As usual it’s down to Jeremy Clarkson to provide a dose of political smelling salts for the chattering classes as he nails an analysis of the immigration riots. He writes in The Sun:
“When I lived in London’s Notting Hill, working in the media, I was a remainer and so were all my friends. It literally didn’t occur to us, as we sat down there in our agreeable houses eating agreeable food that someone might vote to leave. And I think the same thing is happening again.
“Today, I’m surrounded by farmers and plasterers and brickies and butchers and all I hear, all day long, is that there’s too much immigration. But if they say this out loud, or if they go on a march, they are told by the London elite that they are far-right extremists or racist thugs. For the most part, they’re not. They are just people who know that they have to shut up when the Last Post is played and that a cheese rolling down a hill is funny.
“There was a time you’d have called them the salt of the earth. But Sir Starmer doesn’t seem to have grasped this. He is surrounded by people who see nothing wrong with immigration and he’s got it into his head – as I did with Brexit – that anyone who disagrees with him must be some kind of Trump-nut. The fact is though that four million people voted for Reform. More than that voted for Brexit. And he’s p***ing them off by labelling them as modern-day Hitlers. I therefore suggest that both he and his friends at the BBC calm down the rhetoric or we could be heading for some real trouble.”
That also sounds like a Brexit handbrake turn: is Jeremy regretting backing remain? It’d be a great u-turn from the Top Gear legend…
Shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns told Times Radio she would have put a precondition on a China trip if she were PM:
“I would have put a precondition that I was not going to go if I was prime minister, unless Jimmy Lai was coming home with me. I would also put a precondition in the six months leading up to the visit that I wanted a reduction in hostile acts against our country. But that’s not what we saw. And actually, in contrast, what we saw was clearly the Chinese Communist Party did put a precondition, which was that the new embassy in London had to be signed off. So why is it okay for China to set preconditions and to make very clear red lines about what they require for a visit, but we go without having put any ourselves?”