London Diary: Europe’s ‘revolving door’ politics comes to the UK

Watching the turmoil in the ruling Labour party which has pushed Keir Starmer’s premiership to the brink, one feels almost nostalgic about the once famously boring and predictable British politics when rumours about Maggie Thatcher ‘handbagging’ a disobedient colleague was as exciting as it could get.

British journalists envied their European peers who had all the fun reporting their politicians’ shenanigans while their daily bread was Downing Street’s bland background briefings.

Lately though, the theatre of excitement has flipped with all the fun moving this side of the Channel. Europe’s ‘revolving door’ political culture now has a new address: 10 Downing Street.

In the past ten years, it has been home to as many as six prime ministers — David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Soon, it may have a seventh.

At the time of writing, Starmer is struggling to survive an internal revolt by his own ministers and backbenchers against his lacklustre leadership which critics say has led to an alarming erosion of the party’s popular support even among traditional strongholds.

In the regional elections earlier this month, it lost some 1,500 local council seats plus the government in Wales, precipitating long-simmering internal discontent — both Left and Right wings of the party are pressing him to go. A number of ministers have resigned and others are threatening to do so in order to force a leadership change.

The question seems no longer ‘if’ but ‘when’ he will go. Watch this space.

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Muslims step up to defuse antisemitic tensions

Prominent British Muslims have stepped in to try and defuse increasing tensions between Jewish and Muslim communities over Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere in West Asia. They have called on fellow Muslims and anti-racist campaigners to do more to condemn the ‘horrifying’ levels of antisemitism in the UK.

Jewish groups have long complained that Muslims have not done enough to denounce elements spreading ‘hatred’ against them.

In a strongly-worded open letter, a dozen Muslim academics, community leaders, businessmen and counter-extremism experts said the ‘weak and underwhelming’ response to the surge in anti-Jew sentiment since 7 October 2023 ‘cannot go on’.

They said they felt the need to speak out due to the ‘pattern of sustained menace’ against Jews. The recent stabbing of two Jewish men in north London was the latest in more than a dozen antisemitic attacks in the capital last month alone.

Some people, the letter alleged, were using the ‘veil’ of legitimate protest to ‘normalise slogans, symbols and rhetoric that glorify violence’.

Signatories included Dame Sara Khan, the government’s former counter-extremism commissioner; Shiraz Maher, who leads the international centre for the study of radicalisation at King’s College, London; Shabir Randeree, chairman of DCD London & Mutual, a UK investment company that specialises in Islamic banking; and Fiyaz Mughal, founder of the charity Muslims Against Antisemitism.

The intervention followed a poll by Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, which found significantly higher anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslim voters than the wider population.

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The lost charm of a must-see London attraction

For generations of tourists, London’s Madame Tussauds Museum has been a ‘must-see’ attraction. No visit to the British capital was complete without queuing up outside its Regent Street headquarters to see wax dummies of famous people and pose for photos.

No longer, it seems. Gen Z visitors apparently have more historically significant places in their sights than a musty warehouse cluttered with tacky waxworks, plunging the 191-year-old institution into an existential crisis.

A steep fall in the number of visitors because of changing ‘consumer needs’, as its management put it, means it is running at a loss, forcing its owner Merlin Entertainments to write down the value of the brand by £262 million.

Delhites may recall its short-lived appearance in Connaught Place in 2017 amid much media hype, only to shut down three years later — because of a lack of enough customers — and move to a mall in Noida.

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First-ever memorial to fallen war reporters

For the first time, Britain is to have a permanent national memorial to British and UK-based foreign journalists killed while reporting from war zones.

Since the turn of the century, 16 British journalists have been killed — among them The Sunday Times’s celebrated foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in 2012 alongside the French photographer Rémi Ochlik during the siege of Homs in Syria.

Until now, there was no national monument to their memory. But thanks to On The Record, an independent media platform, plans are afoot to build one at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, a 150-acre site that hosts more than 400 memorials commemorating a range of events.

There are also plans to instal a companion sculpture on London’s Fleet Street, the spiritual home of British journalism.

Meanwhile, according to UNESCO, 93 journalists across the world were killed doing their job last year.

And, finally, during debate hour in the Commons last week, Barry Gardiner, Labour MP and critic of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, sat conspicuously reading a book called The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy.

Sweeney was Starmer’s chief of staff until he was forced to resign recently for his role in the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein-linked Peter Mandelson as UK’s ambassador to the US.