Today’s Update

The Man Who Went into Hospital for Gout and the Next Day Was Dead

By Dr Rachel Nicoll

We saw yesterday in ‘Revisiting the “Midazolam Murders”‘ that in many institutions the infamous Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) had been continued in all but name, even after it was scrapped in 2014 following complaints and public outrage. Nevertheless, the April 2020 NICE guideline NG163 brought back the LCP for COVID-19 patients suffering “breathlessness”.

This is a story about a medical inquest in a coroner’s court. They happen every day of the week. But this one has the potential to blow the whole of the end-of-life written and unwritten policy out of the water.

So far there have been three separate hearings for this inquest: in March, August and December 2025, and it’s not over yet.

Derek Dimmock, aged 86, was admitted to Royal Trinity Hospice in south London, on June 6th 2020 for gout treatment. Nevertheless, within three hours, a hospice doctor had assessed that he was “in the process of dying” and put him on a syringe driver (necessary for delivering intravenous drugs) and prescribed end-of-life drugs, including midazolam, alfentanil (for short-term pain relief) and oxycodone, a strong opioid.

Derek Dimmock quickly became comatose and died the following day.

Royal Trinity Hospice recorded his death as heart failure and claimed that his kidneys were failing. Convinced that he had died of an overdose of the drugs, the family demanded an inquest.

Admission to Royal Trinity Hospice

The day before admission Derek Dimmock was seen by a community nurse, who told the court he did not appear to be about to die and recalled that he was able to swallow when she gave him a cup of tea. On the day of admission, his wife also agreed that he did not appear to be on the verge of death. Similarly, the paramedics who transported him had earlier assessed him and reported that he was conscious and able to talk and drink.

On arrival at Royal Trinity Hospice, however, it is a completely different story. Two palliative care doctors said that Dimmock’s GP had told them that Dimmock’s wife and son thought he was “beginning to die”. This is denied by the family’s barrister, James Bogle KC, and in any case the family are not medical professionals.

As for Dimmock’s GP, he apparently could not appear as a witness owing to now being on long-term sick leave. He had prescribed midazolam for Dimmock without doing his own assessment of the patient, after another community nurse recommended “anticipatory medications” because she assessed that he was deteriorating. The GP’s notes do not mention that Derek Dimmock was near end of life.

The GP’s practice partner, called to give evidence, could not explain why Dimmock’s GP had not wanted to carry out his own assessment.

The hospice alleged that Derek Dimmock had agreed to an end-of-life protocol, but it was never signed and never seen by the family before his death. The family’s barrister told the coroner: “The family alleged as far back as 2021 that this is a false and fraudulent document so they should know they could not rely on it.”

Expert opinion on actual cause of death

Palliative care specialist Professor Sam Ahmedzai, whom we saw in yesterday’s piece giving an expert opinion on the LCFCPG report, gave evidence on behalf of the Dimmock family. He said that in his opinion, although Derek Dimmock had complex health needs, putting cause of death as heart failure “was misleading and incorrect”, as well as being “very unsatisfactory and, frankly, insulting”. He said the death certificate should have stated that he died of acute intoxication with the drugs administered by the hospice, as well as acute renal (kidney) failure aggravated by enforced dehydration.

In Professor Ahmedzai’s opinion, the midazolam doses given to Derek Dimmock were alarmingly doubled without any assessment from a doctor and were administered by a nurse with a single signature, whereas there should have been two nurse signatures. He also noted that the treatable gout and dehydration were not adequately addressed before end-of-life protocols were initiated. Derek’s wife said it became clear to her that her husband was being deprived of fluids and she did not believe a swallow test was carried out.

An NHS palliative care consultant, Dr Aparajita Das, appointed by the coroner as an independent expert, having heard the evidence of Professor Ahmedzai, asked whether the case should be discussed in a coroner’s court or as a broader public inquiry.

Professor Ahmedzai’s opinion was shared by health scientist Dr Kevin Corbett, a former palliative care nurse practitioner. He told the coroner: “You can live with heart disease for weeks, months or years.” He also challenged the use of midazolam and the application of NICE guideline NG163 in this case, pointing out that high doses of midazolam could hasten death by suppressing respiration, especially in non-terminal patients such as Derek Dimmock. He also questioned whether the hospice’s swift deployment of the syringe driver (necessary for administration of intravenous drugs) adhered to ethical standards, suggesting it may have caused an unnatural death.

A palliative care nurse admitted that the syringe driver was faulty and she had had to replace it, so she was unsure how much of the drug cocktail had been given. The hospice should have recorded in their controlled drugs book the number of milligrams left in the syringe driver once they removed it. The controlled drugs book is required by law to be kept for two years. However, despite knowing there was to be an inquest into the death, the hospice destroyed the book.

On this point, Professor Ahmedzai said: “It is very disturbing that you would destroy the drug book when there was an investigation going on. I am shocked about the record-keeping on these charts, and the fact that no one picked up on it. It is truly shocking for a specialist unit.”

Dr Corbett questioned much of the evidence presented by Royal Trinity Hospice, in particular:

• How could hospice staff have carried out a face-to-face assessment before Derek Dimmock even arrived at the hospice?
• The midazolam dose was unquantifiable because of the faulty syringe driver, the fact that it had to be replaced, the fact that the amount discarded was not recorded and the illegal destruction of the drugs book. He makes the point that: “Midazolam is a Schedule 3 controlled drug. It’s not just two paracetamol.” This was a serious medical error in the records.

At this point, the hospice’s counsel applied to the coroner to have Dr Corbett’s evidence excluded entirely because he was no longer practising. The request was denied but restrictions were placed on the topics on which he was permitted to comment.

As the Dimmock family’s counsel, James Bogle commented: “It would be hard to find a nurse in this country more qualified academically. He is probably one of the better qualified people in the country to be able to give that evidence.”

Missing witnesses and concerns about the coroner

We have already seen that Derek Dimmock’s GP, who prescribed the midazolam without assessing the patient, could not give evidence as he was on long term sick leave.

And during the final week of the inquest, two nurses who cared for Derek Dimmock were to be recalled but were suddenly ‘unavailable’, in spite of the court date having been set months earlier. The family’s barrister called the workplace of one, only to find that she was at work and could have attended.

Other witnesses were also absent or unavailable for cross-examination: one doctor had gone abroad and was therefore no longer under the jurisdiction of the coroner.

Finally, it appeared that the Royal Trinity Hospice Director, former chief executive of NICE, Sir Andrew Dillon, had resigned one day after the start of the inquest into Derek Dimmock’s death.

In the middle of the August 2025 hearing, the inquest was unexpectedly halted by the coroner moments after Dr Kevin Corbett had given his evidence.

Frustrated with the delays and lack reasons provided, Derek Dimmock’s son complained to the Chief Coroner. Maajid Nawaz reproduces the letter on his Substack, which states that Professor Ahmedzai was listed as giving his evidence that day. He was in the court, waiting to be called but that day’s session was ended, even though the coroner had earlier been claiming that court availability was at a premium. The court then sat empty for virtually the entire day.

The letter complains about this and other delays, which were causing the family additional anguish and distress, for which they held the coroner personally responsible.

It goes on to say that in the family’s opinion, the coroner had shown bias in favour of Royal Trinity Hospice throughout the whole of the inquest. He had “aggressively and almost contemptuously cross-examined Dr Corbett” and compared this to the “very friendly and smiley way he treated the hospice’s witnesses”. The letter claimed the coroner had also favoured counsel for the hospice over James Bogle, the family’s counsel, accusing the coroner of “chumminess” and “childish giggling” with the hospice’s counsel, which could clearly be heard on the court audio recordings. All this showed a clear sign of “disrespect for the role he is carrying out”.

Similar cases at Gosport Hospital

In his cross-examination, James Bogle revealed that Dr Wright, who was on duty the night that Derek Dimmock died on the ward, had previously carried out an audit of the deaths at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, where patients allegedly had their lives shortened through the use of opioids.

According to Sky News in September 2022, more than 450 elderly patients died between 1987 and 2001 after being given the powerful painkillers.

In October 2024, Sky News reported that police had identified 24 suspects and details had been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Then in November 2025, the BBC reported that the police had decided that no charges would be brought against any individuals, as the cases “have not met the evidential test for criminal prosecution”. A further case had been dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.

No mention of midazolam here, but the principle seems to be the same: automatic end of life pathway, insertion of syringe drivers, no patient consent, families kept in the dark etc. 

It seems curious that Dr Wright, having seen what could go wrong at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, would not do her best to ensure that the problems were not repeated at Royal Trinity Hospice.

Further delays

The coroner advised the family that they would receive outstanding answers to questions put to court-appointed expert Dr Aparajita Das by the end of December 2025, that he would provide an update in January 2026 and hand down conclusions by February 2026. Then the family were told the conclusions had been postponed to March 2026. Despite numerous requests from the family to the court seeking updates, there has still been nothing.

Jacquie Deevoy describes the inquest as “a marathon of delays, absences and shocking revelations”. She posted a memento mori for Derek Dimmock on the sixth anniversary of his death last month, mentioning that the family were still waiting for the coroner to give his verdict on the inquest.

We owe our elderly and their families much better than this.

In researching this article I am indebted to the work of Sally Beck in the Conservative Woman (here, here, here), Jacquie Deevoy and Maajid Nawaz on Substack (here, here, here, here) and Rachel Roberts in the Epoch Times.

Dr Rachel Nicoll is a medical researcher, lecturer and writer. You can contact her here.

The Problem With ‘Extreme Weather’

By Ben Pile

Each year, the 23-degree tilt of the planet we live on causes seasons to change as it orbits the Sun. We also know that on top of this regime, heat is moderated, and sometimes intensified by particular weather systems, to create ‘heatwaves’. For most of history, people had no explanation for either seasonal change or differences between a season from one year to the next, or even one week to the next. Now we do have explanations for such things, yet some people are still surprised to discover each year that we in Britain, at roughly 53 degrees latitude, occasionally experience weather that some find uncomfortable. Even more remarkably, and despite these explanations, some people think that warmer temperatures are a harbinger of doom. They are ‘extreme weather events’, such voices claim, and they are ‘getting more frequent and intense’, and soon they will rip society from its foundations – just you watch. But what is ‘extreme weather’, and is it really capable of destroying civilisation?

The New Scientist proclaimed that “Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever” and “temperatures in western and central Europe would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago”. The claim, of course, originated in the widely-debunked climate propaganda outfit, World Weather Attribution (WWA), which responds to weather events by being the first scientists to ‘estimate’ the contribution of anthropogenic global warming to such events. The problem is that “attribution” is not science, new or otherwise. It’s just games with computer simulations that codify their authors’ ideological presuppositions. Its purpose is to keep the climate narrative alive, with heatwaves supplying the never-ending plot with episodes, like some weird soap opera.

In contrast to such green hyperbole, meanwhile, meteorologists in both social and news media explained that the heatwave over Europe was caused by jet streams forming an ‘omega pattern’ (after the Greek letter), which blocked wind bringing hot air from the south, thereby creating a ‘heat dome’. But that explanation wasn’t enough for some, who needed more drama. Following the outbreak of a wildfire in Derbyshire, arch-Blobber Ben Judah took to X to ask: “Where is the Labour politician seizing this to explain this is climate change and this is why we are doing Net Zero?”

Perhaps some Labour politicians have now realised that such real-time ‘attribution’ claims are not science, and that anyone with a memory of, say, the 10-week heatwave of 1976, will see through such bullshit. Thus, such manifestly premature and unscientific claims are very likely to backfire. As Paul Homewood shows on these pages, claims about the ‘hottest ever’ are very easily challenged, and thus raise more questions about those that raise them than about what’s happening to the weather. But not all Labour politicians are alive to reality. One Labour MP, Chris Hinchliff in the House of Commons, stated that:

If we fail to prevent climate change getting worse, we face an existential threat to the British way of life. As our weather becomes more extreme, we face the threat of repeated crop failures and the heat-related deaths of thousands of livestock. And with our country built for a climate that no longer exists, the impacts of storms and heatwaves on our roads, hospitals, schools and pylons will finish off the efforts of the previous Tory administration to wreck most of our national infrastructure.

We could list many ways in which the “British way of life” has changed. But the notion that it is weather that has caused the transformation of high streets, political rights and freedoms, communities, industries, business, shops, customs and traditions, modes of speech, and so on, seems unlikely to be top of many lists, in my view. At the least, it is not so much weather which is forcing us to change our lifestyles as it is policymakers demanding changes in our diets to save us from bad weather. The self-defeating claim is that we must fundamentally change our way of life to stop climate change changing the British way of life. The Government is advising farmers to stop growing beef and start growing lentils, according to the Telegraph. Perhaps the Labour MP confuses effect for cause.

But suppose it is true that British summers are becoming warmer. So what? Is this really going to destroy civilisation beyond what the obviously bonkers plans of ideologues will achieve? How? The claim that heatwaves represent a growing danger to anything other than comfort lacks a corresponding basis in fact. Heatwaves in the era before refrigeration, when people were much poorer, were indeed fatal. But a century on, now that we have piped water, abundant food and fridges in every home, the main causes of heat-related illness and mortality have been eliminated.

This speaks also to the absence of evidence underpinning Hinchliff’s daft claim. Britain, its infrastructure and its homes were not built around a climate. It’s true that the design of British buildings reflects a damper, cooler environment, compared to central European architecture, for instance. But it is the heating source that has changed – and which is being restricted by policy – much more than the weather. British homes were designed to be heated by fire, and to draw air into and around the fireplace. But more importantly than that, the greater issue for the inhabitants of British dwellings a century ago was build quality and maintenance. In the 1930s, massive programmes of slum-clearances moved nearly 4% of the population out of poor accommodation. WWII stalled the progress, yet the problem of slums – old and new – persisted well until the 1980s. There was no golden era in which Britain’s climate, its houses and their occupants’ bodies existed in thermodynamic harmony.

The point here being that the categories that dominate alarmists’ statements are simply false. ‘Extreme weather’ and ‘resilience’ in the form of homes and infrastructure are taken for granted as objectively-grounded concepts. But they manifestly are not.

What is forgotten amid all the hype is that humans are a tropical species. The safest range of temperatures for a human is between 25 and 35 degrees centigrade. These are temperatures that in Britain count as ‘extreme weather’ and produce headlines about ‘heatwaves’. But below an average of 27 degrees ambient temperature, humans need heating, clothing and shelter. A naked human’s prolonged exposure to temperature below 15 degrees quickly becomes fatal. At five degrees, a human will be dead within three hours.

So what we call ‘extreme weather’ in Britain is in fact the opposite; the dangerous extreme occurs practically every day other than in the months that occasionally produce heatwaves. For nine months of the year, from September through to May, we have extreme, deadly weather conditions every single day. Yet we survive without Met Office alerts.

That is why we see vastly more deaths from exposure to environmental cold than to heat. And that’s one reason why the notion of Britain’s homes and infrastructure having been built around some kind of optimum which ‘no longer exists’ is completely bogus. It is wrong to look at the weather – it was the shortcomings of homes that used to be fatal. And that would include the price of energy and the way we treat older people.

In the 1950s, prolonged exposure to cold – rather than clinical hypothermia as such – contributed to rates of excess winter mortality in excess of 100,000 in England and Wales. Over the decades – some might say the era of global warming – this hit a low in 2014 at just 20,000. But aren’t there excess summer deaths also?

That is the claim that comes up each summer – see this piece about last year’s heatwave hysteria, for example. Yes, there are sometimes, but not always, increases of mortality during heatwaves. Those deaths are typically extremely frail people dying a few days earlier than they otherwise would. These are people who struggle to sustain adequate levels of hydration, to move or adjust their circumstances for their own comfort, whose bodies’ capacities to self-regulate are deteriorating and who may have experienced a loss of sleep quality due to discomfort. Paul Homewood, again, has noted however, that official sources of data have attempted to obfuscate and minimise excess winter deaths, while overstating excess heatwave deaths, which barely register – clearly in order to sustain a political narrative, and to quash the fact that the summer months remain far less fatal than winter, spring and autumn. 

This apparently raises the question of air conditioning, and why we’ve not followed America’s embrace of the technology. Some claim that because Britain is now ‘hotter’, the case for it is made. I think this is false, not because I am against air conditioning, but because frequency, trends and averages are not instructive. Older people and people who are ill deserve air conditioning, whether or not they are at death’s door, and no matter whether there are more or fewer heatwaves. Trends, averages and probabilistic forecasting are no guide to action, because any year since 1976 could have seen such a heatwave. And so 1976 (at the latest) establishes the minimum specification that any decision needs to understand. There may well be multiples more heatwave days in the 2020s than in previous decades, but it is the outlier 1976 that should inform our preparations.

Forecasts and predictions will mislead us. This is true of all policy relating to weather. Prognostications are what emerge from crystal balls at fairgrounds; preparing for the future requires understanding what is possible. A summer with a 10-week long heatwave, a summer with no rain, a summer in which it rains every day, and so on. Policies and contingencies designed around trends and averages will miss both winters like 1963 and summers like 1976, which precede the putative era of global warming, but which can still occur, despite any changes in probability.

And this returns to the question of what ‘extreme weather’ really is. What we call a ‘heatwave’ is a mild spring morning for the majority of humanity. The idea that either our existences or our ‘way of life’ is vulnerable to an occasional degree or so of warmer weather is absurd. We survived both the winter of 1963 and the summer of 1976 without civilisation collapsing. And though those years’ seasons brought problems, they are survivable and manageable, either by technical or adaptive means. The possibility of drought requires us to build more water storage and desalination capacity. The possibility of rain requires us to build more containment and management infrastructure. The possibility of cold requires us to make energy for heating available 24/7/365. And so on. These are merely engineering parameters, which ought already to be accommodated for. Neither ‘climate change’ nor ‘extreme weather’ alters any of these parameters. The green policy agenda requires us to believe that being less able to respond to weather makes us less vulnerable to its putative extremes. That’s reckless and insane, and that really will have predictable outcomes.

Prosecutors Must “Consider Unconscious Bias” Before Charging Minorities

By Will Jones

Prosecutors are to be told they must consider their “unconscious bias” before charging ethnic minority suspects under a new ‘two-tier’ requirement in the Crown Prosecution Service code. The Telegraph has the story.

Stephen Parkinson, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), is to introduce a new requirement in the code for all prosecutors that they should be “mindful” of the potential for bias in deciding what action to take with an ethnic suspect.

He admitted his staff had felt “affronted” when it was suggested they were biased in their decision-making, but he said he was “sure” there was “unconscious” bias, which meant it needed to be “in the forefront of people’s minds” when making decisions.

The CPS drew up a race action plan after research two years ago found that defendants from minority ethnic backgrounds were significantly more likely to be charged for a comparable offence than white British defendants.

The plan aims for prosecutors to “understand that bias can be present” in all their work and must be “consciously” addressed, and that they should challenge racial bias in decision-making across the criminal justice system.

The move comes amid controversy about ‘two-tier’ policing after the murder of Henry Nowak, 18, who was handcuffed as he lay dying by officers after Vickrum Digwa, his Sikh killer, had accused him of racial abuse.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said it will review its guidance on race after it suggested that “racial equity” did not mean “treating everyone the same or being colour-blind”.

Sir Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, has warned that policing in Britain has adopted the “language of activism” and official guidance has “over-corrected” to combat accusations of racism.

Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “This is dangerous nonsense. Policing and prosecution decisions should be colour-blind. Decisions should be taken simply on the facts. Different charge rates are not evidence of bias by prosecutors.

“The accused’s colour or religion should not come into it when making charging decisions. Demanding prosecutors consider their own supposed unconscious bias means ethnic minorities will get treated differently to white suspects. This is unacceptable and will lead to two-tier justice.”

Worth reading in full.

Defence Black Hole Triples to £15 Billion

By Will Jones

The defence spending black hole facing Andy Burnham has tripled to £15 billion after Downing Street admitted it had not yet identified the cuts needed to fund Starmer’s plans. The Telegraph has the story.

On Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer pledged an additional £15 billion to boost defence spending over four years, in a long-awaited announcement.

It later emerged that £4.7 billion would not be confirmed until the Budget, expected in October, leaving Burnham, Sir Keir’s presumed successor, with the challenge of coming up with the funds.

But on Wednesday, No. 10 could not explain where the other £10.3 billion, which is supposed to be made up by departmental savings, would come from.

It means Burnham will have to decide where the axe will fall and announce a series of unpopular spending reductions, just months after he takes over as Prime Minister.

James Cartlidge, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said Labour’s defence investment plan (DIP) had “completely unravelled barely a day after it was published”.

“The increase in spending is far too little, the capability promised comes far too late, and now we learn that they don’t even know how to fund it.”

He added: “Keir Starmer is kicking the can down the road for his successor because he has failed to take the tough decisions needed to keep the country safe.”

Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, said that Government departments had agreed to save £10.3 billion between them to pay for the DIP.

However, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said on Wednesday that details of the actual cuts would not be announced until the autumn, by which time Burnham would be in No. 10.

Instead of a raft of spending cuts, the Government could raise tax revenue by lifting the ban on oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

However, that is likely to be opposed by Ed Miliband, the front-runner to succeed Reeves as Chancellor.

Worth reading in full.

Rochdale Rape Gang Leader is Released from Prison After Just 14 Years as No. 10 Insists it is Powerless to Deport Him

By Will Jones

The leader of the notorious Rochdale grooming gang – convicted of 30 child rapes – has been released from prison today after serving just 14 years – less than six months per rape – as Downing Street insists it is powerless to deport him. The Mail has more.

Shabir Ahmed, 73, walked free from HMP Leeds on Thursday and is set to begin life in a bail hostel in the north of England, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of £120 a night.

He is moving in to a facility close to Rochdale, where many of his victims still live, and is wearing a GPS tag.

Ahmed – who instructed his victims to call him ‘Daddy’ – is a Pakistani national who acquired British citizenship through naturalisation. He plied girls as young as 13 with drink and drugs before ‘passing them around’ to be abused by him and eight associates.

Despite his conviction in 2012, his victims – most of them white working-class girls – have been told he cannot be deported to Pakistan because of a legal loophole.

They have also voiced fears for their safety now the Rochdale grooming gang leader is free after serving 14 years of a 19-year sentence.

The Ministry of Justice has refused to say if he is out of jail, citing “security reasons”, but a source told the Daily Mail: “Ahmed has already been released. He is in a secure placement just outside the GMP area.”

Ahmed held dual British-Pakistani citizenship and was stripped of his British citizenship following his conviction. Yet the Government insists it has no legal powers to remove him from the UK.

Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham has said he will ask senior Ministers to find a way to deport Ahmed, declaring that “nothing is off the table”.

But he was undermined by Downing Street today, where Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman said Ahmed had an “exemption from deportation” under UK law.

“Ahmed’s horrific crimes were at the heart of the grooming gang scandal which represents one of the darkest moments in our country’s history. He will rightly be on the sex offenders’ register for life, ordered to stay away from his victims and banned from contacting any child or young person,” she told reporters.

“His every movement will be tracked and he will be forced to wear an electronic tag. In this specific case we cannot deport someone who is protected by the 1971 Immigration Act, these are the same provisions which have protected many individuals caught up in the Windrush crisis.”

Asked if Starmer is frustrated at the law blocking Ahmed’s deportation, the spokesman added: “It is fair to say the PM would always want to see these vile criminals deported.”

The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesperson added that the PM has asked the Home Secretary to look into all options including “what can be done to remove this individual from the UK”.

Ahmed has spent years fighting deportation to Pakistan at taxpayers’ expense, citing human rights laws and arguing that his removal from the UK would affect the welfare of his children.

After his convictions, he complained it was because there were ‘eleven white jurors’ at his trial, adding: “It’s become fashionable to blame everything on Muslims these days.”

Worth reading in full.

Greens Less Popular Than Ever Under Polanski

By Will Jones

The Green Party is more unpopular than ever under Zack Polanski, a poll has shown, with more than half of voters (52%) now having an unfavourable opinion of the party and 36% having a favourable view. The Telegraph has the story.

The hard-Left party’s net score of minus-16 points is the lowest ever recorded by the pollster and follows a series of damaging scandals.

Polanski became Green leader last September and has overseen a surge in the party’s membership, as well as a rise from 10% to 13% in the polls.

However, public opinion of the Greens has soured on his watch. Their net approval score was higher, fluctuating between minus-3 and minus-5 points, in the year to September 2025.

Their score fell to minus-8 by February and its continued decline shows the challenges the insurgent party faces as it seeks to rival Labour in the coming months.

The Greens’ spring conference was overshadowed by a row over a highly contested ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion tabled by grassroots activists. Among other things, the motion would have formally defined Zionism – the belief in Jewish people’s right to self-determination – as a “racist ideology”.

The motion also demanded the abolition of the state of Israel and the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”, while supporting “resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation” including by “armed struggle”.

Polanski, who failed to condemn the motion, was not present for the vote because he was attending a march against the far Right, organised by the Together Alliance, in central London.

In April, two Green local election candidates were arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred for allegedly posting antisemitic comments online.

The Telegraph then revealed that almost 20 Green candidates posted offensive material, including one who referred to Jewish people as “cockroaches”.

Other hopefuls expressed support for Palestine Action, the banned terror group.

The Greens are comfortably the most popular political party among voters aged 18-24 by two to one, with the party polling at 39% to Labour’s 19%.

It also commands a significant lead with voters aged 25-29, reflecting Polanski’s increasing popularity across social media channels including Instagram and TikTok.

The Greens won hundreds of council seats in May at the expense of Labour, but the party’s popularity has started to wane in recent weeks.

Worth reading in full.

Is Michael Gove Right to Say Reform is Not “Conservative”?

By Dr James Allan

The writer is in Australia.

A fortnight ago my wife and I were driving some 750 kilometres one day from the north-western tip of Newfoundland island back to Gander, home of the most important civilian airport in the 1960s because it’s where planes from the east coast of North America had to refuel to get to Europe (and vice versa). It’s also where dozens and dozens of planes landed on 9/11, unplanned of course, and the tiny town put up all the passengers for four days. They made that into a very successful Broadway and West End musical, Come From Away.

Anyway, there we are driving through the wilds of Newfoundland, a fantastically beautiful place where you’ll see moose and caribou as you drive and hope like heck you don’t ever hit one. To while away the time my wife put on a podcast by the Daily Telegraph, one in which the hosts interviewed the Editor of the Spectator, Michael Gove. It was an excellent interview but one thing stuck in my craw. You see, when pressed about Nigel Farage and his Reform political party, my boss’s boss, Gove, kept coming back to the same point. He told the interviewers that Reform was not a conservative party. And many of you in Australia will recognise that it is an exactly similar point that our Morning Double Shot Editor Terry Barnes has repeatedly made in the Australian context, namely that One Nation is not a conservative party.

This being the most pro-free speech weekly in Christendom (and you don’t really get much free speech outside of those historical lands do you?), I’d like to indulge in a bit of colonial pushback against this claim by our venerable London Editor. Because one thing Gove made clear in (and by agreeing to do) that interview was that he is a free speech guy.

So what are we to make of this criticism of ‘not being conservative’? Of course Messrs Gove and Barnes mean their censure or disparaging point to be something more than a purely semantic one, a fight over how to use a word. They mean it to have a political sting in the tail. So that leaves us with two ways to take the term ‘conservative’. One is purely procedural. A conservative party in this sense just happens to be the most Right-leaning of the ones currently on offer. It’s a shorthand for where a party stands on the current spectrum. Lots of people use the term that way. Yet that can hardly be the sense in which Mssrs Gove and Barnes are using it. They mean to make a substantive point, one with real oomph and force.

And that takes us to the other possibility. What they’re saying is that a ‘conservative’ party is one that tries to conserve the good things that have been passed down to us. But clearly that is a context-dependent value or virtue. No sane person would want to conserve anything as regards North Korea’s political set-up. In other words, you need a pre-existing idea of what things are good and what aren’t before you can play the ‘let’s conserve’ game. Right?

And that takes us to the reason why I think that so many former Tory and Aussie Coalition voters have deserted those ships. In 14 years of Tory governments what they most conserved were the woeful Tony Blair innovations to what had been one of the world’s greatest constitutional arrangements. The Tories conserved the awful Human Rights Act. They conserved the country being in the European Convention on Human Rights as it was continually remade by foreign activist judges to make deportations impossible. They conserved an idiotic set-up where top judges effectively pick their own successors. They conserved all of the democracy-enervating qangos and the inability to control the borders. They conserved the Keynesian big spending and big taxing. They conserved (and initiated) the Net Zero insanity. And during Covid they certainly did not conserve “the flood of British freedoms, which to the open sea of the world’s praise, hath flowed with pomp of waters, unwithstood”.

And the Libs in Australia in their nine years were hardly any better. They conserved or initiated the Lefty progressive policies on Net Zero, massive spending and taxing, Labour hitjobs on pensions, the entire Lefty culture war victories. Try to think of anything they undid. Meanwhile they oversaw Covid’s biggest attacks on our civil liberties in centuries.

So what the Reform Party and One Nation might reply to Mssrs Gove and Barnes is that from the vantage of the 1990s they – not the Tories or the Libs – are the real conservative parties. They want to conserve what we had then. Not what we have now. And to do that they will first have to unwind the progressive Left’s triumphs of the last couple of decades.

Put differently, do you as a Right-leaning voter prefer to be part of a team conserving what we had back then or have now? It is patently obvious that the former is the answer most Right-leaning voters are giving. That’s why Badenoch in Britain and Taylor in Australia are desperately pushing their Establishment parties in that direction, big time. ‘Good’, I say. I look at Poland and see a country with big time growth and nearly no mass immigration (putting the lie to the Keynesian, Lefty economic settlement). I also want an end to democracy-gutting managerialism that our established parties of the right ‘conserved’.

So, I think it turns out that the critique of ‘not being conservative’ is sort of time-dependent when it comes to Britain and Australia. Tell us, precisely, what you want to conserve. If it’s what we had before Blair and back under Howard then that means a lot of unwinding and repealing is now needed – to get us back to conserving the good things we had a couple of decades ago.

Moreover, that is precisely what the Tories and Libs are today trying to promise voters they can and will deliver. As I said, ‘good’. But that means the issue between them and the insurgent new parties of the Right is not about who is conservative. Nope, it’s about ‘whom can you trust?’ On immigration. On lower taxing. On getting immigration way, way down and enforcing the borders. On getting unelected judges and transnational bureaucrats out of social policy decision-making. On free speech (which to me has till lately been sold out by the established parties of the Right). On our civil liberties come the next emergency.

But if I am right, and trusting parties to keep their word is the key issue for most voters on the Right, then Farage and Hanson have a big advantage. They do not have to overcome a decade-plus record of not being trustworthy, like the serial philanderer. Yes, there are routes home for Kemi and Angus. But it ain’t going to be easy for them, is it? (For Angus in Australia, for the Lord’s sake, you have to give an explicit number for total net immigration for your first and second year in office, plus promise to resign if it’s not met, or no one will believe you on this issue, not with all the wets in your partyroom.)

Over to you Michael.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.

News Round-Up

By Will Jones

• “Vigilantes take to streets as grooming gang ringleader released” – Vigilantes are taking to the streets of Rochdale after a Pakistani grooming gang ringleader was released from prison, reports the Telegraph.
• “Change law to kick out Rochdale rapist, No. 10 urged” – Labour MPs are demanding the Government close a legal loophole that is shielding freed Pakistani grooming gang leader Shabir Ahmed from deportation, writes the Telegraph.
• “All foreign criminals face deportation” – Every foreign offender will face deportation regardless of the seriousness of their crime under new Government plans announced by Shabana Mahmood, reports the Telegraph.
• “Teen rapists initially spared jail will go to prison, court rules” – The Court of Appeal has ruled that the original sentences handed to two teenage rapists were insufficient, with Ms Justice Norton, Lord Justice Edis and Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr ordering them to prison, according to the Mail.
• “Why Labour’s ‘new safe and legal’ refugee routes will flood the UK with migrants” – In the Conservative Woman, Laura Perrins argues that Labour’s proposed safe and legal refugee routes will open the floodgates to mass migration rather than curb the Channel crossings crisis.
• “‘Godfather of people smugglers’ living in Leicester village” – Twana Jamal, 46, who was jailed for five years in France in 2016 after being identified as one of the most successful people smugglers in Europe, is now living freely in a Leicester village, reports the Telegraph.
• “Burnham has declared war on the South. Your homes and savings are no longer safe” – London and the South East already vastly subsidise the rest of the country, yet Andy Burnham wants to seize southern wealth rather than liberate the North, says Allister Heath in the Telegraph.
• “Andy Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS” – Andy Burnham is poised to axe Palantir from the NHS following pressure from Left-wing critics opposed to the US tech giant’s work with the Israeli Defence Forces, reports the Telegraph.
• “Burnham’s ‘brain’ is far more Left-wing than you think” – Hard-Left MP Miatta Fahnbulleh is expected to wield significant influence over Andy Burnham, raising the prospect of a very radical few years ahead, warns Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
• “Will Andy Burnham be better than Starmer?” – In his Substack, Nick Dixon asks whether Andy Burnham would make a better leader than Keir Starmer.
• “Badenoch blasts ‘moaning’ female Labour MPs over Burnham jobs ‘quota’” – Kemi Badenoch has lashed out at female Labour MPs reportedly demanding Andy Burnham introduce a 50-50 gender split quota in his Government, reports the Mail.
• “Drones spotted over RAF bases were launched from Russian tanker” – The unmanned aerial platforms targeted Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Fairford and Feltwell over four days in 2024, reveals the Mail.
• “Labour failed to prepare properly for power, admits PM’s former aide” – Morgan McSweeney, who served as the Prime Minister’s chief of staff until February this year, says the party “hadn’t done enough to prepare for Government”, according to the Mail.
• “The road projects being killed off to save Labour’s welfare budget” – The Government stands accused of choosing “benefits over battleships” after cutting infrastructure schemes to fund Starmer’s defence plan, reports the Telegraph.
• “Henry Nowak’s murderer is segregated from other prisoners” – Vickrum Digwa, 23, reportedly told guards he did not want to be placed on the wing at HMP Frankland where Soham child killer Ian Huntley was fatally attacked, notes the Mail.
• “Will there be justice for Henry Nowak?” – In the Spectator, David Shipley asks whether Nicola Marfleet, the Director of Investigations for the Independent Office for Police Conduct, can be trusted to get justice for Henry.
• “Pregnant women face being banned from US” – The White House is seeking to bar pregnant foreign nationals from entering the United States in a bid to prevent babies born on American soil to non-citizen parents from obtaining citizenship, reports the Telegraph.
• “Makerfield proves nothing – the Right is on the rise throughout Europe” – The Makerfield by-election result should not be misread as a setback for the Right, which continues to surge across the continent, writes Matt Goodwin in the Conservative Woman.
• “How Britain became Zombieland” – In UnHerd, Mary Harrington argues that Britain has drifted into a state of political paralysis defined by the absence of decisive leadership.
• “How the grammar school rat race left the white working class behind” – The rise of the 11-plus tutoring industry has reshaped the classroom, with profound consequences for the social mobility of the white working class, reports the Telegraph.
• “Is our law praiseworthy?” – It is in the realm of civil liberties that British law has now reached its lowest ebb, writes Yuan Yi Zhu in the Critic.
• “The case against the Equality Act” – While seeming benign, the Equality Act has reduced citizens from being equals before the law to “protected characteristics on legs”, writes Alka Sehgal Cuthbert for the Academy of Ideas.
• “The US should exit the UN” – With the US alone owing $2.196 billion to the UN budget and a further $1.8 billion to separate peacekeeping operations – amounting to one-quarter of all UN funding – the case for a full American withdrawal is overwhelming, says Wendy McElroy for the Brownstone Institute.
• “Jolyon sues Ofcom for not banning TalkTV” – The Good Law Project is dragging Ofcom to the High Court after the watchdog largely declined to act against Murdoch’s TalkTV, reports Guido Fawkes.
• “Revealed: the shady funding of Net Zero” – A complex web of charities, think tanks and advocacy groups is being bankrolled by dark money from abroad to push a Net Zero agenda that leaves working people poorer and the country beholden to hostile powers, write John Power and William Atkinson in the Spectator.
• “Sadiq Khan launches ‘City Climate Facts’ to ‘tackle the growing scourge of climate disinformation’” – On her Substack, Charlotte Gill reports that C40 Cities is rolling out an “anti-disinformation service” starting in Cape Town, with Sadiq Khan championing the initiative as a weapon against what he calls the “growing scourge of climate disinformation”.
• “The myth of rising climate costs: Europe’s weather losses are flat once adjusted for growth” – New EEA data show that Europe’s normalised climate disaster losses have remained flat since 1990 once adjusted for economic growth, writes Thomas Richard for Climate Change Dispatch.
• “PBS News is wrong, climate change is not causing Georgia’s drought” – PBS journalists are accused of pushing a climate alarmist narrative by uncritically claiming Georgia’s drought is unprecedented – when publicly available data tell a very different story, writes Linnea Lueken for Watts Up With That.
• “The north-south divide” – The question of when a UK heatwave actually qualifies as a UK heatwave is put under scrutiny by Mark Hodgson for Climate Scepticism.
• “Thanks to climate panic, it’s 100 degrees inside a ‘flagship’ hospital building – this is what the Left wants for us (but not themselves)” – A German hospital where patients and staff are enduring extreme heat is held up as a stark warning about the real-world consequences of climate-driven energy policy by Samuel Short in the Western Journal.
• “Shark attacks are rising in Australia. Green activists don’t want to admit why” – The rising toll of shark attacks on Australian beaches is being driven by the protected status of great whites, yet green activists refuse to confront the evidence, says the Telegraph.
• “Multi-year study of 808 embalmers across five countries finds 75.2% observed unusual white fibrous clots in corpses” – A multi-year study of 808 embalmers spanning five countries has found that 75.2% observed unusual white fibrous clots in corpses, with the anomalous clots estimated to be present in 23.4% of all embalmed bodies, according to Nicolas Hulscher on Substack.
• “Sports club take Lloyds to ombudsman for being ‘de-banked’” – Walsham le Willows Sports Club in Suffolk, which hosts cricket and football, had been with Lloyds for over 70 years before being de-banked – and is now taking the lender to the ombudsman, reports the Mail.
• “Citizen Vigilante and the folly of censorship” – Attempts to ban Uwe Boll’s controversial anti-immigration rape-revenge film across Europe have badly backfired, writes Steven Tucker in Spiked.
• “After 26 years, it’s farewell to Wild Life” – In the Spectator, Aidan Hartley bids a fond farewell to his long-running Africa column, Wild Life, which Toby commissioned way back in 2001 to bring scoops from the continent to the magazine’s new online edition.
• “J.K. Rowling is a national treasure, so why don’t we treat her like one?” – In the Spectator, Joanna Williams argues that by any metric – with over 600 million copies of her Harry Potter books sold worldwide – Rowling deserves the national treasure status that our culture stubbornly refuses to grant her.
• “Germany bans workers from calling in sick” – New rules requiring ill employees to obtain doctors’ notes before taking sick leave are being introduced in a bid to boost Germany’s stagnating economy, reports the Telegraph.
• “Reform is right to fear the return of Boris” – In the Spectator, Tim Shipman writes that the question of what Boris Johnson is up to – long a familiar one – has become genuinely interesting for the first time in years, and Reform has every reason to be worried.
• “Tice sued after criticising £46 million deal to train Lebanese police” – Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice faces legal action after denouncing a Foreign Office contract worth £46 million to train Lebanese police as “grotesque”, reports the Telegraph.
• “The confessions of J.D. Vance” – Reviewing Vance’s new memoir in the Spectator, Douglas Murray says people should approach it with an open heart and mind, but they won’t.
• “I can’t remember when I was last so disgusted with Trump” – In the Spectator, Lionel Shriver explains why she is so unhappy with Trump over Iran.
• “Spain gives temporary work permits to 609,000 undocumented migrants” – More than 609,000 undocumented migrants have been granted temporary work permits by the Spanish Government as part of the Socialist Prime Minister’s plan to process applications for legal status, reports the Mail.
• “Imagine this is the World Cup” – On X, Xerias hilariously imagines what the World Cup would look like if MAGA played the Dems.

Imagine this is the World Cup ⚽️ pic.twitter.com/ytRgchisYY

— 𝕏erias (@xerias_x) July 2, 2026

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