Forty new pieces of legislation – nearly twice as many as in the last parliament – are being prepared in the opening days of Starmer’s government. Headline manifesto pledges, such as the scrapping of the VAT exemption for private schools, are included. So too is a proposed bill to remove voting rights entirely for hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

In a speech delivered by the King to a packed upper chamber, the government also announced the creation of at least seven new arms-length bodies to coordinate policy: the Industrial Strategy Council, the Border Security Command, Skills England, the Armed Forces Commissioner, Great British Railways, Great British Energy and “an independent football regulator”.

In a further homage to the technocratic tradition of New Labour, the Budget Responsibility Bill would introduce a “fiscal lock” that greatly increases OBR oversight over government tax and spending, including preventing any “large-scale” fiscal changes unless an OBR assessment takes place.

There is an English Devolution Bill, which would make it easier for communities in England to gain new levers to stimulate growth including a “right to buy” power over “empty shops, pubs and community spaces”.

The government also plans to put railway contracts into public hands “as they come to an end or if operators fail to meet their commitments” – a pledge short of full-scale nationalisation.

The rhetorical effect of so many bills is impressive, but the number may also be a strategic choice. “It reflects that we have a lot of lawyers in this government who have particular views on how to avoid being ambushed by annoying amendments”, suggests the Institute for Government’s Jill Rutter.

One bill likely to face resistance even from within Labour, for example, is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which would enshrine the government’s plan to remove the right of local councils to object to new housing developments.

Keeping bills narrowly focused, supporters argue, may minimise the scale of resistance in parliament and get new laws on the statute book more quickly than bills tackling numerous issues at once.

A government cannot simply legislate the economy into life, however. It must also identify the necessary battles and devise a political strategy to win them. 

On the health service, the government pledges to “seek to reduce waiting times” but a bill to that effect was notably absent today. And only time will tell whether plans for a National Wealth Fund to coordinate industrial strategy will provide the right incentives to the private sector in practice.

Starmer has every reason to be ambitious. It is now up to Rishi Sunak as interim leader of the opposition to scrutinise the vision contained in the King’s Speech in the weeks ahead. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

The dismissal comes the day that Trump is expected to announce his running mate and be formally endorsed by the Republican party as its candidate for president at the Republican National Convention, one of the most important events in the electoral calendar.

Democratic politicians including Senate leader Chuck Schumer have criticised the ruling by a Trump-appointed judge who argues that the appointment by the Justice Department of special counsel Jack Smith was unlawful.

But the verdict means that Trump enjoys an enormous tailwind going into the RNC, an extraordinary fanfare even in a normal election year. Just two days after surviving an assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania, Trump says he will use the occasion to “bring the whole country, even the whole world together”.

The net effect will surely be positive for the presidential hopeful. Remember that, until the shock of events on Saturday, Trump was chiefly recognised as the only criminal in US history to be running for President. Some of the T-shirts printed for sale at the RNC read “I’m voting for the convicted felon”.

The shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend has rocked the country and drawn condemnation from all sides. It will also define the tone at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and transform Trump’s campaign.

J.D. Vance, the populist Republican senator from Ohio, has been among the most vocal critics of the Democratic party’s rhetoric, linking it directly to the rally shooting that left two people dead, including the sniper whose bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. A 50-year-old volunteer fire chief and avid Trump supporter, Corey Comperatore, also died at the Rally while trying to protect his family during the attempted assassination, diving onto them to shield them from the bullets.

Vance is widely touted to be the top pick for Trump’s running mate. As events unfold, there is unlikely to be a whisper from the Biden campaign team, which says it is “pausing all outbound communications” following the shooting.

Trump now has five pending criminal cases. The Supreme Court earlier this month ruled that Trump is immune for prosecution for “official acts”, meaning he is unlikely to be indicted for his role in the Capitol insurrection three years ago.

The Republican National Convention begins today and ends on Thursday. While Trump’s big speech is expected on Thursday, he could announce his Vice  President as early as tonight. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Technically, the Democratic Party does not have to choose to elect the President as its nominee when delegates gather in Chicago in August for its National Convention. However, to not do so would be an extraordinary break from convention. Only Biden’s biggest cheerleader, his wife Jill, can save him now from further embarrassment by asking him to step aside. And focus on honing that golf handicap instead. 

London Metropolitan Police have arrested a man, who has not been named but is in his mid-twenties, at a residence in Islington. Police say he is being held in custody on suspicion of “harassment and committing offences” under the Online Safety Act.
 
In April, Politico revealed that individuals working in Westminster, including at least one Labour MP and one Conservative MP, had been receiving unsolicited flirtatious messages via WhatsApp from two unknown phone numbers.
 
The messages seemed to come from someone who knew the victims, either through a political event or a mutual colleague. It later transpired that the attacker had stolen profile photos from a Facebook account in an attempt to appear more authentic.
 
The ensuing conversations are thought to have been designed to solicit explicit images for the purpose of blackmail. William Wragg resigned the Conservative whip in May after admitting he had sent on personal phone numbers of fellow MPs because he was “scared” that the attacker might publish indecent images he had previously sent as part of their conversation.

Nearly two dozen people, mainly staffers, are now known to have been targeted. We do not yet know whether others are being considered for arrest in connection with the attacks.
 
It is all a rather sordid distraction, of course, from that other Westminster scandal dominating the headlines. Labour leader Keir Starmer today called for a change in “the culture of politics” as the Gambling Commission continues its enquiry into illicit bets on the election date made by MPs, mainly from Conservatives.
 
Rebutting Liberal Democrat Sir Ed Davey, who has called for a change of the rules on MPs making bets, Starmer put his emphasis on “the behaviour of individuals”. He argued that “self-advancement” had eclipsed a “culture of service” in high politics.
 
Indeed, former Conservative MP Michael Gove suggested on Sunday that the reputational damage of Gamblegate may be as bad as that of Partygate, which rocked Boris Johnson’s administration during the Covid crisis.

That was around about the same time Conservative MP, Neil Parish, admitted he had watched pornography on his smartphone while waiting to vote in the Commons chamber.
 
Historians of the last fourteen years of parliamentary politics may well come to agree that the smartphone is the common culprit. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

This is a significant gesture of reconciliation from the Biden Administration.

The fifty-two-year-old whistle-blower is heading for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US overseas territory in the Pacific, where he will plead guilty to just one charge of violating the Espionage Act rather than the eighteen originally aimed against him in 2019.

The deal concludes a fourteen-year stand-off which saw Assange spend seven years holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, and a further five years in UK prison attempting to evade extradition for charges of sedition and conspiracy.

It’s an extraordinary moment for Assange’s family. “It feels like it’s not real”, his wife, Stella, told the BBC.

American judges are seeking a fifty-week prison sentence for the guilty plea – a term more than offset by Assange’s stint at Belmarsh in East London, where he has resided pending an extradition order since his expulsion from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge in 2019.

This is also an extraordinary climbdown from the US government. The man who published thousands of classified documents relating to US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including details of detentions in Guantanamo Bay and videos of attacks on Iraqi civilians and journalists, has been set free.

Outlets including The Guardian andThe New York Times spent years working with Assange to bring those secrets into the public eye. His supporters see him, along with US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, as a champion of public interest journalism.

But, like Snowden, Assange turned out to be a much more polarising figure than at first seemed clear. Both maintained uncomfortably close ties to Russia, the latter having been named by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as an unwitting accomplice to Russian election interference in 2016.

In 2019, Ecuador ended its offer of asylum to Assange in part because of his suspected connection to two Ecuador-based Russian hackers.

That Biden’s Justice Department is now willing to forget, if not quite forgive, is the result of many years of quiet diplomacy and, perhaps, a recognition that Assange’s fourteen years of self-imposed exile for allegations dating back nearly fifteen years have been punishment enough.

The Australian government has been crucial. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who argued today that Assange’s case “had dragged on for too long” and that there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”, raised Assange at numerous high-level meetings with US and UK counterparts in an effort to bring him home.

Assange’s legal counsel in Britain, led by Jennifer Robson of Doughty Street Chambers – the firm that launched Keir Starmer’s career in human rights law – also worked tirelessly to clear the way for a plea deal, persuading the High Court in March to put up further blocks to his extradition.  

Not everyone is happy about the latest developments. Mike Pence, vice president when the indictments were made, has derided the bargain as “a miscarriage of justice”. Undoubtedly Biden’s decision will be used against him in upcoming Presidential debates.

But for some defenders of press freedom, even journalism that involves the violation of state secrets, this week’s events are a long-awaited victory.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

The results from the largest-ever survey conducted by the campaign group Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression (FIRE) suggest that recent efforts by higher education institutions to affirm their commitment to freedom of expression have yet to impact culture on college campuses.

The annual College Free Speech Rankings, based on polling of 55,000 undergraduates enrolled at 250 institutions, reported that 27 per cent of students believe violence can be an acceptable form of protest to prevent a campus speech from a controversial speaker from going ahead, up from 20 per cent in 2023.

The report added that less than half of students surveyed across the country feel “comfortable expressing their views on controversial political issues on campus”, with abortion, gun control, racial inequality and transgender rights identified as the most volatile subjects.

This comes despite reforms to free speech policy passed by numerous U.S. universities this week, including Harvard University, MIT and the Prime Minister’s alma mater, Stanford University, including renewed commitments to institutional neutrality and a roll-back of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

This year’s survey results, however, were gathered in an unusually turbulent period for campuses in both the United States and Britain, after Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent military offensive in Gaza triggered waves of student protests and a rise in reported incidents of antisemitism.

Speaking to CNN in December, Lawrence H. Summers, a former President and critic of Harvard, argued that the failure of universities to confront the rise in antisemitism since October 7 “cannot be separated from the broader issues of political diversity” on American campuses.

Students of all political persuasions report a chilling effect on campus when it comes to discussing controversial issues. Some 73 per cent of conservative students polled reported feeling “uncomfortable” disagreeing publicly with a professor on a controversial topic and even 69 per cent of liberal students agreed, despite US college campuses leaning overwhelmingly “liberal”. 

With an average annual acceptance rate of just above one per cent, and with one of the world’s largest endowments, Harvard is considered one of the most prestigious universities in North America and a bell-weather for the health of American academia.

In recent years, however, it has come under sustained criticism from donors and the mediafor its lack of leadership on academic freedom. In December, then-President Claudine Gay was forced to resign in part due to accusations that her testimony to Congress exposed institutional hypocrisy over the enforcement of Harvard’s discrimination policies. The backlash came after Gay appeared to equivocate to Congress on the extent to which prevailing discrimination policies could protect Jewish students from violence.

In an effort to restore public trust, Harvard committed this week to remain neutral on all political issues not directly pertaining to the university.

Harvard and MIT have also both scrapped mandatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) statements for those seeking academic tenure in certain faculties, meaning prospective applicants will no longer have to explain how their teaching contributes to DEI as a prerequisite for being hired. Critics argue that the policy stifles political diversity among faculty.

“Institutional neutrality is essential to academic freedom”, Professor Edward Sidelsky, head of the UK-based free expression group the Committee for Academic Freedom, told Reaction. “If your employing institution is firmly on one side of a controversial issue, it is impossible to feel secure arguing the other side”.

“We hope that the UK’s Office for Students will enshrine institutional neutrality in its free speech guidance to British universities”, he added.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

The presence of a British imperialist so close to the home of South African democracy – in the Rose Garden built on Rhodes’ diamond fortune, no less – is a reminder of the monumental legacy Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress sought to redress when it took power in the country’s first free elections in 1994.

When I visited Parliament during a trip to Cape Town seven years ago, however, the effigies were not burning for the former colonial governor. At the time, then-President Jacob Zuma faced a fresh list of charges against his public and private character, including allegations of an illicit twentieth child and of a $13m villa built in his home village using public money. 

Despite the moderating influence of Zuma’s successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC went to the polls this week with this image of sleaze firmly fixed in the popular imagination. And it shows.

Data from the South Africa-based think tank the Social Research Foundation, widely recirculated by international media, confirms that the party is set to win around 42% of the national vote, fifteen points down on 2019 and twenty points down on 2014. The only party to have governed South Africa in its thirty-year democratic history may have lost its singular appeal. 

Both Ramaphosa and Zuma have overseen a net regression in living standards in the land many once considered to be Africa’s unofficial superpower. Economic growth since the financial crisis has been so pitiful that the population has outgrown it, meaning the average South African is 30% poorer in real terms than a decade ago.

Much of South Africa’s black majority has become frustrated by what it sees as the failure of the party to enact serious reforms to the structure of the country’s economy, including reforms to land ownership from the apartheid era and the nationalisation of the mining companies. The Economic Freedom Fighters Party, a splinter party from the ANC and one of over fifty parties to stand, aims to deliver on such promises.

Others simply believe that its leaders have transformed from insurgent Marxists to insipid marketeers, embracing an economic program that has resulted in the country developing the world’s highest unemployment rate – 32.1% at the end of 2023 – and an enormous expansion in income inequality. South Africa is now the most unequal country in the world by income, according to the widely-cited Gini coefficient.

The ghost of apartheid is obvious to anyone who visits Cape Town today: wealthy all-white neighborhoods around Camps Bay rub uncomfortably close to middle-class “coloured” communities and to the sprawling black townships further south and east on the peninsula. 

That the country is more unequal by income today than in 1993, the last year of apartheid, explains why many are starting to lose faith in Ramaphosa’s “reformist” leadership.

A fragmentation, if not quite a realignment, is now apparent in South African politics. These are the first elections in which independent candidates can stand, giving outside voices a chance. Regional and personal loyalties are at play. Former President Zuma’s new party, uMkhonto we Sizwe, is expected to do exceptionally well in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu Natal. Two other ANC splinter parties, including the EFF, will chip away at the ANC’s majority elsewhere. 

The ANC is by no means finished. It remains the most popular party and the one with the deepest roots in local politics. The likely outcome of this year’s elections is a coalition government with the ANC at its centre. 

If there’s another lesson to draw from Cecil Rhodes’ statue, however, it is that no political regime lasts forever.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

This week, Oliver Dowden, the UK’s deputy prime minister, revealed that hackers sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party had infiltrated the Electoral Commission in 2021, obtaining data on forty million voters. The old line, delivered to approving bankers and nodding party members in 2015 – “Let’s stick together to make Britain China’s best partner in the West.” – is simply no longer credible. 

The Osborne speech reflected an earlier era of optimism towards Beijing. Britain’s then-chancellor was also being a realist, acknowledging the UK’s dependence on China when it came to trade. Economic pragmatism, led by the Treasury, was the driving force behind the Osborne doctrine in its Cameron-era heyday.

All that was before China ripped up what remained of the Hong Kong Joint Declaration in 2019 with its National Security Law, and before Covid-19 forced Britain to confront CCP misinformation for what it was.

In 2020, the British government pivoted to block Chinese tech giant, Huawei, from participating in the construction of the UK 5G network infrastructure, in a major-u-turn estimated to increase costs by up to £2bn and delay the roll-out by two to three years. In May of last year, it banned Chinese-owned social media app, TikTok, from government devices. 

China hawks in the Tory party are calling for an even clearer strategic stance towards Beijing. “We must now enter a new era of relations with China”, Iain Duncan-Smith told journalists on Tuesday morning, which means “dealing with the contemporary Chinese Communist Party as it really is, not as we wish it to be.” He has pointed out that the Integrated Review Refresh, published in May 2023, calls China “an epoch-defining and systemic challenge” but, unlike with Russia, it does not label China an immediate threat to national security.

China hawks have every reason to want to push for tougher wording. But the reality is that a shift from pragmatic compromise to confrontation is difficult.

A more confrontational stance from the UK would certainly suit the interests of the United States, which is engaged in a fierce trade war with China. Even in 2015, President Obama warned Cameron against offering support to the China-led Asian Investment Bank, which his administration saw as a vehicle for China’s mercantilist foreign economic policy.

However, unlike the United States, the UK cannot guarantee that a unilateral trade war with China would be worth the cost. It could be, with the cooperation of the rest of Europe. But cheap Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles are rapidly becoming critical for the EU’s energy strategy in the post-Ukraine world. There is little appetite, whether one looks at Macron’s France or Scholz’s Germany, for using the bloc’s economic weight as leverage against the CCP.

The Rattenkönig, or rat king, was coined to describe rats whose tails had become so intertwined that none could escape from each other. Perhaps it’s a fairer description of Sino-British relations today than phrases such as the “New Cold War”. In the Cold War, Britain was not reliant on Soviet technology to keep its economy running.

It’s different today. Take Cellular Internet-of-Things Modules (CIMs). CIMs are small network-enabled components essential to connecting cars, smartphones and other devices to mobile networks. A new report by the Council on Geostrategy warns that these ubiquitous components, over half of which are manufactured by Chinese companies, pose a systemic security risk of an order of magnitude greater than that of Huawei or other private companies. US members of Congress have already sounded the alarm.

Never before has Britain made itself so dependent at so many levels on its chief strategic adversary. 

This week’s allegations about CCP-sponsored hacking have also made clear the relationship between China’s private sector and the state: it is a loophole waiting to be activated. A serious move away from China, therefore, would require separate strategies to achieve sufficient independence not only in trade but also in energy and technology infrastructure.

China has vehemently denied involvement in this recent cyber-attack. Confrontation is not the CCP’s way, it claims. Instead, the UK has before it an apparently endless series of political stand-offs, diplomatic denials and sleights of hand. It amounts to a slow burn of lower-level disruption to our political and economic systems. The Golden Decade is long gone. If only the alternative were as simple as the Cold War.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

DragonFire, a collaboration between the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and the private sector, promises a cost-effective defence against airborne threats, including drones and satellites, and could be tested against armoured vehicles as early as next year.

Officials say the weapon has enough precision to target a £1 coin a kilometre away. Photos released by the Ministry of Defence and showcased on Friday by The Times show the technology in action:a beam of red light shooting into the clouds above the Outer Hebrides where, unseen a kilometre away, a test drone is said to be disabled. 

The system’s single-shot operating cost of £10 makes it significantly cheaper than the £1m required to build and launch a Sea Viper missile from a Type 45 frigate – the usual defence against an unmanned aerial threat.

Chris Allam, UK Managing Director of MBDA, the French firm leading the project, says the technology “will enable frontline commands to meet the rapidly changing threats they face.” Defence Secretary Grant Shapps added that it would save millions by “reducing our reliance on expensive ammunition” and “reducing the risk of collateral damage” from conventional surface-to-air weaponry.  

Laser weapons were once the realm of science fiction and political fantasy – see Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, or the George Lucas films after which it was nicknamed. 

In recent years, however, allies and rivals have made advances. In 2014 the US Navy fitted a laser-directed energy weapon onto a frigate. China and Russia claim to have tested similar weapons.

Airborne threats have not only dominated media coverage of the war in Ukraine, where drones have been deployed by both sides, but also coverage of the recent aerial attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen against UK and US shipping.

DragonFire began as a speculative project in 2017. Costing over £300m, it has received further support from the government’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), a DARPA-inspired funding body for high-risk, high-reward technologies.

The UK’s Integrated Review Refresh, published in March last year, warned of a “more volatile and contested world” in which emerging threats from AI and other technologies could undermine conventional defences, committing £20bn for the research and development of novel technologies over the next decade. In West Lothian, an Advanced Weapons Integration Centre will test new ways of using lasers in combat.

The MOD claims the weapon will be used for defensive purposes only. It is not clear yet whether such technologies are intended for use, eventually, against human targets.

Bill Ackman, a long-time donor to Harvard University, has called on the university’s board of directors to dismiss Claudine Gay as President following her testimony to Congress last week, in which she equivocated on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s harassment policies.

“In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,” wrote Ackman on Twitter (X). Ackman, an American billionaire hedge fund manager who graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in social studies, highlighted “her failure to condemn the most vile and barbaric terrorism the world has ever seen”.

At least 70 members of Congress, including two Democrats, now back Ackman’s call for Gay to resign. The President of UPenn, Elizabeth Magill, who also testified on Tuesday, resigned over the weekend after a senior donor withdrew a $100m contribution to the university.

“Taking the fifth”, in American crime film cliché, is to admit you might be guilty of something. In the eyes of many Americans, those who testified last week stand guilty of “taking the first”: using the First Amendment’s free speech protections to avoid taking a moral stance on antisemitism. 

The Presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn all offered technically correct explanations of how First Amendment rules should apply on their campuses, given according to the best legal advice. But within the wider debate about the health of American academia, their comments were incendiary.

“When Harvard et al. have no prior credible commitment to academic freedom, institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity, the born-again appeal to principle seems incriminating”, noted psychologist Stephen Pinker, who teaches at Harvard.

In recent years, the litmus test on campus free speech was whether an institution could stomach Charles Murray, a bête noire on the academic left for his work into ethnicity and class.

When invited to speak at Harvard in 2017, one professor of African American studies told the student newspaper, The Crimson, that “the question of free speech on campus” was “more-or-less equivalent to the question of the rights of white men and conservatives to disrespect, insult, bait, and degrade everyone else.”

Another, who served as dean of the college’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time, said that they “didn’t look to Charles Murray as an exemplar of rigorous data science.” Her name was Professor Claudine Gay.

Murray joined the online fracas this weekend to demand Harvard and MIT prove their allegiance to the First Amendment by inviting him again.

But criticism has come from the mainstream, too. Campus antisemitism, noted former Harvard President Larry Summers in an interview with CNN last week, “cannot be separated from the broader issues of political diversity, the broader issues of identity politics” within universities.

Summers worked as an economic adviser to Bill Clinton. He joined Jonathan Haidt, a former John Kerry speechwriter, and others who warn that urgent reform is needed.

What might such reform look like? For some, such as UPenn law professor Claire O. Finkelstein, the protection of Jewish people on campus requires more, not fewer restrictions on speech.

For others, such as journalist Bari Weiss, last week’s testimonies provide an opportunity to dismantle what they see as the root cause of declining trust in elite universities – the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) system of laws, in-house hiring practices and bureaucratic mandates that have made free speech so hard to adjudicate fairly.

There has been a clear shift in tone this past week. The forces campaigning against campus radicalism in US university management look as though they might be starting to win.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

The Presidents of Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were hauled into Congress this week to “answer to and atone for” the rise of antisemitism on their campuses since Hamas’s attack on Israel two months ago.

Of over four hours of grilling, however, mainly by Republicans, only one line of questioning will be remembered. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, asked all three whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” constituted a violation of their respective university’s policies on bullying and harassment. All responded hesitantly, with answers ranging from “it depends on the context” to “if it becomes conduct”.

The responses provoked outrage online, with numerous high-profile individuals, including Harvard alum and billionaire Bill Ackerman, calling for all three “to resign in disgrace”.

For those working within the corridors of America’s Ivy League, however, the exchange has spawned more considered reflection about the future of campus speech codes.

“As a professor who favors free speech on campus, I can sympathize with the “nuanced” answers given by [University] presidents yesterday”, wrote Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Psychology and UPenn alum, on social media site X on Wednesday.

“What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish “microaggressions,” including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense.”

Steven Pinker, a Psychology Professor at Harvard and prominent free speech advocate, renewed calls for “a clear and coherent free speech policy” and other measures to restore confidence in universities. “The wrong way for the elite universities to dig themselves out their reputational hole [would be to] restrict speech even more”, he added.

UPenn President Elizabeth McGill, who testified on Tuesday, may disagree. In a video posted online, McGill appeared to apologise for her apparent equivocation in Congress, citing the structure of the institution’s official code of conduct on hate speech. “For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law”.

The University “condemns hate speech” but “the content of student speech or expression is not by itself a basis for disciplinary action”, according to official guidance, published online. Now, she added, the university “must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies.” 

McGill’s comments imply a forthcoming change to the status quo – though no details have been made public as to what those changes might be.

A small but growing movement has emerged among American academics against what former Harvard President Lawrence Summers earlier this year called “very serious issues of viewpoint diversity” and “pressures for conformity” at Harvard and other elite universities.

In April, Summers, along with Pinker and other distinguished academics, formed a Council on Academic Freedom committed, in its words, to “promoting free enquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse” on campus by supporting academics deemed to be at threat of censure by university administrators or student groups.

Speaking to CNN after this week’s hearings, Summers, who formerly advised Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said that campus antisemitism “cannot be separated from the broader issues of political diversity, the broader issues of identity politics”.

“It’s going to be very important to find a new synthesis as we work our way through this”, he added.

The NAO, which oversees government departmental spending, highlighted a £17bn gap – about 6 per cent – between the MOD’s cost estimates for equipment procurement over the next ten years and its budget. While the government pledged a 19 per cent increase on last year, the NAO estimates that projected costs have risen by 27 per cent. This amounts to a “marked deterioration” in the MOD’s financial position since last year, when the budget was due to exceed predicted costs by £2.6bn.

“The Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan for the next decade is unaffordable and it is facing the largest budget deficit since the Plan was first published in 2012”, said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.

The shortfall casts doubts on the MOD’s ability to meet government ambitions for a revitalised UK defence industrial base. The Integrated Review Refresh and the Defence Command Paper, both published earlier this year, pledged significant investment in existing and emerging technologies, including renewing the nuclear deterrent and investing in dual-use artificial intelligence, following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

On top of the identified shortfall of £17bn, the NAO report warns, “the MOD does not know what the forecast costs would be if the Plan included all capabilities outlined” in its publications from earlier this year.

John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, said that the government had “lost control of the defence budget, failed to fix the ‘broken’ defence procurement system, sent inflation soaring and wasted billions of public money”.

For over a decade, concerns have been raised over the UK’s procurement process. In 2009, the Gray Report found that the average project overran by 80 per cent, or five years, with cost overruns amounting to £35bn. In July, a Commons report into the MOD’s equipment procurement called it “broken”, quoting a previous study by the Public Accounts Committee that argued the MOD was “repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money.”

The purpose of today’s review was not to consider the efficiency of actual MOD spending, but to assess the quality of the MOD’s own projections. Rising costs in the UK’s nuclear and naval programs are of particular concern.

The report also cited inflation. Analysis by the House of Commons shows that while the defence budget is expected to rise by £5.58bn cash terms between 2022 and 2025, this will represent a £1.1bn increase after adjusting for expected inflation.

The government has committed to increasing defence spending to the equivalent of 2.5% of GDP “as soon as economic circumstances allow.” It currently has the third largest defence budget in the world, behind that of China and the United States.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Famously, when the bosses of football clubs declare they have “full confidence” in a manager, it is a prelude to the sack. The manager is usually removed the next day. In politics, last year Liz Truss said she had “full confidence” in chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng not long before he was given the boot.

Sunak’s statement was designed to restore some semblance of unity to the message coming out of Cabinet – though it is clear many of her colleagues are uncomfortable with the position she has adopted. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the BBC he fully supported the PM in his decision and had “nothing further to add”, while noting Braverman’s comments were “not words I would have used”.

In an article for The Times published on Wednesday, Braverman had accused the Met Police of “playing favourites” over the handling of protestors, called pro-Palestine demonstrations “hate marches” and demanded an “assertive and proactive” approach from the Met Police. 

The differences between Braverman and Sunak on how to handle the protests on Armistice Day, tomorrow, are largely of style rather than of substance. The PM had previously tried to persuade Met Commissioner Mark Rowley to impose a ban. But it later emerged that the home secretary had ignored requests from Downing Street to tone down her Times piece, which critics claim undermines the operational independence of the police.

As Rachel Cunliffe writes for The New Statesman today, Braverman’s behaviour puts Sunak in a difficult position. Braverman’s willingness to “say the unsayable” has long offered Sunak a “lightning rod for right-wing sentiment within the party” which he himself would rather avoid. At the same time, her refusal to stick to the party line openly threatens his authority.

The PM’s statement of support today has not quelled rumours of a Cabinet reshuffle. It has been reported that some Cabinet ministers want to see Braverman go as soon as is feasible. 

Over 50 Tory MPs, meanwhile, have promised rebellion if Sunak relegates Braverman to the backbenches. Polling for The Telegraph suggests nearly three quarters of Tory voters back Braverman’s hard-line stance on pro-Palestine marches. 

But Braverman is personally unpopular, according to favourability ratings in which she fares poorly.

If censorship rarely works to ban books, Braverman’s incendiary comments will surely fail to dissuade would-be marchers to take to the streets this weekend. At the same time, as former chancellor George Osborne notes, her decision to pen an op-ed only confirms her “powerlessness” to stop them.

In other news, testimonials from the national Covid Inquiry this week revealed that police were given as little as 16 minutes to begin enforcing new laws surrounding personal freedom. Former home secretary Priti Patel also expressed regret at the imposition of £10,000 fines for breaches of lockdown.

Sunak’s premiership was branded as a return to normality, to government within ordinary constitutional boundaries. This week’s spat with the Met Police will, for some, call that commitment into question.

It also looks like evidence of this rather tired government’s inability to get what it wants, even when it comes to institutions over which it is supposed to wield authority.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

The suspect, reported to be Abdesalem Lassoued, a 45 year-old Tunisian was shot and killed by armed police at 8am this morning after an overnight manhunt. 

Brussels has been put on high terror alert following the attack last night, which left two dead and a third injured outside King Baudouin Stadium in the city centre.

According to Italian news agency ANSA, Lassoued arrived in Lampedusa, Sicily, on a dinghy in 2011, one of his many attempts to seek asylum in Europe. After arriving in Italy, Lassoued went to Sweden. He was deported from Sweden in 2016 and returned to Italy. 

It is claimed Italian intelligence later classed Lassoued as “radicalised” and having expressed interest in jihadism, but no action was taken.

According to reports the attacker later moved to Belgium, where his asylum claim was rejected. A deportation order was issued in 2021, but the Belgian minister in charge of asylum, Nicole de Moor, said today he “disappeared from the radar” after his asylum claim was refused. He had been living in Schaerbeek, in central Brussels, illegally since then.

Belgium’s Justice Minister, Vincent Van Quickenborn, said Lassoued had been previously convicted of “common law offences” in Tunisia but had not been reported as a terror threat until 2016. At the time, he said, “no imminent terrorist threat” was detected despite reports of his Jihadist sympathies.

The Sun reports that Lassoued was “well known” in Tunisia for his role in human trafficking.

After the shooting, Lassoued posted a Facebook video claiming in Arabic that he was a member of Islamic State and that the attack was “revenge in the name of Muslims”, though Belgian prosecutors say there is no evidence the attacker was directly linked to the renewed conflict in the Middle East. That final claim – given the context of the Hamas terror attack on Israel – is likely to be greeted with scepticism.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

With 80% of votes counted, PiS have about 37% of the vote – slightly higher than estimated – and are projected to win around 198 seats in Poland’s lower house. That’s down 37 seats on 2019. 

As the largest of a right-wing coalition since 2015, PiS has instituted controversial reforms to immigration law, state media and the judiciary which have angered EU allies. Opposition leaders have indicated their desire to roll many of those reforms back if they get into power.

Under the Polish constitution, the President appoints the leader of the largest party to form a government. PiS remains the largest party, albeit short of a majority, and it has an ally in President Andrzej Duda.

Donald Tusk, former European Council President and leader of KO declared that ‘democracy has won’ and vowed to immediately begin negotiations with leaders of the two other main opposition parties, Third Way and The Left. ‘Never in my life have I been so happy about taking seemingly second place… we have removed them from power’, he told journalists Sunday night.

Some had argued that Polish voters were so exhausted by perceptions of corruption and political in-fighting that this was going to be a lame duck election. According to the BBC, local election officials now estimate a turnout of nearly 73% – if accurate, the highest since the founding of the modern Polish state in 1989.

Poland is the fifth largest country in the EU and third highest defence spender per capita in NATO, behind only Greece and the United States. KO, Third Way and The Left all campaigned on restoring EU relations and a firmer stance of support for Ukraine.

In September, the Polish government joined other Eastern European countries in refusing an EU order to resume Ukrainian grain imports, citing the interests of rural farmers. It later halted arms supplies to Ukraine, partly in response to Ukrainian criticism of the move.

Over 600,000 expatriate Poles voted, including some of the 700,000 registered in Britain. 

“They’re the most important elections I’ve voted in during my lifetime,” Magdalena Bozek, a Polish voter in London, told the BBC. “It’s been quite a difficult eight years for us, for pro-Europeans.”

Counting continues today.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

There were also reports of the massacre of 40 babies by Hamas terrorists in the town of Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, a town recently recovered by the Israeli military. The reports are unconfirmed but an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldier spoke of the alleged atroctiy to a reporter from i24 News, an American broadcaster. An Israeli major general – Itai Veruv – has repeated the claim.

At least 900 Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed since the terrorist group broke through Gaza’s heavily fortified border into Israel on Saturday, in what is the worst outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence since Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. 

The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen reports on the ground that an Israeli ground offensive into Gaza now looks certain, with tanks, artillery and civilian reservists – 300,000 of which were drafted over the weekend – amassing at the border with Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told journalists today that he wants to “exact a price that will be remembered by Hamas and its international allies for decades”.

The Prime Minister may see a ground assault as his best political as well as military option, given his government’s embarrassing failure to anticipate Saturday’s onslaught.

Israel has belatedly secured its territory though Hamas continues to launch rockets from its bases within Gaza. Civilians in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon were today given just hours to evacuate before missiles rained down.

In Gaza the health ministry has confirmed at least 830 civilian dead and a further 4,250 wounded as a result of retaliatory airstrikes by Israel. Journalists in Gaza say heat and electricity units have been destroyed and that hospitals, overburdened with the dead and wounded, have less than two days of supplies left. 

Israel claims it is only targeting military sites and giving civilians ample warning.

In an effort to halt the conflict, Egypt has called for Israel to provide safe passage for Palestinian civilians, Reuters reports. The Egyptian government is facing pressure to close its border with Gaza as thousands of Palestinian refugees seek an escape. The Rafah Crossing is tightly controlled by the Egyptian government and remains the only land border open to Gaza.

A peaceful resolution looks a long way off, though negotiations have begun to return some of the 150 hostages held captive by Hamas in return for Palestinian prisoners. The Times has reported that some Hamas leaders want to release hostages to undermine international support for Israel’s planned counteroffensive. 

Further violence can be expected in the coming days. Dennis Ross, former Middle East Envoy under Bill Clinton, told Engelsberg Ideas that the Israeli counter-offensive will likely be unprecedented in scale. ‘This crossed all lines, and one can expect that the Israeli reaction is going to cross lines as well,” he said.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

The intent was made clear by Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan in the run-up to the G20 meeting in New Delhi. In August, he told reporters that the administration was “seeking to enhance its value proposition” to developing nations “through investments in the kinds of things that these countries are looking for” – namely infrastructure and clean energy.

It’s an ironic episode for the countries of the developing world, represented in force at last week’s conference. For over a generation, many have been denied the right to subsidise domestic manufacturing by none other than the ‘Washington Consensus’ – the American-led global crusade to ensure free markets and tariff liberalisation.

But the President might be getting ahead of himself. It’s American citizens that still need convincing about the virtues of industrial policy – not the G20. He and his colleagues spent the summer touring the country promoting “Bidenomics” – a series of bills designed to promote domestic investment in bridges, semiconductors, electric vehicles and much else. “Trickle down” is out, Biden recently declared. “Middle out, bottom up” is in.

On the surface, it seems like a smart strategy. Biden wants to convince America that he’s getting done what Trump couldn’t. In the post-industrial mid-west – in states like Ohio – global economic liberalism isn’t so popular. Democratic politicians such as former congressman Tim Ryan and former governor Sherrod Brown clung on here by emphasising local jobs and decrying free trade.

Except it’s not remotely clear how American citizens are responding to “Bidenomics”. It may well be that voters aren’t as grateful to Biden as he hopes.

For starters, voters aren’t necessarily giving Biden the credit despite federal funds contributing to thousands of projects across America. In Ohio, for instance, Republican governor Mike DeWine has fronted promotions for Intel’s new semiconductor complex, Ohio One, despite $20bn in subsidy from the CHIPS and Science Act.

“Biden is looking to co-opt a Republican sentiment”, says Mike DeWine’s Lieutenant, John Husted. “But it’s important to note that both parties can claim a stake in it.”

Second – and more importantly – American pollsters are in the dark on whether voters care about industrial policy at all.

I asked local Democrats in Pennsylvania about local polling on Bidenomics. They say federal subsidies for infrastructure are working wonders. Neither when pressed could point to any data on what voters thought about it, though. “We’ve never been asked that particular question”, says a Pittsburgh official.

Even in Licking County, Ohio – home to Intel’s mammoth new chip factory – voters seem despondent. Biden toured the county before the mid-terms last year, declaring “the industrial mid-west is back”. But a local election official, who lives five miles from the site, is less enthusiastic. “You need to think about what happens when property investments go really high. Property taxes are going to go up,” says Brian Mead, who lives five miles from the Ohio One site. “Some hardship stories will come out here in the next few years.”

It’s hardly a comprehensive poll. But you would expect a better local response from Ohio One – the state’s largest ever private investment, and one secured because of legislation pioneered by this White House.

It indicates what Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell has called ‘the real problem with Bidenomics’: industrial policy’s fixation on a sector with little relevance to ordinary Americans’ lives. Professional pollsters, such as FiveThirtyEight, point out that Biden’s economic approval ratings have flatlined (but, again, no one is asking voters specifically about their views on industrial policy).

The Democrats aren’t fools. Another Pennsylvania senator put it well: “ordinary folks are not looking at statistics, they’re noticing what’s happening in their daily lives – gas prices, grocery prices.” With a year until polling day, the party still has time to improve its economic record with voters.

But with so much committed to ‘Bidenomics’ at this point, the administration seems out of touch with what ordinary voters want from economic policy.

The developing world, saddled with high debt burdens and urban poverty, will be eager for American support for job-boosting industrial subsidies. But the G20 hardly needed convincing. It’s his own voters that Biden still needs to persuade.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Of a sample of 3,000 VR headset users in Britain and the United States, more than 80% said they had watched porn on their new devices. Most were men. But women, we are told, are catching up.

The study had an ulterior motive, however. It was conducted by Dreamcam, a webcam platform which, with the help of stereoscopic imaging, a 360-degree camera and hundreds of paid actresses, promises the next level of porn experience. “This innovative technology teleports your Dreamgirl next to you”, entices the website. “You can touch her. You can feel her. Still in doubt? Just put on your VR headset and try.”

This, we are told, is the future. As the house-bound citizens of the developed world become accustomed to working and socialising online, the VR porn industry is preparing for a twenty-five-fold increase in revenue in the next five years. At the annual SxTech Conference in Berlin next year ­– the largest of its kind – actors and producers, investors and hackers, will explore everything from the future of sex robots to sex in space. 

Nothing, as it were, will be unexplored but “it’s not something to be scared of”, says Ness Cooper, a sexologist and sex therapist, and a regular at conferences such as SxTech. “People were scared of books when they first came out. It’s a natural progression… VR porn is going to be integrated into our intimate relationships.”

In 2015, Chris Milk, an American filmmaker, made the case that virtual reality would act as an “empathy machine”, revolutionising how we interact with people miles away. “Through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected”, he said. “And ultimately, we become more human.”

So, too, has “intimacy” been central to debates over VR porn. Academics in Germany reported in 2019 that men experienced more than just heightened arousal, compared to watching a screen. “Participants felt more desired, more flirted with, more looked into the eyes”, they noted. “VR pornography seems to be a powerful tool to elicit the illusion of intimate sexual experiences.” 

As any regular porn user knows, however, the illusion of intimacy is not intimacy. And some argue that, far from changing our relationship to porn, VR has only so far modulated what normal porn already does: provide passive pleasure for anonymous observers.

“VR pornography is dominated by a variation on the point-of-view genre of pornography where the viewer is embodied in a stationary, subject position – often that of a straight, white male – while a female actor submits to the desire of the actor”, according to a paper in the Porn Studies journal in 2020. “The promise of VR pornography,” the paper concludes, “is currently some way from being realised.”

In the meantime, concrete research on the effects of VR porn on ordinary people is scarce. “We know that more people watch PornHub than watch Netflix”, says Leighton Evans at the University of Swansea, author of the paper cited above. “But there’s an incredible stigma attached to academics who research pornography.”

Leighton cites not only institutional prudishness as a problem, but the puritanism of the technology companies. Meta, previously Facebook Inc., owns the best-selling Oculus headsets. “The primary access of VR is through Oculus, and Facebook won’t allow access to pornographic material”, says Evans. “They claim that no one is watching it, I suspect, because that’s what they want their image to be.” That, and the need to sell data to a variety of clients – including conservative ones that would prefer not to push ads on PornHub.

The millions of curious teenagers growing up in the 2010s, with easy internet access from home computers and smartphones, were the guinea pig generation for the rise of online porn. Now, a more radical experiment is about to take place before the results of the previous one have been fully realised.

NoFap.com, a forum for recovering porn addicts, was founded by former Google employee Alexander Rhodes following the onset of porn addiction. Rhodes would masturbate up to fourteen times a day with online porn during his teenage years. “Your brain becomes accustomed to it”, he told an American interviewer. The Reddit sub-thread which goes by the same name has nearly a million members, mainly men, whose stories of shame, abstention and relapse are alarming. 

“More damage was done to me in the last two years on VR than in the seven before them on 2D videos”, writes one user, who describes being taken on a virtual “date” on a pre-recorded porn video in which the actress frequently looked into the eyes of the user. “Not only will this speed up your addiction rapidly, but it will leave you with zero motivation to find a real partner because your brain believes you are already having sex”, they add. “I eventually realised that the loneliness and depression I was trying to escape with porn was nothing compared to the empty feeling of dread I had after using VR for over a year.” 

Porn addiction affects perhaps one in twenty-five men and one in a hundred women, according to UK Rehab. Even so, Cooper believes that concern over virtual sex is verging on a moral panic. Over half of men and a third of women report using porn on a regular basis, and most do not get addicted. “I’ve met a lot of people who say they’re addicted to porn and often, once you dive deep into it, it’s about what people have been brought up to understand about their sexual responses and needs”, she says.

For Evans, the main concern is for inclusion, rather than restriction. “Currently almost all VR porn is a straight, white man being performed on by a woman. Things are changing, but there’s a long way to go.”

The CEO of Gettr (a contraction of “get together”) is unfazed. There are only two tests for entry into this community, according to Jason Miller, who speaks with me over Zoom from inside an SUV in New York. Number one: “You believe in free speech”. Number two: “You reject cancel culture”.

Miller is an old hand in the sphere of Republican strategy and comms, with a long track record working on political campaigns, including Rudi Giuliani’s presidential bid in 2008. He was snapped up by Donald Trump in 2016 after a spell as Ted Cruz’s top campaign adviser and became one of the ex-president’s most senior aides.

Miller admits that most of the energy for the project has come from Trump supporters. Trump’s banishment from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol Hill riots on 6 January catalysed it. And Gettr’s launch on Independence Day last week, Miller tells me, was chosen to symbolise “freedom from Big Tech”.

But Miller says he wants Gettr to act as a platform for the silenced everywhere: “I never say that this is just for Republicans or just for conservatives, or even just for Americans, quite frankly, because the issue of free speech is one that’s global”.

Over 1.25 million people made an account with the app in the first five days, of which 44 per cent are registered in the United States, according to Miller. The second largest market is Brazil, which makes up a further 16 per cent. There Jair Bolsanaro, the populist right-wing president, is waging a turf war with the establishment and warning of a rigged election.

Gettr’s strapline is “The marketplace of ideas”. The interface is exactly like Twitter’s, but there will be no censoring of political content or “shadow-banning” here. Trump would not have been censored on Gettr – if he were on it. And Gettr promises never to collect personal data beyond a registration email and birth year.

Fulfilling the promise of the marketplace, though, will be a momentous challenge. The top trending stories each day tend to be on staple conservative themes such as Venezuelan socialism and Californian woke madness. So long as Gettr brands itself as a refuge for the right, it is hard to see big hitters on the left migrating over, along with their followers.

Miller acknowledges this difficulty. “We want to make sure that everybody has some kind of platform, and maybe here in the US, that will be conservatives feeling they’ve been de-platformed”, he says. “But maybe in Hong Kong – maybe it’s students who feel that the growing influence of the CCP is infringing on their freedoms.”

I ask if Miller sees mainland China as a serious growth opportunity. “I don’t think we’ll have too many members of the CCP signing up. But I mean, they’re welcome to join me, right? Free speech is free speech. You know, if President Xi wants to open an account, he’s more than welcome to.”

Critics warn – and many hope – that Gettr becomes a conspiracy theory and misinformation hothouse. Conversation turns to the site’s moderation policy.

“I’ll be very much on the level with you, this won’t be easy”, Miller admits. “We want to make sure that people will never be censored or de-platformed based on their political beliefs.”

Gettr is not the Wild West. Through a tiered system of AI and human moderators – with extreme cases sent to the top – bad behaviour can be detected and dealt with.

But anything short of illegal – such as violent speech or child pornography – will only be moderated reluctantly. Miller is reticent to draw a line.

The basic liberalism of the proposal – Miller’s faith in community trust – will raise eyebrows. It sounds like early Zuckerberg idealism born again.

Yet politicians have yet to come up with a better solution to the crisis enveloping the digital public sphere. One of the ironies of the debate is that while Republicans want the Big Tech platforms to do less policing, they want to be able to prosecute them as if they were state actors. Democrats want the platforms to do more policing – but are happy to let them maintain their immunity from prosecution as private fiefdoms.  

Miller knows the system isn’t perfect. People will say untrue things. “A few cases” have reached executive review. But “banning or suppressing certain things is also misinformation”, he argues, referring to the disputed New York Post article on Hunter Biden which Facebook and Twitter suppressed without justification late last year. Both platforms later reinstated the article and Twitter’s CEO issued a public apology.

Then there’s the Trump problem. The man who started all this is nowhere to be seen on Gettr. Miller assures me he has the handle @RealDonaldTrump reserved for him in a “big, beautiful safe in the corner” of his office. Other sources claim Trump has plans for a “separate platform”. Trump is directing a fresh lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet, owner of Google, over his online ban.

The platform that was launched by a former Trump aide to address the specific grievances of Trump supporters would surely be the former president’s new home if he had any confidence in it. “He’s taking his time with it and I know enough from having worked with him to not push them too hard on anything”, Miller says.

But a lot of people want Gettr to fail and Trump’s absence is an ill omen. And Miller’s confidence in “the marketplace of ideas” mantra, while politically appealing, elides the fact that social media is no ordinary product. Miller says he wants two million registrations on the site by the end of the month: an impressive feat from nothing, and enough to keep a small ecosystem going. But it is hardly the 330 million monthly Twitter users – or the 52 million daily Reddit users – that give these platforms their dynamism. If we know anything about the social media industry by now, it is that the network, not the consumer, is king.

The best politicians live by their stories. Barack Obama had his first memoir published at thirty-four, Boris Johnson at thirty-eight. Winston Churchill was just twenty-six when his Boer War heroics first caught the attention of the reading public.

There has been no such promotion for Sir Keir Starmer. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Around the time Johnson began his scribbling career at The Times, Starmer was championing re-nationalisation for Socialist Alternatives, a radical student magazine he edited at Oxford University.

Forty years on, the Leader of the Opposition seems glad to have traded his youth radicalism for a neat haircut and a crisp suit. “More copies of that magazine ended up under my bed than distributed to the world at large,” Starmer told Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs last year.

If the past few months have shown anything, however, it is that a sheen of respectability doesn’t win votes, while playing up your achievements – or letting advantageous rumours hang around – can. This is an art of politics Starmer has yet to learn.

The truth is that we still know little of the man who could be Prime Minister. Nigel Cawthorne’s new Starmer biography, A Life of Contrasts, tries to set the record straight while remaining faithful to the primary evidence, which is scarce. There is no memoir of the boy from the Surrey council house who became a barrister; the former anti-monarchist who joined Queen’s Counsel at age thirty-nine; the radical who became Director of Public Prosecutions, the highest tribunal of law and order in the land, at age forty-five. What Starmer has described of himself, writes Cawthorne, reveals only a “nebula of purpose”.

It is a mystery that threatens to prolong the Labour party’s parliamentary exile, with Starmer failing to make an impression on voters. “The QC who always had the perfect answer for justice in others’ intricate problems was almost dismayed by people’s uncomplicated and less than perfect interest in him,” Cawthorne writes.

So who is the man really? If one of Cawthorne’s aims is to show that, despite appearances, Starmer really is from a “genuinely working-class background”, it is also to show that he is a man of conflicting duties and identities, reflective of a conflicted moment in British history. Cawthorne himself was a student at Reigate Grammar years before Starmer arrived in 1976. Both, he writes, were beneficiaries of “the last gasp of effortless social mobility” that propelled Cawthorne into political journalism and Starmer to the top of the legal priesthood before the abolition of grammar schools. It is this dualism – working-class modesty, meritocratic triumph – that frames Keir’s many contrasts.

Unlike the elite Tony Blair, to whom Starmer is blandly compared today, Starmer’s politics is what Cawthorne calls a “non-aligned, conscience-driven” socialism. His occupation with the NHS has a lot to do with his mother’s long-term battle with Still’s Disease. His views on social justice come not only from years of lawyering for rape victims and those on death row but from working at a Cornwall nursing home during his gap year.

Why is it that these personal struggles are only just coming to light? Political biographies usually want to skip to the action but some of the most gripping chapters here are on Starmer’s education. We are told of the struggle to keep Reigate Grammar free to the clever working-class kids like Keir: his was the last cohort to be offered free tuition at a school that now charges upwards of £10,000 a year for day pupils. The irony that “Blairite” Starmer went state while the actual Blair went to Fettes (and Starmer’s young idol, Tony Benn, went to Westminster) is not lost on Cawthorne, who takes pains to point out the current school fees for each of these private schools. It is a touch that adds a sense of claustrophobia to the supporting cast of politicians and barristers who populate Starmer’s life from eighteen onwards. Even a young Boris Johnson features, punting up Fleet Street, eagerly making his way to his office on Doughty Street.

Starmer is less comfortable in this new world than his philandering opposite number, however. On the campaign trail for the Labour leadership, he had to take questions from the audience just as his wife’s mother had died. “I had been trying to be the best husband I could be to my wife… Then I’m asked, ‘What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done?” And I’m judged on that.’” For Starmer, authenticity means a certain shielding, an aloofness from the political fandom, which backfires versus the Johnson show. “I do not need to have a label – I know who I am,” he told Desert Island Discs. Cawthorne’s Starmer biography reveals a man who would rather dig deep into his work than into himself.

His achievements are admirable. Starmer was pivotal in abolishing the death penalty in Uganda and numerous Caribbean countries as a human rights barrister. He worked pro bono defending civil liberties cases from free speech to domestic violence. He has a knighthood – you can’t get more patriotic than that. No current label – not “woke warrior”, nor “Blairite” or “global elite” ­– quite does justice to Starmer’s professional life.

So the small things matter. Starmer once had to be restrained from punching a man overheard advocating the death penalty while on a case in the Caribbean. He began his first day as MP for St. Pancras and Holborn on crutches after tearing a muscle during an over-enthusiastic football game. Starmer is football mad with, according to a fellow QC, a “silky left foot”. Why he hasn’t made more of this side to him is beyond me.

A Life of Contrasts is a limpid biography at its finest, but it’s by no means comprehensive. The need to trace the dots occasionally leads Cawthorne to make rather obvious conjectures. “Starmer can see multiple sides to every issue because he has lived those opinions himself,” he concludes in the final chapter, “but had to do work to become a big-picture thinker.” Sure.

Yet, this first evaluation of the man is valuable not for its detail, as interesting and necessary as it is. The book is proof that Starmer, “a man of hidden shallows”, has a story to tell. If only he knew how to tell it himself.