This is a very good cause. The vast majority of Western countries teach history to all children until the age of 16, but not Britain. We should do better!
"We've lost our direction as to what society should be." That line from my Coventry focus group last week has stuck with me.
The group was about the Spending Review, but there was something deeper about how we've changed how we treat each other that kept coming up. A short🧵...
⬇️ This is exactly right we are well and truly in the era of toll the dice politics. When people are so unhappy with the status quo it doesn’t matter if the alternative - Brexit, Corbyn, Boris, now Reform is a risk; because it can’t be worse than the hand they’ve currently got.
I think the trend of clips like this (or the Jenrick video) is where citizens shame public authorities into action could become really powerful. I think what’s powerful is the tone of “look something can actually be done” rather than just railing against decline.
Is anyone else just constantly picturing the two roads of their potential life after Wednesday. Either eternal happiness or never watching football again
This is the key test. It’s difficult to overstate public exhaustion with and reticence to return to Brexit rows. If deal is seen as reopening that govt will pay price, but if seen as pragmatic friction reducing changes and Tories/Reform re-litigating Brexit govt stands to win.
BBC management is closing @BBCHARDtalk after three decades holding power to account around the world. Here are some thoughts ⬇️
‘I feel really, really cross at incredibly dumb decisions’: Stephen Sackur on the end of HARDtalk – and leaving the BBC https://t.co/d4vvOTQ6HR
RIP Oleg Gordievsky, arguably the greatest man I have ever met.
I collect books about espionage, as well as politics. I have signed volumes by numerous prime ministers and presidents as well as Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, even one paperback that used to reside on the shelves of Aldrich Ames, the CIA/KGB double agent.
When it comes to spying, though the prized volume is the book written by Christopher Andrew, who taught me at Cambridge, and Gordievsky on the history of the KGB. I was lucky enough to meet Oleg when he came to address students on the intelligence history paper I was studying.
Oleg was the most important source MI6 ever recruited. In 1983 he helped prevent nuclear war. In 1984 he helped both Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher understand each other ahead of a summit which convinced them they could do business with each other.
@BenMacintyre1's marvellous book, The Spy and the Traitor, gives a gripping account of how Oleg, in his day job for the KGB and his secret work for SIS schooled them both. It's one of the most extraordinary stories of the Cold War. The final 100 pages of that book, which recounts Oleg's escape from Russia is among the most thrilling passages of non-fiction I've ever read.
When you met Oleg his face, his eyes in particular - watchful and sad - told you this was a life lived at its limits, a man who has looked death in the face and bore its scars. In that sense he reminded me a lot of John McCain, whose arms couldn't lift a coffee cup all the way to his lips because of the torture he suffered in Vietnam. They were both stubborn as mules but decent, singular men who ploughed their own furrows.
In Oleg you saw the emotional scars. He was a man who made decisions he could not retract and who lived with both the honour of what he had done to destroy a system he despised and who had paid a terrible personal price. It destroyed his marriage and his family.
When I think of Oleg, I think of that scene in the West Wing where Leo's wife tells him that their marriage is more important than his job as White House chief of staff. He replies: "No it isn't. Not for the next four years it isn't." Oleg put belief and principle and the safety of his adopted country before his own safety and happiness.
I am profoundly sad he has died, profoundly grateful that he lived and profoundly honoured to have met him.
Ben has a brilliant piece here which is well worth a read: https://t.co/1NsvbAdp8j
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.
The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).
I trained Kyle Clifford in the Army and put my thoughts together for @Daily_Express
This is the hardest piece I’ve ever written, it forced me to reflect on things I might have missed, how common violence against women is & scarily, how normal he seemed.
https://t.co/QI5aqyWMRZ
Reform’s silence on Trump and Ukraine must end and end urgently:
Nigel Farage has invested a great deal in his relationship with Trump and on so many issues from immigration, tax, net zero and trans on the domestic front to a more hawkish approach to China and Iran on the global stage, there was good reason to do so… but the last few days have changed everything. I had a lot of sympathy with candidate Trump’s ambition to end an incredibly deadly war which had begun to resemble WW1 in the scale of fatalities being incurred without any obvious conclusion to fighting in sight. But Trump has moved well beyond that humanitarian goal. It’s clear he has chosen to ally himself with the blood-stained tyrant in the Kremlin rather than the invaded people of Ukraine and their grievous suffering. Trump’s dishonest attacks on Ukraine and Zelensky in recent days could have been written for him by Putin. All of the free and democratic world must condemn Trump and if the US administration continues on this despicable course normal friendly relations cannot be maintained in the usual way. By joining other British political parties in disowning the US’ posture on Ukraine Farage and Reform may even provide the wake up call that the likes of Rubio, Vance, Thune and Johnson need to hear too.
So it's strange. We're constantly told that Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, and Rupert Lowe are "straight talkers". They've had a lot to say about Putin in the past. They've had a lot to say about Trump in the past. But suddenly they seem to have lost their voices. Why is that.
I wrote this about the foolishness of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and enemies of democracy - those who imagine themselves the most fearless critics of modern civilization are often its most coddled children
https://t.co/5HOguc12RR