LONDON: Bizarre events at No10 Downing Street, this week “senior Downing Street aides briefed selected news outlets against a leadership plot by Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, and his allies to dethrone the Prime Minister. Instead of protecting Keir Starmer and shoring up support as expected, the briefing exposed the vulnerabilities of the most unpopular PM on record, the unintended consequence is that a coup is now a risk. All involved deny everything. The PM says the calls cannot have come from No10, that his team is united and he will fight any challenge, but whose idea this was remains a mystery. Streeting was already scheduled to appear on several platforms the following day and on all these he was articulate and charming in his denials and loyalty to the PM . he demanded accountability. The net result is that No10 appears chaotic, dysfunctional and divided, and folks are pointing the finger at Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney . the PM conducted a brief investigation and it seems anyone who may have been involved is exonerated.
However this is not what the PM needed two weeks before what is predicted to be a hard hitting budget for anyone who earns over £45K. It has also exposed the others with prime ministerial ambitions, John Healey, Shabana Mahmood, Ed Miliband and in spite of denials no one is ruling out Wes Streeting.
The debacle above has not distracted from the scandal of the BBC’s 2024 Panorama program that has accused of misleading viewers when a 2021 speech made by President Donald Trump was edited and spliced together to suggest he was inviting violence, when in reality he was encouraging a peaceful march. This edit has opened a Pandora’s box eliciting further criticisms of bias on the BBC’s reporting on Israel, Gaza, LGBT, the Royal family/Monarch, and India with a recent article with perceived insidious intent to destabilise society.
The BBC declares itself impartial and worthy of society’s annual contribution to fund it, but public perception is that it uses The Guardian and The Independent newspapers as its direction of travel . the BBC organisation seems to be a hierarchy of group think and cultural biases, their sense of superiority and exceptionalism does not appear to comprehend the criticisms. The two top executives have resigned . the Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the President saying sorry, publicly. BBC said the Panorama program was an “error of judgement” and had given viewers “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a call for violent action”. BBC will not show that Panorama episode again. BBC have rejected the President’s demand for defamation compensation . now attorneys for the BBC have written to President Trump’s legal team with a response to the letter received last Sunday.
The UK have rejected to pay the £6.75 billion demanded by the EU to join the new Security Action for Europe (SAFE), designed to provide financial support/bans to member states to enable defence readiness and the economies of scale for common procurement. The UK was not be eligible for SAFE loans, but as a third country which has signed a Security and Defence Partnership with the EU, it can join procurements under conditions to be negotiated. The EU is arguing that if UK companies win contracts that are co-financed by EU-backed loans, the UK government should make a financial contribution to compensate Brussels.
President Trump’s potentially reduced US presence in Europe has prompted the EU to rethink its security capabilities. Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President is considering an EU Intelligence Unit that would gather information from member states national security services. The very small prospective unit would complement the work of the commission’s existing Security Directorate, which currently oversees institutional protection, information security, and risk management. The Financial Times reports that it plans to recruit staff from the intelligence services of member states to consolidate information and use it for common purposes . however the plan has not yet been officially presented to all 27 EU member states, France and Hungary are reportedly not bought in to the idea.
It has been reported that UK intelligence-sharing with close-ally the United States has been suspended over military strikes on drug-traffickers in the Caribbean. UK signals are reportedly no longer going to the Joint Interagency Task Force South stationed at key West in Florida. UN human rights chief Volker Türk said that the strikes violate international law and amount to extrajudicial killing – an interpretation contested by the US. UK do not want to be implicated in the identification of targets. At the post-PMQs huddle Prime Minister Starmer’s spokesman did not deny that the instruction had come from Attorney General Richard Hermer. Neither the Pentagon nor the Ministry of Defence comment on such matters.
Unusually nine former British Army 4-star generals have felt compelled to write to the Prime Minister warning against the Northern Ireland “Troubles Bill”. This bill enables families of victims, including those who never came home from service in Northern Ireland, to seek answers years after any event. It means that veterans who complied with the law thirty years could be summoned to court in their 70’s and 80’s to be measured against current laws. These Generals fear “now extends far beyond Northern Ireland and this pernicious lawfare is able to target anyone in uniform on active service anywhere in the world . they insist the government must disapply the European Convention on Human Rights and the UK’s own Human Rights Act from troops actions while on active service in the UK and globally, “By extending the same protection to those who enforced the law and those who defied it, the bill becomes morally incoherent”. The Generals feel that lawfare is trumping warfare. Today every deployed member of the British Armed Forces must consider not only the enemy in front but the lawyer behind.
Meanwhile ReformUK are still top of the polls, with Maria Caulfield now joining the populist party they can boast 14 former Tory MPs. JCB Chairman Lord Anthony Bamford has donated £200,000 to ReformUK and Kevin Byrne OBE who founded Checkatrade has joined the party, signalling growing business confidence in Reform UK.
