Drew Clode

Press/policy adviser to ADSS/ADASS 1992-2015. Edited many magazines. Now a good egg. Tries to tell things as they are. RTs not endorsements

[Matt Cartoons @MattCartoonist]

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's Telegraph
Buy a print of my cartoons at https://t.co/ILFJjPmckx
Original artwork from https://t.co/bVPAkgE34y

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Peel's Founding Philosophy Has Guided British Policing For Two Centuries. We Have Spent Fifty Years Dismantling It.

In 1829 Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police on a founding philosophy that has guided British policing for nearly two centuries. That philosophy was later codified into nine principles known as the Peelian Principles and is still taught to every new recruit today. Those principles contain everything British policing needs to know about what went wrong on a Southampton street on December 4th 2025.

Principle two. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

Principle five. The police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

Absolute impartial service to the law. Not racial equity. Not colour awareness. Not white privilege training. Not disproportionality monitoring. Not community sensitivity. Absolute impartial service to the law. Every person. Every community. Every accusation. The same standard. Without exception.

Principle seven. The police are the public and the public are the police. Not the police are the ethnic minority communities and the ethnic minority communities are the police. The public. All of them. Equally.

Principle nine. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it. Not the reduction of disproportionality in stop and search. Not the diversity of the workforce. Not the number of officers completing unconscious bias training. The absence of crime and disorder. That is the test.

Now place those principles alongside the documents governing Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary on the night Henry Nowak died.

The Hampshire Race Action Plan commits to pursuing offenders who cause harm to ethnic minority communities specifically. Not all communities. Ethnic minority communities specifically. The NPCC guidance tells officers that a commitment to racial equity does not mean treating everyone the same or being colour blind. The Metropolitan Police race action plan informs officers that neutrality is a myth and that their whiteness prevents impartiality. The Hampshire Inclusion Matters diversity course made nearly twenty percent of officers afraid they would be rejected for saying the wrong thing. The University of Reading noted that officers who did not respond well to the training may benefit from further intervention, monitoring or coaching.

Peel said absolute impartial service to the law. The Metropolitan Police said neutrality is a myth. Peel said the police are the public. The NPCC said the police cannot be colour blind. Peel said the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder. The College of Policing said the test is reducing disproportionality in the use of police powers against ethnic minorities.

These are not compatible frameworks. They are opposing philosophies. One treats every citizen as equal before the law. The other treats citizens differently according to their ethnicity and the accusations they make. One produced two centuries of policing by consent. The other produced the officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak.

Alexis Boon, the chief constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, described the national outcry as a furore that had been whipped up. He does not accept the term two tier policing.

Principle two. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

The public approval is gone. The respect has been lost. The chief constable who cannot see why has not read the principles he was taught on his first day.

The answer has been there since 1829. What changed was the decision to abandon it.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

"You are not likely to see Henry Nowak’s words stenciled on a mural. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made a few words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same words, spoken by a white boy dying on a British street, with what can only be described as a determined, institutional silence. That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts, and whose does not."

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

Keir Starmer: “there is no such thing as two-tier policing”.

Police chiefs today: “we will review controversial guidance advising officers to treat ethnic minorities differently”.

The absurdity of modern Britain.

[William Clouston SDP @WilliamClouston]

@arisroussinos A typically perceptive piece 👏

Key paragraph ⬇️

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Do not put up with this… say no loudly & openly. Protect the next generation, if we don’t it will continue to get worse for our girls. Gents too. These are your daughters being ignored. The law is on our side. Made very clear last year & last week. Males out of female spaces.

[Kira Rudik @kiraincongress]

The only truly productive response to putin’s threats to intensify attacks on Kyiv is sending Ukraine more air defense ammunition.

That is the language he understands. That is what actually saves lives.

[The General @GeneralMCNews]

BREAKING: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine are nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

[Higgy @higgyboson]

I posted this during the week but I'm doing it again because it's absolutely staggering.

@AngelaRayner can claim £40,000 in direct office expenses and a further £240,000 for "staff costs" etc.

She's also been gifted another quarter of a million quid from "supporters" to cover even more "office expenses".

In total it comes to over £500,000 per year.

Or £10,000 PER WEEK.

FOR OFFICE EXPENSES.

A UK pensioner is expected to survive on just £12,500 PER YEAR.

That's just 9 days worth of Angela Rayners "office expenses".

Are you OK with that?

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

"We are being asked to take seriously the image of Sturgeon stepping over the boxes of jewellery, the crates of Mont Blanc pens and the new Jag and luxury motorhome just to gain entrance to their home and then ignoring all of them to ask Peter whether he did anything interesting at work that day" https://t.co/BLqeID6XqC

[Yaroslava @strategywoman]

Kyiv.
City centre.

A woman clearing the damage from the night attack near the antique bookshop.

We won’t give up.
I know.
I see.

[Rod Bishop @rodbishop15]

I’ve posted about this for years.
The left took over the educational system 40 years ago.
Teachers have been breeding socialists ever since.
The country has deteriorated in tandem.
Our universities are the same.
The education system has wrecked Britain.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Right. Nothing signals a fresh start like bringing back Sue Gray.

[D.Radka, #NAFO 🇨🇿🤝🇺🇦 @DakdaR22]

- Giorgia Meloni - PM of Italy:

"Russia's aggression has violated the most basic principles of international law and the European security order.
We cannot accept that force replaces law in determining borders
Italy will continue to stand with Ukraine in military, financial, and humanitarian support, because defending Ukraine means defending freedom and democracy"

Thank you, Italy🫡

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

Smear campaign is 100% on record. his family's lawyers wrote formally to the government demanding to know who was authorising anonymous leaks calling him a "Walter Mitty" fantasist.

Blair's spokesman eventually apologised to the family for it. all documented at the hutton inquiry.

The pension claim i genuinely can't verify.

[Yaroslava @strategywoman]

Greetings from Kyiv.

Morning is here.
It felt so good to welcome it after the night we had.

Much damage in Kyiv after the attack.
Two people were killed and more than 50 wounded, as of now.

I had a silent warcoffee.

[HJB News @HJB_News__]

Unemployed Hassan takes his wives to meet his new third wife. Hassan is taking advantage of Labours new benefits rules to men with multiple wives.

Recognised polygamous marriages from overseas get an extra £125.25 a week per additional wife.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

In a single afternoon on May 22, 1941, the Royal Navy lost two cruisers and a destroyer off the coast of Crete to German dive bombers. The fleet commander was urged to withdraw what was left.

His reply has been quoted ever since, but the situation that produced it is less well known. By the morning of the 22nd, the German airborne invasion of Crete was four days old and on the brink of failure. Of the seven thousand paratroopers Kurt Student had dropped on the first day, roughly half were already dead. The Germans had taken huge losses trying to capture Maleme airfield in the west of the island. Without an airfield, no reinforcements could land. Without reinforcements, the invasion would collapse.

What the Germans needed was a seaborne convoy of mountain troops, heavy weapons, and ammunition. Two such convoys were assembled in Greek ports and put to sea under Italian destroyer escort, hoping to slip across the Aegean to Crete.

The Royal Navy intercepted the first convoy on the night of May 21. In a confused action in the dark, British cruisers and destroyers tore through a fleet of small Greek caïques crammed with German soldiers. Roughly three hundred Germans drowned. The convoy was destroyed.

But by morning the Royal Navy was south of Crete in clear daylight, within range of the Luftwaffe's Fliegerkorps VIII, the most experienced and lethal dive-bomber force in the world. And the British ships were running low on anti-aircraft ammunition because they had spent most of it sinking the convoy.

The Stukas came in waves. The cruiser Gloucester took two direct hits and capsized, taking 722 men with her. The cruiser Fiji was hit by a single bomb that ruptured her hull. She sank slowly, with most of her crew getting off, but 241 men were lost. The destroyer Greyhound was bombed and went down in fifteen minutes. The battleships Warspite and Valiant were both damaged, Warspite badly enough that she had to go to the United States for repairs.

By nightfall on May 22, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commanding the Mediterranean Fleet from Alexandria, was looking at a casualty list that included two cruisers, a destroyer, two damaged battleships, and roughly fifteen hundred dead British sailors. The army on Crete was asking for naval evacuation. The army on Crete also had thirty two thousand troops on it.

Cunningham's staff, looking at what the Luftwaffe had done in a single afternoon, urged him not to commit the rest of the fleet. He could not protect transports from Stukas in daylight. Anything he sent into the waters north of Crete would be sunk. The navy had taken enough.

Cunningham listened, and then he gave the order that is still quoted at Dartmouth Naval College.

"It takes the Navy three years to build a ship," he said. "It would take three hundred years to build a tradition. The evacuation will continue."

The fleet went back. Between May 28 and June 1, the Royal Navy evacuated 16,500 men from the south coast of Crete under continuous air attack. They lost three more cruisers and six more destroyers doing it. Thousands of British soldiers were left behind and became prisoners. But the navy did not abandon the army.

The German victory at Crete was so expensive that Hitler never authorized another major airborne operation for the rest of the war. The paratroopers had taken the island, but the airborne arm as a strategic weapon was effectively destroyed in the process.

Cunningham's decision was not a calculation about morale. It was a statement about what kind of institution the Royal Navy was, made in the moment when the institution was being tested. He was sixty years old. He had spent forty four years at sea. He understood, in a way that staff officers in London did not, that an institution that abandoned its soldiers in 1941 would still be remembered for it in 2041.

Three hundred years to build a tradition. Eighty five years ago today, the bill came due, and Cunningham paid it.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

A perfect symbol of what happens when a country is run by human rights lawyers. The rules are applied, however perverse the outcome. We are importing Russian oil while banning British oil. Why? Because Miliband and Greta and something and mimblewimble.

[Alexander Stafford @Alex_Stafford]

Just been assaulted at the train station. Punched in the head and the face to the ground. @TfL staff did literally nothing, even when the assailant had left. Thank you to the fellow passengers who came to my aid. Sadiq Khan has lost control of the city. This is lawless London.