000. The “Household Guide” had still not been published (and indeed still hasn’t).

2022 ACCOUNTS

Despite 2022 having no general election, the accounts took another £100,000 hit – in itself a significant red flag for a party still trousering £2.3m in membership fees alone – leaving just over £48,000 in the bank.

Nicola Sturgeon resigned as party leader in February 2021 and Peter Murrell followed suit as chief executive a month later, though ostensibly for misleading communications chief Murray Foote over membership figures.

So the finances for the Sturgeon/Murrell reign look like this.

At no point during their eight full years in charge did the SNP have as much money in the bank as even the 2017 “ring-fenced” fundraiser brought in. (Though of course that’s fair enough in 2015 and 2016, as it hadn’t happened yet.)

No referendum happened and no “Household Guide” was published, so unless both of those fundraisers were deliberately and knowingly fraudulent (SPOILER: they were), the full £667,000 ought still to be there.

Yet at least £619,000 of it – 93% – has unarguably disappeared. It has never been identified or in any way accounted for in the books. It is not there, and nobody has ever answered for its absence. To this day, Nicola Sturgeon insists there is no “missing money”, as have a string of other senior SNP office-holders.

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(Though in June 2021 Colin Beattie did grudgingly admit that just under £52,000 of it had been spent on unspecified “campaigning”.)

Sturgeon even tried to deflect by telling the quite audaciously false flat-out lie that the discrepancy was explained by the fact that the SNP’s accounts were managed on a cash-flow basis rather than the alternative, less transparent “accruals” method. But the SNP’s accounts have been done on the accruals basis for decades, and still are.

Peter Murrell embezzled around £340,000 from the party from 2017-2022 inclusive. Even if we notionally attribute every single penny of it as having come from the fundraisers (which is a nonsensical idea as there was only one pot of SNP money), that still leaves an almost identical sum – £327,000 – as having been separately stolen from the “Independence Referendum Campaign Fund” (sometimes the “Referendum Appeal Fund”) that the SNP was still soliciting donations for as recently as the summer of 2020, and which can only have been deliberately and knowingly stolen by the rest of the SNP leadership, not embezzled by Murrell.

Yet inexplicably both the Crown Office and the SNP alike appear to think this is no big deal, and not something that anyone should bother asking any more questions about – even though, as noted above, the crime has already been admitted to by the party’s former treasurer and, as recently as yesterday, by a pompous dim-witted oaf of a former MP and one-time broadcaster who’s – incredibly – being sent out to do the media rounds and blithely insist that there’s nothing to see here.

(Curiously, the Scottish media has no apparent interest in having the story explained by the only journalist who’s been on it for six and a half years.)

But you can’t steal from people and then just give them a vague IOU and pretend that makes it alright, especially when you simply don’t have the money to make good on that IOU. The SNP has only once in its entire history had £667,000 in the bank (the end of 2011, when it had slightly over £1m in cash reserves – the previous year it had just £1,241). At present it’s £619,000 short and hovering on the brink of bankruptcy.

(And in the wildly unlikely event that Keir Starmer agreed to Swinney’s demand for a second indyref tomorrow, what sort of criminally reckless organisation would lend the SNP 600 grand to refill the pot, or extend it an overdraft facility of that size? With membership in freefall and donations almost non-existent they’d have next to zero chance of ever getting it repaid.)

Not only is the fundraiser money gone, it ain’t ever coming back – despite Ian Blackford’s assurances to the Commons in November 2021. (In which, interestingly, he made it very explicit that the stolen money hadn’t only come from SNP members, shattering the lie that John Nicolson is telling everyone in the media who’ll listen.)

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It is, however, a remarkable coincidence that that £619,000 is almost the exact same amount as the party supposedly spent on office furniture and computer equipment in 2020, Murrell’s peak year of embezzling. If those particular numbers were (as we strongly suspect is the case) mostly fiddled to try to hide his super shopping spree, they effectively kiboshed the SNP’s only chance of ever replacing the stolen fundraiser cash. One crime exposed the other.

The suicidal hubris of the SNP in demanding another snap UK election in 2019 was the other big blunder that buried them inextricably in the hole they’d dug themselves. Wings, of course, had tried to warn them.

Fighting that election cost the SNP £1.6m, for precious little benefit.

So you can take your pick, really. The SNP’s finances do indeed go up and down, although there’s been a lot more down than up recently. But even so, long after spending the fundraiser money they still had, and squandered, multiple chances to escape the clutches of Operation Branchform. (Chance-squandering seems to be Sturgeon’s main political speciality.)

They could have stopped the 2019 election, which dealt a hammer blow to their bank balance, by doing a deal with the Tories to pass a soft Brexit – as this site repeatedly suggested – and they might well even have managed to negotiate a second indyref as part of the deal. Even if not, they’d at least have saved themselves a fortune.

(They’re very unlikely to ever get a better chance to exert some leverage rather than just fruitlessly begging for another Section 30, certainly. Johnson was on the ropes and desperate for the escape route of an election.)

Or Nicola Sturgeon could have paid some attention to all the people warning her about the party’s finances – again prominently including this site – and thereby might have stopped Murrell splurging two thirds of a million pounds on possibly-imaginary office chairs and laptops to try to cover his tracks.

Either one would have left the coffers healthy enough to replace the missing fundraiser money long before Sean Clerkin filed his fateful complaint with the police, and none of the traumatic events of the last half-decade would have happened.

But Sturgeon couldn’t bear listening to anyone else’s advice, and now her husband’s in jail and she’s a broken figure of mockery and contempt, who’ll be looking nervously over her shoulder for years to come in fear that her sins will catch up with her one way or another.

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Her ups are over and she’s looking at nothing but slope for the rest of her life. With a fat Holyrood pension she’ll have plenty money to keep her company, of course, even after she’s had to give all Murrell’s little presents back – unless she wants to join him in prison for reset – and her house has been sold to pay his debts. (He’ll also be entitled to a fair chunk of her wealth in the divorce, assuming they ever get round to it.)

At least she won’t miss the kitchen, which she was apparently never in. But with any luck, and certainly if we’ve got any say in the matter, there’s still plenty of heat coming the way of the great betrayer.

Credit: Farzad Mohsenvand / Unsplash

There are more teams than ever before, expanding from 32 to 48 nations. There will be more matches, played across three host countries – the United States, Canada and Mexico – spanning an enormous geographical area. FIFA is expecting record-breaking audiences and record-breaking revenues.

But as millions of fans prepare to follow the tournament, there is another industry preparing for kick-off too: the illegal gambling black market.

Major sporting tournaments always attract criminal operators looking to exploit heightened public interest. But this World Cup comes at a particularly dangerous moment, with illegal gambling firms rapidly increasing their advertising presence in Britain and aggressively targeting consumers online.

That should ring alarm bells in Westminster.

Independent analysis from global marketing intelligence firm WARC has revealed that unregulated operators now account for almost half of all UK gambling advertising spend, with that share set to become the majority within two years.

Just a few years ago, licensed operators accounted for more than 80 per cent of gambling advertising spend. That figure has now fallen to just over half and is projected to drop below 50 per cent by 2028.

At the same time, separate analysis by H2GC forecasts that the amount staked with illegal operators in Britain will almost double from £17bn this year to more than £33bn by 2028.

That would mean almost one in every five pounds staked online could soon be flowing through the illegal gambling black market.

The direction of travel is clear: regulated firms are scaling back while the harmful black market grows rapidly.

And major sporting events like the World Cup provide the perfect opportunity for illegal operators to accelerate that growth.

These operators are increasingly sophisticated in how they target UK consumers. Illegal sites routinely advertise “no ID checks”, “crypto betting” and “anonymous gambling” while using cloned branding and offshore networks to appear legitimate.

Many consumers will have no idea whether the operator appearing online is licensed in Britain or not.

That creates a serious risk, particularly for younger audiences who are far more likely to encounter gambling advertising through digital channels than traditional broadcast media.

The regulated betting industry in Britain operates under some of the strictest standards in the world. Licensed operators are required to carry out age verification checks, anti-money laundering controls and safer gambling interventions. They are accountable to the regulator and contribute to the economy, British sport and the new industry statutory levy, which is delivering over £100 million each year for research, prevention and treatment services.

Illegal operators do none of those things.

They do not carry out meaningful checks. They do not contribute to sport or treatment services. They do not protect vulnerable consumers. And they do not care whether a customer is self-excluded, underage or experiencing gambling harm.

Yet while illegal operators continue expanding aggressively, the regulated sector faces growing restrictions and mounting pressure.

The industry has already committed to removing betting sponsorship from the front of Premier League shirts from next season as part of raising standards. However, while unlicensed operators will be prohibited from appearing on the front of shirts, they will still be able to advertise elsewhere around Premier League matches and broadcasts. Demand for betting does not disappear when regulated advertising reduces. It simply shifts elsewhere.

And increasingly, that “elsewhere” is the black market.

If legitimate operators become less visible while illegal advertisers continue to grow unchecked, consumers will inevitably struggle to distinguish between regulated and unregulated gambling.

That is not a safer market.

It is a market where criminal operators gain visibility, vulnerable consumers lose protections and British sport loses funding and investment.

The overwhelming majority of the 22.5 million adults in Britain who enjoy a bet each month do so safely and responsibly with regulated operators. The priority should always be keeping those customers within the regulated market, where protections exist and standards are enforced.

The World Cup should belong to fans and sport, not criminal gambling operators exploiting the tournament to expand the illegal black market.

Sir John, now Lord, Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.

I have just published a new short book called “Who’s right? The new case for Conservatism.” In it I set out those timeless values and principles which many conservatives have drawn on over the years. I look at current major arguments over net zero, energy, migration, free speech, benefits reform, national security and the scope of the public sector to draw together the ideas we believe in. I was pleased to read Kemi’s article in the Telegraph last Sunday saying she wants new MPs to be Conservative in thought.

Conservatives believe in freedom. We believe in free speech, free elections, and  free enterprise. We value the talents of individuals, the benefits of the small battalions and free institutions, and the power of the family. We understand the importance of traditions and learning passed down the generations.  We wish to see a prosperous country with wealth and ownership widely spread, a well defended country safe from war and threats, and a civil society with sufficient common bonds and culture.

Conservatives accept the need for limits placed on freedoms for the greater good. We expect a strong rule of law. Free enterprise does not extend to theft and fraud. Freedom to do things should not stretch to harming your neighbour or advancing by violence.

Conservatives do not want to blindly follow the past, welcoming positive change from the ideas and actions of enterprising individuals and institutions. Traditions and the past should be respected and drawn upon but not become restrictive bonds preventing something better. Conservatives wish to be the “dwarves on the shoulders of the giants”, seeing further because we inherit past wisdom and knowledge.

Conservatives love the countryside and wish to conserve the best of our natural and built environments. We value clean water and fresh air. We believe in being kind to animals, accepting their needs as they live alongside us.

Conservatives welcome strong families and see them as their own welfare societies, transferring wealth and skills between generations and accepting most of the responsibility for bringing up children and caring for the elderly. The state has a welfare role when families break down or when the demands are too great on family members.

Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity, offering a hand up in preference to a hand out. We want to help people on their individual journeys, and accept that those who achieve more and contribute more may earn more and save more. We believe in lower tax rates to protect incentives. We tax the rich who have the money by setting rates that they will stay to pay.

Conservatives oppose most revolutions for their violence and extremism. Conservatives believe in evolutionary change. There is no perfect state or utopian society that can be created because mankind has criminals as well as saints. Imposing too many solutions from government leads to the abuse of power and to the distress of freedom loving citizens. One of the least perfectible of human institutions is government itself, which needs to be watched, checked and controlled to avoid tyranny.

Conservatives believe in democratic government with choice between parties and philosophies at elections. We believe that Opposition is an important part of democratic government, to prevent a tyranny of the majority and to represent the views of legitimate minorities.

Conservatives believe in their countries, seeing the nation state as the means to create a voluntary common culture, shared experiences and team loyalty in friendly competition with other states. Conservatives are sceptical about drives to international and global government and to rule by an elite or bureaucratic class. There is no global democracy so global government is unaccountable.

Conservatives oppose extremism. We see National Socialism and Communism as two evil creeds of the last century that resulted in mass murders, dreadful wars and the suppression of freedoms which we should strive to prevent in the future.

‘Who’s right? The new case for Conservatism’ is available on Amazon, published by Bite-sized books.