An exhibit in Malmö's Museum of Movements, focusing on democracy and migration

Acknowledgments, Pelle Noroth Taylor. More here.

Tony Blair is fighting very hard against Boris to prevent Brexit

'“She was the most divisive prime minister of modern times.” As I go round talking about the new (final) volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher, variants of this sentence are the most common opening line of questioning, especially on the BBC.' 

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, talking about her in the Daily Telegraph this week, to plug the third and final volume of the biography.

She was the most divisive Prime Minister of the post - war era until the Brexit referendum, but since then Tony Blair working behind the secrets has been even more divisive, using all his influence to persuade people who voted Remain to try to prevent Brexit - and to persuade the EU that Brexit can be prevented.

Freddy Sayers in a very good article explains how he helped scupper Mrs May's Withdrawal Agreement and has almost defeated Boris too.

'On 1 February 2017, the House of Commons voted to trigger Article 50 by 498 votes to 114, supported by more than 75% of Labour MPs. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg wrote an analysis entitled “Past the Point of no-return” in which she concluded, “tonight, for better or worse, few will believe that our journey to the exit door can be halted …the moment for turning back is past.”

Jacques Attali: 'Support for national sovereignty is nothing but the new name of anti-Semitism'

Wikidictionary: sovereignism (uncountable)

1. A doctrine which supports acquiring or preserving political independence of a nation or a region. It opposes federalism and approaches independentism movements.
2. The defence of the sovereignty of individual European countries in the face of broader European or European Union integration.

Tweet by Jacques Attali✔@jattali 9:00 AM - Oct 4, 2019
“Sovereignism is nothing but the new name of anti-Semitism. Jews and Muslims, who are both threatened by it, must unite against the fantasies of the great replacement.”

His tweet links to an article he has written in which he says:

'There is no invasion of France by Islam or Africa. Non-European migrants do

David Goldman (Spengler in Asia Times) talks about China

'Coming from a younger and also reasonably successful culture, which is the Jewish culture, I look at the Chinese in awe. They should never be underestimated. What makes China China? What is it? How does it understand itself? Until the Jesuits turned up in the 16th century, Matteo Ricci and his colleagues, China simply understood itself as civilization. China was a civilizing principle. It was a means of unifying different ethnicities on the basis of a very different principle than Rome or Alexander or the Holy Roman Empire or any entity in the West or its antecedents, and I think that’s best illustrated by what it’s like to be a Chinese child.

Europe is in steep decline

From Fraser Nelson's article today in the Daily Telegraph is another element in the history of the decline of Europe and, by implication, Western civilisation.

'Now and again, we hear reports about the readiness of Europe’s various armies. They’re invariably terrifying. The Dutch admitted recently that half of their army vehicles won’t start. Two months ago, all 53 of the Bundeswehr’s attack helicopters were declared unfit to fly. France does a bit better: at the last count 160 of its 460 military helicopters work. Military readiness costs

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars

The summit between Messrs Johnson and Varadkar yesterday took place away from the eyes of the press and was followed by a joint statement saying they could “see a pathway to a possible deal.” 

This was surprising and promising. Did they mean it or is each trying to look as if a breakdown in talks is not his fault? 

Few people were there and so we know little about what was said.

A piece in the Times says they looked at proposals “that would have had Northern Ireland staying in both the U.K.’s customs union and the EU customs union.”

The Irish Times says it would amount to a version of “the customs partnership” proposed by Theresa May (which sounded like the customs union under a different name) but applied only to Northern Ireland.

It would mean the U.K. levying customs rules on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland but people in Northern Ireland who received those goods getting the money they had paid back, since they are in the U.K. 

That would mean the entire U.K. leaving the customs union, as promised by Boris, but with an administrative customs border in the Irish Sea. 

The DUP, that represents most of the Ulster Protestant Unionists, would be very stupid indeed not to agree, as it will help the Northern Irish economy in general and Protestant farmers in particular. Boris is keeping very close to the DUP. If they don’t agree Boris no longer needs them as much as Theresa May did, as he no longer has a majority in the House of Commons even with them. If they oppose the deal some in the European Reform Group, the hardcore Brexiteer Tory MPs, may find it hard to support it, but I think they will. For them there will not be a better chance.

Michel Barnier has now agreed, after meeting Stephen Barclay this morning, that the negotiations can move to the “tunnel” (intensive secret negotiations). That means this might work, but time is very short indeed.

If it fails, what next? Boris will remain in office but not in power until eventually an election or referendum is called. If it is an election he must campaign with a proposal and, as an alternative, leaving with no deal.

The Tory party obviously cannot win an election saying, 'We want to leave the EU but will not countenance no-deal'. Clearly a deal is impossible unless leaving with no deal is on the cards.

If the Tories win, leaving with no deal will be likely, but that is only a stop on the path to a deal.

Remaining in a customs union with the EU, as Philip Hammond suggests, with the right for the UK to leave this customs union by giving one year's notice, in some ways makes sense at least temporarily. It would take us out of the EU and let an election decide whether we should stay in the customs union, but Nigel Farage would (unfairly) call it Brexit in Name Only and this might well sink the Tories, leading to a Corbyn (Trotskyite, hard left) government backed by the Scottish Nationalists in return for a promise of another referendum on Scottish independence.

But my feeling is that the new proposal may work. I hope so and so do most people, apart from those irreconcilable Remainers, like Tony Blair and Sir John Major, who want to prevent any Brexit, despite the referendum result. They probably make up 20% of the population. 

7 p.m. Bucharest time: More hopeful news. A statement is issued by Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, advocating "a balanced and sensible deal" that makes no criticism of the putative dual customs system for Northern Ireland. This sounds very much like she backs the plan.

'No, Brexit hasn't made the UK economy £60 billion smaller than if we'd voted to Remain'

Economics is not what interests me, nor do I really understand it, but this is important enough for me to blog about. 

Someone called Paul Johnson, director of something called the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said on the BBC Radio Four programme Today yesterday that the British economy is £60 billion smaller than it would have been had we voted to remain in the EU. 

£60 billion is a lot. £60 billion here and £60 billion there and soon you are talking about serious money.

It turns out, though, that it is not true - all is explained in this article by Ross Clark.

The UK performed well compared with European countries, 'despite Brexit' as the BBC would say. We performed much worse than the USA, but this is because Donald Trump's election victory made the US economy spring up. 

The lesson is that electing right-wing governments encourages economic growth.

I think we can all guess how Paul Johnson voted in the Brexit referendum. 

Jeremy Warner: many business leaders would prefer Corbyn to no deal Brexit

Jeremy Warner, the Daily Telegraph’s Business editor, was a Remainer but a very reasonable one. He is always interesting and seems to know better than his political colleagues the details of Brexit. 

He says today that many businessmen have told him that a Corbyn minority government would not be able to do too much harm and would be preferable to Brexit because the harm it did could be put tight. 

From his column today:

'Prior to the June 2016 vote, neither of the two main political parties could have stood on a Leave ticket, and even if they had, they’d have struggled to win an election on it. What the referendum has done is polarise the choice along party political lines, so that finally the Tories can go to the country on an overtly Leave platform.

'....Once a majority for Leave has been won by a single party, then
implementing the decision should be comparatively simple, at least in political terms. As has been recognised by Johnson’s inner circle from the start, this is the only certain way of making Brexit happen.

What will happen to Sealand, after Brexit?

For all the exhaustive coverage of Brexit, its impact on one small country has hitherto been ignored.


I speak of Sealand. Now the Daily Telegraph has put this right with news from the plucky, embattled island.

'Seven miles off the Suffolk coast, it is officially the smallest micronation in the world. For more than half a century, Sealand – a wind-lashed, Second World War naval fort whose main platform, some 60ft above the North Sea, can only be reached by being winched up by crane – has seen off not only German advances but also those from the British government.

'Now, with increasing uncertainty about Brexit on the UK mainland, the sovereign state is receiving hundreds of applications for citizenship each week. According to Michael Bates, the principality’s 67-year-old prince, would-be Sealanders are inspired by the ruling family’s “desire for freedom from authority” – as well as its black passport, embossed with two crowned sea creatures.'  

I draw this to your attention in order to tell you that my father knew not Lloyd George but King Roy, who used to live in the next street to us in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, when not in residence in Sealand.


So did the novelist Robert Nye, who used to come into my father's garden shed to listen to Dick Barton Special Agent, before I was thought of. Mr and Mrs Nye disapproved, for some reason. 

His first novel was full of caricatures of local people and I should read it. I wish I had got in touch with him before he died.

It has come down to a choice: No Brexit or Brexit with No Deal

It is clear now that there will be no deal between the UK and the EU that involves customs or other checks on the British border with the Republic of Ireland.

Therefore there will be no deal.

This is the decision of the Irish Government, which the EU supports.

No deal will hurt everyone, but it is a consolation that it will hurt the Irish Republic more than any other country.

Perhaps there never was any possible deal that did not leave Northern Ireland in a
customs union with the EU and we were all misled by Theresa May.

In an interview shortly after his resignation from Theresa May’s cabinet on 15 November 2018, Dominic Raab, who had been Britain’s Brexit Secretary and is now Foreign Secretary, said: “There were certainly swirling dark forces in the commission, which you would hear rumbling that Northern Ireland was the price the United Kingdom must pay for leaving the EU…  The trail always seems to lead back to Martin Selmayr.”

The backstop was unacceptable unless time-limited. In fact, I believe that Eire would never have allowed the UK to get rid of the Backstop. Why should they have done so?

But it seemed otherwise a few weeks ago when Angela Merkel told Donald Tusk that a deal must be found that Boris could agree to.

Since then the Benn Act became law and Boris’ lost the power credibly to threaten to leave with no deal, though paradoxically the chances of his doing so are higher than ever.

The other very big news is the long text message (SMS) sent to James Forsyth of the Spectator by an anonymous “contact inside No. 10” whose prose style suggests it is Dominic Cummings, Boris’s Svengali.

Please read the whole thing, if you have five minutes.

Anonymous says 

"The negotiations will probably end this week. Varadkardoesn’t want to negotiate. Varadkar was keen on talking before theBenn Act when he thought that the choice would be ‘new deal or nodeal’. Since the Benn Act passed he has gone very cold and in the lastweek the official channels and the backchannels have also gone cold.Varadkar has also gone back on his commitments — he said if we movedon manufactured goods then he would also move but instead he justattacked us publicly. It’s clear he wants to gamble on a secondreferendum and that he’s encouraging Barnier to stick to the line thatthe UK cannot leave the EU without leaving Northern Ireland behind."

He adds that if Boris’s suggested deal is rejected then the Tories
will fight an election on a no-deal ticket. 

“We’ll either leave with no deal on 31 October or there will be an election and then we will leave with no deal.”

Reading between the lines they hope Hungary will veto a further delay to Brexit and slice the Gordian knot.

Theresa May made so many mistakes and gave away so many positions. Her worst mistake was when, at the start of her premiership, she agreed with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny in September 2016 to find “creative and imaginative” ways to deal with customs checks. 

This was not wrong in itself but she was reported to having agreed to no hard border, meaning a border without checks.

Speaking after a meeting at 10 Downing Street the Taoiseach said that he spoke for both when he said, 

“A hard border in normal circumstances means customs posts and customs checks in various places. There will be no return to the hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland of the past, which included towers and military equipment, obviously for different reasons. So I do not favour, I do not agree to a hard border, with a whole range of customs posts, and neither does the prime minister.”

I was persuaded by customs experts in Dublin who said customs checks could be made remotely by electronic means. But now I see that if this were true why do Sweden and Norway not do something of the sort and why does no border in the world use these means of avoiding customs checks? Instead, even though Norway is in the single market, in Schengen, accepts free movement of citizens of EU member states  and has close regulatory alignment with the EU, lorries wait around twenty minutes at the border.

In a phone call between Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel this morning, she is said to have said that ‘a deal is overwhelmingly unlikely’ because ‘the UK cannot leave without leaving Northern Ireland behind in a customs union forever’. 

But did she say it or is the British government trying to place the blame for the breakdown of talks on her?

The British Government no longer needs the DUP because it no longer has anywhere near a majority, but it will never in effect leave part of the country in the EU when it leaves. So, though there may well be a delay to Brexit and a general election, if the Tories win this will very probably mean the UK leaving without a deal. This is because Boris does not want to lose votes to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

The polls suggest the Tories will win, but nobody believes the polls after what happened in 2015, 2016 and 2017. If they do so they will be running against the grain of recent history. Just as the Irish Home Rule Party made the UK's two party system a three party system from 1886 to 1918, the Scottish National Party has done the same thing starting with its landslide Scottish victory in 2015. 

In Scotland the 2014 referendum on independence completely remade the political landscape. The 2016 Brexit referendum looks likely to do the same for the whole of the UK, from Londonderry to Thurrock and Ramsgate.

Hunter Biden's money - is this a scandal or propaganda?

I have a journalist friend who bombards me with stuff about the Ukrainian affair, making out that Trump is blameless and Biden very much to blame. I don't find time to read it all or even most of it, but I have done a little internet research myself. 

As far as I can make out, Mr Trump should not have spoken to Ukrainian President Mr Zelensky in the way he did, asking for an investigation into Joe Biden's activities when Ukraine depends on US aid and support. Still, I don't see that this justifies impeachment. After all, the Department of Justice said the President committed no crime.

On the other hand, impeachment is a purely political matter, not a legal process, so Democrats can disagree with me. 

Mr. Obama ordered the killing of an American citizen abroad without being impeached or his action being questioned in court. Compare what happened with Donald Trump's misnamed 'Muslim ban'. 

What seems to me as important as the telephone call to Mr Zelensky is that  U.S. banking data show Joe Biden's son, Hunter’s American company received monthly payments of usually more than $166,000 from the Ukrainian oil company Burisma, owned by a shady oligarch, on whose board he sat, from spring 2014 till the autumn of 2015, a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine. 

Hunter Biden was put there because the owner wanted to buy influence but that doesn't mean he did buy it. Many have given huge sums to the Clinton Foundation hoping to get something back but that does not mean they did. 

A person I knew at the top in Big Tobacco in America told me Obama "takes the money and does nothing for it". 

Vice President Biden boasted openly about getting prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired by Ukraine and this is said to be because he was ineffective about dealing with corruption, not because he was investigating Burisma. The prosecutors' office where he worked say that Mr Shokin had nothing to do with investigating the Biden family, but he has contradicted this. 

The media say that Mr Shokin was clearly lying and the EU wanted him to go, as well as the US. 

I actually see no reason to think Joe Biden is corrupt, but it is a gift to Donald Trump and to the man in the street it looks terrible. 

Jane Meyer in the New Yorker this weekend said:

'By May, the mainstream media, including the Times, had picked up on the story about Biden and Ukraine. Although the Times’ piece ran under a headline pointing out that that the scandal was being “promoted by Trump and Allies,” and, midway, noted that there was no evidence of criminality, critics attacked the paper for reprising the Uranium One playbook. “It’s precisely what we saw in the last election,” Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the recent book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” told me. Benkler argues that when a publication with the Times’ credibility pays any attention to a fringe conspiracy theory, it “provides enormous validation” just by covering the story. “I don’t fault the Times for doing a story,” he said. “But it’s not like the nineteen-sixties anymore, when there were just three TV networks. You live in a country where a large part of the population is susceptible to propaganda. There’s a new editorial responsibility to be much more careful and not bury the denial.”'

Professor Benkler has his axes to grind - he describes himself as very much the product of a socialist Zionist family. 

Everyone has axes to grind. I do. You do. 

The truth is that the mainstream media are also producing propaganda, of course.  

One example: journalists said that stories about Hillary's poor health were baseless until she collapsed. Fortunately someone caught her doing so and recorded it on a telephone, which is how we found out that Breitbart, etc., might be on to something.

It cuts both ways - there is probably much more to be written about the business dealings of Ivanka Trump and her husband than about Hunter Biden.

The real estate company Cadre, owned by Jared Kushner, his brother and a friend, has received $90 million in investments from Saudi Arabia and a "Goldman Sachs entity" in the Cayman Islands since his father-in-law became President.

Middle Eastern money enabled the family to get out of the $1.4 billion debt that they owed on the mortgage for 666 Fifth Avenue, a property that was worth much less and which Jared had unwisely bought. 

The Qataris had no idea that the President's son-in-law was involved when they paid a high price for the property.

Ukraine is a a mysterious, spy-ridden, corrupt place where many conspiracies are hatched and developed and the truth about Ukraine's relations with the USA since Viktor Yanukovych's government fell will not be known soon.

People who believe in theories that lose Democrats votes are called conspiracy theorists, but some conspiracies do happen. For example, a bipartisan mixture of people in the FBI (and MI6, I think) did try to find a way to prevent Donald Trump becoming President and after he won to eject him from the White House. This isn't even a theory but a fact.

During Watergate no-one believed the official spokesman and everyone believed the anonymous source. That's something that hasn't changed. 

Talking of which, was Watergate a coup by the CIA too? I imagine it was, actually.

'It's not really 2020 is it, to be challenging a black man and the Muslim mayor?'

The BBC's Justin Webb this morning on Radio 4 asked Rory Stewart

'You mention that you are proud of the diversity of the mayoral race in London, you are a white guy and Old Etonian - it's not really 2020 is it, really, to be challenging a black man who is the conservative candidate and the Muslim mayor?'

Mr. Webb's question created a lot of anger on social media but was perfectly fair. This is how things are now and things will become much more riven by identity politics and cantonised in the future.

We are living through a revolution.

Mr Stewart replied, like the politician he is, 

A British 'government of national unity'

A British 'government of national unity' is an odd expression for a government formed to impose the view of 48% of the people over 52%, but this is what journalists in London are talking about.

A second referendum is the next step and is always called a 'People's Vote', as if dogs and cats voted in the last one, the result of which has not been implemented.

Back in the USSR - EU comparison game

In the mad world of political correctness some people can be compared to the Nazis and others (Mrs Soubry for example) cannot. 

It's all about, to quote something Lenin didn't say, who whom. 

Boris, by implication, was deemed to have compared the EU to the Nazis and was roundly chastised by idiots.

Not as bad as the wrong people comparing the wrong people to the Nazis, but still very bad, is the wrong people comparing the wrong people to Communists.

Michael Gove was in trouble for this offence, but was acquitted when Douglas Murray proved with a recording that he had certainly did not say anything that could be construed as comparing the opening of the Berlin Wall with Brexit.

To many people in England, though, that comparison seems valid. 

To me, for example. And plenty of others I know. 

An English academic first made the comparison to me. He was required to keep his vote to leave a secret at work, he told me. People in East Berlin who welcomed the opening of the Wall were free to say so.

There is a fake quote going around on Twitter that Gorbachev made the USSR-EU comparison but the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy did so in this interview. 

Can Viktor Orban save the Hulk?

Most of what I have to say Brexit today has been said for me by James Forsyth here.


He is right that Theresa May has sold the pass and made an acceptable deal immeasurably harder to obtain. He is right that Boris's

new Brexit proposal is a big move, but it still isn’t enough for the EU and Dublin. They still object to anything that leads to checks on the island of Ireland, as the UK scheme would do.

I'd add that I think that if the Theresa May withdrawal agreement had passed the House the Irish Republic would never have let the UK get rid of the backstop. Why would they? They could have forever held the old enemy captive and secured a pan-Irish economy.

We'd have been in a permanent customs union, something Theresa May secretly accepted.

Jeremy Corbyn should have accepted her deal with left-wing tweaks about conforming to EU employment, equality and environmental legislation, had he really wanted to honour the referendum result and prevent leaving with no deal. But he cared nothing about either and, naturally, did not want to lose half his voters to save Theresa May.


Harold Wilson in 1972 and John Smith in 1993 similarly suppressed their own views and tried to sink the Tories. This is life.


It came to me, as I saw the Government pledge to the Court of Session in Edinburgh that they would obey the Benn Act and at the same time repeat that we would leave the EU on 31 October, that the only way to square the circle is to ask Viktor Orban of Hungary to veto Brexit.


He would rightly demand a very steep monetary price indeed to make up for any EU subsidies he would lose by incurring Western Europe's displeasure, but Boris might think any price cheap, assuming he does want to leave with no deal and immediately call an election.

I intend to write and think much less about Brexit, if I can pull myself away. It is the fundamental principle of Toryism or conservatism that politics is much less important than other things. Lord Hailsham said that the foolish Tory thought hunting more important and the wise one Christianity.

Hunting was made illegal in England by Tony Blair and Christianity will cease to be the biggest religion in England in around 30 years' time, but let's leave it there.

Lady Hale, ardent feminist

This is the era of narcissists: Mr Obama, Mr Trump, M Macron, Speaker Bercow and possibly (I am not sure yet) Rory Stewart. 

Pope Francis seems self-regarding too.

Even Lady Hale, the most senior judge in the UK is not self-effacing enough. She was interviewed by the BBC not long ago, which is bad, and talked about her feminism. She wants to be admired.






She spoke to a school a couple of days ago standing in front of a slide projected on a screen which says ‘Spider woman takes down the Hulk', i.e. the Prime Minister.


The slide was not her fault, I concede, and it was a reasonable joke but she should not have agreed to stand in front of it.

She praised 'girly swots' in her speech (the phrase used in a cabinet memo by the PM) which was not an improper thing to do - but not accidental. At a moment like this when anger is running very high on both sides of the Remain-Leave divide it was unwise and also self aggrandising.

How very different she is from the great judges of old and how very typical of the Cambridge educated academic feminists of her generation and later. 

Her being an academic, which is most unusual for a judge, explains her. She is part of the philosophical drift in the universities towards progressive ideas.

Lady Hale proudly calls herself a feminist. Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, said feminism was poison. I mention this to suggest that being a feminist is a political position rather than an uncontroversial thing to be and judges should not have public political positions. I therefore wonder if Lady Hales is well-advised to proudly call herself one. 

She no doubt thinks she is on the winning side of history and a progressive social force and this justified. It's a kind of political Calvinism.

How very different she is from the wonderfully High Tory Lord Chancellor Eldon, who was anything but progressive. He set a face of granite against all social reforms and defended hanging for all sorts of crimes stealing sheep and lambs. He used to lunch each day with a Chancery crony and seek to impress the clerk by only ordering two bottles, but invariably they had a third before they left the table (port, not wine).

Then according to Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, one of the two funniest books I ever read (the other is Kenneth Rose's King George V), Lord Eldon proceeded to the Woolsack to deliver those judgments which continue to perplex the law of equity half a century after his death.

The short march through the Catholic Church

Pope Francis has now appointed more than half the cardinals entitled to vote for his successor. 

Many are 'Franciscans', which means that they have left wing politics and left-wing theology.  

These words came to my mind.

"The evil that men do lives after them."

I'm afraid I decided, after thinking about it, to delete the line before that,

"The good men do is oft interred with their bones"

Here are three quotations from Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the Archbishop of Bologna, who died in 2015.

“… the Antichrist presents himself as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist. He …

Quoted from an incredibly sad story on Sky News

It is not only very sad but like a passage from a daringly surreal dystopia - it outdoes Brave New World.

'"I'm in communication with 19 and 20-year-olds who have had full gender reassignment surgery who wish they hadn't, and their dysphoria hasn't been relieved, they don't feel better for it," she says.

'"They don't know what their options are now."

'Charlie says she has been contacted by "hundreds" of people seeking help - 30 people alone in her area of Newcastle.

'"I think some of the common characteristics are that they tend to be around their mid-20s, they're mostly female and mostly same-sex attracted, and often autistic as well."

'She recalls being approached by a young girl with a beard who hugged her after giving a public talk, who explained she was a destransitioned woman too.'

The leading progressive English Catholic journalist leaves me with no words

'Fake news' - will this phrase save us? 'Politically correct' didn't

Still on the subject of what Michael Gove really said at the German Embassy on Thursday and the untruthful tweet about it by one Professor Neumann, a German who was present and is a lecturer at King's College London, it's another case, like Sir Roger Scruton's very shameful sacking, of how people with malign intent misuse social media and spread what is to coin a phrase fake news. 

This is Douglas Murray's report.

Whatever you think of him and however much you might not like him (I don't much like him either), we must all be grateful to Donald Trump for coining that phrase 'fake news' and showing the world that the media are political actors. 

This is simultaneously much clearer and much less clear now that the political consensus, meaning what unites the traditional parties while they fight each other, is under attack.

President George H W Bush coined the phrase 'politically correct' to point out the Communist origins of a lot of vexatious ideas. I thought at the time that the phrase would ridicule and laugh out of business those ideas but it didn't at all. Instead it is no longer politically correct (i.e permitted in many circles) to use the very phrase itself.

Had Professor Neumann been untruthful in defence of Cecil Rhodes, let alone the Amritsar massacre, or had he had his picture taken next to man in an Islamophobic t-shirt he might have been given the old heave-ho. Had he said that boys are better at maths than girls he certainly would have had to go.