Harry Cole's vivid imagination
Last year Rats in a Sack reported how Harry Cole, the Sun's political editor, was desperate to desert these shores for Trumpland. With his Tory contacts out of power, and not being groomed by News Corp bosses as management material, Carrie Johnson's ex-boyfriend was said to be keen on a transatlantic transfer.
Under the unwieldy headline 'Americans kept asking me 'What the hell is going on in Britain?' – we need to be very worried by the answer', Cole paints a picture of a recent trip Stateside in which everyone – 'from cab-drivers, bellboys, waitresses and strangers to security guards' – was concerned about the state of the UK under Sir Keir Starmer's apparently dystopian rule.
'Complaints ranged from locking people up for things they post on social media, the near-endless stream of protest hate and bile in our cities every Saturday afternoon to the scarring legacy of a generation of kids mutilated by the NHS at the Tavistock gender clinic,' writes Cole, shaking his head at the potpourri of issues his accent had provoked curiously well-informed bellboys and waitresses to bring up with him.
'But most chillingly, there was a repeated fear of ever visiting over concerns they would be mugged or stabbed,' he adds of the inhabitants of notoriously crime-free America (mass shootings in 2025 so far: 91, with 118 dead and 338 wounded).
While conceding that some of this was prompted by 'endless knocking pieces from left-wing US broadsheets' – conjuring up images of cabbies tut-tutting over the New York Times op-ed pages – Cole warns that 'the message is clear: Britain looks totally bonkers at the moment and is serving as a chilling warning for America of what might be'.
In particular Americans were apparently desperate to bring up unprompted with Cole the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, a woman convicted at Poole Magistrates' Court last week of breaching an abortion clinic protection zone, US bellboys being famously consumers of the website of the Bournemouth Echo.
Such cases were putting off 'the very people we need to welcome with open arms to spend big at our globally loved landmarks', worried Cole, space constraints alas preventing him from noting that inbound travel to the US is now projected to decline by 5.5% this year instead of growing by nearly 9% as had previously been forecast, thanks largely to the conduct of the sainted Donald Trump.
Cole filed this 1,000 words of what our American friends would call baloney on April 6 and has since been forced to spend the best part of a week writing about how his hero has knocked $6.6 trillion off the stock markets. What a sad loss to the British media landscape he'll be once Uncle Sam finally comes calling!
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