Politics
Belfast, broken borders and the evasions of our elites
At around half past 10 on Monday night, 8 June, on a residential street in north Belfast, a man in his thirties allegedly pinned another man to the ground and began stabbing him. He was stopped by three members of the public, one of them carrying a hurling stick, who dragged him clear. The victim, a man in his forties, lost his left eye. His right eye sustained serious damage. He has deep lacerations to his face and back. He remains in serious condition in hospital. A kitchen knife was recovered.
The man now charged on suspicion of attempted murder is Hadi Alodid, 30 years old, of Duncairn Avenue, Belfast. He is also charged with possession of a blade in a public place and with threatening to kill a female NHS radiographer while he was being treated for a hand injury following his arrest. The court heard that while receiving that treatment, he told police: ‘I killed someone, I don’t know if they’re dead.’ Judge Steven Keown refused bail on Wednesday, finding that ‘the risks were far too great and unmanageable with any bail conditions’.
Alodid’s route to Belfast is on the public record. He flew from Sudan to Paris and from there to Dublin. On 10 February 2023, he boarded a bus from Dublin to Belfast, applied for asylum, and was granted leave to remain until 2028. He had no (known) criminal record and appeared on no police database. When Jon Boutcher, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) chief constable, contacted his counterpart in counter-terrorism, nothing came back. The attack is not, at present, being treated as terrorism. The motive is yet to be established. The investigation continues.
So too does the journey from Paris to Dublin to Belfast, for anyone minded to take it. It is worth understanding why this journey was taken, because understanding is exactly what the governing class is hoping the public will not acquire.
When the UK left the European Union, it lost participation in the Dublin III Regulation, the mechanism that had previously allowed it to return asylum seekers to whichever EU member state through which they had first passed. After Brexit, the UK introduced replacement inadmissibility rules under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which allow the state to refuse a claimant’s asylum request if he or she has a connection to a safe third country or passed through one before arriving in the UK. But these rules apply to Great Britain and not to Northern Ireland, where a Belfast High Court ruling in 2024 barred key provisions of the UK’s post-Brexit immigration laws. The Common Travel Area, the arrangement between the UK and the Republic of Ireland that predates both states and was preserved through Brexit as a structural requirement of the Good Friday Agreement, means that a person crossing from the Republic into Northern Ireland faces no passport check, no border control and no immigration officer.
This is not an oversight. It is the consciously constructed legal architecture, known to every government in the chain. And none has dared address the problems it poses, on the grounds that doing so might complicate the arrangements around the peace process.
Democratic Unionist Party MP Carla Lockhart asked in the Commons on Tuesday what action the UK government is taking to prevent abuse of the immigration system via the land border with the Republic. Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, confirmed what was already known: that any foreign national who abuses the hospitality of this country to commit crimes should be in no doubt of the government’s determination to deport them, and that net migration is down 82 per cent from its peak under the previous government. That, of course, is an answer to a different question.
Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn, and PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher attend a press conference in Belfast, 10 June 2026.
Benn subsequently offered, in good faith and apparently without embarrassment, a comment about the prospect of using someone’s history and background to assess future risk:
‘Questioning the suspect, seeking to find out more about him and the circumstances, it doesn’t necessarily follow that someone’s previous history is going to enable you to know if they are going to do something in the future. And therefore it is very hard to operate a system in those circumstances which attempts to anticipate what someone might do.’
This prompts one to reach for an argument of Thomas Sowell. There are no migrants in the abstract, Sowell observed. There are only specific people from specific places with specific histories, specific beliefs and specific characteristics. The generalisation ‘migrants’ is not a policy instrument. It is a rhetorical convenience for avoiding the actual policies that would have to be designed if you were dealing with real people. Benn is not refusing to generalise – he is refusing to particularise. He is arguing that because you cannot know in advance what a specific individual will do, the only defensible conclusion is that prior history, background, ideology and behaviour offer no useful information whatsoever. The system, he implies, simply cannot anticipate anything of note. We are, apparently, operating national border control much like a roulette wheel.
This is not merely wrong. It is the precise negation of what every risk assessment, every parole-board hearing, every terrorism analyst, every child-protection social worker and every insurance actuary does for a living. Risk assessment is the applied science of inferring future probability from prior evidence. The counter-extremism Prevent programme, which the government funds to the tune of tens of millions of pounds annually, is predicated entirely on the premise that prior indicators – ideology, association, behaviour, radicalisation pathway – are meaningful predictors of future violence. Following Benn’s logic, Prevent should be abolished immediately, because its entire operational rationale is the thing he just said is impossible.
The government funds a counter-extremism programme built on the premise that prior behaviour predicts future violence. And yet it sends its secretary of state for Northern Ireland to argue on television that prior behaviour cannot meaningfully predict future violence as a reason for declining to scrutinise how a specific individual came to be in Belfast before allegedly attempting to decapitate someone. One of these positions is true. The Prevent position is closer to the truth, which is why Benn’s broadcast remarks are not a serious argument. They’re a holding measure, a way of filling the airtime between the event and the moment when the news cycle obliges by moving on.
Now consider what happened simultaneously at Wednesday’s press conference. PSNI chief Boutcher, appealing for calm and promising law enforcement against the rioters, said that those involved in the disorder would have their images plastered everywhere. It is a legitimate deterrence instrument, and images of rioters do result in identification and prosecution. The observation that the institution declining to characterise the perpetrator of the original attack is energetically committed to naming and imaging the people who responded badly to it will not, however, have escaped the notice of the people being told to go home and be calm. The asymmetry is visible. And visible things tend to be noticed.
This is not an argument for outing defendants before trial. Sub judice rules are sensible and the presumption of innocence is not negotiable. It is an observation about where the state deploys its energy and its language. The prosecutorial machinery has historically moved with speed and purpose against such rioters, just as it did in 2024 after the Southport attack unrest. Yet it tends to be much more cautious when it comes to the events that have prompted the riots. That’s when the authorities throw out the usual lines: the motive is yet to be established, the investigation continues, please be mindful of what you share online. This pattern, swift action against one form of disorder and studied caution around the other.
Protesters in stand-off with police in Glengormley, north of Belfast, Northern Ireland, 10 June 2026.
The Prevent dimension deserves attention. Prevent is the British government’s programme for identifying and supporting individuals considered vulnerable to radicalisation. William Shawcross’s 2023 Independent Review of Prevent found multiple issues: that it had drifted from adequately confronting Islamist extremism; that it was characterised by institutional timidity on the subject; and that Islamist terrorism remained the primary domestic terrorist threat. Indeed, Islamist terrorism accounted for approximately two-thirds of attacks since 2018, three-quarters of MI5’s caseload and 64 per cent of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences. The review recommended reorientation toward the primary threat.
The government accepted several of these recommendations. The acceptance was followed, as usual, by a considerable number of further discussions about how the acceptance might be implemented without causing too much disruption to existing arrangements.
Alodid was not, the PSNI chief Boutcher confirmed, known to Prevent. He was not known to any national-security database. He was, in other words, exactly the type of individual that Prevent’s acknowledged gap in non-networked, non-referred coverage is designed to miss. This was a man who had arrived from Sudan, a nation in the grip of an active civil war in which Islamist militias – designated as terrorist organisations by the US State Department as recently as March of this year – were being absorbed into the Sudanese Armed Forces’ fighting ranks. It is entirely reasonable to ask whether he should have been given leave to remain and why he was not properly vetted. Benn’s answer, that previous history doesn’t tell you what someone will do, is rejected daily by his own government’s counter-terrorism strategy.
Then there is the question of what the word ‘refugee’ is being required to carry in this discussion, and it is carrying considerably more than it can bear.
Refugee status is a legal designation, not a moral quality. It is a determination made by a caseworker, on the basis of evidence available at the time of claim, that a person faces a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. It says nothing about ideology. It says nothing about mental health. It says nothing about criminal propensity or the individual’s relationship to political violence. These are orthogonal categories. A person can be a genuine refugee, genuinely fleeing genuine persecution and also pose a serious risk to British citizens. When determining whether someone is a refugee, caseworkers assess the persecution claim. The security and public-protection assessment is a separate exercise, conducted separately, resourced separately, and in the case of an individual arriving via an unmonitored land border under the Common Travel Area, conducted with whatever information the Home Office happens to have – which, in this case, was apparently nothing.
The governing class and its media interlocutors have fused refugee status and individual safety assessment into a single category. To define someone as a refugee is to declare they pose no threat. This is not an honest synthesis. It is a category error with a political function. The function is to ensure that the concrete question – whether this individual was adequately assessed before being granted leave to remain and whether the route through which he arrived constitutes a structural gap in public protection – cannot be posed without triggering the response that you are calling for the abolition of the asylum system. Nobody serious is calling for that. The question is whether the asylum system, as it currently exists, is doing the full job that protection of the public requires. Benn’s claim, that prior history doesn’t tell you what someone will do, is not an answer to that question. It is a device for making the question sound unanswerable so that it need not be answered.
As Sowell taught us, there are no migrants in the abstract. There is no refugee in the abstract. The abstract refugee is a politically useful figure. He is stateless and suffering, the exemplar of everything the liberal conscience requires one to defend. The abstract refugee cannot be scrutinised without implicating the liberal conscience. The concrete individual here, suspect Hadi Alodid, is a specific man, from a specific country, with a specific recent history. He arrived via a specific route that specific legal decisions have left unmonitored. He was granted leave to remain in September 2023 on the basis of a specific assessment by a specific caseworker. His particular case desperately needs to be scrutinised. Scrutiny is not an attack on the abstract refugee. It is how you protect the next person. The governing class prefers the abstract refugee, because the abstract refugee requires only sentiment. The concrete individual requires accountability.
‘Progressive’ journalist Mehdi Hasan’s appearance on BBC’s Newsnight on Tuesday evening deserves credit for its internal consistency. He argued that this is a story of far-right actors exploiting a hideous crime, amplified by Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. The danger, he continued, is to minority communities, and that anyone drawing wider conclusions from the attack is doing the demagogues’ work.
This is a partial argument presented as a total one. The partial truth is real. On Tuesday evening, homes burned, families were forced to flee and a Turkish barber’s shop in Ballyclare was attacked. These are genuine harms visited on innocent people. All of that is true. But none of it is an argument about whether the system that produced the conditions for the original attack is functioning adequately.
The existence of disreputable or thuggish people who exploit a failure does not determine whether the failure is real. If it did, institutional failure could never be examined, because there is always, in any charged situation, someone willing to exploit the examination for bad purposes. The governing class has understood this and used it consistently in response to incidents similar to the one in Belfast this week. Produce a Musk. Point at the mob. Claim that anyone not pointing at the mob is in league with it. The examination of the actual problem at hand is indefinitely deferred, which is the point.
The history that makes Hasan’s position untenable is not a history he disputes. It is a history he declines to address. The grooming-gangs scandal in Rotherham illustrates the point. The 2015 Jay Report documented over 1,400 victims of organised sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The Casey Review of 2015 found Rotherham council ‘in denial’. Casey’s Rapid Audit of June 2025 found that institutions had, across two decades, avoided discussing perpetrator ethnicity ‘for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems’. It found that one local authority had replaced a plan targeting specific perpetrators with a ‘broad commitment’ to tackling exploitation ‘in its varied manifestations across the district’s communities’, and that police were told by councils to avoid publicising convictions ‘due to fear of raising tensions’.
This was a deliberate institutional choice, made in the face of known evidence, to prioritise what officials called ‘community cohesion’ over the protection of children. ‘Community cohesion’ here means the management of political embarrassment at the expense of the people being harmed. It is a bureaucratic alibi, not a social good.
The language around Belfast – that the motive is yet to be established, that prior history doesn’t necessarily tell you what someone will do, that the investigation must be allowed to proceed – is not identical to the Rotherham mechanism. But it runs on the same fuel and it serves the same interest. Hasan is running the same machine under a different brand, and the machine is running fine.
The same PSNI chief constable who will plaster rioters’ images everywhere is the head of a service whose intelligence operations, as disclosed in recent Investigatory Powers Tribunal proceedings, included routine six-monthly trawls of journalists’ phone data. The same secretary of state who told the Commons that those abusing the hospitality of this country will be deported is the minister responsible for an immigration architecture with a functioning open door in it. The same prime minister who found the attack sickening took the knee in 2020 and is now managing a premiership whose departure timetable is a matter of active parliamentary negotiation. The people moving quickly are moving quickly against the people who reacted badly to the failure. The people responsible for the failure are explaining, at measured length, why the failure was in the nature of things. Why previous history cannot tell you what someone will do, and why it is very hard to operate a system in these circumstances.
Many of us, for different reasons, find this less than fully satisfying. The religion of calm has its sacraments and its clergy. Its central liturgy is the substitution of the emotional register for the analytical one. Their emotivist lexicon consists of sickening, harrowing, deeply shocking, deeply concerning. Its founding doctrine is that concern about the immigration system is contamination, that the person asking the structural question stands in proximity to the mob and must prove they are not by not asking it. Its clerisy are the Benns and the Hasans and the Boutchers and the Starmers. All mostly reasonable people, managing unreasonable circumstances they helped to construct. All gesturing toward the next calm that will precede the next event on the next street.
Three brave people with a hurling stick ran toward such an event this week. Yet the governing class continues to look the other way.
Owen Shapell is a PhD researcher in social sciences.
Andy Burnham has pledged to do politics differently. He certainly wants to change the look of politics, if not necessarily the substance. In his inaugural speech yesterday, out went the official lectern. So too, it seems, will the protocol of formal dress normally associated with high office. Burnham let it be known last week that he intends to wear a suit and tie only in the House of Commons.
So, we face the grim prospect of the UK prime minister conducting affairs of state in ‘figure-hugging’ black t-shirts, jogging bottoms and expensive trainers, as though permanently recovering from a rave in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The tieless days of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell may soon come to look positively Edwardian. Whether nose piercings and neck tattoos make an appearance in cabinet meetings remains to be seen.
Does any of this really matter? Isn’t attachment to the suited-and-booted look merely a fogeyish affectation, the last refuge of people who still iron their handkerchiefs?
Not really. Clothes are never just clothes. They are statements of intent. They tell us how an institution sees itself and how seriously it expects to be taken. Burnham’s determination to import work-from-home aesthetics into the highest offices of state is a strangely adolescent gesture. The office becomes an extension of the sofa. Government becomes just another Microsoft Teams meeting.
For centuries, the workplace has deliberately distinguished itself from the home. The transition from private to public life was symbolised by changing how one dressed. We still understand this instinctively. We put schoolchildren into uniforms not because wearing blazers improves their maths skills, but because uniform marks the transition from the private world of the family into the public world of shared rules, responsibilities and expectations. Dressing differently encourages behaving differently.
That principle once applied even more strongly to high office. Putting on the suit, the gown or the uniform was never simply about appearances. It was a ritual acknowledgement that the office mattered more than the individual occupying it. Ministers were expected to adapt themselves to the institution rather than expecting the institution to adapt to their personal brand.
Burnham’s declaration implies the opposite. The message is that public office should accommodate the lifestyle preferences of those who hold it. It reflects the broader cultural assumption that institutions should become more ‘authentic’, more casual and more like us, rather than expecting us to rise to their standards. It is a curious inversion. The prime minister is no longer expected to look like the prime minister – instead, he is expected to look like everybody else.
Dress codes have always signalled seriousness. Judges still wear robes. Military officers still wear uniforms. Diplomats still dress with painstaking formality because clothes communicate respect – for the occasion, for the office and for those with whom they are dealing.
Nobody imagines that a well-cut suit makes someone more competent. But it does say that the occasion deserves more than whatever happened to be hanging over the back of the chair. Winston Churchill famously wore his informal ‘siren suit’ during the Blitz without diminishing his authority. But Churchill understood that this exceptional clothing reflected exceptional circumstances.
Dress also marked the divide between the old Britain of duty and the new Britain of perpetual youthfulness. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell understood perfectly well that loosening the tie was never just about comfort. It symbolised a broader rejection of the formality and restraint of the pre-New Labour world. Politics would become more informal, more conversational, more relaxed – and, inevitably, more personal.
Since then, every institution has been encouraged to ‘dress down’, flatten hierarchies and blur distinctions. Universities resemble tech start-ups. Bank managers look like marketing executives. Senior civil servants often dress like they are on their way to Glastonbury. The assumption is always that informality breeds creativity, even though it more often breeds familiarity and lowered expectations.
There is, after all, a reason why nobody wants to see airline pilots flying in hoodies or surgeons operating in cargo shorts. Uniforms and conventions reassure us because they communicate professionalism before a word has been spoken. We instinctively associate standards of appearance with standards of conduct, even if we know intellectually that the relationship is imperfect.
None of this means politicians need to resemble Victorian undertakers or City solicitors. But symbols matter because politics itself runs on symbols. Ceremonies, traditions, robes, despatch boxes, Black Rod and yes, even suits and ties, all remind us that democratic government is larger than the personalities temporarily passing through it.
Andy Burnham’s wardrobe may seem a trivial matter. Yet it reflects a deeper instinct of contemporary politics. The irony is that, in trying so hard to look ordinary, politicians risk making the extraordinary responsibilities of government appear ordinary, too.
Keir Starmer proved that a suit and tie are no guarantee of good government. But it is difficult to believe Britain will be better governed by a prime minister who looks as though he’s just nipped out of PureGym.
Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.
Andy Burnham appointed his cabinet on Monday (Alamy)
2 min read
Andy Burnham’s Cabinet has been described as a northern takeover of government. Analysis shows one part of the north in particular is on the rise.
After taking office on Monday, the new Prime Minister gave high-profile ministerial jobs to fellow northern Labour MPs like Angela Rayner and Lucy Powell. There are also seats at the Cabinet table for Lou Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, who both played key parts in Burnham’s journey from the Manchester mayoralty to Downing Street.
Burnham’s northern roots, particularly “Manchesterism”, are an important part of his political identity.
He has set up a new Downing Street base in Manchester, ‘No 10 North’, where he intends to work at least one day a week, starting on Friday, and where he could host foreign leaders.
It’s not just the politics of these places and his devolution agenda, but the cultural side, too, like his love for Everton FC, rugby league and The Smiths.
A comparison of Burnham’s Cabinet with Keir Starmer’s top team when he stood down to make way for his successor shows that specifically the northwest – the PM’s home region – is the big winner in terms of senior ministerial representation.
Burnham has appointed six Labour MPs representing seats in part of the country: Education Secretary Powell; Communities Secretary Rayner; Chief Whip Midgley; Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds; Environment Secretary Angela Eagle; and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
This compares to two MPs in Starmer’s cabinet at the time of his resignation who were from constituencies in the northwest.
Heavy monsoon rains triggering flash floods in Pakistan, July 2026 (Pakistan Press International / Alamy)
5 min read
Too often, political debate about migration begins with a boat, a border crossing or an asylum claim.
But when Abdihakiin Hassan Jiirow gave his testimony to our recent APPG inquiry on Climate Change and Migration, he did not offer such a simple explanation for how and why people move. He described drought and the loss of livestock; he spoke of flooding, insecure shelter, food shortages and scarce clean water; he talked about interrupted schooling, and persistent violence from militias and non-state actors.
For him and for many others, those pressures accumulated until the conditions necessary for ordinary life had broken down. At that point, remaining at home was no longer a meaningful choice. His testimony should change how we discuss climate migration.
That is the central argument of Before the Border, the new report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Climate, Nature and Security. It is also why the government’s new Climate Security Taskforce must be matched by a permanent capability able to identify emerging risks and act before crisis becomes displacement.
Climate change does not operate as a single trigger sending people directly towards Britain. It acts through systems. Drought, flooding, extreme heat and environmental degradation interact with poverty, conflict, weak governance and failing infrastructure.
Movement is usually internal or regional. People travel first to the nearest town, city or neighbouring country where they hope to find safety, employment or essential services.
But geographic distance is not strategic distance. When host communities are overwhelmed, public services fail, food prices rise and governments lose legitimacy, the consequences can reach the UK through humanitarian crises, conflict, disrupted supply chains, pressure on allies, organised crime and irregular migration routes.
The principal security threat is not the person who moves. It is the unmanaged systems failure that removed their choices.
Our evidence also showed what can happen when some of those choices are restored. Ahmad Ouwier arrived in Jordan as a Syrian refugee. He moved from informal work into information technology and entrepreneurship, founded a business, and created opportunities for refugees and Jordanian citizens.
His story shows that resilience depends upon institutions as much as individuals. Ability and ambition can still be frustrated by restrictions on documentation, lawful work, education, finance and company registration.
Shahd Smadi made the same point when speaking about displaced young Syrians. They do not want to remain permanently defined by vulnerability or treated solely as recipients of aid. They want education, skills, lawful employment that facilitates agency and ability to further the social and economic future of the country hosting them – the opportunity to potentially contribute rather than permanently consume.
These testimonies illustrate two paths. Where institutions collapse, displacement can become prolonged, destabilising and intergenerational. Where people retain access to education, water, lawful work, finance and functioning local government, mobility can become a form of adaptation – a means of rebuilding lives and strengthening receiving communities.
This is not only a humanitarian issue. It is a matter of preventive security.
Britain already possesses expertise across government, the intelligence community, local authorities and universities. What it lacks is a permanent mechanism capable of combining that knowledge, identifying where climate pressures are converging with fragility and translating warning into action.
Our report therefore recommends a UK Climate Security Intelligence Team: a small, cross-government capability focused not on producing more reports but on improving decisions.
It should identify where pressures on water, food, livelihoods, infrastructure and public trust are approaching critical thresholds. It should assess those already displaced, but also those trapped because they lack the resources to move. Every warning should be linked to a practical policy choice – diplomatic engagement, adaptation finance, humanitarian assistance or conflict prevention.
This capability must work with countries, not impose solutions upon them. The climate security intelligence model developed with Jordan and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office demonstrates the value of nationally owned systems combining environmental data with local knowledge and political analysis.
Satellite data can reveal rainfall decline, vegetation loss or rising temperatures. It cannot explain whether a family will adapt, move, become vulnerable to exploitation or lose faith in the state. Effective warning requires both data and human judgement.
Britain must also recognise its own exposure. Flooding, coastal erosion, extreme heat and infrastructure disruption will increasingly affect where people can live and whether receiving communities can absorb internal movement. Managed retreat and local resilience are now matters of national preparedness.
Migration policy will remain necessary. Borders will still require management. But a government that begins its response only when people reach a border has begun too late.
The risks posed by climate change and ecological collapse have been recognised in the National Security Assessment; and the new Climate Security Taskforce is a very positive move. Government now needs to establish a permanent warning capability, and the financial strategy and parliamentary accountability required to turn awareness into action.
Security policy is ultimately about preserving choices before events remove them. Acting before the border means helping communities remain safely where they are, enabling movement where necessary and preventing environmental stress from becoming institutional collapse, conflict or coercion.
Climate change is already reshaping mobility. The question is whether Britain will manage the consequences intelligently and early, or continue paying more to confront them after prevention has failed.
Barry Gardiner is Labour MP for Brent West and chair of the APPG on Climate Nature and Security, and Prof Tim Clack is an associate fellow of the Centre for Historical & Armed Conflict Research
Andy Burnham was born in January 1970, in the Liverpool suburb of Aintree (famed for its racecourse and its iron). His dad was a telephone engineer, his mother a GP’s receptionist. It is my regrettable but inevitable duty to have to inform you that he joined the Labour Party when he was 15 years old. He has a Roman Catholic background, but then this shouldn’t really surprise us, as so much of progressivism is homily and responses – it requires no thought at all.
A lot has been written about Burnham lately, and he has certainly talked at great length, but very little information has been imparted. He is like a book that you’ve forgotten you’ve read. You recall the cover, the sensation of turning the pages, but nothing about the story.
As you will know, the new UK PM appears to be a very ordinary man, and in fact almost painfully well-adjusted in his demeanour. Ordinariness should be a virtue in a prime minister, particularly after the run of freaks and geeks we’ve had over the past decade. But it is not. And actually, he is stranger than we think – not in himself, no, but in the aura he creates and its curious effect on others. He is a very weak flavour of a man, which makes his elevation to saviour by Labour MPs all the more depressingly baffling. It’s like being tied up awaiting a terrible fate when the door bursts open and you cry, ‘Thank heavens, it’s Superman!’, when in fact it’s the bassist from the Inspiral Carpets. Labour MPs seem to rate his modestly impressive achievements as mayor of Manchester rather higher than they deserve.
When Keir Starmer came to power, even though I was certain it would mean disaster and would end pretty much the way that it has (though sooner than I anticipated), I kept schtum. I couldn’t help doubting myself. Maybe I’ve judged this wrong, I thought. Remember, at the dawn of Starmer, all those articles by folk supposedly in the know about those ruthlessly efficient, pragmatic political masterminds Morgan McSweeney and Sue Gray?
Reading those, I pondered that perhaps I’d overlooked something. And it would be a mistake to underestimate the intelligence and acumen of your political opponents, wouldn’t it? But this fair-mindedness has now become far harder to sustain. It is very difficult to compose a thought along the lines of ‘Perhaps the mighty brains of Lucy Powell and Chris Bryant know something I don’t?’. I find that there are limits of Pollyanna-ishness which I cannot cross.
This time round, I feel so confident in my prediction that I’m going to put it on paper. Here it is: Andy Burnham will be a disaster. He cannot succeed because he is totally out of step with reality. Even with the most favourable prevailing political conditions, he would fail. And the prevailing conditions are awful.
Andy Burnham as the answer to Britain’s problems? He is comically unequal to the task. The solutions he is unveiling as I write – there should be more mayors, we must have a second No10 in Levenshulme, there’s been too much Thatcherism! – are risibly out of touch. It is like somebody presenting at an emergency room, projecting blood and vomit from every orifice, and being sent away with a couple of Nurofen.
But before we get on to that Burnham policy agenda, let’s examine the tone of its delivery. Apparently, the feeling in Labour is that Starmer was far too doomy and gloomy at the kick-off back in 2024, what with Rachel Reeves circling overhead cawing like a constipated crow. So, in the time-honoured political tradition of overcompensating for a predecessor, Andy is going to be breezy, bright and light.
He has a low bar to clear – to be less annoying than Keir Starmer. Unfortunately, Andy is just as annoying, but in a different way. Starmer makes one want to vomit. The Burnham aesthetic brings on more of a dry heave. He is reminiscent of Chorlton from Chorlton and the Wheelies, but without Chorlton’s innocence. Worse, he has obviously started to believe in his own myth, peacocking and preening and taking everybody and everything for granted.
We’ve had much evidence of self-adoration in the three weeks of his run-up. Excruciating social-media content has abounded. Scrutiny from journalists, even friendly ones, would be far too much of a downer. Instead, Andy has popped up on Reddit for an ‘Ask Me Anything’, in which he answered only the questions he liked the sound of. He ran away from journos after his one public speech of this little interval, but agreed to be grilled by… Gary Lineker. And he chatted on the street to the people of Cardiff, the poor sods. Haven’t they suffered enough? He described this stunt as evidence of him ‘doing politics differently’, as if speaking to members of the public was a spiffing new idea nobody had ever previously considered. I suspect that people don’t care how politics is done, as long as it is done competently. This obsession with tone is a sure sign that there is no actual content.
When the accusation of not being ‘serious’ is made against politicians, I flinch a bit. Neither seriousness nor its lack intrinsically counts for very much. If the person concerned has an easy, affable manner or if they are a crabby, snappy downer, what does it matter? The only important consideration is that they perform effectively and display good judgement. Starmer, like Boris, Truss and Rishi, was dumped not because of his demeanour – though obviously it didn’t help – but because he kept making really bad decisions. The public is remarkably tolerant of weird and unpleasant politicians who govern wisely, though it’s been a long time since that was tested. The current Andy vibes – big head swelling, big mouth running on – are inappropriate, yes. But they wouldn’t be a problem if his worldview were closer to reality.
Which brings us back to Andy’s policy platform, such as we know it. Burnham refuses to acknowledge that anything has happened since about October 1990 (the height of Madchester, appropriately). He is still 20 years old, still the bright northern lad at Cambridge with hair horns and the coolest girlfriend, and the Beautiful South are still at No1 with ‘A Little Time’. John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the long list of subsequent nits – no, didn’t happen.
Britain in 1990 is a world that many would wish to return to. But you have to face reality to deal with reality. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s’, says Andy, 36 years later, as if the Eighties were a few months ago. While I am all for long-term thinking, this is fascinatingly nonsensical. And why stop there? Down with Stafford Cripps! Kick out Bonar Law! It is bizarre, this throwing back of our current malaise to the most recent period that we were governed remotely competently.
It takes blinkers of a most peculiar kind to look at Britain in 2026 – benefits bill bringing us to the verge of bankruptcy; mass immigration, both legal and illegal, destroying the social framework of centuries; staggering rates of taxation choking any hope of economic recovery – and conclude that the problem is Margaret Thatcher. But she remains the indivisible, indigestible block in the guts of the ageing British progressive. They can’t let Maggie go. Things are bad? It must be because of Thatcher, not the subsequent 36 years of progressive rule. In fact, in what passes for Burnham’s mind, the problem must be that her successors were not progressive enough. So he has to correct that.
This is quite frighteningly infantile when you stop to think about it. Burnham is running an ancient mental model that simply cannot be updated by new facts – Windows 3.0 in the age of Windows 11. I told you he is stranger than he seems. His amiable envelope disguises this madness. He may be strikingly inane in his tone, but he is strikingly insane in his thinking.
He has kept details of his actual plans very vague. What do we know? Apparently, he intends to take the political fight to Reform UK head on – with policies such as increasing immigration by admitting the Boriswave at terrifying cost, genuflecting to Hamas and immiserating the final remaining pockets of wealth that are keeping the entire show just barely on the road. He seems to desire the return of British Leyland, which will somehow empower the working class.
And this wonky Weltanschauung is why he cannot succeed. His in-tray is heavy with 2026 problems, and he has a 1990 mind (maybe even a 1978 mind). The first horrible exogenous atrocity of his premiership – and there will be many, things being as they are – will confront him with contemporary reality, but he will be unable to process it.
In fact, the happy-chappy banter already clashes in a very ugly way against the substance, such as it is. ‘We got that wrong’, he mumbled earlier this month, in his apology to Hamas and their British-born proxies.
And who has he assembled as his team? Louise Haigh, a convicted fraudster as the first secretary of state – but this doesn’t seem to matter somehow. Loopy Net Zero fanatic Miatta Fahnbulleh as energy secretary. His director of political strategy is Matthew McGregor – a name which sounds like a spoof version of Morgan McSweeney. Maybe he can be followed by Michael McClaren or Mitchell McFarlane? McGregor is a disastrous quango progressive, all up for the repatriation of ISIS brides and a former head honcho of sinister outfits 38 Degrees and the egregiously misnamed Hope Not Hate.
Burnham is laughably unqualified for the job of prime minister, a job he has been wafted into not by the public but at the urgent demand of the tragic one-term Weebles on the Labour backbenches. His arrival in Westminster has been incredible to behold. Andy Burnham, the also-ran non-entity who falls apart at the suggestion of a difficult question, whose only mark in government in the New Labour era was the MRSA scandal… this is Labour’s messiah?
It can only end in disaster, because neither he nor they can face the reality of what they have done to Britain. They are living in a false paradise. In the words of Charlene in the spoken section of her 1982 No1 smash, ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’:
‘Hey! You know what paradise is? It’s a lie. A fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be.’
Of course, Andy Burnham is not the answer to Britain’s decline. That would take superhuman powers of forbearance and a revival of Victorian-era levels of dedication and enterprise. It also requires honesty and judgement – two interlocking qualities that this trivial twit does not possess and cannot hope to provide. The best we can hope for is that the Burnham era is the final stop of the cognitive dissonance roadshow. That it’s the last splutter of progressivism – and the terminal stage of the final Labour government.
Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who. This is an edited extract from his ‘Working Class Zeroes’ series on Substack.
3 min read
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s plan to scrap digital ID has created confusion in Whitehall and resulted in an apology to officials working on the scheme.
Before entering office on Monday, Burnham announced that he would abandon the Keir Starmer policy and redirect the resources to tackling cost-of-living pressures.
Speaking in his first Cabinet as PM on Tuesday, he said the decision was about “reprioritisation”, after announcing that money saved by ditching the scheme would be put towards cutting VAT from household energy bills.
On Tuesday morning, the Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office, Cat Little, apologised to department officials who had been working on digital ID for not being told about the decision before it was announced, PoliticsHome understands.
Little told officials that what remains of the scheme will move to an expanded Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, headed by Lisa Nandy.
This detail has led to questions over what part of the policy is actually being discarded.
The new Burnham administration has said that it remains committed to the existing Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, including the GOV.UK app, GOV.UK OneLogin and the Government Wallet, with a digital driving licence expected shortly. Digital inclusion work will continue, building on the 2025 Digital Inclusion Action Plan.
Insiders have told PoliticsHome that the government has already spent around £15m on developing the policy since it was announced by Starmer in September last year.
The Institute for Government’s Heloise Dunlop said the money that has already been spent on the policy “is unlikely to be insignificant, given the size of the team and extensive consultation process”.
She told PoliticsHome it was “not clear how the government was going to fund digital ID: the policy was not yet fully finalised, there was no clear idea what online services would be included in the join-up, and the OBR had said no specific funding had been allocated for digital ID in the spending review”.
On Tuesday morning, Darren Jones, a Starmer ally who Burnham sacked from Cabinet on Monday, and who led on digital ID while in government, posted on X that the policy of scrapping digital ID to fund energy bill cuts was “unfunded” as the latter is based on unspecified departmental cuts.
“The government will have to set out how it will pay for its new policies at the budget,” he wrote.
Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, added: “At last year’s Budget, the OBR estimated that the [digital ID] programme could cost a cumulative £1.8bn between 2026–27 and 2028–29, and the Treasury estimates that today’s VAT cut will cost £850m this year.”
Miller said that the numbers mean that the government “will therefore still need to make around £850m of as yet unspecified cuts from other departmental spending to pay for this”.
If the tax cut remains permanent, Miller said, “the government would have a range of options for how to pay for it in future years”.
“This could include departmental spending cuts, but it is unlikely these can be justified solely by scrapping digital ID. Much of the cost of this scheme was likely to be upfront investment to set it up over the next few years, such that scrapping it cannot fund a permanent tax cut.”
The Starmer government hoped that introducing digital ID would help modernise the state and make public services more efficient.
However, it polled negatively once announced, with Labour MPs complaining that the early communications strategy focused too much on how it could help combat illegal migration, with not enough messaging about how it could improve the everyday lives of voters.
In January, PoliticsHome revealed that the Starmer administration was abandoning plans to make the scheme mandatory amid warnings, including from many Labour MPs, that going ahead with the compulsory element would be strongly opposed by the public.
Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com
As Lady Bracknell didn’t quite say, to lose one prime minister before they have served four years may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose five in a row looks like carelessness – or worse. Some argue that a nefarious combination of factors including Brexit, the media, the centralised state, unaccountable elites, the bond markets and political and cultural polarisation has made the job of leading Britain more or less impossible. Did Keir Starmer lose his job because he wasn’t very good at it, or because it can’t be done? And as Andy Burnham settles in at Number 10, do voters think Britain is ungovernable? Or just that it has been badly governed?
We can look in detail at three arguments: that it is impossible to maintain a governing coalition while making painful decisions in office; that the cost of living crisis and the 24-hour news cycle have made people too impatient for change; and that voters are unwilling to accept the consequences of trade-offs between taxes and state spending, while populist parties claim this circle can be squared.
The starting point is that Keir Starmer’s defenestration followed two disastrous sets of local elections – not to mention hundreds of polls – suggesting that he was leading the Labour party down the road to defeat. It is worth noting that Labour started 2025 with a slender polling lead; by the end of that year they were in third place, with Reform well ahead.
Since January 2025 my monthly surveys have asked people what they have noticed that the Labour government had done since taking office. Crucially, they were not choosing from a pre-defined list – they could write anything. This gives us a record of what voters observed month by month over the Starmer premiership. The chart below shows the fifteen most frequent answers over that time and the proportion of respondents mentioning them in each survey.
This suggests that Starmer’s time as PM falls into three chapters. The focal point of the first chapter is the decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance (the fact that the policy was announced in the government’s first month in office and still dominated recall six months later suggests the second half of 2024 can be considered part of this phase). The chapter closes with the U-turn following Labour’s hammering in the 2025 local elections.
The second chapter opens in July 2025 and still has the Winter Fuel Allowance as the most-noticed action, albeit being mentioned less frequently, with small boat crossings consistently in second place. This chapter ends in December with some spikes relating to Rachel Reeves’ budget. The final chapter, covering 2026, does not have a clear-cut narrative: there is not a consistent most-noticed action.
Some of the successes the government claim – such as raising the minimum wage, cutting NHS waiting lists and improving workers’ rights – appear in the chart. But none of these ever attracted the notice of even ten per cent of respondents or made it into the three most noticed actions in a month. This itself says a lot about a government which was never able to articulate a clear vision or plan. Instead, the government allowed itself to be defined by the decision on the winter fuel allowance. Historians of Starmer’s premiership will puzzle over the decision to spend so much political capital on a policy which would save, in the context of government spending, a tiny amount of money – especially as few people were demanding any such action.
Another way to look at the things people noticed about Starmer’s government is to group them into the following four categories. Inevitably, deciding which actions fall into which category is somewhat subjective, but the goal is to look at general trends rather than precise figures.
- Unforced errors, of which winter fuel is the most obvious, but which also includes scandals and other policy U-turns. (This doesn’t include things which simply proved unpopular or turned out badly).
- Occupational hazards, such as difficult trade-offs inherent in governing modern Britain, and the consequences of issues facing the country. Generously interpreted – and whether or not we agree with the policies – increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions and failing to stop the boats could be included here (the former as an unpalatable choice to raise substantial revenue, the latter as something any government would face)
- Achievements, which the government’s supporters could reasonably cite as examples of progress (whether or not they are objectively popular or successful). The Renters’ Rights Act could fall into this category.
- Nothing – that is, not noticing any government actions. This gradually decreases over time.
If we found that occupational hazards dominated public awareness when Starmer’s decline set in, this might support the idea that maintaining a coalition while making tough choices is impossible. If it also showed government achievements being widely noticed during this period, it would boost the argument that voters are too impatient for change. But as we can see, our chart shows neither of these.
The first chapter, to around May 2025, is dominated by unforced errors. These are also the plurality right up to the end of 2025. By the time the writing was on the wall in early 2026, the story of the government had been one of avoidable mistakes rather than the occupational hazards of modern government. Achievements do not comprise more than a quarter of the noticed actions until March 2026; their rise in the last few months was too little and too late to salvage Starmer’s premiership.
What about the second strand in the argument that Britain is ungovernable: that the public has unreasonable expectations about the speed of change? Earlier this month we asked people whether they believed real progress on the country’s problems could be made in a couple of years with the right policies, would take at least a full government term, at least ten years, or if the problems ran so deep that they were beyond fixing. The chart below shows how these responses break down among people currently intending to vote for each of the five largest parties; it also shows the distribution of opinions among people who are not likely to vote for anyone.
The most significant thing about this chart is how little views on this question vary between parties. Populist party supporters are more likely to believe that quick progress is possible, but even then, only one in three Green or Reform voters expect to see real change within a couple of years. A clear majority (the yellow and orange bars) of supporters of each major party think that real progress will take more than two years; a different clear majority (the green and yellow bars) believe that a government should be able to achieve real progress in a full term.
If we can take this at face value, this suggests that most people would not have expected to see major progress by the time Starmer resigned (although people might be less patient in practice than they say they are).
In January 2025, we asked people whether they thought the Labour government was making progress and achieving good things; had yet to achieve much but they were giving them the benefit of the doubt; or wasn’t going to achieve anything good and they wanted them out as soon as possible. At that time, 41 per cent of people were giving the government the benefit of the doubt and a further ten per cent believed that the government was making progress. Thirty-eight per cent felt that the government wasn’t going to achieve anything. When we asked the same question a year later, these figures were 31 per cent, 10 per cent and 48 per cent, respectively.
This is striking: one in four of those who started 2025 willing to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt began 2026 having concluded that they’d seen enough to know they wanted the government out. The following month, more agreed that the government had no direction (46 per cent) than it had the right direction (28 per cent) or the wrong direction (15 per cent) combined. Seen in this way, and against the background of a 2025 dominated by unforced errors, the criticism was not that the government had failed to reach its destination; it was that the government didn’t seem to know what the destination was, let alone how to get there.
Finally, what about the idea that voters are under the illusion that the government can spend more on public services without raising taxes? Labour certainly did little to dispel this notion in the 2024 election campaign, but is the wider argument well founded?
We can discern some clues by looking at voters who hold all three of the following views: that the incoming Labour PM should stick to the 2024 manifesto promises not to increase income tax, VAT or National Insurance; that it is more important to spend more on public services than to cut taxes, borrowing or other public spending; and that austerity is a way of protecting the well-off at the expense of the less well-off, rather than just meaning the country not spending more than it can afford. In other words, people who want higher spending on public services but will not accept it being paid for by increases in the main taxes or spending cuts elsewhere.
In our poll, 17 per cent of people hold these views, but it is not just a question of numbers. If they are mostly dedicated non-voters, they are much less important for a governing coalition. However, if they are largely the kind of swing voters any government needs to stay in power, then any electoral coalition is built on sand. In fact, neither is true: these views are held by 17 per cemt of voters and non-voters alike. The chart below illustrates current voting intention among people holding these views:
Perhaps not surprisingly, such voters are overwhelmingly in the left bloc of British politics. If governing coalitions are unstable because they cannot match their voters’ expectations, it is a bigger problem for those built around the left.
Starmer’s defenders sometimes argue that he is the victim of voters’ unwillingness to show any patience or accept tough choices. Yet his political downfall is attributable to neither of those, but to avoidable mistakes. In the end, his premiership was a demonstration of bad governance, not of an ungovernable country.
There are lessons in this, both for our new PM and the parties currently in opposition. Some of Starmer’s unforced errors can be traced back to a manifesto which dodged difficult choices, meaning the government came to office with neither a clear direction nor any clarity as to the change voters had given their blessing to. Those same manifesto pledges largely tie Burnham’s hands: 54 per cent of people, and 44 per cent of current Labour voters, expect him to adhere to the 2024 promises on tax. Even if he can avoid the unforced errors and communicate a plan in the way his predecessor could not, he will soon reach the next obstacle – that Labour doesn’t have a mandate to make the sort of tough choices the country needs if economic growth does not allow the government to have its cake and eat it.
Full data at LordAshcroftPolls.com
The post Lord Ashcroft: Another new prime minister. But is the UK ungovernable? appeared first on Conservative Home.
Donald Trump is “losing support all the time” from American voters and his political allies as the Iran war drags on, according to a BBC expert.
Sarah Smith, the broadcaster’s North America correspondent, said the public’s patience was wearing thin as the cost of petrol continues to rise.
She said the Republican Party is set to pay the price at November’s midterm elections unless a peace deal can be reached soon.
The US military launched another wave of air strikes on Iranian targets overnight as it tries to stop ships using the Strait of Hormuz from being attacked.
That is despite a ceasefire being agreed between Iran and the US in April.
On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Smith said: “We are in a position now where the president is getting close to full scale conflict once again with Iran, when the majority of Americans are not in support of this, they never were from the beginning.
“He’s losing support all the time as prices are going up and the ever-present problem of the price of petrol back over $4 a gallon, is the tipping point at which voters do not like what is happening.
“Whilst Donald Trump’s base are still very supportive of this … that’s not what the majority of Americans think, and Donald Trump knows that going into midterm elections in just three months time with this kind of economy is going to be very very difficult for his Republicans.
“He’s losing support in Congress as a result of that, where Republicans are deeply worried about the political situation.
“So when you hear travel warnings like that, it’s just one more reason for Americans to wonder what on earth the president, who promised that he would keep them out of forever wars, is doing.
“It may not be a forever war yet, but it’s one that one cannot see the end of easily.”
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Remember #TheDress? In case you (somehow) missed it, someone posted a photo of (you guessed it) a dress in 2015, and the internet collectively lost its mind about colour theory by debating whether it was truly black and blue or gold and white.
Well, the brand behind it has just launched a new collection that will redefine your wardrobe in an entirely different way.
Similar to the likes of M&S and Tu, Roman has just launched a new collection that makes luxury fashion affordable and accessible.
Priced below £50, the collection is made up of everything from floaty summer dresses, to shorts, cotton tops, and even cute co-ords.
Best of all, it’s all designed to be completely multi-generational, so you can share with your daughter or rest assured it’ll get the seal of approval at the family gathering, just as much as it will on holiday or at the office.
Don’t worry, we’ve already trawled the Roman webite for the best picks we think will level up your summer wardrobe, whether you’re going for business casual, bohemian, or beach babe.
The race to fill Lindsey Graham’s seat has created a new test of President Donald Trump’s power. South Carolina Republicans aren’t sure Trump will pass.
Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed last week to fill the remainder of her late brother’s term, announced Monday she will seek a full term for her brother’s old seat. Her decision came after winning Trump’s backing, and his endorsement of the political newcomer had the potential to scare away challengers.
But other Republicans are still charging forward, seeing an opening in a race with a highly untested candidate. Their determination is a signal that challenging a Trump-backed candidate may no longer be the career-ender it once was within the party.
“Even folks that didn’t like Senator [Lindsey] Graham or didn’t vote for him in the primary were pretty happy about the appointment, as a tribute to Senator Graham,” said CJ Westfall, chair of the Dorchester County GOP. “But once we saw the president jump in and support her, 95 percent are saying, ‘What the hell are we doing here? We don’t know how she votes. We don’t know what she believes.’”
“People that were excited about the appointment are now skeptical of the endorsement,” Westfall said.
Rep. Russell Fry, one of Trump’s most loyal congressional allies, announced earlier Monday he was jumping in. He joins Rep. Ralph Norman, who declared his own candidacy over the weekend, along with self-funding businessman Mark Lynch, who lost to the former senator in the primary. A number of other Republicans are mulling runs as well, including former Gov. Mark Sanford and Lt. Gov Pam Evette, who lost her own bid for governor a few weeks ago in spite of Trump’s endorsement.
While Trump’s endorsees have largely won their primaries, Evette’s recent loss isn’t his only setback. His picks lost in the Iowa and Georgia gubernatorial races.
“I think people saw [Trump’s] endorsement of Pam Evette and her terrible performance and know this race could be up for grabs like the gubernatorial was,” said a Republican operative unaffiliated with race who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the landscape.
While Graham’s candidacy will test the power of Trump’s direct endorsement, there’s no question the MAGA movement is still the dominant force in South Carolina politics: All Republicans in the race are running as unapologetic supporters of the president, competing among themselves to prove who is the most authentic champion of Trump’s agenda — a dynamic that has defined GOP primaries across the country this year.
Norman told reporters on Monday that Trump’s endorsement “helps a great deal.” “That’s why I ask[ed] him for it,” he added. “I’d rather have it, but it’s up to the people.”
In Fry’s launch video, he presented himself as a Trump-aligned “MAGA warrior” — and included pictures of him grinning alongside the president.
In a statement, Fry campaign spokesperson Luke Byars noted Fry has “been honored to receive President Trump’s endorsement” in his previous elections.
“Our focus for the next three weeks remains ensuring South Carolina has a conservative fighter in the United States Senate who will advance the President’s agenda and deliver real results for South Carolina families,” Byars said.
Some Republicans said Graham’s lack of prior elected experience and the original expectation that she would only serve the remainder of her brother’s term have kept the field open.
“There is a desire to avoid yet another bruising Republican primary, right after we had a pretty contentious one for governor,” said Joel Sawyer, a longtime GOP strategist in South Carolina who’s not involved in the race. “But I don’t think that’s going to be the case.”
Trump’s endorsement of Graham gives her instant credibility despite her lack of electoral experience. But her campaign announcement on Monday was met with surprise and confusion by many across the state.
Most saw her appointment as a respectful gesture to the Graham family, and she was expected to be a caretaker who would hold the seat until the end of her brother’s term in January. Her interest in running for a full term even caught South Carolina party brass off-guard: Drew McKissick, chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, told POLITICO Friday he thought Graham told Gov. Henry McMaster she’d “accept the appointment to fill the rest of the term, not to be a candidate for it.”
A South Carolina GOP rule adopted earlier this year requires candidates for office to have voted in at least two of the past three statewide GOP primaries.According to local political outlet FITSNews, Graham voted in the 2024 GOP runoff but neither the 2022 nor 2024 GOP primaries. Whether Graham qualifies depends on whether, alongside her vote last month, her 2024 runoff vote counts as a primary vote under the new rule. The Dorchester County Republican Party announced it was formally requesting the state party’s rules committee review Graham’s eligibility.
McKissick, the state party chair, said Monday he hadn’t taken a look at the issue yet since the filing window doesn’t open until midday Tuesday, so no one had officially filed to run.
“As a result I haven’t seen information from any candidates yet,” he told POLITICO. “But suffice it to say that we will look at all of the various candidates’ information and official voting records from the state election commission when they do.”
A spokesperson for Graham’s campaign said she meets the state GOP’s primary voting requirement to file as a Senate candidate and is “qualified to run because she has real experience leading.”
“As to why she is running, it’s quite simple: she is a strong conservative who wants to build upon her brother’s legacy. There were never any conversations surrounding her appointment that were contingent upon serving only the remainder of Senator Lindsey Graham’s term,” Abby Zilch, a spokesperson for Graham’s campaign, said in a statement.
Trump’s endorsement power has been decisive across contested Republican primaries over the last several months, repeatedly propelling his favored candidate across the finish line. But his track record in South Carolina is murkier. After backing Evette early in the gubernatorial race only to see her struggle in the runoff, Trump offered a last-minute dual-endorsement to also back Attorney General Alan Wilson. Wilson ultimately beat Evette in the runoff by more than 30 points.
“I think it’s a nice sentiment,” said another GOP strategist of Trump’s endorsement granted anonymity to speak openly. “But at the end of the day she has no record, nor a right to the seat all because her brother held it. This is up to the people of South Carolina to decide.”
On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would stay out of the August 11 special election. Thune, who was close friends with Lindsey Graham, called his sister a “strong candidate” but said “I’ll let voters in South Carolina decide it.”
Other senators are diving in. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rick Scott (R-Florida), staunch allies of the president, announced their support for Norman over the weekend, publicly bucking Trump to back one of the House’s most conservative members. Both Lee and Scott specifically cited Norman’s support for the Save America Act, the election reform bill that has been a central focus for Trump in recent months. Norman also earned the nod of Turning Point Action.
Meanwhile, Norman — who passed on another term in the House to make an unsuccessful run for governor — has suggested Fry, his House colleague, could jeopardize Republicans’ House majority. If Fry wins the special election for Graham’s seat, the state would have to call a special election to fill his House seat, potentially leaving it empty for months.
“I respect Russell Fry and I have enjoyed serving with him in the House, but the reality is, his candidacy could leave his seat vacant until May 18th,” Norman wrote Monday.
GOP Rep. Nancy Mace announced Monday she would not enter the race.
The candidate filing window closes on July 28. Election Day is just two weeks later. The breakneck speed could play to Graham’s favor: She has the benefit of her brother’s campaign apparatus, which mobilized to win a primary outright last month while many of the state’s other contested races went to runoffs. And the memorial services for Lindsey Graham — scheduled for July 28 in Washington and July 29 in South Carolina — will shrink the calendar further.
“We say it’s a three-week campaign, but really it’s a two-week campaign after the funeral,” said Tyson Grinstead, an RNC committeeman and Richland County GOP chair. “I’m sure there’ll be ads and stuff, but it’s going to be hard for everybody to focus on campaign rallies and make a decision on this, in terms of voters, until after the funeral.”
If no candidate reaches 50% of the vote, a runoff election would be held in late August.
“We don’t always understand what’s going on in D.C.,” said Jeff Green, the GOP chair in Greenville County. “We try to give the president a lot of grace on these things. Would I have picked, you know, another Graham to replace Lindsey Graham? Probably not.”
“We don’t know her yet,” Green added. “But we’re open and trusting in what the president and his team are doing.”
Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
Christopher Nolan has claimed that fans could be in for a bit of a wait before he next makes a film.
Three years after the release of his Oscar-winning historical epic Oppenheimer, Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey hit cinemas last week, and has already been a huge hit with critics and at the box office.
While promoting The Odyssey, the director and its stars have made no secret of the fact that the on-location shoot was an especially gruelling one, with leading man Matt Damon previously sharing that Nolan threw himself into the experience as much as his cast.
“When you’re uncomfortable – and you are most of the time, physically, just by nature of what’s required to get these shots – if you turn and look over your shoulder, he’s no more than five feet away and doing the same thing without complaint,” he told Time magazine.
“There’s something really nice about being a soldier in the foxhole and looking over and the general is right next to you.”
During a recent interview about the film on Today, Nolan admitted: “I definitely hit the limits of my own stamina and everybody’s stamina, I think.
“I mean, it’s The Odyssey – of course it should be difficult. We’re not doing the job right making a film of The Odyssey if it doesn’t seem difficult.”
As a result, he said he intends to take a break from filmmaking before getting behind the camera again.
When asked if he’d be following his usual pattern of waiting three years between releases, Nolan responded: “Oh, at least.”
Earlier this month, the British director opened up about how his latest film wrapped filming both ahead of schedule and under budget.
“We [scheduled for] 100 days. And by day 91, we couldn’t have taken another step. So we finished,” he told The Daily Show.
Nolan stated that filming “finished at the right time”, pointing out that “everybody was done”.
“People were just exhausted,” he recalled. “They’d been through it. So, it took the right time to make the film. We had enough time to make it.”
The Odyssey is in cinemas now.
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