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Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."

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"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom." 

Spectator exposes dastardly Lib Dem plan to encourage Tory councillors to defect

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James Heale has just posted this on the Spectator website:

The Spectator has seen a leaked memo drawn up by Dave McCobb, the Lib Dems' campaigns director. Addressed to senior staff in party HQ, it sets out plans for 'Operation New Home'. This initiative aims to ‘reach out’ to liberally-minded 'Conservative councillors across the country who would be open to joining the Lib Dems.'

The Liberal Democrats are now trying to copy a model that Reform has exploited to great effect: luring Tory defectors to their side.

According to McCobb, the party's troops have received intelligence that ‘One Nation Conservatives on the ground' are  'feeling more and more alienated by their party' with plans to leave the ECHR and overhaul the Climate Change Act two factors being cited. 'We need to be ready for more Conservative councillors to cross the floor to us in the coming months', writes McCobb.

Staff are therefore being instructed to identify and contact 'current Conservative councillors who are open to joining us.' Sir Ed’s aides are being ordered to support council groups ‘in talks with potential defectors’ and attract waverers into the fold.

There's little here that will surprise someone who has been looking at the Liberal Democrat Bluesky feed this week. Still, it's good to have this placed in the Spectator, as potential defectors reading it will get the impression they are assured of a good welcome.

Could this be a case of a mundane document being marked 'Top Secret' and left on a photocopier at Westminster to ensure the press report it?

Alex Cole-Hamilton names three Highland seats the Lib Dems can win back in Holyrood election

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton says his party can “win back the Highlands” from the SNP at the 2026 election, and such a victory would be the “story of the night”.

That's a report from the website Ireland Live. (I know, me too.) And Alex went on to name three individual seats:

He said Lib Dem analysis of the general election results showed these three seats – Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch; Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, and Inverness and Nairn – all falling to the Lib Dems.

Referring to the incumbent MSPs, he said: “Kate Forbes, Maree Todd, Fergus Ewing. Three current and former SNP ministers.

“We are coming. We can win those seats.

“And conference, that would be the story of the night – Scottish Liberal Democrats winning back the Highlands.”

He also told the conference that other Conservative MSPs are set to follow Jamie Greene in crossing the floor - or "moving around the arc", as Andy Maciver terms it in the Spectator - to join the Lib Dems.

This is a development that wouldn't surprise Maciver either.

Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

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George Peretz on how governments can rein in Elon Musk: "There is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms ... That would in turn encourage all the users of X who currently use X to monitor government activity (journalists, businesses, many ordinary citizens) to open and use accounts on those competing platforms."

"Praising a recent Murray article, he said it was 'thoughtful, original, and generated more subscriptions than any other article we published this year'. There it is: hate sells. And since Murray’s opinions sell, sacking him would be bad for business. Those are the priorities." Brian Cathcart argues the Spectator can't defend Douglas Murray but can't afford to sack him either.

Phoebe Weston asks if we should intervene to accelerate the natural migration of tree species in the face of climate change.

"I was expecting to find that all graduates liberalise, but that those studying arts, humanities and social sciences ... become more socially liberal and less racially prejudiced than those studying more technical subjects (such as STEM subjects)." University graduates tend to be more socially liberal than the rest of the population - Ralph Scott summarises his research into why this is the case.

Dale Fox reports that more than half of UK school librarians have been asked to remove books from their shelves, with LGBTQ+ literature being disproportionately targeted: "One anonymous librarian, given the pseudonym Emma, described how she was instructed to remove all LGBTQ+ themed books following a single parent’s complaint about one title."

Carry On Spaceman. Carry On Robin [Hood]. Carry On Escaping. Retroboy is our guide to the 10 Carry On films that were planned but never made.

The social cost of Just Stop Oil's stunts

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I don't look at the Spectator much these days, but Stephen Daisley makes an important on Just Stop Oil's stunts:

It is not true that spraying orange cornflour on Stonehenge or chucking tomato soup on a van Gogh does no long-term harm. It undermines the unspoken system of trust upon which so many social arrangements are predicated. 

Every time Just Stop Oil pulls one of these stunts, it increases the likelihood that museums, galleries and heritage sites will put more distance between their wares and the general public. 

Places and objects that, at present, any ordinary member of the public can view up close and perhaps even interact with will eventually become sights to be peered at from a distance, behind protective screens or over the shoulders of burly security guards. 

There is a price to teaching public venues to be suspicious of visitors and it is a price we all pay.

The UAE buying the Telegraph would be better for the Tories than Paul Marshall buying it

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The Conservative opponents of the bid to buy the Telegraph and Spectator backed by the United Arab Emirates got their way. An amendment to the Enterprise Act 2002, which could be law within weeks, will ban foreign states or government officials from holding direct stakes in British newspapers.

Yet it would have been better for the Conservative Party if the UAE bid had succeeded.

Because the media expertise in the consortium behind that bid was provided by the former president of CNN Worldwide Jeff Zucker. And his ambition was to make the Telegraph a centre-right counterweight in the US to liberal newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post.

And at some point a new Tory leader is going to have to drag the party back from the Trumpian right towards just such a centre-right position. Having two major right-wing British publications there already would certainly have been a help.

By contrast, the UAE's rival bidder Paul Marshall, as a major investor in GB News, offers more of the same. More alternative facts, more conspiracy theories, more attempts to remake the Conservative Party on the model of the US Christian Right.

That's a recipe for continued irrelevance if you are a Tory.

I've been thinking about Paul Marshall and decided that those who say he has made a long journey from the Liberal Democrats to his current position may be a little wide of the mark.

Because if you take the Orange Book as representative of his views in his Lib Dem days, then there is a consistent strand in Marshall's thought. It has always been about setting money free rather than setting people free.

The Spectator uncovers more of Liz Truss's Lib Dem past

Steerpike of the Spectator has got hold of a leaflet Liz Truss put out when she made an unsuccessful attempt to be elected treasurer of Lib Dem Youth and Students, which was then the party's youth wing.

He writes:

Underneath a headline which proclaims 'Elizabeth Truss for Treasurer' it lists her skills as an 'experienced community campaigner' and a 'founder member of the Leeds North East Young Liberal Democrats.'

It notes her maiden speech 'calling for the party to practice [sic] what it preaches' at the Torquay Federal Conference and even boasts an endorsement from-then leader Paddy Ashdown: 'Elizabeth is a good debater and is utterly fearless.' 

Longtime Lib Dem activist Kiron Reid also predicted that 'Liz will be a determined treasurer and lively member of the executive.'

I've reproduced the leaflet here with no one's permission. Meanwhile, Kiron will be investigated by the Liberator editorial collective for suspected counter-revolutionary activity.

Political Beats on Steve Winwood and Traffic

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A three-hour, 20-minute podcast on Steve Winwood and Traffic? Yes please!

Political Beats is produced by the American Conservative magazine National Review. 

Over here, there are still contributors to the Spectator who pretend they know nothing about popular music.

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Geoff Mulgan looks at the Spectator’s grip on the Conservative Party - its weakness over wokeness and overreliance on wordsmiths.

"The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift." Diane Bolet explores the links between pub closures and the rise of Ukip.

Sophia Alexandra Hall explains why Good Law Project has launched a legal challenge on the high numbers of children in care being placed outside their local area.

"England is no more a single country than Great Britain or the UK. The “Jurassic divide” in our geology - traced by the Trent-Humber river - has split England since before it was England." Regularly falling to foreign takeovers and perennially divided, England is a nation that never was, argues James Hawes.

Sarah Lawson talks to Melvyn Bragg about how he has spent more than 50 years championing the joy, value, and fascination of knowledge.

"How extraordinary to glimpse on the horizon, then, amid the unrelenting horizontality of everything, a vertical shape, a tower aimed straight at Heaven, built in a style which took as its fundamental principle precisely the emphasis, the exaltation of verticality." Dominic N visits Boston and the tower of St Botolph's - Boston Stump.

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The system is broken and it’s corrupt: liberals need to make fixing the system and rooting out corruption a key part of our message to voters. If we don’t, then who will?" Max Wilkinson says the latest peerage announcements are yet more evidence that the system is broken.

David Torrance looks at the Government of Ireland Act 1920. He argues that it "paved the way for the formation of the United Kingdom as we know it today".

.Will Davies dissects the intellectual decline of the Spectator.

"The primary message that came through loud and clear from the respondents is that their children began to learn to read when removed from school because the pressure to read was reduced or removed." Peter Gray on how dyslexic children learn to read when removed from school.

"Ever since vaulting to fame, Rowling had sought the protection of some private realm. ... But her safest space had long been the one she found in writing. There, she knew all the secrets, ordained good and evil, and decided how everything would end." Molly Fischer offers a penetrating study of J.K. Rowling.

Tim Worthington remembers the days when the BBC would attempt to scare its young viewers to death: "In the early eighties, the Children’s Department had a go at producing their own Ghost Stories For Christmas, which in all honesty were only slightly less disturbing than their adult counterparts."

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"On 25 April 2020, The Spectator, located in London’s Old Queen Street, just around the corner from CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) in Matthew Parker Street carried a column by its commissioning editor, one Mary Wakefield, wife of Dominic Cummings. In it, she told the touching story of her family’s brush with the deadly coronavirus – save for one now-glaring omission: not even the slightest hint of their now infamous mercy-dash to the North East." Tim Bale examines Cummings, Covid-19 and the British Establishment.

Calum Macleod argues that land reform is central to a green economic recovery in Scotland.

Richard Bentall points out that the effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy has never been proved in a randomised controlled trial.

"Bentham ... argued that consensual sex between men should be decriminalised, on the grounds that the law should only prohibit and punish practices that caused harm overall (and not always then), but that there was no harm in consensual sexual activity. " Philip Schofield (no, not that one) looks at the work of Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century republican, radical, feminist and gay rights advocate.

Virginia Morell says urban foxes may be domesticating themselves all around us.

"There is no room even for the little box adverts that sometimes provided an inadvertent commentary on the text, such as one offering to cure your inferiority complex next to England’s record against Australia." Backwatersman on the evolution and pleasures of the Playfair Cricket Annual.

Boris Johnson and the collapse of British power

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So Boris Johnson is the new foreign secretary.

Our relations with other countries are now in the hands of a man who, only a couple of weeks ago, destroyed his own chances of becoming the Conservatives' leader with one undiplomatic newspaper column.

And he has previous.

In 2004 Johnson was ordered by his leader Michael Howard to go to Liverpool and apologise to the people of the city after he marked the murder of Ken Bigley by running an article in the Spectator that said of them:

"They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it."

In 2006 he had to apologise to the people of Papua New Guinea after likening to his colleagues in the Tory party:

"For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing."

In 2007 he described Portsmouth as

"a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs."

And in 2008 he apologised for a column he had written in 2002 that referred to black people as "piccaninnies" and talked about their "watermelon smiles". During that same mayoral campaign he was also embarrassed by some of the racist columns by Taki that he had published in the Spectator.

The appointment of Boris Johnson is a confirmation that Britain is no longer a world power.

What international relations are left to us will be handled by David Davis, who is a grown up, as we attempt to withdraw from the European Union.

Johnson will merely go around the world exuding what he imagines to be upper-class charm. He will go down well with the sort of people who enjoy Richard Curtis films.

When the foreign secretary gig falls through - and I would not put money on its lasting too long - he will probably turn to playing the English butler in a situation comedy on American television.

Steve Webb is the Spectator's Minister of the Year

The Spectator’s 27th Parliamentarian of the Year awards were given out at the Savoy Hotel this afternoon.

There was a Liberal Democrat victor in the shape of Steve Webb, who won Minister of the Year. Congratulations.

In his speech Fraser Nelson said:

"He has many admirers in Westminster, but his party leader isn't one of them. Back in the days where the Lib Dems polled in double digits, Nick Clegg was overheard saying the following of our winner: 'He's a problem. We need someone with good ideas – and his just don’t add up."

"As it turns out, his ideas did add up: flat-rate State Pension, the triple-lock, auto-enrolment. All complex and far-reaching pensions reforms. As a result, Brits have more options than ever when they're 64. The Chancellor may have stolen the credit for all this but today, we’re stealing it back."

Later...

A richly deserved award for @stevewebb1 as Minister of the Year at the @spectator awards. No one in Whitehall is more on top of their brief.
— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) November 27, 2014

How is Nick Clegg's inquiry into briefing against Vince Cable coming along?

Back in September, during the Liberal Democrats' autumn conference, the Observer announced:

Nick Clegg has launched an inquiry into claims that aides have been involved in a "dirty tricks" campaign against his leadership rival Vince Cable. 

The Liberal Democrat leader is investigating an allegation that members of the media have been briefed with erroneous information damaging Cable's position in the party. 

The move followed an angry complaint from an MP during a meeting of the parliamentary party at last week's Lib Dem conference in Glasgow.

I suggested at the time that there was no need for an inquiry - "Can't Nick just tell his people to stop doing it?"

But an inquiry it was. Yet I have seen nothing since about who is conducting the inquiry and when it is to report.

It is a good thing I am such a trusting person. Otherwise I might question whether this inquiry exists at all.

I was reminded of Nick's inquiry when I read Charlotte Henry's examination of the candidates for the Lib Dem deputy leadership for the Spectator:

As another well placed source put it, it’s ‘about the politics of the big four or five,’ and why would Clegg’s team allow someone close to Cable into the role, when they’ve “spent 18 months putting him in his box”?

We can congratulate Charlotte on being so well connected, but it seems the people around Nick Clegg have not changed their spots.

Bishop's Castle: "That despicable mass of rottenness"

I once wrote in my House Points column for the much-missed Liberal Democrat News:

The steep main street of Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire runs from the site of the long-vanished castle down to a church with a Norman tower. 

At the top of that street is a collection of fine Georgian houses. When you discover how they were paid for, you realise there is nothing new about political corruption. 

Before the Great Reform Act of 1832 Bishop’s Castle was a notorious rotten borough. Despite having fewer than a hundred electors for much of its history, the town returned two MPs. (There were worse cases: Old Sarum – a hilltop above Salisbury – had two MPs and no residents at all.) 

Not surprisingly, this situation led to corruption. But it did not take the form we generally imagine when we think of the elections of past centuries. This was not a case of candidates plying voters with free drink and then dragging them off to the polls. 

Instead, the electors of Bishop’s Castle realised their votes were of great value to would-be MPs and sold them for hard cash.

Which is why, in an 1832 article welcoming the Great Reform Act, the Spectator described the town as "that despicable mass of rottenness".

J.W. Logan in the Spectator

Last week I wrote a short post promoting the new, free online Spectator Archive. As I suspected, it is going to be a priceless tool for research.

Take this blog's hero J.W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough in the good old days.

I once wrote a post quoting James Moore's The Transformation of Urban Liberalism:

In the Harborough constituency Liberal lecturers were frequently refused access to Anglican schoolrooms where they wished to hold meetings. Eventually the Liberal Association became so frustrated with the situation that parliamentary candidate J.W. Logan built himself a portable meeting room which he took from village to village. The mobile contraption - dubbed the "Free Speech Hall" - obviously worked and following its introduction the local clergy were less reluctant to hire out school halls to Liberal candidates.

But there was more to Free Speech Hall than that. Here is a short piece from the Spectator, published after Logan was first elected to parliament, winning a by-election in 1891 (and reprsentative of the slightly hit-and-miss scanning that its archive offers):

Mr. Logan, the Gladstonian candidate, may well pride himself on his tactics. He has been in the field for nearly three years ; has taken round a van, in which Gladstonian meetings have been held under cover; and he has instructed his rural voters in the art of using the ballot by providing them with the means of playing at polling in the various villages of the Harborough Division. He has reaped his reward, and will possibly gather in a rich aftermath at the General Election

This suggests parallels between Victorian Liberalism and campaigning in poor Black communities in American today. It also suggests a solution to the problem of low turnout in inner-city areas in Britain today.

The Spectator Archive

Launched yesterday, The Spectator Archive is a marvellous new online resource.

Every issue of the magazine from 1828 to 2008 has been scanned and digitised, and each article tagged and extracted. That means you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location and date.

Best of all, it is free to use.

Is Theresa May a KGB agent?

When I was an undergraduate the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall were still in existence. And in those days how people responded to repression in the Soviet bloc seemed to me a good pointer to a their moral worth.

Though outright admiration for the Soviet Union - "All them cornfields, and ballet in the evenings" as Peter Sellers' Fred Kite put it in I'm All Right Jack - was rare by then, there were plenty on the left who argued that we should engage with the Warsaw Pact powers and played down questions of human rights.

So, while Jim Callaghan was prime minister, Romanian-built locomotives began to appear on Britain's railways.

In those days, admittedly, Nicolae Ceausescu was supposed to be the great liberal hope of Eastern Europe. The leader of the British Liberal Party David Steel even gave him a labrador. The dictator named it Corbu.

But it remains an uncomfortable fact that you were far more likely to find articles about human rights abuse in the Soviet Union in the Spectator than you were in the New Statesman. I seem to recall that you could even subscribe to a scheme that distributed the Spectator behind the Iron Curtain.

The Conservatives had their blind spots - there were plenty of them who were happy to support Apartheid South Africa - but this history gave me some hope that the Coalition would be more respectful of our liberties than Blair and Brown had been.

Especially when the Coalition agreement said:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

But when you read Theresa May's absurd comments in support of her Communications Data Bill you can see that these hopes of the Conservatives have come to nothing.

Here she is taking to the Sun:

“The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public. 

“Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives. 

“We would certainly see criminals going free as a result of this. 

“There will be paedophiles who will not be identified and it will reduce our ability to deal with this serious organised crime.”

You can say that May is too keen to appeal to her party's right wing or lacks the strength to stand up to the security establishment.

But her thuggish attitude to her liberties do remind me strongly of the mind-set that ruled the Soviet Union - and not a little of the briefing we Lib Dem bloggers were given when this bill first appeared. I am very glad to see Nick Clegg has now had second, better thoughts on it.

Could it be that Theresa May is a Soviet sleeper - an agent put in place when she was but a schoolgirl?

Can any among you remember Theresa May's schooldays? Were there perhaps pictures of Leonid Brezhnev on the dormitory wall? When the other girls were playing hockey was she poring over Soviet coal production figures?

Did she - and this would be the clincher - have a signed photograph of Corbu?