Marie Jessel

Former BBC Radio 4 Producer Week In Westminster. Views my own.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

People getting hot under the collar about @jimpurnell’s appointment as chief of staff because he had clients they don’t like is what is wrong with politics.

He has worked in No10, been a minister, knows how Whitehall works and has run big teams. He is clearly more able than most people now at the top of govt.

He knows Burnham, he never did agree with him on everything but he will be loyal and probably effective. He has the necessary attributes to make a success of this.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

James Purnell would be a good/interesting pick for Burnham’s chief of staff:
-a grown up who’s run things - including but not limited to government departments
-his politics while an MP were v much Blairite

[Michael Crick @MichaelLCrick]

Now presumably Josh Simons, who sacrificed his Makerfield seat for Andy Burnham, will be given a peerage - as Lord Simons of Makerdeal perhaps. What one might call the road to Wigan peer?

[anne mcelvoy @annemcelvoy]

If you’ve had Young go through or have attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the experience of them putting down an instrument at 18 and not picking it up again is more common than not!
It’s SO not a finishing school for hot house prodigies (Menuhin school etc)
(Paging @patrickkmaguire 🎵 ) it’s a scrappy pen of very diverse ranges of talent/application – rather like politics!)

[Nicholas Watt @nicholaswatt]

I picked up some criticism last night from Labour MPs over Keir Starmer’s decision to skip his planned Commons statement on the G7 summit in favour of hosting a garden party in the Downing Street garden for friends and allies among Labour MPs. He left it to David Lammy to deliver the statement.
That was an interesting contrast to Margaret Thatcher on the day she announced her resignation. That afternoon she headed to the House of Commons and delivered a speech which played a crucial role in developing the Thatcher mythology.
The key moment came when the Labour veteran Dennis Skinner joked that Thatcher should head up the European Central Bank. “What a good idea,” she said after a brief pause. To laughter Thatcher then said: “I’m enjoying this.”
And then the Conservative MP Michael Carttiss pleaded with Thatcher to revoke her resignation. “You can wipe the floor with these people,” he said.
There is an important difference between the Thatcher appearance in the commons on 22 November 1990 and Keir Starmer’s decision to skip the G7 statement. Thatcher had to appear to lead her government’s response to a no confidence motion. A PM statement on an international summit is not quite in that league.
But some Labour ministers were unamused by Starmer’s non appearance. One said to me: “And that, Nick, is why we have ended up where we are today.”

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

Am not the only MP who'll be making the most of last appearances this week of some of the most dreadful Ministerial appointments Starmer made. Relatives of established Labour 'royalty', those with zero work experience outside the Party, and those with zero backbench experience...

[Nick Robinson @bbcnickrobinson]

In an all my years covering politics I have never met anyone so lacking in interest in the skills a leader needs - the ability to tell a story; to listen to colleagues; to woo, persuade & chivvy. Keir Starmer isn’t just uninterested in these requirements of the job. He is dismissive & contemptuous of them. @AndrewMarr9 sums this up in the @NewStatesman rather more memorably than I could …

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

Today an observer might notice several signs of the crisis in British democracy and in the civil societies of the West played out in London: this morning, a prime minister is deposed just two years after his election to make way for the seventh First Lord of the Treasury in ten years, one of whom he know little. This afternoon, our great parliament is scheduled to seriously debate a motion that seems to echo the darkest recesses of anti-Jewish conspiracism.

Just over a century ago, operatives of the Okhranka, the secret police of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, forged a manifesto that they called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which they had plagiarized from pamphlets published in 19thcentury France and Germany, and which promoted an antisemitic conspiracy that a clique of Jews were wickedly conspiring to control Western societies using secret power and money. The Protocols were believed by the Tsar himself to be real – after he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, he sought explanations for his downfall – and soon after they were published across the Western world – until The Times of London revealed the astonishing story of the forgery. Nonetheless they were translated into German and other languages – promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the Third Reich – while in the 1920s the book was translated into Arabic where it was propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and widely believed, later quoted in Hamas’s 1988 Charter wherein Article 32 declares: "Their (the Jewish people’s) scheme has been laid out in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”

Today E-Petition 752646 which has attracted 118,000 signatures and is scheduled for debate, is somewhat concerning because its careful wording has echoes of conspiracy theories under the guise of a scrutiny of lobbying and public debate that seems to propose witch-hunts and purity tests that have no place in British society.

The petition might be reasonable if a vast and powerful state was clearly influencing British life in a campaign of subterfuge, bribery and espionage and it proposed an investigation of malign state actors. This happens to be true of Russia, China and Iran at this moment and hopefully we are investigating those bad actors. But this petition claims to be …“concerned about reported Israeli state-linked and pro-Israel lobbying activity in UK politics…” I have no problem with criticism of Israeli government policy being a critic myself - but the call for an investigation “to determine the scope” and “scrutinise how pro-Israel organisations, networks, and lobbying efforts may shape government decisions, party policy, and public debate” is alarming because beneath its framing in the familiar language of balanced inquiry and human rights lurks the hint of hidden networks or control of politics and public opinion that echo historic antisemitic narratives and of course the world conspiracy and cosmic evil of the Protocols of the Elders.

The idea of investigating (‘scrutinizing’) British people who either have relationships with a longstanding European ally and fellow liberal democracy or its citizens in any field, political commercial artistic academic scientific military or even social, or those who wish to hold free opinions and make judgements without the menace of an ideological witch hunt is concerning. After all most countries in the world have some institutional and personal relationships in other countries without allegations of secret influence. But the petition drops its mask when it ominously mentions ‘public debate’.

So what 'public debate' would be ‘scrutinized’? Against whom could this ‘scrutiny’ be aimed and who would do the ‘scrutinizing’? It would certainly cast a shadow over beleaguered British Jews for a start but also the many British people who have the right to those views available to everyone in our civil society and liberal democracy and yes public debate. In an age when everyone is anti-racist and all public discourse is couched in terms of universal anti-racism and human rights, it has been clear for some time that we need to be wary of intolerance and ideological racism itself masked by exactly this jargon. It is one of the reasons that I argue that we need to evolve a much more focused definition of what now constitutes antiJewish hatred and a new vocabulary to confront it.

Therefore this debate is a sign of our times, an alarming one but it is also an important test of the Government’s and parliamentarians’ commitment to tackling antisemitism and extremism and a chance to make clear that conspiracy theories about control of political life and public opinion have no place in public discourse. Following the recent summit on antisemitism, the Prime Minister pledged that “tackling antisemitism requires sustained leadership, accountability and resolve.” I have no doubt that our admirable Parliamentarians will use this opportunity not to legitimize or amplify such calumnies but to challenge them directly, to maintain the respect for facts and truth that are essential to our success. I hope they will acknowledge the risks posed by the petition’s framing, and reaffirm that antisemitic conspiracies and purity witch hunts (sorry, ‘scrutiny’), regardless of how they are packaged, have no place in British politics and society.

[Archbishop of Canterbury @ArchbishopSarah]

It was deeply shocking and moving to visit the @novaexhibition in London this week, and a privilege to meet with relatives of those who were murdered in the 7 October attacks.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

I cried today. I'm not going to pretend I didn't.

Four presidents shared a stage in Chicago, a thing that used to be ordinary and now feels almost holy, and I felt the tears come before I understood them. At first I thought I knew what they were. I thought they were grief. I thought I was crying for how far we've drifted from that morning in 2008 when so many of us let ourselves believe, all the way down, that America could be better than her history. That we could be better. The distance between that morning and this one felt like the whole sad arc of the story, and for a moment I let myself sit inside the ache of it.

But the longer President Obama spoke, the more I understood I had it backwards.

He told a story I can't stop thinking about. The line we all know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, didn't start with Dr. King. King was borrowing it from a Boston minister named Theodore Parker, who preached it more than 170 years ago. And here is the part that broke me open: Parker preached it at one of the darkest moments this country had ever seen. The Compromise of 1850 had just made it a federal crime to shelter a man fleeing slavery. In Boston, a young fugitive had been seized, tried, and marched to the harbor by hundreds of armed officers, put on a ship, and sent back south into chains. While the whole city watched.

That is when Parker said it. Not in triumph. In the dark.

He admitted he couldn't see how it would end. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve... I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

He couldn't see it. He believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting.

As Obama put it today, Parker's words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting... even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”

And that's when my tears changed. Right there. They stopped being grief and became something else, something that scared me a little with how much it felt like hope. Because I realized I wasn't witnessing a eulogy for a country we'd lost. I was watching a man reach down and hand us back the very thing we had set down in our exhaustion. The arc doesn't bend on its own. It never did. It bends because people put their hands on it and pull, people who can't see the end and reach for it anyway. People in the dark, refusing to believe the dark gets the last word.

He would not let the day be about him. He said it plainly: America's story “isn't frozen in the past. It has chapters yet to be written, not by one person or a few people, not by Barack and Michelle... but by all of us.” Michelle said the same thing in her own way, that the center was never about them, never for them. Look up at that building and you'll see three words cut into the stone: You are America.Not him. Not them. You. Us. The ordinary, the unfamous, the tired, us.

And then Bruce Springsteen walked out with a guitar and sang “Land of Hope and Dreams.” If you don't know it, it's a song about a train, a train with room for everybody on it. Saints and sinners. The lost. The broken. The ones who've been left standing at every other station their whole lives. This train carries everybody. He sang it soft and aching, like a prayer he wasn't sure would be answered but was going to say anyway, and when the last note left him he turned to the Obamas and said the only thing left to say. “I love you.”

[Marie Jessel @ringarogy]

Very good to hear that and I do hope your daughter recovers quickly. I am though, very aware of the irresponsible behaviour of some cyclists, particularly on hired E bikes - what to do about it is a major concern IMHO

[Nicky Campbell @NickyAACampbell]

Its been a long and emotional night. My daughter Lilla was hit by an e bike hit and run last night in Peckham - hopefully there is CCTV. Her sisters were with her. She is badly injured but now at home. It could have been so much worse. We are incredibly lucky. Then when she and her sisters and a friend arrived at A&E a drunk entered the trauma room where they were and exposed himself to them. The police were there and he has been arrested. The police were magnificent. I spoke to them when I arrived at 3.15 and he is now in custody. We all want to say a massive thank you to our amazing police, the wonderful staff at @kingscollegehospital - nurses and doctors. Calum and the team. From the bottom of our hearts. ❤️ they were all bloody superb.

[Nicky Campbell @NickyAACampbell]

Its been a long and emotional night. My daughter Lilla was hit by an e bike hit and run last night in Peckham - hopefully there is CCTV. Her sisters were with her. She is badly injured but now at home. It could have been so much worse. We are incredibly lucky. Then when she and her sisters and a friend arrived at A&E a drunk entered the trauma room where they were and exposed himself to them. The police were there and he has been arrested. The police were magnificent. I spoke to them when I arrived at 3.15 and he is now in custody. We all want to say a massive thank you to our amazing police, the wonderful staff at @kingscollegehospital - nurses and doctors. Calum and the team. From the bottom of our hearts. ❤️ they were all bloody superb.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

here's Barack Obama's entire speech commemorating the Obama Presidential Center. He reflected on his administration's successes and failures, critiqued the moral rot of contemporary America, and outlined a positive vision of the future -- all without ever mentioning Trump

[Patrick Wintour @patrickwintour]

Been abroad at the G7 covering momentous world events - of which there are a few - to return to the UK to find the new mediocrity running the BBC is scrapping the BBC Radio's The World Tonight. Is there no end to Britain's desire to insulate itself from the world ?

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: HAHA! Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton burst out laughing at the dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center after Michelle brilliantly shaded Trump over the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is just too good...

"You were unflappable at every turn, always focused, always calm, always looking at the long view," the former First Lady said to her husband. "How absurd it is to even imagine that you might have buckled under the pressure even once, lashed out in frustration, lost your temper. How absurd it is to imagine that you might have done anything but make our family and this entire country proud."

We can think of another President who regularly loses his temper, buckles under pressure the moment that difficulties arise, and lashes out in frustration on Truth Social daily. There is an infuriating double standard at play. Obama had to always keep his cool to avoid getting labeled with the "angry Black man" racist trope. As an entitled white man, Trump can blow his top whenever he wants and nobody bats an eyelash.

"No, you were too busy. I'm not done, y'all! Not done," Mrs. Obama continued as the crowd roared with approval. "So much to say. You were doing the people's work, rescuing our economy, expanding healthcare, ending a war, ordering the Bin Laden raid, saving an auto industry, winning a peace prize."

She paused and smiled at that point in the speech, giving the audience a chance to cheer. Seated in the wing, Hillary Clinton burst out laughing at the obvious jab and President Obama laughed along with her.

It's well-documented that Donald Trump is absolutely obsessed with the fact that Obama has a Peace Prize while he himself has been denied the distinction. Trump aggressively lobbied in vain for one, cajoling foreign leaders to nominate him.

He was so incensed by the Norwegian Nobel Committee's refusal to award him that he wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre: "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace."

He lived up to the implicit threat in that letter by going on to launch a pointless, costly, child-murdering war against Iran that ultimately ended in defeat and surrender for the United States.

And Michelle wasn't done there...

"Keeping us safe from Ebola, regulating the banks, standing up for marriage equality, listening to science, and comforting an entire nation in the face of unspeakable tragedies," she continued, listing more of her husband's accomplishments. "And you did it all with such grace and class and cool that you made the hardest job in the world look like a walk in this beautiful park."

The Ebola bit is another jab at Trump who, with the assistance of RFK Jr. and Elon Musk, gutted research and pandemic prevention. This is the most virulently anti-science administration that this country has ever seen.

One thing is certain. The Obamas will have a lasting, radiant legacy in this country. Trump will be reviled by future generations, his name used as a byword for incompetence, failure, and corruption.

Please ❤️ and share if you love the Obamas!

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

and Marc Bloch's remains are being re-interred at the Panthéon on the 23rd of this month. Finalement.

[Sean Pittman @SeanPittman]

After hearing what was said about Michelle Obama at the White House last night, I can’t stay silent.

She’s a Princeton- and Harvard-educated attorney, a former First Lady, and a global example of intelligence, grace, and elegance.

I’m speaking up because she taught us: *“When they go low, we go high.”* That means calling out disrespect while still choosing dignity.

I stand with Michelle Obama. And she represents the best of American values.

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

I told CNN’s Audie Cornish that the most important part of JD Vance’s book about his conversion to Catholicism was what wasn’t in it.

In his first week in office, Vance accused Catholic bishops of profiting from migrant resettlement and lectured clergy on the teachings of St. Augustine.

It led Pope Francis to rebuke him in a letter to American bishops — a letter ghostwritten by Robert Prevost, the future Pope Leo XIV.

The Church loves its converts.

But a convert who walks in lecturing everyone on how they’re doing it wrong — and gets rebuked by two popes in a single year — is pushing his luck.

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

JD Vance’s book on his conversion to Catholicism is scheduled to be released tomorrow. I got advance excerpts of it over the weekend.

I wasn’t going to release my thoughts about it until tomorrow morning on CNN, but since the embargo has been broken, I’ll have more to share today.

In short, the Vice President’s egotism shines through.

A recent convert, Vance acts as if he deserves special treatment from Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church.

He does not. He is no better than any of us.

[Diane Hankinson @DianeHankinson5]

What you see here is Pure Class...Educated. and even if they weren't they would still be the best folks you'd ever want to meet in your lifetime. They are down to Earth Good People..and Sorry I can't ever say the same about a Rival Barack Obama never deserved in the first place.