Simon Walters is a political journalist and Consultant Editor (Politics) of the Independent.

The way he is going it is soon going to require a Maths degree to keep up with the tally of Keir Starmer’s U turns.

According to reports the Prime Minister is preparing to perform another somersault – his fifteenth – over the soaring cost of student loans.

If so, it will be good news for millions of students – including Maths graduates – saddled

with debts of up to £60,000 and rising.

Incredibly, recent changes by Rachel Reeves to the student loans repayment system, originally supposed to protect low earners, mean that before long ex-students on the minimum wage face having cash deducted from their meagre pay packet.

With professional job prospects for graduates at an all-time low it adds insult to injury.

Politically speaking, a Starmer climbdown will also be good news for Kemi Badenoch who can chalk it up as another personal victory over him.

The Conservative leader has led calls for student loan interest rates – in some cases as high as six per cent (twice the cost of the home loan they can’t afford either!) to be reduced.

Some of her own aides advised her against it, arguing it was a ‘niche interest’ and that it was futile for the Tories to attempt to woo the ‘campus vote’ – long seen as a minority and overwhelmingly Left leaning.

On top of that some of the loan repayment rates at the centre of the controversy, the ‘Plan 2’ scheme, were set by David Cameron’s Conservative Lib Dem Coalition administration.

But Badenoch, who entered Parliament a year after Cameron left Downing Street, wasn’t put off by that small inconvenient detail.

She persisted, arguing the vast increase in student numbers in the last 25 years, allied to rising loan costs, presents the Tories with a captive new audience, an army of aspirational but frustrated thirty somethings, some of whom are still forced to live with mum and dad, in no small part because of their crippling student debt.

She could see that potentially they are a Millennial and Gen Z version of ‘Essex Man,’ ‘Mondeo Man,’ ‘Worcester Woman’ or the more generic ‘Red Wall’ – key groups of voters whose concerns were seen to have been ignored, and shrewdly targeted by leaders from Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to Nigel Farage who spotted a gap in the market.

Badenoch also had the would-be successful leader’s necessary slice of luck when she was handed a publicity coup on a prime time plate after financial guru Martin Lewis attempted a bungled ambush of her on Monday.

Bursting into the ‘Good Morning Britain’ TV studio unannounced he squeezed next to presenter Ed Balls on the sofa where the two proceeded to give one of the most egregious combined displays of mansplaining ever seen.

Kemi could not have been less flummoxed.

She swotted the two Alpha Males away with the same sang froid she demonstrates in dispatching Starmer at the Commons Despatch Box every Wednesday. (Not that anyone has ever accused him of being an Alpha Male.)

Which is precisely what she did to the Prime Minister this week on the issue of student loans.

If Starmer does act to curb student loans no one seriously expects Kemi to be crowned campus queen. But it will further emphasise the growing divide in their perceived authority over their parties. It makes it all the more certain that Badenoch will lead hers into the next election, and all the more likely that Starmer will not.

Badenoch is not so naive as to believe she is anywhere close to building a platform to win that election.

But in an age when Conservative speakers are more likely to have been deplatformed on university forums it is a beginning.

Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.

It is often said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.

Funnily enough, this quote itself is often falsely attributed to George Orwell. But regardless of who did or did not coin it, this memeified phrase strikes at something important. Indeed, sometimes as little as buying an overpriced iced matcha latte can feel revolutionary in deeply conformist London. This is especially true if one is doing so, not merely to lap up some delicious green caffeine, but to prove a point.

It is for this reason, I have henceforth decided to take a detour en route to my local tube station, in order to pick up something from Gail’s Bakery.

Yes, this is indeed a divisive thing to do, given that the chain’s newest branch in Archway, North London, has been vandalised twice in the same week. Aside from the usual string of anti-Israel slogans scribbled across the cafe, one simply read “Support Local businesses”. Is it not presumably better to support such businesses by offering them your custom, rather than ordering graffiti spray off Amazon and dousing rival eateries with it?

That numerous of photographed placards and graffiti also omit a vital apostrophe of possession should tell you all you need to know about these charlatans.

Luke Johnson, who masterminded Gail’s expansion and sale to Boston-based Bain Capital, and remains an investor, was a Brexit supporter and high-profile critic of the government’s tyrannical COVID-19 policies. He has also slammed net-zero zealotry. This is unusually gutsy for today’s typical high-profile businessman, who generally seeks to keep their head down and succumb to the whinging bien pensant, who have increasingly directed their ire toward Israel.

Johnson has also courageously bucked the trend on the matter of the Middle East, praising the so-called “Start-Up Nation’s” entrepreneurial grit, and slamming “the deranged defence of Hamas” in academia. While Johnson is not Jewish or Israeli, Gail’s founder, the baker Yael Mejia is both. The chain is therefore named, not after Coronation Street’s chaotic matriarch, but using the anglicised version of Yael: Gail. Although Mejia is no longer financially linked to the chain which calls her its namesake, Bain Capital reportedly has some investments in private companies based in Israel.

Is Israel committing a “genocide” as these anti-Gail’s goons claim in their messy graffiti? No, it is engaged in a war of self-defence.

Is Gail’s an Israeli company? No.

Even if it were an Israeli company, would that make it automatically complicit or approving of any and all actions ever taken by the Israeli government or military? No, especially given that Israel, unlike China, Russia, Iran and Qatar (who have far more business interests in London than the Jewish State) is a free market economy with a free press and free and fair elections.

The reality is that none of these obvious facts matter to those who have decided that any and all connection with Israel and its culture, however vague, is a grave moral offence.

It is not only Gail’s that has been subject to these nonsensical attacks for years, but Marks and Spencer, Tesco, or indeed any company that the anti-Israel mob deem inadequately anti-Israel. Just this week, ‘activists’ tweeted photographs of themselves sticking fingers inside Israeli avocados, and moving them inside supermarket freezers to render them inedible. In 1985, one person was killed when suspected Palestinian terrorists detonated a bomb inside a Paris branch of Marks and Spencer.

No better is the brainrot of this set exemplified than by Rachida Benamar, who describes herself as a “qualified Career & Life Coach”.

Benamar posted a viral X post reading: “Boycott Gail’s bakery. Gail’s was founded by Israeli entrepreneur Gail Mejia and Ran Avidan. The current owner Luke Johnson’s stances are disgusting and what he said about Gaza is horrific. Please share widely” One response noted: “What did he say? Would be helpful to put it up if you can.” Naturally, she did not. Why? Because Johnson made no such “horrific” comments about Gaza. But to those of Benamar’s persuasion, any remarks about Israel or Gaza that do not include a complete surrender to those that would see the Jewish State wiped from the map, qualify as “horrific”.

The Gail’s fiasco was never about protesting injustice, but about ensuring that anything and everyone Jewish, Israeli (or perceived as such) is driven out of public life.

We should all do our small part to avoid this evil coming to pass, one chilled beverage at a time!

No Second Chances: The Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second Referendum by Morgan Jones

Morgan Jones starts by describing the favourite headgear of indignant pro-European protesters: blue berets with yellow EU stars stuck onto them by passionate Remainers in Bath.

These first-time campaigners were distraught at losing the EU Referendum, held ten years ago this June, and believed they could yet overturn the result. Jones notes

“the strange, anarchic and stubborn spirit of older, previously not hugely political, people doing activism, often viewing getting under the right people’s skin as a victory in and of itself.”

Nothing would induce these bereaved Remainers to moderate their tone, and they could not see their efforts were off-putting to considerable numbers of people whose support they needed if they were ever to get a second referendum, and then overturn the result of the first. As Jones says,

“the base and the culture they created was, well, kind of mad, out of touch with the country and made them often deeply alienating to advocates for their own cause.”

The campaigners believed with passionate intensity that Leave had only won by lying to uneducated voters in backward parts of the country. As the political scientist Rob Ford puts it, the view taken by zealous Remainers of Leave voters was:

“They were lied to, stupid. They are reactionary. They are wrong. The vote was not legitimate. The vote was not fair. They were misled by the media.”

Bereft Remainers could not accept there were honest, honourable, intelligent arguments for leaving the EU.

Nor, usually, were academics able to see this. Anand Menon, Director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, told Jones:

“What was absolutely staggering was the degree to which the academic literature’s starting point was, ‘We’re in the European Union. It’s a good thing. Let’s look at how it works.’ “

In Menon’s view, “We failed as a profession, I think, pretty badly.”

During the 2015 general election I went for ConHome to Bolton West to gauge opinion there, and wrote a piece entitled “Bolton West wants to talk about immigration”, in which I quoted a voter who said:

“We get treated like second-class citizens.”

Voters who felt treated like second-class citizens took the chance in the EU Referendum to confound the Establishment by voting Leave.

Immediately after the Referendum, it was not feasible simply to tell these voters they had got it wrong, but that changed after the general election called by Theresa May in 2017, at which the voters took the chance to render her parliamentary position precarious.

It now seemed worthwhile to a coalition of anti-Brexit organisations to set up People’s Vote, launched in April 2018 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden to campaign for a second referendum.

But a large number of Remainers wished only to preach to the converted. The New European was set up as a newspaper which would only appeal to the converted, who were sufficiently numerous to make it a success.

On Twitter, the hashtag #FBPE, standing for Follow Back Pro-EU, was alienating, Jones observes, to pretty much anyone who was not already a strident Remainer, and was “primarily used by people who were not very good at speaking on the internet, who couldn’t quite get the tone right”.

It was part of a “drive to insularity” which ruled out the winning of converts, and tended instead to antagonise anyone who leant towards Leave, and also anyone who was not sure what to think.

Labour Party members were generally pro-EU, but Jeremy Corbyn, who remained leader until April 2020, was a silent and ineffectual Leaver, who nevertheless thought that party members ought to be allowed to have their say, which they got by applauding Sir Keir Starmer to the echo at the party conference of 2018, when after saying another referendum might be needed to break the logjam, he uttered nine words unauthorised by Corbyn’s office:

“And nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.”

Jones sketches the many different pro-EU organisations which jostled for influence at this time, and touches on some of eminent people who were involved on the Remain side, including Roland Rudd, Hugo Dixon, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis, Alan Rusbridger, Will Hutton, Bill Emmott, Anne Applebaum and Tom Baldwin.

Some of these people could not stand each other. Campbell was heard to say:

“If a computer designed someone to annoy me, you would get Hugo Dixon.”

Campbell’s first career was as a tabloid journalist. He is a bit of a brute, but understands power, and the transforming importance of the story.

Dixon had been at The Economist and The Financial Times, and quoted a prissy remark made to him in 2015 by Hutton, a former editor of The Observer:

“This campaign is going to be polluted by lies and by twisting of facts.”

Dixon had accordingly created an organisation called InFacts, to “try to set the record straight”. We see here the factual heresy, as Claud Cockburn called it, in all its naivety and bogus even-handedness. For as Dixon admits to Jones,

“The fact was that 99 per cent of our fire was targeted on the Brexiteers and increasingly on Boris.”

Boris Johnson is an old friend of Dixon: they were at Ashdown House, Eton and Balliol together.

But Dixon and Johnson remained friends. The bitter divisions were between various Remainers, and Jones relates in a calm tone quite a few of the vicious insults they flung at each other. Baldwin, the Director of Communications at People’s Vote, remembered

“Roland Rudd saying, ‘Well I have appointed myself Chairman of the People’s Vote Campaign’ – in the same way that Idi Amin gave himself Victoria Crosses – or, ‘My friend from college, Hugo Dixon, is now Deputy Chairman of the People’s Vote campaign’, which was news to a lot of us.”

Meanwhile the most fervent Remainers went on huge marches through London, which gave those who took part the feeling that victory was in sight, but which made many onlookers cringe.

Members of staff at People’s Vote tried to persuade the demonstrators to carry Union Jacks instead of European flags, but were informed that the Union Jack is “a National Front symbol”.

As Baldwin said, the more the campaign empowered the most virulent Remain activists, the less chance there was of winning over the Conservative MPs whose support they needed in order to defeat Brexit in Parliament.

In October 2019, the antipathies within People’s Vote burst into public view when Rudd sacked Baldwin and the campaign’s Director, James McGrory.

The staff of People’s Vote sided by a margin of 40 to three with Baldwin and McGrory. When Rudd attempted to appeal to the staff by saying, “We’ve been through a lot together, ” one of them retorted, “No we haven’t. What’s my name?”

This book has the great merit of focussing on what ten years ago was the losing side. Jones in not particularly eloquent, but she is careful and scrupulous and fair as she recounts how the enraged Waitrose shoppers who were the most zealous Remainers antagonised the voters in Bolton West who wanted their country back.